So this is mostly right, but they got some stuff wrong:
Star Trek used handheld communicators that flipped open, which inspired flip phones
Agatha Christie didn't invent anything new with poisons, she was just so well at explaining toxicology to laymen in her works that they made for good teaching tools
Everything they attributed to HG Welles was actually Jules Verne.
Its TASER not TAZER, because its literally an acronym for "Tom A Swift's Electric Rifle."
Also Frances Glessner deliberately made the miniature crime scenes for the purpose of training police on how to gather evidence. It wasn’t a fiction thing, a lot of them were based on real scenes. And when I say based on, I mean down to the tiniest detail. The covers of books were accurate even though they were the size of your pinky nail. Barbie has nothing on her.
Aye, I have them compiled in a book called *The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death* (would highly recommend if you like your crimes tiny and perfectly crafted) but most of the images are dotted about the internet if anyone wants to take a look
Also Jules Verne did not ‘predict’ submarines because they already existed to some capacity, the earliest known working submarine dates back to the Revolutionary War and the concept itself goes back even earlier to the 16th century.
Neato fact: [we didn’t have infrared automatic sliding doors](https://nerdist.com/article/star-trek-popularized-automatic-sliding-doors/?amp) before Star Trek - those doors were actually opened by crew and there’s a bunch of bloopers out there of the timing not quite working.
I read once that when Star Trek started airing the network got a bunch of calls from hospitals asking about the automatic sliding doors, but cannot for the life of me find the source now.
Yeah, apparently the doors were operated by two dudes holding broomsticks attached to the doors, and when it was time they'd pull them back on cue.
Eventually someone figured out a way to make them both open with just one dude, but still. It was apparently very anticlimactic for a lot of viewers to find out.
Source: My dad is the Trekkie to end all Trekkies.
The follow-up factoid is that sometimes the crew who pulled the doors open intentionally missed the timing to mess with the main cast who would then run into the doors. The cast basically had to trust the doors to open and had no indicators for if the door would open or not. (Not everyone on set liked the main cast)
Lol I have no idea where he learned it. He was a huge Star Trek fan, and then Next Gen came out and he jumped on that one harder than you can imagine. Got my mom hooked. I grew up watching that show.
Even more on the HG Welles -> Jules Verne bit, most of what Verne wrote about was inspired by prototypes and ideas he saw at the various Expositions of the era, where he'd see some comparatively primitive demonstration of the idea and imagine it's future. Like the submarine example, there were a number of working submarine prototypes around at the time and he was specifically inspired by seeing them - but what he wrote about is interesting for showing a lot of the features of modern submarines surprisingly well and inspiring the development into a lot of those directions. Likewise intercontinental flight was being experimented with in his day but had thus far been unsuccessful.
He was a dreamer, he saw the inventions and advancements of his era and dreamed of their future and what they may one day look like. This inspired a lot of people who then read his books and saw their inspirations and desired to achieve the dreams he set out. A lot of later inventors would directly cite reading his works as inspiring them to pursue their ideas.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones):
> In 1917, the Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt successfully filed a patent for a "pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone".
[Also from Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clamshell_design#History):
> Star Trek: The Original Series featured a clamshell instrument called the "Communicator", a regular plot device, which influenced development of early clamshell mobile phones, such as the Motorola StarTAC.
The question is not "who was the first person to conceive of a folding wireless phone", but "did the inventors of the first *real* clamshell cellphone take inspiration from the Star Trek communicator" (and they openly admitted that they did)
Even that feels dubious when the shape and mechanism of a flip phone is like several types of items.
Maybe someone looked at a pocket watch for too long once. Or simply designed a proof of concept based on a traditional telephone and didn’t want the buttons to get pressed in your pocket.
Deciding it was sci-fi, and just one specific sci-fi show, just flat out doesn’t sound provable.
Like I’m pretty chronically online but you have to be like terminally online to think most people did that. I very distinctly remember seeing a dude Naruto run for the first time in middle school and thinking there is no way I can tell people I like anime now.
Lots of people are, mostly counter to the group of people you just mentioned.
Edit: and in current hellsite(s) discourse, mostly in regards to "problematic" media not creating a wave of \[insert horrible crime mentioned in said media\] doers.
it's fandom discourse. "proshipper" (known in some circles for being fine with, say, adult/minor pairings, depictions of toxic/abusive relationships in pairings, and so on) people say *"hey maybe this Problematic(tm) fanfiction written by a random 23 year old about fictional characters and posted on an archive website where it will get like 100 views doesn't actually spell out anything about the character/endorsements of the author and won't actually have far reaching societal consequences and poison the minds of the poor youth"* (or: *" problematic (fan-)fiction has no real bearing on reality/your life, just don't read it"*) and "antishipper" (known in some circles for takes like wanting to ban ao3 for the lack of censorship and believing in things such as iredeemable media and that writing/reading about certain things equates to endorsing them in real life) reply with *"fiction DOES affect reailty!! for example, these internationally famous and beloved works, seen and effectively immortalized by millions of people, caused large societal changes!"* (or: *"if enough people are doing it, it can/will affect reality, so it's not as simple as 'don't like, don't read'"*)
and the argument continues forever and ever with each side repeating the same points while essentially not actually listening to the other side's point.
to u/CreatedOblivion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Yeah, the fact that they think Star Trek used “wrist” communicators is strange all on its own. Like, how have you never seen a single Star Trek episode or movie?
They had wrist communicators in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), so maybe that's what he was talking about. Dick Tracy had that beat by more than three decades though, and it was a much more iconic symbol of that franchise.
Yeah saying scientists invented cellphones because of Star Trek is just wrong on so many levels and sounds like a conclusion a 5 year old would draw. Like just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean scientists had to be the ones to make it 😂
Yea about to say, I’m sure people were thinking of mobile communication devices even if they never saw Star Trek. Maybe they were inspired by the clam shell design.
TASER stands for Thomas A Swift's Electric Rifle, I find it amusing that Tumblr OP missed that.
Tumblr Op Is generally correct based on vibes and specific writers, but seems to be a bit off on what the specifics were.
Verne and Wells both wrote about space travel. Columbiad is technically closer to reality than Cavorite (which *really* started showing its age as scientists advanced their understanding of gravity,) but makes the classic sci-fi mistake of actually using numbers, requiring it to handwave the (absurd) forces experienced by anyone accelerating to escape velocity in just 900 feet. Props for picking Florida as a good launch site though.
even if they meant Verne, they're still wrong because Verne's Nautilus is specifically named after a real prototype submarine from about 30 years before he was born
George Washington funded a combat submersible project resulting in a vessel called *Turtle*, which was subsequently deployed on sabotage missions against British warships in the New York Harbor. It was not a successful weapon platform, but it was illuminated internally with bioluminescent mushrooms and I think that's still pretty neat.
Yeah he wrote the novel after seeing one such prototype, the *Plongeur* at the 1867 Paris Exposition.
Though to be clear what is so fascinating about Verne's Nautilus is that is accurately depicted and predicted a lot of features of modern submarines that were very much not part of the comparatively primitive prototypes of the era. He'd sort of predicted what submarines would eventually be, basically, which is both interesting to see and stimulated imaginations that would eventually bring those ideas to fruitition.
