Exitement and disappointment in the new tiny Rubik's cubes (images)

When I saw it at a store in a mall in Massachusetts I was surprised and excited, they hadn't made these since the '80s and the company that had made them was no longer operating.

It's not uncomon to see tiny cubes in coin machines, but those things are utter crap.

[Added] I just looked up to see what the old ones are selling for now --14 to 18 dollars, it's a good buy, not because the value will go up, though be aware that the originally sold for 99 cents, but for the quality (assuming they haven't been damaged, I bought one once that looked fine on the outside but had somehow been absolutely crushed inside, it flew apart in my hands)-- and came up with a surprise.

The name "Wonderful Puzzler" is going to be introduced because it's what I thought my old tiny cube was.  It's not.  I remember the packaging it came in and seeing a picture of that packaging in an ebay listing came with a surprise.

It's in Wonderful Puzzler colors, it's from the Wonderful Puzzler era, and Wonderful Puzzler did make ones that size, but my tiny cube from the old days is an actual Rubik's brand one.

I didn't even know that the actual Rubik's brand made cubes in that size back then.  So, every time I say "Wonderful Puzzler" for the necklace cube in the rest of the post, I was wrong. [/added]

Wonderful Puzzler (Mr. Rubik was from Hungary, then a Soviet satellite state, we respected their patent claims not in the least, tons of companies made their own version) may have been a clone making idea stealing company, but they were also a quality company.  Their cubes were good and so were their mini-cubes.  The 19 millimeter ones were often sold as earrings or necklaces but they were never purely ornamental nor were they mere gimmicks.  They were good solid puzzles that worked just the same as the big ones because they were the big ones, scaled down to the 1/3rd length, width, and height.

Which is to say that they were a fully functional, quality, Rubik's cube that was smaller than two millimeters cubed.

Specifically they were 19mm.  That size is important.  That size is the size of one of the cubies on a regular cube.

Yes, I lost a sticker.  One of my favorite color even.  The thing could very well be older than I am, it's kind of impressive that the other 53 stickers still stay on so well.

Anyway, the point here is, you know it's the same size because of how well it fits between the top and bottom layer.  If I popped out a corner cube and put that in its place you'd see that if fit perfectly there too.  It would have to be a corner because the centers and edges have cutouts that are used to keep the cube from falling apart.  (If you've ever wondered about the mechanism you could google it or I could do a post sometime.)

Before we get on to other things, here's the modern tiny cube joining the family:

I had meant for them all to be showing the same colors but I guess I angled the new one wrong.  An interesting thing to note, which you can't see from this side, is that the regular sized cube and modern tiny one, which is an official Rubik's cube, have the same color scheme as the Wonderful Puzzler necklace cube.

This was not always so.  When the Wonderful Puzzler necklace was made white opposite blue and green opposite yellow was the official Rubik's color scheme and its white opposite yellow and green opposite blue marked it as a clone.

Modern Rubik's cubes are made with clone style coloring.

Anyway, here's just the little ones:

Things to note:

• While the Wonderful Puzzler necklace is a great puzzle, it looks worse because its stickers are a bit too big for it.
• My camera somehow made the Wonderful Puzzler's red side look orangeish but didn't do the same to the modern tiny cube's red side.  (In fairness to my camera, they are different shades of red.)
• Doesn't the modern one look a bit bigger?  By eyeballing it I think that the stickers on the two puzzles are about the same size but look at how much more of the necklace cube is covered by them.

Here's a look at the size difference:

Sorry it's a bit blurry/hazy, I realized way too late that I should have been using macro mode instead of trusting automatic to choose macro mode which sometimes works and sometimes...

Anyway, I didn't take the necklace off the shelf to compare sizes and then notice the difference.  I noticed the difference and then took the necklace off the shelf to compare sizes.

I noticed the difference because of this:

It's not huge.  But it is enough that they don't fit right.  You've got to shove a bit to make it happen, the upper blue cubie of the normal cube is noticeably pushed out of place by the size of the small one.

I looked at that for a bit and concluded it was two millimeters larger clocking in at 21 millimeters.

