> I have seen many fans, in the face of being told the reason for these changes, say that it doesn’t matter because they aren’t personally epileptic. This is, as you might understand, incredibly personally frustrating, and yes, very ableist. In saying this, these fans claim that disabled people do not have a right to feel safe when watching their favorite series, and that their wellbeing doesn’t matter in comparison to a few brighter shots of teenagers using their magic powers to punch each other.
I don't get it. Why is it bad wanting to see the unsafe version for yourself?
> Over 2500 fans signed a change.org petition asking Crunchyroll to take down this edited, safe, version of the series and instead upload an unedited version that was true to the original vision—even if it had the potential to cause seizures.
That's not how I read the petition in question. People are asking to get access to the original that they know exist. I can't find a paragraph that demands deletion of the edited safe version.
>> As fans, we implore Crunchyroll to try to acquire an uncut version of the simulcast as we are paying good money each month for the services they provide.
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.
No one is stopping you from tracking it down and watching it; the request is merely that it not be the version aired on TV, nor the default on streaming media like Crunchyroll. That seems like a pretty reasonable middle ground to me - if you can only host one version, host the safe version. If you want to host multiple versions, feel free to add the unsafe cut as an alternative.
> unless the company has promised its shows to be safe for epileptics
Many jurisdictions have regulations requiring this. It’s also not a tough criteria to fulfill. Most of the things you need to avoid are pretty obvious, and the less obvious things can be caught by automated tools. The blowback for creating or hosting epilepsy-triggering content is pretty intense. It’s not something most companies want to play around with.
I don’t get why people want CrunchyRoll to host this content so bad. It feels like people demanding to be able to set off firecrackers on a wheelchair ramp. Sure it probably won’t hurt anyone most of the time, but why do people want this one specific thing so badly when they can get it somewhere else?
If you host (and charge for access to) content that causes a seizure and don't have warnings & stuff then there's a good argument to be made that your negligence caused any seizures that may arise.
Especially if there's a perfectly good non-seizure causing version right there.
Promising that content won't cause seizures is one thing, knowing that it already has is another.
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.
You can simply "just do some Googling and find it" for literally everything on CrunchyRoll. That's called piracy though, and there are various reasons why people buy a crunchyroll subscription instead of doing that.
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.
It's more like asking for mandatory seatbelts in a world where most people are completely immune to any kind of car crash and will not get so much as a scratch from any kind of collision.
> 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.
> As fans, we implore Crunchyroll to try to acquire an uncut version of the simulcast as we are paying good money each month for the services they provide.
Seems like they want Crunchyroll to offer it, I wasn't able to spot a mention of taking the safe one down; it's an uncharitable or invalid characterization on the part of the author imo
The whole vibe of the petition was dismissive of the issues and only argued for getting the flashing version, so I understand author's view. E.g.
> These things are supposed to help prevent seizures, [...] the ghosting is almost making the visual stimuli worse as people have attested to feeling nauseous and dizzy from the obscene amounts of frame blending.
Emphasis mine.
I don't know how bad the blurring was in motion, but I read the petitioner's argument as "this version is worse in every way for reasons that are only hypothetical". I really don't see much room for a generous interpretation.
> Crunchyroll usually gets an unaltered version for series such as Demon Slayer. But for unknown reasons, most likely due just pure lack of initiative from Crunchyroll's side, Jujutsu Kaisen isn't as lucky.
I'm not sure if it's actually simulcast but they apparently offer the preferred (to the petitioners) version of some shows. I guess that would be simulcast taking all regions into account but not sure within a single region.
>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.
> Unlike with “Electric Soldier Porygon” the movie continued to be shown unedited in American cinemas throughout its entire run. Since the movie failed to pass the Harding Test, an alternative cut had to be shown in the UK, Ireland, and Japan. This meant that for at least two months of its theatrical run, Pixar had a safe cut they could show to English speaking American audiences and yet still chose to have the unsafe version in US cinemas.
Exhibit A - companies will only ever do anything if they are forced to, even if what they are doing is harmful and compliance is relatively easy.
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.
On the other side of the coin: have a kid with epilepsy. After learning about possible effects of K448/Mozart's sonata in D Major, we keep a copy of it on all our phones, and it does seem to relax him when he is having a seizure.
Always thought it was funny that the only other song they had found (up until 2021) with a similar audio signature was from "Yanni Live at the Acropolis"
Also, I found and watched the porygon episode in the last year, and it's certainly pretty intense.
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.
As someone who had a partner with intense seizures for many years, it’s a super helpless feeling to see them suffer in such traumatic fashion and not be able to do anything about it. Having small tasks like playing music seems really unlikely to help but it definitely gives a care taker something to do.
I don't understand why in the current era we don't have videos just post-processed by the media player / TV. That seems like it would increase accessibility while not irritating folks who do not have epilepsy.
I tried to search to see if something like a plugin existed for VLC, and I didn't find anything. Seems like it should be solvable at least if the media can be parsed ahead of time or with some delay for a live feed.
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.
It does somewhat, but its also weird that its not a feature that companies add to things to expand their potential sales base & give people a reason to buy their stuff.
Obviously it should be on all of us to try and minimise the number of seizures we're causing, but it's also on us (as humanity) to make it possible for people to actively avoid or mitigate things that cause seizures.
Someone else on this thread mentioned that Apple have an accessibility feature specifically for this[1][2] which is kind of ideal.
You could just make a requirement that TVs in public places have that feature enabled. If you're watching TV with friends, you're probably already disclosing that information today.
There is a place for unbounded creativity, and I think I'd argue in favor of it, but I can't imagine an easier argument against it: We try to only create websites with sufficiently high contrast for interactive elements, only create public buildings with ADA features, etc. -- even if aesthetics suffer as a result. It's just aesthetics.
To be clear, I'm discussing only that which the public is invited to enjoy. No rules when it's just for you and yours.
