You Forgot About Your Plot Device

there was a free screening 2 days ago and i watched it

it's atrocious and the jerry seinfeld bee was creepy and weird

"I’m very concerned about my client’s right to a fair trial in this case.  He’s being prejudiced by some statements that are being made by government officials. Like every other defendant, he’s entitled to a presumption of innocence. But unfortunately the way this has been handled so far his rights are being violated. And as you know, Your Honor, there’s a wealth of case law guaranteeing his rights to a fair trial, but none of the safeguards have been put in place yet here — in fact it’s just the opposite of what’s been happening. 

He’s a young man, and he is being treated like a human pingpong ball between two warring jurisdictions here.

These federal and state prosecutors are coordinating with one another at the expense of him. They have conflicting theories in their indictment, and they are literally treating him like he is some sort of political fodder, like some sort of spectacle. 

He was on display for everyone to see in the biggest staged perp walk I’ve ever seen in my career. It was absolutely unnecessary. He’s been cooperative with law enforcement. He’d been in custody for over a week. He waived extradition. He was cooperative at all accounts. There was no reason for the NYPD and everybody to have these big assault rifles — that frankly I had no idea it was in their arsenal — and to have all the press there the media there. It was perfectly choreographed. 

And what was the New York City Mayor doing at this press conference, Your Honor? That just made it utterly political. And as your honor knows under Loro v. Charles, the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has held it to be clearly established that these staged perp walks to the media unrelated to a legitimate law enforcement objective is unconstitutional. And I submit that there was zero law enforcement objective to do that sort of perp walk. There’s absolutely no need for that whatsoever. 

And frankly, Your Honor, the mayor should know more than anyone about the presumption of innocence that he, too, is afforded dealing with his own issues. And, frankly, I submit that he was just trying to detract from those issues by making a spectacle of Mr. Mangione. 

And there are consequences to this. 

He has a right to a fair trial. And I just want to put on the record statements that the mayor made publicly about my client. Nothing saying “alleged” for example. And he said “I wanted to send a strong message with the police commissioner that we’re leading from the front. I’m not just going to allow him to come into our city. I wanted to look him in the eye and state ‘You carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city of New York that I love.’” And he wanted to show symbolism. 

Your Honor, he’s not a symbol. He’s somebody who is afforded the right to a fair trial. He’s innocent until proven guilty. And the mayor was talking to jurors — future potential jurors that elected him. Those are the people that elected him that he is talking to and calling this man a terrorist.

Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) dir. Stewart Raffill

Them: “Autistic People are bad at communicating”

At my last job, I rapidly realized that my boss was not very good at communication, and I developed the habit of asking for clarity if I saw a possibility of misunderstanding. Much to said boss' annoyance, the rest of the team began doing the same thing, because they were also sick of hearing "You should have known that--"

when I said X it included Y and Z

when I said X it didn't include Y and Z

X was a figure of speech

X was literal

I mean this X and not that X

I didn't mean every X

I meant every X

"From Bob Clark, director of 'A Christmas Story,' comes a tale of Christmas Terror."

Don't get me wrong, I love all three Stargate shows, and I regard them as some of the best science fiction on television.

But the Stargate itself is a mass of technobabble whose operation is not just ridiculous, but impossible. And I don't mean technically, I mean logistically.

A standard Milky Way Stargate has 39 glyphs. Each glyph represents a constellation. A standard Stargate address involves seven of these glyphs-- six of them identify the location in three dimensional space, and the seventh is the point of origin.

This is several entirely distinct flavors of stupid.

Constellations are not points. One of the stars in Orion's belt, for example, is more than a thousand light years from either of the others.

Even if this weren't the case, the Stargates are millions of years old. Stellar drift has changed the constellations in the ~10,000 years that mankind has been aware of them.

You only need three points to identify a location in three dimensional space. Requiring a second position for each axis does nothing except for drastically limit the locations that can be addressed.

