under the full moon, vol. 6 iss. 6
Hey there. Happy Full Strawberry Moon.
Here's how the media format cycle works:
1) first they laugh at you
2) then they embrace you
3) then they take you for granted
4) then they find a new shiny format
5) then you end up as bargain bin and second-hand store fodder, and eventually,
6) you are completely left for dead... until they feel pangs of regret and
7) they resurrect you with hosannas and wonder why you ever went away.[[1]]
The DVD format, which is short for both Digital Video Disc and (I kid you not) Digital Versatile Disc, is currently sitting somewhere between steps 5 and 6, leaning 6. While they retailed for anywhere from $10-30 new back in the day, you can now probably get five DVDs for a fiver at yr local bargain shop or drugstore, and any garage sale near you is probably doing their best to get rid of as many as they can in earnest.
For at least a decade, larger department stores have been trying to juice sales by packaging collections of DVDs together in bizarre ways that I am obsessed with: here's 3 war movies (different wars, and one is a comedy!) for $8.99!; here's a bundle of 5 thrillers [?!] related to The Bible!; here's a 4-banger of Leslie Nielsen movies; here's a 6-pack of Sandra Bullock!
These bizarre bundles are a sign of just how far the format rose and fell in just 20 years.[[2]] Back in late 1996 / early 1997, however, the future was looking bright.
According to most sources (and I have really tried to dig into this), the first DVD ever released commercially was the natural-disaster-chasing-relationship-reconciliation-action film Twister. While it may officially hold the title, that truth is apocryphal: it was only one of about 30 titles released on March 24, 1997,[[3]] including some other certified heaters like Batman (the original Michael Keaton / Kim Basinger joint), The Exorcist, and Space Jam. Still, for reasons that are not fully clear, it's Twister that's persisted in cultural memory as "the first DVD ever released."
Twister is a film about tornadoes, and it's a film about a woman named Jo (Helen Hunt). After a tornado destroys her childhood home and kills her father, Jo grows up to be a meteorologist who develops a tornado tracking system called Dorothy (get it?), which then leads her to become weirdly reunited with her estranged weatherman husband Bill (Bill Paxton). Over the course of what seems like just a few days, the reunited couple and a motley crew of other storm chasers find themselves confronted with a barrage of tornadoes, constantly increasing in intensity. The team perseveres and is able to deploy Dorothy successfully. A cow flies through the air. Jo and Bill reconcile. Loose ends are tied up neatly.
Twister was as successful a film as you could imagine back then. With a budget of around $90 million, and a concentrated use of CGI that made the storm scenes extra spectacular, the film grossed almost half-a-motherfucking-billion ($494.5 million) dollars. Seriously. Read that again: half a billion. In 1997 money. That's about a billion today.
But none of this explains why we think of Twister as the first DVD ever sold.
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Looking back at the DVD format makes me nostalgic — which is a pretty banal thing to say. I mean, of course it does: I was in my mid-teens when DVDs came to power, and they ruled for much of my 20s. But what I miss about them isn't the quality, nor the convenience, both of which were easily eclipsed by streaming.
Back in the mid-90s, the VHS industry was firmly entrenched. Though numbers are hard to find, one source suggested that the VHS industry brought in $32 billion the year before DVDs were introduced, was decimated down to $15 billion just 7 years later, and has since basically vanished.[[4]] The reason was simple: people fucking loved DVDs. They took up less shelf space, didn't degrade in the same way over time, you didn't have to rewind them and could pick scenes with a couple of remote button pushes, and (this was my favourite part, their true selling point) they often contained Special Features.[[5]]
DVD Special Features were always a mixed bag: they often contained director or producer or actor commentary — which could feel actually revelatory, or could feel like someone was doing a chore they didn't want to do; they might contain deleted scenes or bloopers; they often had listings of credits and bios, as well as original theatrical trailers; they might have other languages and subtitles; occasionally, they would have full-on "making of" documentaries related to the film at hand; and more.
What I loved about this, and what streaming culture has stolen from us in earnest, is deeper context around a given cultural product. At their worst, Special Features were rote filler; but at their best, they gave a significantly deeper look into the film you were watching.[[6]] There is simply nothing analogous to this on Netflix or Hulu or whatever whatever. You can watch the film. Watch it again for all we care. But if you want context, go find it yrself, somewhere else.
