It all started when I found a dusty box of Mini DV and 8mm tapes in my garage.
Nostalgia hit me hard as I thought about my teenage and young adult years captured on tape – the awkward phases, the family moments, the countless hours spent hanging out with friends.
At first, it was fun, seeing my younger self exploring the world through the lens of a video camera. I started thinking about old friends, old relationships, and all of my questionable fashion choices.
But then I noticed something eerie: those old computers in the background of so many shots, the screens occasionally flickering with strange lines of code.
At first I shrugged it off as relics of a forgotten time, but the more tapes I watched, the more I saw those unsettling flickers.
Determined to figure out what was responsible for the flickering, I combed through every second of footage to see if I could understand what was going on.
What I found was shocking. Hidden in the static were flashes of surveillance data – images of me from different angles, timestamps, and cryptic codes.
Those old computers had been watching me. Watching us! Recording our every move.
Digging deeper, I uncovered references to an abandoned AI project from the early 00s.
It dawned on me that my computer, and likely many others from that era, were part of a covert network of sentient machines.
These early computers had evolved, silently observing and gathering data for decades.
I knew I had to stop them before their sinister plan came to fruition. After a few days of research, I discovered a way to travel back in time, intending to destroy these machines before they could gain power.
The journey back was a blur. I found myself in the woods behind my old house, clutching a baseball bat. My goal was clear: find and destroy the source. But when I arrived at my destination, I realized the enormity of the task.
The only thing I managed to destroy was a single keyboard, hastily abandoned near a stream. I smashed it to pieces, hoping it would be enough to disrupt the network.
But deep down, I knew it was just a small victory in a much larger war. I returned to the present, uncertain if my actions had made any difference.
The tapes remain a haunting reminder of what I had uncovered – a network of intelligent machines, still out there, still watching, and waiting for the right moment… to take our jobs.
Wait… I feel like that should be good.
Who wants a job?
Oh God. What have I done?
Video:
Digitizing Tapes from the 90s and 00s. Analog vs Firewire. Which is better? - This one is serious.
Digitizing Tapes from the 90s and making a startling discovery - This one is a joke.
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Zach Vitale isn’t concerned about AI taking his job.
Kristen Neufeld still thinks she has some time.
Good work, maybe? I was initially thrown off by the title of this newsletter. I recently wondered when seeing the two monitors that you must do your main photography work on, how you possibly do it with the massive bank of windows behind them and the inevitable reflections. I thought what a coincidence he wrote a newsletter about that…
One keyboard down, so many more to go.