KneeOfJustice99

what if CPR is actually a necromantic spell

none of you know what the original message was. get jebaited

The worst thing about the lost Doctor Who tapes is that some slimy-faced clumpy-fingered ******* with rotting hair somewhere in the world has probably got some like abysmally low-quality recordings in his cupboard that he's just holding onto so he can drive their prices to utterly absurd levels when he eventually sells them purely because "teres a mahke now hweh hweh hweh this toim nest yiar oill be a millonair"

theory: what if the moon landing was filmed on a green screen, but the green screen in question was set up on the moon's surface and they filmed on location

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imagine if there was like a hole and it's basically endless but not quite. like for all intents and purposes its "bottomless" because its hundreds of millions of miles deep but its known that its not fully endless. so like if you fall in you know youll hit the bottom at some point but not quite when and youll be in the hole for ages and ages and eventually like i guess starvation would hit and whatever but like you would know the bottom is there but then not when you hit the bottom because its so dark. thatd be creepy i think

Not sure if this has been done yet (as in, in an actual project or something on here) but one thing I think would be exceptionally cool if handled right would be an SCP Foundation-based fighting game of some kind - albeit more likely to be a tradfighter than a platfighter given more... unusual mechanics.

I mean, aside from your obvious and well-known candidates like Cain, Abel, Clef, 096, 682, and others, a number of really interesting potential character archetypes spring to mind - whether you use Iris's camera-based abilities to have her act as a bizarre zoner, or use Alexei Belitrov's mechanical enhancements to make him a terrifying close-up combatant, there's plenty of potential overall. Hell, giving lesser-known SCPs (such as SCP-2800, otherwise known as "Cactusman", and SCP-6846, the "Patch Jacket") a chance to shine with interesting and unique properties of their own would be amazing!

The only major problem (at least roster-wise lol) is that I feel like a lot of characters would wind up almost being too complex. Seeing how weirder characters like SCP-2099 (being a reality bender who is literally just a brain in a jar) or SCP-4051 (who can manifest infinite amounts of anything from portals) would be incredibly cool, but a lot of weird and bizarre moves would end up coming into play, and the game itself would probably feel damn near unplayable at times if you included certain characters or locations. Even so, there's like over 8,000 SCPs at this point to pick from - not even including notable individuals or other bits and bobs (for instance, an MTF springs to mind as a potentially interesting composite character) so just being smart with who you include would go a long way.

i think microwaves are a mystery and if nothing else they are proof of alien intervention. cooking of the meats in mere moments. the holy beams of light when interacting with the humble spoon. their screams unsilencable and inconcievable. we will never understand these devices. they know more of us than we know of them

okay so here's the deal. if things are going to be remade, dont just remake good stuff because "it was popular". remake UTTER CRAP. i wanna see a fully remade and remastered zelda cdi trilogy thats in like 4k shd and its literally game of the century. do it. cowards

So let me get this straight, how many ways can we play Tetris on the Nintendo Switch now? Hmm...

• Puyo Puyo Tetris (albeit only in Tetris mode)
• Tetris 99 (against 98 other people???)
• Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 (see above above)
• Tetris Diamond (japanese exclusive unfortunately)
• Tetris Effect: Connected (i still dont know what to make of this)
• Arcade Archives: Tetris the Grand Master (??????????????)
• Tetris (but the gameboy version)

In total, that's seven different ways, and playing them all would cost $131.75 (given that Diamond's RRP of ¥500, as of writing, is equivalent, according to Google, to $3.80 - and also that NSO would cost $19.99 at its cheapest, which also doesn't take into account Tetris 99 DLC but we're presuming you don't want that)

falling block game print money

scripulous fingore vs. missingno fighting to the death (the winner will be officially recognised as existing in a nintendo tweet (but this scenario is a double edged sword (nintendo will scrub all presence of them from the internet due to "contractual agreements")))

A small part of me wonders whether the inclusion of flying machines in TotK is in any way inspired by the minecart/Magnesis glitch shortly after BotW's release. I mean, that's probably not the case, or at least it's unlikely - but I'd like to imagine that there was at least a small amount of inspiration from that.

okay but why is a luigi

I've been mulling over the idea of how exactly a Pokémon platfighter specifically would work for a few hours, and something's kind of occurred to me about it that lends to quite a lot of questions about how such a concept would work. The problem is that a lot of those questions - as in, a vast majority in fact - are somewhat defined by a single one.

