On Myself and Streaming
On Myself and Streaming
I have been accused of being “anti-streaming” in the past. That’s not entirely accurate or even fair, but I do see how one could come to that conclusion. I feel I should clear things up. The misconception is based on a number of factors which include missing the boat but being happier for it, having a rugged individualist mindset, and I don’t trust companies. Also I’m a cheap bastard.
I’m the tech type, I actually know more about streaming than the average person who probably does it 100x more than I do. I’ve been streaming every since I did it with RealAudio on a dial up modem back in 1996 perhaps 97, whatever.
Missing the Boat
What I am, is an early adopter of ripping and compressing, which was not only a trendy thing before streaming became the dominant way of doing things, but I saw it as a real way of managing the reality of physical media. The reality is keeping and using physical media on a daily basis sucks.
Streaming as the dominant music and video form factor actually came into vogue while I worked at NASA. Now let me tell you about the Mission Control Center. The Mission Control Center was built during the cold war, and not late cold war, obviously it was early space-race cold war. The entire facility is a Faraday cage, no shit, there is wire mesh in the outer walls to prevent Soviet spy devices from transmitting out of the building. The old timers that worked with me told me how they did bug sweeps on a regular basis and had a department that spent their time monitoring for radio frequencies during the DOD days. The sweeps and full time monitoring where gone when I went there, but the wire mesh in the concrete on the sides of the buildings was not. That being said modern phone signals, being a shorter wave than the old target bands could sometimes get through, the general rule was sending and receiving radio transmissions sucked.
They did install WiFi while I was there and they gave me access to it. It was supposed to be for work purposes, but I know coworkers did connect their phones to it. I looked at it this way – I know the feds are spying on me, do I really want to hook my phone up to their networks directly and not even pretend anymore? I think I connected my phone to WiFi there once for about five minutes just to play with it. I’m not even sure I actually did that.
So what about home? Well, during that time I lived in a small fishing village of San Leon. San Leon did not have the best of public services, in fact I don’t think it was properly incorporated. I had a P.O. box because I didn’t do the rural-route form paperwork for my house. The best Internet service I could get was DSL, and it was unreliable since the salt water jacked with the copper wiring. I actually asked “what’s the most reliable tank of a DSL modem around?” A Verizon operator told me and I bought a way out of date DSL modem because it was a war-horse that could handle a shitty connection and keep on trucking, I didn’t ask for fastest, I just wanted to be able to connect. Still, I lost connection pretty much every time it rained.
You can see why I didn’t jump on the streaming bandwagon at first. Despite being a technical person, I was surrounded by technical (and financial) limitations, so I kept doing what I was doing.
I Don’t Trust Companies
I don’t trust companies to always be around. I suppose some of my arguments apply, and some don’t. Most of my distrust of companies is the digital-locker perspective. I don’t trust companies to always give me access to what it is that I have purchased in perpetuity. This applies to why I want DRM free ebooks, movies, and music, but I suppose that probably not in direct interest of streaming providers. It is relevant to my explanation however, as streaming providers and digital lockers services are often one in the same. There has been more than one digital locker service that has gone out of business taking its users content down with it. This argument does not apply to pure streaming providers, but it does apply to hybrids like Google and Amazon. In fact I’m a bit miffed that Google completely closed their old music store and went to YouTube music, but fortunately what little music I did have from them was DRM free downloads, so I got it.
No, part of the reason I want hard, real copies of things is cancel culture and modern tinkering. How many people have stated they want a BluRay of the ORIGINAL Star Wars? The fact you can’t get one is the reason projects like 4K77 exist.
Changing things, erasing and hiding history is only becoming MORE common as time goes on. I present to you the censoring of Daryl Hannah’s butt in Splash. I actually would not have objected to this on a TV release. Heck, the way Disney+ works, they could have had two versions on their own service. As it stands when my kids use one of their profiles they don’t see every show that’s available when I’m on my profile. I haven’t actually seen Splay since 1980 something, maybe early 90 something, so I don’t recall if it was kid friendly or not, but I was a kid then, so I could see a second kid friendly one being an option. If you were to have had a Blue-ray of this movie, you would be able to watch it in it’s originally intended form.
The modern cancel culture sucks. Canceling certain Dr. Seuss books all at once by simultaneously ceasing publication, retracting them from bookstores – not just allowing them to mellow on the shelves, removing them from libraries, and banning them on eBay and Amazon is complete and utter bullshit. Any one part of that puzzle could have stood up to the canceling and I hope some libraries and independent bookstores did, but it was a big rug-pulling exercise as far as I’m concerned. They try to hide it under the word “retirement”. Well, when my grandfathers retired they went home took up hobbies, traveled, took up small jobs, and visited family for the rest of their lives. They didn’t get shoved into a wood chipper along with all pictures and paperwork referring to them. Perhaps retirement isn’t the proper word for what happened?
Physical media is cancel proof. Sure I’ve experienced bit-rot, especially on Warner Brothers disks and they refuse to answer questions on the subject when I email them, tapes get shitty with age and vinyl wears with use, but optical disks do tend to hold up, and when I back them up to my server they tend to avoid getting damaged from use.