If every address requires the same seventh symbol at a given gate, there's no reason not to make the gate automatically supply it.

If you can identify the point of origin with a single glyph, why can't you identify the destination with one? (There is actually a bit in the original movie where Daniel tells the natives, "we're from here" and shows the symbol that corresponds to earth and they get it.)

Also, if the point of origin is one symbol.... there can be a maximum of 39 total gates. There is no such limit in the shows.

Of course, there is also the magic eight-symbol address that somehow, despite being made up of coordinates in the milky way galaxy, points to the Pegasus Galaxy. Or the nine-symbol address that can only be dialed from one gate (that apparently isn't even in the right place, affecting its ability to dial), which points to Destiny, which doesn't even have a fixed location.

And while we're on the subject of Destiny, how does THAT gate work? If the glyphs on a gate are constellations, how does that work on a ship that moves between galaxies?

How does dialing even work? The whole spinny thing is just our gate, because we don't have a DHD, but, like... why does spinning it even work? And how is it that, by the end of the show, we've developed the technology to build our own gates, but we're still dialing the main gate with the equivalent of a hotwire?

That's not even getting into the physics of the "wormhole" itself, or, rather, the lack thereof.

An incoming wormhole spits out a vortex that, in a violation of all known laws of physics, completely destroys everything it comes into contact with.

Unless it's the iris, which is just really close to the event horizon.

Or you just bury it, but that seems to have only worked the once.

The iris that we built, because the ancients who created them didn't seem to think anyone would need to be able to lock the goddamn door (until they got to the Pegasus Galaxy).

The iris that nonetheless seems to be completely integrated into the gate so seamlessly that you can't see the mechanism or where the parts go when not in use.

Wormhole travel is one-way. Except, of course, for radio waves.

It is an explicit plot point in several episodes that an object passing through a stargate is de-materialized as it passes through the event horizon, and is not re-materialized until (and unless) the entire object passes through.

Yes stellar drift is a thing and the constellations on the gate should be what they appeared as millions of years ago when the ancients first built the gate system. I'm going to give a little leeway on this because we know the Goa'uld took over the gate system when they took over the galaxy. And since the gates are made of naquada (with no proof that the pegasus gates are made of naquada) im gonna handwave this as the goa'uld repairing or replacing broken hardware.

You need three points to triangulate using radio waves like my cell phone can be geo-located via my pings to the nearest three cell towers. But if the way Daniel drew the box in the stargate movie is the correct canon interpretation (and we have no reason to doubt it, just because it doesnt make sense IRL because this isnt a sci-fact show) then the six points are used to draw intersecting lines to pointpoint a spot in space.

The seventh symbol contrivance is stupid. While there are an infinite option of symbols for planets, there is only one option of placement on the stargate ring itself, in the point-of-origin slot. Its like you can put whatever keycap you want on your computer's E key it will still type an E. As long as the traveler has all 38 static symbols memorized, the traveller will always be able to type the point of origin symbol. This would solve the whole movie plot of "oh noes they are trapped on Abydos until Skarra accidentally shows Daniel the seventh symbol."

The whole stargate device works a lot better, mentally, if you think of it as a computer, with a 39 symbol keyboard. And no GUI. A normal desktop computer has a static keyboard that always has the same symbols, but depending on the program running, the keys can write a document, run excel calculations, play video games, dial a phone number etc. Its the same with the stargate. The default is 'wormhole-mode' but we see in SG1 that Felger and Ba'al is able to access 'update mode'.

Thus the eighth and later ninth symbol, while explained as an area code, is just accessing a different operating program.

The milky way stargates are able to be manually dialled as long as they are plugged into power. Its not just the sgc. We see it on Lanea's prison planet and in 1969. What the dialling computer does is automate the system. The SGC is still manually dialling the gate via a hidden spinny thing controlled by the computers. The DHD bypasses that. The DHD acts as an external keyboard and sends the button presses. The DHD also acts as a systemcheck and makes sure the gate is functioning properly. The sgc computer cant read all the error codes and that comes back to bite them several times.