Counterpoint: while high contrast requirements can make the designer rethink the aesthetics approach, it also makes text easier to read for everybody. Of course, website authors can get lazy and just crank up the contrast without considering whether it looks good, but that’s just bad design.
On the other hand, the techniques we see applied to anime releases are just that: quick low effort fixes. Of course, this doesn’t mean the show producers are lazy or incompetent: fixing those issues properly would take extreme effort as at least a lot of re-coloring. Still, the result is that now everybody has subpar experience.
I’d say just release both versions and let people decide.
Yes. But when you invite the public to subject themselves to art incompatible with schizophrenia, then is it that much different from inviting the public to a website incompatible with visual impairments or to a brand new store incompatible with wheelchairs? Again I do lean on the side of art in this case, but I also find the argument against it to be pretty solid.
TFA notes that it's not just a "miniscule populace". Electric Porygon affected 10% of the people who watched it, most of whom were not epileptic.
> According to the World Health Organisation, about 10% of people will have a seizure in their lifetime. 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. This event is actually what helped confirm that people without any history of epilepsy can have seizures triggered by flashing lights. It is estimated that of the 7 million viewers, 10% had some sort of physical medical reaction but not all of these needed specific medical attention.
I'd like to see a source for that estimate, because "10% had some sort of physical medical reaction" is quite vague and seems improbably high.
Wikipedia states the episode was viewed by 4.6 million households, of whom 685 (0.001%) were taken to hospital. While 12,000 children reported mild symptoms (0.2%), studies suggest many of these were psychosomatic and triggered more by parents freaking out over exposure (this was huge news in Japan) than the exposure itself.
I thought it was accepted that mass hysteria after reports of the first children were sent to the hospital was most likely to blame for the overwhelming majority of reports of negative reactions.
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.
I'd just market it as a comfort feature rather than a safety one. I don't have epilepsy but I also don't particularly like strobing flashing screen effects, especially in older games. Having an option to turn them off increases my enjoyment, even if it doesn't really affect my safety.
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.)
> These include Absence Seizures, when a person stops what they are doing altogether, loses awareness but does not collapse or have visible convulsions; Myoclonic Seizures, when a person’s limbs suddenly jerk uncontrollably but they remain conscious and aware; and Tonic Clonic Seizures where a person loses consciousness, collapses, and their whole body convulses.
I've witnessed something that I've never seen described anywhere – a very similar thing to an 'absence seizure', but the person is still aware and responding but seem unable to break away from the empty stare even when they try.
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.
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.
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.
Okay strong "forbidden fruit" vibes here; I had the strongest compulsion to look up that scene on youtube. It's very unpleasant to watch, at least to me. No wonder this gave people seizures.
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.
I've recently noticed reminiscent effects in Arcane. They have some vfx that quickly alternate between yellow and magenta or yellow and blue. Not full frame.
I think they look rather striking. It's a shame that kind of thing is a danger to some.
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.
I think the author’s tone in the article causes more damage to the cause than good.
Even if you are right, you don’t ever win the hearts and minds of anyone when your argument comes off as entitled or deserving.
The mockery that OP refers to is the direct result of the tone that the author uses. Mocking the other side is how you get mockery back. Then you have to write an article about being mocked.
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.
Serious question for epileptics. Are those failed LED flashing street lights an issue? I feel like they must be. Even to me they can be disorientating at night when the one flashing lamp on the exit ramp is the main light source.
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
I don't see that, but I do see a fair bit of ultra-bright LEDs set to strobe mode because some study somewhere said that was the most visible to vehicles. Now I get blinded and dazzled by both oncoming and leading bikes.
I don't know why bike headlight manufacturers are so damn insistent on improving safety by blinding everybody else in the vicinity. Why do so few bike headlights have a "low beam" mode? Instead its 1,000,000 lumens in a 180 degree cone turning night into day but burning out the retinas of everyone else on the trail.
Because they cost more and people won't buy them. I commuted, year-round, by bike for 19 years. As I recall, my NiteRider Pro light cost around $300-$400. (The current NiteRider Pro Endurance is $449.99) It had high and low beams. There were also instructions on how to mount it properly to show the trail/road. Part of my commute was on roads/trails with no lights and I wanted good lights.
I knew plenty of people that thought a $15 light was fine, as well as a number who said they didn't need lights.
For many people, $15 lights are fine. My commute only has a very short unlit section and its a very wide and easy to follow path, so the lack of an adjustable beam setting is no big deal.
Of course, that means that I absolutely must adjust the fitting to "permanently low beam" rather than "permanently blinding", if for no other reason that I don't want to get flattened by an oncoming car I've just dazzled...
God yes. Primo headache material. Seems so lazy too, to design a light that goes full blast as soon as there is enough voltage from the dynamo. Stick a capacitor in there for chrissakes!
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).
“ I have seen many fans, in the face of being told the reason for these changes, say that it doesn’t matter because they aren’t personally epileptic. This is, as you might understand, incredibly personally frustrating, and yes, very ableist. In saying this, these fans claim that disabled people do not have a right to feel safe when watching their favorite series, and that their wellbeing doesn’t matter”
Or simply that if there is a warming, it’s your OWN choice to Watch it or not.
If I get a migraine from the colour yellow, should it then be banned from television? Seems a bit weird, no?
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.
Probably easier to implement in the NES case too: toggling the screen background color rapidly was a common trick used by NES developers to represent large explosions and the like. That would be easy to sniff for and blur out with few detrimental effects.
Doing the same with today's visually intense games, like Rez and Tetris Effect, would be more difficult. The potentially harmful visual effects are more subtle than simply rapidly flashing the entire screen background, would require heavy processing to scan for, and if you filtered them you risk compromising the visuals that some people purchased the game for.
Best to just warn them so photosensitive people know what they're getting into.
