This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.
They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.
And for eighty years, Americans’ favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.
If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.
Servicing them is like disarming a bomb – their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.
A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.
Old school CRT monitors had the same issues.
Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said “Made me feel nauseous”
So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.
No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.
Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up
The little crackle if you touched the screen to wipe it…
omfg I was watching this sound off but then I was like “wait what if they’re making cute lil animal noises” so I turned the sound on and fucking lost it
ive probably said this exact thing before but i just think that like, cannibalism is such a potent metaphor for stuff that it’s frankly wasteful of you not to include it in your writing.
this isn’t a quentin tarantino foot situation. i’m not saying this bc cannibalism turns me on. the reason my characters talk non-stop about wanting to eat each other is bc all the rest of you are not using your state-allotted cannibalism metaphors and they are going to waste.
does your character love/idolize/worship someone? cannibalism as a means of embodying them.
does your character hate someone? cannibalism as a means of desecrating their corpse.
does your character wanna fuck someone, or own them? cannibalism as a means of claiming their body.
does your character have specifically christian religious trauma? cannibalism as a very literal eucharist.
cannibalism as a means of gaining someone’s power. cannibalism as a means of embracing your inhumanity. cannibalism as a gesture of acceptance. funerary cannibalism as a symbol of returning nature. industrialized cannibalism as a symbol of the devaluation of human life. survival cannibalism as the ultimate sacrifice (you get a free jesus metaphor with this one).
literally every story you write that doesn’t have cannibalism in it is a missed opportunity
Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.
parent-child cannibalism as a means of keeping/recovering your child, as a metaphor for parental possessiveness and infantilisation
child-parent cannibalism as a means of flipping the power dynamic and its physicality, as a metaphor for reclaiming the body that gave birth to you
abuser-abused cannibalism as a means of keeping a part of your victim in you in a way they can never undo or recover it, as a metaphor for your damaging impact on them
abused-abuser cannibalism as a means of transcending your abuse, absorbing and drawing strength from your abuser’s body instead, as a metaphor for resilience
cannibalism as a way to mark yourself as above mere humans
cannibalism as a way to mark yourself as below normal humans
cannibalism as a way to mark all humans as equal no matter social status
cannibalism as a way to mark humans and yourselves as uncivilised and no different from savage beasts
cannibalism as a way to mark humans as equals to animals remembering and embracing nature