Rugged Individualism
I know, talking about rugged individualism on this particular topic is almost discrediting, but it is part of the equation.
When you have your own media on your own devices with you in public, you have your own needs taken care of.
This is important. When you show up and say “I’m bored, you’re not entertaining, give me bandwidth.” you’re asking for a handout. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve spent plenty of time on Coffee Shop WiFi. I’ve been known to select places I intend to burn time and money at based on the availability of bandwidth. This is an understood exchange. The price of WiFi is covered by the price of my over priced coffee as is my space being occupied while I consume said coffee. This is just part of a business exchange. Expecting it everywhere you go is another thing all together. I consider it rude to expect people to give you the WiFi passwords in their homes when you’re just visiting. I’m not talking about relatives and overnight stays, but “the book club meets here this evening” unless there’s a genuine reason to need it based on the social activity. In fact you might want to do what you’re there for and set your phone aside.
Don’t ask other people to take of your needs for you, especially when they don’t qualify as actual needs at all.
At work I’m known as the guy with lots of tools. If there’s something I need on a daily basis there’s a good chance I have it on my person. I don’t ask people around me for screwdrivers if the reason I’m at this work site is to drive screws. Take responsibility for yourselves dammit! It’s a philosophy and it penetrates everything.
I’m a Cheap Bastard
I’ve realized that I can spend less money by not streaming.
I can buy used CD’s that sound just as good today as when they were pressed 20 years ago for next to nothing if I buy them at the right place. When I rip and compress that disk it goes into the collection and I can’t tell it wasn’t pressed yesterday. I paid $1 for a CD at a used place. It’s done. It’s in my collection and I don’t have to pay to hear it again ever if I don’t want to. If I’m streaming I have to pay that dollar every month.
I’ve heard words of wisdom on ownership. You buy everything three times. You purchase it, you pay to move it, you pay to store it. I try to circumvent some of that. I use binders for my optical media. I still pay for everything three times, but I get it at a discount rate when it comes to storage and moving. I’ve also reduced just how much stuff I own in general. I’ve actually gotten rid of most of my printed books and do keep a digital library in Calibre. (the picture used as my banner is quite old and I don't even have all of that anymore and the disks are now in binders) That still take hard drive space but in comparison to books it’s minuscule. On this particular case the streamer might just have me beat with exceptions:
Bandwidth isn’t free. I pay $10 a GB for mobile network streaming. I would rather not, so I download my podcasts and take them with me.
Even on my home network, the cable provider is threatening caps and I have exceeded the cap on a previous provider on occasion. The threat of caps is always looming, not streaming keeps the bandwidth use down.
Most importantly, by sticking to what I’m doing, when the Agenda 21 and 2030 stuff kicks in they start cutting off our communications, as long as I can keep power (I have plans for that) I’ve still got my stuff for relaxing in the evening. If I actually have the compound I sort of want to build, then everyone in the compound still has music and movies for their own use. Remember, the line between government and corporation is thin, and becoming thinner all the time. They’re already controlling availability to regulate what we see and do. Yeah, we probably should just quit worrying about it all together and turn off our TVs, I’ve pretty much done it before, and could do it again, but if I intend to have a small happy village when the world is a shit show around us, we need something to feed their old addictions.
Why Calling Me Anti Streaming is Unfair
You may have caught up in the “I Don’t Trust Companies” section I mentioned my Disney+ subscription. That’s right, I have their triple play thing and I pay extra not to have ads on Hulu. I have lots of streaming ability, -paid for - for the rundown:
Hulu+
Disney+
ESPN (I don’t use it, but it’s in the package)
Amazon Prime
Peacock
Paramount Plus
In addition to those we make use of PBS Kids and Disney Now – which is different from Disney+ and is a lot like PBS Kids. We may on occasion use another free service like Pluto, Crackle, or a local TV Station that has a web presence. I do a lot of my “odd one offs” with plugins for Kodi. I don’t pirate on Kodi, I use it as a content manager and yes, I do use a legit streaming plugin from the default official repositories on occasion, but I don’t get into the pirate repos.
Oddly a person who called me anti-streaming was my own wife and she knows what services we have, but I have a reputation for it. She said this AFTER watching every 24th century Star Trek with me, while I was slowly working my way through watching all of the X-Files on my own.
She has stated that she thinks all the work I put into ripping/compressing and maintaining a media server are why I must be anti-streaming. There is a bit of that, but I also think it's stupid to watch a bps constrained movie on a streaming service that I already have in higher quality on a computer right next to the TV. That and I want to instill the "rugged individualist" ideology by training the kids to use what's yours instead of having them build a dependence on companies and bandwidth.
So, I need to get moving right now, I haven’t even proof read this, but I’m going to post it as a blog anyways. I probably have at least one super embarrassing typo in here, but even if I proof read it I would probably still have one or two, so whatever. Hope this clears up why "I'm anti streaming".