@eniko @troublewithwords K so if you came here for a bloodshot-eyed retro gamer weirdo rant about how flat panel TVs give you respiratory disease, welcome

Here's your first disappointment: it's not that, it's more like "Having incredibly high voltages in your house makes your air cleaner and your surfaces filthier, and CRT TVs were the last thing in a typical house that used incredibly high voltages"

Your second disappointment is me, hi, I'm not a scientist or a doctor or an epidemiologist, I'm a pinball machine repairman, treat my theories as though they come from a pinball machine repairman thx

So back in my early PAPA days everything was filthy because they'd gone a long time with only one tech and 500 games (note, the tech was brilliant but he was One Tech for 500 games and the maths just doesn't work out) and despite buying Gojo by the gallon I still kept getting Spiderman Fingers and I was tired of it, so I decided right, any time I'm fixing a game I'm giving it a damn good clean as well, after a few years we'll have no more Go Web Go situations, and after a while I started working on the vids as well, and I brought my Clean All The Things mentality with me, to the point where I'd bother actually wiping down the back of the tubes. If we did a tube swap I'd straight-up Wash The Tube first.

(lol there was one guy on the arcade forums who didn't just wash the tube but Scrubbed it, hard enough that he literally scrubbed off the dag and had to redo it. Dag is short for aquadag, a conductive paint applied to the back of the tube so it can get continuity with the springy braid that's part of ground, also dag looks like dirt if you've not played with tubes very much)

Anyway as you might know some parts of CRTs use really scary high voltage, tens of thousands of volts and the bigger the tube the higher the voltage. And if you've ever looked at the back of a pinball board that drives plasma displays (a few hundred volts) and noticed that the high voltage traces are dirtier than the ones for 5v logic, you know that high voltages attract the crap floating in the air. Literally stick an extra electron on whatever particle happens to be floating past, and it becomes electrically "sticky" and gets attracted to the nearest surface

Anyway if you take a sparkling clean tube and run it for a while, and then touch it, the tip of your finger comes away JET BLACK. Like, vantablack filth. And you go "Holy shit that got dirty SUPER fast, also all that stuff used to be in the air and my lungs, wtf" and you might get curious and find some asthma society's website (can't find it right now on my phone sorry) and look at the Concerning Graph and note the Sudden Acceleration around the mid-2000's and go "Yeah that tracks." If I were an actual science-doer I'd try to cross reference with income so I could see if the rich kids with new tellies had respiratory problems sooner than everyone else, but I'm a pinball machine repairman

If you've ever had one of those electrostatic air filters you know this, you plug it in and a little light comes on and it doesn't look like it's doing anything but every week or two you pull out the collection plates that used to be shiny stainless steel and wipe off a layer of sticky black gunge

Anyway back when I was a lad you could buy the old shitty versions of those, you plugged it in and left it on a table and the table got really filthy compared to the rest of the room, all it was was some exposed prongs in recessed holes with like 10kv on them and a sticker saying "Don't stick your fingers in the holes." IIRC these are still used in some NHS hospitals.

So yeah in summary new tellies give you wheezy lungs, I am a scientist

EDIT: if you came here from a boost check upthread, this is a reply to better posts by @eniko who you should also follow