I recently bought Barney Miller on DVD. I got it on eBay. It was advertised as brand-new, in the shrink wrap. It was $8 cheaper than the set on Amazon, so I ordered it. The box looked mint. It was in the cellophane, with stickers. But when I went to rip it to my NAS, I had all kinds of problems.
Ripping DVDs is seldom straightforward. I use both Windows and a Mac. I have three different DVD/BD drives. I have three different ripping programs. Usually, switching combinations of these three factors will eventually rip a problematic disc. But some of the Barney Miller discs resisted all efforts.
I asked my AI. It informed me that bootlegs are common. It said to check the disc with MakeMKV. If the DVD was a single-layer disc, it was probably a bootleg. They were. Evidently, bootleggers try to save a few cents per disc by buying the cheaper single-layer discs rather than dual-layer discs. Look for Data capacity under Disc Information using MakeMKV. Under 5GB is single-layer; above is dual-layer.
This means they compress the files, reducing the playback bitrate. That means inferior picture quality. Even when playing the Barney Miller discs on my Blu-ray player, the picture quality was somewhat fuzzy. I thought it was because the TV show was old.
While ripping the discs with MakeMKV, it warned me that the discs were probably bootlegs made with DVD Fab Mac Ripper. That gave me an idea. I downloaded the free trial of DVD Fab Mac Ripper. It ripped the bad discs. I then paid $55 to buy the full version. I’d been wanting an alternative to MakeMKV for ripping Blu-ray discs on the Mac anyway. And the rips made with DVD Fab Mac Ripper didn’t look that bad. They were watchable.
I reported my findings to the seller. He said he’d give me a refund. I let him off the hook. I figured that after working so hard to rip the discs, I would keep them. I could have sent Barney Miller back and kept my files, but I didn’t want to be a ripoff artist too.
The lesson here is to be leery of great deals on eBay when buying complete TV series on DVDs sold as new. I noticed the DVD set I got was the 2011 edition – the one pictured on the right above, with the door. Amazon still sells that edition, but it ships from a 3rd party. Amazon also sells and ships a 2019 edition, the one pictured on the right. Both are $40. Even buying from Amazon might get you a bootleg if it’s from a 3rd party.l
I’m curious: if I had spent the extra $8 and bought the newer set, the one sold by Amazon. Is it legit and recorded on dual-layer DVDs? If anyone bought that set from Amazon and uses MakeMKV, let me know.
I really enjoy great picture quality. I hate to think Barney Miller could be sharper.
Checking some recent buys:
Barney Miller – Single-layer (eBay)
Downton Abbey – Dual-layer (Amazon)
Quantum Leap – Dual-layer (eBay)
Hazel – Single-layer (eBay)
The Loner – Dual-layer (Amazon)
Frasier – Dual-layer (Amazon)
MASH – Dual-layer (Amazon)
I guess I need to stick with Amazon. Two out of three sets from eBay were probably bootlegs. However, they were from sellers who had multiple copies to sell, all labeled new. Individuals selling “used” copies might be safe.
I’ve also seen people online say they are willing to buy bootlegs if no one else is selling the series. That might be true for me too. I’d love to find the second season of Mr. Kovak.
I still wish the publishers of old TV shows would sell them as digital files. See my essay about this. Messing with discs is a pain.
I discovered Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968. I found it on the 7-day bookshelf of the Coconut Grove Library, in Miami, Florida. Being just sixteen and in the 11th grade, the crazy antics of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters enchanted the juvenile male in me. Wolfe’s jazzy prose inspired my impressionable pseudo-intellect. Boy, I wanted to run off to San Francisco. At that age, I was just as goofy and naive as the Pranksters (although they were about ten years older than me).
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, watch these videos.
For some reason, I was drawn to Neal Cassady. This was before I had read On the Road or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Up until then, I had mostly read science fiction, and a smattering of popular science books. It pleased me that Kesey and crew read Stranger in a Strange Land. At that time, Heinlein was my guru.