It seems to be something of an urban legend that the original Pokemon seizure clip was subsequently rebroadcasted by Japanese news stations in the immediate aftermath of the first broadcast, thus increasing the number of impacted viewers. I can't find any source backing that claim, though, in the Wikipedia article.
> I have seen many fans, in the face of being told the reason for these changes, say that it doesn’t matter because they aren’t personally epileptic. This is, as you might understand, incredibly personally frustrating, and yes, very ableist. In saying this, these fans claim that disabled people do not have a right to feel safe when watching their favorite series, and that their wellbeing doesn’t matter in comparison to a few brighter shots of teenagers using their magic powers to punch each other.
As a person who's never had a seizure, and who doesn't want to find out the hard way that I'm vulnerable, nor have anyone vulnerable be harmed, I get angry at filmmakers who throw in rapid strobe light scenes.
(Secondarily, it even happens in non-action movies, so you can get the sudden strobe lighting when you're just watching a movie at night, in a dimmed living room, to wind down from the day before bed.)
It's often a nightclub scene, but most recently it was a fight scene with gratuitous strobe light.
The strobing is usually a surprise, as evidenced by the startled note to my initial curse word.
An engineer solution would be to make a software filter that operates on video playback in real time.
A lawyer solution would be to wait for someone's family to be devastated, then sue the perpetrator so hard that US companies start caring.
A social media mob solution would be to downvote punish movies that did this, then go through the credits, and downvote all the other properties in which those people are involved.
A human solution would be for people to be more considerate and responsible.
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.
Wait, how do closed-loop air conditioners poison anyone?
And who is using high powered lasers to blind people in clubs? And when hasn't getting too close to music required hearing protection? Even a flute is over 90 dB.
> Wait, how do closed-loop air conditioners poison anyone?
Not parent-poster, but I believe "closed loop" is referring to having no air exchange between inside and outside atmosphere of a room, as opposed to the refrigerant flow inside the air-conditioner itself.
So somebody trying to make their cooling or heating effective (or extra cheap) may inadvertently seal off too much ventilation, and then a crowd of humans becomes in danger of their own CO2.
> And when hasn't getting too close to music required hearing protection? Even a flute is over 90 dB.
Not that it's impossible for a symphony to play so loudly that one needs ear protection but that the giant speakers on the concert stage are engineered and tuned to output sound that's as loud as possible such that everyone within a certain distance of them is likely to suffer hearing loss without protection from such damage.
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.
Downvote, loosely, such as on social media sites/apps that have up/down votes, and with minimal stars on interfaces that use those. I don't know a good term or phrase for it.
> In Japan, the stricter rules for passing the Harding Test have resulted in techniques known as “dimming” and “ghosting”.
These are also used in the UK, and in fact are automatically applied to video going through the broadcast chain, in order that live broadcasts are also considered "safe". If the system detects bright flashing at any point, the white point of the video is clamped down to a lower level, until the flashing has stopped.
The mechanics of the human optical system are absolutely wild, and the abstraction many have of "the eye just gathers pixels and sends them to the brain to interpret" is just wrong.
One of the most fascinating things to me about virtual reality was the discovery that we can mitigate VR nausea by giving people temporary "tunnel vision" when they are repositioned in space without their bodies being moved in the real world. For a significant percentage of users, it's the motion in the peripheral vision that leads to the gross dissociative-body nausea, and simply cutting off that stimulus helps significantly. And for other people, it doesn't!
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).
> In an ideal world, the animators in 1997 should absolutely have been aware of the risk using flashing lights could cause, but in reality, their ignorance is understandable.
Cmon, just 600 out of 7 million people experienced this. You have my sympathy but we can’t take every imaginable condition into account and make it a legal requirement. Just today i’ve read that Costco called back all their butter to destroy it because they forgot to print that butter contains milk. It’s getting absurd.
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.
It's unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be a free open source version of the harding scanner that flags possible sequences that could be triggering in this way. Or probably I'm just searching wrong.
I’m glad they bring up the techniques of ghosting and others to pass the Harding test, and the outcry from western audiences about it. Because personally, I find the diminishing of the animation quality really distracting during those hype scenes.
I wish we could find some solution where we distribute the epileptic-safe versions alongside the unsafe ones and users could choose.
>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”.
It's also odd that there seems to be a large overlap of autistic, disabled, queer or trans, anime fans with far left politics (add in the requisite bluesky/mastodon account). It doesn't necessarily mean anything - but that kind of union of disparate things always sets of some skepticism alarms for me around social contagion or general mental illness that makes me distrust the argument as presented, like there's some detail being left out in pursuit of some partisan goal.
I also just have an allergic reaction to people calling others *ist at this point too, espeically when trying to leverage some policy against them.
I think the author does a fine job of pointing out you don't know whether this scene can harm you (you can be hit by it while not having had a seizure before in your life), so you cannot make an a priori judgment on whether you can safely watch the scene unedited.
So playing the edited scene seems like the safest choice for everyone...
Putting up a warning (and maybe this warning should be more prominent, or some other mechanism ought to be invented if warnings are not effective) - is what we currently do to accommodate people with food allergies. Does it make sense to take peanut butter off the store shelves, and completely eradicate all nuts, dairy, and wheat out of all food products?
The comparison to allergies s interesting: if your kid is allergic to peanuts, every food item in the house will be screened for peanuts, and if you still keep some it will be in a protected place.
What the equivalent would be for flashing lights ? Would you be sitting with the kid at the start of every single episode/content he watches to read the warning labels ? If we look at the Pokemon incident, it was one episode amount hundreds, so just cutting off whole series wouldn't work.
And there's also the additional burden of providing alternatives. For a school restaurant, they can replace a peanut butter sandwich with a donut it won't be a big deal. You can't replace a Pokemon episode with a Digimon one and go on with the story the next week, your kid will still want to watch the episode, and the airing company will probably drag their feet at providing costly alternatives.