Eventually I found the calipers and the confirmed it.

It's still nice to have the little cubes in production, and there are still a lot of things that can be done with them, but it's disappointing that the size is off what I was expecting by those two millimeters.

If I want to make a 9x9x9 cube that's exactly the same size as a traditional cube, for example, it can't use the new little cubes for parts.  Making a cube where parts of it move as a 3x3x3 and parts of it move as a 9x9x9 is likewise not going to be had via combining part sizes of the two new standards.

My glasses are held together via the twisty ties from bread bags (image post)

Ok, so you know those things that twist around the open end of a bread bag to keep it closed?  Don't throw those out.  Don't ever throw those out.  They're massively useful.

So, it's like this:

I haven't had my eyes checked in, probably, seven years or more.  There's a slim chance that I got them checked four years ago but it's really slim and lacking memories or evidence to the contrary I'm going with, "I haven't had my eyes checked since before I lost my insurance the first time."  Thus seven years or more.  I think.  Possibly significantly more since we actually thought I lost my insurance before I actually lost my insurance and the fact that I was still being paid for as part of the insurance was because the Byzantine nature of insurance company renewal policies (it does happen and indeed did happen after I lost it for real.)

The Affordable Care Act got me insurance back for less than a year and maybe I had my eyes checked then, but I honestly don't remember, so, like I said, presumably seven years or more.  Quite possibly more like a decade.

With me so far?  Does this mean that I'm wearing glasses that are seven years to a decade-ish out of date?  No.

I lost my most recent glasses.  Best guess is that there was an accident involving a not-really-solid shelf and a toilet.  (There's a reason I set my glasses on the windowsill now when I take them off to take a shower in that place; there is no counter in the bathroom.)

These are my second most recent glasses from fucked if I know when.  This brings us to thing two never to throw out: out of date glasses.  When I occasionally misplace these and am in too much of a hurry to find them I can quickly grab third-most-recent glasses.  Like I said, don't throw out old glasses.  If all else fails maybe when apocalypse comes you can use them for beam scattering on your laser weapon which will decrease the punch packed but increase the area.  Don't believe me?  (Why would you not believe me?  It's self evident.)  Get a laser pointer and prescription eyeglasses, shine one through the other, note that the dot has increased to a blob.

So: old glasses.

The thing about glasses is that that they have to put up with the strains of life.  They'd not as bad off as shoes, but wherever you go and whatever you do they go with you and if you haven't invested in a hard and generally bulky glasses case (which in spite of their bulk tend to be easily fucked at the hinge) there's a good chance that in the course of human events they will be bent  You'll have to bend them back (unless you have a professional to do that for you.)  Accidental bend, corrective bend, slow bend over time, corrective bend, bend, bend back, and so forth.

This can lead to problems.  And I'm not just talking about the fact that the slow bend over time can lead to them falling off of your face onto the ground where the hazards are multiplied severely.

Glasses are held together by screws, screws do not like bends.  Screws, especially machine screws, want things to be straight because they're designed to go into a straight hole and have the threading alone prevent things from falling apart.

Now, take stress over however long it's been and things start going wrong.  The first time a screw comes lose you can tighten it.  Screwdrivers are nice but in a pinch a fingernail can work provided it can fit into the right place.  Pinky finger recommended for tight spaces.

As time goes on though, and things continue to warp and bend, and you never get around to making adjustments and alignments with needle nose pliers (which, honestly, who ever heard of such a thing.  Alignments use bog standard hammers, for adjustments you pull out the sledge; but in glasses everything is in miniature; they are strange beasts) eventually the screws don't catch anymore.

Left screw failed at the Great Northeastern War.  It took a while to find someone with a screwdriver small enough, just for me to try, and repeatedly fail, to get the screw to work.  So I raided the bread supply.

Which brings us to twisty ties.

If you don't know what they are --um, seriously?  I said they're the things on bread bags that twist, since we've ruled out the things that don't twist that seems pretty specific-- here's a public domain picture:

The blue one is a single tie, twisted.  The yellow is three ties flat.  The red is two ties flat.

