#theprisonindustrialcomplex

Remember, young grasshopper: There’s no eschewing fanservice, there’s only different tastes of fanservice, for Tiny Girl + Big Comfy Jacket × Cool Lizardmen Hypebeast, too, is fanservice.

VHS is an old analog video format from way back in the days when we rode dinosaurs to school (and it was always snowing and it was uphill… both ways!). The data was stored on magnetic tape wrapped around a drum (seen on the left in the picture above). VHS players would spin the drum, feeding the tape through a read head and on to the other drum on the right. THEN, when you were done, you had to re-wind the fucking thing before you could watch it again!

Can you whipper-snappers imagine that shit?

Every damn time you watched a movie you had to rewind the tape so the next person could watch it again.

Oh, sure, you COULD be a dick and leave it for them to do, but back in my day that was a sin punishable by death. Literal Communists were held in higher regard than people who didn’t rewind VHS tapes.

The real bitch, though, was that early tapes were limited in how much they could store so some movies were actually split across multiple tapes. Nothing ruined a Friday movie night faster then getting through half a movie, grabbing tape #2, and finding out that THAT one hadn’t be re-wound. Now everyone’s sitting on the couch grumbling, waiting for the movie to start again, pissy because the whole atmosphere’s been ruined.

But wait, there’s more! They also degraded over time. Every time you watched it the tape would get a little more worn and the visual and audio quality would get worse and worse. You always knew what someone’s favorite movie was as a kid because the tape would be un-fucking-watchable by the time they hit middle school.

Alright, alright, I sat on this way too long but here we go -

The VHS is a Croatian assault rifle developed in the early-2000s after one of the strangest and most convoluted design histories I’ve ever read about.

Initially they wanted a bullpup AK, but IM Metal (the predecessor to HS Produkt) couldn’t ever get it to work so they said “fuck it” and changed to a delayed blowback system modeled after the FAMAS. They couldn’t make that work either so then they tried an M16-style direct impingement system. The DI system kind of worked, enough that the gun went into production with it for a few years, but was ultimately changed again to a short-stroke gas piston. That’s probably what it’s still using today, but it’s hard to say because the entire history of this thing isn’t documented in a paper trail so much as a paper labyrinth, with conflicting filings being made in patent offices and no real documented history aside from “my cousin’s girlfriend’s brother told me....”