Long story short, I see having the safe version as default to be the more viable choice, with the unsafe version as the alternative fans have to seek to find, probably at cost.
"Some other mechanism if warnings are not effective" -- like what, and how would it differ from the edits? A method known to work trumps an hypothetical method in my opinion.
The "ableist" comment by the author seems a direct response to "I don't care about this because I'm not an epileptic", which is the definition of ableism: not caring about the disabilities of others. He/she seems upset that some animé purists only cared about watching the original sequence and disregarding potential harm to others.
Unlike with PB&J, where if you are allergic to peanuts you're not harmed by someone else enjoying them, exposure to epilepsy-inducing animé can maybe harm you if you glance at what someone else is watching. Say you enter a friend's house, and they are watching this episode, and they've already skipped past the warning (because, after all, it doesn't affect them) and you watch what they are watching and it turns out you are affected.
Of course, you cannot cover all risks all the time, but editing these animés just in case seems like a reasonable and safe choice to me.
And let's not be dramatic, everyone can still watch the animé, it's just that some visual effects have been edited to make them less potentially harmful. It's not like censorship.
I feel like you are arguing with some “bad telephone” version of what I wrote.
I am supportive if efforts being made to accommodate people’s disabilities.
My charge here - is that also offering unedited versions of original experience is not discriminatory, not insensitive, and not “ableist” as the article claims it to be.
Furthermore - the author presented facts in bad faith. I went to the petition linked in the article, and unlike what the article claims - it makes no demand to take down epileptic-friendly version, just asking to offer the unedited one. And i quote:
“ As fans, we implore Crunchyroll to try to acquire an uncut version of the simulcast as we are paying good money each month for the services they provide. Not only does it impact the fans but Toho and Crunchyroll are gravely underestimating how the lack of effort to provide clean versions is affecting the engagement and overall reception of the season, as in many instances the ghosting completely ruins or takes you out of the experience.”
How would they offer the unedited version in a safe manner that doesn't accidentally expose epileptic and undiagnosed people?
The author never claimed anybody wanted to take down the edited version. He/she claimed fans clamoring for the unedited version didn't care or understand about the consequences.
Crunchyroll app, which I am a subscriber of by the way, has “mature content” setting - like that, add a setting. Or label the version like they do for different releases. They have lots of options.
Again, this discussion thread has nothing to do with Crunchyroll and everything to do with charging people who want and expect to be able to see an unaltered version - as discriminating against disabled viewers.
And finally, quote directly from the article:
“Over 2500 fans signed a change.org petition asking Crunchyroll to take down this edited, safe, version of the series and instead upload an unedited version that was true to the original vision—even if it had the potential to cause seizures.”
If we are going to discuss the article - we should both read it.
Fair enough, TFA does claim some fans want to take down the edited version.
Helping the author's case is the ambiguous wording of the title of the change.org petition, to wit:
> "Remove ghosting and dimming from Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 on Crunchyroll"
While "remove" could be read either way (i.e. either "make another edit also available" vs "replace the version that exists now"), I think the author's interpretation, coming from an experience of being actually disabled, is a reasonable take. I don't see bad faith like you do.
PS: going by the comments on change.org, only one seems to be openly asking for both versions to be made available, while most of the others seem to match the accusation of the author: "but I'm not epileptic!" (in so many words). Spot on.
Uh no, that’s revisionism to define ableism that way, we’re not going to let you rewrite the language.
Ableism is specifically “the discrimination and prejudice _against_ people with disabilities”. Not “not caring about the disabilities of others”.
I also think they’re somewhat manipulating statistics to their benefit- they start by saying “1 in 100 people have epilepsy” but it’s an untrue statement that 1% of people have the type of epilepsy that would react to this specific example of flashing lights between 5-25 a second.
> 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...
I really resent the use of “unsuitable for some viewers” in story arcs. Is someone with epilepsy just supposed to watch the rest of the series with a hole in the middle of the story? Why even do that. Tell the writers to fuck right off and try again.
> I have seen many fans, in the face of being told the reason for these changes, say that it doesn’t matter because they aren’t personally epileptic. This is, as you might understand, incredibly personally frustrating, and yes, very ableist. In saying this, these fans claim that disabled people do not have a right to feel safe when watching their favorite series, and that their wellbeing doesn’t matter in comparison to a few brighter shots of teenagers using their magic powers to punch each other.
I don't get it. Why is it bad wanting to see the unsafe version for yourself?
> Over 2500 fans signed a change.org petition asking Crunchyroll to take down this edited, safe, version of the series and instead upload an unedited version that was true to the original vision—even if it had the potential to cause seizures.
That's not how I read the petition in question. People are asking to get access to the original that they know exist. I can't find a paragraph that demands deletion of the edited safe version.
>> As fans, we implore Crunchyroll to try to acquire an uncut version of the simulcast as we are paying good money each month for the services they provide.
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.
Yeah, but if I know that and still want to try it?
No one is stopping you from tracking it down and watching it; the request is merely that it not be the version aired on TV, nor the default on streaming media like Crunchyroll. That seems like a pretty reasonable middle ground to me - if you can only host one version, host the safe version. If you want to host multiple versions, feel free to add the unsafe cut as an alternative.
It is not middle ground if it requires breaking the law...
"Not enough money? No one is stopping you from defrauding someone or robbing a bank"
Edit: I meant piracy
I think you might be responding to the wrong thread? My comment had nothing to do with illegal behavior
Well, how do you "track something down" when it isn't provided through official channels?
This is a giant liability issue for any company.
If you want the raw version, I'm sure it's out there...
I'm skeptical unless the company has promised its shows to be safe for epileptics. Is this because it's for kids?
Anyone have a source for this?
