4 min read

Friday, March 7, 2025

Consider a newsletter with three floppy disk drives, the third drive being installed using DRIVER.SYS, and two hard disk drives, with a primary and an extended partition on each hard disk drive.

I am going to stick with frivolity today, but I have been doing a lot of thinking about Jason Kottke's post about Mike Masnick's post about whether, and how, one can write about anything other than what's going on in politics/autocracy right now. There's a place for silliness, even (especially?) under creeping authoritarian rule, but it does not feel right to just shut up and dribble - even if I'm somewhat less accomplished or influential than LeBron James. So forgive me if I get a little earnest and annoying in calling for Democrats to stop being so pathetic. I wouldn't do it if they would act like this is the national emergency that they happily fundraise off of. Whoops, I already forgot that I was about to smoothly transition back to the usual Wolmania stuff. About that:

hackaday on Mastodon linked to this video from "YouTube Pedant", who writes:

In 2002 D-Theater launched in the US - the dealers needed a demo tape of HD footage. JVC reused some HD video that had been shot as a demo for the Japanese HD market back in 1993.

So what we have here is HD video of New York City (home of "I'm walkin' here", etc) back in 1993, when the city was abuzz with, well, I don't really know. At the time I was probably studying my Haftorah portion for my upcoming bar mitzvah. But presumably there was a lot of chain smoking and residual punk rock going on. From what I understand this is also around when some glowing green ooze leaked into the sewers. But I digress.

One thing I enjoy about this stock footage is that at first it seems like basic b-roll, just capturing life in the Big Apple. But it seems a little too authentically New Yorky. Cabs and the Twin Towers and Wall Street dudes in boxy suits. It's like a tourist's idea of what it would really be like to walk around in Manhattan. (Which of course that's what it is - it's footage shot to show off the incredible fidelity of the medium for an original audience of Japanese tech consumers, who would presumably not want to be confronted by anything discordant with their preconceived notions of what New York is Really Like.)

So anyway, once you realize it's all probably carefully crafted to look like cinéma vérité, to fool simpletons like yourself into thinking they're seeing real life unspool in beautiful 720p, you can start to really appreciate some of the fun little moments the geniuses at HiVision threw in. Of course, there's this handsome jester, making balloon animals outside of the Broadway production of Paper Moon that never actually happened:

A kid in a jester costume making a balloon animal (I think it's a... circle) across the street from a Sbarro's.
Dignity personified

But to be honest with you, I wrote all of this just so you could watch this beautifully staged protomeme (starting at the one minute mark):

She's got some big earrings on. Which was the style at the time.
A good-looking woman is walking down a crowded sidewalk. Just living her life. What's that in the foreground? It appears to be a man in a suit, with a jaunty little ponytail.
She's doing what women have to do in this patriarchal world - avoiding eye contact and just making sure she's not sending any signal whatsoever that she wants this creep's attention. I wonder if it'll work.
It seems he's going to walk by her, respectfully, not shamelessly ogle her like a piece of meat.
It didn't work.
Oh never mind. He's oglin' real hard. And he doesn't care what videographer knows it.
By which I mean he's giving her a looooooooong once-over. It's basically a twice-over! SMH.
He's gotta go back for a second slice.

My dream, naturally, is that the HiVision crew had their camera rolling, decided to follow this attractive woman for a few seconds, and accidentally captured the cheesiest moment in the history of the human race. But I've come to terms with the fact that these are probably just (perfectly cast) actors doing what they were paid to do. Either way, this is a great moment for digital video, New York City, and the art of storytelling.

And yeah, of course this delightful little moment is the most replayed part of the video:

I like to imagine she was very early into Google stock and retired in 2005. And he immediately fell into an open manhole.
I♥️NY.

Digital VHS walked so that we could run.

So yeah. Fun to look back at New York City in the early '90s.

Item 2: a list

Disc drive letters on an MS-DOS system with one floppy disk drive and one hard disk drive, with two MS-DOS partitions (a primary partition and an extended partition containing a single logical drive) on the hard disk, ranked:

  1. C:/
  2. A:/
  3. D:/
  4. B:/

Item 3: a media recommendation

The Rolling Stones - Country Honk

Item 4: word of the week

Epistrophe

Professor, I know you love epistrophe. She knows you love epistrophe. We all know you love epistrophe. Maybe try another rhetorical tactic?

Item 5: a photograph

I guess he just wanted to take another look.

See ya!

Oh, before we go, I did want to update everyone who wrote in about last week's list: some scientists recently announced they had made a "woolly mouse", but it's dumb.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.

Published by:

Jacob Wolman

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