> "the tell-tale signature artifact of simulation is not the spiky glitch, it's the smooth, shallow, facile surface"

Notably, this has been true for visual content from the beginning, compare the original "TRON" movie. It had been especially true in times, when smooth gradients and perfect lines had been a luxury, which were hard to achieve in analog media technology, and became the tell-tale signature of computer generated visual content. After an intermezzo in the uncanny valley and with embraceable pixels, we seem to be right back where we started. – It's somewhat logical that what is true for visual content should also be true for textual content.

[Edit] We may add a definition: "Interesting" is the artful deviation from the smooth and perfect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom#Production

hard to achieve as a practical effect, but still cheaper than digital.

Max Headroom is somewhat special, since it's a crossover of digital and video. The later has always been signaled by glitches and artifacts (as in color, unstable vertical and/or horizontal hold, overly expressed scanlines, lately also by exaggerated cushion distortion, etc).

See also the expressed scanlines in the "faked" 80's of the first video in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398456 .

As for exaggerated curvature, surely we've all run across https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term by now?