How do I know the number of the unseparated ones?  Note those ridges?  There's one in the center of every twisty tie.  It is the heart and soul of the tie.  Also the spine.  It cannot be said to be the only important thing because the paper or plastic (usually plastic in my experience, I think) provides for ease of use and prevents rust.  Also, it probably reduces poking, but poking has never been a problem for me.

What these innocuous seeming things are, then, is a piece of metal pliable enough to twist into whatever shape you want and strong enough to not break under the strain of repeated twisting.

This is a very useful thing, though, generally, it's not something you plan to use so much as something you want to have on hand in case anything goes wrong.

Paperclips can serve a similar function with more strength (they'll hold a shape if need be) at the cost of more bulk and more difficulty in twisting (paperclips can be especially difficult to wrap, for example, if you don't have the best grip on them.)

So, here are my glasses in all their present glory:

And on the subject of new new new computer, that second picture is fucking awesome full size but there's no way in Hell I'm putting a 3819 x 2436 picture up here.  Not everyone reading has the best bandwidth and even they did, you can't see the full picture at full resolution ... ever.  Um, that's not the point.  You can't see the whole of the glasses at full resolution without a 4k monitor which most people don't have.   (Also, Blogger wouldn't let me do full resolution.  It wouldn't even allow me to come close.)  But the 4x monitor I now have was definitely worth it (even though getting it at a price my warranty could afford means having no on-board disk drive) as I am reminded every time I see something like that picture.  It's not the glasses in the picture that make it worth it though, it's the wood grain and cracked paint.

The first picture was taken inside and demonstrated beyond all doubt that even the light of a sun facing window is no substitute for just taking a damned picture outside.  At 4k you just notice the blur of needing a longer exposure to get adequate light (greatly intensified by the fact that I have no tripod so my unsteady hands, even at their most steady, will screw up any shot unless the exposure is so short that my hands don't have time to really move the camera.)

Back to The Great Northeastern War:

The screws are tiny, which makes the torque of any twist or bend comparatively huge, and as you can see, the screw never stood a chance:

At this point it has given up entirely and I forgot it was even in there.

The gap where you can see the screw isn't supposed to exist.  The two pieces are supposed to sit flush.  The trouble is that of all the corrections you can make to glasses, that is by far the hardest one to deal with.  Basically what you need is to pop out the lens, hold onto the frame as close to where the screw goes as possible, do it with something that has a really good grip but is small enough to not get in the way of part two, and then grab onto that little screw spot (hard) and twist.  (Two pair of needle nose pliers would do it.)

If you can't do that, or merely don't do that, the the screw isn't just trying to hold the frame tightly enough to stop the lens from popping out, it's also trying to hold a piece of metal in a place that is no longer its rest-state and constantly fighting against the metal's desire to twist into a different position.

(Yes, I am personifying, or at least assigning motivation to, the screw and the glasses' frame.)

So at The Great Northeastern War the screw decided it couldn't do that anymore.

After a quest to find someone with a screwdriver was successful, I tried to convince it to do it, but it kept on saying, "No."  This was bad as it meant the lens wouldn't stay in unless a solution was found.

I raided the bread.

Thus twisty tie.  You just strip off the protective coating --which is why a) it doesn't look horrifically stupid, and b) it has oxidized-- and then wrap.  Tightly.

Here are some pictures from other angles (the reason some aren't that close up is that the pictures I took inside weren't sharp enough for it to be worth it {all that's lost in scaling is blurring around the edges, not detail}; also one of the exterior ones had the wrong focus but I liked it) click for full size:

Ok, so that was done four months ago, hence the oxidation, and it only accounts for one twisty tie.  I said "twisty ties" plural.

Three days ago, possibly at around this time of day, the other side failed.

Wait, actually, important thing.  Well, "important" is an overstatement.  Notice that round thing that's just sort of sticking out there between the not-working frame-screw and the working hinge-screw?  Want to know what it is?