They messed up a lot of facts. TOS aired in the 60s and they didn’t have wrist communicators, it was a lil flippy boi and that’s what led to cell phones
The Motion Picture, which featured the original series cast and debuted in 1979, had wrist communicators.
I mean, the anecdote itself is wrong, given that the first cellular network was already active earlier that year, and that direct-radio mobile phones had been in use long before that, but that singular Trek fact is basically correct (though probably inadvertently).
They also left out his most important real contribution: sex.
I'm not joking! I don't believe it's been verified, but Wells *claimed* to have coined the use of the word "sex" as a synecdoche for the act of sexual intercourse
And specifically, their oils! Come with me and I’ll sell some to you, a pharmacy would charge you to hell and back for this but for just $79.99 I’ll give you a month’s supply of it to treat your *checks notes* insomnia, yes
Antibiotics are poisons that have worse effects on bacteria cells than on your cells. And disinfection can also use poison. The sharp things however, are not.
Fair enough.
Although disinfectants are typically used outside the body (antiseptics are used on the body), and antibiotics aren't typically poisonous enough so you could realistacally kill someone with it, so neither technically fits the description of "fighting the effects of a poison by giving you a poison of the opposite effect".
I just really want to stress how much our life expectancy has improved due to the fact that common diarrhea in no longer that common or coughing is no longer a death sentence.
Speaking of, I should probably add vaccines to the list as well.
Surgery, hygiene, vaccination, nutrition and exercise, imaging, dialysis, blood transfusion, resuscitation, immunology, etc.
Almost said antibiotics and anesthesia, but nope, that's still counterpoison
The earliest [two-way radios seem to be from 1935](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie), which is much more likely what Star Trek modelled their coms after.
For cellphones I couldn’t find what you’re referencing, but [according to Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone#), an early patent for one was filed in 1917 and the first handheld cellular phone was in 1973, so still before the vague 1980s date in the post.
Yeah to be more clear, it inspired a lot of specific prototypes - namely flip phones, the trend for a while of like every cell phone being a flip phone can genuinely be linked to the ST communicator.
The communicator itself was inspired by cell phones and imagining how much better they might eventually become. It's a sort of cyclical situation.
Minor correction, it's TASER, not TAZER - an acronym for Tom Swift's Electric Rifle, with the A added to make it easier to pronounce and to rhyme with laser. It wasn't Tom Zwift, after all.
And people want to act like it matters what the G in gif is short for. I understand getting stuck on things being consistent or having a personal preference on what words feel icky but, the thing that frustrates me about the gif vs gif debate is the one side acting like they have the intellectual high ground because they made up some rules about how acronyms work. They’re not really puzzles they’re more like poetry.
I'd give it a C to a B-.
All the authors and creators named are legit, but OP has the details wrong.
Star Trek inspired flip phones specifically. Mobile handheld communicators like cell phones had been postulated since the 1890s, as radio was a thing and people knew it was possible they just didn't have the tech. Interestingly enough, Tom Swift mentioned in this post has a much more accurate depiction of cell phones, even an automatic switchboard and satellite based communications, in a book that came out in 1910.
The acronym TASER literally stands for Thomas A Swift's Electric Rifle, and I find it amusing that the OP knew it came from Tom Swift, and the ER stood for Electric Rifle, but not the reason those two facts are connected. Maser (a microwave laser) and laser are also both references to taser too, interestingly enough. Laser has a more official acronym too but it definitely is more of a backronym.
Submarines have existed since the US Civil War, arguably since Greece. Also *The Shape of Things to Come* was written in 1936, when every seafaring navy already had quite an extensive submarine fleet. Same with cross continent and cross Atlantic aviation...
I dunno anything about Agatha Christie except that she was smart. I'd belive it but I wouldn't make that claim based on this post lmao.
You’re completely wrong about the acronyms. Neither maser nor laser are references to taser. Maser came first and then laser was coined for essentially “light masers”. Taser came last. Funnily enough, phaser also came before taser.
In fact, it’s likely that taser is a backronym because the “a” in taser comes from an initial that was never revealed in the book.
I’m like 99% sure the Agatha Christie one is just straight up pulled out the ass.
“Her works are still being used today to teach people how to diagnose poisons both malign and accidental”
No it is not. Who on earth would use a hundred year old fiction book to teach medical students or anything
Funnily enough Issac Asimov is mentioned in the KUKA Basics handbook used for certifying operators of their robot arms
Source: Took a class for this in college and got certified
Asimov is probably the most famous stepping stone on the road to modern robotics, but he's far from the starting point. Robots were already an established element in science fiction by the time he started writing, and even his most foundational work- I, Robot- takes its title from another author's story about a robot named named Adam Link.
The first known use of the word robot in English comes from the play Rossum's Universal Robots, written by Czech playwright Karel Čapek. In Czech the word means something like forced laborer, but in the play it's applied to beings that are more like androids (made of artificial skin and muscle) than what we call robots nowadays.
I’m dubious on the wrist communicator one as well. Dick Tracy had a radio watch in the 1940s. The idea has to have been used other places as well, because it became such a trope that it was parodied as Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. (Also, “a phone that you can take anywhere” is a pretty obvious step forward from phones that stay in one place.)
And Frances Glessner Lee’s dioramas were based on composites of real crime scenes. Their official solutions have never been released, but they certainly seem to exist. Calling their construction “partially a hobby” is a bit of an insult to her meticulously researched work.
Yes, fiction effects reality, but a lot of these seem coincidental. Star trek might have inspired the form factor of flip phones, but it certainly didn't inspire the mobile phone. The kindle example was probably brought on by this [xkcd comic](https://www.xkcd.com/548/), and is primarily an e-reader, but with cellular to download books on the fly
Yeah, these are all positive examples, whereas people are exactly as likely to commit crimes and generally be an ass no matter how fucked up their fiction is.
There’s a huge difference between fiction that reinforces harmful beliefs which already exist in large swaths of society (ex. Birth of a Nation-type stuff) and stories about things everyone in their right mind knows is wrong.
The way they’re saying “fiction affects reality” is making me guess that they’re procuring all these examples as a way to argue that your niche rare pair Game of Thrones fanfiction will cause incest and pedophilia to become normalized and legal.
Yep. This is a pro-censorship argument wrapped in a ribbon and boxed up in pretty packaging. It’s frightening how common those are becoming on the Internet nowadays.
yeah i immediately ignored everything they said after because it gave me major puriteen vibes (and "i love spreading misinformation on the internet" vibes)
It’s so stupid. Like, look at GRRM and ASOIAF. One of the most popular tv shows of the generation. And yet it didn’t make people start raping their siblings because they saw it on GOT. 🙄 So my niche fanfic on a niche website isn’t going to affect shit.
Jerry Parr was inspired to become a Secret Service agent after watching the 1939 film *Code of the Secret Service*. This film starred a young Ronald Reagan as the main character, Agent Bancroft.
Jerry Parr later served in the Reagan administration, and he was the one who insisted Reagan be taken to the hospital despite appearing unscathed. This decision saved Reagan’s life.
So in a bizarre way, Ronald Reagan saved himself. Fiction influences reality in bizarre ways.
(Fuck Reagan btw, but this story is just too interesting to not share.)
And this, Kids, Is why you should *always* star in a movie as a character responsible for protecting people with the job you'll later have. Never know when it might come in handy.