Now the iris idea comes from the movie, there a deleted scene where O'Neil looks at the backside of the coverstone and sees a fossilied Ra Guard who integrated into the stone. The SGC iris is so close that it stops anyone from integrating, they just become atoms on a windshield.

The kawoosh is problematic and inconsistent. I have no explanation.

One way matter transport could be a function of the matter to energy conversion equation. It might only balance one way. Two way radio transport is problematic because once the SGC gets asguard beaming technology whats to stop them from beaming someone into energy and then transmitting it the wrong way through the wormhole.

-------

Of course this whole thing is unimportant. The showrunners (not movierunners) always intended for the gate to be a vehicle for stories. Like the enterprise or the tardis or the impala or the time tunnel.

I mean yes, but this is blog where I pick things apart. :)

Also, the movierunners are guilty of a worse sin. They went on record, when the show started, saying that they never intended the Stargate to connect to more than one destination. Which raises the question of why the fuck an address was needed in the first place.

"The location as seen in the sky from Earth" is not a three-dimensional coordinate. It's a two dimensional coordinate on the surface of a sphere, and even then it's wildly imprecise, given that even with the third dimension taken out of the equation, those stars are light-years apart.

But even if we assume that it is a precise 3D coordinate, the six-coordinate system is pants-shittingly inefficient, as it only allows you to locate planets that lie directly between three sets of these points.

Given the four-dimensional nature of a galaxy, a seven-coordinate system actually would be ideal. Just.... not those seven coordinates.

Your first three coordinates would be the x, y, and z, where 0,0,0 is the center of the galaxy. (Alternately, they could express vertical and horizontal angle, plus distance, from a particular view from galactic center-- think "look forty-three degrees to your left, and eighteen degrees up, then it's 16 light years in that direction" but expressed with better math.)

You next three coordinates would be pitch, yaw, and velocity. (These measurements would need to account for the fact that the movement would be circular, which is easier to do that explain in words.)

Your final coordinate would be the point at time in which the measurement was made. This allows you to update the address to account for the kind of fuckery that happens at cosmic scales; it's reasonable to assume that a species advanced enough to travel to a location and put a stargate there would be able to keep track of where it was and simply recalculate those values.

Of course, the other thing that gets glossed over is that the Stargates are all connected via some kind of network, and have an operating system that can be modified. Which means that the most efficient way of doing it would be to just give each gate a numerical address.

And the gate spinning thing is entirely a Looks Cool factor. It doesn't even make sense for it to be there, considering that if you're working the gate without a DHD, you also don't have a power supply. And it especially doesn't make sense in the SGC after the first season, considering that they found a functioning DHD in Antarctica.

Don't get me wrong, I love all three Stargate shows, and I regard them as some of the best science fiction on television.

But the Stargate itself is a mass of technobabble whose operation is not just ridiculous, but impossible. And I don't mean technically, I mean logistically.

A standard Milky Way Stargate has 39 glyphs. Each glyph represents a constellation. A standard Stargate address involves seven of these glyphs-- six of them identify the location in three dimensional space, and the seventh is the point of origin.

This is several entirely distinct flavors of stupid.

Constellations are not points. One of the stars in Orion's belt, for example, is more than a thousand light years from either of the others.

Even if this weren't the case, the Stargates are millions of years old. Stellar drift has changed the constellations in the ~10,000 years that mankind has been aware of them.

You only need three points to identify a location in three dimensional space. Requiring a second position for each axis does nothing except for drastically limit the locations that can be addressed.

If every address requires the same seventh symbol at a given gate, there's no reason not to make the gate automatically supply it.

If you can identify the point of origin with a single glyph, why can't you identify the destination with one? (There is actually a bit in the original movie where Daniel tells the natives, "we're from here" and shows the symbol that corresponds to earth and they get it.)