How mechanically complex would a Pokémon platfighter even be allowed to be?

This might seem like an odd question to start with, but I do genuinely think it'd be important to ask. It'd start with more obviously complex stuff, like, for comparison, a moveset as complex as Steve's might not really work considering the likely younger audience of a Pokémon product, fair enough. You don't want your characters to be inaccessibly complex - and it wouldn't make sense for Urshifu to be a straight port of Gen from Street Fighter Alpha in a "kids game". But how far do you take that?

Eliminating meters and UI-influencing mechanics seems like a reasonable start, fair enough, but we eventually get to some more nebulous instances. Are fighter-specific mechanics that apply to no other character in the game "too complex"? Sure, it'd eliminate characters like Lucario from the mix but he could be switched up with ease. Then again, are counters and reflectors as a whole "too complex"? Let's take it further, actually - are "weird moves" just, as a whole, "too complex"? Looking at you, Mewtwo! Would it be too complicated to have a move not immediately react in exactly the way you'd expect it to react? Would any non-combat move be "too complex"?

Pikachu's obviously your main benchmark and the character you want people to easily and simply understand, but where do you go from there? Even if you're taking the opportunity to promote more obscure picks like Orbeetle or Vikavolt, them being in the game at all will ideally be to increase merch sales - so why would you want them to be more complex when it's possible for little kids to latch onto any of their colourful and unique designs?

I bring this up because if a Pokémon platfighter were actually to come to pass, I don't think characters like Urshifu or Wobuffet would even be considered for inclusion purely on the basis of being too complex. Pokken, remember - was never really directly marketed toward a particularly young market, but a platfighter likely would be - and I think if anything, it'd share more similarities to the design philosophy of Smash 64 than to Smash Ultimate by essentially removing anything that could be considered a gimmick in the pursuit of universal accessibility - even to little three-year-old sticky-fingered Timmy who likes "pressing the button that makes the red one go fast".

On the one hand, it's quite possible that a return to simplicity could be a great way to handle it, and compared to the needless complexity of some Smash Ultimate characters, it'd be a nice way to return to basics. The problem is that it runs the risk of kneecapping actually interesting potential contestants purely because very small children need to be able to understand the game's mechanics to at least a degree of competency, otherwise... the game's never going to get past the pitch meeting due to the fact that it's "capitalising on the wrong audience".

It's still a fun idea though.

Y'know the funny thing about Vsauce's content is that, somehow, it feels more like "modern science YouTube content" than nearly anything else - not in the sense of you watching it and thinking "yeah this is what [BLANK] was inspired by!", but moreso in the sense that you can look at the time the video was posted, see that it's either like a month or a literal decade, and yet the production quality and basic concept has remained so high for so long that you kinda can't tell the difference aside from certain bits and bobs such as maximum video quality (which doesn't even affect me anyways, 360p or death)

echolalia's kicking in again and i am now lying in bed softly repeating "toyetic" to myself

help

Random semi-rant: I feel like my problem with the MCU's "humour" is less that it's objectively bad but more that literally any main character could make the exact same joke and it'd somehow be in character for them. Like, sure, dumb quips aren't exactly my cup of tea - but they've at least got fans, and "cOmEdY iS sUbJeCtiVe", so fair enough, it's fine. Y'know, sometimes I even do find myself sharply exhaling my breath at some of the jokes, so fine. You got me.

The problem is that seeing someone like Spider-Man having the exact same humourous sensibilities as someone like Captain Marvel or the Winter Soldier just makes no sense given how different they're supposed to be - not even in a "iTs NoT lIkE tHe CoMiCs!!!!!!11!" way but more just in how they want us to see their characters overall. I think we can agree that Spider-Man, y'know, generally positive dude, pretty young, is supposed to be different character-wise to someone like Captain Marvel, toughened space warrior, bit too disconnected on the outside - but they seem pretty much the same.

