Thread by @gravislizard

the sticker on this is what i consider a goldmine, and i think that says a lot about my perspective on what we call "retro tech"

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1120772409227800576

in essence: i don't care about gadgets. i don't care about "technology" - we have better "technology" now than in any of the stuff I take an interest in. and I don't have use for much of it.

what I care about is humans. if you look at my youtube videos, i think you'll find that i spend a lot of time speculating about *why* things were done, and *who* did them. Even when I've made a video about how terrible a program is, I talked about how it must have gotten that way

there is nothing juicier to me than a missive from the past. that's what excites me. i like finding a note left for some future individual and thinking about the context in which it was written, and how its meaning may have changed, and what they did or didn't predict.

My interest in retroelectronics is an extension of this. Companies in the mid to late 20th century were trying to rewrite our future, and they mostly failed. There were many ideas floated, and only the boring ones survived.

Sometimes the engineering of a thing is a statement by its creator. Sometimes its limitations tell a story about its creation. I love looking at these things and thinking about them because the era of mad science in electronics is dead and gone and over.

The things that were being attempted in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, even 2000s were often amazing leaps of faith, leaps that fell short. Now everything is absolutely dead fucking dull. I haven't cared about a new electronic device in longer than I can remember.

A lot of what was going on in the 80s was miniaturization. The feats accomplished in that arena were incredible. That's over. Shit is limited by the size of its connectors now. We fit all electronics into a molecule. Now it's just a question of profit.

There used to be products worth competing over. There used to be many angles to compete on. Aesthetics, cost/weight/capabilities. Now everything's dead cheap and too small to see. Capitalism used to be *somewhat* compatible with consumer electronics.

I adore 80s tape players. I just found one recently that is absolutely beautiful. There are so many compromises in its design.

There's a radio stuffed in there - a big deal at the time - and they found a novel way to half-conceal the tuning dial and it has this belt pack and

and now none of these things matter because we can pack a music player and radio into a package so small it's dwarfed by the chassis, which has to be at least as big as the smallest buttons our fingers can operate.

that broke electronics. miniaturization ruined everything - nobody knows what to DO. there's no room for cleverness because we can do *anything.* so now nothing has any design, any passion at all put into it. why bother? it's just going to go in a pocket and be invisible.

and then spotify happened, and now the entire concept of a "music player" is foreign and is only going to become moreso.

if you follow the walkman from inception to demise, every step of the way you can see where people had ideas - fantasies about how the product would be used, ideas about how to make it appeal to people. all that's over.

all these voices are silent now, unneeded by a world where one device can do thousands of jobs.

anyway. i got off topic.

the point is that i always think about the people in the past who were just dealing with the realities of their world and every time i can see that explicitly it's really, really special to me

i'm guessing the note on that laserdisc is from the mid 90s at latest, prior to the explosion of laser printers (hence the dot matrix font) but, more critically, prior to DVD.

Criterion has a fantastic box set of Lone Wolf & Cub. I think they did one on DVD, and now they have one on Blu-Ray. In 1996 nobody knew that was going to happen someday - it was unprecedented. Laserdisc once represented something a little special.

blam1.com/DiscoVision/Ot… This disc was most likely pressed in a 4 year period, 81-84. By 1996, it may have been 12 years since the last one was made. The only alternative was VHS.

While not a DVD>Bluray degree of difference, anyone who was A Film Buff would have wanted an LD version. well, per the link there, the LD transfer is terrible. Maybe better than the VHS, maybe not. Probably better audio, at least.

the point is, there was scarcity, both in selection and quantity. The fact that Criterion makes a Lone Wolf & Cub set *at all* means, to me:
- I can have it
- For a reasonable price
- If I don't buy it now, it'll be available later on eBay

even if a company DID make a very short run of a movie nowadays, it isn't hard to find out it exists and where to get it. nobody would go to the effort of hand annotating a *single copy* of *one movie* and writing a quarter page of notes on it!

thanks to ebay, way fewer things get thrown away. thanks to bluray being so cheap to manufacture, every movie gets made in the millions. And this is not to mention netflix and so on.

so this laserdisc is something very special - a passion project, a moment of joy for a person who knew very much and cared very much about this thing they had found, and wanted it to go to another person who would appreciate it.

and what's really special is that this commentary *travels with the object.* it's not part of an ebay listing that will be deleted from the database after a few years. someone changed the object, enhanced it with their perspective. their life is part of this object now.

that makes this stop being a movie, and become an *artifact.* It's no longer a copy of a movie which has since seen much better transfers and translations - it is a journal entry in the life of someone who was there before that, who can tell us what things were like back then.

I would not watch this version of the movie, I would watch my Criterion bluray. But the object itself I would literally hang up in a glass covered frame on my wall, like sports memorabilia. Like a museum piece.