Could you imagine making your own movie, making like 20 million dollars, and then going “awesome, now to install a DVD duplicating machine in my house and personally burn copies by hand like a medieval monk preserving sacred texts”
Like I need people to understand the mental image here of a multimillionaire internet creator personally overseeing DVD production in his own house like he’s running an underground bootleg operation out of a basement in 2007.
It’s weirdly charming because there’s something very “old internet” about it, this energy of “I made a thing, and now I will physically hand it to people myself like an artisan at a craft fair.”
The man really said: “The future of cinema is me standing next to a humming disc burner at 2am”
And like... I can't help but believe he's onto something
A) Yes, he does seem to have gotten these specifically for Iron Lung.
B) DVD and CD burners are not devices that exist exclusively for bootlegging. You can go buy one yourself right now. If you make a movie, an album, a game, you are entirely free to burn copies and distribute them.
When I say "I can't help but believe he's onto something," that's what I'm talking about.
Not that everyone should suddenly start mass-producing DVDs in their basement.
I mean the underlying idea.
That we've become so accustomed to everything existing at the mercy of platforms, storefronts, algorithms, licensing agreements, and corporate infrastructure that we've almost forgotten creators can just... put things out into the world themselves.
There is something appealing about physical media as an act of ownership and preservation.
And I think we've collectively become a little too comfortable treating the continued existence of creative work as something that should be outsourced to social media platforms and streaming services.
There's value in remembering that if you make something, you can put it on a physical object and hand it directly to another human being.
Just a thing that came from your mind, made with your hands, existing in the world because you decided it should.
I think we should be doing more of that.
Even if you're not a fan of Markiplier, even if you have absolutely zero interest in Iron Lung, I think there's something genuinely inspiring about what he's doing here.
The willingness to look at the modern content ecosystem and go, "No, actually, I'd like to put this thing on a physical object and hand it directly to people."
That creative work can exist as a thing in the world, sitting on a shelf, surviving platform changes, algorithm shifts, licensing disputes, and whatever fresh catastrophe the internet invents next week.
Maybe it's the preservationist bug in my brain.
Maybe I'm just old enough to find comfort in media that continues existing after somebody forgets to renew a contract.
But regardless of if you're a fan of Iron Lung or not, I think that's an idea worth being inspired by.
It's certainly inspired me.
Yeah! CD-RW drives were a thing before USBs! You could write music to them as if it were a USB drive, or in an audio format. You can also store pictures and films on them like a USB drive.
I remember when I was a kid, my dad would make Christmas mixes and a series of playlists he called "Eclectic Seizure" by mixing and matching tracks from CDs he'd bought and burning them onto custom CDs. You can buy them for incredibly cheap; a stack of 100 medium-quality CDs cab go for like $30, and you can get a bunch of cheap cases called "Jewel Cases" to store them in. You write the title in marker on the label side.
One of my dream projects is to modify one of these guys to have a CD-RW instead of an audio reader and store my important memories on CDs there, or maybe use it to mass-produce CDs for my friends:
