[0:00] As we swiftly approach the end of November...
[0:04] oh, as December draws so near, it's here,
[0:07] the holiday season is upon us.
[0:09] And, as is tradition, many people will be stringing colorful electric lights all every which way.
[0:16] Because why not?
[0:17] And, as is tradition, 
this person makes a video about the awful state of Christmas lights
[0:23] brought about by scientists 
who were so preoccupied with whether they could,
[0:27] they never stopped to think if they should.
[0:30] But before I launch into the tirade 
I've launched into half a dozen times now,
[0:35] here's an actual Christmas light storage tip I learned from a teacher in high school.
[0:41] When it comes time to put the Christmas lights away for the season,
[0:44] don't use the tried and true
[0:46] "wrap them around your arm like an extension cord and then shove it all into a Jewel bag" method my dad taught me
[0:51] because that's bad.
[0:53] Sorry, Dad, they just get way too tangled up and tend to break.
[0:57] Instead, take a rectangular piece of cardboard 
and cut a slit into its side near the end of its long edge.
[1:05] Cut at least two slits with one on each 
end.
[1:08] Then, and this is very important,
[1:10] start with the female end of a strand of 
Christmas lights and shove the wire down that slit.
[1:17] Now, simply wrap the lights repeatedly around the cardboard until you're back to the male end, like so.
[1:26] [a very high-pitched rendition of Entry of the Gladiators]
[1:37] Okay,
[1:38] now you can either stick the male end 
into the female end if there's enough room or
[1:43] simply slide it into the other slot and you'll 
have a nice and compact flat thing
[1:48] with all your Christmas lights on them.
[1:51] If you do it this way, you will discover that they stack nicely into boxes while remaining completely tangle-free.
[1:59] And so long as you remember 
to start wrapping with the female end,
[2:03] they function as a decent spool 
when it comes time to decorate next year.
[2:10] I am a full-on convert to this method 
of storing Christmas lights and wish to spread the knowledge.
[2:15] So there you go!
[2:15] And now back to my regularly scheduled tirade.
[2:19] You see, I am old enough to predate 
the commercialization of LED lighting technology.
[2:26] When I was a youngin', we were still mostly shoving electricity through tiny tungsten filaments
[2:31] which caused those filaments to get incredibly hot such that they glow with a bright white light.
[2:38] That's just how light bulbs worked.
[2:40] And since the underlying technology 
produced a full spectrum white light output,
[2:45] if we wanted to produce colored light, we'd need to use filters
[2:50] which removed certain 
frequencies of light and only let some through.
[2:55] This had two inevitable side effects:
[2:57] One, the filtering wasn't perfect,
[3:00] so the colors produced, while often quite 
intense and beautiful, weren't unnaturally pure.
[3:07] It does not look, for lack of a better word, electronic.
[3:11] Secondly, this filtering from a wide 
spectrum of light to a small sliver of that spectrum
[3:17] reduces how much light escapes the bulb,
[3:20] causing those colored lights 
to be much darker than their clear counterparts,
[3:25] particularly the cooler colors on the 
shorter end of the spectrum, such as blue and green.
[3:31] Now, I am fully familiar with that 
Douglas Adams quotation which says,
[3:35] "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works."
[3:41] And while I'm sure there's some 
wisdom there relevant to my whole deal,
[3:46] the part that follows about stuff which hit the scene in your teenage to early adult years being new and exciting
[3:53] only sort of applies to me.
[3:56] Because you see, while I absolutely love what the light emitting diode has done to make the world better,
[4:02] it has made Christmas much, much worse.
[4:06] Now, instead of decorating with 
warm and pleasant festive lighting,
[4:10] we are decorating with horrid points of flickering 
saturated colors that belong in a gaming PC.
[4:20] And not even, like, a good one.
[4:22] Why is this?
[4:24] Well, because LEDs are actually only capable 
of emitting light of a single wavelength.
[4:30] This means they produce a single and very pure color.
[4:35] Now, when it comes to 
white LEDs, there's some trickery involved.
[4:39] Every modern white LED you'll ever see is actually 
a hybrid between an LED and, believe it or not,
[4:46] good old fluorescent lighting technology.
[4:49] The actual diodes produce blue (or as is increasingly common these days) a purplish near-UV light.
