Once again thinking about Tenna

[rynling]

This is my conclusion to an essay about "analog nostalgia" comics that I'm getting ready to pitch...

The celebration of the analog in comic travelogues of Japan is more than mere nostalgia. These works translate local Japanese aesthetics into accessible and emotionally resonant narratives that speak to a global audience struggling with the alienation and relentless acceleration of contemporary life. Their embrace of analog media and “outdated” spaces creates room for reflection and connection.

Instead of idealizing the past, artists use its spaces and textures to imagine what a more sustainable and humane future might look like. This future is shaped not by productivity metrics, but by locality and tangible experiences. Artists thereby reclaim clutter, slowness, and even emptiness as meaningful counterpoints to capitalist excess and digital saturation. Far from being regressive, the analog nostalgia in these travelogue comics is beautifully restorative.

...and I just think it's neat that everyone who played the recent chapters of Deltarune saw the old CRT television who's in danger of being thrown away and instantly developed an intense emotional attachment.

I've got an essay about this coming out on Sidequest btw! It's titled "Deltarune Remembers How to Have Fun" (ETA: it's here) and fuck yeah it does. I'm once again playing Chapter 3 and thinking, you know, this is what Zelda is supposed to be like. Just hanging out with (internet) friends and discovering weird secrets and finding doofy ways to break puzzles without worrying about discourse or whose post got how many notes or whatever. Good times.

Comments

[shinon]

Some years ago, my dad, who likes making things explode for recreational purposes, had plans in place to explode the CRT television I grew up with "unless [I] had other plans for it." Of course I immediately drove over to his place and brought it home. I haven't played Deltarune and don't particularly plan to, but it's been kind of a trip seeing my Tumblr dashboard filling up with people appreciating old TVs. Sometimes sexually.

The TV still works, and so does the N64, and I can still play N64 on it. I unironically think that analog tech still has a lot to offer us.

[rynling]

My mother lives in a small town about two hours south of Atlanta in rural Georgia, and she still has a CRT television. The infrastructure in that town is garbage, and the internet cuts out all the time like it was back in the AOL dial-up days. But the old television still works just fine, all day every day. Honestly that thing will probably survive the apocalypse, and it’s hooked up to a DVD player from 2003 that works much better than my PS5.

If I had to guess, I’d say that one of the major draws of older technology is that type of no-hassle accessibility. You don’t need a wireless connection, you don’t need a password, you don’t need a proprietary app, and you don’t need to link your PayPal. I’m not saying that everything was better back when a laptop weighed ten pounds and cost a thousand dollars and had a battery life of forty minutes… but I also wish they still made games for Nintendo DS.

Speaking of which! I visited your FFT site this morning, and it is beyond fantastic. Much love to you and the amazing work you’re doing in your corner of the internet.

Also much love (and fearful respect) to your dad. 😅

[shinon]

Yeah, the plug-n-play-ness of older tech is a virtue we have largely lost these days. I had a small printer in college that I connected to my laptop by USB, and then it printed stuff. If anything inside the printer broke, you could open it up and replace the part. I was loaned a modern WiFi-enabled printer by my then-workplace during lockdown in 2020, and sure I could print something from another room, but the user experience was nightmarish in contrast.

And yeah, the Nintendo DS era was peak.

Re: FFT website, I'm afraid you've got the wrong person! But if you mean the site I think you mean, the webmaster is corpsebrigadier, and it's a huge honor to me to be confused for them, haha. Everything they've ever put online has been cool as hell.

[rynling]

Oh nooooo!!! I knew that, I'm just in horrible brain fog land right now. I hope you'll forgive me!

[shinon]

No worries! Who among us is not currently having a horrible brain time, etc.?