Agree. The whole world doesn't need to give up alcohol/peanuts/gluten just because some people are allergic. It should be enough to put to a warning for them so they can safely avoid those things. Similarly, a warning on a version had has potentially problematic strobing seems like enough? I've certainly seen that warning on several things recently.\\

I noticed this issue in Kaiju 8. It was so bad I thought my TV was broke. It was clear the scene was supposed to be brighter and flashy but it was at like 50% brightness. I had incorrectly guessed at first that it was the TV not liking some extra bright scene.

Turns out it was this. It did arguably ruin the scene. An analogy would be if someone walked up to the TV and turned down the volume by 50% for an action scene.

> I don't get it. Why is it bad wanting to see the unsafe version for yourself?

Because, as shown in Japan and called out in TFA, even those without a history of seizures can have them. These can be bad enough, even in those with no history of seizures, to warrant a visit to the ER.

This is a giant liability issue for any company.

If you want the raw version, I'm sure it's out there...

If they just want to see the unedited version, it feels lazy to demand that CrunchyRoll track down and host the episode when (in the time it takes to read the petition) you can just do some Googling and find it. Right now anyone who wants to see it can track it down (and the Streisand Effect will ensure that remains the case) but it isn’t so easy to find that someone would stumble across it by accident. Why change that status quo?

This kind of feels like a troll petition, especially with that weird invocation of “we are paying good money each month for the services they provide”. People often tack that sentence on to something when it’s clear that what they’re asking for isn’t self-evidently necessary.

>I don't get it. Why is it bad wanting to see the unsafe version for yourself?

Half the point of the article is that the seizures frequently occur in people who had no history of seizures, i.e. who were "not epileptic". Thus, saying "I don't care, I'm not epileptic" is pure nonsense.

Reading from the petition:

> This petition may be pointless and may not affect the outcome of this season, but if not that, hopefully it can affect Crunchyrolls future simulcasts from suffering the same fate as Jujutsu Kaisen is right now.

I'm not a CR customer, have they ever offered multiple versions of their synchronized on air series （simulcast)?

I'd assume it would only be a single chosen version, with perhaps an alternative days or months after airing, but from an effort and financial perspective I wouldn't expect it.

At no point does the petition ask for separate versions (it argues the dimmed version make them nauseous), it's a commenter that surfaces the option, so I see TFA's point standing.

I think the allergy analogy people are deploying in these comments is misleading. It’s more like you’re asking for a car without seatbelts because you’ve never been in an accident. These visual patterns are dangerous even for people with no history, according to the article, and the consequences of a seizure can be severe. The author suffered a fractured spine! This is not a reasonable thing to have in the environment; it’s good that we’ve established protections.

> Why is it bad wanting to see the unsafe version for yourself?

No one has said it is bad to want that.

Being free to want that doesn't mean you are entitled to have someone fulfill your desire for you.

I think they correctly judged that the general public wouldn’t care one way or the other, whereas in Japan they knew they would be publicly crucified if they kept it going.

An optimistic take is that the organization was simply too incompetent to identify and assess the financial risk of injuring someone.

Wait what?

And it’s just those two songs?

Is it just difficult to study this with a wide variety of songs because you need to perform the study in an MRI machine while a patient is suffering a seizure? It seems weird that one particular song by Mozart would have this effect but not other classical music with similar arrangements or instruments.

I watched the clip now and even though it’s only one or two seconds it’s wildly uncomfortable and makes me feel weird.

There is a feature called "Dim Flashing Lights" available on iOS, and the algorithm with multiple implementations is on Github : https://github.com/apple/VideoFlashingReduction

That pushes the onus onto the disabled person to avoid places and rooms with TVs that haven't had the setting enabled, repeatedly asking the same questions and revealing their health history to feel safe in public.

I’ve wondered about that too.

My immediate suspicion is liability fear. If you add that feature, even if it helps a tons of people, someone will sure you when it doesn’t help them/their family member.

Similarly, I would love if videos/blurays/streams/etc had a way to adjust volumes separate from each other. So many movies have such loud music and quiet dialog. So I'm constantly adjusting the volume between different scenes.

> while not irritating folks who do not have epilepsy.

From the article:

"However, photosensitivity is not just connected to seizures! Photosensitivity also affects those who are visually impaired, and those who have migraines, amongst other conditions."

...

"And these non-epileptic seizures are exactly what occurred during “Electric Soldier Porygon.” 76% of those who had seizures during the event had never experienced a seizure before, and of those who had, most had never had a seizure provoked by TV before."

The software to do this doesn't exist. We have some software to assess the "epilepsy-safety" of a given piece of media, but it's proprietary and afaik not realtime.

There was a bounty to make an open-source replacement, but I've lost my link. I've still got the WCAG info sheet, though: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/three-flashes-or... if anyone wants to have a go. (I'd suggest making a standalone application, plus something that works with GStreamer.)

This movie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looker

is usually panned but it has a lot of great ideas in it including a light pulse gun that reliably causes absence seizures. Probably my favorite weapon from sci-fi movies although I have a soft spot for the zap gun out of Battlefield Earth which must be like one of those ray guns that Hubbard thought people have been using to implant us with bad ideas for trillions of years.

Just a bit ahead of its time it's like a 1984 movie that came out in 1981.

I knew someone who would get seizures when sleep deprived and was aware during them.

I only saw one once. He was sitting on a couch, clutching a pillow in front of him, and kept shoving his face into the pillow. At the time, I wasn't aware of his seizures, and asked him if he was good. He just said "I'm fine, I'm having a seizure. Just give me a minute and it will pass."

Sure enough, after a minute or two, he stopped, explained the situation, and said he needed to call it a night before it happened again.

