6 ms·

On a lighter note, I had a good chuckle when the article mentioned that the director deliberately avoided depiction of cellphones to avoid creating an unintenti

by Laforet 10y ago

On a lighter note, I had a good chuckle when the article mentioned that the director deliberately avoided depiction of cellphones to avoid creating an unintentional period piece[0]. The last movie I watched in the treatre is Clint Eastwood's "Sully" and I distinctly remember the main character using a chronologically appropoaite Samsung flip phone and that single prop instantly dates the movie to the first decade of the 20th century. Just as much as Pulp Fiction is locked in the early 90s with Vincent Vega pulling the antenna out of his Motorola brick phone in one exaggerated motion, albeit these choices are probably intentional. Some long running manga series take another approach by quietly giving its cast the latest gear despite the timeline moving at a much slower pace.[1] It works until you start revisiting the earlier episodes and get reminded of how old the series really is with its depiction of personal electronics. [0]: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnintentionalPeriodPiece http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnintentionalPeri... [1]: http://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/77/how-much-time-has-passed-in-universe-in-detective-conan http://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/77/how-much-time-ha...

lobster_johnson 10y ago
Conversely, in William Gibson's Neuromancer, there are no cell phones, despite being set decades into the future. Gibson knows a thing or two about seeing their scifi becoming dated, of course. The famous opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so (although for a number of years, many digital TVs would display blue for missing input). There's also some fun stuff about people physically carrying information (this also happens in short story "Johnny Mnemonic"). For a world where there's a highly connected, super fast worldwide computer network available, people sure travel around a lot.
- ronilan 10y ago
  > although for a number of years, many digital TVs would display blue for missing input I'm sure you are aware that "the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" is not blue - right? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZAMjpjYfQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZAMjpjYfQ
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    Of course. My point was that for a brief period of time, you could give Gibson the benefit of an accidental retcon; "ah, so the sky was a dark shade of blue, that works". As opposed to "uh, NO INPUT?".
  - RandomOpinion 10y ago
    Given that he spent the entire paragraph talking about how younger people wouldn't know what that passage refers to, presumably yes, he does.
- xor1 10y ago
  >There's also some fun stuff about people physically carrying information (this also happens in short story "Johnny Mnemonic"). For a world where there's a highly connected, super fast worldwide computer network available, people sure travel around a lot. Sneakernet isn't an irrelevant concept in any sort of context where data transferred through a computer network can be intercepted.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    But carrying a concealed micro-sd card with encrypted data would be a lot more convenient. Heck, you could fit many times as much data as in Johnny Mnemonic (40GB, I think?) inside your head too by shoving a micro-sd card up your nose or into your ear.
    - walrus01 10y ago
      Nose, ear, really? On a more realistic note, what is the maximum microsdxc card capacity of a human rectum?
      - labster 10y ago
        A metric buttload.
      - pravda 10y ago
        Believe it or not, that's a thing, and it's called 'keistering'! Apparently, pro's can get a cellphone 'keistered'. But I think the flip-phone style, not an iPhone. As far as microsd cards -- I think you'd be able to 'keister' many many terabytes. They are so tiny and so thin, I'd guess hundreds would fit.
        throwanem 10y ago
        There's a difference between "fit" and "fit without making it impossible to walk normally". And really, you'd want some sort of carrier for the cards, because otherwise they're likely to be lost or damaged. So it becomes a fairly complex question of the optimal balance among total carrier volume, gait effects, and maximizing internal volume of the carrier without thinning the walls so much they're likely to crumple. (Metal walls might serve, but then we're back to gait effects. Not comfortable.) And once the carrier design is in hand, there arises the question of how to maximize its bandwidth, which is itself a rather nontrivial packing problem.
