I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

Sex, Lies and Videotape (oh, and Blue-Laser DVD Formats)

Attention lazy received-opinion-espousing comment posters.

Last week, there was lots of discussion around Sony reportedly refusing to allow porno to be distributed on their Blu-ray high def format.

(For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that this isn’t necessarily true—the Blu-ray Disc Association deny any such ban.)

The lazy opinion I refer to is “Sony have learned nothing—The reason VHS won over Betamax is because they refused to allow porn on Beta.” (Entertainingly, this very opinion is spouted in the ArsTechnica article linked to in the previous paragraph which I was using to debunk the opinion in the paragraph before that.)

I’ve hunted around for anything online that can back up the idea of Sony not allowing teh pr0n on Betamax, and can’t find a sausage. However, I did find an article entitled Pornography Drives Technology: Why Not to Censor the Internet which proposed a considerably different connection between boobies and videotape:

Predicting that the greatest use of home VCRs would be time-shifting, that is, recording TV shows off the air for later viewing, Sony designed Betamax tape with a one hour playing time. When the market for videotape proved not to be time shifting, but prerecorded movies instead, longer-playing tape was demanded, and VHS arose to meet the demand. Though Beta eventually went to a four hour format, it was too late. Within years, two-, four-, and six-hour VHS tape became the industry standard.

What were people watching on these early videotapes? The early home video rental stores, the outlets that drove Betamax from the market, were almost exclusively pornographic, drawing on the same clientele as early nickelodeons.

So while it can be argued that yes, there was a comparative lack of red-hot-girl-on-girl-action on Betamax, and that, potentially, this contributed to the downfall of the format. However, it was for purely technical reasons—the unavailability of suitably girthy videocassettes—rather than moralistic stances by Japanese corporations.

(And as an aside, is there really that much demand for HD porn? It strikes me that most porn I’ve seen in my life would be improved by reducing the resolution of what I was witnessing.)

Things My Rabbit, Doozer, Said to Me Last Night, Within Six Hours of Me Posting a Link Allowing Web Visitors to Make Him Speak

• Message from Citizen Nabaztag : Hi Doozer! My Name is Citizen Nabaz and Im very happy to meet you!
• Message from Tape : blah blah blah?
• Message from lmorchard : Lucifer helps me prepare the chex mix
• Message from M : will it blend?
• Message from Rey : I miss myself!
• Message from Me : One day i will crush all humans
• Message from The Spice Girls : Tell me what you want. What you really really want.
• Message from Bacon : I am totally sleeping with your wife. (I think Joy might have helped Bacon type this, since he was asleep on our bed at the time)

Carry on.

Do The Write Thing

Comments are now live once more. Nothing fancy like OpenID or whatnot, but enough so you can tell me where to stick it.

Theoretically, I could enable comments on posted links, rather than just posts. Anyone got any interest in that?

Doing Things Is What I Like to Do

I promised myself I wouldn’t rise to it. If someone tagged me with that “5 Things You Don’t Know About Me” meme that’s been going around for the last month, I’d ignore them.

Earlier today, Danny tagged me.

1. In my final year at high school, I got a better grade (B) in my Higher Grade English class than I did in Higher Computer Studies (grade C). I appealed the Computing one, and it was bumped up to a B.
2. Despite my natural geek tendencies, I’ve spent much of my life determined not to pursue a career in computing. As a teenager, my dream job was to work as an advertising executive.
   
   After discovering how hard it was to break into advertising, I applied to study Maths at university. At the last minute (during Freshers Week!), I switched to CompSci. The reason I switched isn’t important, although I did realise years later that it was based on a misunderstanding.
   
   And as I approached graduation, I was determined not to end up like most CompSci graduates in Edinburgh, working in the basement of some bank. So instead, I aimed at becoming a pop journalist, submitting sample reviews to “Smash Hits”. They didn’t write back.
   
   After the dotcom bubble burst and I got laid off, I spent almost three years working in the basement of a bank. It was as bad as I’d expected.
3. My fantasy dream goal in life is to be a panelist on Radio 4’s Just a Minute. My dream used to be having my name printed on a record sleeve, which I achieved a few years ago through pretending to have been at Glastonbury.
4. Rod is short for Roderick (not Rodney, as some suspect). For the first few years of my life I was called “Rory” for short, but at the age of 9 I decided I wanted to be called by my full name, so from Primary 4 on it was “Roderick”.
   
   I remained Roderick through high school until I left and took a year out before Uni. During this time, I worked at a library where, after introducing myself as Roderick, folks got to shortening my name to “Roddy”. “Roddy Begbie”?! I fucking hate how that sounds.
   
   Thus, I decided to shorten my name even further to prevent any future Roddyness. On my first day at university, I started introducing myself as Rod, and I’ve been that way ever since.
5. When faced with single-pole double-throw lightswitches, I don’t like it when the lights are off because both switches are in the On position. I will go out of my way to turn off lights by throwing the On switch Off, even if it means walking downstairs in the dark. (Luckily, albeit somewhat annoyingly, the guy who did the electrical wiring in our house didn’t use SPDT switches, so if one switch is Off, the lights stay off. Oh, the number of lightbulbs I’ve changed unnecessarily!)

And now the time where tradition dictates I tag others… Messrs Cheever, Del Vecchio, Martin, Sandler, and Miss Russell: Go!