We have reached an era where JPEG artifacts are used as an ornament - like artifacts from film photography, vinyls and more.

Perhaps spotting that in a demastering project is bending the rules a bit, but still - I like how it indicates that our tastes and internet speeds have changed.

I noticed this too. I love this kind of thing so much. I wish more people had the time, money and patience for polish like this.

I did not see it at first. Once I did, I was entranced just scrolling about to see it again.

The whole site is polished to a high degree. Lqbor of love, just like all the quirky items rhey have to loved just as much.

Nice, I was wondering if they were actually making use of progressive JPEG or just switching between images.

[dead]

> this toothbrush plays Green Day’s “Pulling Teeth” while you brush. Finally, you can put Dookie in your mouth (not recommended).

The mere mention by the title had the classic phrase "Do you have the time..." blaring in my head as if it were thirty years ago, even if the last time I listened to that was at least a decade a ago. The nostalgia, right in the feels.

American Idiot also had it's 20th anniversary, I ordered the CD/bluray box set that comes out later this month.

When “Out Come The Wolves” by Rancid hit 20 years I was starting to feel my age.

we definitely gonna rediscover what de-mastering means, when AI finally gets to master everything instead of us. can't wait for a wave of punk-pixel-human-in-the-wrong-loop-nostalgy much stronger than vaporwave.

Absolutely incredible product. I don't have the $99 to splurge on this but it was very enticing :)

>eight-channel recording of “Chump” including synchronized eye and snout movements

Am I understanding this correctly to mean that some of the audio channels on a Teddy Ruxpin cassette are silent tracks that control the motors in the toy? That's kind of interesting. I wonder if there are any other examples of a custom Ruxpin track being made . . .

Edit: comment directly below this one addresses this.

unbelievable tbh this had to have been an insane amount of work

Yeah, the teddy bear singing "I don't know you, but I think I hate you / You're the reason for my misery" and the bass singing "I am one of those melodramatic fools, neurotic to the bone no doubt about it" are my favorites. "Longview" would have sounded... interesting too coming from the bear, but I guess they chickened out there and picked a device that couldn't reproduce the lyrics :)

> Back when I thought it might be a fun side hustle to make cool youtube videos (long ago put to bed), I thought about making videos of Ruxpin singing death metal and stuff. It's been years since it seemed like it was worthwhile to make Youtube videos...

But should it? There used to be a time when people put this stuff on the internet for fun, not as a side huste or to "monetize" it... Maybe there's not so much money in this idea, but you can make people laugh for a few seconds.

not 'beeps' so much as either Pulse-position modulation or FM to control the positions. I had a 'beta test' teddy before they were released, a friend of my father was a sculptor at WoW. I guess little me didn't want to give it back but had to, my Mom had to fight hard to find one at Christmas with a little inside info on delivery dates. You can still make cool stuff for your own sake, you don't have to monetize every hobby.

Had a bit of a look in a few places about the protocol, am I right in understanding the only way to do it with actual cassettes would be to find an 8 channel cassette recorder?

Here's what I was reading http://www.illiop.org/workings.html

[edited to say 8 channel to avoid confusion with 8 track]

I love that... 13 years on that Callin' Oates is still alive.

"The hotline dates back to December 2011 and was created by Michael Selvidge and Reid Butler. Selvidge, who at the time worked for Twilio, told The Verge that he was required to build an app for the company and “Callin' Oates” was the result"

This was my first thought when checking out their website and other projects. Just more digital than physical.

https://brain.wtf

It's very catchy, but not super-impressive musically IMO, however it had a huge impact on the scene and entire ecosystem at the time. Many other bands piggy-backed off their success, which I'm not sure happens as much in today's mega-single model. The band has gotten continually better while still staying relevant as well, which is really cool.

It is both.

The story of Lookout Records being basically kept afloat by selling Kerplunk their first album after they left and blew up is also tragic/hilarious

I personally prefer Insomniac. I used the opening riffs from Brain Stew as a ringtone during my on-call days, which ruined the track for a long time for me.

FWIW, when it came out I couldn't be bothered to listen to Green Day. 20 years later they became one of the favorites.

I mean, when I first tried to open the website it just wouldn't load on my iPhone, so I tried on the laptop. It took ~10 seconds to load. I just assumed the bitcrushing was more issues with bandwidth and badly compressed images rather than a design choice. But your comment made me sit through everything to see if i could really get it. I guess I can recognize the work that went into this and the concept behind it... having said that, I am definitely not the target audience for this website and am struggling not to write an extremely negative comment about green day and 90s nostalgia

…yes, well, it’s quite common for people to pay others to do things that they could do themselves but would rather just do something else. That is kind of how the world works.

What's missing is the PXL-2000 tape with a video for one of the songs.

this is honestly the most impressive one here. i looked into doing hitclips with a friend and we basically tapped out once i found out how they work under the hood since there's no way they'd be cost effective.

Same! I feel somewhat offended that the version from the site is so lo-fi. MDs had fantastic quality, to my ears indistinguishable from CDs!

Edit: Aha, I see now, this is a mic'd recording of an MD player with a built in speaker.

I remember seeing this album on MiniDisc in a store in Sweden circa 2000. If you do enough Googling you might be able to find a copy.