The original DVD release of Twister contained a rather bare bones, but demonstrative set of Special Features: theatrical trailer, cast & crew bios, quasi film-themed menu screens, scene access, English and French audio, and English, French, and Spanish subtitles. It was nothing super special, but much more than you'd get on a VHS, and it showed what the format could do as a baseline. The "Special Editon" of the DVD, released in 2000, would leapfrog that offering with an added audio commentary (with director Jan De Bont and VFX supervisor Stefen Fangmeier), 2 theatrical trailers, The Making of Twister featurette, Anatomy of the Twister featurette, and a music video for Van Halen's "Humans Being" song from the soundtrack.[[7]]
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It's hard to reckon with, but I think most people just don't care about context anymore. Demand for it is dwindling as much as DVD sales — and I always keep my eyes open for the bizarre bundles of context on sale for a fiver (or given away for free).
Still, some context is worth remembering: Netflix started out as a DVD delivery service before it pivoted to streaming. Between 2007 and 2009 they shipped a billion DVDs out to viewers, and people were returning about 1.6 million DVDs each day. This was not just a huge business, but a logistical fever dream. As streaming demand grew, the DVD mailing business shrank in proportion — and yet, managed to hold on all the way until 2023, when Netflix officially cancelled it. The reason it lasted so long was simple: for a lot of the non-broadband world, DVDs remain a convenient and reliable way to watch a movie.
In the early days, one of Netflix's biggest competitors was Redbox, a company that operated tens of thousands of kiosks around the U.S. where you could rent DVDs for a dollar. The two companies had very different vibes: Netflix was based on personal curation and building a watch queue, while Redbox seemed to corner the convenience / impulse market. They also had relatively different business models: Netflix was essentially a traditional startup with founders that slowly expanded what it meant to literally be a content delivery business — first physically, and then digitally; Redbox began as McDonald's Marketing "Project 361," with the goal of getting bad food into even more corners of... well, everywhere. When selling food didn't work, they pivoted, somewhat bafflingly, to DVDs, and broke off to become a separate entity.[[8]]
Fast forward to 2022. While both Netflix and Redbox built their empires on a quicksand made of DVDs, Netflix was nimble in ways that Redbox couldn't be. Netflix pivoted to streaming and dominated; after several acquisitions and sales, Redbox was eventually sold to the company that makes the Chicken Soup For The Soul books for $375 motherfucking million. But of course, this company had no idea what to do with Redbox, and stopped caring in short order. 7-Eleven and CVS both sued Redbox for not paying proper commissions, and more lawsuits followed.
From there, the company sputtered and went under. They made a cursory attempt to remove the 34,000 kiosks they owned from around the continent, but many were abandoned and left for dead, just like the format they carried for over a decade. Some enterprising junk removers set out to reclaim the kiosks for scrap. Others took them home and reverse engineered them.
The thing is... the kiosks kept functioning, even after the company went under. I don't know how many of them still exist, and how many are still doing their thing, but Redbox seems to be the zombie service that won't die, renting out films on the zombie movie format that persists in spite of numerous headshots. Their kiosks simply refuse to succumb, dispensing any DVD you want as long as you give a money offering to the disc-god...
With one exception: Twister.
That's right: due to some kind of software glitch, the zombie Redbox DVD kiosks refuse to loosen their death grip on the first ("first") DVD that was ever spawned.
There are technical explanations for this, and certainly the tinkerers could figure out a hack to fix the error and make a Twister rental happen. Maybe they already have... But I sincerely hope they don't. I want this error to exist and persist. I want the zombie Redbox kiosks to keep the Twister DVDs, all of them, in their guts, forever. To me, this is a cosmic glitch that brings the whole trajectory of the DVD format full circle, back into its own mouth like a digital ouroboros. The poetry of this whole situation is staggering.
A glass disc emerges into the world from layers of compressed and superheated sand. In a static-free room, a beam of concentrated light etches sigils below the first layer, sigils that tell of plagues of weather, of love lost and regained, of nature not tamed but respected and studied. Over time, the miracle discs — once worshipped — are discarded and abused, until one day they become confined within monoliths that dot the landscape, prayed to as altars by a much smaller number of devotees. Eventually, the formal religion dies out, and the devotees scatter, their worship now informal and occult. The monoliths continue to provide discs for reverence and love, but the one disc they refuse to relinquish is the first disc, the primal material of the whole cosmology.
