More otimistically, there were far fewer obsessive niches online then as the technical requirements were so large to set a site up. Even if the ones that existed were great.

There are a lot more obsessive YouTube channels and newsletters in a lot more varied niches today by comparison. I'm delighted regularly by new discoveries.

Kagi has a cool app called Small Web around this

I forget who said this but very similar idea:

"Writing online is a way to show people the 'wrinkles' of your brain. If you write enough, people can see how closely your winkles match their wrinkles. If the wrinkles match closely enough, you start to get followers who like the way you think. Those people can become friends and that leads to future life opportunities and experiences."

There's a book of BASIC software I have. I'd like to publish the programs online. I've tried to contact the author, but he's dead. I tried to contact the publisher, but they were acquired. I tried to contact the acquiring publisher, but they went out of business 20 years ago. The trail is cold there, and I imagine it's nearly impossible to figure out who owns the rights now.

There are projects like eXoDOS that are attempting to provide a complete DOS archive. They are currently at version 6 that weighs in at just under 700GB. But they seem to be finding new stuff all the time, thus the versioning of the archive.

I played a bunch of random shareware games on our family's Apple IIgs and I'd love to find some of those again, but I was so young I can't really remember much other than like some visual images and vibes.

Nevermind the Commodore etc. who are preserved as abandonware. Remember FLASH games? They are mostly gone already. Even if you still have a copy, they can't be run anymore. There were some efforts made, but last I checked plenty of FLASH games still didn't work flawlessly.

> There's an unfathomable number of games that were released on the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and most famously DOS that were made by one or two people, self-published, and have now completely fallen into obscurity to a point where it's not 100% clear who owns the copyright and who to give money even if you wanted to, which has led to the "probably-illegal-but-not-really-enforced" term of "Abandonware".

Mostly unrelated but if you are looking for this "effervescence" in modern times, don't hesitate to take a look at Pico8 games and Ich.io.

On Pico 8, everything is free (except the one time pico 8 licence).

On Itch.io I bought a ridiculous 400 games pack for a few dollars a few years back.

You have to dig a little but I found more gems in both those libraries than I expected.

At some point we have to accept that it's not possible to preserve all history, and be content with a sample.

It should be. There are lots of good ideas of modifying copyrights so that its not the automatic 70 year after life of author (or what every it is now).

>unfathomable number of games that were released

One of the problems is that there are too many and hard to find curate to separate the good from the meh.

Wait til you hear it's (or at least was) possible to get dinged for 0.00 seconds.[1] That particular issue's probably solved by now, since Youtube requires claims to include a time stamp showing where the problem clip is. Nevermind the fact that wasn't a requirement to begin with. No wonder the corps ding every creator out there. It's free money with no downside to them. Nevermind the fact they're actively destroying culture.

[1] https://youtu.be/VvFGumd_esg?&t=685

They may be illegal to run if they are made to depend on servers, even for single player, and those servers are taken offline.

On top of the shenanigans we have seen recently about revoking paid licenses to watch movies.

Some time in the next 20 years, pirates will be able to download the game from the e-shop server and create a fake e-shop server where everything is free.

> Nothing is stopping people

The original game might be stopping people. It's not like games have a good track record of continuing to work for decades. DRM of all kinds poses a huge problem in this regard, but so does garden variety technological change. The GOG preservation team has quite a few videos about deeply technical work they needed to do to make e.g. Prince of Persia run properly on modern PCs. Sure I can just pirate a copy for PS2 and run it with PCSX2, but thats “piracy" (even though I still have a working original disc!).

So, no: there's a lot stopping people, especially copyright law, from keeping around working copies of their games.

> copyright expires

Not in your lifetime. 70 years after death if the author brings us out into centuries. Books written 60 years before my kids were born won't be out if copyright until they are in their 40s, for example.

I think the real tragedy of abandonware is that copyright holders aggressively pursued abandonware sites "just in case", while not actually having any plans to redistribute the games legally. The abandonware sites were cracking (or making cracks available, whatever) and making these games playable in modern devices, thus ensuring these games were preserved, but copyright holders (through ESA [1] legal action or similar) simply wanted to stop this, with not plans otherwise. These games often weren't available otherwise. We're talking games of the DOS or C64 era, with no real commercial viability (unless bundled with thousand other games, which they eventually sometimes did, often using the cracks developed by the abandonware scene!).

