vhs sucks, don't do it

I recently watched one-and-a-half YouTube videos of some guy who decided hey, wouldn't it be cool if I put out some videos using nothing but broadcast quality video equipment of the '90s. Being I actually have a college degree in Video and Radio Production, I thought okay, sure, I'll watch this.

I got through the first video. Then I started watching another, got about halfway through it and... no. I had to stop.

I'll explain why I had to stop in a bit.

At the time I was going to college, television industry broadcast standards weren't exactly standards but rather a weird mix. Whatever you could afford dictated what you used.

There was a period when four video editing standards were being used all at the same time. The old-and-crusty (even back in the '90s) U-matic, S-VHS (Super VHS), Betacam, and non-linear digital editing with Avid.

When I got my degree, a cuts-only non-linear Avid video editing system was $30,000. If you wanted digital video effects a.k.a. DVE, that was $60,000. Not an exaggeration. A cuts-only system was at the college I attended that was brand new then, and students were VERY FORBIDDEN from touching it because staff was still learning how to use the damned thing.

Not only was I forbidden from touching that setup as was everyone else, but one year after I graduated, that's when students got to use it. I was a bit pissed off about that, but whatever.

The stuff I was exposed to was lower tier craptastic S-VHS cuts-only editing systems. One play deck, one play/record deck, one edit controller, two 9-inch monochrome monitors. That's it. The only other thing I used that would have been considered somewhat high-end was the Grass Valley Group switcher in the studio.

Other stuff at the college I had very limited use with (only because the classes I was taking didn't call for much use of it) were Amiga 2000 and 4000 computers with a Video Toaster card and LightWave 3D.

There are three things I remember from that stuff.

First, unreliable and slow. It was normal that those Amiga computers would break, especially for the Amiga 2000 boxes.

Second, eye strain. Even in my teens, I hated any time I had to do any work on an Amiga box, and I know exactly why. 60Hz standard NTSC refresh rate for the monitors. This hurt my eyes to the point where whenever it was crunching whatever data it had to, I would look away just to give my eyes a rest. On my Windows PC at home, I could set the monitor refresh to 70Hz or 72Hz, which my eyes agreed with just fine. Unfortunately, I didn't know how to change the refresh rate on an Amiga box at college, so I had to suffer. Believe me, if I had known how to get that monitor refresh rate changed to 70 or 72Hz, I absolutely would have done it.

Third, the "RENDERING" notice. This was for the 4000 boxes. Students who were rendering whatever crappy animation they were working on in LightWave would start the rendering process, turn off the monitor, then tape a piece of paper over the monitor glass warning people not to use nor shut off the computer. One student in particular taped a notice that said "rendering for many moons, leave on" or something to that effect. The monitor was clicked off to prevent burn-in.

I remember the cuts-only editing, the color bar crap, the time base correcting, the flaky Amiga boxes with awful picture, and so on.

IT SUCKED.

And that brings me to the one-and-a-half videos I watched on YouTube.

As I said, the videos were purposely shot on '90s-era broadcast quality equipment. It's not that the videos were bad, but I hated looking at the picture. It's the very nature of how native NTSC video looks that really puts me off.

No, this isn't one of those things where it looks bad because I'm viewing it on a modern computer monitor. Even if I were viewing the video on an actual CRT television, I'd still hate it.

The '90s NTSC look sucks, and the end result is always a bad picture.

Keep in mind there is a giant difference between a native NTSC look and film-on-television.

Film-on-television actually looks decent. Sure, it's cropped to 4:3 with a "safe title area" border around it, but it doesn't look bad. Perfect Strangers and Cheers are good examples of '80s and '90s television shows shot on film. You'll immediately notice the color looks great and shot depth is good.

A broadcast quality NTSC look, like a soap opera from the early '90s, looks absolutely awful. Where film has depth, video looks shallow. And the only reason broadcast quality NTSC video looks semi-decent for news broadcasts is because everything was shot at close, flat angles, which defeated a lot of the shallow look since the shot basically had no depth to begin with. That, and the in-studio lighting was bright enough to power a small town. News broadcasts of the era very purposely made everything appear as flat as possible since that ultimately was the best look they could get.

