What Not To Do

This article is dedicated to mishaps, accidents, improper care and negligent destruction of war cassettes and VHS tapes. Submissions are community driven, so feel free to share your own mishaps in the discussion section.

Oil-soaked Stan'te paše i Ustaše

At some point in its life, this copy of Stan'te paše i Ustaše was soaked in a kind of oil or fat, we're not really sure. The J-Card has been destroyed beyond repair, and while the soaked paper leaves no residue on the fingers, it has a very obvious slickness when touched. The smell has been reported by its owner as "straight from 'Split, Croatia'", further elaborated as "the typical smell of an old book, mixed with motor oil, fermented in the sun for the length of a civil war, with a dash of forty-year-old expired Christmas." Crust has been reported on the card.

The actual substance coating the card is unknown, but may possibly be a kind of motor oil. How the tape met its fate is also unknown.

When played, the quality of the audio was actually not as bad as some other tapes, but its songs were plagued with horrific wow and flutter. Kind of a vibe though.

Stan'te paše i Ustaše (Destroyed by oil)

Notes

• Obviously unusable now
• Possibly a first issue tape
• Even the tape is soaked

The 2025 Koridor 2. Disaster

On January 8th 2025 reddit user Nikolai14888 submitted a post to the r/CassetteCulture subreddit titled "Is this fixable". The post contained images and only a single line of text reading "My tape was eaten by mu cassette player". The post included photos of the album Koridor 2 clearly mangled with around a meter of tape strung out of the casing. The loose tape was clearly shredded and chewed by the player, and a smaller length of destroyed tape is clearly seen separated from the pile. He then put the cassette and loose tape back in its case for an unknown reason.

One reddit user commented "I hope you can read music, because you won't be listening to any off that section of tape ever again." which was met with four downvotes.

Let this be a lesson to never play your tapes in an inferior player. Maybe try it with a Beatles album next time.

2025 Koridor 2 Disaster (aftermath)

Notes

• Obviously unusable now
• Happens to be an uncatalogued variant of the album
• You can practically hear the flappy tape fluttering around

Remnants of coffee-time's past

We can all picture it. It's war-time Yugoslavia, 1994, and you're at home with the boys. You've just turned off SRTV-KNIN for the day and you push the button on your CRT TV to turn it off. Your friend Banje is in the kitchen making coffee. Amid the sound of the boiling pot of coffee, your friend Zoran goes to turn on the tape player and play some tunes. But not just any tunes. The newest hit album from Gordan Krajišnik: Život damo Krajine ne damo. Bought from the tape store the same day. The boys look at the tape impressed and within a moment, the tape is in the player and the first songs of this ground-breaking album are filling the ears of those in the room. Zoran is clapping his hands to the beat and Banje has his arms raised, dancing in the kitchen holding the freshly brewed pot of coffee. He pours a cup for each guest and sets them down on the table in the living room. Zoran stirs milk and sugar into his coffee when the song "Srbi u svetu" blasts out of the speakers. It's a hit. Banje is jumping up and down to the beat when all the sudden he bumps into the coffee table with his knee, causing some of his coffee to spill over and onto Zoran's new tape. A gasp erupts from Zoran, but nobody can hear it because the speakers are turned up way too high. It wasn't a lot of coffee, but it soaks into the card pretty well. Zoran is mildly inconvenienced for about three seconds before he realized the tape was in the player and is unharmed. He goes back to dancing.

Fast forward to 2021. Your name is BalkanMapper and you're dying to find this cassette. At long last a copy comes up for sale and uhh... looks like Zoran (or maybe Zoran's kids at this point) have dug up the tape to sell.

Now we can't verify the authenticity of this story, given that it's entirely fictional and I made it up on the spot. But this tape clearly suffers from some kind of beverage stain to the J-Card. When the tape was received, the card had to be "gently" pried open to reveal the back, causing part of the image to be ripped. The tape itself is unharmed, except for some odd red discoloration to Side B (labeled as Side 2), which could be anything.

One day this tape will have degraded into nothing. The magnetic pulses left on the tape will play a faint tune of barely audible music. Its words and meaning will be lost to time. But that coffee stain will still be there.

A Decades Old Coffee Stain

Notes

• Obviously not that bad
• J-Card is ripped from being pried open
• Tape unharmed!