> unless the company has promised its shows to be safe for epileptics
Many jurisdictions have regulations requiring this. It’s also not a tough criteria to fulfill. Most of the things you need to avoid are pretty obvious, and the less obvious things can be caught by automated tools. The blowback for creating or hosting epilepsy-triggering content is pretty intense. It’s not something most companies want to play around with.
I don’t get why people want CrunchyRoll to host this content so bad. It feels like people demanding to be able to set off firecrackers on a wheelchair ramp. Sure it probably won’t hurt anyone most of the time, but why do people want this one specific thing so badly when they can get it somewhere else?
If you host (and charge for access to) content that causes a seizure and don't have warnings & stuff then there's a good argument to be made that your negligence caused any seizures that may arise.
Especially if there's a perfectly good non-seizure causing version right there.
Promising that content won't cause seizures is one thing, knowing that it already has is another.
Looks like this is it? (Seizure warning) :
https://youtu.be/7gOlodTlpwk (Seizure warning!)
It's about a minute of rapid red-to-blue cycles. It's fairly intense.
Oh wow, that is intense. Intense to the point that while watching it, I had to ask myself: "wait, am I 100% sure I'm not epileptic?"
Yeah. The Simpsons bit is funny https://youtu.be/3Eox1ogr3SE
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.
You can simply "just do some Googling and find it" for literally everything on CrunchyRoll. That's called piracy though, and there are various reasons why people buy a crunchyroll subscription instead of doing that.
Seems quite a reasonable request to me.
It's not necessary, but it is nice to have. IMO demanding the original version would be inappropriate, but you can ask for it.
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.
It's more like asking for mandatory seatbelts in a world where most people are completely immune to any kind of car crash and will not get so much as a scratch from any kind of collision.
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.
> As fans, we implore Crunchyroll to try to acquire an uncut version of the simulcast as we are paying good money each month for the services they provide.
Seems like they want Crunchyroll to offer it, I wasn't able to spot a mention of taking the safe one down; it's an uncharitable or invalid characterization on the part of the author imo
The whole vibe of the petition was dismissive of the issues and only argued for getting the flashing version, so I understand author's view. E.g.
> These things are supposed to help prevent seizures, [...] the ghosting is almost making the visual stimuli worse as people have attested to feeling nauseous and dizzy from the obscene amounts of frame blending.
Emphasis mine.
I don't know how bad the blurring was in motion, but I read the petitioner's argument as "this version is worse in every way for reasons that are only hypothetical". I really don't see much room for a generous interpretation.
The generous interpretation that it makes them nauseous instead of giving them an epileptic attack.
I’m nearly certain for 90% of people the problem is entirely psychosomatic.
> Crunchyroll usually gets an unaltered version for series such as Demon Slayer. But for unknown reasons, most likely due just pure lack of initiative from Crunchyroll's side, Jujutsu Kaisen isn't as lucky.
I'm not sure if it's actually simulcast but they apparently offer the preferred (to the petitioners) version of some shows. I guess that would be simulcast taking all regions into account but not sure within a single region.
I read it as CR usually only getting the unedited version, with no alternatives.
>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.
> 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.
> Unlike with “Electric Soldier Porygon” the movie continued to be shown unedited in American cinemas throughout its entire run. Since the movie failed to pass the Harding Test, an alternative cut had to be shown in the UK, Ireland, and Japan. This meant that for at least two months of its theatrical run, Pixar had a safe cut they could show to English speaking American audiences and yet still chose to have the unsafe version in US cinemas.
Exhibit A - companies will only ever do anything if they are forced to, even if what they are doing is harmful and compliance is relatively easy.
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.
On the other side of the coin: have a kid with epilepsy. After learning about possible effects of K448/Mozart's sonata in D Major, we keep a copy of it on all our phones, and it does seem to relax him when he is having a seizure.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95922-7
Always thought it was funny that the only other song they had found (up until 2021) with a similar audio signature was from "Yanni Live at the Acropolis"
Also, I found and watched the porygon episode in the last year, and it's certainly pretty intense.
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.
As someone who had a partner with intense seizures for many years, it’s a super helpless feeling to see them suffer in such traumatic fashion and not be able to do anything about it. Having small tasks like playing music seems really unlikely to help but it definitely gives a care taker something to do.
I watched the clip now and even though it’s only one or two seconds it’s wildly uncomfortable and makes me feel weird.
I don't understand why in the current era we don't have videos just post-processed by the media player / TV. That seems like it would increase accessibility while not irritating folks who do not have epilepsy.
I tried to search to see if something like a plugin existed for VLC, and I didn't find anything. Seems like it should be solvable at least if the media can be parsed ahead of time or with some delay for a live feed.
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's actually pretty cool, props to Apple for open sourcing it
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.
It does somewhat, but its also weird that its not a feature that companies add to things to expand their potential sales base & give people a reason to buy their stuff.
Obviously it should be on all of us to try and minimise the number of seizures we're causing, but it's also on us (as humanity) to make it possible for people to actively avoid or mitigate things that cause seizures.
Someone else on this thread mentioned that Apple have an accessibility feature specifically for this[1][2] which is kind of ideal.
1 - the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129236#42130043
2 - You can find it under motion settings here: https://www.apple.com/au/accessibility/vision
You could just make a requirement that TVs in public places have that feature enabled. If you're watching TV with friends, you're probably already disclosing that information today.
But do you honestly expect humanity to only create content for this miniscule populace? That sounds horribly limiting.
There is a place for unbounded creativity, and I think I'd argue in favor of it, but I can't imagine an easier argument against it: We try to only create websites with sufficiently high contrast for interactive elements, only create public buildings with ADA features, etc. -- even if aesthetics suffer as a result. It's just aesthetics.
To be clear, I'm discussing only that which the public is invited to enjoy. No rules when it's just for you and yours.
Counterpoint: while high contrast requirements can make the designer rethink the aesthetics approach, it also makes text easier to read for everybody. Of course, website authors can get lazy and just crank up the contrast without considering whether it looks good, but that’s just bad design.