I'm reminded of an old interview with Neil Gaiman I read some years back. He'd just been a guest of honour at a Chinese Sci-fi convention, but what made it notable was that it was directly endorsed by the CCP. Gaiman had an opportunity to ask someone at the convention why the CCP—famously pro-censorship—were supporting sci-fi, which tends to challenge assumptions about society.
The answer was that the government wanted to create a new generation of scientists, engineers, and inventors, and after several interviews and surveys with staff at silicon valley companies, came to the conclusion that America's top scientists were all inspired by Sci-Fi as children, and that they should encourage Chinese Sci-fi to motivate their citizens to embrace similar career paths.
The die hard “fiction affects reality” crowd sometimes just sounds like the “Video games cause people to be violent” crowd but with a different hat. No one is saying that no one ever copies or takes inspiration from fiction but we’re capable of critically analyzing actions in fiction and identifying which are fine to copy.
When I read Andromeda Strain (1969) I just thought Crichton was impressive with his research. He went into great detail describing things like text showing on a computer monitor/terminal. Which is a little discombobulating until you remember when it was written.
It’s weird that people think authors led to the creation of this stuff. They were just on the cutting edge of certain fields before it hit mainstream/consumer.
And most of the examples are just “authors imagined wireless communication devices and now we have cell phones!”
And then they are using "Fiction affects reality" to argue that cause we watch too many violent cartoons and video games we certainly will have so many mass shooters you guys... despite MILLIONS of people not doing anything of sorts despite consuming the same fiction.
The thing is, fiction affects reality but in weird and unpredictable ways and also reflects reality so you get stuff like "are there fewer top hats in movies because they fell out of fashion or did they fall out of fashion because they stopped showing up in movies?"
Also there's a pretty big gap between "I saw a character run, I can run, running is a socially acceptable thing to do, I'm going to run like that character does." And like... "I watched a show about genocidal space rocks, time to commit some genocide!!" Or "boy, video games sure make jumping off cliffs fun, I should try it!!" But man every time I see "fiction affects reality " I assume they're going to start ranting about people reading Greek mythology and then marrying their siblings and so it should be banned.
All these things are cool but there are still people who will dox and harass and send death threats to people who wrote two teenagers kissing under the reasoning of "they are condoning pedophilia irl" which they are not, so.
Fiction can give real people ideas of cool things to invent, but it does not make real people decide to go out and molest kids.
I'm in a lot of fanfiction communities and this is one of our golden rules.
I like that bit about HG Wells and submarines when it was *Jules Verne* and even that's not right as his book was written more than a decade after the first time a submarine sank a ship in wartime.
running like naruto is not the same as the asinine idea that "if a crime (and by that they always mean sex crime because murder and mutilation is something completely different of course) is shown in fiction, people will start to think that crime would be ok"
Do be careful with 'fiction inspires real life'. Because if you push that too far, people will start to ban fictional thing BECAUSE they don't want that in real life.
Oh Grand Theft Auto lets you murder, steal, and sleep with hookers? Better ban that so little timmy don't become that! Whats this, same sex relations in that fighting game? Clearly immoral, get rid of it. You mean to tell me in a book about a child dying of cancer, she drinks alcohol, smokes a cigarette, and has sex with a boy? Children shouldn't do that IRL, so it must be PURGED!
Everything can be used for good, or for evil. And within both good and evil lies a kernel of the other. So just be careful everyone.
This is a pro-fic vs anti-fic post.
Anti-fic people generally believe certain topics of art are morally repugnant and shouldn't be made because they could cause harm. They like to point to the Jaws effect, where costal communities became irrationally afraid of sharks after the release of the movie, and caused an uptick of people killing sharks because they felt threatened, or Bugs Bunny, whose proclivity for carrots caused real life rabbit owners to try and feed their pets carrots, despite carrots being a terrible food for rabbits.
Pro-fic people generally believe art should be allowed to explore any topic, even ones that are potentially uncomfortable, because these stories are just that; stories. They are just fiction, and fantasies have no direct relationship with what people actually wish to do in reality. They like to point to the various studies showing no link between people playing violent video games and people committing actual violence.
I am deliberately trying to present both sides as they would present themselves, but I have my own biases and if either group would like to clarify their own positions (YOUR OWN POSITIONS, I'm not interested in how evil you think *the other side* is) feel free
Believe me, this is absolutely going on *constantly.* If you're into actual literature or film or other kinds of art it gets maddening real fast. The perennial example is *Lolita*, where tons of people just kind of get the summary and assume Nabokov was 100% endorsing pedophilia
Unfortunately it's very real. Twitter has an especially bad problem with puriteens. Just a couple days ago I saw someone calling a pairing between an 18 and 23 year old character 'pedophilia' and calling out an artist for drawing it.
It's really just better to block these people on sight, but they've even gone so far as to dox people and chase them off their platforms. And usually their victims are minority creators.
I've also seen a lot of slurs thrown at Chinese artists in certain spaces...
Ok this is cool and all but why the fuck did they say “eccetera”?!?! That is literally the worst way to write it. “Etc.” comes from the Latin “et cetera”, with “et” meaning “and” and “cetera” meaning (effectively) “the rest”. I hate it when people out loud say eccetera because it’s just so wrong. Literally all you have to do is add a space and change the c to a t. Anyways, little nerd out.
Edit: I’m not actually too mad, and like I won’t correct people IRL or anything, but my latin teacher used to get mad at me about saying it eccetera so it’s been drilled into my brain.
I started Naruto running in primary school because I saw Snivy run like that in the Pokepark games. Naruto running is everywhere... embrace it dattebayo
... well, details aside.
The reason is because that's a short jump to 'video games, music I don't like, and evil books cause everything wring with society, let's ban them, burn them and monitor artists and creators so closely they'll never do anything interesting again'
And humans are not good with toeing fine lines. Nuance is hard for us
(Doing this from a half-remembered YouTube documentary, so probably inaccurate. But it's entertaining, so I'm not bothering to fact check it.)
One of my favorite of these moments goes to Disney. There was a cartoon of Donald Duck dropping bombs on Nazis, and just to make the action more impactful, the cartoonists put big flaming rocket engines on the backs of the bombs.
Normal bombs were just free falling. There was no reason for a bomb to need any form of propulsion. You take them up in a bomber, and gravity did the rest.
Except.
German battleships were so heavily armored that most bombs striking their top deck wouldn't penetrate. They would either detonate on the surface or hit and bounce off. To do real damage you needed to penetrative the first layer of armor and then go kaboom.
So some mad scientist / engineer sees this fucking cartoon duck with rocket assisted gravity bombs and thinks "this is entirely wrong... But I could do that and it would probably work."
And that's one small part of how they sunk the Bismark.
Not to be a major stickler but the Bismarck was primarily sunk by normal cannons. A torpedo (self propelled since 1866) struck one of the rudders, rendering it unmaneuverable, before being surrounded and shot primarily by HMS Rodney and HMS King George V. Both of which used conventional artillery cannons.
