Author Archives: Tin Man

Living in the Future

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Sometimes I feel like we’ve been living in the future for the last 100 to 130 years. What I mean is, sometimes it seems like the real world ended sometime in the late nineteenth century, and everything since then has been an epilogue, or not quite real. At various times I feel like the real world ended with the invention of the light bulb, or with the beginning of World War I, or with expressionism or atonal music — that the world stopped making sense somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century, and that nothing since then has been real: automobiles, movies, TV, radio, rock music, space travel, iPads.

Of course, every new technology has made the world seem different. One could just as easily say that the real world ended with the invention of the railroad, or with the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of cities, or the development of agriculture or the invention of writing. The last 5,000 to 10,000 years themselves could just be an epilogue to the vast human history that came before it. Perhaps ancient nomadic tribal society was the last “real” type of human existence.

That may be true, but there’s something about the light bulb to me that just seems different. It changed human existence not gradually but immediately and drastically. It robbed us of our regular circadian rhythms, and there must have been something magical about it. Or maybe I’m really thinking of electricity, not just the lightbulb? Maybe it was the telegraph that began to make the world seem unreal?

By “unreal,” I mean that electricity is something we can’t see. It’s something we can’t intuitively understand. Human beings can understand steam power, or mechanical power, or farming. But electricity? It seems like magic. I can’t even imagine how you’d explain the internet to Thomas Jefferson. And remember the first time you saw an iPhone? Remember how fucking awesome it was that you could zoom in on a website just by pinching it with your fingers? I’ve got an iPhone in my pocket and it still feels like magic.

Maybe that’s what I mean. We live in a world we don’t understand.

And yet… even the iPad is created out of materials that have existed for a few billion years. Yes, the materials have been mined and refined and chemically treated, and the architecture might be based on principles nobody understood until a few decades ago, but the raw materials themselves — the elements — have existed since the Earth finished forming. If we could somehow teleport an enormous group of human beings back in time a few thousand years — a group containing the right mix of people, including experts in every subject imaginable — they could probably recreate our modern conveniences, eventually. Some of them would know how to mine metal, some would know how to create electricity, and then electrical generators, and some would know how to create lathes, and so on. They could create the meta-tools needed to create the tools needed to create anything we have today. It couldn’t be done instantly, but it could be done.

Ultimately there is no “real” versus “un-real.” There was no golden age of the world. Ever since the Big Bang, the universe has been changing, and it always will change.

Sometimes the world I’m living in doesn’t feel real, but it is as real as I am. This world is weird, but I can laugh, and cry, and feel fear and happiness, and the littlest things can seem like the realest, most important things in the world to me.

As long as I am real, my world is real.

Screen Clutter

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Lost is my favorite show on TV, even though the final season so far has been a little slow and disappointing. But the other night it was practically unwatchable, because for nearly the entire hour there was this bright red “V” at the bottom of the screen along with a countdown clock, promoting an upcoming episode of, well, V. The first scene of the episode was tinted green, because the characters were being seen through night-vision lenses, which made the ugly red V stand out even more. This episode also had lots of subtitles and a couple of scenes where a character was writing on a pad, and some of the words were obscured:

[image via Alan Sepinwall]

The TV executive who came up with this idea should be fired, though it’ll never happen. I’m used to bugs by now, but, really? Bright red? It couldn’t at least have been translucent? And you needed to include a countdown? We don’t have clocks?

And apparently it worked, because now for an aside about V.

I watched the first episode of the V remake last fall and was underwhelmed. Perhaps I’d have liked it better if I hadn’t seen the original as a kid. First of all, on the new series, the characters refer to the aliens as “the V’s,” which is totally ridiculous because in the original story, “V” stood both for “Visitors” (the aliens) and for the hoped-for “victory” against them; it wasn’t their frickin’ nickname. But I guess in the 21st century we have to dumb everything down.

I also actively hated a couple of the characters. I haven’t watched the show since.

So some big stupid red V is not going to make me tune in to your stupid remake. Lost is practically a religious experience for some people — me included — and we don’t want any distractions. You want to put garbage on the screen during something like Dancing With the Stars that doesn’t require any brain cells, fine, but don’t interrupt me when I’m trying to watch Lost.

The Hulu.com version didn’t have the V at the bottom, but that would have required waiting a day and trying to avoid spoilers.

Here’s more on the stupid red thing. And Alan Sepinwall went on a long rant about it, which made me feel better because it meant I wasn’t alone in hating it.

I’m just waiting until the night my dreams start to have TV logos in the bottom corner. Dude, what if someday they invent a sleeping pill that has in-dream ads for cola and TV shows?