[4:56] So to fill in the rest of the spectrum, 
a yellow dab of various phosphors sits in front of the diode
[5:03] and converts the high frequency light 
it produces down to various lower frequencies
[5:08] which cluster together well enough 
to trick our eyes and brains into thinking it's actually white.
[5:15] We've gotten incredibly good at this.
[5:18] While cheap and nasty LEDs 
are still on the market in the bargain bin,
[5:22] any decent LED fab these days is 
capable of producing incredibly good white LEDs
[5:29] that produce light which is 
nearly indistinguishable from an incandescent filament.
[5:34] And of course, we're now able to embed 
the actual blue or purple diodes onto a substrate in such a way
[5:40] that we can make 
very convincing mimics of incandescent light bulbs.
[5:45] This is all innovation I'm 100% on board with!
[5:49] And when people care, we can even do stuff like combine diodes of different color temperatures into a single product
[5:55] for producing a fixture or bulb 
with a selectable color temperature.
[5:59] Or, as is my favorite application,
[6:02] automatically shifting the color temperature 
down as light intensity decreases
[6:07] to mimic the warming effect 
of an incandescent bulb on a dimmer switch.
[6:11] You can build that directly into a light bulb
[6:14] which means you can use old-fashioned 
dimmer switches to control new fangled light bulbs,
[6:19] and you don't even need an app!
[6:21] Philips used to shove that tech 
into pretty much every kind of light bulb they sold,
[6:25] but not enough people seem to notice how good 
of an idea that was, and now it's annoyingly hard to find.
[6:30] Even their own website filter doesn't work.
[6:33] You people need to start caring about lighting more than you do!
[6:37] I'll rant more about that later, but back to Christmas lights.
[6:41] While we have had the capability 
to produce extremely good white LEDs for a long time
[6:46] and while the market clearly understands that there are lots of people who want the energy efficiency and long life benefits of LEDs
[6:54] but who also want to have the aesthetics 
of old hot-glowing-wire light bulbs...
[6:59] that memo just never gets received 
by Christmas light manufacturers!
[7:03] Because year after year they end up putting Christmas lights on the market which look like these old ones.
[7:09] Now, instead of taking a 
white light and filtering it down to various colors,
[7:14] each light produces its own wavelength, 
which leads not only to oversaturated colors
[7:19] but especially in the case of multicolored 
light sets like this, which have blues and greens,
[7:24] overly bright colors which overwhelm the rest 
and result in a garish blue-green color palette, which,
[7:31] while admittedly a matter of taste, 
I find to be the exact opposite of warm and inviting.
[7:37] It's Christmastime, not the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance.
[7:43] Now, the really frustrating thing here 
is that the solution to this problem is obvious!
[7:48] Do what everyone already does with regular old light bulbs and make old-fashioned looking things using modern technology.
[7:58] Produce Christmas lights with warm white diodes 
that then have a color filter over them
[8:03] like we used to have to do with incandescent lights.
[8:07] For years, I was making YouTube videos where I would buy cheap warm white LED sets of Christmas lights
[8:13] and color them by hand 
with various materials to demonstrate that
[8:17] A) this could be done and 
2) it works reasonably well.
[8:22] I was never completely happy 
with any of my various experiments,
[8:26] but this was just a silly thing I did every year to hopefully prove a point and inspire someone with an R&D budget to take action.
[8:34] And as many of you know, this is finally starting to happen.
[8:37] A few years ago, I learned about Tru-Tone bulbs, the passion project of a designer who had the exact same bugbear as me,
[8:45] but who actually bothered to do something about it.
[8:48] True Tone started out 
making LED C7 and C9 light bulbs
[8:53] which actually looked
 exactly like the incandescent bulbs they replaced.
[8:57] And they are truly great products 
which I can personally vouch for.
[9:01] I love them.
[9:03] But they weren't making mini lights... yet,
[9:07] so I just kept making the same video year after year.
[9:11] Then last year, my friend Dan 
let me know about Vintaglow lights,
[9:15] and these were almost perfectly argeted at me specifically.
[9:19] This is my preferred color combo 
of red, yellow, green, and blue,
[9:23] and they executed the idea much better than any of my experiments could.
[9:28] I did have a few nitpicks, but well...
[9:34] those have all been taken care of.