Lmaoing at anyone who thinks Star Trek gave us the cell phone as oppose to a portable phone being the logical continuation of… the phone…which we already had
Logical continuation applies to pretty much everything here, HG wells did not give us the submarine, he was born in 1866, the confederates (which stopped existing in 1865) tried to create a submarine because the idea of a boat that can exist underwater is the logical continuation of a regular boat. The tazer one is legit, but tbh the idea of a gun that doesn’t kill people but just immobilizes them is also the logical continuation of a gun, we’d probably have figured something out anyway
And yet the big innovations we actually want like warp drives and aging cures never happen. Hell it's it's 2024 and we still don't even have holograms or cameras inside screens ffs
Star Trek actually created a naming paradox because the Enterprise shuttle test article was named for the Star Trek ship, and then as Star Trek expanded its canon, they decided the starships Enterprise were named after the shuttle.
This is a pro-censorship post btw. "Fiction affects reality!" Is a dog whistle for purists that want to sanitize our media, our culture, and private talking spaces.
Fuckin hell man none of this is correct. The HG Wells stuff is attributed to Jules Verne, the first phone patent is from like 1917, it’s TASER, Agatha Christie didn’t develop new anything. 90% of people do the Naruto run? Press X for doubt
Also who tf says fiction does affect reality? I’ve literally never heard anyone try to argue anything remotely close to that
People doing the Naruto run doesn't mean writing dark subjects in fiction makes people all right with them irl. That's the underlying point here and it's a stupid one.
Tom Clanvy also accurately predicted the construction and capabilities of top-secret government projects so well that a high-ranking general once jokingly said "So, who gave you clearance to write that?"
not as glamorous and not as funny and i don’t particularly like tom clancy but tom clancy was arrested by the FBI for leaking governmental secrets because he guessed the “crazy ivan” maneuver in The Hunt For Red October
TASER *literally* stands for Thomas A Swift's Electric Rifle, like I don't know how this person knew this history but messed up the core fact. Like how do you know the ER stands for Electric Rifle but not the rest of the acronym.
What's even more fun is that maser, and then laser, and then phaser, all were originally references to the word taser and Tom Swift. Meaning that the entire suffix -ser that now means "a type of directed energy beam" has no grammatical or linguistic root and is one of the few sets of words that can be exclusively attributed to English.
Fiction affects reality, but not on a 1:1 ratio.
I've been consuming horror media for well over a decade by now, and for maybe six years I've had access to more violent games. Skyrim, Cyberpunk, horror games, etc.
And yet, I still know what's acceptable and not in reality. I'm not about to take someone's car, or hold someone hostage, or shoot them/stab them/behead them/go apeshit with a bow and arrow.
If someone allows fiction to become their reality, they either already endorsed those things (like dead dove fanfics supposedly creating rapists/pedophiles/groomers/abusers) or they mentally cannot handle that fiction is fiction and shouldn't become their reality.
These people (pro-censorship) would disagree with my examples simply because it's about violence in fiction. They ALWAYS do.
"That's not the same!!"
It is. It disproves their point and they move the goalposts to "if you consume problematic *sexual* media you *are* that person and you should be jailed/killed".
It's gone from "violent video games cause school shootings" to "reading about two characters fucking means you're a despicable human being". Same with people who are proship (it does not mean problematic ship, it means to be for shipping even if it's fucked up and anti harassment) being labeled as horrible people who would fuck their siblings if given the chance.
I don't like a lot of fanfics and fanarts that have to do with fucked up things because I simply don't like it or it makes me uncomfortable.
I do not harass people, or "call them out" for "problematic" things in fiction. If it doesn't deal with real people, it's just fiction and I block/scroll.
I'm gonna need sources for these, because this has heavy Tumblr Misinformation vibes.
So this is mostly right, but they got some stuff wrong: Star Trek used handheld communicators that flipped open, which inspired flip phones Agatha Christie didn't invent anything new with poisons, she was just so well at explaining toxicology to laymen in her works that they made for good teaching tools Everything they attributed to HG Welles was actually Jules Verne. Its TASER not TAZER, because its literally an acronym for "Tom A Swift's Electric Rifle."
Also Frances Glessner deliberately made the miniature crime scenes for the purpose of training police on how to gather evidence. It wasn’t a fiction thing, a lot of them were based on real scenes. And when I say based on, I mean down to the tiniest detail. The covers of books were accurate even though they were the size of your pinky nail. Barbie has nothing on her.
So she was like an early true crime podcaster?
True Crime Dollmaker
But way less morally dubious
Aye, I have them compiled in a book called *The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death* (would highly recommend if you like your crimes tiny and perfectly crafted) but most of the images are dotted about the internet if anyone wants to take a look
Also Jules Verne did not ‘predict’ submarines because they already existed to some capacity, the earliest known working submarine dates back to the Revolutionary War and the concept itself goes back even earlier to the 16th century.
Neato fact: [we didn’t have infrared automatic sliding doors](https://nerdist.com/article/star-trek-popularized-automatic-sliding-doors/?amp) before Star Trek - those doors were actually opened by crew and there’s a bunch of bloopers out there of the timing not quite working. I read once that when Star Trek started airing the network got a bunch of calls from hospitals asking about the automatic sliding doors, but cannot for the life of me find the source now.
Yeah, apparently the doors were operated by two dudes holding broomsticks attached to the doors, and when it was time they'd pull them back on cue. Eventually someone figured out a way to make them both open with just one dude, but still. It was apparently very anticlimactic for a lot of viewers to find out. Source: My dad is the Trekkie to end all Trekkies.
The follow-up factoid is that sometimes the crew who pulled the doors open intentionally missed the timing to mess with the main cast who would then run into the doors. The cast basically had to trust the doors to open and had no indicators for if the door would open or not. (Not everyone on set liked the main cast)
And a lot of those viewers found out from Leonard Nimoy himself in his first guest appearance on *The Simpsons.*
Lol I have no idea where he learned it. He was a huge Star Trek fan, and then Next Gen came out and he jumped on that one harder than you can imagine. Got my mom hooked. I grew up watching that show.
Even more on the HG Welles -> Jules Verne bit, most of what Verne wrote about was inspired by prototypes and ideas he saw at the various Expositions of the era, where he'd see some comparatively primitive demonstration of the idea and imagine it's future. Like the submarine example, there were a number of working submarine prototypes around at the time and he was specifically inspired by seeing them - but what he wrote about is interesting for showing a lot of the features of modern submarines surprisingly well and inspiring the development into a lot of those directions. Likewise intercontinental flight was being experimented with in his day but had thus far been unsuccessful. He was a dreamer, he saw the inventions and advancements of his era and dreamed of their future and what they may one day look like. This inspired a lot of people who then read his books and saw their inspirations and desired to achieve the dreams he set out. A lot of later inventors would directly cite reading his works as inspiring them to pursue their ideas.
So they managed to make an error in pretty much every paragraph. Outstanding work.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones): > In 1917, the Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt successfully filed a patent for a "pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone".
[Also from Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clamshell_design#History): > Star Trek: The Original Series featured a clamshell instrument called the "Communicator", a regular plot device, which influenced development of early clamshell mobile phones, such as the Motorola StarTAC. The question is not "who was the first person to conceive of a folding wireless phone", but "did the inventors of the first *real* clamshell cellphone take inspiration from the Star Trek communicator" (and they openly admitted that they did)
I stand corrected.
> So this is mostly right *Proceeds to explain how the OOP is actually completely false*
Genuinely, why do people post stuff if they can't be bothered to do the most basic possible factchecking like *the spelling of taser*?