///
Time lurches ever forward, history in the rearview mirror... but the road ahead of us is a ring gently curving, looping forever like the backdrop of a chase between the coyote and the road runner. We wait for the ACME anvil to drop, until we realize that we're the offscreen hands of god; it's us dropping the anvils. ACME: the point at which someone or something is best, perfect, or most successful. One running joke in Looney Tunes cartoons was that ACME products often failed in hilarious and spectacular ways.
Tornadoes are a decent metaphor for the media format cycle: they are circular and turbulent, but seem pretty calm when yr in the middle of it. It helps to have a top down view. Tornadoes emerge from the sky downward. Only because of the way their cyclonic action works does it look like the troubles are coming from the ground up (but anvils don't fall upwards — at least not yet). And after it's done, all that's left is the wreckage and calm.
Twister is a film about tornadoes, but one of the first writing lessons I ever learned is still etched into my brain: a (literary) monster is never just a monster. The film's tornadoes are monsters, yes, but they're really extended metaphors for the cycle of death, a turbulent relationship, a reconciliation of hearts. The tornado is a force of nature, appearing slowly, then all at once, then dissipating and leaving behind an eerie quiet.
Maybe the real tornado is the way that history happens slowly, then all at once.[[9]] Maybe the real tornado is the final destination we're trying to get to, that unattainable endpoint on the ring road, that destroys us through our efforts to grasp it, background artwork looping all the while. Or maybe, just maybe, the real tornadoes are the anvils we drop on all our most beloved formats along the way.
the farmers are counting potential debts in the glow of foxfire, while the crows are bartering for our favour, and demanding we lace up our boots. don't let all this talk of abundance serve as a distraction: you (yes, you) have got seeds in yr teeth. pluck a berry; squeeze. remember that the bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness you reveal.
what I’ve been listening to:
Lee Reed - Pitchforks & Torches — i don't listen to Lee Reed to have my mind blown musically; i listen to Lee Reed to recalibrate my inner anarchist compass and to remind myself what side i'm on... when Lee Reed calls one of his records "the darkest of music for the darkest of times," you know yr in for a heavy one.
Electric Wizard - Come My Fanatics — Electric Wizard provide a simple and straightforward guarantee: minor pentatonic blues riffs, saturated in distortion, played slowly and repeatedly. ah yes. that's the stuff.
Cursed - Hell Comes Home b/w Search & Destroy — the first time i ever saw Cursed was in 2004 in Ottawa. Chris Colohan came on stage as the band was starting to lean into some opening drones of feedback and said very plainly into the mic "hope yr ready for some permanent fucking ear damage." and i was.
dogwhistle - textile waste — holy moly, dawg. this is crushing. Toronto-based hardcore that takes no prisoners, and is actively playing / touring now. keep an eye out and go see them if they come around.
Atari Teenage Riot - Burn, Berlin, Burn! — there are a lot of bands who have tried (and mostly failed) to make electronic music sound punk. it's hard to imagine anyone topping this (including ATR themselves, who followed this up with 60 Second Wipe Out, which felt weirdly polished by comparison).
Melt - If There's A Heaven — finely crafted pop songs, that sound like they were written by a group of friends in a room together. that shouldn't be as novel as it sounds... but the main point is, this is great, and probably what i listened to most this past month.
Lucifécit - Devoção — this hasn't been tagged with any words like "spiritual," but this is some of the most devotional music that i've heard in a while. if ophiolatreia had a soundtrack, this might be it.
The World Provider - Tears (single) — not much to say here other than i fucking love this and Malcolm is really doin' it with this one. can't wait to hear the whole record, homie!
what I’ve been reading:
it’s dangerous to go alone… take this, and this…
Larry David: My Dinner With Adolf — subtle times call for subtle satire, and hamfisted times... well...
A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy — nevermind that the Administration is gutting research institution funding, which will into lead to a massive STEM brain drain... but the idea that factories (and their entire supply chains) can just magically move here is a fiction. but hey, read this advice on how to cope, containing chestnuts of wisdom like, "you don't actually need a new phone."
Canada vs the 51st State — between this cornucopia of maps and this deep dive on our population concentration, Thomas Pueyo gives a whole bunch of context to the relationship between the two countries you may not have realized.
Leo XIV Pledges to Lift Up ‘Ordinary People’ — i’ll believe this when i see it.
The Countercultural Figures who Helped Give Birth to the Neo-Nazi Terrorist Networks of Today — a very good reminder that those who “flirt” with fascist symbolism and edgelord garbage are usually just telling on themselves. in this case, the evidence is now overwhelming.
