--mythical creature (person) that lurks (lives) deep within the haunted caverns (my house) operating a mystical machine of untold power (my computer)

<3 @kokoscript

pfp by @ViktorTheGreat

mastodon: yiff.life/@cosmopawt
bluesky: cosmopawt.bsky.social (tho i kinda fucken hate it. dont expect all the bangers to be posted there)
tumblr: can you guess my tumblr username. also i kinda hate it there. ill probably only use it for gamedev stuff. maybe.


god the fucking. IRREPARABLE damage that one twitter post did to the CRT market. You know the one. The one thats like "look how dracula's eyes in castlevania look better on a crt!" despite there being different types of phosphor masks on different CRTs that would lead to different results. Now every crt on ebay is labelled as "great for retro gaming!". Don't get me wrong, I like authenticity and period-accuracy in my retro game setups. but my god now you have youtubers claiming that CRTs are great for Modern games too. wtf.

Im going to make a post about how "the pathetically low contrast on cheap LCDs from 2005 actually improves the atmosphere in games from that time!!!!1!! It actually softened the super sharp and dark shadows that are characteristic of games like quake 4 and doom 3." and the market for god awful dell LCDs you can get from goodwill for 9 dollars is going to EXPLODE.

edit/addendum: this is an issue that extends WELL beyond CRTs.
Some shitty mushy keyboards from the 2000s go for as much as mechanical ones just cuz theyre "retro gaming" keyboards.
People are trying to sell rusty, beat-up japanese cars from the 90s for 20-40 grand (USD) just cuz of a subculture that arose around it.
Ive seen digital cameras from 2005 going for 40+ USD just cuz of the whole "digicam! CCD sensor! film-like (which is a lie)!!" craze
Sony vaios? the name alone drives the price up tenfold. some vaio UMPCs go for 600-1000 USD.
And I get that new stuff is generally low quality... but there was plenty of old stuff that is also (wouldnt you believe it!) also low quality (often due to their age).
As someone with a genuine interest in old tech, old cars, old etc... im just tired.


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in reply to @cosmopawt's post:

Yknow youre probably right about that, I just vividly remember seeing the castlevania comparison shared and reposted EVERYWHERE. So it probably just exacerbated the issue that was starting to rise.

No blame for the account that posted the castlevania comparison though, they seem genuinely interested in CRTs mostly for the aesthetic and recently replied to their castlevania post with an Oppenheimer screenshot lol

GOD i have been trying to find a good CRT monitor for ages. not because i think it's good for games or anything, i just like having a 00s style setup.

unfortunately the trend of "one of these sold for a high price, so all of them are valuable!" struck with CRTs, so a lot of the ones i can find on local sales (gumtree, ebay) are extremely highly priced for bottom-of-the-barrel quality monitors. a friend has a really nice quality CRT he says he's been considering selling but nothing definitive, plus it's currently broken :(

one of the biggest problems is trying to find a monitor that can do 1280x1024 or higher at a refresh rate higher than 60hz, because 60hz flickers like hell and hurts my eyes. i want to use it as a main monitor and i do NOT want to look at a flickering light for ages. but every CRT on the market i can find is a shitty baseline one that can only do 1280x1024 at 60hz!

hell, i think every CRT i've seen after i moved to melbourne has been more expensive than ones i bought while in tasmania only a year ago. 300 bucks for a monitor that would have sold for 30 in tasmania, 500 for a TV that cost me 60. it feels like an insult, "you shouldn't have moved here if you like old tech"

i've been using a HP L1750, one of those old LCD monitors that has to warm up its backlights. it's nice but since i found it in a literal dump (well, a store that recovers stuff from the dump) it has a lot of issues, notably a bunch of tiny scratches on the screen that are really distracting when bright colours are behind them...

re: edit:
absolutely. the second-hand digicam market has gone fucking nuts as of late. i could buy shitty point n shoot cameras from some point in the 00s for as cheap as $3 from cashconverters, a store notorious for its price hiking. now? the same model of camera can go for as high as $300! it's idiots trying to make a quick buck off of a thing they saw in their youtube recommended.

it just makes me angry because one of my favourite things to do was to go to a random second-hand store and buy a random old camera, maybe even multiple if they were cheap enough. now i can't do that because people "know" that they have something "valuable" (read: think they can make money off of something from their trash)

When exactly are you going to do this ?
I'm asking for a friend who recently had the urge to buy a dozen shitty LCDs for no particular reason and is considering when to make their move ...
😜

I worked in the computer service half of a computer service/e-waste business c.2006-2009. Peak Baby's First LCD Monitor years. So many people threw out so many perfectly-functional CRT monitors and TVs. The idea of paying money for one is viscerally offensive to me.

i've been around a lot of tip shops (shops that recover recyclable/interesting/valuable things that people throw in a dump (or "tip", as some australians (me) call them)) and the amount of functional CRTs still being thrown out (and being resold at pretty low prices) is incredible. I only held off on buying a good one because it would be a pain to move interstate. i regret that.

Similarly, I've been trying to build a mid 2000s era PC for a project that requires a computer from the 2000-2010 era and... I can't find anything that's early enough that isn't sold at ten times the price it should be. Or parts for one. (This project doesn't need a CRT, luckily everything will work fine on even the cheapest LCD monitor.)

I'm considering just repurposing parts from my old computer of the time, which is too powerful for the kind of things I want to do. But finding a case on its own that isn't rusted to hell or a compatible power supply that doesn't have 100 plugs I don't need is also pretty damn hard.

All I know is, my old LCD computer monitors get nice and dim, and being unable to see shit in dark movies is worth it.

Meanwhile, I always have to install something on my LED monitor so it doesn't blast my eyeballs into migraineville. (Why so bright??? WHY ARE THEY SO BRIGHT IT HURTS)