And this was before I had smoked grass or dropped acid. I worked as a bagboy at the Kwik Chek in the Coconut Grove. My biggest problem as a horny teenager was being afraid of girls. The wild sex life of the Pranksters made me wish I could be like them.
Cassaday spoke like an over-revved engine. The man never stopped twitching and rapping. Cassaday’s thing was flipping a small sledgehammer. I imitated him by walking around my house flipping a large can of pork and beans. My father asked, “What the hell are you doing?” It made me feel self-conscious, but I kept flipping those pork and beans.
My prank at the time was joining the Columbia and Capitol record clubs to acquire albums as fast as possible. I’d get 12 albums for free, promising to buy eight more for full price. Because I was working, I could pay for my commitment quickly. I’d then quit and rejoin to get another 12 albums. That quickly let me build a library of all the back albums of my favorite groups. Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, and all the new groups coming out of San Francisco. I identified with those people.
I knew nothing about Haight-Asbury, the Summer of Love, Acid Tests, or even Monterey Pop. News of the hippie world was sparse where I lived. I remember watching a segment on The Today Show about the light show behind The Jefferson Airplane, and reading about the group in Life Magazine. Besides astronauts, these rock musicians seem like the coolest people on the planet.
What Tom Wolfe described was as far out as fantasy or science fiction. All I knew about LSD was from Popular Science and CBS News reports about Timothy Leary. The Kwik Check was near the park in Coconut Grove, and all the kids who wanted to be hippies showed up there on the weekends. I looked up to these older kids, believing they had special knowledge.
When I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968, I didn’t know about the spiritual side of psychedelic drugs. But I’d soon find out when I read Leary’s The Politics of Ecstasy. But that was months later. In the 1960s, drugs seemed about ecstasy, while in the 1970s, they were about exploring spiritual horizons.
Crazy fun is what I saw in my first reading of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I pictured The Merry Pranksters like a trippier version of The Monkees. But I imagined them looking like the kids in the news stories about Haight-Asbury.
A few years ago, when I first rented Magic Trip, I was shocked by how Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters dressed. They didn’t have long hair or weird clothes. They wore the kind of shirts I wore in 1965. In fact, they reminded me of what the Beach Boys looked like before The Beatles.
The Merry Pranksters’ antics were less sophisticated than any episode of The Monkees. I couldn’t believe how silly and uncool they were. Magic Trip uses the 16mm film Kesey and the Pranksters took on their 1964 trip in Furthur. Probably the same film Tom Wolfe viewed to write his book.
And the Acid Tests were childish. No wonder Leary and Albert were anxious to get rid of these guys. And I can’t blame Kerouac for getting drunk and looking so goddamn morose when he had to endure an evening with the Pranksters. I have to admit, after watching Magic Trip, even my young 15-year-old self would have thought the Pranksters completely uncool. I don’t know how Larry McMurtry was so patient with them.
This week I reread The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and rewatched Magic Bus. I supplemented those two with videos I found on YouTube. With this reading, I was impressed with Wolfe’s reporting and writing.
I love books about generational cohorts that create artistic/literary movements like The Beats, The Lost Generation, The Transcendentalists, or the German Romantics. Ken Kesey and the Pranksters inspired that kind of a movement, although theirs was less defined by specific artistic works.
They could even be the headwaters of the 1960s drug counterculture. Many writers have suggested Ken Kesey and the Pranksters were the children of the Beats and parents of the Hippies. However, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Cassady were the tip of the iceberg of Beat-like people emerging all across America in the 1950s. And Kesey and the Pranksters were another visual tip of a new wave of rebellion. Actually, I think it was all one wave.
I was surprised to see so many references to Ken Kesey and the Pranksters in the YouTube videos about The Grateful Dead. I just ordered The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties by Dennis McNally. I hope his book explores those theories and provides a history of what happened next. Did this movement end when Jerry Garcia died?
