Sweet Summer Zoomer

[cimorene]

I know it's just ONE baby (teenager), but I'm still laughing about this Stranger Things fic I read set in 1986 where a character gets a new Canon camera and then immediately shows his friends the pictures he's been taking all day. Then he takes a few embarrassing shots of his pal asleep and the pal is like "Delete those!"

Baby... child... precious...

...how do they THINK cameras worked?

They think his 1986 Canon had a tiny full-color LCD screen in the back of it; that's funny enough without getting into digital and film photography.

Comments

[stranger]

Oh, yeah. I grew up with a camera nut in the house, and one bathroom was an occasional dark room for developing film, complete with pans and drying racks and bottles of fluid we children were cautioned not to touch. Photos were a *process*.

Then came digital imaging, and eventually... TikTok...

[harpers_child]

I've been reading through your bookmarks and hit one yesterday where they were talking about using Fabreeze on the furniture to get rid of pot funk. Fabreeze didn't exist until the 2000s.

[cimorene]

Oh yeah, there's lots of errors of that kind. Stores and restaurants that didn't exist, or only exist in Britain. Food and drinks that didn't exist. Clothes that didn't exist absolutely everywhere. The children really don't have the faintest idea about jeans before the modern era. Also they frequently have a character who lives in a trailer park and drives a junker running out and impulse-buying new leather jackets or having a huge wardrobe of different pairs of jeans or having like... ten or five spare custom-printed tshirts in different sizes for his local garage band...

[niqaeli]

having like... ten or five spare custom-printed tshirts in different sizes for his local garage band...

...only if he had, like, salvaged (read: maybe kinda sorta stolen) screen-printing gear from some print shop that'd closed unexpectedly on no notice that he'd worked at, and he did that shit hissown-damn-self, ahahahaha oh my GOD, my sweet precious summer child. (and if he had that, he would've been doing small-scale custom shit for the indie scene as a side gig to bring in a few bucks, definitely.)

[cimorene]

Exactly. Without even a screen printing setup, my friends and I were into making shirts in our early 20s. The costs mount up!

I'm gonna assume one of his band mates had access to a small/simple silkscreen like my mom used, bc I can't see them like, buying one just for this, and I think they say in canon that they're homemade.

[alexseanchai]

and here was me a couple months ago trying to figure out if any handwaving of the "canon set approx 2017 has tech that doesn't exist in RL yet" nature would be required to have somebody able to spontaneously (that is, without having brought dedicated video equipment with her) film a home video in 2007 or if smartphones had video camera functionality by then

(answer: the third-generation iPhone had that natively and the second-generation could be made to do the thing, but timing-wise only the first-generation works, so the fictional big-tech company canon gives us has to have sniped Apple here by a couple of years—though this somebody having a prototype of a phone from that tech company that's not yet available for commercial sale is plausible to probable, so I could narrow that gap if I felt like getting into detail)

[cimorene]

Hm, yeah, no, I still remember 2007,and my cameraphone wasn't good enough for pics yet really - they were all tiny. It wasn't the top of the line, but no phones were that great. I still had a separate camera with a mini usb cable. I think my first video-competent phone was 2010, probably.

[ealgylden]

Auuuugh... *turns into the Skeksis emperor and crumbles into dust* I did a photography unit in Jr. High art. I can still smell the chemicals.

My current fave, in a fic I otherwise quite like (not wholly on the right continent, vocab-wise, but very close!)- Eddie wearing a Nirvana shirt. He's a rock prophet!

[cimorene]

That's adorable. 😭