Well, as it turns out, corrective eyeglasses and sunglasses have a somewhat oppositional relationship to one another and as a result there are all sorts of "sunglasses for corrective eyeglasses" specialty-shit things but the kind of glasses I prefer (small lens close to the eye rather than larger lens at a greater distance) makes it so the specialty shit that works best at maintaining uniform polarization across both eyes doesn't fit on me because my forehead happens to be where it expects empty space to be.

Alternate things, or at least the ones that can fit on my glasses without making my glasses not fit on my face, tend to be bendy.  This is ... sub-optimal.  Polarized lenses filter out specific light and which light they filter out depends on the angle at which you're holding them.  (So if you watch a 3d movie and the 3d technology they use makes use of polarized glasses, don't tilt your head too much.)  Bendy things, by being bendy, do not hold the two lenses at fixed rotation relative to themselves.  This means that they filter out different light.  This in turn means that something as simple as looking at a blue sky can result in your eyes getting into an argument over what color it is.

For some reason, I don't really know what, my eyes don't like that particular kind of argument.  This is somewhat odd, to me at least, because my eyes have never agreed on what color things are.  They've had my whole life to come to a detente and, honestly, if I'm not outside (full sunlight) in a colorful place repeatedly closing one eye and then the other, I have trouble remembering what the difference is or which one goes which way.

I think that there's a yellow tint in one, and in one the colors are brighter and more vibrant.  The yellow tint is not a cataract, not even a nascent one (thank all gods of vision), but I don't remember what eye-care professional said it was.  Meaning that it's probably mundane.  Probably something like, "Some lenses are just tinted a bit."  Best guess would be that colors are more vibrant in the non-yellow-tinted eye, but it's fucking cold here, and I'm staying inside where the light is dimmer so eye testing will not occur at this juncture.

Anyway, my eyes don't like inconsistent polarization, in spite of being perfectly fine with having different color information coming from each to the point that I don't even notice it unless I'm outside on a bright day and closing eyes one at a time for some reason (trying to determine dominant eye is always a good reason.  Also, the nearsightedness in my right eye can make foliage look impressionistic given the right conditions.)

So, what does one do?  Well, back when I was still a person who got my eyes tested and bought glasses, one solution was to get glasses with sunglasses made for them.

What's the round thing?  A magnet.  There's another one on the other side.  Together they make it very easy to put on or take off the accompanying sunglasses at a moment's notice since the sunglasses are just polarized lenses, their frames, and the matching magnets that attach them to the glasses.

Of course, since these glasses are ancient I have long since lost the sunglasses that go with them.

* * *

Now then, three days ago was Monday, and I was in three states on Monday.  Though New Hampshire hardly counts since the bus went along the coast and thus was hardly in it (though it did stop in Portsmouth so it counted to the people who got on or off there.)

It might have been at this time of day, as I said.  That means that it was in the first state of Monday which was not this state which means that I was not home.

So there I was, in someone else's home, when the other screw failed.  What to do?

Well I didn't initially know it had actually failed forever so first there was a lot of trying to get the screw to work again.  Then there was a look for anything that might help.  Then there was a question of whether or not it's moral to take the twisty tie off of someone else's bread thus reducing protection and increasing the possibility of mold, and finally there was finding one that was not in use and thus avoiding moral conundrums all together.

I stripped the plastic, and got to repairs (click for bigger pictures)

And some more angles:

I took pictures in three places, the black background was a chair that really, truly, I'm not making this up, ought to be getting direct light from the window.  The second was on an air conditioner slightly closer to the window that I need to find a place to store for winter such that moving it to said place will not mess up my back (only one picture taken there was worth showing), and finally on my porch.

The move from the black chair to the white air conditioner produced this lovely shot:

There's a reason I generally don't use manual settings.  the two things are a few feet away from each other, they're being lit by the same source, and . . . yeah.  I get that a white background means more light but . . . a manual photographer I am not.

And, in closing, I was taking pictures in various places.  I have a cat.  This happened:

That's not my best anyway since the wrist strap, which I hardly ever use, is in the shot.  But that's not the point.  The point is more that when I finally thought I'd gotten free of the cat I took this shot and didn't notice until I was looking at pictures on the computer that she managed to sneak a paw in:

What the future used to look like (Alien: Isolation) (image post)

[If you want to skip the introduction and go straight to pretty pictures, click here.]

