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...
Omg no one's even talking about the smell of the screen
This is both horrifying to read and nostalgic
I liked to turn the back of my hand to the screen, right after it was turned off, and pet the static with the little hairs on the backs of my fingers. It felt soft and fluffy.
one of the reasons CRTs are such a hotbed of glitch videography is that unlike modern monitors that block irregular signals, CRTs don't have an opinion about the signal you feed into them. they will display anything. and if you've ever done glitch work with a video modulator or such, you know what it's like negotiating with a living beast. the images you can get are often unpredictable and impossible to reproduce even with the same settings on your hardware, because it's just electricity. there is something magical and strange about the cathode ray tube and when you play with them enough you really remember why The Ring fucked people up so bad. samara climbing out of an HD flat screen is a laughable image; but her climbing out of an old school boob tube? yeah man, i believe it. there's fucking demons in that thing