----

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Associa...

> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.

Which people? In the case of abandonware, the original software is often not in the hands of the copyright holder anymore, due to neglect or lack of interest. Sometimes all or most relevant physical copies have become damaged. All that remains is a (cracked) file download in an abandonware website. Thanks to the abandonware community it gets preserved.

Besides, a piece of software history only serves its purpose if you can experience it. With no way of legally experiencing it (you cannot buy it) how do you propose to experience it? You cannot always wait it out, you might die first due to how long copyright lasts. Or is this nebulous concept of copyright more important than human experience?

> Isn't that one of the whole points of copyright? So the authors can print new copies and not have to compete with other people releasing copies they made?

The more important point of copyright is 'to promote the progress of the useful arts'. The 'securing for a limited time to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their writings and inventions' is just the means. Do the means in this case seem to work well in achieving that goal?

> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.

Except the 70+ years it takes before you're legally allowed to publish it, or even just adapt it. If I'm going to play things by the book, even if I archive it when I'm 10 years old, sales stop on day two of the copyright period, and the rights expire the day after it's 70 years years old, I will be 80+ years old when I'm legally allowed to let people download it, or I myself can publish an adaptation (or more likely, I'll have died and my archive version will be lost in the estate sale).

Copyright law is about finding a balance between, on one side, incentivizing creators via granting them a legal monopoly on publishing, and on the other side, the philosophical notion of freedom of speech, which would allow anyone to republish, remix, and repurpose any preexisting work. The original formulation of this legal monopoly was that it was supposed to be short enough that it would expire well within the average person's lifetime, a notion which has long been gutted via regulatory capture.

I am am an amateur recordist, I absolutely love to bootleg concerts and gigs and things, as in: make my own recordings of live music and so on. I have shared everything in the appropriate places, also. I believe it is an essential artistic expression: to record the nature of the world around you for the future.

So, I do it a bit.

I think this ethos can be applied in many ways and with different media; preservationism is a high value objective. The future needs it, kinda.

This is true but people also use it as a magic shield to (needlessly IMO) justify their piracy, even though they are 1) only downloading things they happen to like and 2) don’t even follow a basic 3-2-1 backup protocol, let alone anything remotely resembling SOP for preservation.

I bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.

Yep, definitely! I know of instances where professional archives and libraries work with specialized torrent sites to archive content directly and these days that's sometimes necessary with how content is locked down, games are dependent on a server or DRM schemes don't make archiving easy.

You frequently hear of cases where the last remaining official copy got lost and only due to some fan service (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694382) data could be recovered.

I’m absolutely obsessed with it. For me it’s driven purely from childhood nostalgia. In particular, Macintosh games. I want, and want others to have that warm excitement of nostalgia when they re-discover something forgotten.

Since you brought up Blade Runner (and I agree with all your points, by the way) I'm deeply offended by how the Final Cut decided to add all these wonderful improvements yet Ridley Scott agreed to completely mess up the color grading. What's up with the new greenish tint? Did he think it would make Blade Runner look more modern or what?

Fortunately, we can still watch the Director's Cut. It's a shame, too, because the Final Cut has a lot of improvements otherwise (e.g. fixing Zhora's face is a major one).

There are 58 mentions about Han in this thread but none of them state that Han shot first! [0]

0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_shot_first

This opinion rubs me the wrong way. I don't think you meant it like this, but it really feels like when someone creates something, they now have some obligation to society, should society deem it good enough.

In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing to support this idea. If I make something, I can change it however I want, as many times as I want, and throw away old copies - even if you really really liked those old copies. It's my art, not yours.

Maybe one could make the argument that George Lucas is not the only artist here, and I'd agree with that, but to imply that society is owed something that someone created of their own volition, simply because society happens to like it, feels wrong. He can change it however he wants until the day he dies, as far as I'm concerned.

After that day, I think the argument changes.

I also remembered that scene and the early Jabba the Hutt scene from the novelisation. And because I knew them from the book, I initially loved it when the Special Editions added them back. Until I realised they don't really work. Well, Biggs does, but Jabba becomes much less terrifying from having Han talk to him like that and even walking over his tail. Jabba being just a feared name works so much better.