- duskwuff 10y ago
  "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." -- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. (In an intentional homage to Neuromancer.) On another tangent: Gibson wrote, in an afterword in an early-1990s digital edition of Neuromancer, that he had never owned, nor even used, a computer until some years after he wrote the book. He noted that: > Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they're about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they're actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer.
- tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
  > "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so when reading that my mind conjures a gray sky, but then again when I was young TVs displayed static if you turned them to a dead channel, not solid blue...
  - doomtop 10y ago
    I believe gray sky is the intended image.
  - c22 10y ago
    I own a 60" television with no TV tuner attached to a smattering of devices that play and stream digital content. I suspect when my 1 year old is an adult she won't even have a solid conception of a "channel" let alone be able to imagine the color of a "dead" one.
    - stephancoral 10y ago
      The grey of a dead OTA channel and the grey of a missing / removed YouTube video aren't too dissimilar
      - icebraining 10y ago
        That's because YouTube mimics the TV static in their player.
- cwp 10y ago
  Probably the worst (best) bit of future-past in Neuromancer is that it starts with the main character trying to fence "three megabytes of hot RAM". That seemed like a ludicrously large amount when it was written.
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    I think we can give Gibson the benefit of the doubt here and say the point was not the size, but the fact that it was hot RAM -- the contents was valuable. The price of 3MB, even as early as in 1984, was not so high as to make it that impressive even by the standards of the day.
    - mortenjorck 10y ago
      Ha, I never considered that. It would fit with the data-smuggling theme of Johnny Mnemonic (the short story, at least), which is set in the same universe.
    - SamReidHughes 10y ago
      Hey, 3 megs of RAM is nothing to sneeze at: http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP48-2MB-RAM-memory-card-for-HP48GX-SRAM-card-/252456869804 http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP48-2MB-RAM-memory-card-for-HP48GX-...
    - Lio 10y ago
      I always thought it was a prototype of some very, very fast cache RAM. I think I like your idea of hot RAM containing data better now.
- bboreham 10y ago
  > fun stuff about people physically carrying information This is a thing, though. https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ Or if you have 100PB: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
- Lio 10y ago
  I wonder what these people who don't know what a TV tuned to a dead channel looks like make of the HBO intro.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    Especially after it's been encoded poorly, as static is a worst case scenario for video codecs.
- unimpressive 10y ago
  I was born in the last twenty years and understood the sentence just fine when I read it. Interestingly enough, youtube does static when your connection times out. (Though I grew up with CRT televison as a kid and definitely remember TV static. I also played a lot of classic video game consoles because my dad was a thrift store hound.)
  - usrusr 10y ago
    Just like we do have an idea about how steam engines look and feel, but the mental image painted by words referring to one will be very different for those who only know steam engines from the Hogwarts Express, compared to those who actually stood close to one fully heated up and regulating pressure by bleed valve, turning half the station into a sauna. Firmly establishing in those opening lines not only the future setting of Neuromancer but also the era of analog electronics it was written in will be of great benefit to future readers.
numbsafari 10y ago
The first season of Law & Order is delightfully full of these sorts of anachronisms. My favorite is when they bum quarters off passerersby to make a call on a pay phone. This horrible plot device, the phone call, is so entrenched in their writing, they've brought it fully up to date in SVU with everyone carrying iPhones.
- hsitz 10y ago