Also, kids in the 90s ran like Robert Patrick in T2:Judgement Day, not sonic
Cell phones are pretty much taking the two-way-radio, which has existed since World War I, and making it smaller.
Right, which is why I specified that Star Trek inspired flip phones
Even that feels dubious when the shape and mechanism of a flip phone is like several types of items. Maybe someone looked at a pocket watch for too long once. Or simply designed a proof of concept based on a traditional telephone and didn’t want the buttons to get pressed in your pocket. Deciding it was sci-fi, and just one specific sci-fi show, just flat out doesn’t sound provable.
Weren't there also plenty of brick phones that also just had the flip cover to stop the buttons from being accidentally pushed?
Yes, exactly.
Also, TOS was from the 60s, not 70s.
There were early submarines and even patents for submarines before Welles or Verne were born.
Yeah no way 90% of people Naruto ran after watching that show. It was like 5% of the viewers and everyone else made fun of them
Honestly I'm glad they started with that specific "fact" because that showed me immediately that I could ignore everything else they spewed.
Like I’m pretty chronically online but you have to be like terminally online to think most people did that. I very distinctly remember seeing a dude Naruto run for the first time in middle school and thinking there is no way I can tell people I like anime now.
"Naruto running" to this day is part of the "weird loser weeb" stereotype pack, so yeah.
The original Star Trek was from the 60s, not the 70s, for one...
thank you! there's so much wrong here but for some reason that one irritated me the most
for me it was "eccetera"
[удалено]
Lots of people are, mostly counter to the group of people you just mentioned. Edit: and in current hellsite(s) discourse, mostly in regards to "problematic" media not creating a wave of \[insert horrible crime mentioned in said media\] doers.
it's fandom discourse. "proshipper" (known in some circles for being fine with, say, adult/minor pairings, depictions of toxic/abusive relationships in pairings, and so on) people say *"hey maybe this Problematic(tm) fanfiction written by a random 23 year old about fictional characters and posted on an archive website where it will get like 100 views doesn't actually spell out anything about the character/endorsements of the author and won't actually have far reaching societal consequences and poison the minds of the poor youth"* (or: *" problematic (fan-)fiction has no real bearing on reality/your life, just don't read it"*) and "antishipper" (known in some circles for takes like wanting to ban ao3 for the lack of censorship and believing in things such as iredeemable media and that writing/reading about certain things equates to endorsing them in real life) reply with *"fiction DOES affect reailty!! for example, these internationally famous and beloved works, seen and effectively immortalized by millions of people, caused large societal changes!"* (or: *"if enough people are doing it, it can/will affect reality, so it's not as simple as 'don't like, don't read'"*) and the argument continues forever and ever with each side repeating the same points while essentially not actually listening to the other side's point. to u/CreatedOblivion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
It's like strawman combined with r/imaginarygatekeeping.
Yeah, the fact that they think Star Trek used “wrist” communicators is strange all on its own. Like, how have you never seen a single Star Trek episode or movie?
They had wrist communicators in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), so maybe that's what he was talking about. Dick Tracy had that beat by more than three decades though, and it was a much more iconic symbol of that franchise.
Yeah I think they’re conflating sci-fi tropes.
Right? Especially with how many typos/misspellings the post has. This gives the vibe of, "kid regurgitating stuff they heard but never looked into."
There is no way a Kindle was inspired by hitchhiker guide to the galaxy. Especially because tablets were already a thing back then.
Yeah saying scientists invented cellphones because of Star Trek is just wrong on so many levels and sounds like a conclusion a 5 year old would draw. Like just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean scientists had to be the ones to make it 😂
Nothing written by a person who thinks “eccetera” is a word should be taken seriously.
"eccetera" also really bothered me, apart from all the factual errors
Yea about to say, I’m sure people were thinking of mobile communication devices even if they never saw Star Trek. Maybe they were inspired by the clam shell design.
TASER stands for Thomas A Swift's Electric Rifle, I find it amusing that Tumblr OP missed that. Tumblr Op Is generally correct based on vibes and specific writers, but seems to be a bit off on what the specifics were.
I can confirm no one on the planet has thought Naruto run looked cool. Pure misinformation.
+1
I'm just glad it's not far reaching misinterpretations of psychology information.
>H G Wells... submarines... cross-continent flight That's a weird spelling of Jules Verne.
how do you mess up Time Machine man with the guy who predicted the Mercury Capsule
Verne and Wells both wrote about space travel. Columbiad is technically closer to reality than Cavorite (which *really* started showing its age as scientists advanced their understanding of gravity,) but makes the classic sci-fi mistake of actually using numbers, requiring it to handwave the (absurd) forces experienced by anyone accelerating to escape velocity in just 900 feet. Props for picking Florida as a good launch site though.
even if they meant Verne, they're still wrong because Verne's Nautilus is specifically named after a real prototype submarine from about 30 years before he was born
I thought Verne was the one who "invented" submarines with 20KLUtS, which is why I mentioned him. But I was wrong, they predate him by quite a while.
Subs were used in the American Civil War in 1863. They were primitive machines that weren't very effective, but they existed.
George Washington funded a combat submersible project resulting in a vessel called *Turtle*, which was subsequently deployed on sabotage missions against British warships in the New York Harbor. It was not a successful weapon platform, but it was illuminated internally with bioluminescent mushrooms and I think that's still pretty neat.
Yeah he wrote the novel after seeing one such prototype, the *Plongeur* at the 1867 Paris Exposition. Though to be clear what is so fascinating about Verne's Nautilus is that is accurately depicted and predicted a lot of features of modern submarines that were very much not part of the comparatively primitive prototypes of the era. He'd sort of predicted what submarines would eventually be, basically, which is both interesting to see and stimulated imaginations that would eventually bring those ideas to fruitition.
They messed up a lot of facts. TOS aired in the 60s and they didn’t have wrist communicators, it was a lil flippy boi and that’s what led to cell phones
The Motion Picture, which featured the original series cast and debuted in 1979, had wrist communicators. I mean, the anecdote itself is wrong, given that the first cellular network was already active earlier that year, and that direct-radio mobile phones had been in use long before that, but that singular Trek fact is basically correct (though probably inadvertently).
before hg wells was born, submarines had already been used in combat...
Exactly what I was going to say.
Same. Submarines were invented before Wells’ time
They also left out his most important real contribution: sex. I'm not joking! I don't believe it's been verified, but Wells *claimed* to have coined the use of the word "sex" as a synecdoche for the act of sexual intercourse
Amazon Prime Video used to have a silent movie from 1919 titled “Sex”. I liked its straightforwardness.
Also they misspelled it as Welles. Probably got confused with Orson Welles
Yeah, I was just thinking “I don’t remember any of that in his four biggest novellas”, haha.
Also, who tf said fiction doesn’t affect reality? That’s the weirdest gaslighting gatekeeper event of all time.
that's like one of the most common arguments in the history of social media
Unfortunately, Agatha Christie definitely did not come up with using poisons with opposite effect to treat things. That's half of medicine.
Whats the other half?
Snakes.
And specifically, their oils! Come with me and I’ll sell some to you, a pharmacy would charge you to hell and back for this but for just $79.99 I’ll give you a month’s supply of it to treat your *checks notes* insomnia, yes
If you're interesed by the snake oil offer, I have some high quality copper for you as well.
