7 ms·

Definitely an example of the Coconut Effect [1]. If they had consulted a historian versed in swine culture and produced period-accurate pigs it would have been

Definitely an example of the Coconut Effect [1]. If they had consulted a historian versed in swine culture and produced period-accurate pigs it would have been a meme about how weird and alien the pigs look. People don’t care about period accuracy, they care about art that matched their expectations. Suspension of disbelief is the operative word here. Trying to fight against it is tilting at windmills. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect

anyfoo 4y ago
But just like we’ve now come to accept again, through modern productions, that horses’ hooves don’t sound like coconut when running on dirt, we might start accepting that medieval pigs looked different. The question is rather how feasible that is to depict with consistency.
btilly 4y ago
The phrase "tilting at windmills" is an interesting one. It is a reference to Don Quixote attacking windmills because they were giants oppressing the people. Which, today, just seems ridiculous. However the main reason to switch from hand mills to windmills was that it was far easier for the miller to collect taxes when the grain was milled than for tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there. Not only was it more efficient, but lords who forced their peasants to switch often raised taxes simply because it was easy to do so. This was all current events when Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. And therefore his audience would have been expected to understand that windmills truly WERE "giants oppressing the people"! No point. Just fun trivia about how different a modern phrase looks when looked at from the point of view of its history.
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  I love this. Similarly, the expression "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" was originally used ironically or mockingly, as it is physically impossible. Some time in the early 20th century it began to be used as an unironic exhortation.
  - Loughla 4y ago
    I do love these. I wonder if there is a collection of these sayings that have shifted entirely to mean something else. Like "blood is thicker than water" was originally "blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb." The meaning is literally the opposite, but it got co-opted and changed at some point. These things are fascinating.
    - yellowstuff 4y ago
      That seems to be a popular internet myth, but without much evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water
      - Loughla 4y ago
        That might be even better! Now there's no meaning other than what you, individually, choose to attribute to it. I love living languages.
      - Nition 4y ago
        Another one I've seen recently circulating on the Internet is an idea that "The customer is always right" was originally "The customer is always right, in matters of taste". Also not true.
    - scarmig 4y ago
      I wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon. Eggcorns aren't quite right, as they're more about mishearing a word or phrase in a way that still makes sense in context (e.g. Alzheimer's disease -> old-timers' disease). Mondegreens are about mishearing a word or phrase and substituting them for something different. Those are errors in interpreting phonic elements, but there's no misinterpretation of the words for these phrases/idioms; it's just disregarding the meaning entirely and substituting a new meaning.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 4y ago
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Well that's pretty wild, I can now add "windmills were a tax thing" to the pile of random facts I never thought I'd know.
- lupire 4y ago
  Are you sure? If the windmill didn't make milling more efficient, and if hand milling at home was an effective tax dodge, people would avoid using the windmills. And the tax collector coming to the house is just as oppressive as being taxed at the windmill. A quick web search suggests windmills increased grain production by a factor of 5.
- Someone 4y ago
  > However the main reason to switch from hand mills to windmills was that it was far easier for the miller to collect taxes when the grain was milled than for tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there. I think you’re mixing cause (larger windmills are more efficient, making it a win to centralize them) with effect (that makes it easier to tax flour production). If that were the main reason, we would have stories about people clandestinely milling at home. I’m not aware of any. (I also think, but am not sure, milling already was centralized before the introduction of wind power)
