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@owashii@plush.city it actually originated as a thing for physical disability, but i believe (but can't say with any authority, mind!) that community has no problems extending it to other disabilities too
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@pup_hime that could mean anything, really. as we understand it, typically if something is returned to a store and re-sold (I'm assuming that's what happened here, but i dunno) it'll be marked down as having a defect. the defect could just be a slight scuff on the plastic (or even just that the box has been opened!), but since it's not in perfect brand new condition they can't sell it without noting that
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re: long, how NTSC line 21 captions work 

@terrana @hi_cial Unfortunately, teletext never caught on in the US! it would have been really neat to have had, though.
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re: pokemon violet thoughts 

@hi_cial aw damn, it worked okay for us
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re: pokemon violet thoughts 

@hi_cial oh nooo

we've seen it crash once or twice, it definitely feels really unstable

i recommend keeping autosave turned on
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@mawr @owashii@plush.city @astra we're from the south and have lived there our whole life up to 2020, and yet we're only just now trying to use the word y'all more because it's a genuinely useful word
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re: LRT 

@Oneironott i can't see the boost you're referring to

do you want an actual answer to this? we work in semiconductor manufacturing
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re: pokemon violet thoughts 

@hi_cial have you seen the sushi fish yet though

we love the sushi fish
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re: long, how NTSC line 21 captions work 

@hi_cial also!! i apologize, we didnt' check the charity store today, today was exhausting at work and we didn't have the energy. tomorrow *should* be less intense?
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re: long, how NTSC line 21 captions work 

@hi_cial if they came out in the late 80s or 90s they were probably legally required to, so it's possible
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@astraluma all we see is a bunch of blank black boxes, unfortunately
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@astraluma What exactly is it? whatever it is, it doesn't look like their site works right on our browser
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long, how NTSC line 21 captions work 

@hi_cial so analog video in north america has 525 lines of vertical resolution, of which only 480 are visible (the other 45 are blank lines used to give the deflection coils time to move the electron beam back to the top left of the picture tube); by convention, the invisible lines are partially before the visible ones and partially after them

starting in the late 70s, people experimented with ways of adding captions to television. One of the systems developed was line 21 captions, which placed digital text data on line 21, one of the invisible scanlines before the picture. A decoder box could pull out this data, convert it into text, and overlay it on the image (the format also included information for where in the image the captions should be placed, as well as various colors the text can be, so it's already superior to youtube captions).

in 1990, the US congress passed a law that required every television sold after then to have built-in circuitry to decode line 21 captions and display them, so it became ubiquitous since no one needed any extra hardware. either the same law or a different one passed around the same time (i'm not too sure) also required that line 21 captions be broadcast on every channel (with a few exceptions, i think), including for live media--news stations had to start hiring stenographers to do their captions live

Captions were also required on all prerecorded videotapes made after a certain date, and VCRs (as they just record the raw video signal) do reproduce the captions that were transmitted along with the video they record, so it's quite likely there are captions on your tapes
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@hi_cial ...you know what,

we also live in the city with the world's last remaining blockbuster and I *think* they rent out hardware to watch rental movies on too??? so might be able to do that too, if we're right about that and can't find a vhs player elsewhere
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@hi_cial we do! it might miss some stuff (i don't know if it can get line 21 captions, we've never tried) but it will get the video and audio!

i was going to mention USPS media mail to you as a way of getting the tapes to us cheaply but then i realized, you of all people probably know that exists
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@hi_cial technically, all we would need to do for that is find a vhs player.....

might stop by a goodwill or something after work and see if we can't be that archive nerd for you
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@tabitha@chitter.xyz compensate by having like five legs
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@Nina @lovewish i misparsed "bug severity" as referring to the severity of insects (presumably on a scale of curious bumblebee to pissed-off mosquito), and i thought that amusing enough to be worth making a post about
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@astra @packbat oh actually epenthetic /w/ isn't usually written either

i guess it's a semivowel thing?
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