It's gotten to the point that some of their "hilarious funny jokes" are basically just undermining the semi-serious stories they want to tell, and whilst it makes sense in some cases (see the aforementioned Spider-Man as a good example of this), seeing this in cases where genuinely serious events are going on and then, oh look, funny relatable character with 2010s hipster humour made a funny relatable joke, everyone laugh! Why aren't you laughing, Doctor Strange referenced Ihop!

It kind of confuses me, because a consistent problem with superhero media that's existed since the late 30s is that all of these people in funny costumes kind of blend together to the point where it's nearly impossible to keep track of them because almost all of them seem the same. Just look at the sheer amount of 30s/40s era Superman expys as an example of this. The problem is that they all die off because nobody cares, but the MCU is falling into exactly the same trap and nobody seems really all that concerned. I have to wonder how many "epic xd funnymen" you really need in a cinematic universe, because when you look at your screen and see around 5 "epic xd funnymen" making "epic xd jokes" then it gets to a point where nuance doesn't really matter to people watching.

I don't want to say "just make it good" or something stupid like that because I know for a fact that my own sense of humour is middling at best, but if you were to at least give each character a semi-unique sense of humour and have them make different jokes as opposed to "culturally relevant reference!" or "funny tangentially-related quip!" then it'd make audiences just in general more interested in them as, well, characters.

But what do I know? Obviously there's a good reason I'm not on a Marvel Studios board of directors. I'm just some whiny internet user.

Hey all! Time for me to show off something I think is pretty interesting even if it's full of technicalities!


I present: Le Manoir du Diable (or The House of the Devil, not to be confused with the later remake The Haunted Castle), a film from 1896 prominent today for being arguably one of the first "horror films" in history! Of course, the issue with this is that the film was originally intended as a comedy - obvious through its pantomine influences and the like - but it'd set into motion a wide variety of aspects that would go on to become staples of horror in film, and it's incredibly interesting to see the formulaic beginnings of a genre that, nowadays, feels almost like a fact of life.

In fact, one aspect I particularly love is seeing in this film elements of what would come later - sprinklings of things that are more familiar to our modern sensibilities with films like The Shining. Some have argued that the main character's transformation from a bat into a human indicates this film as, perhaps, the first vampire film! Strange to think of this spawning ****ing Twilight of all things.

Also, a moment to comment on the special effects! Given the film's by Georges Méliès - oft-considered the father of cinema special effects and probably better-known for A Trip to the Moon - there's plenty of early cinema trickery such as cuts and the like which allow for sudden appearances - with the majority of effects being practical in nature. The film's also notable for being one of the first appearances of Jehanne d'Alcy in cinema - essentially the first "film actor" in history.

Of course, it's no Nightmare on Elm Street, and it doesn't hold a candle visually to works like The Thing, but for its time... it's a fabulous piece of art, telling an interesting, engaging story, and setting into motion something that would inevitably eventually exist - but kicking it off in a pretty damn good way. Jolly good show that only 90s kids will remember!

why does big the cat fish like sure cats like fish but they dont like water thats their whole thing (they are fire-attuned)

I might be a little sleep-deprived at the moment, and it is coming quite close to 1am, but I'm genuinely beginning to wonder whether Thursdays hold some particular power of some kind. Sort of.

Basically, I'm not sure whether others associate "patterns" with nearly everything (I'm told it's an autistic thing) but one of these "patterns" is the nebulous and difficult-to-explain concept I like to call "conscious importance". Basically, the idea that everything has a certain degree of importance in the cultural consciousness as a whole - for instance, Mario has a high degree of "importance" compared to Bubsy, the number 2 has a higher degree of "importance" compared to the number 917, and so forth.