I was intrigued by this video from The Shakedown Archives. (That channel focuses on the Grateful Dead’s history.)
This video accuses Tom Wolfe of spending too little time with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. That because he only did acid once and didn’t like it, he couldn’t have fathomed what it meant to be on the bus. In another video, Kesey said The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was a good book, an accurate book, but it just didn’t understand everything about him.
I’m fascinated by how history is reported. Is it ever 100% accurate and complete? I often ask people who lived in the 1960s to name books they feel captured those times. No one book stands out. I wasn’t there, but for some reason I feel this book might be the best for what it covers. I compare its quality to The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, a book I might use for the 1970s.
One reason I back Wolfe on this is that he doesn’t editorialize about his subject. He doesn’t judge. He observes. He got to interview many of the principal players and see all the films. Just because he did all this work in three weeks doesn’t mean he couldn’t grok it. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters could never edit their own film.
But there’s one other clue. Throughout the story, Kesey and the Pranksters judged people by whether they were on or off the bus, and then by the acid tests. Tom Wolfe graded them in one place. He compared them to Hermann Hesse’s book, Journey to the East. I read that back in the 1970s. I completely understood what Wolfe was saying, but to be sure, I reread the book this week.
Hesse’s book is about H. H., who remembers being on a pilgrimage with a special group of spiritual people. He was on the bus. Somehow he got lost from the group. He was off the bus. Eventually, H. H. finds Leo, the leader of their group. H. H. wants to write the history of their group, but can’t. He’s even been given access to the group’s vast library of mystical documents. Leo even tries to show him that the documents are worthless by burning some of them. It’s not until H. H. sees two figurines that represent him and Leo that he understands. He sees the light from each figure merge.
Tom Wolfe put Ken Kesey on the Merry Pranksters on this higher plane. He knew that just seeing them wasn’t enough. On the outside, they looked goofy and stupid. Maybe he was saying that unless people merged together with some inner light, it was impossible to understand. Wolfe knew he was never on the bus, in real life or spiritually, but he guessed what it meant.
I remember back in the 1970s belonging to a group of people who did various drugs. We all moved to the same street. We pursued many wild, creative projects, which we were very good at. We dressed in silly clothes and played silly games. Years later, I was in a second group. They were about mysticism, meditation, and spirituality. More like what Ram Das taught. In both cases, it’s about being in the group, exploring the edge of consciousness. In each case, we had our own version of being on the bus.
In another YouTube video, one I can no longer find, the narrator felt that being on the bus meant you were moving and part of a group. That Jack Kerouac’s failure was that he had stopped moving and became solitary. He said these artistic/literary movements ended when individuals branched off to be by themselves. I liked that idea. They also said being a Deadhead was all about being part of a group.
When I was a kid reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I think that’s what I wanted. To be part of a group. I wanted to find my own kind. I did that several times over my life. I don’t have that now. It’s sad.
I love YouTube. If I’m not careful, I’ll watch it for four or five hours a day. And I’m not saying YouTube is all bad; it’s just so damn addictive. But YouTube also has tons of crapola content to avoid. If I mined more gold and less pyrite, I might feel better about being such an avid fanboy.
Is avoiding bad content my problem, my self-control, or can we blame content creators or even YouTube? Too many people see YouTube as a gold rush, especially after AI. They have no scruples seeking views and will do anything to capture our attention.
Either I figure out how to watch the best content and ignore the bad, or I’ve got to go cold turkey. Yet, what determines if a video is worth my precious time? Is it up to me, or could YouTube become its own Maxwell Perkins? What makes newspapers and magazines great aren’t just the writers, but the editors.
There are two approaches. First, identify the best and ignore the rest. Or I could keep pulling weeds until YouTube is a beautiful lawn for my mind.
Identifying the Best
Subscribe to channels produced by the best magazines. The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, etc. This works for the pro content, but not the amateur.
Subscribe to channels with trustworthy human hosts. YouTube is fantastic because it allows anyone to create content. It’s open to amateurs. But somebody has to hold the hook.