I want to be able to recommend the game Alien: Isolation because it's a visual masterpiece in terms of set building and that could have been worth the price of admission in itself if the gameplay and story weren't such crap.

I would argue that it would have been a far better game if it had taken after Gone Home and actually had you isolated in a place where your objective is to explore, find notes, messages, documents and such, and learn the story by putting stuff together on your own in a place devoid of others.

Why it would have been good, which is different from what made Gone Home good, is why I so very much want to be able to recommend the game, and am so disappointed that I can't.

In Gone Home the point was to learn the story, primarily of your sister, but also of your parents and, in general, why you arrived to an empty house.  That could have been good in Alien: Isolation too since the crap parts of the story weren't the things you learn via the emails, logs, and recordings scattered around the station, that was actually well done, the crap parts were everything that happened around your character during the actual game.

The reason that Alien: Isolation would have been great as an exploration game, though, isn't about story but instead about setting.  The setting is amazing to see and wonderful to stroll around in.

You see, Alien: Isolation is a sequel to the first movie of the franchise: Alien itself.

I'm not saying that it ignores, disregards, or contradicts the later movies.  It just takes place before them.  There's a time skip in there, recall.

The second movie, Aliens, takes place decades after the first and during those decades things changed.  The signal being broadcast from the derelict space ship with the alien eggs stopped for unknown reasons, the planet with said space ship was teraformed and colonized, synthetics/artificial people had a programming upgrade that changed them from complete monsters who would do whatever The Company told them, no matter the cost in human lives, to compassionate individuals who were programmed not to fucking harm human beings, Ripley's ten year old daughter (Ripley promised to be home in time for her eleventh birthday) grew up and eventually died at the age of sixty-six, Gateway Station was constructed.  Probably other stuff too.

The game follows movie-Ripley's daughter, Amanda, as she goes on a mission to look into the first clue about her mother's disappearance in 15 years since it happened.  Thus game-Ripley is 25 years old during the game.  It also means that the game is 15 years after Alien and 43 years before Aliens.  Thus Alien: Isolation is closer to Alien than any other movie in the franchise.

Hence me saying that it's a sequel to the first movie.

Here's the thing about the first movie: it came out in 1979.  That means it has Zeerust.  What is Zeerust?  It's a town in South Africa.  Seriously.  Douglas Adams and John Lloyd collaborated on two small dictionaries which operated on a simple premise: There are lots of definitions that need words; there are lots of words (specifically the names of places) that are lazing about without definitions.

Thus in The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff Adams and Lloyd took those words off of signs and gave them definitions.  Zeerust was given this definition: the particular kind of datedness which afflicts things that were originally designed to look futuristic.

A lot of things pull utter bullshit when dealing with how they relate dated visions of the future in their cannon.  See Enterprise, which never tried to have a pre-Original Series vision of the future except for that one alternate universe episode where evil Hoshi became evil empress of the evil empire by taking control of a ship of the same class as the Original Series Enterprise (but even then they weren't trying to deal with it, more just pretending it didn't need to be dealt with) or see Human Revolution the nominal prequel to Deus Ex which (oddly) rebelled against the lack of Zeerust in the original and added a metric fuckton to the the thing that was supposed to come between the present day and the not-Zeerusty future.

Alien: Isolation takes a different tack.  It's a sequel to Alien, it knows it, and for fuck's sake it's going to to look like it.

* * *

Stepping into Alien: Isolation is stepping into what the future looked like in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  The vision of the future given to us in 1979 by the film Alien is lovingly recreated and expanded.

Instead of using the 15 years between Alien and Alien: Isolation to justify Zeerust reducing aesthetic changes the entire game is set aboard old things to justify keeping more or less the exact same Zeerust.  First there's a brief introduction on-board a transport ship that's not much newer than the ship from Alien (and was thus able to be bought cheaply as a near-wreck by the current owner and then be repaired over time into a decent ship) then the entire rest of the game is set on an old station that's in the process of being decommissioned and shut down.

