Let’s have a little break from the
top 10 albums that changed my life, just for today, okay? I have something else
I want to talk about. Let’s take a little photo tour of my bedroom, shall we? I’m
going to show you a few of the things in my collection.
Now this here is what I believe to be
the oldest VHS tape in my collection. It was my mom’s first, but I acquired it
when the rest of the family switched over to DVD. Do you know how long it’s
been since this movie was just called Raiders of the Lost Ark, with no
Indiana Jones in the title? It was before the second movie came out, that’s for
sure! The year on this tape is 1981. Now I don’t know if that’s just the year
the movie was made, but the tape must be nearly as old. Certainly older than
me. Cool, huh? Still works after all these years. It’s going to be 40 in a
couple years! And it still plays fine! Amazing. Simply amazing. And they try to
tell you VHS tapes degrade into being unwatchable after five to ten years.
Maybe if you leave it in the sun, or throw it in a microwave. But if you take
decent care of it, this is what you get. I could pop this into my 21-year-old
VCR that still works fine and watch it anytime I want.
Here’s a picture I have on my door. The
Never-Ending Story, what a classic 80’s fantasy film! But, you might be
wondering, isn’t that kind of a small poster? Well, it’s not a poster! You see,
I had this movie on DVD for a while. But it became scratched and unplayable
after about five years even though I thought I took pretty good care of it and
hardly ever removed it from its case! So I threw the DVD away, but kept the
cover as a tiny poster. Neat, huh? See how that kinda contrasts with the last
thing I showed you? Not yet? Well let’s keep looking around.
Ah, the crown jewel of my video game
collection! I’ve had this Sega Genesis since 1993. I can still hook it up to my
TV whenever the urge strikes me and play any of the games I still have after
all this time. The controllers all work, the AC adapter is fine, the RF switch is fine. How old is that now? Let’s see…it turned 26 years old this year, didn’t
it? Oh my. 26 years and still going strong! I have some NES games that are even
older than that and still play fine. My old Nintendo Entertainment System bit
the dust about four years ago, but it must have been pushing 30 years old at
least by that time. I got years of good use out of that thing. I have one of
those bootleg Retron systems to play NES games on now, and that works. I
kept my old NES controllers too because they still work fine, and they're compatible with the Retron console. But I play newer
games too. Let’s have a look at my newest game system, the Playstation 3! Yes, I’m
a little behind the times when it comes to games, but oh well. I’m old now,
what more do you want?
What’s this? I press power, but it’s
not working? The game controller isn’t doing anything either? Hmmm, what’s that
yellow light mean? Let’s have a looksie on Google.
Oh no!
My PS3 overheated and the motherboard is fried! And now I either have to go back to college and get a degree to become
an electrician and then take the thing apart and replace the motherboard, or buy another used PS3! Or just get a current generation console, which is
no doubt what Sony wants me to do! And how old is this system? I mean it
belonged to my wife Deborah before we met, but it couldn’t be much more than ten years
old, the system came out in 2006-ish. You know what, this reminds me of a
couple years back when the disc drive on my Nintendo Wii died and it was
cheaper buying another used Wii than getting it repaired, thus losing all of
the games I’d downloaded from the online Nintendo store back in the day (Gee, I
guess I just have to buy them again, right Nintendo? So much better than having
one physical copy that you only buy once and lasts you decades…). And that
system was only ten years old too! And yet here I am with a working Sega
Genesis from 1993.
Gosh, if I didn’t know any better, I’d
think that it is possible to build electronics that last for decades upon
decades without something like this happening, but because that’s not very
profitable and causes people to hang onto electronics for too long rather than
buy new ones, the corporations started to build their crappy electronics with short
lifespans ON PURPOSE starting around the turn of the century or so to make people spend more money! But that’s just a crazy
conspiracy theory, am I right?
I’m so pissed right now. I’m still
not sure what I’m going to do. I’d been mostly using the PS3 to watch YouTube,
Hulu and Netflix. I had it hooked through my VCR so I could record stuff as
part of my weird, quirky hobby of putting things on blank tapes before they can
get taken off the streaming service and making bootleg VHS tapes. These newer
systems use HDMI output so it’s going to be a lot harder to do with those. But
whatever I do about this, it will involve spending money I’d rather not have to
spend. Don’t you just love capitalism? I miss the damn 1990's.
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