It's Saturday Night, and you're headed to a concert. It's the same one every week, same bat-time, same bat-channel. You're not alone; you've got plenty of other people who will join you. You're in your pajamas, and most of them are too. But the best part? You don't even have to leave your house.

What I'm describing is a reality for some, and occasionally that includes me. A place online recaptures what it felt like to be a kid in the 90s and early 2000s. A time when only the rich had a TiVo, and on-demand was a foreign concept.

The place in question is Toonami Aftermath. A 24/7 live TV Station in the aether of the internet, serving up heaping scoops of nostalgia to people like me. You can check its schedule to see if something you like is coming up. Multiple channels replicate the feel of that era with East and West Coast streams for Toonami and Nickelodeon. The schedules even separate the "daytime" and "evening" blocks with Nick Jr. during the Morning and early Afternoon, followed by the traditional daytime Nick schedule, and finally shifting to Nick @ Nite… at night.

But beyond the children's cartoons and the action-packed anime of Toonami are the Movie and Music Channels. There's a channel for Anime and Toonami Music, and another channel that replicates MTV and VH1's constant flow of Music Videos. The most impactful for me, however, has been the "Movies" channel. The movies one is the most unpredictable because you really don't know what you're going to get.

The Movies channel is running a constant stream of films of all genres and no discernible pattern. One minute you're at the climax of Natural Born Killers, and the next you're weeping for Anthony Hopkins while watching Remains of the Day. The dramas have been the real surprises; Jane Eyre (with William Hurt) and Little Women (with Winona Ryder) were both standouts with phenomenal stories and productions. They also gave a dose of nostalgia to the times my mother would watch period dramas while I was on the computer. I can't tell you how many times and how many versions of Pride and Prejudice I've seen growing up. Though my exposure to the stories did give me quite a chuckle in high school when my junior-year English teacher was literally named Mr. Bingley.

The exception to the rule is the concert I mentioned at the start, Interstella 5555. It happens every Saturday Night on the Movies channel, and most viewers will hop over and type along in chat to the songs. They often share their experiences as Daft Punk fans, or tell stories of how they first came to know about the film. For me, it takes me back 25 years to August 31, 2001, when Toonami aired the first three tracks from Daft Punk's Discovery and debuted "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" to the world. All the Daft Punk tracks were interspersed with tracks from the debut Gorillaz Album. I'd heard "One More Time" on the radio, and Devin mentioned that the Music video was a "cartoon". So, the pair of us stayed up late and watched the "Midnight Run" broadcast on our old faux wood-paneled GE TV from the 80s. We didn't know what to expect just eleven days later.

So why would someone actively choose to go to this place? The answer is simple, but effective: to take away choice. Rather ironic given my previous sentence. Choosing to give up choice is in itself a choice, but it isn't a loss; in fact, I'm reclaiming something in its stead. For decades, there were fewer channels, and the odds that you were watching or listening to the same thing as your neighbor or friend were very high. Nobody organized that. The schedule did it to everyone at once, whether they wanted it or not. Call it involuntary simultaneity. Shared experiences across borders, between boroughs, and across party lines. Some folks call it "Appointment Television," where the same night, the same time, thousands were watching the same thing. This is what has been lost in our "On Demand" culture. What was originally a limitation of the technology and the medium is now something you have to actively recreate. By no means am I arguing for the scarcity and constraints we once had when it comes to channel access; I am, however, arguing that the byproducts of that constraint are what we're missing today.

We have some replacements, shallow they may be. We have Twitch streamers with varied "engagement" strategies, and countless people who watch along. That is real simultaneity. Thousands of people are inside the same minute, reacting to the same thing as it happens. What's different is how they got there. Every one of them went looking. You find a streamer because you already like the game, or the bit, or the person. Broadcast sat you next to people who shared none of your taste and had no vote in the matter. While it may happen on occasion that a coworker also watches a certain streamer, it doesn't hit the same way as a shared experience over a TV show you discuss at the watercooler. And with television, many people now watch the day-after broadcast via streaming services or on demand. The simultaneity is diminished, and the connections are weaker as a result.

Call it nostalgia, or wistfulness; I do mourn the loss of the old ways, where you had to set your VCR to record That '70s Show because you had a T-Ball game and you weren't going to be home for the broadcast. I mourn the loss of the countless real radio DJs that would curate the music and cue it up with a clever turn of phrase. The warmth and the human quality of entertainment.

Today we're given all the choices, and many of us spend more time searching for what to watch than actually watching it. And though the phrase is tried and true, we all still end up "judging a book by its cover," which is an added dimension of manipulation considering that the icons and cover images for shows can be wildly different based on your algorithm. We self-curate the content we consume, which just feeds into the echo chamber of what we like and what we watch. That wouldn't be such a bad thing if it weren't for the fact that we lose the magic of finding something that we otherwise would have never watched.

I'm choosing not to choose, sometimes. For the last 15 years, I've been chasing that dream of recreating the way we used to do things. It started with Toonami Aftermath, coming home from school and firing up the stream just like I used to do with my television. Instead of the regular DBZ, I would get two episodes of Abridged to laugh along to.

Aftermath runs unlicensed streams of copyrighted programming, and it survives because no rights holder has decided that a takedown is worth the trouble. It could be gone next year. It's also the only place I know of where people went back and restored the bumpers, the promos, and the old commercials that the networks themselves never bothered to keep. That material was made for a schedule, which is why on-demand has no version of it.

If you're dubious about watching copyrighted content, then check out Pluto TV, go onto the Channel Guide, and surf. For music, well, I've got my Baofeng, but if you're lucky enough to have a radio or phone with an FM tuner, fire it up, listen to the airwaves. Be surprised by what gets played. Check out the KEXP app, and listen to a live broadcast with a warm body calling the shots and playing the songs that move THEM. I never would have found the heartbreaking drama of Anthony Hopkins in Remains of the Day, or the intense moral dilemma between Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in Crimson Tide if I hadn't let go and opened myself up to what was there. Losing the reins and letting something— and someone else take the lead.