Hello, everyone, and welcome to Slash Film Daily. Today is Tuesday, March 11th, 2025. On today's

episode of the show, we're going to be talking about disc rot. My name is Ben Pearson. I'm an editor

at slashfilm.com, and I'm joined on today's episode by Slashfilm staff writer Bill Brea.

Greetings, Earthlings. Bill, good to have you on the show again. So Ryan Scott and I

talked about disc rot a little bit, almost exactly a

year ago on the podcast. And neither Ryan nor I had any personal experience with encountering it

in the wild. But you have. You actually recently wrote this big article called, What is DiscRot,

physical media's greatest boogeyman explained? And that's up at Slash Film right now.

I'm going to link to it in the show notes. Bill, the phrase boogeyman there is intriguing.

So I thought before we could get into the details, you could just tell me what inspired you to write this piece in the first place.

Well, let me start off by clearing the air a little bit. I personally have not had any personal experiences with disc rot as it's usually defined.

Okay.

The reason why I wanted to write the entire piece that I did is that it is, I think, and, you know,

speaking to your question about the use of the word Brookie Man, I think it's being used as a catch-all term for a wide variety of defects, whether it's

manufacturing or encoding or playback issues in physical media, specifically optical disk

physical media.

And I certainly don't want to invalidate the existence of Discrot as it's usually described,

which is you know, you Google it,

you'll see on message boards, especially for physical media enthusiasts, you'll see a lot of

personal photos taken of discs and discs in their collection that, you know, everything from

discoloration to what looks like little bubbles on the bottom of the disc to, you know, all sorts of things.

And as I said in my piece, you know, Discrot does have a Wikipedia page.

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