Limit which topics to follow. My mind wanders, and YouTube leads it all over the universe.
Find the hosts that I’m convinced know what they are talking about.
Stick to sites that don’t waste my time.
Identifying the Worst
If it’s AI-generated, I pull the plug.
If they bury the lead. This drives me insane. I always back out when I realize this is happening.
They spend 30 minutes covering five minutes of information.
If they use AI photos or videos, or stock photos or videos that don’t match the narration. Or they use stock photos with watermarks.
If the human host is not qualified.
If the human host depends on AI slop.
If the thumbnail is deceptive.
If the title is deceptive.
If the channel is designed solely to sell something.
If the host is obviously an influencer.
If the reviews are paid for.
When AI is used instead of real photos. For example, all these images have famous actors in them, but you can’t recognize any of them.
Luckily, I pay for YouTube Premium Lite, so I don’t have to watch commercials. However, if I didn’t pay that toll, I’d probably never watch YouTube because of the insane bombardment of ads.
I Wish YouTube Would …
Have something like a “get the hook” button. Meaning, never show me this channel again.
And if I’ve used the hook, let YouTube’s AI deep-six anything like that again.
Switch/setting that filters out pure AI content.
Strict rule requiring all AI-generated video to be clearly watermarked.
A method that allows viewers to report misinformation.
Hire human editors who reject shitty content. Basically, YouTube is one vast slushpile that everyone is reading. Hire some editors who can tell content providers they suck and should try harder.
Go ahead and use AI to recognize the content I value and reject what it knows I will hate. Potentially, this could make YouTube irresistible.
YouTube is Changing
A Few Examples I Admire
Just Josh is an A+ site for laptop reviews. I post this video because Just Josh has problems with YouTube too. Much of what makes content bad for viewers also makes YouTube bad for creators.
Listen to how he’s going to combat AI. It’s a case of fighting fire with fire. I like that. AI search engines and AI YouTube slop are killing his channel. His approach is to use AI to make his channel even more useful to humans.
I admire CBS Sunday Morning, but I seldom watch broadcast TV. Using YouTube to catch the best of broadcast TV makes watching YouTube more valuable. It’s funny to contrast the professionals at CBS with amateur YouTube content creators reporting on the same information.
My opinions sync well with the science fiction book reviews by Bookpilled. YouTube channels don’t have to be by world-class experts. Just people you trust.
Useful Charts has a highly unique focus. Matt Baker explains history using charts. It’s very effective.
Usagi Electric focuses on rebuilding old computers. This is rather esoteric. But that’s a significant virtue of YouTube: finding the esoteric topics you’re interested in.
Python Programmer promotes learning. I have no idea what his credentials or educational background involve, but I’ve come to trust him. YouTube allows anyone to teach. It would be great if the system had a way to validate what’s being taught for accuracy, but I don’t see how that’s possible. We all have to decide for ourselves. There are too many channels where I’m wary of the host.
AstroBackyard is a channel devoted to astrophotography. This is a hobby I wish I had, but I don’t for many reasons. I live vicariously through his videos. There are many YouTube creators who I wish I could be like.
Pop Goes the 60s is a great example of an amateur expert. His videos are well done, well researched, and worth their length.
Pete Beard has cornered the market on videos about old book and magazine illustrators. His little videos are beautiful and instructive. It’s an extremely narrow focus, but he does it so well.
I could list dozens of more channels I follow. I don’t want to point to channels that annoy me. I don’t really want to pick on people. Some creators are well-intentioned but lack ability. Others use every trick in the book to get views because they dream of giving up their day jobs and becoming rich. This type has exploded since ChatGPT.
And don’t get me wrong, some people can wring some amazing content out of AI. But so much of it is horrible. On the other hand, what will happen when AI gets so good that anyone – and I mean anyone, even a five-year-old kid asks an AI to create a 30-minute professional quality video for YouTube that will get a million hits, and the AI does it?