Also, if the point of origin is one symbol.... there can be a maximum of 39 total gates. There is no such limit in the shows.

Of course, there is also the magic eight-symbol address that somehow, despite being made up of coordinates in the milky way galaxy, points to the Pegasus Galaxy. Or the nine-symbol address that can only be dialed from one gate (that apparently isn't even in the right place, affecting its ability to dial), which points to Destiny, which doesn't even have a fixed location.

And while we're on the subject of Destiny, how does THAT gate work? If the glyphs on a gate are constellations, how does that work on a ship that moves between galaxies?

How does dialing even work? The whole spinny thing is just our gate, because we don't have a DHD, but, like... why does spinning it even work? And how is it that, by the end of the show, we've developed the technology to build our own gates, but we're still dialing the main gate with the equivalent of a hotwire?

That's not even getting into the physics of the "wormhole" itself, or, rather, the lack thereof.

An incoming wormhole spits out a vortex that, in a violation of all known laws of physics, completely destroys everything it comes into contact with.

Unless it's the iris, which is just really close to the event horizon.

Or you just bury it, but that seems to have only worked the once.

The iris that we built, because the ancients who created them didn't seem to think anyone would need to be able to lock the goddamn door (until they got to the Pegasus Galaxy).

The iris that nonetheless seems to be completely integrated into the gate so seamlessly that you can't see the mechanism or where the parts go when not in use.

Wormhole travel is one-way. Except, of course, for radio waves.

It is an explicit plot point in several episodes that an object passing through a stargate is de-materialized as it passes through the event horizon, and is not re-materialized until (and unless) the entire object passes through.

Yes stellar drift is a thing and the constellations on the gate should be what they appeared as millions of years ago when the ancients first built the gate system. I'm going to give a little leeway on this because we know the Goa'uld took over the gate system when they took over the galaxy. And since the gates are made of naquada (with no proof that the pegasus gates are made of naquada) im gonna handwave this as the goa'uld repairing or replacing broken hardware.

You need three points to triangulate using radio waves like my cell phone can be geo-located via my pings to the nearest three cell towers. But if the way Daniel drew the box in the stargate movie is the correct canon interpretation (and we have no reason to doubt it, just because it doesnt make sense IRL because this isnt a sci-fact show) then the six points are used to draw intersecting lines to pointpoint a spot in space.

The seventh symbol contrivance is stupid. While there are an infinite option of symbols for planets, there is only one option of placement on the stargate ring itself, in the point-of-origin slot. Its like you can put whatever keycap you want on your computer's E key it will still type an E. As long as the traveler has all 38 static symbols memorized, the traveller will always be able to type the point of origin symbol. This would solve the whole movie plot of "oh noes they are trapped on Abydos until Skarra accidentally shows Daniel the seventh symbol."

The whole stargate device works a lot better, mentally, if you think of it as a computer, with a 39 symbol keyboard. And no GUI. A normal desktop computer has a static keyboard that always has the same symbols, but depending on the program running, the keys can write a document, run excel calculations, play video games, dial a phone number etc. Its the same with the stargate. The default is 'wormhole-mode' but we see in SG1 that Felger and Ba'al is able to access 'update mode'.

Thus the eighth and later ninth symbol, while explained as an area code, is just accessing a different operating program.

The milky way stargates are able to be manually dialled as long as they are plugged into power. Its not just the sgc. We see it on Lanea's prison planet and in 1969. What the dialling computer does is automate the system. The SGC is still manually dialling the gate via a hidden spinny thing controlled by the computers. The DHD bypasses that. The DHD acts as an external keyboard and sends the button presses. The DHD also acts as a systemcheck and makes sure the gate is functioning properly. The sgc computer cant read all the error codes and that comes back to bite them several times.

Now the iris idea comes from the movie, there a deleted scene where O'Neil looks at the backside of the coverstone and sees a fossilied Ra Guard who integrated into the stone. The SGC iris is so close that it stops anyone from integrating, they just become atoms on a windshield.