[9:35] This is a set of generation 2 Vintaglows,
[9:39] and they are a near spot-on perfect match 
to the incandescent light sets of my youth.
[9:46] Also of note, for those of you who would prefer the more 
traditional five color combo, that's now an option.
[9:52] Now, I do want to point out that in a dozen sets of my Gen 1 Vintaglows, I did find one where a strand lost a section.
[10:00] I'm sure it's fixable, and each set included some spare bulbs, 
but it's probably going to be annoying to fix,
[10:06] and I haven't gotten around to it right yet.
[10:08] I might do that for Connextras but it'll be a couple of weeks.
[10:11] But since so many of you know 
about my Christmas light opinions,
[10:15] I tend to be alerted to the existence 
of new options on the market.
[10:19] And this year there were 
a couple of developments worth sharing.
[10:23] This puts me in a bit of an odd spot because I very much want Tru-Tone and the Vintaglow line from Merry Co to succeed as businesses.
[10:32] But both of them are carving out a very specific niche
[10:36] and that makes their products relatively unattainable both from a cost perspective and simply where to get your hands on them.
[10:44] I've had correspondence with both founders now and have learned some very interesting things about the Christmas light industry.
[10:52] It's clear that the actual creative direction which is producing these better lights is coming from them.
[11:00] The biggest problem with Christmas lights today is that nobody at the big box stores who is in charge of ordering them for the year
[11:08] really cares that much and simply takes whatever options the overseas factories that barf them out present to them that year.
[11:17] But Tru-Tone and Merry Co are quite a lot more persnickety,
[11:21] so I want to make sure they get the credit for sparking much of what has happened and I'm sure will happen in the future.
[11:28] But I also get the sense that both of them will 
feel a sense of accomplishment
[11:32] if the broader Christmas light market gets a little less...
intense and a little more warm and festive. \So with that,  
[11:39] So with that, let's look at this copycat.
[11:43] I was a little too late, as you might have been able to tell, 
getting this video started so I had to drive to a
[11:48] pretty far away Target to get these and the only option 
were these net lights rather than simple strings.
[11:55] But there now exists a Sylvania-branded 
"Traditional Glow" set of Christmas lights which are...
[12:01] pretty good!
[12:03] These appear to actually be made of glass,
[12:05] so this is pretty much the best way to create traditional looking mini-lights with LEDs rather than filaments.
[12:13] But the green...
[12:16] the green's not great.
[12:18] It's more like a jade or forest green 
than the emerald green I'm used to in Christmas lights.
[12:24] Honestly though, that's really the only problematic color.
[12:28] This is not my favorite color combo, 
in fact, it's my least favorite,
[12:33] but it's a very standard one 
and I think most people buying these will be happy.
[12:38] And it's a good sign that these are sold out already while there are plenty of other options still available in the store.
[12:45] So perhaps signals will get to the appropriate people 
in charge of ordering Christmas lights for next year.
[12:51] And speaking of sold out copycats, I was also alerted to this vintage option for sale at the Home Depot this year,
[12:58] which is, as far as I know, 
the first copycat of Tru-Tone's Jewel Tone lights.
[13:05] Now, this is as good a look as you're going to get.
[13:07] I would have absolutely bought a set to compare them, 
but again, they were sold out throughout my area.
[13:13] Which I will take as a very good sign.
[13:16] People know this looks better, 
but haven't been able to get them until quite recently.
[13:22] But while these are at least getting the concept correct, the quality of the color coating doesn't look that great.
[13:30] The blue is extremely faded.
[13:33] That might as well be a cool white.
[13:36] Now, it's possible that it was a darker blue 
when this display was first switched on,
[13:41] but if the color was able to fade 
that much in an indoor display, that doesn't bode well.
[13:48] For comparison, this set of Tru-Tone Jewel Tone lights 
was outdoors for two seasons, and they still look great.
[13:55] And now, a small diversion on nomenclature.
[13:59] Of course I checked out my mostly Midwestern mega merchandise mecca, Menards, to see what they might have in store.
[14:05] And I have one positive thing to say, 
along with several very negative things to say.
[14:11] I got excited by the packaging,
[14:13] which had been revised for 2025 and which was 
touting "classic incandescent glow,"
[14:18] but that was just pure lies.
[14:21] This is the same product I got my hands on last year, though I can't remember if there was a twinkling option or not.
