Tell me about references in older media lost on modern audiences

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Tell me about references in older media lost on modern audiences

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Applewhite posted:

William Gibson discusses it in newer editions of Neuromancer. The famous opening line "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" has almost become a lost reference. Younger readers may picture a steady, solid blue of a flatscreen with no input rather than the ominous, turbulent gray of CRT static.

Given that modern TVs automatically search and programme all available stations in the area, would modern kids even understand what "tuned to a dead channel" even means? Whether you cycle through the channels or enter the number for the one you want, there's no way to get to a frequency that hasn't been programmed in and no reason to ever programme in a frequency that doesn't have anything on it.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2019 16:06

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 17:24

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Milo and POTUS posted:

Yeah I've been of the opinion for a while that cards are probably a huge liability to impulse spenders. Some people just can't help their drat selves and while that's their prerogative, they should have the option to at least use cash if they feel it'll be at least a speed bump to draining their bank accounts.

I've always found it works the other way around for me. Once I took cash out of the ATM I already thought of it as gone, so I had no hesitation about spending it. Now that I use a debit card for practically everything and don't carry cash, every time I spend money I know it's coming out of my account so it actually feels like I've got less money at the end. Cash is just bits of metal and plastic. Money is the number in my bank account.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2019 12:12

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

alexandriao posted:

You don't see how the BBC picking up EM bands to see if someone's watching TV is related to BT illegally picking up EM bands to check for WiFi interference is related?

They're doing roughly the same action (snooping on EM bands) and the one is definitely illegal.

I don't know what these things mean or why thy would be illegal.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2019 01:28

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

alexandriao posted:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_high_frequency

That doesn't clarify anything for me.

alexandriao posted:

Back on topic, I'm finding more and more people who don't understand how to properly respond to "You don't mind, do you?" and similar phrases. Usually to say "no" means that you don't mind, in other words that it is ok to do whatever it is. Likewise answering "yes" means that you do mind, which means it is not ok to do whatever it is.

Most people these days below a certain age seem to not understand the question and answer a general affirmative "yes", when what they really mean is that they don't mind. It's small but it's irritating because I have to ask what they really mean every single time.

Ask a less stupid question then. Both "yes" and "no" work - "No, I don't mind" or "yes (you are correct) I don't mind" - and it feels more natural to give permission with an affirmative answer. You could ask "Could/may I...?" instead.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2019 05:57

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

BiggerBoat posted:

For some reason, people still use the term "got it on tape" though.

Because "tape" came to be a synonym for "record" (both the verb and the noun) and it hasn't lost that meaning, so it's the same as saying "got it on record", as "I taped it" is for "I recorded it".

# ¿ Dec 20, 2019 14:45

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Discendo Vox posted:

C'mon, think for a minute. There is no way to automatically assign SSNs at birth. Think about what that would entail. I am not an expert on national ID systems, but a quick googling says all nations with similar populations and such systems require an appliation process. It's never automatic.

Do you not have to register births in America? That's mandatory here. It's not automatic, but you would have to take extreme measures to avoid it and not get chased up about it until you did it.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2020 02:35

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

PHIZ KALIFA posted:

It strikes me that it used to be much more common for Antichrist to be plural rather than a singular figure before the release of the Left Behind series.

Is Left Behind actually well-known, or just one of those things that's well-known to internet people and otherwise just among a very small and dedicated fanbase?

# ¿ Jan 20, 2020 08:16

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

FreudianSlippers posted:

People just watching a stream of stuff they have no choice in will probably be weird to them.

It's weird to me and I grew up with it. Why anyone still watches broadcast television is a complete mystery to me.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2020 07:13

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Krispy Wafer posted:

The concept of 23 episodes in a season that have nothing to do with each other is another thing the next generation is going to have trouble with.

There are so many episodes....but so little happens.

