Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on the infamous Pokémon episode

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Wikipedia article also has the scene that you can watch at your own risk.

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.

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!

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 wonder how the animators themselves could stand it.

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.

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.

So playing the edited scene seems like the safest choice for everyone...

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...

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.

Are people who want to make PB&J “ableist”?

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I think they look rather striking. It's a shame that kind of thing is a danger to some.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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

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 "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'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 knew plenty of people that thought a $15 light was fine, as well as a number who said they didn't need lights.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I’m nearly certain for 90% of people the problem is entirely psychosomatic.

> 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.

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.

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.

Anyone have a source for this?

https://youtu.be/7gOlodTlpwk (Seizure warning!)

It's about a minute of rapid red-to-blue cycles. It's fairly intense.

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 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.

After reading OP’s article, I did not even feel “I want to like a Facebook post in support.”

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 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.

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?

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.

Not because of containing noise, or a strange aesthetic decor, etc.

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.

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

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.”

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.

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.

Seems quite a reasonable request to me.

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.

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.

You're providing the same definition in different words, anyway.

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.

"Not enough money? No one is stopping you from defrauding someone or robbing a bank"

Edit: I meant piracy

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28567682

I read it as "We'd like CR to seek an altered version, because we're not getting what we're laying for". The author said they asked to have the original taken down, followed by calling it ableist.

Is the latter really more correct, or is that what's seen through a cynical lens?

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.

Every time I look up an older one (2000s) to watch it, they don't have it. So no wonder people pirate it all.

At least the Internet Archive is bereft of advertising and malware that scourges most piracy sites.