[14:27] I checked the steady version and it had identical colors and their clear colored C7s and C9s are just as horrendous as before.
[14:34] So, whoever your supplier is isn't getting the memo.
[14:41] Or else you haven't figured out how to write that memo yet.
[14:44] So, what's my positive thing to say?
[14:47] Well, Menards is rolling out the term 
"vivid" for some of their other multicolor options.
[14:53] And I think they might have stumbled upon a great way to distinguish between monochromatic LED Christmas lights
[14:59] for you freaks which like that for some reason
[15:01] and the more pleasant vintage versions I'm yearning for.
[15:06] They need to actually get their vintage line 
to look decent before I can really give them credit.
[15:12] But I think vivid versus vintage is a good distinction.
[15:16] Though I also think the "traditional glow" works well.
[15:21] I'm starting to think a big issue with modern lighting
[15:24] is that many people simply don't have 
very broad vocabularies to describe the qualities of light.
[15:31] So, while they can describe something 
as looking off or harsh or unpleasant,
[15:36] it can be difficult to communicate the specific reasons.
[15:39] A simple distinction like 
"vivid" and "vintage" might be just the trick!
[15:44] And now, a second diversion on color combinations.
[15:48] For this video, I checked out a different 
mostly Midwestern mega merchandise mecca,
[15:53] Meijer.
[15:54] For those who aren't familiar with Meijer, 
which is probably most of you,
[15:58] it's essentially Walmart 
but run out of Michigan by a different family.
[16:02] Now, they didn't have anything really notable except they are still selling incandescent twinkling light sets -
[16:09] branded as Phillips, oddly enough.
[16:12] my first Christmas light video was about these things and I love them a lot, so I was happy to see them for sale.
[16:18] And bought some, many more than two of them.
[16:22] But then I discovered that the 
Philips-branded multicolored sets for sale at Meijer
[16:27] were a color combo 
I haven't seen in the wild since I was a little kid.
[16:32] Red, yellow, green, blue, and purple -
[16:36] though you might call it magenta.
[16:39] This is the color combination of my grandparents' Christmas tree, and it hit me right in the nostalgia.
[16:46] And it also made me realize something.
[16:48] In the past, I have said I want none of those purples or pinks.
[16:53] But that's not strictly true.
[16:56] I am actually completely cool with there being a fifth color so long as it's distinct from the rest.
[17:03] That's why I don't like these sets with red, orange, and pink.
[17:08] Those three colors are simply too similar, and it means you end up with what blurs into an orangey red mess
[17:15] with scant pops of blue and green.
[17:18] This combo swaps orange 
for a bright yellow, which actually stands out from red.
[17:23] And rather than a pink, which is simply a lighter red, 
it has a true magenta between red and blue.
[17:30] So, it also stands out as a separate color.
[17:34] Here's a comparison between the more intense 
purple here and the paler pink of a more typical set.
[17:40] I realize most of what I'm doing here is rationalizing a subjective opinion,
[17:45] but I really do think it's important to have very 
distinct colors to make a pleasing combination.
[17:52] I like the red, yellow, blue, green combo 
because each color stands apart from the rest.
[17:58] But the much more common red, orange, pink, blue, green has three warm colors which all just smear together.
[18:05] This five color combo with yellow rather 
than orange and purple rather than pink
[18:10] manages to have five colors 
which are all very distinct from one another
[18:15] and so the addition of that purple doesn't bother me.
[18:18] In fact, I like it!
[18:21] And since the multicolored twinkling sets also have that combo,
[18:25] well, you know, I bought a bunch.
[18:27] I put them in my tree this year, though, 
I will be honest, it might be just a bit much.
[18:34] There is a thin line between 
Christmas cheer and tacky, and this is right up against it.
[18:41] I'll see how my opinion changes 
once I get the ornaments on there.
[18:45] So, there's really not a whole lot more to this video, 
but I want to circle back to Tru-Tone and Vintaglow.
[18:51] If you're after the sorts of Christmas lights that I am, 
I would strongly encourage supporting their efforts directly.
[18:58] I know the folks at these companies are the reason the situation is starting to improve,
[19:04] and they're even more persnickety than I am.
[19:07] I've purchased products from both companies 
and have been extremely happy with them.
[19:12] Links to their store pages are in the description, 
though my tardiness means a lot of stuff is already sold out.
