Rinko is a Terran broadcast personality running a popular weekly TV show out of Titan Garden. An inquisitive and curious person, Rinko is the sort to find one end of a thread and follow it along towards its source, exploring its twists and turns, inferring what sort of knots it may once have been tied in and expanding her own library of knowledge along the way. Sometimes it isn't really important to make it all the way to the source, though, and the journey itself is more important than arriving at a destination; when she "gets the idea" her interest will often drift away and catch onto a new thread of knowledge to pull. You know how it is. She's rummaged through every kind of intellectual junk heap in her years and while she's started her fair share of adventurous side projects, she maintains an enduring interest in two particular topics: interplanetary linguistic humor and obsolete media formats.
"Welcome back, Deck Detectives, to another episode of Digital Derelicts!" Every Friday at 10pm GST Rinko hosts a new episode of her weekly TV show, "Digital Derelicts with Rinko Aomori", where she introduces and explores the history of media storage formats that didn't quite make it to the present day. These formats are fascinating for the mechanical innovations they introduced, for the form-factors they explored, for the problems they attempted to solve and for the broader technological context in which they were developed. There's a lot to learn about old media that's easy to take for granted, and for an hour a week you can tune into Channel 83 and enjoy a fresh look at old tech you may have forgotten about or simply never heard of! With many species from many worlds, each with their own technological histories, there's so much to explore and document and preserve for future generations to appreciate, it's a thread with virtually no end!
A lot of work goes into each episode of Digital Derelicts, and while she has a few friends who like to help out with her program Rinko likes to do a lot of that heavy lifting herself. She'll often start her stories on the holonet, keeping a weather eye out for any hint of media formats she hadn't heard of before- this often goes hand-in-hand with another passion of hers, finding weird old games to play and acquiring them one way or another. She might see a century-old game called Catch 'Em Fish available on the well-known Horizon TELEVIDTRONIX cartridge format, but also released in Europa on something called Aoba Systems Bubbleplex-8, an optical format designed to import media from the Great Below to an undersea audience orbiting Jupiter, and now we need to figure out what Bubbleplex-8 was! Having an eclectic taste in weird media is a great way to lead yourself to weird media formats, and this curiosity is the backbone of the program.
In addition to her tireless research on the holonet, Rinko loves to pop into used electronic and antique stores like Altair Electronics in the A-District or some of the salvage shops in the Garden's Dockyards. Metal shelves stacked with odd bits of tech are a treasure trove for Rinko, and with an encyclopedic knowledge of data cables and a solid grasp of many languages' instructive shorthands she is pretty good at recognizing an odd piece of forgotten machinery as an old media storage device, and will grab the deck and as many disks, chips or cartridges as she can, gleefully leaving these shops like a funny little rat with a morsel of cheese in her arms. What's a United TX-48000 Secure Media Encoder? You're about to find out!
Part of the fun of Digital Derelicts is preparing all the little scenes and slides for her show, and Rinko loves to do this work herself. She likes to render old tech as 3D hardlight projections so she can zoom in, rotate them and show their inner workings without risking damage to what might be an irreplaceable relic. She's got a good sense for comedic timing and will go to lengths to set up visual effects to really sell what she thinks is a fun joke- it helps keep the vibe of Digital Derelicts fun and informal rather than being stuffy and academic. Where she can Rinko will always try to run the media herself on camera, since handling and negotiating old tech to work right is an important part of the context of media history. She'll be sure to screen this media ahead of time, but old tapes with faded labels are a real treasure trove of looks into the lives of starfarers past, what they valued and what they had for entertainment. This context is an important part of presenting the kind of hardware she works with so Rinko makes sure it always has a place on her television program.
Unsurprisingly, Red Raven's Amy is a big fan of Digital Derelicts and will find the time to tune in every week right at ten. Channel 83 broadcasts along the Outer Belt satellite relay network so starfarers who are out and about can still enjoy their favorite TV shows in the cold reaches of space; ship crews will keep track of local times on many worlds, but when it's 10pm in the Garden Amy will take over the TV on the Jackrabbit II and tune in to the latest broadcast. She likes to post in the holonet chat while an episode is running and is inspired to keep an eye out for weird old tech when her crew is exploring a shipwreck, Digital Derelicts is a fun vibe and the Mercurian mechanic likes to vibe with it however she can. She is a big fan but she can get a little starstruck whenever Rinko comes through Red Raven to check the salvage racks- she'll try to play it cool, like "Huh? Oh, yeah I think we might have something like that", gesturing to the back of the hangar where the CRT monitors are stacked up. The shops in the A-District usually have better stuff, but you never know what might turn up on a forgotten shipwreck adrift for decades in the vacuum of space, so it's always worth a peek checking out the salvage outfits. It all makes its way into the program, and Rinko does a great job exploring, documenting and preserving it all.
"That's all the time we have today, Deck Detectives! For more forgotten formats and hi-fi history, be sure to tune in next week for Digital Derelicts, broadcasting live across the Outer Belt right here on Channel 83!"