Thus the creators of the game have plausible in-universe reasons for the setting to have pretty much the same look as seen in Alien.  And it's fucking wonderful.

Before I start the pictures I should point out that they all look worse than they do in the game itself.  The game uses film simulation effects that you usually don't notice unless you see a lens flare because the non-lens-flare component, a constant low level film-grain effect, actually does a pretty good job (I'm not sure if it's intentional or not) of simulating how human eyes deal with low light situations, BUT when you take a still, regardless of lighting, that low level film-grain effect becomes unmissable and annoying.

That caveat aside, let me introduce you to the future of the past, it's just down the hall and through the door.

This is a fairly standard work station on the station:

That doesn't look too odd, which is a large part of what's so great about the game, they took the 1979 future and made it fucking work, but there are some things that give us some flashbacks to the years before I was born.  That light on the right seems to come from a different aesthetic, and those joysticks . . . well you can't really see them that well because of the scaling down I had to do, let's get a closer look:

I remember those!  But, I don't know much about space tech, maybe they still use them on the space station that's in orbit right now.  I'm almost entirely sure they don't, but not absolutely sure.

What we really need to look at are computers, right?  They're what shows age.  Other than the NSA being able to be blackmailed because they broke their charter by working to spy on Americans (something they now do constantly with no push-back in spite of it still being illegal) the only thing that dates the 1992 movie Sneakers (now over 20 years old) is the computers in it.

Well that and occasional oblique references to the fall of the Soviet Union.

So let's look at some computers.

Well, actually first another workstation picture because the desk toy is taken directly from the movie Alien and it does get us a nice look at a keyboard and a microphone which are also things that change with time.

The loss of detail was so annoying that I didn't scale that one (I did crop it some), though blogger probably did so automatically, even so, if you click on it you should get a larger image than the one you see without clicking.

Points of interest:

• Top Left: drinking bird perpetual motion machine that appeared in Alien (though I didn't remember it because, honestly, why would I?)
• Right: microphone the likes of which we no longer use.
• Bottom Center Rightish: another type of joystick.  I also remember those.  We had at least one when I was a kid.
• Bottom Center: keyboard with the nice big fat keys that seem to be on the way out (though are by no means gone) because people prefer (apparently) the smaller keys developed for laptops or even having touchscreens that do away with keys entirely (which: oh my god, what the fuck?)
• Bottom Left: Is that ... an ashtray?

Why yes, it is an ashtray, because in the future of the past people smoked in space.  Sometimes they still do in the future of the present, but not as often.  Back in the future of 1979 everyone smoked in space.  It went without question.

Nick Naylor: So cigarettes in space?
Jeff Megall: It's the final frontier, Nick.
Nick Naylor: But wouldn't they blow up in an all oxygen environment?
Jeff Megall: Probably... but it's an easy fix, one line of dialog, "Thank God we invented the ... you know, whatever device."
         - Thank You for Smoking (2005)

Ashtrays are everywhere, as are packs of cigarettes, and this can be found on a wall:

KOORLANDER lovingly machine-rolled for YOUR pleasure

Whatever the hell it means to be lovingly machine-rolled.

And I've just noticed that there's something else in the image with the ashtray that I can expand on, I took a closer shot of the keyboard and joystick and then completely forgot I had done so.  So here:

In the future there will be markers.  I'm not totally satisfied with the view of that totally futuristic keyboard, so let me do a closely cropped shot so you can see it in mildly better detail:

Future keyboards have shapes and shit instead of letters.  Also note the fun lights that serve no purpose we provincial people in the early decades of the 21st century can understand.  There's a lot of lights whose purpose we cannot hope to understand about, but I said we'd get to computers.

So, here's a computer:

That's what computers will look like in 2137 AD/CE. They will be bulky, their screens will generally be green only, they won't have pictures or graphics (except for one video message that happens to be one of the few places where they throw consistency aside) their interface will be extremely basic, and yet ... and yet they fit so God damned well into the aesthetic that it won't fuck with your sense that you're on a space station orbiting a distant gas giant more than a hundred years after the present day in the least.

