I wrote this several different ways. When Thomas goes off on these monologues there’s not a lot of choice for me but to just make them a text wall. Part of the point of them and of his character in these situations in general is to explain things in a very confident verbose way. When I started doing comics text walls like this were verboten. You’d catch all kinds of shit for doing it, which made me hesitant. In the end though almost all the people who were so critical of everyone else’s work have day jobs now and don’t make comics, so fuck you, I win. I’ll make my comic however I want. Which, if you’re reading this you probably were fine with already. I’m just airing my grievances here because no one else will listen to me.

When I was working retail the shadow of streaming was looming large on the horizon. Businesses were worried about the changes coming and making terrible choices in every direction. I worked in a video rental and media store for several years and went through the change from VHS to DVD. That was quite an experience. The company wanted to keep renting tapes SO BAD. The market was just drying up though and they eventually made the change. CD sales were still high enough that we kept them the entire time I was there, but I saw cassette tapes out. We had a pretty eclectic selection by the time we abandoned them. They were still extremely popular with migrant workers and immigrants, so we had lots of music to cater to them in that media by the time it was finally drying up. VHS was he same way. We had Spanish language VHS tapes even after the switch to DVD was mostly complete.
I still remember when we sold off our rental VHS players. We sold them in their big black cases and everything. With the store numbers on them and the whole nine yards. I almost wish I had one. I do have a Dreamcast that has the store info carved into it though I think. We sold those off in a similar way.
I left that store before the actual final decline, but watched it from afar since I knew it was going to be worth remembering for my story. It hung on for another decade or so after I left, so in the comic universe there’s still a lot of time before the store has to logically close. I don’t even know for sure if I’ll ever make it to that point. The cast may have moved on before that even happens. I’ve been setting it all up for ages.
Anyway, that’s all for later. Hopefully I will be allotted the time needed to bring the story to a close the way I want to someday, but I know that’s not always how life works. For now however I hope your weeks starts off nice. On Wednesday I’ll hopefully have another page ready and we can go on as we have lo these many years. Until then, goodnight.

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So, does this mean Megatainment is about to enter its “Funko Pop” phase?

It’s been said, more or less, more than once already.

Heys, Jackie, want to hear something crazy? I’m in the middle of reading the newest David Wong book, I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom, and one of the side characters is named Jolene Brooks. She has a backstory and everything, and a traumatic arc, and one of the main characters is trying to fix her life, so she is getting mentioned by full name quite a few times already.

I don’t know who that is.

David Wong. Used to be pretty much the biggest wheel at Cracked before it disintegrated. Bigger than Soren Bowie. Also the guy who wrote “John Dies at the End.”

Being bigger than Soren Bowie doesn’t mean much, as he wasn’t a big guy. At least when Cracked was good, I don’t know if he somehow ended up important because the actual talent left or something.

Soren Bowie is–or at least was–a staff writer on American Dad, so that means something as far as I’m concerned.

As a radio amateur who used to go to Radio Dhack and buy parts (most of which I fried soldering together) I recognize what Megatainment is undergoing.

I said people were stupid for going streaming since the writing was on the wall. Only seems now, are people really starting to realize how they screwed up, but sadly it also seems many are just accepting it as the way it’s going to be.

Unfortunately, if the content you want is in a format you don’t like, eventually you have to suck it up and buy it the way it’s being sold. I don’t think there is a lot of volition in this choice, unless you choose to not have access to the content.

I get that, but the issue is, the content will stay in physical media if people kept buying physical media, but they switched to streaming and companies knew they could keep and remove it at will.

I knew that when it started and it seems only later people started to realize it as they didn’t think that would happen and it was to late.

Yeah, but that’s not really a viable alternative for most people; you can pay for streaming and watch hundreds of hours a month, or buy, what, 2 DVDs for the same price in that month? I get regretting the nonsense companies are getting up to, like altering movies in some weird Ministry of Truth manner, but there was never a chance that people were going to pass up a VASTLY cheaper method of watching content. Especially in the early days when it was just one subscription to Netflix to get everything, instead of needing 6 of them.

This is why I “stream” through Bittorrent and a VPN. After consuming the media, I erase it from my system unless I go on to pay for it (or it’s media that is so old it’s “abandonware.”)

You may want to “own nothing and be happy,” but I don’t.

Ah yes. The long slow death of physical media.

I can’t help but wonder if it will come back, though, thanks to all the streaming shenanigans. Like the “yeah-we-made-this-more-appropriate-for-a-modern-audience” and the “you’re-not-allowed-to-watch-this-anymore” concepts.

This comic often brings up a sense of nostalgia for me. I worked at a theater rather than a Megatainment store but it went through a lot of the same process. I started work as a university student in the midst of an oil drilling boom. At that point we were filling the old single screen theater in town, the two screen drive in on the edge of town and a three screen mutiplex every time the doors opened. Then as it does with Oklahoma oil booms, the bottom fell out and we were lucky to have three people in the room. Pretty soon we were renting VHS and Beta out of the lobby of the theater in town. During slow moments one of my jobs was to call people and harass them about returning video tapes. Fast forward thirty odd years later and all that is left is the multiplex. These days the projectors are digital. It’s probably been a decade since there was any actual film in the theater.

You from Alva, lol?

Close, I went to school at Weatherford.

Small world

Personally, I kept buying VHS until I couldn’t anymore. For all practical purposes, Wal-Mart stopped selling them.

Then I finally got hold of a dvd player and started buying those.

Same when Blu-ray came out, tho I’m not yet fully engaged to the point I buy *only* Blu-ray. I mean, If I can get a movie for a reasonable price on dvd as opposed to $24 for a Blu-ray, I’ll take the cheaper dvd every time.

I have only a few fully digital purchases, but honestly if I have any choice I will never give up my physical media. I just don’t trust anything that could vanish in a puff of 1s and 0s at any moment.

It’s especially interesting for all the movies that didn’t even make it to DVD. Soon, trying to watch them will be like that Cowboy Bebop episode when they had to plumb the ruins to find a VHS player.

“Pressure lighting a fire in you.”
So, Thomas thinks that Reggie has a diesel engine?

Heh.

Just sell cereal. Seriously, the last time I went to an FYE shop, they seemed to have at least as much shelf space dedicated to novelty cereal as music CDs. How did this become a thing?

2732 Come To Jesus Moment.

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