Imagine it a bit like a search engine, where the most "searched" (or, in this case, thought) thing is ranked higher on an arbitrary scale. This can change, over time - celebrities like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson are more "consciously important" to our modern society and culture at this moment in time compared to someone like acclaimed (1930s) actor Katharine Hepburn because the former is more commonly "cited" in terms of thought. It's not to be conflated with pure recognisability, but Johnson is more "searched" than Hepburn for instance. If I were to perform an identical thought experiment in like, 1934, then Hepburn would of course be significantly more "consciously significant" primarily because of Johnson not even existing yet.

So here's the thing. Whilst celebrities, characters, other things like that, do have "importance" - they're not cultural mooring points. You could probably find people that don't know what a Mario is. But they do know what the number 2 is. See, "conscious importance" can also apply to wider concepts as opposed to just singular things, and one of the single most prominent and important things in modern society is the concept of the day. It's a fundamental force on the planet, it's existed for as long as culture has, and we assign "importance" to certain days.

Mondays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Wednesdays, Tuesdays, Thursdays. Odd order at first glance, but I think this is the reasonable decending order of "significance" of each day - Monday is dreaded more commonly than Friday is celebrated, Wednesday is a "halfway point" but not really as significant as Sunday in multiple cultures, etc. And yet Thursday's at the bottom. It's near universally-accepted that Thursday is different to nearly all other days to the point that SmashBoards ****posts and acclaimed science fiction author Douglas Adams can agree on it. Thursday isn't quite the same as Monday or Friday not purely in terms of the fact that it's another day of the week, but in that it fundamentally feels different on a level difficult to even conceptualise.

What is a Thursday? Thor's Day? Why Thor? Why would one Norse farmer from the 9th century naturally associate the ferocity of storms with a day recognised near-unanimously for its complete and utter lack of substance? The natural conclusion is one of two: either that there wasn't enough days to go around (which is why Reddit invented Cake Day) or that Thursday wasn't always considered as "nothing" as it is. So where did it change? I feel the importance of my idea of "conscious importance" is interesting because Thursday probably hasn't had a particular "thing" happen to it that's made it less notable, but rather, a lack of things that's happened to it. A statistical void of notability compared to other days - whether it be Sunday due to its association with Christianity, Monday and Friday for their connections to the working week, even Wednesday purely for its placement in relation to that. And what is a day, anyway? In terms of a week, why is it Thursday 7 days after it's Thursday over and over again? Well...

Thursday is a void. And what is a void but a lack of being? Entropy is naturally associated with the state of being, but the paradoxical state of un-being that Thursday exists within ironically makes it more "consciously significant" than even days like Tuesday because of its sheer lack of notability, which causes a paradox, because how can something be un-notable if it's notable for being un-notable? For comparison, if I post where the least-thought-about place on Earth is, the second I think about it, it's no longer notable for being the least-thought-about place on Earth because of the fact that I'm thinking about it in the first place.

The problem is that this causes yet another fallacy because of the simple nature of searches. For every page of Google searches there's billions of others that nobody really cares about - some having not even been clicked in literal decades. Even me knowing about something being "un-notable" makes it instantly more notable than the vast majority of "things", because in the grand and scarcely comprehensible list of "things" there is inevitably - purely by force of probability - a vast, equally scarcely comprehensible list of "things" that nobody is, has, or ever will think about. Links of the mind that will never, ever be clicked, in a sense.

That's not even getting into what a "thing" is in the first place because I could fold up a handkerchief into the shape of a crane and call it "a handkerchief", "an origami crane", or "fabric" and technically never be wrong in the first place. What is a "thing", after all? Something that can be catalogued as "existing"? If we were to make a genuine, citable list of everything we know about - a physical representation of the conscious importance index - that massive void of things we don't know about wouldn't be added, would it. Are they still "things?"

Is a Thursday a "thing" in the first place? It's a concept related purely to terms of reference, after all - a constant keeping-of-count of one planet spinning around as it spins around a star as it spins around a galaxy as it spins around a universe. From an external perspective, a Thursday doesn't only just "not exist" but it doesn't even have a need to be conceptualised. It's fundamentally, utterly redundant - not even being notable for its lack of notability. But what would look from the outside? This brings up a question of space. If we leave our solar system, what do we use to measure "time"? Thursday is, after all, a product of Earth-centric "time" in pure relation to our complete and utter lack of spatial awareness. Would Thursday - and indeed nearly any other unit of time aside from the SI units of seconds and so forth - become utterly pointless, archaic-at-best systems with which to even consider time?

