i was talking with a friend about missing and trying to recreate the classic tv experience on plex and kodi, and while googling around i found this absolutely incredible project:
this person built their own tv, including building the channels themselves and programming it with accurately timed bumpers, commercials, and seasonal content. this is an insane amount of work but it looks so so worth it to me. this is SO cool. i want it so bad
It's not quite as bespoke as this person's solution, but it's a lot easier to do, and lets you access your channels from any device that you already use Plex on.
It's really interesting to me as a post-tv-era* zoomer that people have nostalgia for TV with ads.
*I might be making this up idk
that's not a good thing. it is, in fact, a bad thing :D
however, believing that doesn't get them out. shouting corny slogans and looking at visuals inspired by the Memphis Design Movement still feels like childhood to us. we can't erase those memories and if we could it would remove the foundation the rest of who we are is built on, because so much of our emotional stuff is, like, third-order replies to those early childhood feelings.
like. to make that more concrete, let us describe our inner life from early childhood. so, we enjoyed the intense exuberance and repetition that the commercial world offered us, it meshed well with our ADHD and autism. then we needed to find calm spaces in nature to balance that out and we developed an appreciation for moss, water, trees, ice, stone... and for quietly sitting and being at peace with ourselves (this was also helpful because it provided an escape from non-consensual violence which we were constantly subjected to). so these two facets, the exuberance and the calmness, both in different ways helped us cope with the constant retraumatization, food insecurity, and so on that we were facing at the time. we also read a lot of science-fiction literature and dreamed, basically, techno-solutionist dreams of making the world better through building stuff (oops), and that was all integrated with this, it can't be separated from it, the cartoons and advertisements and comic books often sparked thoughts about the engineering and vice-versa.
then as we got into our teens we started to find ourselves drawn to Japanese art of various kinds, first anime but eventually, as we reached our twenties, ukiyo-e and calligraphy... and in many of these works you can see this very deep and reflective portrayal of all these things. and eventually we attained balance where we know how to indulge all aspects of ourselves as the situation calls for, and let go of things when it doesn't. or that's the goal at least, it's never perfect.
but we can't remove the little part of us in the back of our brain that's shouting "Centidimetri-eye!" because we misheard "More than meets the eye!" when we were five. None of the other things we are would work without that. nor would we want to remove it, because we'd be drastically different people had we not grown up in that way. that's true even though our ideals today are in many ways opposed to what we wanted back then - in fact, it's true because of that. we hold these ideals - around building a better world through helping people talk through their problems - in the ways we do because we explored the other direction so thoroughly, first. also most of the power we have to reach people is because we know other belief systems than the one we settled on.
sometimes we just want to indulge that part
there was a thing in Mother 3 (endgame spoilers!!!!!! this is a thing that will decrease your enjoyment of the game as a work of socialist fiction if you know it going in)
... where it turns out the inhabitants of the village where you start the game had chosen, in the past, to erase their own memories of soda pop and hamburgers and so on, because it was the only way they could see to be happy without those things. it worked, until Pokey came.as we said above, we wouldn't want that solution. fortunately we don't need it, because eventually we will get old and die, which solves the problem without any extra action needed. someday perhaps the world will consist of only people who didn't grow up with TV commercials, and we think that will be a good thing. death is the great renewal.
anyway! yes, there are old people like us who are nostalgic for ads. we probably always will be. we are glad that all y'all young 'uns aren't, ads suck :D
Is that it's based on a conceived emotional experience. It's not whether something was better back when or not, or even if we enjoyed the things or not - things like commercials are absolutely worse - but the familiarity that gets stirred up. Old TV ads bring up generally comforting sensations in a similar way that comfort foods do; again regardless of whether or not they're better.