The kawoosh is problematic and inconsistent. I have no explanation.

One way matter transport could be a function of the matter to energy conversion equation. It might only balance one way. Two way radio transport is problematic because once the SGC gets asguard beaming technology whats to stop them from beaming someone into energy and then transmitting it the wrong way through the wormhole.

-------

Of course this whole thing is unimportant. The showrunners (not movierunners) always intended for the gate to be a vehicle for stories. Like the enterprise or the tardis or the impala or the time tunnel.

I mean yes, but this is blog where I pick things apart. :)

Also, the movierunners are guilty of a worse sin. They went on record, when the show started, saying that they never intended the Stargate to connect to more than one destination. Which raises the question of why the fuck an address was needed in the first place.

"The location as seen in the sky from Earth" is not a three-dimensional coordinate. It's a two dimensional coordinate on the surface of a sphere, and even then it's wildly imprecise, given that even with the third dimension taken out of the equation, those stars are light-years apart.

But even if we assume that it is a precise 3D coordinate, the six-coordinate system is pants-shittingly inefficient, as it only allows you to locate planets that lie directly between three sets of these points.

Given the four-dimensional nature of a galaxy, a seven-coordinate system actually would be ideal. Just.... not those seven coordinates.

Your first three coordinates would be the x, y, and z, where 0,0,0 is the center of the galaxy. (Alternately, they could express vertical and horizontal angle, plus distance, from a particular view from galactic center-- think "look forty-three degrees to your left, and eighteen degrees up, then it's 16 light years in that direction" but expressed with better math.)

You next three coordinates would be pitch, yaw, and velocity. (These measurements would need to account for the fact that the movement would be circular, which is easier to do that explain in words.)

Your final coordinate would be the point at time in which the measurement was made. This allows you to update the address to account for the kind of fuckery that happens at cosmic scales; it's reasonable to assume that a species advanced enough to travel to a location and put a stargate there would be able to keep track of where it was and simply recalculate those values.

Of course, the other thing that gets glossed over is that the Stargates are all connected via some kind of network, and have an operating system that can be modified. Which means that the most efficient way of doing it would be to just give each gate a numerical address.

And the gate spinning thing is entirely a Looks Cool factor. It doesn't even make sense for it to be there, considering that if you're working the gate without a DHD, you also don't have a power supply. And it especially doesn't make sense in the SGC after the first season, considering that they found a functioning DHD in Antarctica.

Today's topic: The landline. A lot of people still have them, but as it's not the only game in town, it's an entirely different thing now.

(Credit to @punk-de-l-escalier who I was talking to about this and made some contributions)

for most of the heyday of the landline, there was no caller ID of any kind. Then it was a premium service, and unless you had a phone with Caller ID capability-- and you didn't-- you had to buy a special box for it. (It was slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes.)

Starting in the early nineties, there WAS a way to get the last number dialed, and if desired, call it back. It cost 50 cents. I shit you not, the way you did it was dialing "*69". There's no way that was an accident.

If you moved, unless it was in the same city-- and in larger cities, the same PART of the city-- you had to change phone numbers.

As populations grew, it was often necessary to take a whole bunch of people and say "Guess what? You have a new area code now."

The older the house, the fewer phone jacks it had. When I was a kid, the average middle-class house had a phone jack in the kitchen, and one in the master bedroom. Putting in a new phone jack was expensive... but setting up a splitter and running a long phone cord under the carpet, through the basement or attic, or just along the wall and into the next room was actually pretty cheap.

Even so, long phone cords were pretty much a thing on every phone that could be conveniently picked up and carried.

The first cordless phones were incredibly stupid. Ask the cop from my hometown who was talking to his girlfriend on a cordless phone about the illegal shit he was doing, and his wife could hear the whole thing through her radio.