This is what the future once looked like.  This is the world that Alien: Isolation immerses you in, and the experience is amazing to the point that I cannot possibly convey it in this post and, unfortunately, it's completely ruined by the game-play and plot really, really sucking, so as much as I want to be able to, I can not in good conscience recommend paying money for the game.  Maybe if someone makes a mod for it where they turn it into a pure exploration game, but I don't even know if it's modable.

So that's your bog standard desktop.  There are other types of desktops but if your interacting with a computer in a place that doesn't look like NASA's mission control from the Apollo missions, then you're going to be dealing with one if these, not one of those.

But wait!  Not all computers are desktops.  Surely we will have tablets in the future, right?

Why yes we will:

See, there's one right there on that desk.  Maybe you can't see that well, here:

And it's not like there's just one kind of tablet, look at this one:

Actually, honestly, the second one looks like a better fleshed out version of the first but that's not the point.  The point is that in the future of the past we'll have computers we can walk around with that have a number pad and little dials and stuff.

There will also be these things:

Which... I honestly don't know what they are.  You only ever use them to playback audio recordings of transmissions made by people on the ship from the movie Alien before shit went wrong.

But the future will not just be about workstations, computers and smoking.  People will spend time sitting at tables and eating or talking or conferencing or playing cards or whatever it is that people do when sitting at tables.  So I give you a non-scientifically determined, not rigorously random but not created with specific intent either, collection of tables from the future:

Wait, was that a boombox in the back?

Why yes it was.  Here's another:

They're not just decoration.

In a game where you'll be hunted by a bulletproof Alien (it seems that the game creators forgot that the reason you can't shoot them is because shooting makes them bleed and the blood is acid so powerful it could eat right through the hull which is less than ideal when you're in space), variously threatened and hunted by evil uncanny valley androids (to distinguish themselves from the company an alternate company said, "Isn't it creepy when you don't know if someone is a human or a synthetic?  We make sure ours are recognizable on sight," the marketing strategy failed but they were manufactured on the station where the game takes place so there are tons of them) and also in danger from amoral humans who shoot first and ask questions never, something that makes distracting noise can be useful.

Mind you, as I noted, the game-play and plot weren't very good, so it's more interesting to us for aesthetic reasons.  It's boombox in the most traditional sense: it combines big speakers with a radio and a cassette player.  So there must be audio cassettes, right?

Yup:

They aren't just found in boxes, they're also found laying around solo or in small groups.

Random note about the audio cassettes:

This is the loading screen from Gone Home, the exploration game I mentioned repeatedly in the introduction:

I actually had to go online to find that because for some reason my copy is crashing.  That's ... distressing.  Regardless, I bring that up because this is the saving icon in Alien: Isolation:

Not exactly a huge connection, but I think it's the platonic ideal of the game reaching out and saying that it wants to be more like Gone Home.

Also in music, though I don't have any nice shots, there's at least one harmonica and a few wooden acoustic guitars scattered about.

I'm not sure about the harmonica, but I think it's still the case that a near-centuries future without wooden acoustic guitars is pretty unbelievable.

The instrument family has been in style for over five thousand years at this point (and that's just what we know of) and while it's hard to place exactly when older guitars sufficiently like modern guitars to be considered guitars without qualification, it's several centuries at least with no signs of the trend having peaked, much less started to decline.

Anyway, back to the world of Alien: Isolation.

Even before a killer creature started screwing things up, the station was in the process of being decommissioned, the businesses on it shutting down, the inhabitants trying to secure some form of future for themselves elsewhere, so forth, but it originally housed all of those businesses which employed all of those people and while I didn't take any shots of the arcade, the bar, the air-hockey tables, or that sort of thing, I do have one shot of a reception desk:

A thing that I'll continue harping on (guitaring on? luting on?) is the fact that the giant fracking cathode ray tube monitors there (and elsewhere) don't jump out at you and scream, "This is not the future!"  There's a decent chance you didn't even take notice of them when you looked at the picture, though I don't pretend to know for sure how any given person will process any given image.