  The pay phone definitely reveals you're dealing with an old Law & Order episode. But it's not an anachronism. Law & Order doesn't purport to display a period of time different from the one in which it was made. When you watch a 1990's Law & Order you see the world as it was in the 1990's. For it to show a scene where someone bums quarters for a pay phone is no more anachronistic than it would be for a film/tv-show depicting a scene from the 1890's to show people riding around in a horse and buggy. Much different when you're watching a 1990's film that purports to display life in 2020, 2050, or 2100. Then the use of 1990's technology in the film is a true anachronism.
  - slededit 10y ago
    Law & Order purposely based its stories on topics of the day. It was a show meant to be watched in its time. Future watchers won't get the same experience out of it. That said I still enjoy the older episodes. It's like looking back in time.
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      That's called nostalgia. But it isn't as good as it used to be in the 1990's.
scott_karana 10y ago
FYI, you mean 21st century: the 20th century is the 1900s :)
- dghughes 10y ago
  That's back when flip phones filled an entire room.
huehehue 10y ago
Reminds me of "It Follows". David Robert Mitchell made some pretty interesting prop choices specifically to avoid dating the movie. From his AV Club interview: > There are production design elements from the ’50s on up to modern day. [...] if you show a specific smartphone now, it dates it. It’s too real for the movie. It would bother me anyway. So we made one up. And all of that is really just to create the effect of a dream—to place it outside of time, and to make people wonder about where they are.
- trevyn 10y ago
  Great reference. The shellphone is one of my favorite parts of that movie.
- jbigelow76 10y ago
  If you're going to make up a faux smart phone to prevent people from pegging it to a specific time frame you may as well say your props people some time and use a Windows phone.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
amiramir 10y ago
Blade Runner's production design is beautiful and almost prefectly timeless in its depiction of a future. The only thing that dates the film for me is the cathode ray tubes. They are even in the flying cars I think. Directors and designers could start using flat blue devices so that interfaces can be re-imagined, in 2-D, or 3-D, and composited in future re-masterings. I like the non-desript tri-fold devices in Westworld. Kudos to the 2001 team for getting imagining tablet interfaces although that did not sway the jury Samsung vs Apple iPad case[1][2]. [1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/23/samsung_cites_science_fiction_as_prior_art_in_us_ipad_patent_case.html http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/23/samsung_cites_scie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electronics_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron....
- geon 10y ago
  If Star Wars has taught us anything, it is that later remastered editions should keep to the original as closely as possible.
- gozur88 10y ago
  I love Blade Runner's design, too. The story goes there was an actor's strike that year, and they couldn't shoot any of the scenes. As a consequence the artists had far more time than usual and made the best of it. It's supposed to take place in 2019.
- usrusr 10y ago
  Flat blue compositing placeholders? The gods of advertisement seem to have anticipated your request: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement#Re-placement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement#Re-placeme...
  - DanBC 10y ago
    For some reason this reminds me of Repo Man's use of blank product labels - everything has a white label with blue writing.
labster 10y ago
Just a reminder to people, All The Tropes is a fork of TV Tropes, but everything is under a free license and has no advertising. TV Tropes uses a nonfree license.[1] The same page is available here: https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Unintentional_Period_Piece https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Unintentional_Period_Piece [1]: At least under Stallman's definition of nonfree: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#CreativeCommonsLicensed https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Creati...
- legulere 10y ago
  Why bring in ideology when you can simply state that TV Tropes is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licensed, while allthetropes is Attribution-ShareAlike licensed?
  - labster 10y ago
    Eh, it was just an interesting article that was featured on HN a few days ago. Mainly it's just one more reason that I'm still upset at TV Tropes for relicensing things I wrote without my consent. They took a lot of things that used to be community property, and decided that they should be the only ones to make money off of it. And they've gotten away with it because none of their users really know copyright law. I guess really, it's because sometimes ideology matters.

