Alex Hirsch reminding us all to go buy the Gravity Falls complete series set since streaming services are untrustworthy now
[Image: Tweets by Alex Hirsch ( @/_AlexHirsch ); transcript follows.]
With Streaming Services cruelly dropping beloved series & Disney’s love of locking things “in the vault,” feels like not a bad time to remind y’all about the Gravity Falls box set. Commentary on every episode- and guaranteed to survive Streamageddon!
[Attached image: The Gravity Falls Complete Series box set.]
It’s also the perfect weight to use as a weapon in case the Streaming Wars break out into the streets.
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I am happy to say that I already have my Gravity Falls box set, and once again disappointed by all of the other series that don’t have DVD sets for me to buy in the first place. Which I am inclined to blame on corporate greed, since we already know how much they hate paying writers (and everyone else involved in making shows, let’s be honest), and the previous writers strike involved increased residuals from DVD sales.
My dad still has my mom’s copies of the Star Trek movies.
THE ORIGINAL ONES.
FROM THE EIGHTIES.
ON VHS.
I don’t know if they play anymore because my family is notoriously really not good at protecting their media and storing it appropriately, but many still-playing copies are out there.
The point of me saying this is that if you want to be 100% guaranteed you can watch Gravity Falls in 2055, go out and buy the DVDs.
… and then jail break them to a non-DRM encumbered format if you’ve the inclination. Same with Blu-Rays, especially the newer UHD format which has the capability of remote-bricking players, although I’ve not see that happen… yet.
If there’s no other choice, thought? Piracy. As noted by XKCD, “If you pirate something, it’s yours for life. You can take it anywhere and it will always work.”
Reminder that the reason there’s still like 100 lost episodes of Doctor Who is because the BBC fucking destroyed the original film rolls for storage space and everything that has been rescued since has been illegal copies and foreign broadcasts.
Reminder that it’s impossible to find the Star Wars original trilogy as it aired in 1977 because Lucasfilm made sure to only make the remastered version available and there’s been decades of fan work trying to reconstruct them with little success.
Reminder that about half of all video games ever made have been lost to time due to lack of retrocompatibility.
Reminder that the only way the Soviet Union got access to rock music was through illegal copies burned in old x-rays and without it we wouldn’t have the modern Russian punk scene everyone loves.
Reminder that the modern rise of Japanese media happened in no small part thanks to the work of dedicated fan subbers who pirated shows in VHS, exported them illegally risking deportation, subtitled them on really old computers and spread copies around their friends, and without that the modern anime and video game industries wouldn’t be a tenth of their current size.
Reminder that Napster is the reason we got digital purchases, PayPal, and eventually streaming and online banking.
Reminder that a lot of modern authors got their love of books from stolen PDFs.
Reminder that the world we live in has been shaped by piracy in so many ways that have contributed infinitely to the development of technology and art, and the only thing to come out of its restriction has been lost media and lawsuits in favour of the megarich.
Destroy the monopolies. Liberate the arts. Steal their profits, take the spoils and redistribute them. Piracy is an effort for the good of humanity.
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