  - scarmig 4y ago
    It'd be interesting to see if the initial windmills when introduced were more efficient, post-tax and capex, than traditional methods. There's a parallel with grains: staples like rice and wheat are more legible to states than other alternatives like legumes, tubers, and starch plants, even though the latter were comparable in terms of calories generated by unit labor. E.g. many roots are buried and hidden from tax collectors. States which enforced cultivation of the legible grains had a greater tax base and outcompeted those that didn't.
    - adwn 4y ago
      That's not very convincing. Before the introduction of the potato, there were no below-ground alternatives that were superior to cereals in Europe and Northern Africa. > E.g. many roots are buried and hidden from tax collectors. Those roots tend to be attached to green stuff that's above ground and very visible. Why should that be any less legible to tax collectors than wheat or rice?
      - scarmig 4y ago
        > Those roots tend to be attached to green stuff that's above ground and very visible. Why should that be any less legible to tax collectors than wheat or rice? It's a combination of factors. Cereals like wheat and rice tend to ripen seasonally and simultaneously. They do so visibly, and must be harvested soon after. So a state sends its tax collectors around when the grains are ready to be harvested, and the amount that was generated is immediately visible. They also keep well: tubers go bad relatively quickly (and can be kept underground until actually needed for consumption), while rice and wheat can be transported over long distances and times with an order of magnitude less loss. Consider the case of the Incas. As a civilization, they relied on two crops for calories and nutrition: maize and potatoes. Despite that, efforts at taxation primarily focused on maize, because it was so much better suited for taxes and commerce (though they did eventually invent a way to freeze dry potatoes).
- Bakary 4y ago
  Reading Don Quixote was fairly mindblowing in general because the humor seemed so modern... in a time when the novel as we know it was itself a recent invention. Now your fun fact makes it even more mindblowing.
- TrueSlacker0 4y ago
  Today in the US the 3 music industry giants tax(via legally required license fees) the venues where musicians play instead of taxing the musicians for the exact same reason. The venue doesn't come and go as quickly and has a set location. Musicians change band names, people, etc often and are harder to track.
- rapind 4y ago
  > tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there I suspect that this individual collection raised the risk of getting a beating if the peasantry was in dire straits. (drought, raiding, over taxation, etc.). Inefficiency isn’t all bad.
- dllthomas 4y ago
  Do you have a citation? I'm not nearly confident enough to think you're wrong, but I'm surprised early 1600s Spain wasn't already provisioned with wind- or watermills and I'd be curious to learn more of the context.
  - btilly 4y ago
    It was from in a philosophy course I took 30 years ago. I didn't keep the textbook, but I wish I had.
_ea1k 4y ago
Its kind of funny, but that article itself has some misconceptions. Bullets flying overhead don't sound like that. Its more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTuuOiWgVZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTuuOiWgVZ0
pasquinelli 4y ago
the period accurate pigs don't look that weird.
jaclaz 4y ago
As a side note, the apex of coconut use is in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai... >Originally the knight characters were going to ride real horses, but after it became clear that the film's small budget precluded real horses (except for a lone horse appearing in a couple of scenes), the Pythons decided their characters would mime horse-riding while their porters trotted behind them banging coconut shells together. The joke was derived from the old-fashioned sound effect used by radio shows to convey the sound of hooves clattering.
- baud147258 4y ago
