Comment by dylan604

Comment by dylan604 18 hours ago

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Funny, when I was in my 20s and not British, I knew what a Dalek was because it was just part of the zeitgeist. Tricoders are frequently mentioned as one of the life imitating art type of things that modern tech is striving to take from sci-fi to IRL. I had never even seen an episode of Dr Who, but I was familiar with it because of all the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into. Ironically, I did know what someone wearing an H on their forehead meant from watching Red Dwarf, but that’s a tangent. It just seems like a strange Venn diagram where source code android and Star Trek tricoder do not intersect would be a very odd diagram

perching_aix 17 hours ago

I think you hit the nail on the head there, you and the author are simply from different cultural zeitgeists. I also remember Star Trek and Dr Who being a big deal, but I was entirely too young to care. And I continue not to care, since I don't watch live action shows much. Never seen an episode of Friends or Game of Thrones either for example. Just a starkly different generation and subculture.

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  • ROllerozxa 9 hours ago

    Indeed. There is such an immense amount of media that is produced from decade to decade that nobody can ever know everything and understand "all" the references. Things that may seem like "things everyone know about" vary wildly between location and year ranges, and in the recent decades with the Internet there are just so many subcultures that all could be classified as "nerdy" but which lack a lot of overlap.

    I suppose I'm too young to have watched Star Trek when it was really popular (and have all sorts of other blind spots when it comes to TV shows and other media even for people my age), but I've definitively heard about it. And I know some other references to it like Spock and the Vulcan salute, but the Tricorder had completely missed me until now.

    Also, with something like GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I I could pretty easily tell it was a reference to something fictional (in that case Star Wars) since there is obviously no celestial body with that name. But with the Tricorder I was looking to actually make sure it's not some kind of actually real but vestigial hardware sensor thing that Android might have supported in the 00s, tangentially related to the Tricorder that was on Star Trek. I have certainly witnessed stranger coincidences.

    Like Android still has functionality in the API for supporting trackballs, which I know used to be on some really early Android phones. So if that had been among the list as "there's this joke input device called a 'trackball' in the API, implying there are phones with a big physical ball you can roll around to move a cursor on the screen", that would be quite silly. Because it was a real and used thing in the past, even though nowadays it's more of a legacy feature (though might be a bad example as I assume you can connect input devices over USB or Bluetooth that may be treated as a trackball by Android).

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eCa 17 hours ago

> the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into

I guess that’s your answer. People have different interests and as such there’s a virtually unlimited number of culture combinations that people can be into. And people can have white spots in places that are surprising to others, there’s only so much time.

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