For most of the heyday of the landline, there was no contact list. Every number was dialed manually. Starting in the mid-eighties, you could get a phone with speed dial buttons, but I cannot stress how much they sucked, because you had to label them with a goddamn pencil, you only had ten or twenty numbers, reprogramming them was a bitch, and every once in a while would lose all of the number in its memory.

All of the phone numbers in your city or metro area were delivered to you once a year in The Phone Book, which was divided between the White Pages (Alphabetic), the Yellow Pages (Businesses, by type, then alphabetic), and the Blue Pages (any government offices in your calling area (which we will get to in a moment)).

Listing in the white pages was automatic; to get an unlisted number cost extra.

Since people would grab the yellow pages, find the service they need, and start calling down the list, a lot of local business names where chosen because they started with "A", and "Aardvark" was a popular name.

Yes, a fair chunk of the numbers in it were disconnected or changed between the time it was printed and it got to your door, much less when you actually looked it up.

One phone line per family was the norm.

Lots and lots and LOTS of kids got in trouble because their parents eavesdropped on the conversation by picking up another phone connected to the same line.

A fair number of boys with similar voices to their father got in trouble because one of their friends didn't realize who they were talking to.

And of course, there were the times where you couldn't leave the house, because you were expecting an important phone call.

Or when you were in a hotel and had to pay a dollar per call. (I imagine those charges haven't gone away, but who pays them?)

Since you can't do secondary bullet points, I'll break a couple of these items out to their own lists, starting with Answering Machines.

these precursors to voicemail were a fucking nightmare.

The first generation of consumer answering machines didn't reach the market until the mid-eighties. They recorded both the outgoing message and the incoming calls onto audio cassettes.

due to linear nature of the audio cassette, the only way to save an incoming call was to physically remove the cassette and replace it with a new one.

they were prone to spectacular malfunction; if the power went out, rather than simply fail to turn back on, they would often rewind the cassette for the incoming messages to the beginning, because it no longer knew where the messages were, or how many there were.

Another way they could go wrong was to start playing the last incoming call as the outgoing message.

Most people, rather than trying to remember to turn it on each time they went out and turn it off when they got back, would just leave it on, particularly when they discovered that you could screen incoming calls with it.

Rather a lot of people got themselves in trouble because they either didn't get to the phone before the answering machine, or picked up when they heard who was calling, and forgot that the answering machine was going-- thus recording some or all of the phone call.

Eventually the implemented a feature where you could call your answering machine, enter a code, and retrieve your messages. The problem was that most people couldn't figure out how to change their default code, and those that did didn't know it reset anytime the power went out. A guy I went to college with would call his ex-girlfriend's machine-- and her current boyfriend's-- and erase all the messages. He finally got busted when she skipped class and heard the call come in.

And, of course, there's the nightmare that was long-distance.

Calls within your local calling area were free. (Well, part of the monthly charge.) This usually meant the city you lived in and its suburbs. Anything outside this calling area was an extra per-minute charge.

This charge varied by time of day and day of the week, which made things extra fun when your friend on the west coast waited until 9pm for the lower charges, but you were on the east coast and it was midnight.

Depending on your phone company, and your long distance plan, the way your long distance work varied wildly. Usually in-state was cheaper-- with zones within the state that varied by price, and out of state had its own zones.

Your long distance plan came in lots and lots of distracting packages, and was billed to your phone bill.

At one point, when I was living in North Carolina, a scammer set themselves up as a long distance company and notified the phone company that a shitload of people had switched to their service. They got caught fairly quickly, but I was annoyed because they were actually charging less than AT&T.

"Would you like to change your long distance plan" was the 80's and 90's equivalent of "We have important news about your car insurance."

If you needed to call someone from a payphone and didn't have the quarter, or you needed to call someone long distance and not pay for it yourself, you could place a collect call. Originally, this meant talking to the operator, who would call the person, ask if they would accept the charges on THEIR bill, and if they did, put the call through.

