I have a question for the people who made my DVD player.
Regular readers might be familiar with my other complaint letters to the makers of my DVD player, such as Why the Fuck Did You Make This Remote So Small That I Feel Like the Thing From Fantastic Four When I Try to Push the Buttons, or the classic, Could This Be Any Goddamn Wider to Accommodate One DVD?
In addition to that, I would like to add the following entry: What The Hell Were You Thinking When You Were Making the Fast-Forward Feature Go From 2X to 4X to 64X?
Just in case that’s not clear, let me help everyone a bit.
2X or twice the speed is pretty much worthless. It still takes 45 minutes to an hour to go through a movie. I’m not sure why someone would go that speed ever for anything ever. Maybe on a movie starring Kristen Stewart so that you catch very little of her and still find her to be a attractive person with a good attitude. Or, possibly, to the opposite effect with Amy Adams, where you’re so afraid of falling deeply in a true sort of love you can’t even understand that you think it’s safer to go at double the speed.
But other than those situations, 2X is a waste.
4X is a little more useful. I would estimate that it is approximately twice as useful as 2X.
And then, from 4X, my DVD player goes straight to 64X. For people who are not super familiar with time and numbers, that mean that each minute of a movie lasts just under a second. An entire feature film will be over in less than a minute and a half. God forbid you try to skip forward in a TV show, which will now be just a hair under seven and a half seconds long, total.
I understand that 64X would have its uses. Anyone who has seen a Lord of the Rings movie once never needs to see another scene where a guy is giving a battle speech on top of a horse that looks bored or maybe uncomfortable. That’s not my question. My question is, why not put some fucking steps in between? 10X? What happened to 10X?
As a test, I watched Conan on 16X. All you see is a weird mountain desert, a snake temple, what was either a boob or a water pitcher, and then credits.
The jump from 4X to 64X is a multiplied increase of 16. So imagine you are at Subway. You get a sandwich and ask for mustard. The dude puts some on, and you ask for a little more. He doubles the original amount, which still seems excessive but is understandable. You say, Take it one step up, Mac. And then he proceeds to put on 16 times the amount of mustard that’s already on the sandwich. That’s a fucking crazy person who would never get a job at my Subway.
If you were going 16 time the speed limit in a 35, you would be traveling 560 miles per hour. You would die.
If you made 16 times minimum wage, you’d be making in the neighborhood of $250,000 a year. Actually, that’s a bad example because lots of people might be making more than that, I guess, based on some of the leather pants I have seen on television.
If you were 16 times stronger than the average man, you would probably be able to do some fucked up shit and it would be kind of interesting to see if you turned into a complete asshole.
Guys, let’s just give me some gradual steps, okay?