One reason I want to reject AI content is not that I’m prejudiced against AI, but because I enjoy seeing what humans can do. YouTube is a wonderful venue for that, but it needs some kind of control. I wonder if a voting system like the one on IMDb.com? I find that any movie or TV show that gets a 7.0 or higher rating is something I’m likely to enjoy. But there is a technical issue. I watch YouTube on my television. How would I enter the rating?
I don’t know if YouTube has any incentive to help its viewers find better content. It’s already the most popular streaming service.
If I can’t learn to discipline my YouTube addiction, I will have to give it up. Yesterday I didn’t watch any YouTube, and I got so much more done. Today, I watched a little and still got a lot done. That’s a good sign.
Companies are spending trillions to win the AI race. They believe they will make back their investments and go on to earn trillions. That assumes people are willing to pay for AI. Millions of people are already using AI, hoping to make their fortunes. However, in all cases, for AI to win money, humans have to become economic losers.
This is already causing a backlash. As internet-addicted doomscrollers spend more time and dollars, they are encountering more AI content. Most consider this content AI slop.
Whether you consume news, fiction, music, video, advice, education, philosophy, religion, or even porn, do you really want that content created by AIs?
Yesterday I found a wonderful video of a kitten running in slow motion through the grass. I liked it so much I shared it on Facebook. Then the algorithm showed me several more like it. I thought the first one was real. But after seeing the others, I figured they were AI-created. I was disappointed. Artificial kitten cuteness felt like a con.
I used to enjoy videos of two species of wild animals playing together. Thinking that animals don’t always eat one another was very uplifting. But then these videos became a trend. Now I don’t know if wild animals actually play together. The AI videos make me doubt all animal videos.
The new trend on Facebook and Instagram is AI-generated sexy women. I think real women began the trend on those sites, offering teasers to get guys to find them on OnlyFans. But then real women were replaced by AI women directing users to porn sites. I didn’t follow those links, but I wondered if porn is being replaced by AI too. Will greedy folks with AIs put real humans out of sex work?
My gut reaction is to quit social media. If it’s going to be overrun by greedy people trying to make a buck using AIs, I want to walk away.
I’m already seeing fans of music and books protest AI content. There are young protestors on YouTube advising people to return to the analog world. And one piece of advice is interesting. Buy old stuff. That’s because the only way to know if content was created by AI is to buy content created before AI.
There’s been a flood of websites, YouTube channels, games, novels, albums, software, and other creative content produced in the last year simply because AI lets almost anyone create impressive results.
And some of the AI-generated art is impressive. I love fiction and music. What if AI creates novels and songs I love more than the books and albums I loved over my lifetime?
Doesn’t The Catcher in the Rye move me because J. D. Salinger wrote it? I just read a biography of Salinger, and I love his stories even more. Isn’t On the Road great because Jack Kerouac lived it? Aren’t the songs on Highway 61 Revisited meaningful because Bob Dylan composed the music and lyrics?
What if ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini produced an album that impressed me more than Blonde on Blonde? Is it brilliant because of a machine’s insight?
People who want to make money using AI only want to make money. They aren’t struggling to be creative themselves. As everyone discovers this, I think their greed will destroy AI.
I’m reading How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker. It’s a fantastic book. Stanford is where kids who want to become billionaires go to college. In one of Baker’s classes, the students were asked to raise their hands if they were concerned with ethics when planning the inventions that could make them rich. Only Baker raised his hand.
The people and corporations spending trillions on AI don’t worry about ethics either. Baker’s book shows that so many of these tech bros who claim to love science and technology are really seeking money and power. I got into computers because I loved computers. I assumed a book about the brightest kids going to Stanford would be about kids who loved computers too. But what they really love is money.
This new generation of greed seems inspired not by technology but by billionaires. There are genuine reasons to create AIs, but greed isn’t one of them. It’s like the gold fever of 1849.
