New and Old #256
Video games and memories, third places and remote offices, new cassette players, and discontinued Blu-ray players
An Internet of Checkpoints, Longreads, Bijan Stephen, February 26, 2026
For seemingly no reason at all, thousands of people were telling stories about themselves, unguarded even against the background toxicity of internet comment sections. Many of them used the word “checkpoint.” In video games, a checkpoint is a safe space: a place to save your game, where the danger can’t reach you. It’s a place to breathe, in other words. A relief; a respite. They’re also places to marshal your bravery, because they’re not the end of the game. That comes later, after more struggle. One of the better ways to get through something difficult—whether a video game or the general unpredictability of life—is to feel connected with other people, like you’re not alone. I saw it again and again.
Years ago I wrote about video games as art, and one of the reasons I thought they could be considered true art and not mere entertainment was exactly this: that they capture, distill, store, real feelings and memories. In fact, one of the examples I gave was this exact soundtrack, which is such a striking melody for a very good but typical 16-bit 2D mascot platformer game. It’s one of those pieces of music you swear you’ve heard, that sounds as if it’s always existed. That slightly spooky feeling of deja vu over a distant memory that, probably, doesn’t exist.
After the channel got popular and then taken down over copyright issues, this happened:
Then a funny thing happened. The channel came back online—sort of. Back in 2021, as the takedowns were heating up, a person named Rebane posted on the Taia777 subreddit. “Hey,” she began, “I’m an internet archivist and I archived the taia777 channel and also the comments on it. Now that Nintendo has struck down many of the videos, I’m going to share my archives.” What she shared was a fully functioning dump of all 29 videos and every comment—up until April 7, 2021, when she’d grabbed the data.
Beautiful little story.
Is The Third Place Dead?, The Future of Where, Bill Fulton, February 23, 2026
If you hang around Bend enough, you will wind up spending a lot of time in breweries with tech workers who work remotely. Some of them are drinking beer. Some of them are working. And some of them are doing both.
In theory, these folks are today’s “Third Place” leading edge. They spent all or most of their time in Third Places like coffee shops and brew pubs. But the more I think about it, the more I think that they’re not reinforcing the whole idea of the Third Place. They’re tearing it down. And I am not sure if that’s a good thing for cities and other communities.
And:
Increasingly, we live in a “place mashup”. The First Place (home) has, for many, become The Second Place (work) – thus combining the two stress-filled environments that Third Places are supposed to provide refuge from. Increasingly, as I noted above, Third Places have become the location for Second Place activities – turning a stress-relief location into a stress-inducing location. Many Second Places have taken on aspects of a Third Place – free coffee, ping-pong tables, happy hours – but of course in the end they’re places where you’re supposed to work. And if you’re an artisan, you may well be turning your Second Place into your First Place by living in your workshop.
Look, I like working in a coffee shop, but it’s true that this was workable when it was maybe 10 or 20 percent of all customers, but in some places it’s now much more than that. A few people can use that hack of a $4 coffee as a day pass for a remote office. Not everybody can.
My first thought is there simply aren’t enough pleasant places to sit. Such places fill up, so that indicates very high demand. But it might not be profitable to anybody to make that space, so the demand ends up changing the places that do exist subtly. It’s a bit like housing demand and neighborhoods: many neighborhoods end up completely different precisely because their outward form remains the same. Also, society isn’t really designed for mass remote work, when you think about it. There is a reason that offices exist, so that work can only be focused on, but contained.
It happens that one of my old articles—one of my favorites, actually—is linked in this piece, about the last cassette-player design still made, a relatively low-quality design that means every cassette player still made has a ceiling on how good it can be compared to the best models during the heyday of the industry.
What if you could have the physical without the headaches of the past? What if you could blend the experience of the 20th century with the abundance and convenience of the 21st century?
That’s where We Are Rewind sits just now. This French startup is “bringing back the walkman” by manufacturing and selling 21st-century portable cassette players and boomboxes. I sat down with founder Romain Boudruche to find out how his small project became the tip of the spear to disrupt a market many believe had already died.
And part of the blame lies with Marvel’s Kevin Feige.
One of the interesting storylines here is the split between media formats and media players. It’s easy enough to still make cassette tapes, though the ones available are also not as good as the good ones back in the day, and some relearning did have to happen. But it’s much easier to make the format than it is to make the player. So you’ve had a resurgence in the popularity of the tapes, but it’s too difficult and expensive to make a top-of-the-line player or deck.
Making a retro device is easy; making a good retro device is harder. The mechanical components for high-quality playback - the mechanisms, heads, motors, capstans, pinch rollers - are relics of the past. What is available today, some 22 years after Sony’s last model reached the US market, is often cheap, generic, and based around a single available design. As Addison Del Mastro discovered, “Virtually any cassette-playing machine being made today uses one of these.”
Wrapping a good-looking case around a poor engine was not an option for We Are Rewind.
The improvement they’ve made is the flywheel, which was upgraded to metal from the typical plastic, and produces a better wow and flutter number. But the more sensitive stuff—really, the tape head—is what it is, as far as I can tell. Their advantage is basically doing the best possible customization of a cheap stock design, along with marketing:
This focus on cultural cachet has led to some ambitious collaborations, including a special edition of Duran Duran’s “Pop Trash” that comes with the cassette and the player, an Elvis-branded cassette and player, and an unreleased special edition of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side Of The Moon” coming this May.
Does Boudruche have an ultimate collaboration he’d love to see? “I had this crazy idea for a totally white cassette player with a special box, and a special edition of The Beatles’ “White Album”.”
The fact is, these are probably as good as, or better than, a lot of the junky cassette players that were available back when they were still widely made. And nobody is really buying cassettes for the sound quality. So not bad at all.
Another media format versus media player story! I was just reading about how young people are embracing physical media again, but here we see another company discontinue Blu-ray drives. These are for computers, but companies have also been discontinuing Blu-ray players for television setups. I think disc-reading assemblies/lasers are probably easier than cassette mechanisms, and someone is still going to be making them, but it’s strange seeing real demand for physical media while the ability to just go buy a decent, new player for the stuff is drying up.
I remember when electronics stores or departments had, like, actual electronics. All sorts of visually and functionally distinct devices. There’s barely anything except TVs, soundbars, and random accessories in those departments these days. It’s a bit of a shame.
Related Reading:
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I was in Best Buy last weekend because I wanted to actually see the size of something in front of me before I bought it, and the store just seemed so empty. One corner of laptops with several empty shelves. One wall of TVs. A section for cell phones. Even the video game section was mostly racks of gift cards for games that you could then download, rather than actual game disks. I spent way too much time and money in Best Buy as a teenager. I'd stop in on Friday afternoons after my summer job to flip through the CD racks. I bought everything I needed to replace the stock stereo and speakers in my clunker Oldsmobile, a job I enjoyed spending a weekend on when removing the dashboard proved a larger than expected process. I don't know if it's even possible to replace the stereo in a modern car with all the touchscreen dashboards and such. It's probably extremely American to miss a big box store for what it once was, but it was pretty sad walking through there.
I am intrigued about Third Places but far behind on my homework. My initial thoughts about Oldenburg based on a reading of the introduction is that he imagines all Third Places as public places and that could be an internal problem or a problem for urbanists. In addition to needing to read the book, I need to read sociologists on "social trust."
Fulton raises some interesting questions here.