Option 23: VHS tape. The bot's home video plays from a worn tape: smeared colour, tracking bands, head-switching noise at the bottom, dropouts and handheld camcorder wobble. Use the transport buttons like an old VCR (video cassette recorder).

**A home video, not a game.**
The bot hops along a backyard fence at golden hour. The camcorder sways by hand and slowly zooms in and out.

**The tape plays at its own time.**
Rewind really runs the bot backwards. Fast forward speeds it up. Pause freezes one frame with a jittering noise bar.

**The shader imitates how VHS stored the picture:**
**Press Stop, then Play.**
You get the VCR blue screen, then the picture rolls vertically before locking on. That's the sync settling.

**Tracking error to 100%, then "Auto tracking."**
The meter appears and the band fades. Old VCRs needed a knob for this.

**Tape wear 100% + EP long-play.**
That's a copy of a copy recorded at slowest speed: blurrier, noisier, more smear.

**Pause.**
One noise bar sits on the image and it jitters: the heads re-scan the same stretch of tape.

**Two kinds of text.**
The orange date stamp was burned into the recording by the camcorder, so it's blurry and smeared with everything else. The white PLAY and counter come from the VCR, drawn fresh on top, so they stay crisp.

**The blue screen was a feature.**
VCRs showed blue instead of static when there was no signal, so viewers knew it wasn't a broken TV.

**Why colour smears but shapes don't.**
Eyes see detail mostly through brightness, so VHS saved space by blurring colour heavily. JPEG and modern video use the same trick more gently (chroma subsampling).

**EP (extended play) meant 3× longer tapes.**
It recorded tracks three times narrower, so every flaw got worse.

**How VHS split the picture**
```
camera RGB ─► Y (brightness): ~240 lines, mild blur, sharpened → halos └─► IQ (colour): ~40 lines of colour detail, delayed → smear right tape ─► + noise + dropouts + tracking/head errors ─► recombine ─► TV
```

**Transport modes**
```
PLAY ▶ tape × 1 clean except faults PAUSE ❚❚ tape × 0 1 noise bar, vertical jitter FF ▶▶ tape × 6 2 noise bars racing down REW ◀◀ tape × −6 2 noise bars racing up, action reverses STOP ■ blue screen
```

**Two text layers**
```
[camcorder] SEP 27 1996 → recorded INTO picture → degraded by tape [VCR] PLAY ▶ SP 0:01:23 → drawn ON TOP at playback → crisp
```

**Critical thinking:**
VHS lost the format war on picture quality yet won on recording time. What does that say about which "quality" matters to buyers, then and now?

**Lateral thinking:**
photocopying a photocopy, retelling a rumour, and re-encoding a meme all degrade like VHS generations. What in your work loses fidelity with each handoff, and where could you add a "keyframe" to reset it?

**First principles:**
why is it safe to throw away most colour detail but not brightness detail? What about the human eye makes chroma subsampling nearly invisible?

- How do filmmakers get authentic VHS today: real tapes or plug-ins?