Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on Pokémon's “Electric Soldier Porygon”

Comments

• zabadoh@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  What a great article!

  I always thought the random dimming was some kind of copy protection scheme, like the old Macrovision from back in the days of VHS.

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  • wjs018@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Wow, that sent me down a rabbit hole of searching. I am old enough to have messed around with lost of VHS tapes in my day, but I was still too young to know what was going wrong with the picture. Reading how Macrovision screwed up the picture through desyncing the scanning explains why some of the “non-authentic” tapes I got never played right for me.

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    • zabadoh@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      To get around Macrovision, you had to have a gadget called a genlock or time base corrector that repaired the video’s frame signal so that a VCR could record it properly.

      Genlocks and TBCs were also very helpful when dubbing unprotected anime tapes.

      They didn’t entirely solve the video signal degradation to the copy, but they did make the copies much clearer.

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• Chronographs@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I wish streaming services would have the dimming as an accessibility option like captions or audio description; you could even have it on by default and have the uncensored version be opt-in

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• wjs018@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Really interesting perspective on this issue. Out of curiosity at one point, I got my hands on the porygon episode and the flashing is certainly jarring. It didn’t really bother me, but my wife said it gave her a headache (just a minor one, not a migraine fortunately). I had no idea that there was so much that came out of that incident. Really neat!

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  • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I wonder if different screen technology at the time made it worse (CRT then, vs LCD now)?

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    • wjs018@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Hmm, I bet it has more to do with brightness and contrast more than anything else. So, in that respect, CRTs are significantly dimmer than modern LCDs. Additionally, CRTs were just much smaller than most people’s living room TVs these days, so it would take up a much smaller portion of somebody’s field of view. It’s an interesting question though.

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• arin@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Link to Spy x Family Season 2 opening. I understand why it can stimulate seizues youtu.be/Hlw8dTz_iq0?si=ZqKyiNBkU3SZsEss

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• P4ulin_Kbana@lemmy.eco.br ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  What an interesting website name!

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