[19:18] I'm not a very good Christmas lights influencer,
[19:21] but I am apparently enough of a Christmas lights influencer to get the inside scoop on some new products they have in the pipeline.
[19:30] However, once again, I'm in a bit of an awkward spot 
because True Tone and Mary Co are competitors.
[19:37] I like what both of them are doing,
[19:39] and since Merry Co focuses primarily on mini lights
while Tru-Tone focuses primarily on C7s and C9s,
[19:47] I feel like they complement each other quite well
and you will not catch me picking favorites.
[19:53] So, I will just say they both have some really cool new stuff coming which I am excited to see.
[20:00] And if you've been afflicted with Christmas light issues similar to mine,
[20:04] or perhaps even ones I don't have, such as a sensitivity to flicker,
[20:09] I think it would be worth signing up for their newsletters.
[20:12] They really are the epicenter of good nostalgic Christmas light innovation and are actually getting it done.
[20:19] So kudos to everyone at both companies.
[20:23] But I will take it as good news that other brands and stores are finally starting to get it.
[20:29] Slowly but surely.
[20:32] People genuinely want Christmas lights that look like this!
[20:36] But you have to make it clear that it's something special 
and you have to have it on display and actually lit.
[20:42] So many people have sent me hopeful things 
to investigate which turn out to be disappointments.
[20:49] You can't just put the word vintage on the 
packaging and hope that'll work, Menards.
[20:54] People can see what's wrong with modern Christmas lights, 
but they might not have the best words to describe it.
[21:01] If some actual effort is put into creating 
a best of both worlds product, people will buy it.
[21:08] But it has to be real effort.
[21:11] These Sylvania lights are close, 
but there's a good distance to go.
[21:16] And their white strands, while solidly above average, 
are still using quite cheap diodes.
[21:22] This white is too pink and color rendering is poor.
[21:26] Vintaglow proved last year that you can source 
these tiny little diodes with excellent light output.
[21:32] Genuinely, their clear mini lights are incredibly good and nearly indistinguishable from incandescent.
[21:38] But it takes a lot of work to keep overseas suppliers from cheapening out just a little too much...
[21:44] and the big box stores don't seem too inclined to do that work.
[21:48] And now I'm going to finish this video up
[21:51] with an unscripted section where I talk about some of my other LED-related complaints.
[21:56] I've written down a list of things to cover, and here we go:
[21:59] We'll start with a call back.
[22:02] "You people need to start 
caring about lighting more than you do!"
[22:05] I meant two things by that.
[22:08] First, we are now in a place where LEDs are so good and so efficient 
and so cheap
[22:13] (as well as cheap to operate)
[22:15] that overlighting your environment is very easy to do.
[22:20] One of the reasons I don't like modern 
Christmas light displays is because they're just too bright.
[22:27] No lights like this are very bright at all 
because these are bare filaments you are staring directly at.
[22:35] This is supposed to be in your line of sight.
[22:37] So, the thing you're looking at needs to be very dull. 
Otherwise, it's going to strain your eyes.
[22:43] And a lot of modern Christmas 
light installations are horribly bright.
[22:48] I got caught off guard by someone who decorated way before Thanksgiving on my drive home and, geez,
[22:54] it was like they had a billboard in their front yard.
[22:56] That's not good!
[22:57] But it's not just Christmas lights.
[23:00] One thing that has also happened is I think LEDs have changed standards people have for lighting in a largely bad way.
[23:09] I've talked about this before when I 
made my video on switched outlets -
[23:14] we are now very used to having central 
overhead lighting which is extremely bright.
[23:20] And that means a lot of people these days will look at more traditional lighting environments where you have things like
[23:26] table lamps and task lighting and 
complain that there's not enough light.
[23:33] Whereas what I think is really the case is 
you've gotten used to very cheap and bad lighting.
[23:40] I challenge you to figure out the difference between a single overhead saucer light and a bare light bulb hanging on a string.
[23:48] It's not actually that different.
[23:50] The saucer light is probably a little more aesthetically pleasing,
[23:53] but the pattern of light that it shines in the 
room is almost identical to a single light socket on the ceiling.
[24:00] And I think you would agree that's not good enough.
[24:04] But because LEDs are now so bright, you can have enough light to see in the room with a single point of light.