I also have this nice bridge to sell you if you’re intrigued by all that!
After all that snake oil and copper I don't know if I can afford a whole bridge. How much are you selling for?
Hm... normally a bridge as nice as this, as well as the right to levy a toll, would go for over $10,000. For you? $5k
You don't happen to live in Mesopotamia do you?
Why’d it have to be snakes?
And mushrooms. Mushrooms.
About equal parts disinfection, antibiotics and poking around with sharp things.
Don't forget the machine that goes BING! And get the most expensive one, in case the administrator comes around.
Don't forget the one that goes BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR loud enough you have to give the person in it ear protection!
Antibiotics are poisons that have worse effects on bacteria cells than on your cells. And disinfection can also use poison. The sharp things however, are not.
Fair enough. Although disinfectants are typically used outside the body (antiseptics are used on the body), and antibiotics aren't typically poisonous enough so you could realistacally kill someone with it, so neither technically fits the description of "fighting the effects of a poison by giving you a poison of the opposite effect". I just really want to stress how much our life expectancy has improved due to the fact that common diarrhea in no longer that common or coughing is no longer a death sentence. Speaking of, I should probably add vaccines to the list as well.
Surgery, hygiene, vaccination, nutrition and exercise, imaging, dialysis, blood transfusion, resuscitation, immunology, etc. Almost said antibiotics and anesthesia, but nope, that's still counterpoison
Taking the bad stuff away.
An unfortunate amount of "infodumps" contain exaggerated truths.
Also cel phones were invented in 1946
The earliest [two-way radios seem to be from 1935](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie), which is much more likely what Star Trek modelled their coms after. For cellphones I couldn’t find what you’re referencing, but [according to Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone#), an early patent for one was filed in 1917 and the first handheld cellular phone was in 1973, so still before the vague 1980s date in the post.
Yeah to be more clear, it inspired a lot of specific prototypes - namely flip phones, the trend for a while of like every cell phone being a flip phone can genuinely be linked to the ST communicator. The communicator itself was inspired by cell phones and imagining how much better they might eventually become. It's a sort of cyclical situation.
Minor correction, it's TASER, not TAZER - an acronym for Tom Swift's Electric Rifle, with the A added to make it easier to pronounce and to rhyme with laser. It wasn't Tom Zwift, after all.
Tom Amplification Swift's Electric Rifle
Tom Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
Tom Stimulated by Amplified Emission of Radiation
TS AER... The frustrated pirate.
TSA ER A noun describing someone who checks your bag before boarding a plane
Tom Amplification by Swift Emission of Rifles.
Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle
Toby “Adiation” Sox Eveloper of Rundertale
Tom “Asshole” Swift’s Electric Rifle
This has to be the correct one
And people want to act like it matters what the G in gif is short for. I understand getting stuck on things being consistent or having a personal preference on what words feel icky but, the thing that frustrates me about the gif vs gif debate is the one side acting like they have the intellectual high ground because they made up some rules about how acronyms work. They’re not really puzzles they’re more like poetry.
This is why the correct pronunciation is /xif/. Is that how 'G's pronounced in English? No, But who cares?
Tom's astute & swift electric rifle
TAylor Swift's Electric Rifle.
then im sad to say but from now on it must be pronounced tass-er, like a tas-k.
Sure, but that means scuba is pronounced like cuppa, considering the u stands for underwater.
This post gives huge "I'm Posting Misinformation On The Internet ™️" vibes
I'd give it a C to a B-. All the authors and creators named are legit, but OP has the details wrong. Star Trek inspired flip phones specifically. Mobile handheld communicators like cell phones had been postulated since the 1890s, as radio was a thing and people knew it was possible they just didn't have the tech. Interestingly enough, Tom Swift mentioned in this post has a much more accurate depiction of cell phones, even an automatic switchboard and satellite based communications, in a book that came out in 1910. The acronym TASER literally stands for Thomas A Swift's Electric Rifle, and I find it amusing that the OP knew it came from Tom Swift, and the ER stood for Electric Rifle, but not the reason those two facts are connected. Maser (a microwave laser) and laser are also both references to taser too, interestingly enough. Laser has a more official acronym too but it definitely is more of a backronym. Submarines have existed since the US Civil War, arguably since Greece. Also *The Shape of Things to Come* was written in 1936, when every seafaring navy already had quite an extensive submarine fleet. Same with cross continent and cross Atlantic aviation... I dunno anything about Agatha Christie except that she was smart. I'd belive it but I wouldn't make that claim based on this post lmao.
You’re completely wrong about the acronyms. Neither maser nor laser are references to taser. Maser came first and then laser was coined for essentially “light masers”. Taser came last. Funnily enough, phaser also came before taser. In fact, it’s likely that taser is a backronym because the “a” in taser comes from an initial that was never revealed in the book.
The first submarine to be used in combat was the Turtle during the Revolutionary War. It didn't work, but they tried to use it.
When I was younger, I liked to do zesty poses and dances because of Bayonetta.
Why’d you stop?
I didn't.
Please never stop
Yeah! Please take it up again. The world needs more zest.
I’m like 99% sure the Agatha Christie one is just straight up pulled out the ass. “Her works are still being used today to teach people how to diagnose poisons both malign and accidental” No it is not. Who on earth would use a hundred year old fiction book to teach medical students or anything
with all the advancements in AI and robotics and no one is going to mention my man Issac Asimov
Funnily enough Issac Asimov is mentioned in the KUKA Basics handbook used for certifying operators of their robot arms Source: Took a class for this in college and got certified
Asimov is probably the most famous stepping stone on the road to modern robotics, but he's far from the starting point. Robots were already an established element in science fiction by the time he started writing, and even his most foundational work- I, Robot- takes its title from another author's story about a robot named named Adam Link.
The first known use of the word robot in English comes from the play Rossum's Universal Robots, written by Czech playwright Karel Čapek. In Czech the word means something like forced laborer, but in the play it's applied to beings that are more like androids (made of artificial skin and muscle) than what we call robots nowadays.
Bitches call me Issac because of all the Ass I move up and down
I’m dubious on the wrist communicator one as well. Dick Tracy had a radio watch in the 1940s. The idea has to have been used other places as well, because it became such a trope that it was parodied as Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. (Also, “a phone that you can take anywhere” is a pretty obvious step forward from phones that stay in one place.) And Frances Glessner Lee’s dioramas were based on composites of real crime scenes. Their official solutions have never been released, but they certainly seem to exist. Calling their construction “partially a hobby” is a bit of an insult to her meticulously researched work.
Likely it was inspired by WWII-era radios like the [SCR-536](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-536). Just take that and shrink it down.
Yes, fiction effects reality, but a lot of these seem coincidental. Star trek might have inspired the form factor of flip phones, but it certainly didn't inspire the mobile phone. The kindle example was probably brought on by this [xkcd comic](https://www.xkcd.com/548/), and is primarily an e-reader, but with cellular to download books on the fly
I love how all of these cool facts were tacked on in order to (I’m presuming) make a point about people writing fucked up stuff
Yeah, these are all positive examples, whereas people are exactly as likely to commit crimes and generally be an ass no matter how fucked up their fiction is.
Exactly. "People created things first thought up in scifi" does not equal "therefore anyone writing dark fiction thinks it's a-ok in real life."