The issue in this case is vagueness. Humans are utterly ****ing terrible at categorising anything. If I take sixteen atoms of your black forest gateau away, it doesn't suddenly become classified as a main course. If I attach an infinite number of legs to a chair, it doesn't stop being a chair. The fundamental rules of what "is" are almost completely dependent on point of view, context, expectations, and a massively simplified observation as to what I'm trying to show you (either physically or metaphorically.) Even then, we're limited by a language system that only has a finite number of methods with which to describe concepts, relying on mechanics like metaphor to continue maintaining relevancy as a means of conveying ideas.

When it comes to days of the week, Thursday is the least notable. It's a void. It lacks substance. But because of that, Thursday becomes notable. It draws something from nothing, a fundamental violation of the basic laws of thermodynamics. What is a Thursday but an anachronism, a series of infintisimally small coincidences that perfectly lined up in that vast and unknowable storm of entropy to form a group of apes citing the name of a god nobody cares about and laughing because it's spelt wrong on their light boxes?

Thursday is nothing because it is something because it is nothing - recursive. That's why it has power. Oh, and one more thing - if you ever did that thing as a child where you kept asking your parents "Why?" whenever they explained something and they'd eventually get pissed off and shout "BECAUSE IT IS", this is... yeah, pretty much it.

concept: isekai where the main character is killed. they wake up and look to the sky. above them, an angelic choir... and a formation of clouds in the shape of the words "the simpsons"

bo birmingham fans when he sings about the rise of the television show pawn stars during the 2008 economic crash (so funny! so quirky! so relatable!)

mario.

Everyone's going soooo crazy about Ohio, not realising that Ohio was a social construct developed by the citizens of New Jersey to direct attention away from them

Random thought experiment: if someone handed you the reins to add a Space Invader (from Space Invaders) into Smash, would you have their key design be based on their in-game sprites, a future redesign seen in later media, or on their design on the cabinet art? Also, why exactly?

Just out of interest!

what if shrek was a factual documentary

Hello all! I've been giving some thought to a pretty interesting topic and something's occurred to me that I think is pertinent to ask, even if there's a reasonable argument that I'm about half a decade late. Specifically, I'm going to pose a question:

Can you think of any character redesigns (in gaming ideally, but elsewhere if you like) that felt good, appealing, or natural?

A lot of people talk about really bad redesigns - Spyro's look in Skylanders, Crash's look in Crash of the Titans and Banjo & Kazooie's look in Nuts and Bolts spring to mind - but I'm kind of interested to see what people feel is a particularly good instance of character redesigns either in terms of modernisation or just a generally changing artstyle over time. For context: I'm not talking about full-on reboots of character design like in the case of Dante in DMC: Devil May Cry where characters look very distinctly different on purpose so as only to invoke the original, I'm moreso thinking about evolutions.

The main one that I know people seem to like is Pac-Man's from the Pac-Man World series, but I'm interested to hear your points!

I reckon, personally at least, that the best way to handle an Atari crossover of some kind (especially in the case of older games like the 2600) would be by featuring characters as they appeared on boxart - even if they never actually appeared in the games themselves. Obviously there'd be some exceptions - Centipede and Yar spring to mind as obvious inclusions from within their actual games - but there's some picks I think could potentially be really cool, like the Commander from Missile Command, or the Escapee from Breakout.



And come to think of it, using a similar redesign philosophy to that seen in the Recharged series for each character feels like it'd be a lot of fun. Keeping aspects of their original designs whilst giving them a fresh coat of paint seems like the best way of handling these in some cases, because it'd even let you come up with characters for games that otherwise might not get represented (such as Asteroids and Missile Command) due to the lack of in-game characters!