[24:11] And, uh, I honestly think people are 
just getting used to that, even though it's bad.
[24:17] It's really bad.
[24:18] One thing I've seen a lot of people complain about is hotel rooms because hotel rooms generally don't have overhead lighting -
[24:25] and they might have a light by the entrance 
to the room and then lamps throughout the room.
[24:30] I think that is actually a much more pleasant environment.
[24:33] But again, when you're used to having a single overhead light that illuminates the entire room from the center,
[24:40] oh well,
[24:41] then the room can look underlit.
[24:44] But I would challenge you to change your mindset to ask,
[24:47] "Well, what actually needs to be lit?"
[24:50] Here's a great example:
[24:51] I changed the light fixture above my dining room table to this.
[24:55] Not only because it's 
mid-century modern in a way that I very much like,
[24:59] but these light fixtures only direct light down.
[25:03] The previous light fixture had the bulbs able to shine in all directions, which meant the room was very, very bright,
[25:11] but it also meant I was 
looking at light bulbs when sitting at the table.
[25:16] This fixture, by directing light only down 
at the table, creates a very moody environment.
[25:22] There's almost no light 
hitting the walls at all, unless I turn on my accent lights.
[25:26] That's the sort of stuff I would really encourage 
more people to be cognizant of and to play with.
[25:33] Lighting impacts your environment so much,
[25:36] but if all you want is enough light to see, you're probably going to end up with environments that are very harsh and very overlit.
[25:46] But continuing on that train of thought,
[25:48] there is a weird twist which I think has happened 
as we have made daylight balanced lighting available.
[25:54] I no longer get that hung up on people who claim to prefer daylight balanced 
lighting -
[25:59] I still say "claimed to" because of what I'm about to say -
[26:02] But I am increasingly convinced 
that the people who prefer daylight lighting
[26:08] (in some contexts - I'm not going to say you can't prefer it)
[26:11] but I'm increasingly convinced that a lot of that is 
because if you have had an underlit environment before,
[26:18] like for example, you lived in a house which had a single boob light in the center with two 60W bulbs in there,
[26:25] then the only thing you have experienced with 
warmer lighting is badly lit and underlit environments
[26:33] and if you swap those warm lights 
for daylight balanced light your visual acuity will go up.
[26:39] So I think something that has happened 
is there's an some combination of un -
[26:45] I don't want to say unawareness but poor awareness of the virtues of task lighting and directed lighting
[26:52] and having more sources of lighting 
in your home than just a single overhead light
[26:56] and not recognizing that it's not the color temperature 
that makes that environment look underlit,
[27:03] it's the fact that there isn't enough light in enough places.
[27:06] What I'm trying to say here is that 
LED lighting technology has freed up a lot of new ideas,
[27:13] but it has ended up changing our expectations 
in what I would say is a bad way.
[27:18] One of the things that we still have is wattage equivalents.
[27:22] We still look at light bulbs and say 
that's a 60 watt equivalent or a 100 watt equivalent.
[27:26] And that's because it was, in the incandescent days, a fairly consistent amount of light output per watt.
[27:34] And now that LEDs have broken way beyond that level of brightness,
[27:39] I think it's just quite easy for us to expect 
brighter lights in the same location
[27:45] rather than expecting more lights spread out to have a more pleasant environment which is more evenly lit.
[27:53] I'll just put it like that.
[27:54] How am I doing for an unscripted section?
[27:56] I'll tell you, I don't think I'm doing pretty great because my next thing is a thing I already talked about.
[28:00] But to reiterate I guess
[28:03] I really feel like people these days 
are less interested in replicating certain kinds of lighting,
[28:08] like using additional lamps or directional light.
[28:12] And this has resulted in a lot of overlit environments, 
which is changing people's idea of what enough light is.
[28:20] One example, there's a house that I drove by that was built in the last couple years and they've got some exterior eaves lighting,
[28:27] like uh basically can lights in the eaves and my god,
[28:32] they are just way too bright!
[28:34] There's way too much light being fired 
out of these eaves of this house and it looks horrendous.
[28:39] It does not look good.
[28:41] But I really think more and more people are just expecting cannons of light now that the LED can do that for us.
[28:50] But maybe we shouldn't.
[28:52] And for another great example of 
just because you can doesn't mean you should,
[28:56] if you haven't already run across these, there are now really convincing LED alternatives to neon tubes.
