Stimulated Emission

December 29, 2012 9:09 PM

light AMPLIFICATION - Is the color of future of your future neon pink? Is the language Japanese? Are the city's an eternal nighttime of airbrushed martini glasses, glossy red lips and consumer electronics? Do you jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace? Then this is the tumblr for you. [via mefi projects]
posted by Artw (44 comments total)

"Oh my god! I want to live in this tumblr."

---> Near the end of 2012 it was discovered that sendai sleep master could be turned into a squeeing child via this tumblr.
posted by sendai sleep master at 9:16 PM on December 29, 2012 [3 favorites]

Beautiful! Thanks Artw!
posted by deo rei at 9:21 PM on December 29, 2012

Looks like somebody is biting rekall.tumblr.com.
posted by GameDesignerBen at 9:24 PM on December 29, 2012 [10 favorites]

Omni magazine. Flying grids. TurboGrafx 16. Truth.
posted by thecjm at 9:51 PM on December 29, 2012 [3 favorites]

(oops)
posted by growabrain at 9:56 PM on December 29, 2012

I don't know whether to be proud or sad that I can look at an image like this (and SO many others in both the tumblr Artw linked to and the one GameDesignerBen did) and recognize the source before clicking through to see the filenames.
posted by radwolf76 at 10:01 PM on December 29, 2012

griphus you have enough tumblrs already.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:11 PM on December 29, 2012 [1 favorite]

Ah, thanks - I had mislaid my happy place, and I'm glad to see where it wound up.
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:50 PM on December 29, 2012 [1 favorite]

griphus you have enough tumblrs already.

DON'T LISTEN TO HIM BROTHER, WE HAVE TO STAY STRONG
posted by cortex at 10:58 PM on December 29, 2012 [1 favorite]

I don't think lightamplification is that similar to rekall? That is, apart from the ways in which they obviously are similar, rekall is about memory, lightamplification is about sensuality. I like lightamplification a lot.
posted by deo rei at 10:58 PM on December 29, 2012

Woah, Rekall is fantastic.
posted by migurski at 11:19 PM on December 29, 2012

Another one of interest:
galaxyhead.tumblr.com
posted by Artw at 11:31 PM on December 29, 2012 [4 favorites]

I have a headache.

And it was worth it.
posted by Chutzler at 12:22 AM on December 30, 2012

The summer of '82 was three decades ago. Thirty years. Pris' incept date isn't some distant dream. It's Valentine's Day, three years from now.

I want more life, fucker.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 1:19 AM on December 30, 2012 [7 favorites]

this tumblr has a theme song
posted by The Whelk at 1:42 AM on December 30, 2012

Is the color of future of your future neon pink?

No, it's the color of television, tuned to a dead channel, obviously
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:33 AM on December 30, 2012 [5 favorites]

All of these tumblrs might be set in 19A0.
posted by jonbro at 3:25 AM on December 30, 2012 [2 favorites]

I was Dallas recently, not far from the convention center, in the early morning. They seem to like a lot of lights on their buildings in Dallas. Anyway, there was one entirely outlined in green light, and I just stared at it and thought Dallas is the future the 80s promised us. For some reason, that made me sad. Then I got to work.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:42 AM on December 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

the color of television, tuned to a dead channel

Sadly, a whole generation now thinks of this color as a flat primary blue.
posted by sonascope at 4:43 AM on December 30, 2012 [4 favorites]

Sadly, a whole generation now thinks of this color as a flat primary blue.

This joke is already getting old. Kids these days may see "a dead channel" as a blank browser window with a loading icon spinning somewhere on the screen. Then, after 30 seconds, they close the app and do something else in frustration.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:15 AM on December 30, 2012 [2 favorites]

I just re-watched the original "Tron" yesterday. And now this shows up. Something must be in the water.
posted by device55 at 5:34 AM on December 30, 2012

Are the city's an eternal nighttime of airbrushed martini glasses, glossy red lips and consumer electronics?

::twitch::

Cities.