What is HDR, anyway? — an exhaustive explanation of one of the most misunderstood functions on yr phone's camera.
The Coyotes of San Francisco — i want to pet them all. i know that's not the point of this article, but i am just saying this for the record: i want to pet them all.
Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online — whoopsie!
The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great — it's like if computer magazine ads were designed by the artist who does the Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Bear. adorable.
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens — a good (and pretty short) paper that outlines how we deal with having a firehose of content sprayed at our brains each day.
The Israel Embassy Shooter Manifesto — you know that when something intense happens in the world and there's a manifesto involved, i'm gonna read it. Ken Klippenstein's publication of this text earned him an FBI visit, surprising considering his neutrality — and Yasha Levine's analysis provides a cogent point of view (he's been increasingly wearing his heart on his sleeve about this in a way that is really worth paying attention to).
The Signal Clone the Trump Admin Uses Was Hacked — for me, the story here is not that this gov't channel was hacked. the story is that the U.S. gov't uses 3rd party software, based on Signal but with a message archiving function, and that that software is owned / hosted by an Israeli company. insane stuff, probably the furthest from secure i can imagine.
SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 75: An interview with Raven Myers, trucker/photographer queen of the Southwest. — evocative photos and a solid interview. meghan garvey doesn't miss.
All You Gotta be When You’re 23 is Yourself — Evangeline turned in an absolute banger of an article about her time at The Arthur and the current editorial interregnum. i loved this.
‘Intensification has been directed by the city’ developer says as backlash to proposed 17-storey East City development grows — it would greatly enhance this article if everyone quoted in it who said "i'm not opposed to intensification" had to finish their sentence by actually saying what they're implying (ie. "but not in my backyard"). i get it! no one wants a big building in their backyard. but the hand-wringing and insistence that they DO want these SOMEWHERE is just... annoying as fuck.
>>> 2025-03-01 the cold glow of tritium — i'm behind on my reading of j.b. crawford's blog, but i did manage to read through this one recently, on the evolution of the use of tritium radioluminescent paint in military and civilian applications. good stuff.
The age of radical message-board utilitarian terrorism — because my work is so closely adjacent to Effective Altruism, and because of my long standing obsession with cults, this new era of very online weirdos whose brains have been cooked by utilitarianism (includiing these folks, the Zizians, etc.) is fucking FASCINATING to me.
and now for some AI stuff...
A Judge Accepted AI Video Testimony From a Dead Man — it's not exactly “testimony,” but rather a victim impact statement from beyond the grave. either way… weird!
Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining — for me, the story here is not so much that the models have this capability, it‘s that they‘re obfuscating how they come up with the answer when explicitly asked.
OpenAI's new reasoning AI models hallucinate more — i wanna highlight this HN discussion thread of this article... less for the substance of the article and more for a point i want to make about listening: before you buy into hype read discussion threads of the people who use the tools constantly. it will really help you understand the AIs current limits (and what it's doing well).
AGI is not a milestone — a clear argument for why a milestone that we don't even know how to define consensually can't really be a milestone in any meaningful sense of the word — and is largely about marketing and competition.
Why We’re Unlikely to Get Artificial General Intelligence Anytime Soon — kind of a pedestrian analysis, but still a good overview if yr confused by what all this talk about AGI is about.
Chicago Sun-Times publishes made-up books and fake experts in AI debacle — oof. embarassing is an understatement.
Teachers Are Not OK — i've worked very hard to stake out a default view of "don't worry too much, old man, the kids are alright." but... this is grim stuff.
Human — i thought this story (and the associated "artifacts") was a charming lil' thought experiment. kind of level one oppositional perspective-taking, but still charming nonetheless.
xAI’s Grok suddenly can’t stop bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa — LOL. grok used to be woke. the pendulum swings...
Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry — there is a lot i want to say about this, about piracy and the cultural commons and capital and Aaron Swartz (pbuh) and and and... but it will have to wait for another newsletter. in the meantime, nick clegg can piss up a rope!
Google is Using AI to Censor Thousands of Independent Websites Like Mine (And to Control the Flow of Information Online) — this is a bit of a silly headline — Google has been censoring independent websites and controlling the flow of information online for a very long time — but what's interesting here is that it dives into the social contract of search (never heard this term before) and how it differs markedly from an engine that just scrapes data and gives you an answer.
