Marion Stokes, the Woman Who Spent over 30 Years Recording Every Minute of US TV
allthatsinteresting.com
allthatsinteresting.com
https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1393212448325308416 | https://archive.today/F0QDo
https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1392996252866932736 | https://archive.today/LFmyQ
As one might expect, these tapes eventually began to take up space — a lot of it. By investing in Apple stock, Stokes saved enough money to buy as many as nine additional apartments, which she used as storage units to hold all of her tapes.
A rented apartment is a liability to the tenant, but an asset to the landlord. And whether a residence is rented or owner-occupied isn't an inherent property of the residence, since it can change over time–it isn't uncommon (for a person of sufficient means) to buy a new house/apartment/etc and then rent out the old one instead of selling it.
> We generally call them "condos" when owned.
Is this a peculiarity of American English? In Australian English, "apartment" is about the type of physical structure, and has nothing to do with the building's legal structure. (What Americans call "condominiums", Australians call "strata title", but it is essentially the same thing–newer apartment buildings are almost all strata title, but older buildings sometimes have other ownership structures, for example company title.)
That sounds really confusing – owning one thing, but are talking about it as if it were two separate things. Does anyone actually talk that way?
"No."
What am I, your invited guest, to do with this information? If someone else invites me to "their condo" should I behave differently?
Perhaps there is some kind of social embarrassment in renting and thus apartment owners have come to try and differentiate themselves by using what originated as a legal term?
Homeownership wasn't always the obsession we know it to be today.
I tell you this as an American who's spent enough decades on this earth hearing English, American apartments are rented 99.9% of the time.
It's not "just vernacular", it is perfectly proper formal English. For many non-Americans – and even it seems many Americans too – calling something an "apartment" says nothing about the legal structure of building ownership.
I can find heaps of American news stories about people in the US buying apartments. Random example, this 2007 story from Fox News about the disappearance of a college student in Madison, Wisconsin [0]. It says regarding the victim that "Nolan, originally from Waunakee, had recently bought an apartment and moved to Madison from Whitewater, where she went to school". If Fox News is talking about people buying apartments in Madison, Wisconsin, then it is perfectly normal American English. Much more convincing than random Americans on HN telling me it isn't.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/story/cops-look-at-bars-surveillance...
For the record - to non Americans (both the majority of the world and the majority of the english speaking world) - "apartment" refers to the type of dwelling, not the ownership status. For many readers this localised hidden meaning in a common term is not obvious.
Homes and condos are an asset, but for a variable portion of their ownership history, they are assets with a matching liability.
If you don't pay rent for the next month, basically you're out, but other than the time you lived without paying, some penalties and interest on the owed amounts, you're free, albeit potentially homeless.
If you don't pay your mortgaged, you'll be mortgaged, thus, potentially homeless, but depending on how much you market is valued on the market at the time it happens, and the balance of your mortgage, you can still end up homeless but still owing money to the bank.
If she lived in a similar building, all she'd have had to do was move her door to the end of the hall, and all of the apartments around her would have become additional rooms.
Given she chose to buy nine apartments, we can at least assume she found the arrangement convenient and affordable, and that she valued fixed expenses. Extending from that, so she could house the televisions, easily access and change the tapes, and not have to transport them to wherever might be cheaper but further for storage, she would have chosen apartments physically near her.
My explanation was how someone could "buy apartments" to expand their floor plan, which is what I thought it likely she did, since people may not be familiar with how that might work.
Rent only really makes sense if you can't afford to buy, generally
I'd really like to know more about why she collected 192 Macs. What did she think/know?
I have a feeling we will really miss supermarket and retail interior footage with people actually shopping.
If there existed a vast archive of footage displaying mundane normalcy, you would quickly tune out.
If you want copies of old TV shows that had bad DVD/BD copies, and can get through the VCR snow, then maybe... uploading that stuff anywhere would probably still incur the wrath of DMCA takedowns though, so personal use only.
Back in the early 00s, I had a DVR and for the life of me, I couldn't get a clean copy of some shows. Stations would always throw junk on the screen, and some repeats of repeats would also have them (and sometimes weird cropping angles to boot)
Sometimes stations do keep a record of their old broadcasts. But that depends on their size, organizational structure, funding, etc. some stuff is just lost to time simply because someone felt it was cheaper to just reuse tapes.
As for value, that's hard to determine. Depends on what was taped, when, by whom and in what kind of context. That's where curation comes in to play.
Of course, absence of that doesn't mean there's no value to anyone.
Direct link to the videos https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo
This is misleading statement. If the recording format is better than the source format, it does not mean that the recording of the source will be better than the source. So I'm not really sure why this was added to all of the stats you've mentioned. Why not say that the LTO-9 tapes are better quality than VHS?
You then go on to say that "can" be encoded at around 300MB/h, yet that is also very misleading. Nobody encoding VHS tape sources at 480p will be using that kind of bit rate. You have to be using some very strange settings to even be able to convince an encoder to allow that value, and even then the encoder is so efficient I doubt it would ever use that bandwidth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Arc...
There also used to be tuning screw accessible via a very small hole on most models in the UK, and you could re-tune it to output on a different channel that way, but sometimes you had to open up the VCR to get to that. Or maybe she just didn't know that was even possible. In any case, there would only have been so many spare channels for her to use before she started interfering with the broadcasts she was trying to capture.
Maybe she just liked having a bank of screens that all had a different channel. I know my younger self would have thought that was pretty cool!
Ch 36 was (is) about 590-600MHz, and wasn't used by any transmitters (neither was 35 or 37, at least until the 1990s when Channel 5 came out)
Is there any laws or rights to protect her legacy? I can already feel lawyers salivating at it.
If anyone has experience with any of this, please reach out, I’d be interest in learning more.
Regardless, her contributions to archiving TV of the era is nothing short of impressive.