Vincent Kinian

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.

I am so setting this up

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

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.

rebugged a post a few minutes ago which invoked the adjective "brechtian", someone on my feed mentioned they were unfamiliar with brecht¹, and generally I am too but here's one of his works, the poem "A Worker Reads History", which I just generally adore

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

1. in the tags, so there's not a great way to respond to them yet²

2. someone should do something about this

also worth noting that brecht wrote the song which was localized into english as "mack the knife" which, as an uncultured american, I'd always thought "mack the knife" was a goofy sinatra song about an american street tough, and only learned brecht composed it after seeing the epigraph at the start of braverman's "labor and monopoly capital" quoting the extra stanza he wrote for the 1931 film version of the opera he'd composed it for:

Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die andern sind im Licht
Und man siehet die im Lichte
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.

There are some who are in darkness
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
Those in darkness drop from sight.

which is also extremely hard

But I did read On Theatre and here's roughly how I think of the term "Brechtian", if folks are curious:

Brecht was really suspicious of emotional narratives. He didn't want people to get lost in the story and drama of his plays because he thought that, by appealing to people's emotions instead of their logic, you could sneak in really regressive ideas. He wanted people to think about what the play was saying, so he purposely did a lot to jolt people out of the experience, whether that was heightened acting or purposefully sparse or nonliteral set design.

For a popular usage, it doesn't quite mean that a work is weird, but rather weird in a way that draws you out of it and makes you consciously engage with it. One of the techniques he used, and is kind of synonymous with "Brechtian" is the "Distancing Effect" or the "Alienation Effect." Here's a good definition of that!.

Not trying to be pedantic or anything. I just think Brecht is neat!

always gonna be a little sad that so much of masahiro sakurai's time in game development was devoted to super smash bros because i think that man has a knack for making monstrously cracked single-player-focused action games that he ended up not getting to flex nearly enough

kirby super star and kid icarus uprising are actual masterworks of game design

This a hundred percent. If Sakurai's columns over the years and especially his YouTube series have demonstrated anything at all, it's that there are probably very few devs working in Japanese games today who are as literate in as many genres and styles of games as him and I think it's long overdue that he finally go back to freelancing other stuff again. His contributions are always at the very least academically fascinating, especially when they come from a more detached place where he isn't necessarily a personal fan of the genre in question, yet still clearly gets what makes them tick like with stuff like Meteos.

I won't necessarily go so far as to say his talent is wasted on Smash Bros. when that series has clearly had such a tremendous impact. But he's too fluent in too many types of games to deserve to be chained down to it forever at the very least, in my opinion.

That's the dilemma facing commercial game developers in general, isn't it? Although finding work relies less on producing high quality games so much and more on your ability to reliably generate profit for your publisher (which can mean making a big hit, but also running a consistent and cheap production where called for), nobody wants to be known as "the person who helmed Doraemon: Nobita to Fukkatsu no Hoshi." They want other people to value their creative output, and they want the space in which to produce creative output that's worth valuing.

The problem, however, is that commercial game development specifically precludes the latter - think of the oversized role crunch plays in the industry - and, where it does offer the former, only offers a hollowed out version that primarily serves the publishers' best interests. The minute you create a successful enough game to tie to your name specifically, that's ALL you'll be working on until you die. Capital values nothing more than predictable return on investment, after all. Meanwhile, the developers whose name is now tied to that creation realizes they're effectively shackled to said creation, and express the dissatisfaction you'd expect. This article reflecting on Miyamoto's reflecting on his own legacy in the 90s (the 90s!) comes to mind.

As always, now comes the part where I beat my head against the problem of how exactly we encourage a better culture in the here and now without paving the way for more of the sufficiently-similar, EG pointing to altgame/indie devs whose games you should buy, thereby encouraging the formation of tomorrow's celebrity indie devs trapped in a prison of their own success.

This is Jordan's Furniture, a brand of furniture stores throughout New England, and as the sign would imply, their gimmick is they partner with IMAX to run their eponymous theaters in the same building. You read that right: this isn't something one or two individual locations have chosen to do, but something that defines the Jordan's Furniture brand as a whole.

Think that isn't weird enough? Don't worry: several locations (I don't know if all of them do this; just that it's a Jordan's Furniture thing) also run their own indoor amusement parks.

Don't get me wrong. Taken alone, I can understand each individual component from a rational standpoint: the amusement park gives something for the kids to do while mom and dad buy a new kitchen table, and the IMAX imparts unto you the idea that you, too, could enjoy this same experience in the home theater system the fine people at Jordan's are ready to sell you. But taken together, they leave a deeply spiritually unnerving impression upon me. It's an artifact from a forgotten era; a reminder of the capitalist celebration the end of history served to engender. "Behold", its Festival Marketplace facade cries out, "the perfect merger of private consumption and public spectacle. At last, buying a dinette set has become an event worthy of celebration."

Obviously, this only reads as celebratory within its original historical context of the 1990s and 2000s. Today, it reeks of the same desperation to drum up demand for trends for which there neither was nor ever will be any organic demand - perhaps more broadly, of the futile attempts to escape the contradictions capitalism lacks the ability to resolve itself - which has defined online spaces for the past several years. Yet at the same time, that Jordan's Furniture still exists at all attests, like all artifacts do, to the fact that it will outlive its historical moment in a way we never can.

They're showing Oppenheimer at these Jordan IMAXes. I'd recommend going, if only to approximate experiencing that one part of Beautiful Dreamer where the characters all watch Godzilla. What better parallel to watching a movie about nuclear destruction in the collapsed ruins of somebody else's dream - a dream from which YOU stand no chance of waking up?