After watching my Lain blu-ray, I was curious about the production - there's lot of effects that feel like they would've been original done in standard-def and either had to be upscaled or recreated for an HD presentation. It did not take much searching to turn up full ISO rips of the 1999 Pioneer DVD set of Lain! Apparently the Internet Archive is totally okay hosting that - the catch being that the ISO rips are 1:1 byte-for-byte copies - ie they are still encrypted, so it's up to you as the downloader to get around that yourself (it's as easy as mounting the ISO and then opening it in VLC, since VLC does its own DVD decryption, or there's like 8 programs out there for decrypting the ISO if you want to burn it to physical disc).

So that makes me wonder if it would be Chill of me to upload 1:1 ISOs of some of my own discs to IA - primarily stuff that's really expensive, OOP, or just difficult to find.

I'm of two minds about how easy it is to find pirated stuff on IA - on one hand, it's delightful and fun to stumble across that sort of stuff, on the other hand it feels like exploitation of a system - knowing that the people behind IA can't check every single upload and so piracy will almost certainly slip through the cracks, and then this pirated stuff could be used against IA in court to harm it at some point down the road - I mean they're already embroiled in lawsuits over the trick they pulled with ebooks during 2020, so adding any more potential fuel to that fire feels kind of mean-spirited.

Unless the people behind IA are totally cool with stuff like 1:1 encrypted disc rips. In which case oh boy.

Oh yeah I never finished the point I started with here, which is that, Yeah, a lot of the effects in Lain were originally done at 60i, giving them a "video look" which all got converted to 24p for the blu-ray. This because very few blu-ray companies want to do 1080i releases, because they're all cowards (the real reason is that 60i video would have constant 3:2 pulldown stutter). It's very interesting to see those effects in their original form on the 1999 DVDs - even though by all other regards the old DVDs are extremely mediocre. They pulled the classic "just plug a pro VCR into an MPEG-2 encoder and call it a day" option.

Still, there's something to be said about how all the digital effects move distinctly differently to the animation of the real world. It also helps the cool computer UI look more like an actual computer UI, since those usually run at 60Hz.

My main interpretation of Lain up until the end was that it was a fairly direct metaphor for how the internet can completely consume people who are more socially isolated, dissociative, etc. As a character Lain reads to me as someone who struggles with some sort of schizoaffective disorders and gets addicted to online validation, and begins to lose her ability to delineate between the Real and the Wired as her sense of identity becomes fractured.

and then the last 3 episodes kinda shat all over that interpretation. From the moment Lain meets "God" up until the end, the show seems to spiral out of control and collapse in on itself. I thought the two Lains was pretty clearly about how people can behave completely differently online than they do in real life, but no, actually there are two different Lains. I think. I guess. She's never sure, so neither am I.

The little grey alien bit is completely opaque to me, I have no clue what the show was trying to communicate by sticking Lain's head on E.T. Something about how she feels alien and distinct from humanity? I guess. I loved the question posed by her ability to edit memories by deleting things from the Wired - if there is absolutely no record anywhere of an event, did it still happen?

I feel like there's a layer I'm missing. Lain ending up as some benevelont God, watching over the Wired and the world as an unaging, lonely being feels like a bad ending, I don't care if she's smiling, it feels like something is missing. Albeit Arisu's "actually being alive is cool because you have a heartbeat" argument was a little schmaltzy, I wanted to see the flesh automaton Lain or whatever she is forge her own path an identity - but maybe that's the point, that she can't do that without hurting people, that the Wired and the real world must stay separated and that's what her job is now.

If that's the case, it feels funnily similar to the end of Loki Season 2? I feel like an idiot comparing this show to some Disney+ Marvel slop, but the ending of that show surprised me by genuinely dedicating itself to a pretty bleak and melancholy conclusion. In both Lain and Loki, the main character can only save those they love by removing themselves entirely from the world and spending the rest of their lives holding everything together on their own. Damn.

Anyways good show.