I imagine it'd be unpopular to some due to a percieved "lack of respect" for the original source material, but I feel like a prisoner with a hammer and a ball and chain would be way more interesting than a paddle with someone presumably inside it, for instance. Even then, you could still represent key aspects of gameplay through things like stages - a Breakout stage feels like it'd be fun, and likewise seeing interesting takes on concepts like the Caverns of Mars as a stage would be awesome. It'd still be unquestionably Atari - just not quite in the way you might expect!

I feel like this would end up being the best way of doing an Atari crossover fighter if you were to go ahead with that. Whilst there's a certain charm to the original box art (or even, in some cases, sprites), I think recontextualising some aspects of the characters whilst paying effective homage to the original source material would be an effective way of making it all work - whilst keeping things fresh and interesting across the board! (I think these kinds of redesigns would be cool even for later inclusions, such as stuff from the 5200 or even as far as the Jaguar, even if a lot of Atari's most popular and prominent stuff is either arcade releases or 2600 games.)

Come to think of it, even aside from Atari's own catalogue, there's a ton of potential for some interesting guest picks here. Characters like the Robotron Hero, a Space Invader, and Mrs. Pac-Man feel like they'd all be really fitting, even if you'd need to see whether Warner Bros., Square-Enix and uhhhhh presumably Namco, AtGames and Midway??? are willing to play ball. Oh well!

AI discussion in the 1960s: "AI could be used to automate gruelling work that, currently, is performed by humans. It could lead us into a bohemian and colourful age of art and expression, with work still existing - but taking a backseat compared to a life of leisure and creativity. Wouldn't that be a fabulous evolution of the human race?"

AI discussion in the 2020s: "I have been working at McDonalds since I was 15, get paid a pittance for 12-hour work days, and now I can't even make art or music because computers do it all for me. Life is hell, it gets worse every day, and I have absolutely no power or direction because of it."

oh~ the future is delightful!~

I feel like one cool take on the "indie crossover" concept that I don't think we've seen yet could be a puzzle game! Using basic puzzle games as a basis as to how it could work, I imagine it'd have some similarities to something like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo or the Puyo Puyo series, with characters having special abilities of some kind that aids them in-game. For instance - someone like Welltaro could have a beam-like attack that eliminates all tiles on a vertical line, whilst alternately I can imagine something like a SuperHot character having the ability to only make time tick down whilst tiles are moving. Not sure whatsoever how balancing this would work - but it feels like it could be a lot of fun!

So was nobody ever going to tell me that there was a Street Fighter game released on PC which was controlled only by a mouse and actually only featured like 5 Street Fighter characters, 2 Rival Schools characters and an original pick, as well as several characters from novels written by Chinese wuxia novelist Jin Yong in like the 50s as well as like four characters from Cyborg 009 and then ****ing Barack Obama as a Valentine's Day DLC addition



This reads like a ****post but I'm dead ****ing serious

imagine pitching chess today

"yeah so you have 16 pieces each with unique functions"
"okay so presumably you have to unlock a piece through lootcrates"
"no you just get them at the start of the game"
"oh through like a shop system with microtransactions?"
"no you just have them all like there"
"not interested, next pitch please"

imagine being in the netherlands and its like 1772 and you're the very first person in history to buy into tinned food and then realising you'd have to wait for like nearly 100 years for the tin opener to be invented

Come to think of it, given Warner Bros. hired Ronald Reagan back in the late 30s and he'd act in a number of B-movies around that time period, plus the fact that they own the rights to MAD Magazine, it's not unreasonable to suggest a parodical interpretation of Ronald Reagan (likely with a deliberately caricatured design based on the magazine itself) could hypothetically be a character in MultiVersus. I imagine his moveset would mostly centre around him being a nuclear-powered madman with particularly powerful attacks, most prominently one in which he utterly wrecks the economy around him and results in the opponent falling into deep poverty.

Unrelated but my sleep schedule is wack lmao

Is it just me that finds the existence of the WikiReader so annoying because of how much missed potential lies right there?