Consumer grade VHS video is the worst of the lot. The color is bad, with the worst being the image always showing a sickly green. That green is always there even without chroma keying and sticks out like a sore thumb. And nothing ever looks truly in focus. The end result is a shallow, fuzzy, sickly green appearance. Also, there's no way to get even lighting with VHS. Something will always be too bright or too dark or both, depending on what's in the frame. Totally unavoidable.

Poe Effect is real for nerds into yesteryear video tech

Anything on the internet to the tune of "things were better in the '80s/'90s" will include tons of talk about television since that was the #1 source of entertainment at the time. Naturally, home video also gets talked about since camcorders were a big deal of the era.

Nerds get blinded by others waxing nostalgic about video, thinking that home video, the "VHS aesthetic" if you will, was something cool and awesome that everyone loved.

Wrong.

Just because a lot of people say something was awesome in the past doesn't mean it was.

Video tech nerd first gets into VHS because it's cheap, then quickly realizes how garbage the picture is, so he bumps up to broadcast quality NTSC video gear.

After that, video tech nerd realizes later (usually much too late) that all the '90s broadcast quality cameras, S-VHS or Betacam tapes, decks, crusty old Amiga boxes and Video Toaster cards will not fix that crappy shallow picture. Doesn't matter if it's a field or studio camera. Trying to fix that shallow picture is a battle you cannot win.

Even if you know everything about color correcting, lens adjustment, time base correcting, lighting, and shot composition, you are never fixing that shallow NTSC video appearance. The picture will always be bad in the end.

What really is the VHS aesthetic?

Video, even at its best pro-grade NTSC quality, sucks. The look of it has a depressing vibe. Where film has an organic quality, video is inorganic.

The VHS aesthetic is a funny thing. Want to know what that aesthetic truly is? It's when the video signal is screwed up either from tape degradation and/or VCR head misalignment. Those problems caused by wear, tear, and age actually give the video an organic quality.

Yes, I am saying the VHS aesthetic is achieved when the media and/or playback machine starts to fail. That is something only exhibited with aging VHS technology. Okay, technically consumer grade Betamax can exhibit it too, but VHS is the one people know.

Another funny thing is that try as people might, you can't digitally reproduce VHS degradation. Oh sure, there are video editing software plugins for it, but they're all terrible. You legitimately need an old VCR with semi-working video connectors, and proper old media to achieve just the right look.

What I would say to any nerd into yesteryear video that's chasing after the VHS aesthetic is this:

Stop buying '90s era pro-grade NTSC video gear, because you're barking up the wrong tree. Start buying old crappy working VCRs instead.

Shoot and edit all your video digitally, then re-record it to VHS on a deck with a wonky head using old videotape. Heck, you might even want to purposely seek out two-head VCRs instead of four-head to degrade the quality even further.

Given the choice between "perfect" (no such thing) pro-grade video and consumer grade VHS, I'd prefer watching VHS video with periodic flubs in the audio, tracking that sometimes goes off, and crackly static that happens from the videocassette slack naturally breaking down. Why? It has way more life to it compared to cold, corporate "perfect" NTSC professional Betacam video.

Consumer grade VHS has the worst picture, no question. But wonky VCRs and old tape slack put life into it. Even with the shallow picture, sickly green, bad light detection, and the never-really-in-focus look, it all can be forgiven when you see crackles, slight tracking errors, hear audio warbling, and so on.

Stop trying to make "good" NTSC video. Go for the aesthetic instead. That's not what people wanted in the '80s and '90s, but it is what people want now.

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my insane way of dealing with email spam

I've pretty much been through all the standard ways of filtering spam. After a lot of research, I found a way that works for me that I'll detail in a moment.

Everybody's spam experience is different based on which companies are selling off account data and absolutely not giving a shit otherwise, where an email address has been leaked, how many of the email address owner's dopey friends had their email accounts compromised (in which the contact list is harvested and put into a spam database), and so on.

I can tell that the lion's share of spam I'm receiving right now is all coming from one botnet and most likely being sent from infected office PCs. How do I know? I get blasted with the same type of spam over and over with only minor variations, and like clockwork, the spam slows significantly on weekends and major holidays.

The fortunate part is that I was able to nail a pattern the spammer was using since all the spam was done in a specific way. After some experimentation, I found a pattern I could match, and now 100% of whatever that asshole sends goes straight to the spam folder.

So what's this insane way I deal with email spam?

I use no spam filters at all.