Eventually, this got automated-- you'd call a number, punch in the number you wanted to dial, and record your name, and a computer would call the other person.

Charges for a collect call were higher than if you paid them directly.

Even before this was automated, people had ways of getting around the charges-- "If I give my name as 'Charlie' it means I arrived okay, but if I give my name as 'Chuck', decline the charges and call me back." Once it was automated, you could actually give a two-second message.

Oh, yeah, and payphones. Until the early aughts, there were phones everywhere that you could put in coins and make a phone call. The phrase "It's your dime" is left over from when it cost ten cents, and continued well into the age where the call cost a quarter. (In that age, we developed "Here's a quarter. Call someone who cares.")

Payphones were everywhere and completely unmonitored, making them the method of choice for lots of illegal or just annoying activities, since you could trace the call to the phone and still have no idea who placed the call.

Originally, payphones were enclosed in a booth for privacy, but between the fact that these booths got used for non-phone activities-- sex, drugs, changing into superhero costumes*-- and the fact that, with such privacy, people would tie up the payphone for extended periods of times, the concept of the "phone booth" got redefined to what we would call a kiosk today.

Kids were expected to be able to answer the household phone reasonably politely from a young age.

As a kid, I got drilled on "I'm sorry, she can't come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?" to obscure the difference between Mom is busy, Mom is in the bathroom, and I am home alone and thus at risk.

Managing the long curly phone cord took skill. If you stretched it around a corner, it would sweep things off tables. The spiral would invert in places, making it look ugly and move less predictably.

Kids were expected to memorize their home phone number from a fairly early age. (not as much to call themselves as to tell an adult if they got lost or otherwise needed help)

You could have an unlisted (not in the phone book) number in most places. Single women sometimes put their first initial instead of their first name.

Schools sometimes made phone trees for efficient spreading of information like snow days (for schools too small to have that information on the radio). They were written-out paper trees where one person would call the next two or three, and each of them would call the next two, and so on.

Party lines. The first several decades of phones being common, they did not have a single dedicated phone line to each individual house, because that would have been too expensive. Instead, there was a single phone line that went to every house on the street. Every house had a different ring pattern so you could tell which house was being called, but anybody who misheard it (or was nosy) could pick up their phone and listen to anybody else's phone conversations any time they wanted to. There was usually a slight click sound as they picked it up, but you might not be able to tell. This was another reason for using phone booths for any sensitive conversation.

Calls were connected by a living person (almost always a woman). You told the operator who you wanted to call (which might be a name, and might be a word+number, like "Pensylvannia 6-5000" of the famous song) and they would physically plug in a cable to the phone line you wanted to reach. There were automatic switching machines starting in the 1880s, but most places didn't have them until fairly late--the last manual switchboard in the UK wasn't replaced with a mechanical one until 1960. And even if your area had automated calls for local numbers, a long-distance call would require an operator. On early phones, you got the operator by picking up the phone; once you had an automatic switching machine, you had to dial zero, but there was always an operator on duty and easy to reach.

Operators, redux. A large apartment building or office building might have separate lines for each apartment or major office. But they didn't have separate phone numbers for all of those different extensions! Instead, they would have an operator for the building whose job was to connect people. This led to answering services. If a person lived in such a building, they could pay to have the operator take messages for them when they weren't home.

Monopoly. Pretty much all telephone lines in a country would be owned by a single company, in the US it was AT&T, sometimes called "Ma Bell," because it had originally been called the Bell Telephone Company. AT&T was forced to de-monopolize in 1982, leading to the development of competing phone companies.

Billing. Local calls were included as part of your monthly bill, but long-distance calls were billed as separate line items, so you could look at your bill and tell every single long-distance call from your phone that month. And it added up, so people did look a lot of letter-writing. You'd call long-distance for an emergency or big news, but people rarely called long-distance just to talk. Instead, they would write letters.

