dragonlady7

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so i’m doing a big VHS transfer order at work. the thing about the full-size VHS tapes is that the recorder doesn’t stop itself when they’re over. (The digital-8 recorder is perfectly happy to do so, it pops up a cheerful “imported 123 minutes from your cassette!” and sits there not filling the hard drive for however long it takes you to get back to it. Yes of course every type of video transfer runs in realtime, this is not science fiction.)

So I have one I run downstairs and I set a timer to check on it (because if you let it keep running, it’ll just fill the hard drive with a black screen at like 100mb a minute), but the one up here I run with a little mini ClearClick thingy and I… just leave it not-muted, so I can hear when the noise stops and it goes “FZZZT! click WHRRRR” and starts rewinding. if I hit ‘stop’ then, then I have zero editing to do, and save myself about an hour of computer time. Yes, it’s that much.

But that means that I have to listen to people’s home movies. This family has young children. The earlier tapes had a lot of screaming babies on them. For some reason one of the things this proud papa Camcorded was the newborn’s first bath, like right out of the womb, so that was some extremely distressing high-pitched squalling. I did not like that. I also hear a lot of tinny Christmas carols, which gets a bit old, but what’s been getting to me is group renditions of Happy Birthday. Like, I don’t mind that, but the local custom, which I’d never encountered before I moved here, is instead of the “how old are you now” verse, or the “you look like a monkey” verse, they do a verse that’s just “what’s your girl/boyfriend’s first name”, and I don’t understand it at all, but it’s like every fucking time? It’s clearly meant to tease a child too young to really be dating? But I don’t totally understand it, and there’s never a funny punchline, it just seems like a focused bit of mortification on the child who’s being singled out for positive attention, so they also get negative attention at the same time? Not sure.

So I don’t like that.

(Oh, this rendition is a lot of yelling children and they are doing the “how old are you” verse, so that’s something. Ah and a lone child is doing the “what’s your boyfriend’s first name” variant, and now they’re redoing the whole song but with adults this time… well.)

Anyway but what I came here to write about was how i’ve now sat through a bunch of really dire children’s school music concerts, virtually, and I’m starting to prepare myself for more of those in my real life, as the children in my life are aging into that sort of thing.

It can’t be this bad if you actually know the kids, right?? … right? (Your picture was not posted)