There are still shows like that. Most sitcoms, for example, can still be watched out of sequence without any issues.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2020 13:59

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

PHIZ KALIFA posted:

http://www.chemistryexplained.com/Ar-Bo/Artificial-Sweeteners.html and this just covers artificial sweeteners.

So, specifically not sugars and therefore not covered by the phrase "other sugars"?

# ¿ Feb 1, 2020 03:41

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

RC and Moon Pie posted:

Now I'm wondering the scope of these books. My high school was quite rural; was this created as a thing to appeal to our non-cultured parents that their Billy Bob here is as good as them city kids with them there museums?

I'm pretty sure there were a million of them put out by various different companies in different times and places. It's a pretty obvious scam�, and once you've seen it once it's pretty easy to come up with your own version to sell to your own particular subset of customers.

� The original idea being a book listing the notable and influential members of a particular society, which probably existed for all of about three minutes before someone went "I bet John is real pissed about not being included - and I bet he'd pay good money for a 'new edition' with his name in it, and so would plenty of other people..."

# ¿ Feb 2, 2020 13:50

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

a kitten posted:

It seems like "here's Johnny!" with Jack busting through the door is pretty well known as being from The Shining.

I do wonder how many people realise that he's saying that particular thing as a reference to how Ed McMahon used to introduce Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show.

I had no idea. I've also never seen/read The Shining and assumed that the character's name was John and that was all the explanation it needed.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2020 03:56

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Xiahou Dun posted:

(Not being lovely to stay at home parents and just stumbling over vocab.)

Paid employment?

# ¿ Feb 11, 2020 11:42

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

The song No Aphrodisiac by The Whitlams starts "A letter to you on a cassette 'cause we don't write anymore."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qi7SlM1eDk

# ¿ Feb 25, 2020 10:06

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Cemetry Gator posted:

It's hard to think about reading a clock. I feel like I learned it the same time they taught us about time. I feel like someone could quickly grasp what's going on, provided they understand 12 hour time.

I think most people who say they can't read an analogue clock actually just mean they'd have to stop and think about it, as opposed to a digital clock that they can just glance at and instantly have the information they're after.

doctorfrog posted:

One of my jobs is to play board games with kids and I have to gesture when indicating that we take turns "clockwise" or "counterclockwise" or I'll get blank stares. I guess many board games instructions these days don't even use those terms, they say "to the dealer's left, and so on."

I think "to the left" has always been more common in game instructions than "clockwise".

# ¿ Feb 26, 2020 05:18

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Bar Ran Dun posted:

On some documents a name being printed, not even by hand, just printed on the document by a printer or type writer is a signature.

You can type your name onto a pdf and it's a signature. The purpose of a signature isn't to make sure your handwriting matches, it's to acknowledge that you accept the terms.

Leperflesh posted:

Specifically, your assertion that changes don't proliferate if they're worse at conveying meaning is wrong: changes proliferate if people use and adopt them; and people do so for a variety of reasons, many of which are specifically (albeit perhaps unconsciously or unintentionally) to obfuscate meaning. That's literally what slang is for/why slang happens: identifying within an ingroup and differentiating from everyone else.

That's an example of being better at conveying meaning though. Specifically, to the in-group, who are the intended audience.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2020 05:07

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

FilthyImp posted:

VoIP also shits itself if an earthquake takes the power out, right?

Yep. Old telephones got power over the phone line, which is why you could still have a working phone if your power was out, but if you've got anything other than a basic, old-fashioned, wired landline phone and a copper phone line then you'll also need a power source.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2020 07:16

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Is the childproofing the little metal hoopy thing that sits over the wheel thingy? I knew a couple of people who would always insist on removing those, even from other people's lighters if they saw them, and I never understood why you'd bother.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2020 17:09

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Boonoo posted:

I think there�s going to be enough pent up demand that once things like that are open again they�ll see business.