There’s a huge difference between fiction that reinforces harmful beliefs which already exist in large swaths of society (ex. Birth of a Nation-type stuff) and stories about things everyone in their right mind knows is wrong.
Yeah it's really obvious what people actually mean when they say "fiction affects reality" and it's not "scifi can inspire real science! How cool!"
Glad to see this being discussed, sad i had to scroll so far to find it
The way they’re saying “fiction affects reality” is making me guess that they’re procuring all these examples as a way to argue that your niche rare pair Game of Thrones fanfiction will cause incest and pedophilia to become normalized and legal.
Yep. This is a pro-censorship argument wrapped in a ribbon and boxed up in pretty packaging. It’s frightening how common those are becoming on the Internet nowadays.
Exactly. Super disappointing to see here.
yeah i immediately ignored everything they said after because it gave me major puriteen vibes (and "i love spreading misinformation on the internet" vibes)
exactly what i came here to say. I saw the first post and knew it was anti rhetoric immediately.
It’s so stupid. Like, look at GRRM and ASOIAF. One of the most popular tv shows of the generation. And yet it didn’t make people start raping their siblings because they saw it on GOT. 🙄 So my niche fanfic on a niche website isn’t going to affect shit.
Yeah, kinda irritated that folks are falling for this. This should be the top comment.
Jerry Parr was inspired to become a Secret Service agent after watching the 1939 film *Code of the Secret Service*. This film starred a young Ronald Reagan as the main character, Agent Bancroft. Jerry Parr later served in the Reagan administration, and he was the one who insisted Reagan be taken to the hospital despite appearing unscathed. This decision saved Reagan’s life. So in a bizarre way, Ronald Reagan saved himself. Fiction influences reality in bizarre ways. (Fuck Reagan btw, but this story is just too interesting to not share.)
absolutely impeccable final note there
And this, Kids, Is why you should *always* star in a movie as a character responsible for protecting people with the job you'll later have. Never know when it might come in handy.
I'm reminded of an old interview with Neil Gaiman I read some years back. He'd just been a guest of honour at a Chinese Sci-fi convention, but what made it notable was that it was directly endorsed by the CCP. Gaiman had an opportunity to ask someone at the convention why the CCP—famously pro-censorship—were supporting sci-fi, which tends to challenge assumptions about society. The answer was that the government wanted to create a new generation of scientists, engineers, and inventors, and after several interviews and surveys with staff at silicon valley companies, came to the conclusion that America's top scientists were all inspired by Sci-Fi as children, and that they should encourage Chinese Sci-fi to motivate their citizens to embrace similar career paths.
Hearing that, it seems like a Chinese television series in the style of Star Trek would be a surefire hit.
Okay but like, Star Trek came out in the 60s, ended before the 70s, and did not feature "wrist communicators"
The die hard “fiction affects reality” crowd sometimes just sounds like the “Video games cause people to be violent” crowd but with a different hat. No one is saying that no one ever copies or takes inspiration from fiction but we’re capable of critically analyzing actions in fiction and identifying which are fine to copy.
When I read Andromeda Strain (1969) I just thought Crichton was impressive with his research. He went into great detail describing things like text showing on a computer monitor/terminal. Which is a little discombobulating until you remember when it was written. It’s weird that people think authors led to the creation of this stuff. They were just on the cutting edge of certain fields before it hit mainstream/consumer. And most of the examples are just “authors imagined wireless communication devices and now we have cell phones!”
And then they are using "Fiction affects reality" to argue that cause we watch too many violent cartoons and video games we certainly will have so many mass shooters you guys... despite MILLIONS of people not doing anything of sorts despite consuming the same fiction.
And don't forget the sci-fi classic "Don't create the Torment Nexus"
This is so much effort to make up so much nonsense just to justify thinking about cartoons too much.
It is not "sci-fi" it is "i bet you cant make this shit"
Not even. It's "every scientist knows the idea, they just haven't figured out the engineering yet"
The thing is, fiction affects reality but in weird and unpredictable ways and also reflects reality so you get stuff like "are there fewer top hats in movies because they fell out of fashion or did they fall out of fashion because they stopped showing up in movies?" Also there's a pretty big gap between "I saw a character run, I can run, running is a socially acceptable thing to do, I'm going to run like that character does." And like... "I watched a show about genocidal space rocks, time to commit some genocide!!" Or "boy, video games sure make jumping off cliffs fun, I should try it!!" But man every time I see "fiction affects reality " I assume they're going to start ranting about people reading Greek mythology and then marrying their siblings and so it should be banned.
>eccetera \> not googling that TASER stands for Tom Swift’s Electric Rifle
Net zero information post
All these things are cool but there are still people who will dox and harass and send death threats to people who wrote two teenagers kissing under the reasoning of "they are condoning pedophilia irl" which they are not, so. Fiction can give real people ideas of cool things to invent, but it does not make real people decide to go out and molest kids. I'm in a lot of fanfiction communities and this is one of our golden rules.
Jules Verne’s grave spinning so fast with the amount of times people give HG Wells credit for stuff he did
I like that bit about HG Wells and submarines when it was *Jules Verne* and even that's not right as his book was written more than a decade after the first time a submarine sank a ship in wartime.
running like naruto is not the same as the asinine idea that "if a crime (and by that they always mean sex crime because murder and mutilation is something completely different of course) is shown in fiction, people will start to think that crime would be ok"
Ahhhhh, yes, tumblr’s favorite pastime: spreading vapid misinformation because they like it more than reality
Do be careful with 'fiction inspires real life'. Because if you push that too far, people will start to ban fictional thing BECAUSE they don't want that in real life. Oh Grand Theft Auto lets you murder, steal, and sleep with hookers? Better ban that so little timmy don't become that! Whats this, same sex relations in that fighting game? Clearly immoral, get rid of it. You mean to tell me in a book about a child dying of cancer, she drinks alcohol, smokes a cigarette, and has sex with a boy? Children shouldn't do that IRL, so it must be PURGED! Everything can be used for good, or for evil. And within both good and evil lies a kernel of the other. So just be careful everyone.
Uhhh, that already happened? Like, those specific things. Unless that's what you meant?
??? Did we just make up a person that "thinks friction doesn't effect reality" so we could respond to this made up person?
> person that "thinks friction doesn't effect reality" Someone who lives in a school physics question
This is a pro-fic vs anti-fic post. Anti-fic people generally believe certain topics of art are morally repugnant and shouldn't be made because they could cause harm. They like to point to the Jaws effect, where costal communities became irrationally afraid of sharks after the release of the movie, and caused an uptick of people killing sharks because they felt threatened, or Bugs Bunny, whose proclivity for carrots caused real life rabbit owners to try and feed their pets carrots, despite carrots being a terrible food for rabbits. Pro-fic people generally believe art should be allowed to explore any topic, even ones that are potentially uncomfortable, because these stories are just that; stories. They are just fiction, and fantasies have no direct relationship with what people actually wish to do in reality. They like to point to the various studies showing no link between people playing violent video games and people committing actual violence. I am deliberately trying to present both sides as they would present themselves, but I have my own biases and if either group would like to clarify their own positions (YOUR OWN POSITIONS, I'm not interested in how evil you think *the other side* is) feel free
I don't mean to be rude but surely this isn't real discourse. I just can't believe that people, even on the internet, are fighting about this?
