lapisnev

Don't squeeze me, I fart

Things that make you go 🤌. Weird computer stuff. Artist and general creative type. Occasionally funny. Gentoo on main. I play rhythm games!

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

back when i was about 18 i had a real problem with saying shit that I didn't know anything about. i still do, but it was worse then. i worked at an electronics surplus store, one of the few left in california.

one day, someone dropped off a Panasonic S-VHS Reporter. i was already a huge camcorder dipshit (although I didn't know that, because I'd been told for years that i liked computers, and it would take me another decade to start realizing I'd been lied to) so I immediately began fawning over the thing

i worked with an awful old man, definitely in the "shitty ham radio guy who was shitty even when he was young in the 60s" mode. at some point he snarkily asked me what I thought was so cool about it.

the only friend i had in the world at that time was my brother, who was extremely physically abusive but, what else could I do, I had nobody else to talk to. i think I told him about this thing on the phone, and he either did a bad job of googling it or just bullshitted me, I don't know which, and came back and told me some string of nonsense, including the assertion that it was a "true NTSC camera"

i repeated this to the guy at the store. he had long since started openly mocking me, so he chuckled and said "you don't have the faintest idea what that means, do you?"

and, you know, I didn't. i looked him right in the eyes and confidently repeated what I had been told; "525 lines of interlaced video with such and such color encoding" followed by some other quantity of adjectives, none of which were wrong, but none of which meant anything in that context. and he rolled his eyes, sighed and walked away shaking his head

the funny thing about this whole situation is that I had been misinformed, and i wasn't using real terms of art, and I was going off half cocked about this gadget I knew very little about other than that it looked cool, but he didn't know any of that, and he also didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. because there was some truth to what I had been told.

typical VHS cameras are not, in fact, "true NTSC." they have brutally slashed chroma resolution compared to broadcast spec, and it's been one of the big dividing lines between consumer cameras and professional ones since time immemorial (e.g. the 70s.) even betacam, the big pro format for decades, didn't have full chroma res. it was a damn sight better than VHS though, and so was SVHS, and i'm certain the Reporter was genuinely quite decent compared to most anything else I, personally, could get.

it wasn't what i thought it was, but i'm certain he didn't know that. and he might have grokked that I didn't know what I was talking about, but it wasn't his fucking place to talk down to a teenager who was excited about something he knew jack shit about. we could have had a conversation, but instead he decided to be a big sack of lukewarm shit water.

fun facts about that guy: i never once recall him saying he liked something. he later quit because he refused to take the same pay as me, and meanwhile i became assistant manager


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