[29:03] And I'm talking like traditional 
neon signs made of bent glass tubes.
[29:07] I'm a little sad for what that's doing to the neon industry,
[29:09] but it's a lot easier to work with 
and you don't have to deal with blowing glass, etc.
[29:15] However, so many of these products, while they look great,
[29:18] are way too bright!
[29:21] It's as if nobody who makes them 
has ever seen an actual neon sign.
[29:26] And the trouble with making it brighter is that, especially when you think of something like a neon sign,
[29:31] the contrast is against a dark background, the night sky.
[29:36] And if you have something with an ornate shape 
which is being illuminated, if it's too bright, you can't read it.
[29:44] There's a lot of new Christmas decorations that are coming out that have that sort of LED neon look to 
them.
[29:50] And the thing is, they're so freaking bright that if you have them outside, you're never going to be able to tell what that is.
[29:57] Like, uh, I've seen a Santa head, which is just going to look like a red and white blob from any reasonable difference*
[30:03] They only look correctly 
illuminated in already very bright environments.
[30:09] So, this is what I mean about the LED is great 
because it means we can make really bright lights  
[30:14] in really small spaces, 
but it's so easy to go overboard.
[30:18] And I wish more people were thinking about that as a possibility.
[30:23] And for my last LED hot take,
[30:25] this is something that is more vibes based than anything else, 
but I wanted to bring it up.
[30:30] I truly believe that when you have too much 
freedom in design, this can be a bad thing.
[30:36] One of the things that the LED is letting us do now
[30:39] is create these incredibly interesting light fixtures and whole new kinds of light fixtures which are very cool.
[30:45] But when you have that completely unlimited freedom,
[30:49] sometimes you end up making 
a lot of stuff that looks cool but isn't very functional.
[30:53] Whereas on the other hand, when we used to have to design around standardized light bulbs,
[30:59] that led to a lot of really interesting creations.
[31:02] And so in a sense, I am truly bummed by what the LED has done because it's now so cheap, so easy, and so reliable
[31:11] (for the most part)
[31:12] that we have made some really visually interesting things that just don't actually work that well as light fixtures.
[31:22] And uh I've had this thing going on where I feel like a lot of sectors of the economy and industries etc.
[31:29] are losing their sense of purpose.
[31:32] And I think that the LED is a great example of that where now that we have brighter, faster, cheaper, stronger,
[31:38] we just do that rather than thinking about what would actually be a really good application for this technology.
[31:44] And thus explains why it's taken 10 years for 
someone to do this at a mass market scale.
[31:56] Yeah.
[31:57] Okay. Well, that's the end.
[32:00] I didn't write anything for the outro either,
[32:02] so hopefully uh the music is fading pretty well.
[32:05] I think we're going to do that jazzy 
We Wish You a Merry Christmas I typically do on these videos.
[32:10] And I guess the only thing left to do is to cut the black.
[32:13] ♫ a jazz version of We Wish You a Merry Christmas ♫
[32:19] just like I promised!
[32:20] ...and string it - shove it more appropriately.
[32:24] [laughs]
[32:26] ...better, so long as you remember to start wrapping at the female end,
[32:31] then they become a nice and functional spool...
[32:35] And you'll notice on this one, 
I did not remember to start at the female end.
[32:40] [angry sigh] Or did I?
[32:43] No, I did. I just got tangled up.
[32:45] Wait, did I?
[32:48] No, I did not. Darn it.
[32:50] Here, watch watch me do it again because last year me made a boo boo.
[32:58] Which is why I am being very...
[33:02] ...I did - I did this on several of these and that is why I am making sure I point out start with the female end
[33:09] or you will regret it.
[33:11] They glow with a bright white light.
[33:16] That doesn't work
[33:17] [laughs]
[33:18] which caused those filaments to get so incredibly hot they glew with a bright white light.
[33:25] Glew? Heh.
[33:28] So here's a fun fact:
[33:31] I wrote this end-of-video captions gag in the middle of Kansas.
[33:34] Just passed a billboard 
advertising an "Old Fashion (sic) Soda Fountain"
[33:38] This isn't what you were expecting for an end-of-video captions gag, huh?
[33:42] Well, me neither.
[33:44] Merry Christmas!