The Zeerust isn't a problem for immersion.  This is, to me, a bit surprising.  But it's also (again: to me) really neat.

I never showed the first shot I took of a workstation, so have a look at it now:

Did you catch that?  No, not that there was one of these:

Though I did decide that they were important enough to quickly boot up the game, find the nearest one (which was, unfortunately, in a badly lit area, hence the crap quality of the image) and take a shot of one so you could have a better look.

No, I was wondering if you noticed the magnetic tape computer in the background?

I actually think it was noticing that (as in that one, right there) that really caused me to realize the game was fully embracing the vision of the future from 1979.  It didn't make me feel any less like this was a plausible future space station, but it did help me realize that there were no half measures in recreating the future of Alien (which I'd already been impressed with the faithfulness of anyway.)

Now I don't want to make it sound like magnetic tape is a thing of the past because it very much is not.  Some really powerful computers still run on magnetic tape, and magnetic tape has never been abandoned (and is still being improved upon) as a computer storage medium.  However, computers that run on magnetic tape you can see in reel-to-reel format?  That's dated.

We don't do that anymore (for non museum-esque purposes, that I'm aware of.)

In case you did miss it, here are two more examples without a lot of crap in the way:

That's the sort of thing that this post is all about.  This is what the future used to look like but doesn't anymore.  Many people would be concerned with such a thing being in their source material and thus try to pretend it wasn't there; covering it up through omission or adaptation.

Alien: Isolation doesn't do that.  Don't get me wrong, it's not in your face about it either.  There's nothing forcing a player to stop and take notice of these things.  You have to take notice because you're currently reading a post in which I'm basically only including Zeerusty stuff, but a player of the game doesn't.

It's unapologetic about being a same-technology-level sequel to a 1979 sci fi movie, but that lack of apology doesn't show up in it coming out and shouting, "I'm not ashamed of what I am!" instead it comes out in the game being secure enough in its own existence to simply be what it is.

And that quality, that state of being a sequel Zeerust and all, means that the Zeerust doesn't make it feel dated.  You don't play it and think, "Damn is this a 1979 future," you play it and are able to fully believe that it's a space station in 2137 and, when taken at a meta level, that's a metric fuckton more impressive than something made with the aesthetics of the future today, rather than the 1979 future, presenting a convincing setting of a space station in 2137.

Because cassette tapes and reel to reel computers and bulky CRT monitors and all sorts of other things are already past so how could they be future?  But they are.  They are the future because it turns out that even dated visions of the future can feel like the actual future when they're presented as part of a consistent and well thought out aesthetic.

And that is the wonder of Alien: Isolation, you're transported into a different world where you can fully accept that this is the kind of ad you might see on a space station one hundred and twenty two years from now:

A future where people still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea (because they are):

Didn't get a good enough look there?  How about here:

A New Dawn of Precision Digital Watches

Random other shots from yesterday's future:

As I said up there somewhere, there's no way I can adequately convey how unexpectedly awesome it was to be walking through this world that was covered in Zeerust but somehow not marred by it.  Unfortunately the game makes it so you're doing it while trying to hide from an alien that will kill you with insta-death if you make too much noise or look around in one place for too long, surrounded by innocent people who are all damned to die for the crime of not being the main character, shot at by jerks who have taken social Darwinism to it's maximum gun wielding extent, on the run from killer androids because: "Why not?", and locked into a plot that's really craptastic on multiple levels.

You can, as I did, download a third party program that makes it so stopping to take a nice look around will not get you brutally impaled or otherwise dead, but unfortunately having the giant piles of "We named the game 'Isolation' so we're surrounding you with people and things that want you dead so you'll never be isolated for long," simply not notice you when you're standing right in front of them breaks the immersion in a way that an unashamedly 1979 era vision of the future never could.

Hopefully some day someone will make a game like this that's the exploration game this so desperately cried out to be.

That day is, unfortunately, not today.