On the other hand, the techniques we see applied to anime releases are just that: quick low effort fixes. Of course, this doesn’t mean the show producers are lazy or incompetent: fixing those issues properly would take extreme effort as at least a lot of re-coloring. Still, the result is that now everybody has subpar experience.
I’d say just release both versions and let people decide.
Isn't art the place for unbounded creativity?
Yes. But when you invite the public to subject themselves to art incompatible with schizophrenia, then is it that much different from inviting the public to a website incompatible with visual impairments or to a brand new store incompatible with wheelchairs? Again I do lean on the side of art in this case, but I also find the argument against it to be pretty solid.
TFA notes that it's not just a "miniscule populace". Electric Porygon affected 10% of the people who watched it, most of whom were not epileptic.
> According to the World Health Organisation, about 10% of people will have a seizure in their lifetime. 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. This event is actually what helped confirm that people without any history of epilepsy can have seizures triggered by flashing lights. It is estimated that of the 7 million viewers, 10% had some sort of physical medical reaction but not all of these needed specific medical attention.
I'd like to see a source for that estimate, because "10% had some sort of physical medical reaction" is quite vague and seems improbably high.
Wikipedia states the episode was viewed by 4.6 million households, of whom 685 (0.001%) were taken to hospital. While 12,000 children reported mild symptoms (0.2%), studies suggest many of these were psychosomatic and triggered more by parents freaking out over exposure (this was huge news in Japan) than the exposure itself.
I thought it was accepted that mass hysteria after reports of the first children were sent to the hospital was most likely to blame for the overwhelming majority of reports of negative reactions.
I'd be very interested to see how they came up with that estimation.
I could understand if this was something major, but avoiding excessively flashing lights doesn't seem all that limiting to me.
Humanity does.
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.
I'd just market it as a comfort feature rather than a safety one. I don't have epilepsy but I also don't particularly like strobing flashing screen effects, especially in older games. Having an option to turn them off increases my enjoyment, even if it doesn't really affect my safety.
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.)
That is incorrect. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42130656
> These include Absence Seizures, when a person stops what they are doing altogether, loses awareness but does not collapse or have visible convulsions; Myoclonic Seizures, when a person’s limbs suddenly jerk uncontrollably but they remain conscious and aware; and Tonic Clonic Seizures where a person loses consciousness, collapses, and their whole body convulses.
I've witnessed something that I've never seen described anywhere – a very similar thing to an 'absence seizure', but the person is still aware and responding but seem unable to break away from the empty stare even when they try.
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.
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.
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.
This is the first time I came across this somewhere else other than this one person I know that has this. Fascinating.
Okay strong "forbidden fruit" vibes here; I had the strongest compulsion to look up that scene on youtube. It's very unpleasant to watch, at least to me. No wonder this gave people seizures.
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.
Still frames: https://0x0.st/XkVY.avif
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've recently noticed reminiscent effects in Arcane. They have some vfx that quickly alternate between yellow and magenta or yellow and blue. Not full frame.
I think they look rather striking. It's a shame that kind of thing is a danger to some.
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.
I think the author’s tone in the article causes more damage to the cause than good.
Even if you are right, you don’t ever win the hearts and minds of anyone when your argument comes off as entitled or deserving.
The mockery that OP refers to is the direct result of the tone that the author uses. Mocking the other side is how you get mockery back. Then you have to write an article about being mocked.
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.
Being persuasive means understanding that there are a million more dimensions to communication than just “nice vs. assertive.”
After reading OP’s article, I did not even feel “I want to like a Facebook post in support.”
Serious question for epileptics. Are those failed LED flashing street lights an issue? I feel like they must be. Even to me they can be disorientating at night when the one flashing lamp on the exit ramp is the main light source.
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
I don't see that, but I do see a fair bit of ultra-bright LEDs set to strobe mode because some study somewhere said that was the most visible to vehicles. Now I get blinded and dazzled by both oncoming and leading bikes.
I don't know why bike headlight manufacturers are so damn insistent on improving safety by blinding everybody else in the vicinity. Why do so few bike headlights have a "low beam" mode? Instead its 1,000,000 lumens in a 180 degree cone turning night into day but burning out the retinas of everyone else on the trail.
Because they cost more and people won't buy them. I commuted, year-round, by bike for 19 years. As I recall, my NiteRider Pro light cost around $300-$400. (The current NiteRider Pro Endurance is $449.99) It had high and low beams. There were also instructions on how to mount it properly to show the trail/road. Part of my commute was on roads/trails with no lights and I wanted good lights.
I knew plenty of people that thought a $15 light was fine, as well as a number who said they didn't need lights.
For many people, $15 lights are fine. My commute only has a very short unlit section and its a very wide and easy to follow path, so the lack of an adjustable beam setting is no big deal.
Of course, that means that I absolutely must adjust the fitting to "permanently low beam" rather than "permanently blinding", if for no other reason that I don't want to get flattened by an oncoming car I've just dazzled...
God yes. Primo headache material. Seems so lazy too, to design a light that goes full blast as soon as there is enough voltage from the dynamo. Stick a capacitor in there for chrissakes!
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).
“ I have seen many fans, in the face of being told the reason for these changes, say that it doesn’t matter because they aren’t personally epileptic. This is, as you might understand, incredibly personally frustrating, and yes, very ableist. In saying this, these fans claim that disabled people do not have a right to feel safe when watching their favorite series, and that their wellbeing doesn’t matter”
Or simply that if there is a warming, it’s your OWN choice to Watch it or not.
If I get a migraine from the colour yellow, should it then be banned from television? Seems a bit weird, no?
I thought it was common knowledge that Pikachu was the culprit.
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.
It's probably more the animators than the writers at fault. (Though not on purpose, of course).