Yes!! I remember reading this book at the library as a kid, and for years afterwards I wondered if I had just hallucinated the whole thing.

I think it's a really important scene, and I'm sad that it was cut from the movie.

Side note: the (extremely well-done) Star Wars Radio Drama [0] included a great many expanded scenes on Tattoine (with quite a bit of expansoin on Tosche Station), and I think those scenes (which include the aforementioned scene with Biggs) really add to the richness and flavor of the setting.

If you're a fan of Star Wars and haven't yet listened to the radio drama, I highly recommend it!

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-29uKdckL4

There was also Luke looking up at the space battle and "Treadwell" the droid, which would have played just before all of the Biggs scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDPZfPe5F-w (a cleaner version is shown in How Star Wars was saved in the edit)

There was also a comic book that came out before the movie.

In the scene where the sand people shoot R2D2, it looked like the other way around so it was quite confusing to see them captured in the next frame. Who knew the little guy didn't have a blaster?

that scene is in the radio drama version as well (along with many others that aren't in the movie)

Also Dune came out before star ears

if you've seen this scene, does that mean that you've sailed the high seas?

I know it's a meme at this point, but being an "idea person" is legitimately a thing. But there is also being self-aware enough to recognize what your strengths are and when you should call in reinforcements, as it were, to fill in where there's a need. Seems there's a spectrum where people fall in how readily they will recognize this and Lucas falls more towards the reluctant side perhaps.

On a similar vein, Gene Roddenberry was pretty similar with Star Trek. He had a pretty big universe imagined, got the scaffolding in for it, but all the best works under the name of Star Trek were made by other people. Anything Gene Roddenberry was directly involved in as a script writer (see: many episodes of the original and first two seasons of The Next Generation) are generally the weakest and worst parts of Star Trek.

One huge addition that she created entirely in the edit is the "ticking clock" during the final battle. Originally there was no count down to the Death Star destroying the base. Imagine how much tension would be lost without that.

https://www.rogerebert.com/tributes/the-woman-who-saved-star...

That version of events has been disputed: https://youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE .

> I think it's pretty clear to everyone now that when Lucas is flying solo his final output is... not great.

The evidence is pretty compelling that George had a lot of great ideas as well as some not-so-great ideas and his own ability to distinguish between the two was... less than ideal. Thus his best work was from those times he collaborated closely with talented people who had significant input and there was a strong, empowered curator. Positive examples include the great results on Star Wars, the fact that Empire is so good and his work on Raiders with Spielberg. A clear negative example is Phantom Menace where George was in absolute control.

A lot of fantastically talented creators simply shouldn't have unchecked 'final cut' over their own output. It's really nothing to be ashamed of, and frankly, is more common than not.

This is oft-repeated mythology that became popular on reddit; it's part of the campaign of feminist revisionism that's commonplace over there regardless of whether it matches reality or not. They constantly try to argue that it must have been a case of a man getting credit for work a woman did, even when the woman concerned made no such claim or even received appropriate credit.

> even hardcore fans want nothing to do with

I think the main series has turned to trash, but isn’t it still commercially successful? I personally adored Andor, but even my parents couldn’t sit through the first couple episodes because they’re slow moving.

How are the blaster bolts different? I'm genuinely surprised I never noticed...

Yeah, because what EVERYONE thought Star Wars needed was more poop jokes and bad CGI.

RotK: Author's Cut runtime is 35:03:2:6:21:13

This isn't even the worst outcome. There are hundreds of video games that are never re-released at all and have never been available for sale digitally, entirely because of soundtrack licensing.

> Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music

Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.

Yeah, I'm in agreement with the blog post in that I don't advocate for dismantling of copyright, but there are absurdities within the system like this that are in dire need of attention.

Video games sign terrible licenses even for their most core parts. Many of the millions selling Forza games disappeared from the digital stores because they couldn't use the cars anymore.[0] It's almost unbelievable since cars and their makers are actually getting a big marketing push from those games, but studios cannot get better conditions.

[0] https://kotaku.com/forza-horizon-4-delisted-xbox-licensing-1...

Yeah I bought GTA IV and still pirated it. As a bonus, don't have to launch that Steam shit every time I want to play it.