  And on the same subject, quoting the tvtropes article linked above: > Ironically, in a major sense-of-humour failure, Monty Python founder Eric Idle threatened to sue an independent film-maker who used the "that's not a horse - you're using coconuts!" gag, claiming he had originated it for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Saner counsel prevailed, when it was pointed out to him exactly how old the gag was, and that (for instance) a radio comedy show Idle himself had written for had used this gag way back in the 1960's - ten years before the Holy Grail movie. And the BBC radio comedy archives preserved older examples still...
jvanderbot 4y ago
Off topic, but this is why all guns sound like they are just a bucket of screws being shaken around. It may surprise movie goers to realize that guns don't make noise unless you cycle the action or fire them.
- dathanb82 4y ago
  "I wouldn't use a gun that sounded like that" - me to my wife just about every time we watch an action movie
- majormajor 4y ago
  I can't think of an example of this off the top of my head, do you have one? I'm just coming up with a lot of counter-examples - anytime a character with a gun is sneaking around in silence, when not actively using the gun. Like, I can't think of a time a character tried to sneak around but took a step and their gun rattled...
  - orthoxerox 4y ago
    It's the sound they make when they are picked up or handed out.
  - Pxtl 4y ago
    I think he's referring to the ka-clack of gun cocking noises that is used when a weapon is drawn, even if it's a weapon that doesn't have to be cocked.
    - mcv 4y ago
      Sometimes, if the other person doesn't get the hint, they cock it again!
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Guns being handled (picked up, shifted to the other shoulder, handed out, just any time they're being handled) tend to make lots of little clacking noises in movies and TV, as if all the parts are really loose and rattling against one another.
DeathArrow 4y ago
>People don’t care about period accuracy, they care about art that matched their expectations. Then let's not educate people as they might get upset to discover their assumptions were false. What if people start believing 2 + 2 = 5?
- dathanb82 4y ago
  Unless the purpose of the game is educational, I don't think it's incumbent on them to educate their players about anything. Just like I don't expect everyone who sells something at the Renaissance Faire to use medieval furnaces for their blacksmithing or to eschew lathes for turning wood bowls. It's not their responsibility.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    I wasn't saying video games should educate people, I was referring about not meeting demands of the people with absurd expectation about reality.
  - andrewflnr 4y ago
    But the education will happen, whether you mean it to or not. Most people have nothing but what they see to base they're expectations on, so if they see your game, and don't specifically read about pig herding in the middle ages, your game comprises the total information in their head on the topic. Congratulations, you're an educator! Now take some responsibility. Your point about authentic fabrication methods is entirely orthogonal. It's really hard to see why you brought that up.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      That responsibility is optional and it's fine for people to decline. It is also fine for someone like the author of this blog to highlight the topic so that some people may make choices to accurately depict pigs. It Is entirely unnecessary to bring morality into it.
      - 4y ago
pjungwir 4y ago
That is a fun article, but they left out my favorite: the dial tone when someone hangs up. Speaking of phones, it's interesting to see movies' choices about the UI on mobile phones. Do they try to show something like a real phone, or do they give a simplified UI that the audience can read at a glance? I remember seeing the Net as a teen, and in the climactic scene when the bad guys were trying to break into the room, and Sandra Bullock was hacking their computer and waiting tensely for a progress bar to finish, while it slowly crept towards completion and the bangs on the door got louder, the audience could see it and read . . . "resolving IP address."
- javajosh 4y ago
  DNS resolvers can be slow, ya know.
- nottorp 4y ago
  I believe Matrix 2 had an actual proper hacking scene. All command line, showing a script exploiting some ssh vulnerability that was actually real at the time they filmed.
  - detaro 4y ago
