I keep forgetting to make this post, but it's only been a few days, no harm done. No, not the Justin Bieber song, though that certainly is on brand given that 2010s nostalgia is ripe in the group these days. A chance encounter at a thrift store! With sixteen burned copies of a student film from New York:

I don't normally go to thrift stores. I don't have anything against them, but they've always felt a little sad to me, a reminder of what extreme poverty looks like. Is what it is. After a really successful flea market outing about a month ago, though, my mom suggested we go browse the CD selection there, and I like adventuring.

These uncurated selections have definitely piqued my interest this year. At a record store, you largely know what you're getting, and you'll be paying for that guarantee, but at a flea market, thrift store, library sale, or any place not specifically built to sell you music, you could find anything. Lots of garbage of course—I found a copy of Cher's Believe in just about every bin I looked in at the flea market, and you bet there was plenty of gospel and karaoke CDs at the thrift store, but then there's not garbage! Then there's indie rock CDs, copies of Windows Me, sealed blank CD-Rs you pick up for a dollar entirely for the novelty of having a 1999 Verbatim blank you burn Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 for the PS1 onto! That's not even counting all the mix CDs, home movies, and strange locally-released albums I found in the shelves.

And then we have Baby. We naturally took our time going through the bins in the back of the store, cassettes, VHS tapes, DVDs (where stray PC games like to hang out, but nothing all that great this time), and tons of used monitors and TVs, all of which I'd much prefer to deal with over a shitty smart TV you buy new. (Can you believe our cheapo Onn Roku TV requires you to enable the composite inputs in the settings before you can use them? What the fuck?) I found a box of circa 2005 HP slimline jewel cases that I thought were unused, and not realizing I had a ton at home already, I picked up the whole box.

Before we'd even paid, though, my mom and I looked closer. There were discs in these cases! Each DVD-R looked exactly the same, a screenshot from some kinda independent film with some text reading "Baby" on them. They were dated 2008, by "Muse Productions". (Better than Passion Project Studios, I suppose!) Now her and I were immensely curious. What was on these? A really low-budget indie film? Porn? They came with the box of jewel cases, which was $6, so we were gonna find out one way or another.

As it turns out, it's a student film! It's about nine minutes long, probably multiple people's final, and absolutely reeks of late 2000s Final Cut Pro goodness, even down to the DVD authoring. Ithaca College in New York is thanked in the credits, and there seems to be a decent-ish cast to it. It's not all that interesting of a short film, but it is pretty competently mixed, edited, and structured, so I hope whoever was involved with it got a nice grade. (We didn't want to stalk the names we found too hard, but of the two girls who got top billing, we found one has been working as a head of production VFX artist at the same place basically since graduating in 2008, so that's a happy ending.)

If you're curious, I have uploaded Baby to The marf Collection on YouTube. Like I said, it's not really that interesting—some light commentary on quick hookups that aren't all that appealing the next morning. I suppose we'll see if anyone involved awkwardly finds it in a few years and asks me to take it down. I don't think it's anything to be embarrassed about, though. Certainly a lot better than the result of my attempt at a film degree.

That does leave me with one final question, though: what were sixteen copies of Baby doing in my thrift store 150 miles away from the college they're attached to? It's one thing if, say, twenty copies were made and then given out to production staff and professors, I totally get that. These are untouched though, and not only that, in the cases, they were aligned perfectly upright, meaning they were placed very intentionally and then never touched again. Were these intended to be given out and then they just didn't get around to it before graduation? Did one of the girls or production people bring them back home to here in town and then they just went to the thrift store? If you're curious, the DVD-Rs varied in brand, which tells me they were using the college's media to burn onto, and as I said, the HP box branding was copyright 2005, which means they went into these jewel cases at the time and just have not been unearthed since then.

I'll keep a copy for myself and then, as I need cases, recycle the rest or something. What a bizarre and fun find.