Doing God's work.

It was bound to happen with Star Wars, given how big a series it is. I wish we could have the same with more, but the amount of effort is huge in many cases, and literally impossible in others.

to my eye there is quite a difference .. in favor of the 4K77 remaster !

And on top of all that, sales were not what they hoped, and with that we lost any chance of an official remaster of DS9 or Voyager, since the same work would have to be done as for TNG.

That isn't really true. It's different people involved - the artists really do care about the art, but they are joined at the hip to business people who don't care at all and just want to make more money.

Have you seen this video?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RfjH4lO241I

Apparently Alec has contacted the studio that makes the discs; they don’t make single-layer discs for the Frasier box set. Alec seems to have purchased a bootleg sold at retail.

"It certainly feels like physical media is dying right now. Maybe more reason to switch to investing in it over streaming services, not that an individual's budget decisions in this vein will affect the company's bottom lines enough that they will notice."

What is an ocean if not a million drops?

It works wonders for small kids since most of the time they just want to watch the exact same thing over and over.

I'm not saying I disagree, but very interesting how this contrasts with attitudes people have towards books. People keep physical books around just for kicks. Often times they haven't even read half the books on their shelves.

Physical media can be had for very cheap on the second-hand market, so it also makes sense if you do not watch all that much.

The further your timeline goes into the future the more sense owning your media makes. You might not want to rewatch this movie in the next ten years, but what about the next thirty? Fifty years? Inflation will only make subscriptions more and more expensive. Thirty years ago a yearly salary of $40k was the same as a yearly salary of $100k now. It's funny how so many people think they earn more than their parents did, when in reality they earn way less. And that won't get better in the future. Maybe you won't even have enough money in your retirement to afford a subscription.

We could share physical media with others. Like a library of sorts.

The problem with physical media is that often they are scratched, sometimes even unwatchable because of it.

The kids tried renting some kids series from the local library, but none of the DVDs were readable.

Yeah, I've thought about that too. Original content for e.g Netflix probably never sees a physical release. As my earlier post probably alluded to though, we don't really watch a lot of TV in our household so narrowing my 'options' is not per se a thing that would impact me.

But it does suck for those who want to move to more physical-based media _and_ enjoy original content from the streaming providers.

I'm a super Tolkien nerd (or at least used to be) who hasn't even watched the Hobbit films, but I'd watch this one.

That does sound like an improvement over the actual Hobbit movies. I'm not even joking about Oppenheimer, would do it if I were really bored. Might be a great movie if it were simply in order.

When it was first announced that Peter Jackson's film of The Hobbit was going to be split into two parts, I thought "Yeah, that makes sense. There's a LOT of material in that short book, because of how sparse Tolkien was being with description. Makes sense that Jackson would have trouble fitting it into a single 2.5-hour movie."

When I heard, later, that the film was going to be a three parter instead, I thought "Uh oh. There's plenty of material for two films, but three? Filler City, here we come."

My wife and I saw the movies in the cinema, and while we enjoyed them overall, I found that I was right about the filler. I was particularly annoyed by the barrels-down-the-river scene, where the film turned what should have been a moment of quiet drama into a sort of rails shooter on the screen. That scene threw me out of my immersion; the whole time, I was thinking "The only reason for this scene to exist is to be made into a video-game level." As a video game level, it would kind of work: you're in the barrels floating downstream, and you have to shoot enough orcs with the bow you somehow have (or flatten them with your barrel that has been inexplicably launched out of the water) to stop them from killing your friends. (Or perhaps the video game level would make more sense if you play as the elf on the shore, killing the orc archers before they can shoot the fish^H^H^H^H dwarves in a barrel).

Regardless of how that scene would work as a video game, the problem with it is that while watching it, I was laughing at how ridiculous it was, instead of on the edge of my seat with excitement. That is NOT what the audience should be experiencing, and it means that someone — director, producer, screenwriter, editor, who knows — made some very poor choices in putting that scene on-screen.

So yes, I'm not at all surprised that a fan edit of The Hobbit which removed all the filler would be wildly popular. In my case, I would rather buy a 4.5 hour version of the film than the officially-released version. If only that version was for sale legally.