There are all kinds of presentations for seizures. Ones in the frontal lobe are particularly hard to catch based on external presentation. If one is suspected of having seizures they will get a continuously monitored EEG where times associated where the seizure like state is monitored electrically. Sometimes it's a really weird presentation of a seizure or sometimes it's psychogenic. Either way it's good to have these people get some help I'd it keeps happening.

That sounds like a focal aware (simple partial) seizure. There are other things that it could be but if you want to search, you could try starting with those keywords.

This is the first time I came across this somewhere else other than this one person I know that has this. Fascinating.

Link for the lazy: https://youtu.be/B4wSFjR9TMQ

I didn't find it that bad, but over time I've found that I think I keep my screen's brightness a little lower than most people, because I don't find light themes to be blinding.

It’s crazy: full frames with a solid blue and red alternating. To me also very unpleasant, but an effect I haven’t seen before.

I had to look it up as well (I had already tried many years ago, but back then it wasn’t on YouTube yet) and I actually like it a lot artistically. There should be a way to safeguard people whom it causes issues for, while still allowing others to enjoy it.

Wow you weren't kidding. I love strobe lights at shows and wouldn't mind staring at one directly but that video made my heart skip a beat!

Very uncomfortable to watch indeed.

I wonder how the animators themselves could stand it.

The history of disability rights, or any rights for that matter, has been more of raising the cost of ignoring them rather than just being "nice". If they were "nice", nothing would have ever changed.

I'm not epilectic but I'm always super annoyed when someone walks their bicycle and the led front light keeps pulsing in bright rapid flashes because of the dynamo

While anything could push you over the edge, it seems like 5 to 20 hz is the bitter spot that will make someone flop around. I don't have tonic-clonics anymore, but the strobes still trigger some seizure activity in me.

To your question, not too bad of an issue unless you're easily triggered. Their speed is kind of off, ime.

I cant speak for epileptics, but I do suffer from photosensitive migraines (which the author briefly mentioned in the article), and in my case failing flashing LED lights are indeed an issue. Luckily for me it is not as instantaneous as a seisure, I feel it building up over many seconds, so in many situations I can just look away or close my eyes and it doesn't turn into a full blown migraine (just a kind of "hangover" in my head).

The NES Classic is somehow able to detect rapidly flashing screens in its built-in games and temporally blur them as an anti-seizure measure. Nintendo certainly learned its lesson from the Pokémon incident.

I was thinking about the same thing, also as an accessibility feature for your phone or software for your PC (I imagine this last one already exists).

I think it is, but the article really is about giving more context around what happened, and how it impacted the industry.

Pikachu isn’t real but the writers are.

Entertainment is becoming more and more "in your face" harmful as technology evolves.

From night-clubs that move high-power lasers around blinding people, concerts with sound-walls that people have to use ear protectors to get close, events with closed-loop air-conditioning that poison (and contaminate, but the trend on that is unclear) people by not taking enough outside air, to whoever invented that safer fireworks can be used close to people. And yeah, the strobo and UV lights.

Governments aren't rushing to fix optional activities, so yeah, expect all of those to get worse.

What do you mean by downvote? Has Reddit become real life? Given what people get away with for art a simple warning at the start is probably all that you need.

Distill that down further and you get iPhone motion sickness protection, where just having dots overlaid on the phone screen that move based on the accelerometer noticeably help reduce nausea (or at least they sure do in my case).

It would've been many more if the episode wasn't pulled though. "cmon" is minimizing the harm caused and dismissing the victims - literally children having seizures and being admitted to hospitals.

Sure, some laws are absurd, and people with lactose intolerance or allergies probably do have enough common sense to avoid butter, but at the same time people need to be protected from harm.

I understand this argument for something like an small indie studio or some YouTube channel, but I'm less likely to accept that as an excuse for a company that can easily afford to hire a11y experts.

> Just today i’ve read that Costco called back all their butter to destroy it because they forgot to print that butter contains milk.

Oh no! What will these multi-billion dollar companies do? Who is there to protect them? I think maybe we should create a foundation of sorts that we can all invest our money in to advocate for the rights of Costco et al. It seems like otherwise the evil government will cause too much damage on them while trying not to kill people due to allergy attacks or medical insensitivities. I can't ever imagine a situation where saving at most one or perhaps two hypothetical human lives being worth the risk of causing a butter recall. Someone should protect shareholder profits no matter the consequences, and especially if the consequences are so minor (just a few possible deaths) compared to thousands of dollars in profits shareholders can make.

>I wish we could find some solution where we distribute the epileptic-safe versions alongside the unsafe ones and users could choose.

They seem to be able to distribute uncensored & censored versions for some of the more risque or violent shows, as well as various levels of censorship for different regions. So, the solution is sort of already there, there's just not enough motivation I guess.

I wonder what people think about that part of the article where the author paints people who want to see the unedited version of the show in a negative light. The author presents “but i am not epileptic” crowd as ableist and insensitive.

I strongly disagree and this kind of take makes me sympathize with the author less than I would otherwise, subconsciously.

I can simultaneously support the idea that we should make adjusted content for people with epilepsy, or in a more general sense - it is a sign of elevated society to strive to accommodate people with disabilities or differences, but at the same time resent the notion that accomplishing the above has to mean that asking for an unaltered experience is “wrong”.

I feel that putting those two demands on the opposite sides of the scale is “wokeism”.

> I wish we could find some solution where we distribute the epileptic-safe versions alongside the unsafe ones and users could choose.

How would the users choose though?

"I want to risk an epileptic fit" vs "I don't want to risk one"? And if you do have a fit due to an underlying condition you didn't know about, and you break your back or suffer some injury (as the author narrates having experienced, though not due to Pokemon), would the broadcaster be legally at risk?

It doesn't seem crazy to me to play it safe here...