Literally the only thing stopping me from spending the entire afternoon in a pub and then going straight on to a restaurant for dinner on the very day they all open back up again will be the fact that absolutely every one of them is going to be packed to capacity for, like, two months solid.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2020 08:51

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Greg12 posted:

the chorus seemed so stupid and racist

The Offspring posted:

So don't debate, a player straight
You know he really doesn't get it anyway
Gonna play the field, and keep it real
For you no way, for you no way
So if you don't rate, just overcompensate
At least you'll know you can always go on Ricki Lake
The world needs wannabes, ah
Hey, hey, do that brand new thing

Maybe I'm missing something (because honestly I don't get, like, half the references in the song) but what's the racist bit?

# ¿ May 5, 2020 09:58

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

New Yorp New Yorp posted:

despite the words being spelled differently, pronounced differently, and having different meanings.

"make due" :argh:

# ¿ Jul 6, 2020 14:19

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKtJobLOVYQ

# ¿ Aug 8, 2020 09:34

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

wesleywillis posted:

1970s os 80s slasher films and someone being chased by the killer is fumbling with the car keys. And they put the door key in the ignition or the ignition key in the door.

Aren't they the same key?

# ¿ Sep 14, 2020 06:24

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

silence_kit posted:

It's like how extremist political people (including posters on this website) like to talk about how the media brainwashes people, but an alternate interpretation of the media is that they just say things that people like to/want to hear, and that the media is more of a reflection of a culture's values. IMO it is not incredibly obvious to me which opinion is is true.

It's both. They're not mutually exclusive. A given media organisation will say mostly things that most of its audience already agree with, because that's what they want to hear. But for each thing they say, there will be four segments of their audience: those who already agree; those who disagree; those who will consider the new information and investigate further; and those who will accept the new information as true due to their trust in the reliability of that organisation. The first will be the majority, but will be composed of different people for each specific thing. And that ever-changing fourth group are the people who are gradually being drawn further into the worldview espoused by that organisation. And almost everyone is going to spend at least some time as part of that fourth group, so gradually your views become more extreme as you consume media that reinforces and expands upon them.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2021 09:54

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

I know that Americans don't use the word "fringe" for hair, but do you also not use it for anything else? It seems like a pretty common, ordinary word to me?

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 03:13

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Scudworth posted:

Anyone who had the internet but didn't use AOL in that time period didn't know wtf was up with that either. I still don't.

My family's first ISP was AOL and I never knew what AOL keywords were or what you did with them. I'd used the internet at school before getting it at home so I just opened the AOL app to make it connect to the internet then left it minimised unless I needed to disconnect (or reconnect).

# ¿ Mar 13, 2021 07:22

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

I'm not convinced that most of them know the difference between a directory and a folder.

Because there is no difference, it's just two names for the same thing? When you typed "cd \games\doom" you called it a directory but when you clicked on "My Computer -> C: -> games -> doom" you called it a folder. But it was the same thing.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2021 07:45

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

VideoGameVet posted:

I would classify casual games by the audiences that play them and their low complexity. They can be �arcade� games (Flappy Bird comes to mind).

I would have thought a casual game is one that you can pick up on a whim and play for as little as a couple of minutes at a time. The Sims, for example, could never be a casual game as it takes fourteen minutes to load and cannot be played for less than six hours at a time.

Bucnasti posted:

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." � William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984

This means something completely different to people today when most TVs show a bright blue screen when they're not receiving a signal.

No they don't. They show the home screen.

Kevin DuBrow posted:

set to the wrong aspect ratio. And they're so used to it they don't see anything wrong.

It wasn't even that they were used to it; some people just can't seem to tell that the picture's squished/stretched. You'd fix it for them and they'd be like "I don't see the difference?" or "But now it doesn't fill the whole screen?" like as though you'd just wasted their time and possibly made their TV experience worse.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2022 11:48

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

I thought of one that's going to baffle the gen-A kids. There's a great Fountains of Wayne (sob!) song called "Little Red Light". It's all about the protagonist having been broken up with by his girlfriend, and his coming home hoping that the light will be blinking on his answering machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUxEsPziu0E

Gen-A kids? I was born in 1985 and I've never owned or used an answering machine. I feel like they were never ubiquitous and only relatively common for a fairly short time period.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2022 07:16

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Ironhead posted:

Are kids these days still taught the Dewey Decimal System?