Gee this seems like an actual useful feature to build into smart TVs.
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.
That's a better solution than putting warnings in front of every game.
Probably easier to implement in the NES case too: toggling the screen background color rapidly was a common trick used by NES developers to represent large explosions and the like. That would be easy to sniff for and blur out with few detrimental effects.
Doing the same with today's visually intense games, like Rez and Tetris Effect, would be more difficult. The potentially harmful visual effects are more subtle than simply rapidly flashing the entire screen background, would require heavy processing to scan for, and if you filtered them you risk compromising the visuals that some people purchased the game for.
Best to just warn them so photosensitive people know what they're getting into.
The cookie banners of the 90s
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).
Apple's "Dim flashing lights" accessibility option is built into tvOS, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
It seems to be something of an urban legend that the original Pokemon seizure clip was subsequently rebroadcasted by Japanese news stations in the immediate aftermath of the first broadcast, thus increasing the number of impacted viewers. I can't find any source backing that claim, though, in the Wikipedia article.
> I have seen many fans, in the face of being told the reason for these changes, say that it doesn’t matter because they aren’t personally epileptic. This is, as you might understand, incredibly personally frustrating, and yes, very ableist. In saying this, these fans claim that disabled people do not have a right to feel safe when watching their favorite series, and that their wellbeing doesn’t matter in comparison to a few brighter shots of teenagers using their magic powers to punch each other.
As a person who's never had a seizure, and who doesn't want to find out the hard way that I'm vulnerable, nor have anyone vulnerable be harmed, I get angry at filmmakers who throw in rapid strobe light scenes.
(Secondarily, it even happens in non-action movies, so you can get the sudden strobe lighting when you're just watching a movie at night, in a dimmed living room, to wind down from the day before bed.)
It's often a nightclub scene, but most recently it was a fight scene with gratuitous strobe light.
The strobing is usually a surprise, as evidenced by the startled note to my initial curse word.
An engineer solution would be to make a software filter that operates on video playback in real time.
A lawyer solution would be to wait for someone's family to be devastated, then sue the perpetrator so hard that US companies start caring.
A social media mob solution would be to downvote punish movies that did this, then go through the credits, and downvote all the other properties in which those people are involved.
A human solution would be for people to be more considerate and responsible.
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.
Wait, how do closed-loop air conditioners poison anyone?
And who is using high powered lasers to blind people in clubs? And when hasn't getting too close to music required hearing protection? Even a flute is over 90 dB.
> Wait, how do closed-loop air conditioners poison anyone?
Not parent-poster, but I believe "closed loop" is referring to having no air exchange between inside and outside atmosphere of a room, as opposed to the refrigerant flow inside the air-conditioner itself.
So somebody trying to make their cooling or heating effective (or extra cheap) may inadvertently seal off too much ventilation, and then a crowd of humans becomes in danger of their own CO2.
Surely that would happen in any building with inadequate ventilation regardless of whether there's an air conditioner or not.
Inadequate ventilation without air conditioners is unbearably hot.
I think the idea is that a major reason for inadequate ventilation comes from venues cheaping-out on their air conditioning setup.
Not because of containing noise, or a strange aesthetic decor, etc.
> And when hasn't getting too close to music required hearing protection? Even a flute is over 90 dB.
Not that it's impossible for a symphony to play so loudly that one needs ear protection but that the giant speakers on the concert stage are engineered and tuned to output sound that's as loud as possible such that everyone within a certain distance of them is likely to suffer hearing loss without protection from such damage.
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.
Downvote, loosely, such as on social media sites/apps that have up/down votes, and with minimal stars on interfaces that use those. I don't know a good term or phrase for it.
> In Japan, the stricter rules for passing the Harding Test have resulted in techniques known as “dimming” and “ghosting”.
These are also used in the UK, and in fact are automatically applied to video going through the broadcast chain, in order that live broadcasts are also considered "safe". If the system detects bright flashing at any point, the white point of the video is clamped down to a lower level, until the flashing has stopped.
The mechanics of the human optical system are absolutely wild, and the abstraction many have of "the eye just gathers pixels and sends them to the brain to interpret" is just wrong.
One of the most fascinating things to me about virtual reality was the discovery that we can mitigate VR nausea by giving people temporary "tunnel vision" when they are repositioned in space without their bodies being moved in the real world. For a significant percentage of users, it's the motion in the peripheral vision that leads to the gross dissociative-body nausea, and simply cutting off that stimulus helps significantly. And for other people, it doesn't!
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).
I've been using an equivalent Android app called KineStop and same thing here, it definitely helps.
For more context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Senshi_Porygon
The Wikipedia article also has the scene that you can watch at your own risk.
> In an ideal world, the animators in 1997 should absolutely have been aware of the risk using flashing lights could cause, but in reality, their ignorance is understandable.
Cmon, just 600 out of 7 million people experienced this. You have my sympathy but we can’t take every imaginable condition into account and make it a legal requirement. Just today i’ve read that Costco called back all their butter to destroy it because they forgot to print that butter contains milk. It’s getting absurd.
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.
if you need a warning that butter contains milk, frankly you had it coming
An interesting viewpoint. And from it, a good example of how failure can be positive -- even when it hurts.
Is it possible to program a look ahead filter that detects too much sudden change across a window of frames and blanks it or somehow stifles it?
It's unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be a free open source version of the harding scanner that flags possible sequences that could be triggering in this way. Or probably I'm just searching wrong.
I’m glad they bring up the techniques of ghosting and others to pass the Harding test, and the outcry from western audiences about it. Because personally, I find the diminishing of the animation quality really distracting during those hype scenes.
I wish we could find some solution where we distribute the epileptic-safe versions alongside the unsafe ones and users could choose.
>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”.
