One day I was watching some Rifftrax on streaming and it started showing these commercials about how "Kamala Harris let out some illegal alien who tried to kill me. She doesn't care about white women!" They kept referencing an LA Times article from about 15 years ago. Since the commercial was made by "Make America Great Again," I thought maybe I should do a little research.
So I go to the LA Times. Paywall. I go to newspapers.com that promises they have millions of clips. "Start Your Free Trial Today." And then I just sighed and thought that in the old days you could just go to the library and use a microfiche reader to read old articles. They probably would have had a national paper like the LA Times as well as local papers. While it would have been bulkier and more time-consuming, it would have been pretty much free except however much you spent on gas--which in the 90s wouldn't be much.
Now that it's football season it kinda pisses me off that I can only get CBS and ABC on my TV with my digital antenna. What was it, 20 years ago when the government strong-armed everyone into using these digital antennas for TV? But they suck. I mean maybe if you're in a rural environment or own your own place they can work better, but I live in an apartment that's surrounded by other buildings so the signal I get is shit; all I get are two channels in Lansing plus some PBS.
In the old days with regular antennas you just put a big antenna on the roof. Sure it might blow off in a storm, but you'd be likely to get more stuff with it. I mean when I was a kid we'd get stations from Flint, which is like 30-40 miles away. So, really, it'd probably work better if my building just had a big antenna on the roof that everyone could tap into. But then we couldn't get whatever benefit there is from digital!
The only alternatives suck pretty hard too. The cable company charges $30 per month or more just for local channels. Sling, Fubo, Hulu, etc want $40-$70 per month for packages that include local channels. There's a local Fox app but that only shows you news, not actual shows; NBC probably has something similar. With NBC at least I have Peacock so I can see some stuff but not everything on NBC is also on Peacock, which is kind of annoying. ESPN is kind of the same thing. I used to have Hulu/Disney/ESPN+ but the problem was that ESPN+ doesn't let you see the main ESPN stuff so I couldn't watch most Monday Night Football games--though last year I lucked out; thanks to the strikes they put some of the games on ABC--and the big college football games like the college playoff so I couldn't even watch the Michigan game. But I could watch Ivy League football games and also volleyball, hockey, and lacrosse for a lot of teams. Hooray!
And with all the streaming services it can be annoying when they move stuff around so on August 31st you might be able to watch a movie free on one service but September 1st it moves to another service you don't subscribe to. Am I going to waste time signing up for a free trial or enrolling for a month--and hope I don't forget to cancel? Probably not.
On Fandango's app I used to have a bunch of movies I used digital codes for. A lot of them were DC superhero movies like Man of Steel or BvS but I also had for instance a free copy of Stripes. There was a menu on my Roku where I could find the stuff if I felt like watching it--which wasn't often. One day I went to find it and the menu on the Roku was gone! I went to Fandango's site, but nothing would come up there either. I think when they took over Vudu they probably fucked things up so all the stuff I had with Fandango got vaporized. I could probably contact their "help" but that would just take a while and accomplish nothing.
As I mentioned a while back with Amazon Music, they suddenly made it so unless you subscribed to Music Unlimited you were forced to listen in shuffle mode--even if it was something you already bought from their site on MP3. Spotify is the same way except I don't think you can actually buy things on MP3. Anyway, so if I wanted to listen to the stuff I own, I'd be better off using an old copy of Winamp on my PC or on an MP3 player.
Just to make things worse, some of these short-sighted companies are also destroying old stuff. Paramount recently erased the entire archive of MTV News. Maybe not a huge loss, but it shows how vulnerable online content is.
Anyway, the point being that thanks to corporate greed, stupidity, and short-sightedness it's getting to the point where you're better off going back to old analog ways to do things. I've probably said this before, but if there's a movie/TV show, album, or book you really like, get a physical copy of it. Then if it moves to some other streaming service or it gets erased you can still watch it when you want to. Just make sure to have something that plays that format. Maybe we should just bring back microfiche and analog antennas and stuff like that since the alternatives have become too expensive or just aren't that good.
And of course for all the writers, make sure you back up your stuff to somewhere other than "the Cloud" or OneDrive. You never know when they'll decide to start charging some astronomical amount or want to use your material for "AI" training or just erase it because some dumbass pushes the wrong button or they get hacked or whatever. I think I said before you should probably print out anything you really want to keep and then put it in a fireproof strongbox. Or copy it onto clay or ceramic tablets--those seem to last a good long time.
It sucks to have to think this way but more and more I see the immediate future isn't going to be peace and light and happiness. It's going to be shit thanks to greed and stupidity. You might as well start preparing yourself now. Sorry to end on a downer, but it is a downer subject.
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