Why not? I don't trust them. It's a certainty that spam filters will flag messages that aren't spam, and not flag messages that are spam.

If you just said to yourself, "But I can't turn off my spam filters?" Ah, yes, you're one of those 'free' email users. Yeah, you can't turn those filters off. Not possible.

I use hosted email, and that allows me to completely disable all the filters.

So how do I stop the spam? Server-side regular expression a.k.a. regex email filter rules written by hand.

"Only receive emails from my contact list" doesn't work.

Automatic "reply back to confirm and your message will be delivered" doesn't work, and pisses people off who are just trying to email you.

"Click this to confirm you're a human" doesn't work (and again, pisses people off).

Token-based anything doesn't work.

Blocking IP ranges doesn't work.

Blocking specific gTLDs (addresses ending in .shop, .cc, .app, etc.) doesn't work.

Relying on blocklists of any kind, paid or free, doesn't work.

Plus addressing doesn't work.

Mail relays a.k.a. mail masking doesn't work.

Out of every single way to filter email spam, manual regex filter rules is the only thing that actually works.

Oh, and "I'M STARTING OVER!" doesn't work either.

Let's say you decided to:

1. Register a domain the internet has never seen before
2. Host using a provider that allows to turn all the filters off
3. Set up a master email account for that domain
4. Set up separate forwarders going to the master account for EVERY SINGLE PERSON AND COMPANY that emails you

...doesn't matter. You still lose. You'll end up with a giant pile of forwarders that will be difficult to manage, and then one day in not-too-distant future... a spam gets to your inbox. And you will rage. It will most likely be from some dopey company you do business with. So, of course, you dump that forwarder, make a new one, and adjust your account with that company to email you at the new forwarder. But now you know that new forwarder will eventually get spammed since it happened before with that same company.

What can you do about that? Nothing.

And that's why it's better to get good at regex pattern matching. Online tools are available. One of my favorites is regex101, although RegExr is pretty good too and has a cheatsheet directly in plain sight. Nice.

Of the spam I'm currently receiving, it's mainly spammers faking messages from Omaha Steaks, Tractor Supply, Marriott hotels, and a sprinkling of others. The addresses used go all over the place, but that doesn't matter because I filter it with just a few lines of regex.

The key thing to making regex work with filtering email is figuring out the pattern the spammer is using, then nailing it using the shortest amount of lines possible.

When I first started filtering out what that botnet was sending, my regex filter rules list got huge because I was doing the whack-a-mole thing. And I'd argue that's sometimes unavoidable when trying to nail down a regex pattern that works.

The eureka moment happened when I came up with one particular regex line using negative lookahead that nailed the pattern only the spammer was using and didn't mistakenly match legitimate emails. From there, everything came together. I was able to greatly decrease the amount of regex lines I was using, and my inbox was clear once again.

The insane way is the only way to filter out the spam

Before I deleted Thunderbird, I was using a craptastic plugin to get the regex filtering I needed. I'm now using NeoMutt and having the filtering done server-side instead of client-side.

To me, using email without regex is actually more insane. If I had to deal with the always-on and can't-be-disabled spam filter from a 'free' email provider... no. Just no. Their filter would screw up routinely and I'd be fighting with it left and right.

Regex is somewhat of a danger zone for filtering and not for the timid, but there's nothing better for ridding the inbox of spam.

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retro things that aren't anachronisms

A lot of stuff being sold as "retro" ends up being a pile of suck because it's nothing more than an anachronism. An example of that is this thing, a CD player made to look like a record player with fake wood grain, fake tone arm and all. Yes, really. That audio player misses the mark so badly that it's living on a different planet.

Retro things that aren't anachronisms are the best kind. "True to original", if you will. And if it's cheap, that's even better.

I did find a few.

Coca-Cola Ruby Red plastic tumblers

If you ever ate pizza at Pizza Hut in the '80s or '90s, you will instantly recognize these. It's the tall red plastic Coca-Cola tumbler you'd always get your fountain drink in, for whatever that might be.

And does it have the texture on the outside like it's supposed to? Yes. Yes, it does.

Kit Kat Clock

Funny enough is that I've never seen one of these in person, but have seen it a million times in television shows, movies, and even cartoons. It's that black cat wall clock with the swinging tail and the eyes that go back and forth.