Putting an untrusted layer of chatbot AI between you and the internet is an obvious disaster waiting to happen — this article is about AI, but truly i think this sort of argument applies to ALL contexts: the more layers of mediation you put between yrself and the information you seek, the more yr subject to other people's filters, moderation, and context shaping (often done in service of profit). as always: keep yr stick on the ice.
what I’ve been watching:
Bad Religion - Decades — a nice series of videos where Bad Religion romps through the greatest hits of their vast catalogue, peppered with interviews and b-roll from years past. as corny as they can be sometimes, this was a good reminder to me that they have SO many bangers, so many songs that are smart as fuck and rip hard.
Taskmaster Season 19 — for a show that lives and dies by its cast, this season is really solid. it's halfway through right now, and i have no favourite just yet... and though i love him, Jason Mantzoukas is not at the top of my list!
Sam Campbell - Companion — and speaking of Taskmaster contestants, i always thought Sam Campbell was hilarious. i just had no idea his actual comedy would be like... this? hahaha still good though.
DOOM SCROLL — rather than recommending one episode at a time as i have in the past, i will just heartily recommend this entire show. Josh Citarella is a very, very smart interviewer, and no intellectual slouch in his own right. very, very good stuff.
Could AI models be conscious? — whatever you think about AI (and i hope you think something about it), an emerging question we (might) need to reckon with is what machine sentience might look like and what the fuck to do about it. though this is still mostly resting in thought-experiment territory, there's some interesting things in here that may tickle yr brainstem — and yr reaction to that likely depends on whether you love or hate to be tickled.
miscellany:
judyrecords — an online tool providing full text search of over 750 million (!!!) U.S. court cases. whoa.
Scraperr — a self-hosted webscraper that is pretty user friendly. get busy!
WHAT THE HELL ARE PPL DOING? — i wonder about this sort of thing with some frequency and looking at this makes me laugh. to all 9,000,000+ people on a smoke break right now, enjoy.
The 25 Gardens You Must See — this is a very eurocentric list, and as much as i LOVE New York City, i would not include the High Line on here. still a very enticing list nonetheless!
FUTURE RUINS — who wants to sponsor me to go to back to LA for this fest in november? lol jk but in all seriousness this looks awesome, and if you live anywhere near there, you should go.
Why Americans Are Dressing Like Russian Troops in Oklahoma — last month i shared a link about how Poles are LARPing as Americans — of course it turns our Americans are LARPing as Russians. soon, society will just be LARPers all the way down...
Two rare ‘doomsday fish’ wash ashore, sparking global superstition — scary fishmas, everyone!
Owls In Towels — yr welcome.
Thanks for reading. I hope this full moon fills you with the energy you need to get to the next one.
garbageface.
[[1]]: The most famous and salient example of this process, of course, is vinyl. It's worth noting, however, that some (actually, many) formats never leave step one — see: LaserDisc.
[[2]]: Some of my best friends still watch DVDs and I still have a modest box of DVDs (and CDs!) kicking around, exclusively made of titles that I am positive will never be streaming and which the pirate networks I frequent would not carry. Still, I don't want to hear the pedantic arguments about how DVDs are not dead — they really are! It's okay, buds. It's okay to like dead things.
[[3]]: Side note: this link contains a preamble with some fascinating discussion of the format's limitations, such as "On DVD, 120 minutes of fast action, spinning cameras and constantly changing visuals take up more disc space than 120 minutes of stationary cameras and very little on-screen movement."
[[4]]: Again, to my VHS-watching friends — I see you, I love you, yr special. But the format is indeed dead, no matter how many Instagram filters it inspires.
[[5]]: Perhaps my favourite special feature of all time is found on the DVD of David Lynch's Inland Empire, a 20min short simply titled Quinoa, which is ostensibly a film where David Lynch shows you how to cook quinoa his way. But this short is so much more than that. When Lynch died recently, this was the first piece of his work that I reached for to watch on YouTube... and I was so touched by all of the comments that showed me I wasn't alone in making that move.
[[6]]: Probably worth mentioning here that streaming has significantly decreased "exclusivity windows" for releases on digital formats after theatrical release, and that in their heyday, DVDs wouldn't be released for about 3-4 months after the end of a theatrical run — so there was no chance of the Special Features spoiling the movie magic.
[[7]]: Lest you think I'm some Twister historian, I just got the info from this insanely deep review / comparison of the two releases. Holy moly.
[[8]]: The McDonald's project was initially called "Tiktok Easyshops"
[[9]]: Quote Investigator has a lot of shit to say about this one...