by Laforet 10y ago

lobster_johnson 10y ago

Conversely, in William Gibson's Neuromancer, there are no cell phones, despite being set decades into the future. Gibson knows a thing or two about seeing their scifi becoming dated, of course. The famous opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so (although for a number of years, many digital TVs would display blue for missing input). There's also some fun stuff about people physically carrying information (this also happens in short story "Johnny Mnemonic"). For a world where there's a highly connected, super fast worldwide computer network available, people sure travel around a lot.

ronilan 10y ago
> although for a number of years, many digital TVs would display blue for missing input I'm sure you are aware that "the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" is not blue - right? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZAMjpjYfQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZAMjpjYfQ
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Of course. My point was that for a brief period of time, you could give Gibson the benefit of an accidental retcon; "ah, so the sky was a dark shade of blue, that works". As opposed to "uh, NO INPUT?".
- RandomOpinion 10y ago
  Given that he spent the entire paragraph talking about how younger people wouldn't know what that passage refers to, presumably yes, he does.
xor1 10y ago
>There's also some fun stuff about people physically carrying information (this also happens in short story "Johnny Mnemonic"). For a world where there's a highly connected, super fast worldwide computer network available, people sure travel around a lot. Sneakernet isn't an irrelevant concept in any sort of context where data transferred through a computer network can be intercepted.
- vidarh 10y ago
  But carrying a concealed micro-sd card with encrypted data would be a lot more convenient. Heck, you could fit many times as much data as in Johnny Mnemonic (40GB, I think?) inside your head too by shoving a micro-sd card up your nose or into your ear.
  - walrus01 10y ago
    Nose, ear, really? On a more realistic note, what is the maximum microsdxc card capacity of a human rectum?
    - labster 10y ago
      A metric buttload.
    - pravda 10y ago
      Believe it or not, that's a thing, and it's called 'keistering'! Apparently, pro's can get a cellphone 'keistered'. But I think the flip-phone style, not an iPhone. As far as microsd cards -- I think you'd be able to 'keister' many many terabytes. They are so tiny and so thin, I'd guess hundreds would fit.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        There's a difference between "fit" and "fit without making it impossible to walk normally". And really, you'd want some sort of carrier for the cards, because otherwise they're likely to be lost or damaged. So it becomes a fairly complex question of the optimal balance among total carrier volume, gait effects, and maximizing internal volume of the carrier without thinning the walls so much they're likely to crumple. (Metal walls might serve, but then we're back to gait effects. Not comfortable.) And once the carrier design is in hand, there arises the question of how to maximize its bandwidth, which is itself a rather nontrivial packing problem.
duskwuff 10y ago
"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." -- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. (In an intentional homage to Neuromancer.) On another tangent: Gibson wrote, in an afterword in an early-1990s digital edition of Neuromancer, that he had never owned, nor even used, a computer until some years after he wrote the book. He noted that: > Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they're about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they're actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer.
tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
> "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so when reading that my mind conjures a gray sky, but then again when I was young TVs displayed static if you turned them to a dead channel, not solid blue...
- doomtop 10y ago
  I believe gray sky is the intended image.
- c22 10y ago
  I own a 60" television with no TV tuner attached to a smattering of devices that play and stream digital content. I suspect when my 1 year old is an adult she won't even have a solid conception of a "channel" let alone be able to imagine the color of a "dead" one.
  - stephancoral 10y ago
    The grey of a dead OTA channel and the grey of a missing / removed YouTube video aren't too dissimilar
    - icebraining 10y ago
      That's because YouTube mimics the TV static in their player.
cwp 10y ago
Probably the worst (best) bit of future-past in Neuromancer is that it starts with the main character trying to fence "three megabytes of hot RAM". That seemed like a ludicrously large amount when it was written.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  I think we can give Gibson the benefit of the doubt here and say the point was not the size, but the fact that it was hot RAM -- the contents was valuable. The price of 3MB, even as early as in 1984, was not so high as to make it that impressive even by the standards of the day.
  - mortenjorck 10y ago
    Ha, I never considered that. It would fit with the data-smuggling theme of Johnny Mnemonic (the short story, at least), which is set in the same universe.
  - SamReidHughes 10y ago
    Hey, 3 megs of RAM is nothing to sneeze at: http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP48-2MB-RAM-memory-card-for-HP48GX-SRAM-card-/252456869804 http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP48-2MB-RAM-memory-card-for-HP48GX-...
  - Lio 10y ago
    I always thought it was a prototype of some very, very fast cache RAM. I think I like your idea of hot RAM containing data better now.
bboreham 10y ago
> fun stuff about people physically carrying information This is a thing, though. https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ Or if you have 100PB: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
Lio 10y ago
I wonder what these people who don't know what a TV tuned to a dead channel looks like make of the HBO intro.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  Especially after it's been encoded poorly, as static is a worst case scenario for video codecs.
unimpressive 10y ago
I was born in the last twenty years and understood the sentence just fine when I read it. Interestingly enough, youtube does static when your connection times out. (Though I grew up with CRT televison as a kid and definitely remember TV static. I also played a lot of classic video game consoles because my dad was a thrift store hound.)
- usrusr 10y ago
  Just like we do have an idea about how steam engines look and feel, but the mental image painted by words referring to one will be very different for those who only know steam engines from the Hogwarts Express, compared to those who actually stood close to one fully heated up and regulating pressure by bleed valve, turning half the station into a sauna. Firmly establishing in those opening lines not only the future setting of Neuromancer but also the era of analog electronics it was written in will be of great benefit to future readers.