P.S. Not all the filler material in the Hobbit film trilogy was bad. Some of the scenes that weren't technically in the original book, such as Gandalf and Galadriel discussing the threat of The Necromancer, were a positive addition and helped link the Hobbit film to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If Jackson had stopped there it would have been fine. I have never watched the fan-made "Tolkien Edit" recut version of the Hobbit film(s) so I don't know if that scene was included or not — but in my opinion, that one would fit into a "Tolkien Edit" even if it wasn't technically part of the original book.

What are all the "made up portions" of this work of fiction?

Well I want a single movie, and don't mind if it's dramaticized at the expense of accuracy.

My working theory to this point is that he made the movies he had to make then, as he got increasingly successful, he gradually transitioned (back?) to making movies he wanted to make. Which, as it turns out, I'm less enamored with then his post-big break efforts. Oh well.

Nobody can fight me on that because I don't know who Nolan is. Guessing he's a director, but in that case, didn't know he directed Oppenheimer. I'm part of the popcorn reviews, not the tomato ones.

The movie is bad cause nobody can tell what is going on, or they can but it's a chore without reward. "3 weeks earlier" kind of crap every 30 seconds in the movie. Even the big plot twist is, "this scene with Einstein that you thought happened early in the timeline actually happened at the end, wow." But maybe it can be fixed.

Mainly the scene where Oppenheimer randomly has sex during the questioning. Could maybe also do without some of the other parts where he slowly zones out for no reason.

Remux is not a community, it's a tag that pirate release groups uses to indicate that a release contains exact copies of the original video and audio streams present on the disc.

GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.

ETA: To the author's credit, this is convention rather than a hard rule. I checked my usual sources and found the exact 89gb 4k Arrow remux the author mentions in the closing paragraph and it is indeed labelled 'remux' only. The uploader did make a note of this though: "Unfortunately, as Arrow had to pull the Italian dub due to rightsholders demands, I had to sync it from the 2017 Kino Lorber disc."

Every high quality remux release group I know of does both normal and hybrid remuxes.

The Art of Internet Pedantry™

I don't read it that way. If you start using words like container and encoding, I feel you have to describe what those words mean and I suspect the writer probably felt that level of detail might have caused the article to drift away from the point. I have personal experience of accidentally going into too much detail when describing remuxes to non technical friends, and had later opted to describing almost exactly as the author did, because that description I think conveys the purpose pretty well.

I didn't even realize that page existed, and I'm a developer. Could I have found it if I was determined enough? Sure, of course. But starting from the homepage as an impatient average user, there's nothing obvious. I found it under "Gift MUBI" (which presents entirely different pricing schemes than what you linked) but that was after putting thinking and hopeful clicks into it. It shouldn't be that hard. Why isn't RIGHT ON THE HOMEPAGE?? It gives me the "Am I gonna have to call and talk to a human to cancel?" ick.

pardon me?

One of the more annoying parts of this to me is that, surely, a high quality version of the original must exist somewhere in the archives of the publisher, right? And if not that, surely the original footage must still be there, so one can recreate the edit frame by frame, as was done with TNG?

The good stuff is out there, just behind lock and key. You can't have it, because screw you.

It could also be that it genuinely isn't. The source code of Silent Hill 2, one of the best horror games of all time, is lost. It's clear from cases like that that publishers can't be trusted to preserve their media. We have to do it ourselves.

Wikipedia has a decent overview on this, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_preservation

"By the 1980s, it was becoming apparent that the collections of motion picture heritage were at risk of becoming lost. Not only was the preservation of nitrate film an ongoing problem, but it was then discovered that safety film, used as a replacement for the more volatile nitrate stock, was beginning to be affected by a unique form of decay known as "vinegar syndrome", and color film manufactured, in particular, by Eastman Kodak, was found to be at risk of fading. At that time, the best-known solution was to duplicate the original film onto a more secure medium.[5]

A common estimate is that 90 percent of all American silent films made before 1920 and 50 percent of American sound films made before 1950 are lost films.[6][7]"

That is obviously false: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_copyright>

You could just as well say that political protest is not a thing, that it’s just vandals looking for reasons to break stuff.

You're right, now that you mention it. I want a version that combines the Arrow contrast with the Lorber colours. How strange that they still didn't get it right.