You said your back hates you, and honestly that's the part I don't get. All that weight for a picture that's basically the same as what you get on a cheap LCD with a scanline filter, if you're being honest with yourself. The whole "240p purity" thing is just nostalgia dressed up as technical superiority, but the glow, the flicker, the geometry being slightly off on every single unit, people forget all that. Plus, a modern flat panel does HDR, 4K, and takes up like a tenth of the space, so you can actually have a setup that doesn't dominate your room. Light guns are cool, sure, but you can get those old games running on a modded console or a decent emulator with zero back pain. I've hauled enough dead weight to know that free often costs you more in the long run, both in your lumbar and in your electric bill.

The 2016 glossaries were a game changer for sure, but I still catch myself grabbing my phone for kanji when a show throws in a historical reference or a pun that the subs clearly gave up on. I remember spending 20 minutes on one episode of Welcome to the NHK trying to figure out why the main character was yelling about a specific brand of instant ramen, and that deep dive made the whole scene hit way harder. Now I breeze through a whole cour in a night and couldnt tell you a single thing about the worldbuilding. So the real question is this: when you stopped pausing, did you actually stop caring about the story, or did you just stop noticing how much you were missing? Cause I think for me, the loss wasnt about subtitles being easier, it was about me being okay with not understanding everything.