For context, the WikiReader is a device released in 2009 that's basically an offline Wikipedia machine - which allows you to update it yearly and was released for around $100. It runs on AA batteries and lasts for around 90 hours, has the option to load other Wikimedia stuff, eBooks and custom articles, and is small enough to fit into a pocket - all whilst containing the sum total of mankind's knowledge in your pocket.

Why the hell was this released exclusively as a consumer device?

Consider for a moment the other options we could consider here:

- Shipping them out to still-developing countries to utilise as a part of schools with next to no money behind them would be essentially a world-changing use of the device, and considering how small and relatively cheap it is for an "online device", it'd be a perfect pocket way to bring technology to people without having to create complex internet systems for more than one central computer (for updates to the Wikipedia database and the like.)

- Using them in schools and the like would alleviate concerns surrounding the classic "WE CAN'T USE MOBILE PHONES BECAUSE YOU WILL BE DISTRACTED" argument (which I think needs rethinking anyways but ech) and would act as a valuable educational tool - note also that there's plenty of parental controls on the device such as password protection for certain articles and the like too, and that the relatively low consumer price point is actually a quite enticing offer for schools even now, let alone the potential lowering of prices due to buying in bulk

- Use in things like hiking or exploration groups as a valuable resource when used out and about! Albeit, it'd be ideal if it were a little sturdier, but still!

Releasing it as a consumer-only device feels like a huge missed opportunity because it would work so, so much better otherwise, and it's kind of funny because its legacy - rather than being recognised for putting the sum of all human knowledge into more hands than ever before - is one of being utterly forgotten or simply laughed at 10 years later. It's a shame, and yeah. It's huge missed potential.

Hear me out here: I think it'd be cool to see someone eventually release a modern take on a cassette player. I'm not talking just "Walkman but again", I'm thinking like a solid number of additions that still keep the classic vibe - add things like a rechargable battery and Bluetooth support and the like, but then also keep basic cassette features like an autostop and stuff. I think it'd be really cool (even though it probably already exists and utterly flopped.)

Come to think of it, there's probably a reasonable argument that physical music releases are technically now considered a form of merchandise. I mean, whilst I suppose you could argue something like a CD still has a "practical use" as a form of media storage, I feel that releases on things like cassettes or maybe even vinyl are by nature less intended to be "a method of listening to it" and more "a collectable item" in a sense.

Aside from that, I love that the concept of "new thing on old format" still exists, whether it be in the form of music or other things like modern physical releases on older consoles. It's awesome!

Not gonna lie, 90s-era Sony are so interesting to properly delve into - because for every "design for design's sake" product they have that has absolutely no target audience and would never sell, there's an oddly forward-thinking and really interesting concept to match it.



Pictured are Sony's "Digital Block" concepts, which is basically a modular "gadget" with a number of different things you can freely add to it. I find this particularly interesting because the idea of a modular mobile phone is something that's still kinda being kicked around even today, whilst this specifically has been at least conceptualised since the mid-90s! Sony's design documents suggest that, amongst other things, their central concepts were:

• A "Battery" module, which would exist on everything and would act as the central source of power
• A "Radio" module, which allows you to access FM/AM band radio
• Something referred to as an "MD Recorder" (probably Minidisc?), which apparently basically turns your device into a Walkman
• A "Speaker" module, which allows you to use an actual built-in speaker as opposed to headphones
• A combined "CCD & CCU" module, which is basically a digital camera of sorts (that would apparently use the MD Recorder's screen as a display?)
• A "CD Player" module, albeit one of those really dangerous-looking open-faced CD players

I feel like something like this, even now, could have a lot of potential. From what I can tell, it seems like this never actually released - which is kind of a shame if I'm honest, it'd be really cool to get a hold of it. I'd love to imagine people even now homebrewing some interesting module concepts such as a microphone/dictaphone, some kind of touchscreen integration, a "storage" module for SD cards and so forth - though, I imagine this would never really have caught on due to how weird it is (especially with how long a single unit can become if you stack together a number of devices for the sake of getting as much use as possible, very "Tower of Powery".) This lowkey seems like it'd be so much fun to just screw around with, and I think it'd have been awesome to look at had it ever come to market.

Not really sure why I've latched onto this so much