But still a cool post.
posted by Foosnark at 5:41 AM on December 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

That's not water, it's just a representation of your memory of water.

and, in fact, it's a shitty Kahzak pirate of a representation of your memory of water
posted by pompomtom at 5:47 AM on December 30, 2012 [3 favorites]

Actually, I don't think of it as a joke as much as I think it's sad that we felt like we needed a mechanism designed to hide static from us. There was a lot of mental play available in exploring pareidolia in a screen sizzling with uncertainty. There was something in that nothing in a way there just isn't in a field of samey-same pixels.
posted by sonascope at 6:02 AM on December 30, 2012

It's not so much that static is being hidden, it the difference between analog and digital. The analog TV was basically a direct translation of signal to electron beam. Digital TV is heavily encoded and the TV is saying, Dude, there nothing here to decode.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:13 AM on December 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

CheeseDigestsAll: "It's not so much that static is being hidden, it the difference between analog and digital. The analog TV was basically a direct translation of signal to electron beam. Digital TV is heavily encoded and the TV is saying, Dude, there nothing here to decode"

It's worth mentioning that this doesn't necessarily have to be this way. The fact that your TV can tell there's no signal means the encoding is wasteful; if compression was cranked up as high as it could go, any arbitrary binary sequence could be "decoded" into image and sound. There are a number of reasons why you don't want this, especially with sound, but it would be possible.

In fact, digital glitches are often more visually interesting than analog ones, especially in the high-compression motion compensated codecs, where glitches mean you get pieces of image sliding around in weird ways, leaving trails, morphing into other things, etc. Here's an interesting tutorial with some examples.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 7:09 AM on December 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

the color of television, tuned to a dead channel

Have you looked at the sky over the port at Chiba City lately? It IS a featureless blue: Chiba Port Tower / 千葉ポートタワー(ちばぽーとたわー)
posted by moonmilk at 8:11 AM on December 30, 2012 [4 favorites]

The one thing I'm really going to miss about the 80's is the fact that spaceships looked like they were actually used: full of physical switches and static ridden CRT monitors displaying mono line graphs and random 3 letter combinations.

Now everything is going to be shiny 1080p HD displays controlled from your friggin' iPhone.
posted by PenDevil at 8:21 AM on December 30, 2012

It was 1981. and this was the cover of the manual for my first computer. Which I built with a soldering iron on the desk in my bedroom and plugged into an old TV chassis I'd fixed up, that spat ozone and whistled evilly.

We don't have front covers any more. We have minimalist unboxing and grimly upbeat marketing.

I want my future back.
posted by Devonian at 8:45 AM on December 30, 2012 [2 favorites]

Thanks! I'm really feeling this Tumblr, as someone who just discovered the Ware Tetra-whatever-ology via William Gibson's Twitter feed.
posted by montag2k at 9:50 AM on December 30, 2012

Soundtrack.
posted by tracert at 10:04 AM on December 30, 2012 [4 favorites]

TA-lee-Haaaaawk!
posted by Rock Steady at 10:12 AM on December 30, 2012

Another one of interest:
galaxyhead.tumblr.com

Ha! That's my old tumblr. Maybe this will inspire me to update it.
posted by Young Kullervo at 10:21 AM on December 30, 2012 [3 favorites]

That would be hilarious because yours is what got me to make this one.
posted by griphus at 10:28 AM on December 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

Well, then perhaps I'll just let the next generation of Trapper Keeper lovers take over.
posted by Young Kullervo at 10:31 AM on December 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

HP-41c, awwwwwwwwwwww.
posted by humboldt32 at 10:52 AM on December 30, 2012

Soundtrack.
Great, now I have to organize a cyberpunk RPG just so I can play that during the game. Full costume will be strongly encouraged.
posted by agentofselection at 11:00 AM on December 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

The sky was the color of television tuned to an episode of Happy Days.

oh god I hope that's not too cryptic

posted by humboldt32 at 11:07 AM on December 30, 2012 [3 favorites]

Quatro - official thread beverage.
posted by Artw at 11:07 AM on December 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

My HP41C did not come with a spaceship/vibrator. I am disappointed.
posted by GuyZero at 11:23 AM on December 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

This site is splendid!
posted by Greg Nog at 12:45 PM on December 30, 2012

Sigue Sigue Sputnik wrapped it up in one package.
posted by bongo_x at 2:32 PM on December 30, 2012 [5 favorites]

The fact that your TV can tell there's no signal means the encoding is wasteful

It is -- although a lot of work goes into making the encoding as efficent as possible for video quality versus bitrate -- but that's not the reason it can tell that there's no signal. It's not that the TV is trying to decode a channel from static; it's that it can't even find the framing and metadata in the static that would tell it *which* bits of data represent a decodeable channel.

(Although usually it's simpler than that: the tuner reports that it failed to lock and the decoder fails over into loss-of-signal mode.)

I don't know why we ended up with blue as the typical loss-of-signal output. I would guess that it's preferable to black because that could look like a failed display rather than a failed input.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 5:06 PM on December 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

Kind of reminds me of http://robotsarehot.tumblr.com/ [NSFW]
posted by sp160n at 5:08 PM on December 30, 2012 [2 favorites]