This thing has been around since 1932! There is the classic black and white, but now there are also several other colors and color combinations. Still the same size as the original.

Light-Up Gyro Wheels

I did play with these as a kid. It's just a wheel that attaches by magnetism to a handheld rail that lights up when it spins, and it's pretty much exactly the same as it was from decades ago.

Movie Wall Clock

This is another wall clock I've seen a bunch in both television and movies, usually seen in an office or restaurant if memory serves correctly. I do appreciate how clean the clock face is on this one. Very easy to read, and runs on battery so there will be no ugly power cable hanging from it. I believe the battery is just one AA, so it's ridiculously easy to replace.

Casio A158

Couldn't end this without mentioning this digital watch. It's the same as the F-91W in a steel version, and is exactly how you remember it. The only thing that's changed is that it's made in Thailand instead of Japan now.

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gamers have been screwed for years

I recently talked about deleting accounts to get rid of digital clutter in my life. I've made progress, but out of curiosity, I wanted to know the answer to a question:

Who has it the worst when it comes to having too many online accounts?

Answer: Gamers.

I thought my total number of accounts was pretty bad before I started my deleting. Nope. Gamers have it far worse.

It's so bad for gamers that a video game library manager exists in an attempt to handle it all.

That utility is Playnite, an open source free thing for Windows, although there might be a Linux version soon.

I don't game other than playing little time-waster games while taking a dump, such as on one of those cheap 200+ game handheld things. I'd even be happy with handheld Tetris. Even so, I do recognize gamers having ridiculous numbers of accounts is actually a big problem.

The entire point of Playnite is to have one unified launcher for all your games, regardless of what account the game uses. This literally means you can put all your Steam, Origin, GOG or whatever into this thing and it supposedly works. I do not know that for sure because I've not used it personally.

When I looked all the account types Playnite supports, the list is long. That's good, but it doesn't solve the problem of gamers having way too many accounts.

The funny thing is that I learned about Playnite from a forum thread discussion posted all the way back in 2018. What gamers were saying then is still a problem now, only worse. They were saying it was "normal" to have over 100 active online accounts sprawled out all over the place. Multiple gaming accounts, multiple Gmail and Outlook accounts, multiple accounts for PC control software updates, and all sorts of other ridiculousness.

I had an eyebrow-raising moment when I read over how most gamers manage all their accounts. A notepad. No, I don't mean Windows Notepad. I mean putting pen to paper, physically writing down account info, then putting that in a desk drawer until needed later. And no, I'm not kidding. Enough distrust for the Windows environment existed even back then due to fear of malware and keyloggers to where more than a few came to the conclusion the only way to safeguard account info was to never store that info in Windows.

Did things get any better now that it's 8 years later? No. It's worse now than ever, and gamers are still doing the pen-to-paper thing.

If I were ever to get back into PC gaming, there is absolutely no way I would touch the modern way it's done. Windows 11 is a complete dumpster fire, the cost of PC hardware is too high, and everything "requires" an account.

The way I would do PC gaming is use Linux only, play free open source games only with no ads whatsoever that run smoothly on old low-powered PC hardware, and very purposely avoid "required" accounts like the plague.

And there's also no way I would use a "gaming optimized" Linux distro since those are all trash. The best Linux distros for gaming are ones that support the most hardware while having a lightweight UI. For most people, that means Xubuntu. True, there are environments lighter than XFCE, but with Xubuntu, that's the kind of desktop environment which is light but still friendly. The most important thing to a gamer is getting to the game, so it's best to have an environment that's easy enough to use and stays the hell out of the way during gaming, which XFCE does. It's also important to be able to use your computer like a computer when out of the game, and XFCE is fine for that also.

Gamer account hell begins to end when the rage-quit moment happens

I'm not talking about rage-quitting a game, but rather a rage-quit directly due to account "security" garbage.

Here's how it happens:

Ordinarily, you login to Account on your PC. It's always worked, there's never been a problem, Account is in good standing, and everything is okay.

One day you login to Account using a different browser or maybe your phone. Why? Maybe you wanted to try a different web browser. Maybe you weren't at home and needed to check on something. You had a reason.

This is where you just officially screwed yourself.

Uh oh, Account no longer considers your main PC using the browser you've always used "trusted". From that point forward, you can NEVER login to Account on your PC ever again without extra "verification" steps. Or, you're flat out not allowed to login to the account the way you used to ever again.