    https://www.theregister.com/2003/05/16/matrix_sequel_has_hacker_cred/ https://www.theregister.com/2003/05/16/matrix_sequel_has_hac...
    - Macha 4y ago
      > But then, the film does take place in the future. Is Zalewski surprised to see unpatched SSH servers running in the year AD 2199? "It's not that uncommon for people to run the old distribution," he says. "I know we had a bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years." Zalewski here is a security analyst. At least that's one thing that's improved, but I suppose this was the era of SQL injections in every second website.
- account42 4y ago
  Interactible computers in general are common in video games. But rarely does the interface even have nearly the complexity as a real OS. I imagine there must be some games that go all the way and run an actual OS in a VM or emulator though. Similarly to some games that let you play the predecessor/inspiration from an in-game device like e.g. Day of the Tentacle which includes a fully playable Maniac Mansion.
virusduck 4y ago
Total off topic, but I followed the link to read about the Coconut Effect. Not looking at the URL, I ended up about 10 tabs deep before I realized it was friggin tvtropes!! I haven't been over there in a while, but I'm glad to see that site still has that effect on people.
axiolite 4y ago
> period-accurate pigs it would have been a meme about how weird and alien the pigs look. That apparently wasn't a problem for the listed counter-example: "Kingdom Come: Deliverance"
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  I don't know how truthfully they've handled it, but historical accuracy is one of the main selling points of KC:D. I've only heard about the game through word-of-mouth, but that's been the most repeated detail I've heard. Less fantasy and hollywood, and a more accurate representation of the time period. One of the main features listed on their Steam page: > Historical accuracy: Meet real historical characters and experience the genuine look and feel of medieval Bohemia.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    It's worth pointing out that the "historical accuracy" comes less from a medievalist perspective and more of an appeal to tradition. The characters and setting are often amazingly historically accurate in some parts while following the same old revisionist tropes in others. Given some of the political statements of the developers, this isn't all too surprising. It's a bit like reconstructing a vision of the 1950s US by exclusively looking at 1950s TV ads. Yes, you'll get a lot of details right to an astonishing extent but the result will not at all be representative of what living in the 1950s was actually like.
- njdvndsjkvn 4y ago
ziml77 4y ago
The kung-foley point is the best example for me because I've seen fight scenes in old films that didn't have any of the sound effects. It was unsettling how quiet it was and it actually felt (more) fake.
TheRealPomax 4y ago
Except of course the very coconut that this effect is named after has long since died: TV and film doesn't use cococnuts for hooves anymore except when warranted, and people aren't weirded out by horse tread sounding like what horses sound like. The coconut effect exists as a self-reinforcing problem that is easily broken but for people going "but the coconut effect!". Repetition familiarises: if all the games you play start showing period-accurate pigs, then after a few games that force a bit more realism into your experience you stop going "my immersion!" and instead go "oh neat, this is what they looked like in the era this game is set in?" and then immediately move on because you're not here to start a period-accurate pig farming business. ...usually...
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Representations of computer screens in movies generally fall under this category
whoknew1122 4y ago
Period accuracy, especially in the context of medieval settings, is championed by a very small-yet-vocal minority of gamers. But it's a essentially a bad faith argument used to criticize the existence of non-white characters in a game. Basically, 'period accuracy' is to racists what 'ethics in gaming journalism' is to misogynists. But a Venn diagram of these two groups is pretty much just a circle.
Kye 4y ago
I want my spaceships to rumble and whoosh.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Not a gamer, but aren't games trying to differentiate themselves? A weird pig would be good thing.