I actually won one of the 50 floppy copies of "Having a Blast"! If you send me an email at my HN username @gmail.com I'll send you a copy once I get it and rip it.

You could just proxy it through something like myus.com or the like

There's a whole industry based on overpriced, "limited edition" nostalgic merch. Traditionally, "prints" (i.e. posters) for bands, movies, and even individual star trek episodes are huge. If you set the limit right, you're barely limiting sales at all while convincing people what they're buying is somehow more special and worth more money.

Art of the past is cheap and plentiful. Instead of doing multiple runs of an unlimited poster and bothering to keep it in stock, you do one run can call it "limited edition". Then you move on and mine the next anniversary.

This site is unusually slick for such a venture, but Dookie is a bigger deal than most albums, and the prices correspond to that.

What exactly is insane about it? These are all hand created, very limited production items. They all took time to develop and test.

Apologies, a little slow here (probably because I was in high school when this album came out)...what are you actually buying for those listed prices?

Gotta stay relevant somehow!

Speaking of the loudness wars, remember when Californication came out? I thought my copy (on cdrom) had been ripped from a distorted tape. Still one of my favourites though.

128 isnt a thing?

What bit rate does Spotify use for streaming online regular quality?

While I grant you that nobody enjoyed music directly from a Teddy Ruxpin in the 1990s, I think you’re wrong about this. It is nostalgic. And I think you’re missing the point that it’s supposed to be fun - they have player piano rolls and wax tubes for goodness sake.

About the 90s though - people used gameboys. People used PCs. Those devices had tons of music and music culture. Chiptunes, mod music makers and players, the demo scene are all late 80s into early 90s. The very first sound blaster card wasn’t even launched until November 1989; before then it was all pc speakers.

On the streets in the 1990s, people used walkmans, listened to tapes; in cars eight track was nostalgic, people listened to the radio and their tapes a lot. I didn’t have my first portable CD player until 1997 or so.

Smaller creators are also doing it for money, and Green Day and Brain are also doing this out of funny memery.

To be clear, this is a raffle, and there are limited editions of each item. There is no way this is going to make money directly - it’s a fun fan engagement give away, and super creative. If I win one of 100 game boy cartridges, I will pay $39, which is probably close to the unit cost of making them, and will never pay back the software engineering time to create the cartridge. I assume most of the items are like that.

That's $3,000 to $5,000 per million. Or did you mean the Roman M?

They are only offering one Teddy Ruxpin.

3 * 10^-3 * 10^6 == 3 * 10^3 == $3000 per million streams, not $30.

I'm on Firefox with ublock origin and it works just fine.

Either way... the site is a store.. of sorts... for Greenday's "Dookie" album, where the songs are mixed down into various bizarre formats. They said de-mastered, and I was hoping that they were actually releasing the individual tracks. Sad.

Here is a quick 30 second trailer of what's on the site, from Green Day's YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziZ8SLooNx8

FF with ublock here, not seeing any difference between this and Chrome

Surprising take.

Their sound and ethos is undeniably pop punk.

They played Gilman St, a punk mecca in Berkeley. See some of their shows in the 90s and 00s. If you don't think that's punk, I don't know what to tell you.

They didn't do much fast skate punk type stuff like NOFX and No Use did, but punk is a super wide genre anyway; to me, it's about what you are, not how you play (see also: second wave ska a la Reel Big Fish and No Doubt, or country cow-punk, like Hank Williams III)

They leaned harder on the "pop" aspect of pop punk (American Idiot is widely considered one of the first punk operas ever made and is one of the best-selling rock albums ever) and experimented with their sound over the years (check out their stuff from the 2010s) but they never lost their edge, IMO (They dropped Saviors this year; incredible album.)

Regardless, they inspired a zillion punk bands of all kinds. Hell, FOD, one of my favorite pop punk bands from The Netherlands, was inspired by FOD, which is on this record!

Wow, the "is Green Day punk" argument also turned thirty. Probably older, I'm sure someone had it before Dookie.

There are few things more punk that spawning a 30+ year argument about them not being punk enough to be considered punk. They don't conform enough to the standards of the non-conformists?

I haven’t participated in this conversation since Kerplunk was released!

San Francisco punk was always a little different but Green Day was part of the late 80s/early 90s punk scene in the Bay Area. It was all centered around 924 Gilman Street.

It’s kinda punk pop. It has the intensity of punk. It definitely had the mosh pit element to it. I remember it being more intense than the grunge that was popular at the time.

It was on MTV alot. But then again so were Primus and Faith No More. It was a different time.

I was at the attempted free show in Boston in the 90s that ended after just a few songs.

https://youtu.be/O7cJUUZIvNk?si=Yr7ivWCICTC0MTi7

I thought I'd seen the end of the singing bass trophy, but if it has to come back this is a good way.

This is getting downvoted, but I'd never even heard them referred to as punk before. And as a British former punk, I don't understand it either.

Which band do you consider as punk?

Very limited editions, with sone items having just one edition. This won’t make much money.

Looks like a cool art project.

It's a middle finger at the bands that do a cashgrab with reissues at every anniversary. So, the opposite of KISS.