James left a comment on a YouTube video pointing out that a hyped “new” HTML feature was just jQuery’s load event, which has existed for roughly two decades. The creator deleted his comment. This was the inciting incident for an entire episode about why old things keep becoming cool again — and whether nostalgia has anything to do with it.
Vinyl, Taylor Swift, and the Decorative Plastic Situation
Tim buys vinyl. Listens to it, plays it on an actual record player, the whole thing. James’s wife also buys vinyl. They do not own a record player. Some of the records are hanging on the wall. They are, at this point, art.
This is apparently not unusual — there are two distinct vinyl buyers in the market right now: the listeners and the collectors. Vinyl is outselling CDs, which sounds impressive until you realize CDs have been in a consistent death spiral since streaming arrived. The more relevant fact is that vinyl is genuinely growing, and a meaningful chunk of that is Taylor Swift, who still releases albums — with intention, sequencing, and the full cover-to-cover experience — rather than just dropping singles into the algorithmic void.
Tim’s point: vinyl forces the album format. You can’t casually skip to the good part. You have to stand up to change sides. You’re going to hear every song, including the ones that take a couple listens to click, because there is no other option. Spotify technically doesn’t stop you from doing the same thing, but you do hit shuffle. You know you do.
Everything Old is New Again (Except DVDs, Which Are Just Dead)
The retro revival inventory, circa now: vinyl up, physical books rebounding, film cameras and Polaroids making a comeback, retro game consoles selling well enough to drive an actual market for CRT televisions. That last one deserves a moment — game developers in the early console era literally designed around the way CRTs blurred pixels, so plugging an N64 into a modern 4K screen doesn’t just look different, it looks worse. The blurriness wasn’t a flaw. It was load-bearing.
DVDs and Blu-rays, however, are down 30% a year with no bounce. Tim’s theory: the experience isn’t different enough. Whether your TV is pulling from a disc or a Roku, it still looks the same from the couch. Vinyl sounds different. A physical book feels different. A DVD is just a slower, more inconvenient version of streaming. The format doesn’t add anything.
The exception — and this one’s quietly alarming — is the copyright jail problem. The Drew Carey Show can’t stream because the music rights for all the songs they used are either expired, unresolvable, or owned by defunct companies. She-Ra’s later seasons might simply cease to exist if Netflix loses the rights without releasing a physical version first. You could own a Blu-ray. You cannot own a streaming license. James has a physical copy of Willow, which was, for a while, genuinely hard to find. He’s not wrong.
The Tech Pendulum (James Got His Comment Deleted For This)
Server-side rendering is back. HTMX is having a moment. Astro.js is picking up speed. Next.js is making server rendering the default. A generation of developers who learned on React is now discovering that you can just have the server send HTML, and treating it like a revelation — which it was, the first time, in approximately 1996.
James sees this all the time in Reddit threads: developers who grew up on microservices posting “hey, did you guys know you could just have one big app? it’s easier.” Yes. That’s a monolith. That’s what we started with. Microservices are what you reach for when the monolith gets too complicated. The pendulum swings, and each new generation finds the swing exciting.
Tim’s reframe: vinyl players are also technology. Just because it’s analog doesn’t mean it’s not tech. James has a smart microwave he can turn on from another room via an app. He also has a record player. These things coexist. The irony was noted and not resolved.
The Tangent About T-Shirt Cannons (It Was Relevant at the Time)
James looked up a t-shirt cannon once. The $1,500 version shoots 1,500 feet. Tim immediately clocked that 1,500 yards would be artillery — “that’s not a t-shirt cannon, that’s a t-shirt howitzer” — and James confirmed it was feet, not yards. The $400 version only goes 300 yards, which the product description suggested was “great for picnics,” a claim neither Tim nor James was prepared to accept.
Tim has shot a t-shirt cannon exactly once, at a conference, after winning the opportunity from a raffle. He dipped it too low. The MC sprinted across the stage and physically shoved the barrel upward before he fired. He didn’t understand what was happening until the trigger was already pulled.
This is all in the episode. It connects to the retro gaming conversation in ways that made sense in the room.
Would You Rather: Retro Edition
Round 1: Listen only to vinyl — OR have all the digital music you want, downloaded Napster-style on a 28K modem?
Both chose vinyl, immediately, no hesitation. James spent a moment reminiscing about downloading a full album over the course of an entire day, only to discover you’d downloaded a virus. “Britney Spears dot exe.” Tim pointed out that at 28K, you could download it once and store it forever, technically making the digital option viable. James found this loophole. Tim called him out. The premise survived.
Round 2: Physical photos on film — OR digital photos, but you pay per photo?
The per-photo rate in the question was one penny per photo, per year. Tim pointed out this means you’d have to hold a photo for a hundred years before it cost as much as a dollar of film. James said it didn’t matter — it was the principle of a subscription fee that he objected to. The ROI was acknowledged to be irrational. The principle stood. Both chose film.
Worth noting: James has made a family photo calendar every year for 25 years. In the early years, getting photos was the problem. In the cell phone era, the problem became that everyone handed over thousands of pictures and he had to excavate the good ones from 14 photos of the same bug. Now, he says, people barely have photos at all — and when his niece flipped through one of the old calendars, she went through it four times. The intentional photograph has become rare enough to feel special again.
Round 3: A Roomba that behaves like a Tamagotchi — OR a Tamagotchi that behaves like a Roomba?
Tim declined both options and proposed Option C: a t-shirt cannon that acts like a Tamagotchi, randomly shooting t-shirts at you if you neglect it. This was considered an improvement on the original question.
James revealed that iRobot used to sell hackable Roombas — developer units where the vacuum functionality was reduced but the platform was open to modification. Tim pointed out people attached knives to them. The episode ended with Tim threatening to man-in-the-middle James’s Nest thermostat, and James warning listeners that if the next episode is remote and he’s visibly sweating, Tim is responsible.
The Takeaway
The things making a comeback aren’t necessarily better than their digital replacements — they’re just different in a way that matters. Vinyl isn’t higher quality. Film isn’t more convenient. Local multiplayer in a basement with four controllers and a bag of Cheetos doesn’t scale. But the experience is distinct in a way that streaming, cloud storage, and online matchmaking aren’t. When you can have everything instantly and infinitely, the things with friction start to feel like features.
DVDs are still dead, though.
James’s wife’s vinyl remains on the wall. The record player remains hypothetical.