numbsafari 10y ago

The first season of Law & Order is delightfully full of these sorts of anachronisms. My favorite is when they bum quarters off passerersby to make a call on a pay phone. This horrible plot device, the phone call, is so entrenched in their writing, they've brought it fully up to date in SVU with everyone carrying iPhones.

hsitz 10y ago
The pay phone definitely reveals you're dealing with an old Law & Order episode. But it's not an anachronism. Law & Order doesn't purport to display a period of time different from the one in which it was made. When you watch a 1990's Law & Order you see the world as it was in the 1990's. For it to show a scene where someone bums quarters for a pay phone is no more anachronistic than it would be for a film/tv-show depicting a scene from the 1890's to show people riding around in a horse and buggy. Much different when you're watching a 1990's film that purports to display life in 2020, 2050, or 2100. Then the use of 1990's technology in the film is a true anachronism.
- slededit 10y ago
  Law & Order purposely based its stories on topics of the day. It was a show meant to be watched in its time. Future watchers won't get the same experience out of it. That said I still enjoy the older episodes. It's like looking back in time.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    That's called nostalgia. But it isn't as good as it used to be in the 1990's.

scott_karana 10y ago

FYI, you mean 21st century: the 20th century is the 1900s :)

dghughes 10y ago
That's back when flip phones filled an entire room.

huehehue 10y ago

Reminds me of "It Follows". David Robert Mitchell made some pretty interesting prop choices specifically to avoid dating the movie. From his AV Club interview: > There are production design elements from the ’50s on up to modern day. [...] if you show a specific smartphone now, it dates it. It’s too real for the movie. It would bother me anyway. So we made one up. And all of that is really just to create the effect of a dream—to place it outside of time, and to make people wonder about where they are.

trevyn 10y ago
Great reference. The shellphone is one of my favorite parts of that movie.
jbigelow76 10y ago
If you're going to make up a faux smart phone to prevent people from pegging it to a specific time frame you may as well say your props people some time and use a Windows phone.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

amiramir 10y ago

Blade Runner's production design is beautiful and almost prefectly timeless in its depiction of a future. The only thing that dates the film for me is the cathode ray tubes. They are even in the flying cars I think. Directors and designers could start using flat blue devices so that interfaces can be re-imagined, in 2-D, or 3-D, and composited in future re-masterings. I like the non-desript tri-fold devices in Westworld. Kudos to the 2001 team for getting imagining tablet interfaces although that did not sway the jury Samsung vs Apple iPad case[1][2]. [1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/23/samsung_cites_science_fiction_as_prior_art_in_us_ipad_patent_case.html http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/23/samsung_cites_scie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electronics_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron....

geon 10y ago
If Star Wars has taught us anything, it is that later remastered editions should keep to the original as closely as possible.
gozur88 10y ago
I love Blade Runner's design, too. The story goes there was an actor's strike that year, and they couldn't shoot any of the scenes. As a consequence the artists had far more time than usual and made the best of it. It's supposed to take place in 2019.
usrusr 10y ago
Flat blue compositing placeholders? The gods of advertisement seem to have anticipated your request: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement#Re-placement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement#Re-placeme...
- DanBC 10y ago
  For some reason this reminds me of Repo Man's use of blank product labels - everything has a white label with blue writing.

labster 10y ago

Just a reminder to people, All The Tropes is a fork of TV Tropes, but everything is under a free license and has no advertising. TV Tropes uses a nonfree license.[1] The same page is available here: https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Unintentional_Period_Piece https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Unintentional_Period_Piece [1]: At least under Stallman's definition of nonfree: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#CreativeCommonsLicensed https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Creati...

legulere 10y ago
Why bring in ideology when you can simply state that TV Tropes is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licensed, while allthetropes is Attribution-ShareAlike licensed?
- labster 10y ago
  Eh, it was just an interesting article that was featured on HN a few days ago. Mainly it's just one more reason that I'm still upset at TV Tropes for relicensing things I wrote without my consent. They took a lot of things that used to be community property, and decided that they should be the only ones to make money off of it. And they've gotten away with it because none of their users really know copyright law. I guess really, it's because sometimes ideology matters.