adventures in physical media 💿📼📀

 hello, lovelies!

there are a couple things to know about me:

first, i love watching movies and tv

so, last year, when my grandmother asked me if i wanted some of her old vhs tapes, as well as her vcr, i was ecstatic. except, after she gave it to me, i left the vcr in the box and put it under my bed for over a year. and the tapes? those went into my closet with the rest of the tapes leftover from my childhood. IN MY DEFENSE, my tv hadn't been mounted yet, so i felt that setting it all up just for it to have to be undone and then redone in a couple weeks would be a waste. i mean, it was going to be mounted shortly after my twenty-first birthday. and then it wasn't. by the fourth of july, then. nope, it remained on a card table we had set up. surely, before halloween! wrong, yet again. before i knew it, it was my twenty-second birthday, and the tv remained unmounted. finally, though, my brother and brother-in-law did it.

"okay, so you set up the vcr right away, then?" if by right away you mean another five months later, then yes! it took some trial and error, and realizing my grandmother didn't give me the remote for it, but i finally had it set up. all the cords were plugged into the correct inputs and everything. so, i pulled out my favourite movie, uptown girls, and popped it into the dvd player side of the vcr. worked beautifully. i did the thing that dads do when you're watching something in the living room where they act like they don't want to watch it, but then they end up standing behind a chair and being more invested than you in it and stood in the middle of the room watching it. so i popped the dvd out and back into it's case and decided to test the actual star of the show: the vcr herself. i went to my newly set up media shelf and picked out a tape. it had been about ten years since i had actually used a vhs tape, so i did google how to put it into the machine just to make sure i wouldn't destroy the tape or the vcr. finally, it was in, the machine was set to the correct mode, i looked to the tv screen and... nothing. i ejected the tape and put it back in, making sure i was watching the screen to see if it was just waiting for me to do something. it did the usual thing, and then nothing, again. i tried again a couple more times, no luck. so still no working vcr, but at least i have a dvd player. and i did get the remote eventually.  

second. i love music, and almost always have it playing at some capacity at any given moment

i practically lived on spotify. i have many, many playlists i would regularly shuffle through. i've made playlists for other people. i've burned cds from playlists for a friend's birthday. i love music. it's in my blood. but recently, i was unable to renew my spotify premium subscription. "no big deal," i thought. "i had the free version for nearly ten years before biting the bullet and getting premium, surely i can do it again." i was wrong, apparently. ads every other song, five at a time, limited skips, not being able to rearrange my queue. i couldn't do it. i was distraught. how would i live without my music? then i remembered something. i had a collection of cds and cassette tapes, just waiting to be played again. in middle school, i had listened to my original cd of from under the cork tree by fall out boy so many times it broke. and i had obtained not one, but two cd players from my papa, as well as already owning another player and a stereo system. so, i pulled out all one hundred and thirty-one cds from the bottom drawer of my nightstand and dusted them off. thank god for those hoarding genes, i suppose. and i had pretty much anything i ever wanted to listen to: i had eighties mixes, greatest hits from queen and the beatles, grammy's nominees from the early 2000s, all the pop and rock albums i adored, and (almost) every taylor swift album at least once. PLUS i had whatever loose cds from my dad and several cassettes from my papa. fleetwood mac, sade, and tracy chapman. DOUBLE PLUS, a random seven inch vinyl of a couple songs from the movie 10. unfortunately, i no longer have a record player, but i'm more than happy simply displaying it with my cds and cassettes in my cabinet.

as for the cassettes... i've only tested one, fleetwood mac's live album, the dance. it wasn't the best. the audio quality was grainy and a bit warbly, but it wasn't the worst i had ever heard, in all honesty. never forget when i received a cd from my dad of what i thought was katy perry's album prism. imagine my shock when instead of light pop, i was met with a bootlegged cd of five finger death punch. i cried. but the cassettes are fine, i like having them. i might test another one out soon. maybe celine dion's the colour of my love.

i don't really remember what the point of this post was, i won't lie. i think i just wanted to talk about my adventures in being a physical media lover recently. don't even get me started on my book collection. it's so much worse. 

until next time, xoxo