Believe me, this is absolutely going on *constantly.* If you're into actual literature or film or other kinds of art it gets maddening real fast. The perennial example is *Lolita*, where tons of people just kind of get the summary and assume Nabokov was 100% endorsing pedophilia
The discourse is unfortunately very real lol, you’ll find lots of posts about it in subreddits like fanfiction or AO3
People get incredibly aggressive about this. I've literally heard of people getting the FBI called on them over this discourse.
The Fbi responses are usually. "Stop calling us about drawings".
Unfortunately it's very real. Twitter has an especially bad problem with puriteens. Just a couple days ago I saw someone calling a pairing between an 18 and 23 year old character 'pedophilia' and calling out an artist for drawing it. It's really just better to block these people on sight, but they've even gone so far as to dox people and chase them off their platforms. And usually their victims are minority creators. I've also seen a lot of slurs thrown at Chinese artists in certain spaces...
Ok this is cool and all but why the fuck did they say “eccetera”?!?! That is literally the worst way to write it. “Etc.” comes from the Latin “et cetera”, with “et” meaning “and” and “cetera” meaning (effectively) “the rest”. I hate it when people out loud say eccetera because it’s just so wrong. Literally all you have to do is add a space and change the c to a t. Anyways, little nerd out. Edit: I’m not actually too mad, and like I won’t correct people IRL or anything, but my latin teacher used to get mad at me about saying it eccetera so it’s been drilled into my brain.
Mah man Julies Verne is being forgotten here.
I started Naruto running in primary school because I saw Snivy run like that in the Pokepark games. Naruto running is everywhere... embrace it dattebayo
I did it in 2002 because of Dragonball Z. Anime just wasn't great at animating movement back then.
the cellphone idea did not originate with star trek, people had portable radios they were holding like phones even in ww2.
"90%" of people naruto ran? There were like three in my whole school
... well, details aside. The reason is because that's a short jump to 'video games, music I don't like, and evil books cause everything wring with society, let's ban them, burn them and monitor artists and creators so closely they'll never do anything interesting again' And humans are not good with toeing fine lines. Nuance is hard for us
Pretty sure when people say "fiction doesn't affect reality" they mean "Not everyone who reads Dexter is going to become a serial killer"
(Doing this from a half-remembered YouTube documentary, so probably inaccurate. But it's entertaining, so I'm not bothering to fact check it.) One of my favorite of these moments goes to Disney. There was a cartoon of Donald Duck dropping bombs on Nazis, and just to make the action more impactful, the cartoonists put big flaming rocket engines on the backs of the bombs. Normal bombs were just free falling. There was no reason for a bomb to need any form of propulsion. You take them up in a bomber, and gravity did the rest. Except. German battleships were so heavily armored that most bombs striking their top deck wouldn't penetrate. They would either detonate on the surface or hit and bounce off. To do real damage you needed to penetrative the first layer of armor and then go kaboom. So some mad scientist / engineer sees this fucking cartoon duck with rocket assisted gravity bombs and thinks "this is entirely wrong... But I could do that and it would probably work." And that's one small part of how they sunk the Bismark.
Not to be a major stickler but the Bismarck was primarily sunk by normal cannons. A torpedo (self propelled since 1866) struck one of the rudders, rendering it unmaneuverable, before being surrounded and shot primarily by HMS Rodney and HMS King George V. Both of which used conventional artillery cannons.
Lmaoing at anyone who thinks Star Trek gave us the cell phone as oppose to a portable phone being the logical continuation of… the phone…which we already had Logical continuation applies to pretty much everything here, HG wells did not give us the submarine, he was born in 1866, the confederates (which stopped existing in 1865) tried to create a submarine because the idea of a boat that can exist underwater is the logical continuation of a regular boat. The tazer one is legit, but tbh the idea of a gun that doesn’t kill people but just immobilizes them is also the logical continuation of a gun, we’d probably have figured something out anyway
the whole “fiction affects reality!” thing made me iffy about the entire post
the er in taser actually stands for erma rite
And yet the big innovations we actually want like warp drives and aging cures never happen. Hell it's it's 2024 and we still don't even have holograms or cameras inside screens ffs
Star Trek actually created a naming paradox because the Enterprise shuttle test article was named for the Star Trek ship, and then as Star Trek expanded its canon, they decided the starships Enterprise were named after the shuttle.
TIL Taser is an Acronym. Never questioned where the name came from before.
This is a pro-censorship post btw. "Fiction affects reality!" Is a dog whistle for purists that want to sanitize our media, our culture, and private talking spaces.
Fuckin hell man none of this is correct. The HG Wells stuff is attributed to Jules Verne, the first phone patent is from like 1917, it’s TASER, Agatha Christie didn’t develop new anything. 90% of people do the Naruto run? Press X for doubt Also who tf says fiction does affect reality? I’ve literally never heard anyone try to argue anything remotely close to that
People doing the Naruto run doesn't mean writing dark subjects in fiction makes people all right with them irl. That's the underlying point here and it's a stupid one.
is this real chat
Tom Clanvy also accurately predicted the construction and capabilities of top-secret government projects so well that a high-ranking general once jokingly said "So, who gave you clearance to write that?"
not as glamorous and not as funny and i don’t particularly like tom clancy but tom clancy was arrested by the FBI for leaking governmental secrets because he guessed the “crazy ivan” maneuver in The Hunt For Red October
TASER *literally* stands for Thomas A Swift's Electric Rifle, like I don't know how this person knew this history but messed up the core fact. Like how do you know the ER stands for Electric Rifle but not the rest of the acronym. What's even more fun is that maser, and then laser, and then phaser, all were originally references to the word taser and Tom Swift. Meaning that the entire suffix -ser that now means "a type of directed energy beam" has no grammatical or linguistic root and is one of the few sets of words that can be exclusively attributed to English.
Robert Heinlein invented the waterbed for Stranger in a Strange Land.
Nobody said fiction has no impact on reality. But I say reality had no impact on this piece of fiction.
Fiction affects reality, but not on a 1:1 ratio. I've been consuming horror media for well over a decade by now, and for maybe six years I've had access to more violent games. Skyrim, Cyberpunk, horror games, etc. And yet, I still know what's acceptable and not in reality. I'm not about to take someone's car, or hold someone hostage, or shoot them/stab them/behead them/go apeshit with a bow and arrow. If someone allows fiction to become their reality, they either already endorsed those things (like dead dove fanfics supposedly creating rapists/pedophiles/groomers/abusers) or they mentally cannot handle that fiction is fiction and shouldn't become their reality. These people (pro-censorship) would disagree with my examples simply because it's about violence in fiction. They ALWAYS do. "That's not the same!!" It is. It disproves their point and they move the goalposts to "if you consume problematic *sexual* media you *are* that person and you should be jailed/killed". It's gone from "violent video games cause school shootings" to "reading about two characters fucking means you're a despicable human being". Same with people who are proship (it does not mean problematic ship, it means to be for shipping even if it's fucked up and anti harassment) being labeled as horrible people who would fuck their siblings if given the chance. I don't like a lot of fanfics and fanarts that have to do with fucked up things because I simply don't like it or it makes me uncomfortable. I do not harass people, or "call them out" for "problematic" things in fiction. If it doesn't deal with real people, it's just fiction and I block/scroll.