anyfoo 4y ago

But just like we’ve now come to accept again, through modern productions, that horses’ hooves don’t sound like coconut when running on dirt, we might start accepting that medieval pigs looked different. The question is rather how feasible that is to depict with consistency.

btilly 4y ago

The phrase "tilting at windmills" is an interesting one. It is a reference to Don Quixote attacking windmills because they were giants oppressing the people. Which, today, just seems ridiculous. However the main reason to switch from hand mills to windmills was that it was far easier for the miller to collect taxes when the grain was milled than for tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there. Not only was it more efficient, but lords who forced their peasants to switch often raised taxes simply because it was easy to do so. This was all current events when Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. And therefore his audience would have been expected to understand that windmills truly WERE "giants oppressing the people"! No point. Just fun trivia about how different a modern phrase looks when looked at from the point of view of its history.

ericbarrett 4y ago
I love this. Similarly, the expression "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" was originally used ironically or mockingly, as it is physically impossible. Some time in the early 20th century it began to be used as an unironic exhortation.
- Loughla 4y ago
  I do love these. I wonder if there is a collection of these sayings that have shifted entirely to mean something else. Like "blood is thicker than water" was originally "blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb." The meaning is literally the opposite, but it got co-opted and changed at some point. These things are fascinating.
  - yellowstuff 4y ago
    That seems to be a popular internet myth, but without much evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water
    - Loughla 4y ago
      That might be even better! Now there's no meaning other than what you, individually, choose to attribute to it. I love living languages.
    - Nition 4y ago
      Another one I've seen recently circulating on the Internet is an idea that "The customer is always right" was originally "The customer is always right, in matters of taste". Also not true.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    I wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon. Eggcorns aren't quite right, as they're more about mishearing a word or phrase in a way that still makes sense in context (e.g. Alzheimer's disease -> old-timers' disease). Mondegreens are about mishearing a word or phrase and substituting them for something different. Those are errors in interpreting phonic elements, but there's no misinterpretation of the words for these phrases/idioms; it's just disregarding the meaning entirely and substituting a new meaning.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago
moffkalast 4y ago
Well that's pretty wild, I can now add "windmills were a tax thing" to the pile of random facts I never thought I'd know.
lupire 4y ago
Are you sure? If the windmill didn't make milling more efficient, and if hand milling at home was an effective tax dodge, people would avoid using the windmills. And the tax collector coming to the house is just as oppressive as being taxed at the windmill. A quick web search suggests windmills increased grain production by a factor of 5.
Someone 4y ago
> However the main reason to switch from hand mills to windmills was that it was far easier for the miller to collect taxes when the grain was milled than for tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there. I think you’re mixing cause (larger windmills are more efficient, making it a win to centralize them) with effect (that makes it easier to tax flour production). If that were the main reason, we would have stories about people clandestinely milling at home. I’m not aware of any. (I also think, but am not sure, milling already was centralized before the introduction of wind power)
- scarmig 4y ago
  It'd be interesting to see if the initial windmills when introduced were more efficient, post-tax and capex, than traditional methods. There's a parallel with grains: staples like rice and wheat are more legible to states than other alternatives like legumes, tubers, and starch plants, even though the latter were comparable in terms of calories generated by unit labor. E.g. many roots are buried and hidden from tax collectors. States which enforced cultivation of the legible grains had a greater tax base and outcompeted those that didn't.
  - adwn 4y ago
    That's not very convincing. Before the introduction of the potato, there were no below-ground alternatives that were superior to cereals in Europe and Northern Africa. > E.g. many roots are buried and hidden from tax collectors. Those roots tend to be attached to green stuff that's above ground and very visible. Why should that be any less legible to tax collectors than wheat or rice?
    - scarmig 4y ago
      > Those roots tend to be attached to green stuff that's above ground and very visible. Why should that be any less legible to tax collectors than wheat or rice? It's a combination of factors. Cereals like wheat and rice tend to ripen seasonally and simultaneously. They do so visibly, and must be harvested soon after. So a state sends its tax collectors around when the grains are ready to be harvested, and the amount that was generated is immediately visible. They also keep well: tubers go bad relatively quickly (and can be kept underground until actually needed for consumption), while rice and wheat can be transported over long distances and times with an order of magnitude less loss. Consider the case of the Incas. As a civilization, they relied on two crops for calories and nutrition: maize and potatoes. Despite that, efforts at taxation primarily focused on maize, because it was so much better suited for taxes and commerce (though they did eventually invent a way to freeze dry potatoes).
Bakary 4y ago
Reading Don Quixote was fairly mindblowing in general because the humor seemed so modern... in a time when the novel as we know it was itself a recent invention. Now your fun fact makes it even more mindblowing.
TrueSlacker0 4y ago
Today in the US the 3 music industry giants tax(via legally required license fees) the venues where musicians play instead of taxing the musicians for the exact same reason. The venue doesn't come and go as quickly and has a set location. Musicians change band names, people, etc often and are harder to track.
rapind 4y ago
> tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there I suspect that this individual collection raised the risk of getting a beating if the peasantry was in dire straits. (drought, raiding, over taxation, etc.). Inefficiency isn’t all bad.
dllthomas 4y ago
Do you have a citation? I'm not nearly confident enough to think you're wrong, but I'm surprised early 1600s Spain wasn't already provisioned with wind- or watermills and I'd be curious to learn more of the context.
- btilly 4y ago
  It was from in a philosophy course I took 30 years ago. I didn't keep the textbook, but I wish I had.

