aramis87

You might check around with your friends and relatives, to see if any of them digitize stuff; I’ve done it on a casual basis for some of my friends and relatives.

Alternatively, you can probably get an old VHS machine at Goodwill, give it a quick cleaning, and pick up various digitizers (standalone recorder or computer-input) and convert your own tapes. If you do it yourself, I would strongly suggest checking your setup with old commercial tapes first, so that you iron out any setup issues on something you don’t care about, before sending your irreplaceable tapes through whatever process you have.

[Note on commercial tapes: some of them have copyright protection on them, which will make the video fine when you send it to a tv, but just make it erratic when you send the video through another device. Very very occasionally, for undetermined reasons, an entirely home-recorded tape will also exhibit this behavior. If this happens to you, there are two main options: (1) if the device you’re recording onto has front input jacks, switch your setup to record through those jacks, as many of the front inputs lack the monitoring needed to screw up your recordings. (2) Check eBay or other online shopping places for a “video stabilizer”, which is old-timey code for “copyright buster”. Look at the listing for some indication that it’s used for VHS or VCR.]

If you think there might be issues with the tape quality (for example, dropouts or the magnetized bits sticking to the back of the previous strip on the reel), you might want to go professional - but only after seeing what steps they take to minimize this, and what that might cost.

Edit: when I did this for family and friends, I’d monitor the first five minutes or so of each recording, simply to make sure that the tape wasn’t crinkling (more likely to happen at the start of a tape, or some midpoint that was heavily used (repeatedly rewatching a single scene) of where someone had left the tape sitting. And then I’d check in periodically, to see if the tracking needed to be adjusted. I’d also try to at least stay in the same room, so that I could react quickly if I heard the tape crinkling.

Also, in an attempt to minimize problems with the tape having become slack over the years (even if properly stored on their spines), before I started any new tape, I would: if it was stopped partway or at the end of the reel, I would rewind the tape to the start, fastforward it to the end, then rewind it again, to try to reset the tension on the tape. If the tape was stopped at the start of the reel, I’d fastforward and then rewind, to reset the tension.

Also, if you do this yourself, it’s good to have some old tapes lying about that you don’t care about, either old commercial tapes or home-recorded tapes with content you don’t care about. This is because every so often, a tape will jam inside it’s cassette, at which point you need to open it up and unjam it. But sometimes the cassette itself (but not the tape) has developed problems, and you need to re-shell the tape into the shell of a different cassette.

Aside from what everyone else’s already mentioned, there’s the whole hassle of setting up a new device - debloating, tweaking the settings, etc. Why go through the pain of adjusting to a new device when the old one works just fine?

I never said it was planned, just that I have doubts that the story she’s presented on her video channel is the full story.

Am I not allowed to look at her video history where she’s always the victim, note the fall in the number of her followers (until this video came out), look at the video that she edited and put online, notice discrepancies in that video, and think, “There may be more to this than just what she’s chosen to show us”? Because that’s where I am.

I have watched the video, and I’ve watched a couple others on her channel. She doesn’t speak like that normally, she’s exaggerating it for the views. And the only video we’ve seen is the one she’s chosen to put online (with her own edits), which will naturally portray her as in the right.

Apparently she’s a law student, very litigious, and has been losing followers because her ongoing saga with the HOA board has become “boring”.

instead of ignoring a single drink

We have no idea how many drinks she had before getting on the plane. Perhaps the flight attendant didn’t want to deal with an argumentative, potentially drunk passenger in addition to her other duties.

I watched the video when it came out. The first couple sentences the woman speaks do sound as if she’s deaf - but then she sounds progressively less deaf as the disagreement goes on. As the public spat continued, I visited her TikTok account and (as of yesterday), she’s pinned this December 2024 video where she says the ear doctor told her she’s losing her hearing, and you’ll notice she’s speaking pretty normally.

I have friends and relatives who have become increasingly hard of hearing as they aged, including a couple that have gone completely deaf, and none of them have that “lost hearing before learning to speak” deaf ‘accent’. That’s because their brain and muscles remember what the movements for those words sound like. They do tend to lose verbal ‘crispness’ over time, but it takes years. So right off the bat, she was implicitly exaggerating her ‘hearing loss’ in the viral video.

Someone on yesterday’s reddit thread commented in part

I went down a rabbit hole of her TikTok, and she’s a disgusting person personality wise. ALWAYS playing the victim. […] We don’t know what led up to this. I hear them constantly bring up “accommodations”. My bet is she was making a scene about her “accommodations” and during that the attendant saw the cup. Rather deal with someone whose drunk […] [they] decided to kick her off so she can […] calm down.

To which someone else replied

I used to follow her TikTok (until I realized she is super annoying) and she is both a law student and is rather litigious in general. She’s involved in a variety of legal issues with her HOA (which was the story that initially got me to follow, admittedly but it’s no longer interesting).

I’m betting that this isn’t the only person who’s found her annoying and the HOA storyline now boring and she’s lost followers, and this is her latest attempt to recoup followers grift.

Uh, how 'bout No.

Edit: you just know that anyone who comes in, is just going to get blamed by Trump and the Trumpettes for anything that goes wrong - which will be everything.

And that’s just if they’re lucky. At some point Trump will fuck off and leave them holding the bag - and a bunch of the blame - on occupation-or-evacuation, face some kind of moral depression on rebuilding (you know the US isn’t going to do it, those days are over), and also likely terror attacks on their home soil and infrastructure. So yeah - no thanks. We used up whatever goodwill we had in the voluntary military operation department when we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.

he goes on about how people speak English in America and in Germany and Norway, they speak other languages

They do speak other languages. However, 88% of Norwegians seem to be fluent in English. The percentage is less in Germany, I think about 25%, but that’s still enough people that you could get by, particularly in the tourist areas.

Hungary has parliamentary elections in six weeks. Right now his party controls parliament, but polls show the other party is likely to win. He’s trying to preserve his control over the country.