Obsolescence.
So we just got a DVD player.
And I’m hooking it up to our ancient television set which means I’m actually hooking it up to the VCR which is at least able to hook up to our ancient television set through a whaddayacallit, a coaxial cable, as well as being able to handle those little RCA pulg thingamabobs or VCA or whatever the hell that’s all that comes with the DVD player. (The set’s a Zenith, since, if you get your hands on an old one, it’ll last forever. The VCR is a Sharp, since it was cheap. The DVD player is a Phillips, ditto, and it sits on top of a Kenwood 5-disc CD player which does fine enough, and the whole thing’s run through a Technics amplifier/tuner whateverthefuck, except for the VCR and the DVD player, which just pump sound out of the TV set, because the amp is so old it only has one set of auxilliary jacks, and who wants to get up and unplug this and plug that in every time? Huh? —Anyway, point being: we are a promiscuous couple of people when it comes to audiovisual equipment. We do not stand on brand names.) So in setting things up I have to turn the VCR to the AU channel (and why is there no AU button on my goddamn remote? Why do I have to turn the TV to channel 02 or channel 99 and then click up or down to hit AU? I tell you, the crap we have to put up with these days) and get the blue screen of death, you know? Except all the plugs worked and everything hummed along fine when I turned the DVD player on; that dead blue screen was replaced with the happy DVD logo and all was right with the world. (Or at least this tiny little corner of it. You know. Focus.)
After that, though, it was time to eat dinner and watch another set of Sopranos episodes. It was finally our turn to get the tapes from the library, so we’ve been watching an episode or two a night. (Not as good as the first two seasons, no. And there was definitely a feeling of maybe setting up the cards to deal out at the end—Chase had talked about bailing at the end of the third season, until they gave him a year off to go and come up with seasons four and five—only to take them back and deal out a new set and get it all a little bobbled and then flub the ending. —Keeping in mind that this is The Sopranos and as such is held to a standard that’s altogether rarified.)
So we put in the tape and press play (and everything worked fine, this isn’t that kind of story) and the Macrovision Copy Protection logo comes up and the FBI warning (which we fast-forwarded through; which we won’t be able to do with our DVD player, I don’t think), and then the “Feature Presentation” animation, which seems strange, since, you know, no previews, and then the HBO Original Programming blip, which uses a screen full of television snow to make its logo—
You remember snow, right? Static? Used to fill up the screen on a dead channel back when there were dead channels, before 250 undead channels of cable and TVs all started doing the blue screen of death?
Anyway. It occurred to me that one of the more famous opening lines in science fiction—
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
—looks one fuck of a lot different these days, doesn’t it.
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Very different, and perhaps a bit scarier. That is definitely not a sky blue.
Although, actually, not having cable, we still get the dead channel snow.
But you know, I've still never seen a computer snow crash ...
And you're lucky that your DVD player would hook up to your VCR. Even though our VCR player has the red, white and yellow jack inputs, our VCR refused to play nice until we went out and bought it its own adapter box to translate from the red, white and yellow to the coaxial. I figured it was some sort of anti-taping trick.
Cue long and acrimonious discussions in rec.arts.sf.written split across generational lines about what Gibson _really_ meant.
Have you read Neil Gaiman's _Neverwhere_?
Contratulations, Kip! You're now officially kinda famous.
I was at a social event this evening, and a friend started telling me about reading on some random blog she'd ended up on about how the first line of Neuromancer didn't work anymore.
I was racking my brains for hours trying to remember where I'd seen the post...