_ea1k 4y ago

Its kind of funny, but that article itself has some misconceptions. Bullets flying overhead don't sound like that. Its more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTuuOiWgVZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTuuOiWgVZ0

pasquinelli 4y ago

the period accurate pigs don't look that weird.

jaclaz 4y ago

As a side note, the apex of coconut use is in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai... >Originally the knight characters were going to ride real horses, but after it became clear that the film's small budget precluded real horses (except for a lone horse appearing in a couple of scenes), the Pythons decided their characters would mime horse-riding while their porters trotted behind them banging coconut shells together. The joke was derived from the old-fashioned sound effect used by radio shows to convey the sound of hooves clattering.

baud147258 4y ago
And on the same subject, quoting the tvtropes article linked above: > Ironically, in a major sense-of-humour failure, Monty Python founder Eric Idle threatened to sue an independent film-maker who used the "that's not a horse - you're using coconuts!" gag, claiming he had originated it for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Saner counsel prevailed, when it was pointed out to him exactly how old the gag was, and that (for instance) a radio comedy show Idle himself had written for had used this gag way back in the 1960's - ten years before the Holy Grail movie. And the BBC radio comedy archives preserved older examples still...

jvanderbot 4y ago

Off topic, but this is why all guns sound like they are just a bucket of screws being shaken around. It may surprise movie goers to realize that guns don't make noise unless you cycle the action or fire them.

dathanb82 4y ago
"I wouldn't use a gun that sounded like that" - me to my wife just about every time we watch an action movie
majormajor 4y ago
I can't think of an example of this off the top of my head, do you have one? I'm just coming up with a lot of counter-examples - anytime a character with a gun is sneaking around in silence, when not actively using the gun. Like, I can't think of a time a character tried to sneak around but took a step and their gun rattled...
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  It's the sound they make when they are picked up or handed out.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  I think he's referring to the ka-clack of gun cocking noises that is used when a weapon is drawn, even if it's a weapon that doesn't have to be cocked.
  - mcv 4y ago
    Sometimes, if the other person doesn't get the hint, they cock it again!
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Guns being handled (picked up, shifted to the other shoulder, handed out, just any time they're being handled) tend to make lots of little clacking noises in movies and TV, as if all the parts are really loose and rattling against one another.

DeathArrow 4y ago

>People don’t care about period accuracy, they care about art that matched their expectations. Then let's not educate people as they might get upset to discover their assumptions were false. What if people start believing 2 + 2 = 5?

dathanb82 4y ago
Unless the purpose of the game is educational, I don't think it's incumbent on them to educate their players about anything. Just like I don't expect everyone who sells something at the Renaissance Faire to use medieval furnaces for their blacksmithing or to eschew lathes for turning wood bowls. It's not their responsibility.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  I wasn't saying video games should educate people, I was referring about not meeting demands of the people with absurd expectation about reality.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  But the education will happen, whether you mean it to or not. Most people have nothing but what they see to base they're expectations on, so if they see your game, and don't specifically read about pig herding in the middle ages, your game comprises the total information in their head on the topic. Congratulations, you're an educator! Now take some responsibility. Your point about authentic fabrication methods is entirely orthogonal. It's really hard to see why you brought that up.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    That responsibility is optional and it's fine for people to decline. It is also fine for someone like the author of this blog to highlight the topic so that some people may make choices to accurately depict pigs. It Is entirely unnecessary to bring morality into it.
    - 4y ago

pjungwir 4y ago

That is a fun article, but they left out my favorite: the dial tone when someone hangs up. Speaking of phones, it's interesting to see movies' choices about the UI on mobile phones. Do they try to show something like a real phone, or do they give a simplified UI that the audience can read at a glance? I remember seeing the Net as a teen, and in the climactic scene when the bad guys were trying to break into the room, and Sandra Bullock was hacking their computer and waiting tensely for a progress bar to finish, while it slowly crept towards completion and the bangs on the door got louder, the audience could see it and read . . . "resolving IP address."