It's also odd that there seems to be a large overlap of autistic, disabled, queer or trans, anime fans with far left politics (add in the requisite bluesky/mastodon account). It doesn't necessarily mean anything - but that kind of union of disparate things always sets of some skepticism alarms for me around social contagion or general mental illness that makes me distrust the argument as presented, like there's some detail being left out in pursuit of some partisan goal.
I also just have an allergic reaction to people calling others *ist at this point too, espeically when trying to leverage some policy against them.
I think the author does a fine job of pointing out you don't know whether this scene can harm you (you can be hit by it while not having had a seizure before in your life), so you cannot make an a priori judgment on whether you can safely watch the scene unedited.
So playing the edited scene seems like the safest choice for everyone...
Putting up a warning (and maybe this warning should be more prominent, or some other mechanism ought to be invented if warnings are not effective) - is what we currently do to accommodate people with food allergies. Does it make sense to take peanut butter off the store shelves, and completely eradicate all nuts, dairy, and wheat out of all food products?
Are people who want to make PB&J “ableist”?
The comparison to allergies s interesting: if your kid is allergic to peanuts, every food item in the house will be screened for peanuts, and if you still keep some it will be in a protected place.
What the equivalent would be for flashing lights ? Would you be sitting with the kid at the start of every single episode/content he watches to read the warning labels ? If we look at the Pokemon incident, it was one episode amount hundreds, so just cutting off whole series wouldn't work.
And there's also the additional burden of providing alternatives. For a school restaurant, they can replace a peanut butter sandwich with a donut it won't be a big deal. You can't replace a Pokemon episode with a Digimon one and go on with the story the next week, your kid will still want to watch the episode, and the airing company will probably drag their feet at providing costly alternatives.
Long story short, I see having the safe version as default to be the more viable choice, with the unsafe version as the alternative fans have to seek to find, probably at cost.
In the UK, many schools do just this to defend allergic people against the threat that homemade lunches would otherwise pose.
What do you mean? Do they ban homemade lunches in schools?
No, homemade lunches are fine: but parents making them are instructed to avoid the worst allergens like nuts and peanuts.
"Some other mechanism if warnings are not effective" -- like what, and how would it differ from the edits? A method known to work trumps an hypothetical method in my opinion.
The "ableist" comment by the author seems a direct response to "I don't care about this because I'm not an epileptic", which is the definition of ableism: not caring about the disabilities of others. He/she seems upset that some animé purists only cared about watching the original sequence and disregarding potential harm to others.
Unlike with PB&J, where if you are allergic to peanuts you're not harmed by someone else enjoying them, exposure to epilepsy-inducing animé can maybe harm you if you glance at what someone else is watching. Say you enter a friend's house, and they are watching this episode, and they've already skipped past the warning (because, after all, it doesn't affect them) and you watch what they are watching and it turns out you are affected.
Of course, you cannot cover all risks all the time, but editing these animés just in case seems like a reasonable and safe choice to me.
And let's not be dramatic, everyone can still watch the animé, it's just that some visual effects have been edited to make them less potentially harmful. It's not like censorship.
I feel like you are arguing with some “bad telephone” version of what I wrote.
I am supportive if efforts being made to accommodate people’s disabilities.
My charge here - is that also offering unedited versions of original experience is not discriminatory, not insensitive, and not “ableist” as the article claims it to be.
Furthermore - the author presented facts in bad faith. I went to the petition linked in the article, and unlike what the article claims - it makes no demand to take down epileptic-friendly version, just asking to offer the unedited one. And i quote:
“ As fans, we implore Crunchyroll to try to acquire an uncut version of the simulcast as we are paying good money each month for the services they provide. Not only does it impact the fans but Toho and Crunchyroll are gravely underestimating how the lack of effort to provide clean versions is affecting the engagement and overall reception of the season, as in many instances the ghosting completely ruins or takes you out of the experience.”
How would they offer the unedited version in a safe manner that doesn't accidentally expose epileptic and undiagnosed people?
The author never claimed anybody wanted to take down the edited version. He/she claimed fans clamoring for the unedited version didn't care or understand about the consequences.
Crunchyroll app, which I am a subscriber of by the way, has “mature content” setting - like that, add a setting. Or label the version like they do for different releases. They have lots of options.
Again, this discussion thread has nothing to do with Crunchyroll and everything to do with charging people who want and expect to be able to see an unaltered version - as discriminating against disabled viewers.
And finally, quote directly from the article:
“Over 2500 fans signed a change.org petition asking Crunchyroll to take down this edited, safe, version of the series and instead upload an unedited version that was true to the original vision—even if it had the potential to cause seizures.”
If we are going to discuss the article - we should both read it.
Fair enough, TFA does claim some fans want to take down the edited version.
Helping the author's case is the ambiguous wording of the title of the change.org petition, to wit:
> "Remove ghosting and dimming from Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 on Crunchyroll"
While "remove" could be read either way (i.e. either "make another edit also available" vs "replace the version that exists now"), I think the author's interpretation, coming from an experience of being actually disabled, is a reasonable take. I don't see bad faith like you do.
PS: going by the comments on change.org, only one seems to be openly asking for both versions to be made available, while most of the others seem to match the accusation of the author: "but I'm not epileptic!" (in so many words). Spot on.
Uh no, that’s revisionism to define ableism that way, we’re not going to let you rewrite the language. Ableism is specifically “the discrimination and prejudice _against_ people with disabilities”. Not “not caring about the disabilities of others”.
"We" are not going to "let you"?
You're providing the same definition in different words, anyway.
I also think they’re somewhat manipulating statistics to their benefit- they start by saying “1 in 100 people have epilepsy” but it’s an untrue statement that 1% of people have the type of epilepsy that would react to this specific example of flashing lights between 5-25 a second.
> 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...
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I really resent the use of “unsuitable for some viewers” in story arcs. Is someone with epilepsy just supposed to watch the rest of the series with a hole in the middle of the story? Why even do that. Tell the writers to fuck right off and try again.