I accidentally procured the extremely unfortunate hobby of collecting and restoring old technology, I'll probably write more extensively about this in another article, but that's not related to the point. Despite this hobby, some of my favorite pieces of technology are the arguably worthless pieces of low-quality black plastic that came out from the late 80s to the late 90s, that I've done aproximately zero work on.

These things have absolutely zero reason to still work, they were made using extremely primitive computerized systems, that honestly had no place being in them, yet, for some reason, they seem impossible to kill.

Take this TV, it's a 13" RCA CRT that probably costed about 50 bucks new. It has no connections on it other than RF, and has remarkebly below average (but not bad!) video quality. It's been sitting to my right on my desk, playing random anime, everyday, for at least five hours, for five years now, and god knows what it went through before I got it.

This is insignificant enough that I didn't even bother moving it from it's eternal resting place to take a photo of it, I feel it's extremely important that I capture this device with it's natural lighting, and natural positioning. I legitimately have no idea why this thing still works, but I'll be sad when it stops working. The black magic that keeps this thing alive, along with many other devices that had the misfortune of being created in the "shitty black plastic" era of technological design is exactly why I love them so much.

Now, I do feel it's my duty to reflect that, despite the title of this article, some of these "crappy" pieces of old tech are held in high regard. Take this attached photo (ignore the cassette deck on top, that is actual crap but i love it dearly)

Picutred above (but below the cassette deck, once again, it still sucks, once again, I still use it daily and love it) is the Luxman R-115, something, which to the layman, is a prime example of black plastic crap. Despite it's appearence, however, it's generally regarded as one of the best amplifiers of the late 80s. I'm listening to it as I write this article, and it's powered the speakers I use with my computer for years now, and I strongly agree with this statement. It doesn't look nearly as good as the silver faced equipment I use in my main HiFi stack, but man, it sounds good.

Despite the inherently satirical nature of the title of this article, I feel it's my duty to "enlighten" the masses that despite the awful appearence of technology from this era, it really holds up, and sometimes, it's even good. I have a lot more tech from this era that I use often, but this article would be pointlessly long if I covered them. Basically, TLDR, ugly old tech cool, ugly old tech good.