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  • The VHS Wizard 🦝📼🧙thevhswizard@retro.pizza
    Sep 19, 2026, 2:12 PM

    There's got to be a proper term for this - probably in German, since they have words for everything - but when I say it, you'll know what I'm talking about.

    Limits, even artificial ones, foster innovation and creativity, and help our brains work... better?

    I have a million examples I can think of.

    Like how people are STILL making brand new Game Boy games, to this day, because the limitations of the hardware hone creative visions into a narrow laser-like focus.

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Replies

  • The VHS Wizard 🦝📼🧙thevhswizard@retro.pizza
    Sep 19, 2026, 2:13 PM

    Or how picking what to watch was easier when there were only 3-4 tv channels, and every "innovation" we've made since - cable, DVR, streaming, etc - has made making choices harder and harder.

    I watched some absolute garbage back in the 3-4 channel days, and some of that garbage became some of my favorite things ever, but I never would have even tried watching it if it hadn't been the best bad choice amongst a field of even worse choices.

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  • The VHS Wizard 🦝📼🧙thevhswizard@retro.pizza
    Sep 19, 2026, 2:16 PM

    When I started getting into anime, the only "anime" that was easy to watch was Sailor Moon, Ronin Warriors, and a couple of anime movies at Blockbuster.

    When I found out that a low power TV station that was 25 miles away from my house was showing an animation block once a week, I built my own duck-tape-and-chicken-wire amplifier antenna so I could watch really, really staticky dubs of Lupin III, Robot Carnival, Crying Freeman, Zillion, and a ton of other things I'd never heard of.

    Now... I have every single anime that I could ever want, and I find it hard to get excited or "want" any of them.

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  • The VHS Wizard 🦝📼🧙thevhswizard@retro.pizza
    Sep 19, 2026, 2:29 PM

    My Steam library has like 800 games in it. I have actually played maybe 20 of them. My excuse used to be that my PC was geared towards video editing and not gaming, and sometimes struggled. But some of these games are now decades old and even the Steam Deck that I somehow wound up owning can play almost all of them.

    The number of unplayed games has not gone down.

    There's just too many games to make a choice. It's not just analysis paralysis, it's like... a "Choice Flashbang" goes off in my face every time I try to make a decision.

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  • Tamazon ⁂tamazon@indieverse.social
    Sep 19, 2026, 2:33 PM

    @thevhswizard Taking away the ability to rent games means having to buy them to give them the 10 minute try to see if I want to play it. And often those 10 minutes is good enough for now, I'll come back to it later.

    And there it goes to the backlog, never to be played again.

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  • The VHS Wizard 🦝📼🧙thevhswizard@retro.pizza
    Sep 19, 2026, 2:38 PM

    @tamazon

    Gods I miss renting games. Nothing like a rainy saturday when your plans are cancelled and you know you have like, 8-10 hours of gaming time max to squeeze as much joy out of this game before you have to return it.

    And the fact that it's on the clock means you don't have to feel guilty about really sticking in and playing the shit out of it, because you're being "economic"

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  • Tamazon ⁂tamazon@indieverse.social
    Sep 19, 2026, 2:40 PM

    @thevhswizard Thank goodness for libraries that have games. I've seen a couple on social media that even set up their media sections like little Hollywood Videos or Blockbusters.

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  • Lisa Makes Stuff (she/her)lisamakesstuff@mastodon.art
    Sep 19, 2026, 2:40 PM

    @thevhswizard I've often said that creativity *requires* limitations: on resources, time, energy, topic... It's actually more difficult to be creative when the world's your oyster.

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