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a-m-e-t-h-y-s-t-r-o-s-e · 3 years

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I know this is an issue that’s already been talked about but this is my blog and I get to choose the hair shirt we wear.

“Stark Raving Dad,” S03E01 of The Simpsons and the episode with Michael Jackson in it, is so damn hard to find. It’s not on Disney+ with the rest of the Simpsons, it’s not on Amazon Prime, and the only place left I can possibly access it legally is YouTube, if I pay to watch the whole third season of the Simpsons. That’s $19.99 for the one episode I actually want to watch.

But aside from me being dead broke at the moment, I’m not spending $19.99 to watch what YouTube calls the “complete” third season of the Simpsons, because after doing some research, they might claim to have it and not actually have it at all, even if they say they have it by name. Even if they do have it, I don’t want to pay $20 for something I don’t fully own (more on that in a bit.)

I checked out my less-than-legal alternatives too, and made the discovery that you can label a torrent anything you want, but the file people download can be anything else. You could, hypothetically, go to download what appears to be “Stark Raving Dad,” S03E01 of The Simpsons, in 1080p, and wait and wait and wait while the file downloads, and be totally confident you’re downloading “Stark Raving Dad” because the torrent listing claims to be “Stark Raving Dad” and has a screenshot of “Stark Raving Dad” and has the plot summary of “Stark Raving Dad” and the correct episode number of “Stark Raving Dad”...

Then when you go to open the file it’s “Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington” because FUCK YOU THAT’S WHY.

Hypothetically, of course.

And that’s if you (hypothetically) try to torrent the episode standalone, by itself. You could take the time and bandwidth to download the entire third season of The Simpsons, but if the people uploading it got it from Disney+ or Amazon Prime or anywhere else that’s going to be 1080p, it’s not gonna have “Stark Raving Dad.” The issue still remains, too, that it could say it has “Stark Raving Dad,” but doesn’t actually include it once you’ve downloaded the files, in which case you’ve wasted possible hours downloading videos you don’t want only to find out the thing you downloaded it for wasn’t even there to begin with. Same disappointment, longer time to figure it out.

All of this assuming there are even seeders on the (hypothetical) torrents, which if there aren’t, it doesn’t matter if someone else has this file, because you won’t.

Then of course, the other less-than-legal options would be various websites that host uploaded videos of cartoon shows (like KissCartoon or WCOStream,) but the reason almost anyone who accesses these sites knows at least a handful of them or inevitably asks what the “new domain” is when they change their URL for the 80th time is because while those websites technically work, they aren’t reliable sources. They’re less-than-legal, so they’re not explicitly illegal, as far as I know, but they aren’t totally legal either. Even if you find what you want to watch, you’re gonna have to deal with spammy banner ads and pop-ups (because they all ask you to remove your adblock and refuse to play the content with adblock running,) and it’ll only ever be in as high a quality as the site can source it, which takes you back to the issues I just mentioned.

I had to go into my bookshelf and dig for my box set of The Simpsons’ season 3, which fortunately still has all the discs, but the box is grody and beat up and the disc that has the episode also has a fair amount of schmutz and dust on it. That got me thinking; I’m very fortunate to have bought this boxset when I did all those years ago, and I bought my current desktop tower specifically because it still had a CD drive so I could watch my movies. But DVDs are falling out of favor for Blu-rays, which are in turn falling out of favor for digital downloads.

How long until CD-ROM players and DVD players go the way of the VCR and you can’t find one that isn’t secondhand on eBay for $200? What happens if my disc won’t play, if the plastic degrades enough that it won’t even run? If the computer gets too advanced to recognize it? If any future releases of The Simpsons omit “Stark Raving Dad” for the same bullshit reasons that Disney+ omitted it? But, more importantly;

What happens when this isn’t just about Michael Jackson anymore?

It’s annoying when it’s only a quality issue, when now all of The Simpsons is 1080p except “Stark Raving Dad,” which if this DVD still works will be in 720p (I could try to find a Blu-ray of The Simpsons’ third season, if one exists, but again; would they still include the episode on a Blu-ray sold in 2020?) but it’s going to become an issue of much greater importance when the DVD becomes obsolete.

When my DVD stops working, I won’t be able to access this episode in anything beyond 480p. If and when torrent sites and less-than-legal sites like KissCartoon are taken down, I won’t be able to access this episode at all. Sure, I’ve seen it before and it��s just an episode of The Simpsons, but if this can happen to my silly little Simpsons episode, imagine what will happen when this happens to something of cultural significance.

We’ve lost footage of the fucking moon landing because the people working on it didn’t think to save the original film, we’ve lost some of the very first films in general because the celluloid was turned into heels for shoes and materials for war. If media of that much importance can be lost because of carelessness, imagine what can be lost because of malice.

“Stark Raving Dad” is maliciously being left behind because people think Michael Jackson is a child molester. I 100% believe he is not, and there’s no evidence to support that he is, but that doesn’t change what some other people think. And unfortunately for me, it’s those people that decide whether or not the thing they made with Michael Jackson gets to be saved with all the other episodes of their animated TV show.

However, I feel this sets a precedent for censorship moving forward. How many movies, TV show episodes, Hell; even entire TV series, are we going to lose? Who gets to make those determinations? And at that rate, for which reasons? It can already be for accused crimes, not actual guilty verdicts (because Michael Jackson has only ever been accused, never found guilty, and no evidence of wrongdoing ever found.)

So what if I accuse someone I’ve never met of raping me? Can I get the stuff they worked on taken down too if I make my accusation sound horrible enough? If I come up with the most disgusting thing imaginable, can I get anything taken down? How graphic do I have to describe my (fictional) rape to get a movie I don’t like taken off of Netflix? To make sure that it’s unreasonably hard for anyone to ever see that hypothetical movie ever again?

With all this in mind, I hate not owning things. I hate paying to access a streaming service where someone can censor or remove something I paid for, or where it’s not guaranteed to even be there in the first place. I hate when a service wants to gaslight me into thinking episodes are out of order, or didn’t exist in the first place, or didn’t air the way I remember them airing. If I pay for something, I want what I bought and I want it to keep, not to be altered or taken away just because someone somewhere said so!

Today it’s “Stark Raving Dad,” because of Michael Jackson, but what is it gonna be next time I’m trying to find something? What else are we going to lose not because it’s “Lost Media,” but “Destroyed Media?” Who gets to decide, and why? (That should always be the question, shouldn’t it? “Who gets to decide, and why?” We need to make that phrase a common daily occurrence. Critical thinking is so important.)

‘Cause this is exploitable as hell, and mark my words, it’s gonna keep getting worse as time goes on.

#michael jackson #mj #stark raving dad #sj shit #long post #personal potatoes #don't fight me

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