javajosh 4y ago
DNS resolvers can be slow, ya know.
nottorp 4y ago
I believe Matrix 2 had an actual proper hacking scene. All command line, showing a script exploiting some ssh vulnerability that was actually real at the time they filmed.
- detaro 4y ago
  https://www.theregister.com/2003/05/16/matrix_sequel_has_hacker_cred/ https://www.theregister.com/2003/05/16/matrix_sequel_has_hac...
  - Macha 4y ago
    > But then, the film does take place in the future. Is Zalewski surprised to see unpatched SSH servers running in the year AD 2199? "It's not that uncommon for people to run the old distribution," he says. "I know we had a bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years." Zalewski here is a security analyst. At least that's one thing that's improved, but I suppose this was the era of SQL injections in every second website.
account42 4y ago
Interactible computers in general are common in video games. But rarely does the interface even have nearly the complexity as a real OS. I imagine there must be some games that go all the way and run an actual OS in a VM or emulator though. Similarly to some games that let you play the predecessor/inspiration from an in-game device like e.g. Day of the Tentacle which includes a fully playable Maniac Mansion.

virusduck 4y ago

Total off topic, but I followed the link to read about the Coconut Effect. Not looking at the URL, I ended up about 10 tabs deep before I realized it was friggin tvtropes!! I haven't been over there in a while, but I'm glad to see that site still has that effect on people.

axiolite 4y ago

> period-accurate pigs it would have been a meme about how weird and alien the pigs look. That apparently wasn't a problem for the listed counter-example: "Kingdom Come: Deliverance"

squeaky-clean 4y ago
I don't know how truthfully they've handled it, but historical accuracy is one of the main selling points of KC:D. I've only heard about the game through word-of-mouth, but that's been the most repeated detail I've heard. Less fantasy and hollywood, and a more accurate representation of the time period. One of the main features listed on their Steam page: > Historical accuracy: Meet real historical characters and experience the genuine look and feel of medieval Bohemia.
- hnbad 4y ago
  It's worth pointing out that the "historical accuracy" comes less from a medievalist perspective and more of an appeal to tradition. The characters and setting are often amazingly historically accurate in some parts while following the same old revisionist tropes in others. Given some of the political statements of the developers, this isn't all too surprising. It's a bit like reconstructing a vision of the 1950s US by exclusively looking at 1950s TV ads. Yes, you'll get a lot of details right to an astonishing extent but the result will not at all be representative of what living in the 1950s was actually like.
njdvndsjkvn 4y ago

ziml77 4y ago

The kung-foley point is the best example for me because I've seen fight scenes in old films that didn't have any of the sound effects. It was unsettling how quiet it was and it actually felt (more) fake.

TheRealPomax 4y ago

Except of course the very coconut that this effect is named after has long since died: TV and film doesn't use cococnuts for hooves anymore except when warranted, and people aren't weirded out by horse tread sounding like what horses sound like. The coconut effect exists as a self-reinforcing problem that is easily broken but for people going "but the coconut effect!". Repetition familiarises: if all the games you play start showing period-accurate pigs, then after a few games that force a bit more realism into your experience you stop going "my immersion!" and instead go "oh neat, this is what they looked like in the era this game is set in?" and then immediately move on because you're not here to start a period-accurate pig farming business. ...usually...

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Representations of computer screens in movies generally fall under this category

whoknew1122 4y ago

Period accuracy, especially in the context of medieval settings, is championed by a very small-yet-vocal minority of gamers. But it's a essentially a bad faith argument used to criticize the existence of non-white characters in a game. Basically, 'period accuracy' is to racists what 'ethics in gaming journalism' is to misogynists. But a Venn diagram of these two groups is pretty much just a circle.

Kye 4y ago

I want my spaceships to rumble and whoosh.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Not a gamer, but aren't games trying to differentiate themselves? A weird pig would be good thing.