For the companies spending trillions on AI to make the money they desire, tens of millions of ordinary people have to become poor. AI might produce another 1,000 billionaires, but it will also create tens of millions of unemployed. Do we really want to back that kind of greed?
I assume most people will say no, and the AI industry will collapse.
In the 21st century, we often talk about how technology has taken over our lives, referring to the Internet, smartphones, and AI. But we forget the major technological revolution that television brought to Baby Boomers. Thinking about it, I realized that television shows have brought me far more pleasure than all the features of the internet.
I love Amazon, YouTube, AppleNews+, Facebook, Wikipedia, ABEbooks, and all the other websites I visit, but they have never made the emotional impact that sitcoms, dramas, and miniseries have made since 1955.
It would be far harder for me to decide between TV shows, books, and music. In fact, I don’t know if I could decide between those three. I do know that if I had to pick between movies on TV and movies at the theater, I’d choose movies on TV.
Watching TV has brought me so much pleasure that it’s impossible to imagine my life without it. This might sound odd, but the tightest bond I’ve had with my wife, Susan, is watching television together for 50 years. This is even truer since I set up a Jellyfin server and put many of our favorite TV shows on it. Every night we watch two hours of old TV together.
Even though the internet is famous for social media, that feels like a solitary pursuit. I have many internet friends I’ve never met, and I value that, but it’s just not the same as sitting in a room with someone else, even if we’re only staring at a screen together. Most of my childhood memories involve watching television, especially with my sister, Becky, but also with my mother and father.
Of course, that’s kind of sad too. People worry about kids spending too much time with screens, but I grew up with TV screens in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s a shame I didn’t spend more time getting to know my parents, especially my dad, who was mostly a mystery to me.
Reading science fiction and listening to music are the only other forms of entertainment that might equal the pleasure of watching TV. I’ve always tried to make science fiction and music more social by seeking out friends who enjoyed them too. But I’ve never had as many people to share science fiction and music with as I’ve had with television shows.
Starting in the 1st grade, I could always talk with people about television shows, from The Mickey Mouse Club to Star Trek. I didn’t meet someone to talk science fiction with until the 10th grade. A while after that, I loved getting together with friends to smoke pot and listen to music, but that only lasted a few years. Talking about television shows has always been the most useful way to have something to talk about. If you meet someone who likes the same show as you, it often means there’s a reason to be friends.
And even when I lived by myself, television was always a better companion than social media. The Tonight Show and The Dick Cavett Show were often great company on lonely nights before I got married.
But I wonder about young people today. Do they feel the same about television, or do they prefer social media? They seem to get a lot of YouTube and internet influencers.
I’ve always found immense pleasure in reading. And that’s truly a solitary pursuit. Science fiction got its start with the pulp magazine era. Before TV became big in the 1950s, millions of people read pulp magazines. Short stories were incredibly popular. When I was growing up and talked with old guys who grew up with the pulps and radio, I got the feeling they preferred them over television. But didn’t television unite the Baby Boomer generation?
When the power goes out, my wife and I get very restless. We miss TV and the internet. But we miss TV most.
I think I could walk away from the Internet. It’s nice being connected to the world. It’s nice having friends on five continents. I’d hate to have to go back to shopping in physical buildings. I couldn’t find the rare books I wanted without ABE. And I couldn’t keep up with relatives and old friends like I can with Facebook. Plus, I’d feel immense anxiety when I leave the house without my smartphone.
What Susan and I really like is watching complete TV series on DVDs. Of course, I rip them to my Jellyfin server, but there’s something special about watching a TV show from pilot to finale. We’re currently going through the 264 episodes of Frasier, one episode an evening.
However, when you think about it, isn’t it kind of pathetic that we’ve bonded so tightly with something so artificial as a television show, spending so many thousands of hours glued to a TV screen? I suppose we could have grown up differently, but Baby Boomers grew up with television.
TV was the technology that shaped us. TV was our screen of choice.
