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Old Junk Is Old Junk - Photonamus - 08-03-2026
Old Junk Is Old Junk
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I never used an 8mm projector. Never threaded Super 8 film. Never operated a single piece of equipment from that era. I saw an 8-track cartridge once in my grandparents' basement. It didn't work. I never heard the output of one, never saw the equipment function, and never had any desire to explore it. A few more turned up at yard sales and thrift shops over the years. That's the extent of my relationship with an entire generation of media technology.
And I'm the tech guy.
I've spent decades elbow-deep in hardware and software. Built PCs since the early 2000s. Worked in a computer shop for roughly a decade. I live in systems, I think in systems, and I have genuine love for the craft of making things work. But I have zero romantic attachment to old technology that has been fully and completely surpassed.
Old junk is old junk. It was good once. It isn't anymore.
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The Line That Actually Matters
There is a meaningful difference between "this technology produces a result we cannot replicate with modern components" and "I enjoy doing things the hard way because it makes me feel something."
CRT monitors are a legitimate example of the first category. Zero input lag, true blacks, motion handling that even high-end modern panels don't perfectly match. The scan lines, the phosphor glow, the slight curve of the glass — those weren't flaws, they were characteristics that certain applications were designed around. A Donkey Kong arcade cabinet with an LCD panel inside it is a cosplay of itself. The original game was built for that display. Preserving it is preservation, not regression.
Tube amplifiers fall in the same camp. Something about the way a tube saturates is different from a transistor or MOSFET-based amp. That difference is measurable, reproducible, and valued by people who aren't performing nostalgia — they're chasing a specification that modern solid-state designs genuinely do not replicate. The tube amp comeback happened for engineering reasons, not sentimental ones.
These are cases where old technology still does something modern technology doesn't. That's not looking backward. That's asking a real question: how do we still do this today?
Everything else is costume.
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The Cult of Vinyl
Records are the clearest case study in technology worship divorced from function. Every format around them evolved, arrived, served its purpose, and either advanced or died. 8-track came and went. Cassettes came and went. MiniDisc came and went. CDs dominated and then gave way to streaming. Through all of it, vinyl just sat there, refusing to die, wrapped in a devotional community that treats the format like a sacrament.
Nobody was tossing CDs to go back to 8-track. But records never needed a comeback because they never fully lost their cult. Even at the peak of the CD era there were shops, collectors, and evangelists keeping the faith.
Which tells you it was never about the audio.
The "vinyl sounds warmer" argument is mostly people hearing harmonic distortion and calling it superior. It's a coloration, not fidelity. I owned a turntable. I owned records. They wore out in what felt like five minutes. The equipment was fragile, the media was fragile, and proper care only delayed the inevitable. It was an awful experience mechanically. But the cult doesn't care about mechanics — they care about ritual. The cleaning. The needle drop. The jacket art at full size. The act of physically handling your music. That's communion.
Jack White built his own pressing plant. It's booked out two years. He challenged other companies to meet the demand. That is how deep this goes. And the downstream effect is real — pressing plants backed up for years means new artists can't get their work manufactured on the format the market now demands again. The nostalgia economy creates drag on the system. One person buying a record is harmless. A movement buying millions of them bends supply chains around an identity performance.
Because that's what it is. Once "I'm a vinyl person" becomes part of someone's self-concept, you can't argue them out of it with specs or convenience or logic. You're not debating a format at that point. You're threatening an identity. The shared inconvenience is what proves membership. Nobody bonds over how easy Spotify is. But flipping through bins at a record shop on Saturday morning with fellow believers? That's the whole point.
And every single one of them found their favorite obscure pressing because of the internet. They're using modern amps, modern speakers, modern wiring. The entire aesthetic of going backward is subsidized by everything that went forward. The identity doesn't require consistency. It just requires the vinyl.
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The Pixel Art Problem
This same pattern infects game development, and it might be even more damaging there because it wastes talent.
Pixel art became a shorthand — a costume developers wear hoping you'll project your childhood onto their game. But projection requires a source. I have Chrono Trigger burned into my nervous system. Sonic, Mario, Link — those are emotional anchors built over years of actual experience. Some new platformer starring a little character I've never met, wearing pixel art like a Halloween costume, doesn't get to borrow that feeling. It didn't earn it.
Here's the part that kills the argument entirely: I have actual proven classics sitting unplayed on my drive right now. Games that history has filtered and confirmed as great. Earthbound, for example — I know it's good. Everyone says it's good. I believe them. And I still can't make myself play it because its time has passed for me. I moved on.
So if I won't go back for games we know were excellent, what makes any developer think I want a brand new game that looks exactly like the ones I'm already skipping?
The backlog doesn't lie. The aesthetic isn't what's stopping people from playing old games, and slapping that same aesthetic on new games doesn't solve the problem. It adds to the pile.
Shovel Knight is the exception that proves the rule, and it proves it perfectly. Nobody played Shovel Knight and said "wow, the NES palette accuracy is incredible." They played it because Yacht Club Games built a world with immediate personality, a character with presence, tight mechanics, and a tone that was both familiar and entirely its own. The pixel art was a design constraint, not a nostalgia play. The team chose to work within old rules to limit scope, and those limits forced better decisions.
Creation is a process of elimination, not addition. You slice away almost everything and leave only the elements that were specifically chosen. Then you use those to the limits of your ability. Yacht Club did that. Most pixel art games do the opposite — they start with addition, piling on aesthetic and vibe and borrowed identity, hoping the constraints create meaning retroactively.
The industry looked at Shovel Knight's success and learned exactly the wrong lesson. They saw the frame and started mass-producing frames with nothing inside them.
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The Real Cost
My actual problem with all of this isn't that people have weird hobbies. One guy on YouTube living like it's 1887 is an eccentric with a passion project. He's documenting something nobody else is documenting. That's harmless and arguably valuable.
But when eccentricity scales into a movement, the math changes. Pressing plants booked for years. CRT prices inflated on monitors that were literally being thrown away five years ago. The indie game market flooded with pixel-art titles that make it harder for genuinely good ones to surface. The collective weight of nostalgia culture creates drag on the entire ecosystem.
I don't want to hook up a beige box PC. I don't want to go back to any piece of technology I've moved past. We dreamed of the screens we have now. We dreamed of the storage, the speed, the access. And some portion of the market wants to drag the rest of us backward because letting go threatens their identity.
I'm not misunderstanding these people. I see exactly what they're doing and why. I just don't like it. And understanding it better isn't going to change that, because my objection was never based on confusion. It's based on values.
I value forward motion. I find drag offensive. Old tools are fine when they're the right tool. Old tools as identity are dead weight.
And someone needed to say it.
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