Once you look up the book you're interested in on the computer, you still need the code to tell you where it is on the shelves. And if you're just looking for books on a particular topic rather than a specific title, you can still go to the correct shelf based on those same codes. Other than replacing it with a different system that fulfilled the same function, how and why would they get rid of it?

Cemetry Gator posted:

Wait, do people outside of librarians learn how to use the Dewey Decimal System? Back when I was in school, we learned that it existed and that's how libraries work, but you would just look up where things were.

Isn't "looking up where things are" exactly what it's for? How else do you use it?

# ¿ Mar 21, 2022 15:52

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Splicer posted:

Being "taught" the dewey decimal system includes memorising all the slots so you can go "Origin of Species that's a theory of evolution book so 575".

Did they ever make kids memorise the codes? They were all written down (on paper, not a computer) for easy reference in my school's library. No one tried to make us memorise them because that would be a massive waste of everyone's time.

Splicer posted:

As to why replace it, well see my last post. As to what, either another decimal system with a more coherent and less biased division of subjects or something completely different that's easier to insert new topics into without having to go 299.x.x.x to reach Buddhism.

Yes, that's why I said "other than replacing it with a different system that fulfilled the same function".

# ¿ Mar 21, 2022 16:20

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Sweevo posted:

I refuse to believe anyone has ever used a Dvorak keyboard for anything except writing 10,000 word blog posts about how they use a Dvorak keyboard.

I used one for a few years. Concluded pretty quickly that it didn't really make a noticeable difference, but kept using it for the novelty.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2022 13:39

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Jack B Nimble posted:

This is a good one, yeah. I'm old enough to remember the phrase "smart enough to program a VCR" but I didn't know this is what they meant.

Adults not being able to figure out how to use a VCR always bewildered me as a child (and still does, looking back) because literally all I did was read the instructions and do what it said. Then relay those instructions to the adult who had requested my help in the vain hope that they'd be able to do it themself the next time. Similarly, my aunt just recently had me set up a new computer for her (ie. plug it in, turn it on, and follow the on-screen prompts). Thanks to the pandemic, the computer had been sitting, unused, for two years, because she couldn't possibly have figured it out on her own. She's been using computers for literally decades but is somehow convinced that if she turns on a new one it'll spontaneously break.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2022 04:32

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Jack B Nimble posted:

And I wasn't even around for the time before that when people were apparently creating their own lean batch files to squeeze out a bit more memory? Honestly old computing is fascinating and I always wanted to get an 80s PC to tinker with.

Conventional memory was limited to 640 KiB, and many programs would either only use conventional memory or would require a certain amount of it. Things (like mouse drivers) would often need to be loaded into conventional memory before starting a game (that required a mouse), and the game itself would require a certain amount of conventional memory, and you might have other TSRs that you automatically load on startup. So you'd want to either switch out your boot configuration files (CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT) and reboot, or boot from a floppy disk, to free up as much conventional memory as you possibly could by eliminating everything that wasn't required to play that one game.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2022 15:02

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

My Lovely Horse posted:

Knowing this, I more than once tried to pre-empt it with "Okay, can you tell me what it says on the screen?" and got "'File, edit, view, history, bookmarks...'"

As the family Computer Understander I always hated the inevitable exchange
:buddy:

A message popped up on the screen and now it's not working.
:kiddo:

OK, what did it say?
:buddy:

I don't know. I didn't read it.

# ¿ May 2, 2022 04:41

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 17:24

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

You used to just hit electronic devices to make them work when something went wrong. Didn't always work, of course, but sometimes that just meant you hadn't hit it hard enough or in the right spot.

# ¿ May 15, 2022 15:39

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Tell me about references in older media lost on modern audiences