Would you like fries with that?

So, this is one of my fave musicians, Psychonaudia! His music has a lot of stylistic variety, but the majority fall somewhere in the electronic genre. Subgenres abound as well.

This is his latest release on SoundCloud.

Music critique or commentary aren't things I'm really skilled at, but I'll put some notes and thoughts below:

BRAVELY DEFAULT the first two lines read (I'm excited- this is the first time I've seen the letter Y)

then for some reason I skipped to the fourth line and my heart froze.

A I R Y

w... what the hell is........ WHY IS AIRY'S NAME HERE?!?!?!!! Honestly I was shaking (yes, I get very over invested and over emotional over stories and the mere mention of Airy just-...).

Turns out it says BRAVELY DEFAULT FLYING FAIRY (but the F in "fairy" is mostly erased. They knew exactly what they were doing.) followed by BRAVELY SECOND

A magnetic tape works because information has been magnetically encoded on the tape. The tape is very long, and is wound around two little spools, one at the end, one at the beginning. In the middle is a part where it is flat and there is a thing called a ‘head’ and it reads the magnetic encoding on the bit of the tape next to it and converting it into sound and/or images. When the tape plays, the little spools wind/unwind so that new sections of tape are constantly being run past the head. Every single thing a VCR can do is a function of controlling which part of the tape is next to the head.

unless of course the tape hadn't been rewound before being taken out last time. then, unless auto-rewind was a feature of the VCR in question, you had to push that button first to get back to the start so the movie was watchable.

#and then someone took the camera away and 'looked through the pictures'#to see what they were of and if they were Forbidden Content#and then gave the camera back like no harm had been done and i'm like

#so she...didn't rip the film out and ruin it? then what just happened?

Tapes had no mandatory ads at the front. Oh, sure, there often were ads at the front, but there was no way to prevent just fast forwarding through them.

For the busy among us who wanted to watch a film while another was rewinding, separate tape rewinding devices were sold.

Tape rental places would ask you to "please be kind, rewind!" and some places charged a rewinding fee if you didn't.

Music was affected by the jump from tapes to disc, too! I remember it blowing my mind that CDs could replay a track instantly, instead of me having to memorize how long it took to rewind a tape to play back a tune.

Both VCRs and music tape players would occasionally break and "eat" the tape, which meant an unspooled, destroyed tape and having to take the player apart to free the tape from it. Sometimes the player could be fixed afterwards, and sometimes it couldn't.

Sometimes if you played the same portion of a tape over and over, it would lead to tape degradation: distorted video and audio, or even the tape snapping and having to get a new one. (I did this to at least one Disney movie - don't remember which - and one soundtrack.)

Adjusting the tracking! I don't remember how this physically works but if the video is jumping around, sometimes you would have to adjust it so the VCR reads the tape correctly. Looks like there's some how-to guides out there on the Internet on how to do this. Usually there was a button on the remote to do this.

Your position was just referred to as employment. Independent contractors do not have employers; they do not have employment. Congrats, your contact at this company just provided evidence that you were illegally missclassified.

This contact is claiming that you have set hours you’re obligated to fulfill. Unless a work task can only be done at a set time for practical reasons (i.e. you’re an audio freelancer paid to support a live event that occurs at a particular time and requires a certain amount of pre-show setup), a company cannot set an independent contractor’s work hours. This is further evidence that you were missclassified.

The whole exchange establishes that the company is interpreting an employer-employee relationship rather than expecting a service. Discipline and potential for firing (you cannot fire an independent contractor; no longer purchasing their service is not equivalent) establish that this person views themselves as a manager. Independent contractors cannot have managers.

This one text exchange could:

Get you back pay for the full duration you’ve worked there, to bring you up to the compensation that an employee would have gotten

Get you back compensation for lost benefits that an employee would have gotten

Get you back pay for the additional self-employment taxes the company should have covered

Get the company to pay back taxes to the government

Get the company to hire everyone who performed a similar role, or face further penalties and fines

A win would encourage the rest of their missclassified workers to sue for the same, or give them leverage to demand a better deal

You can also file a form with the IRS to force the company to correct your classification (assuming you meet the criteria), without necessarily having to sue:

Keep in mind that this is just federal. Most states also prohibit missclassification as an independent contractor; and even if states have more lenient rules, companies still have to comply with this federal law. The rules have largely been bipartisan and existed for decades, so they’re common.

States also have an interest in having regulations about missclassification: it’s a significant loss of tax revenue. Your self employment tax does not fully equal what a company would have paid for you in payroll taxes.

“Wow I should check out this Persona 5 game my friend has been recommending, sounds cool!”