I rewatched Ringu this week and found myself a little underwhelmed by it. The first time I saw it was on a bootleg DVD I got off eBay back in 2000. Sending a money order to a random person across the country is a fitting introduction for the film, but honestly, it wasn’t really a hit for me back then either, aside from the part where—spoiler alert—Sadako crawls out of the tv.

I remember that being genuinely chilling, like it was possible that she could come out of my tv too. But on the rewatch, I felt nothing. Part of that is probably the upgrade in resolution, but I think a lot of it is just that I’m not scared of my tv.

That’s interesting to me because televisions are probably the most dangerous they’ve ever been. I ran a network-level ad blocker for a short period and was truly shocked by how many times the two Roku TVs were calling home. Those things were reaching out to home base like 10,000+ times per week. Who knows what kind of shit they were talking about me?

I don’t like it, but it’s not scary.

I’m surrounded by items that know way too much about me and my finances and I guess I’m just numb to it. Or maybe it’s that there’s one crucial difference between the analog technology of yesteryear and the digital technology of today:

I will beat this TVs ass.

If you were born after 2000 or so, you may not have any memories of a tv you couldn’t take in a fight. The 32 inch Magnavox I watched that bootleg DVD of Ringu on? For most of my ownership of it, it weighed more than me. I could easily see some dingy-ass well broad climbing out of that, no problem. Good luck trying to climb out of this LG OLED, it’s not anchored to shit. I don’t care what the manual recommends.

So yeah, the elaborately sculpted wooden console television we had when I was a kid would be an absolute problem if it were haunted. You need at least two people and possibly a dolly to even shift that damn thing, let alone move it any actual distance. I still remember the feeling of turning it on, how the cathode ray would hum and the air would crackle with electricity. It was essentially a ticking time bomb we tricked into showing us pictures. A ghost gets ahold of that and we just have to move. Ghost haunts my fucking iPad and guess what? You’re haunting the neighbors roof now.

Cameras are different now too. I’m confident that I could win a fight with most of the non-medical imaging devices I’ve seen in my life, so it isn’t a matter of might. But if I took a picture of someone and their face appeared to be contorted in an inhuman manner, I wouldn’t be scared, I’d be pissed. The amount of money I paid for this goddamn phone and it starts doing that shit right when it’s out of the warranty phase? Again, it’s on the neighbor’s roof.

There’s a certain magic to analog technology. Maybe that’s because of the age I was when I was surrounded by it, but there’s a nebulous quality to static or the weird scrambled negative images you’d get when you tried to watch a channel you didn’t have. Analog technology held mysteries, while digital technology holds mostly paywalls. It’s scary in an “Eastern European man got your credit card number and keeps booking flights to Toronto” way, but not in a “ghost is about to crawl out of it” way.

I will, however, offer this brief rebuttal to my own editorial: I once worked with a guy who showed me a printout of a realtor’s listing and said “do you see what I see?”. What I saw was a smeary inkjet printout of a poorly compressed jpeg of someone’s living room. What he saw was the ghostly outline of Osiris, Egyptian Lord of the Underworld, who had somehow harnessed the power of compression artifacts to announce himself. This guy repeatedly emailed the realtor with messages like “I see what you’re trying to do” and “you can’t fool me”, so maybe digital technology can be scary in the right hands.

Things I Like

I’m conflicted by how much I enjoy music streaming services. I don’t have any particular lot for physical media–it’s mostly a means to an end for me–but I grew up on the idea that I had to directly support the artists I enjoyed, because there weren’t a ton of us listening. Now music that required numerous monetary leaps of faith for me to get at the turn of the century is available at the touch of a finger. From a consumer standpoint it’s great, but the only people making money on it are guys who don’t need it. Still, the fact that it’s easier than ever to go through a band’s discography has made my convictions weak, so I recently dug through the career of Japanese metal legends Sigh.

Back in the bulletin board days of the internet, I saw someone describe their Hail, Horror, Hail album as “a cross between black metal and music from a soap opera”.  That sounded like a phenomenal combination to me—and it is—but it took me a few years to actually track it down.

Band leader Mirai Kawashima has an unparalleled ability to make music that sounds disjointed on first listen and makes perfect sense on the third or fourth round. Part of that is the tremendous palette of sounds the band uses and part of it is just good old fashioned song craft. Unfortunately that means their discography is spread over a few different labels with various availability throughout the years, which means there were at least 3 Sigh albums I heard for the first time last week. For the record, I still think Imaginary Sonicscapes is the best, but it’s also the first one I heard back at the turn of the century, so my judgment might be suspect. But check out “Corpsecry – Angelfall” and if it works for you, dive in.

And ironically enough, Hail, Horror, Hail isn’t available on Apple Music and I apparently never ripped the copy I had (I remember the version I had having 99 tracks, but I might have made that up), so I bought it on Bandcamp from what may or may not be an official source. Turns out the old ways aren’t completely dead.