What can you do about this? Not a damned thing.

The end result of this is that you have to spend 1 to 2 minutes jumping through hoops just to login to Account. Or worse yet, you aren't allowed to play your game at all. And you paid for it.

A very loud I'M DONE moment happens right then and there. That's the rage-quit. Later on, that will naturally lead to a rage-delete both for the game and the account. If Account slaps you in the face with all sorts of "reverify" crap and/or blocks you from playing the game, oh yes, you will delete it.

Deleting the account immediately solves the problem, because there is absolutely no game worth wasting your life over due to account login issues.

Then you start questioning why you have accounts for any game you have. After all, the rage-quit to rage-delete you just went through could happen for any "account required" game.

And this is when Linux and free open source games start looking very attractive. Neither the OS nor the games have any account required whatsoever. The only time you will ever see anything to do with an account is for a donation link to support the game developer(s). This is perfectly fine because it's a) it's optional, and b) that account has nothing to do with the game itself.

Are we having fun yet?

Gamer account hell will suck the fun right out of any game in the blink of an eye. Regardless of how good the game is, that account... that STUPID ACCOUNT ruins everything the moment it acts up. And it will.

It is no wonder to me at all why there are continued remakes and updates to DOOM, Quake, Ultima VII, Civilization and the like in Linux that you can run right now. Yes, there are newer game titles. But the older remade/updated stuff is fun enough to where it actually attracts young players and not just oldheads.

It is sad that no requirement of an account to play would be considered part of the fun these days, but here we are.

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dumping digital clutter

I wasn't intending on deleting a bunch of internet accounts to be my New Year's Resolution, but that's just how things ended up happening.

While going through the account list in my password manager, I found some seriously old and crusty stuff there, and it was long overdue to do some jettisoning.

True, I could have just left those old crusty accounts as-is and nothing bad would have happened... probably. But that lingering doubt is something I couldn't shake, so I started deleting the old stuff.

I can best define the doubt as questions.

What if the site the account belongs to is bought by some corporation, and then all the personal data in every account is sold?

What if the site is run by idiots and everybody's account info is "leaked" later?

Then there is the most important question:

Why do I even have an account for insert-whatever-site-here in the first place?

There has to be an answer to that question, even if it's not a good one. If I can't come up with any answer at all, then that account has to go.

Of the deletions I made, some of them were:

• "Free" email accounts I had and didn't use.
• A "musicians wanted" account on a site that I probably hadn't used in over a decade.
• Three link shortening accounts.
• An email newsletter service account (for sending, not receiving) that I never used.
• A formerly free comment system account that turned freemium.
• An online cloud storage service account.
• Some blog host thing account I tried out forever ago and then never used.
• A social media management service account I stopped using years ago.
• Four social media accounts. Or maybe five. I'll talk about that fifth one in a minute.

It takes time to go through all this crap, but it's worth it

No two sites have the same process for deleting an account, so I was not able to get all my deletions done in a single sitting. It took days, especially for sites that "require" you to email them just to get an account deleted.

A few of them do that 30-day wait thing. Yes, you can delete, but the account isn't 100% gone until 30 days later, which is annoying, but whatever.

A few things learned

Some accounts I deleted had some images and/or videos I posted years ago that I completely forgot about. One of them was an imgur account, and this is that fifth social media account I mentioned a minute ago. Does imgur count as social media? I'm not sure, but I'll say it does. Before deleting that account, I downloaded an archive of everything in there (which imgur thankfully makes easy to do), and there was stuff dating all the way back to 2014. Just dopey things for the most part. I had no local backup of any of it, so I was happy to get that archive.

Thing I learned: When you have too many accounts, you completely forget what you have out there.

Some accounts I kept around solely for the reason of, "I might need this someday". The cloud storage account I mentioned was one of those. I don't use cloud storage and doubt I ever will. And if I had to transfer files online that were too big for email, I'd just use a file sharing service since no account is required.

Thing I learned: Just-in-case is weak justification to keep an account active, more often than not.

And there were some accounts I had belonging to sites that were basically dog slow versions of desktop programs, such as online image editors. Better to just use GIMP, because every online image editor sucks.

Thing I learned: Don't use a site that "requires" an account to do something a free desktop program with no account required can do 100x faster and better.

Happy new year.

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