Fairly quickly, they invented devices which you could plug into the phone jack and then into your computer (plus a separate power cord), so that nobody had to physically pick up the phone for the screaming to connect. Eventually, they invented modems that you could install inside your desktop, just like video cards, and eventually after that ones that slotted into special slots on some laptops.

Of course, since this was literally just a phone call where computers squealed instead of humans talking, it *tied up the phone line*. And, naturally, if someone else picked up the "regular" phone, it would fuck up the delicate balance of computer squeals and you'd lose connection.

Ads for long distance calling services were frequently sappy. I’ve seen the phrase “cries at long distance television commercials” used to describe emotional characters.

Example:

Commercials for various collect calling services were everywhere in the 1990s/early 2000s. A lot of them had Mr. T:

And finally this isn’t a phone commercial, but it’s a good example of how we used to use the collect call message to tell our parents to pick us up without them having to accept the charges:

Don't get me wrong, I love all three Stargate shows, and I regard them as some of the best science fiction on television.

But the Stargate itself is a mass of technobabble whose operation is not just ridiculous, but impossible. And I don't mean technically, I mean logistically.

A standard Milky Way Stargate has 39 glyphs. Each glyph represents a constellation. A standard Stargate address involves seven of these glyphs-- six of them identify the location in three dimensional space, and the seventh is the point of origin.

This is several entirely distinct flavors of stupid.

Constellations are not points. One of the stars in Orion's belt, for example, is more than a thousand light years from either of the others.

Even if this weren't the case, the Stargates are millions of years old. Stellar drift has changed the constellations in the ~10,000 years that mankind has been aware of them.

You only need three points to identify a location in three dimensional space. Requiring a second position for each axis does nothing except for drastically limit the locations that can be addressed.

If every address requires the same seventh symbol at a given gate, there's no reason not to make the gate automatically supply it.

If you can identify the point of origin with a single glyph, why can't you identify the destination with one? (There is actually a bit in the original movie where Daniel tells the natives, "we're from here" and shows the symbol that corresponds to earth and they get it.)

Also, if the point of origin is one symbol.... there can be a maximum of 39 total gates. There is no such limit in the shows.

Of course, there is also the magic eight-symbol address that somehow, despite being made up of coordinates in the milky way galaxy, points to the Pegasus Galaxy. Or the nine-symbol address that can only be dialed from one gate (that apparently isn't even in the right place, affecting its ability to dial), which points to Destiny, which doesn't even have a fixed location.

And while we're on the subject of Destiny, how does THAT gate work? If the glyphs on a gate are constellations, how does that work on a ship that moves between galaxies?

How does dialing even work? The whole spinny thing is just our gate, because we don't have a DHD, but, like... why does spinning it even work? And how is it that, by the end of the show, we've developed the technology to build our own gates, but we're still dialing the main gate with the equivalent of a hotwire?

That's not even getting into the physics of the "wormhole" itself, or, rather, the lack thereof.

An incoming wormhole spits out a vortex that, in a violation of all known laws of physics, completely destroys everything it comes into contact with.

Unless it's the iris, which is just really close to the event horizon.

Or you just bury it, but that seems to have only worked the once.

The iris that we built, because the ancients who created them didn't seem to think anyone would need to be able to lock the goddamn door (until they got to the Pegasus Galaxy).

The iris that nonetheless seems to be completely integrated into the gate so seamlessly that you can't see the mechanism or where the parts go when not in use.

Wormhole travel is one-way. Except, of course, for radio waves.

It is an explicit plot point in several episodes that an object passing through a stargate is de-materialized as it passes through the event horizon, and is not re-materialized until (and unless) the entire object passes through.

The glyphs aren't earth 'constellations' that's just how they were attempting to rationalize them during the initial translation attempts

They couldn't successfully dial anything other than abbydos until Sam Carters program that calculated the stellar drift variance

The 6 point address system supposedly keeps you from traveling through other stars, because that does timey-wimey junk

Different gates have different glyphs, and as they start traveling further, they build that mid-point gate on a space station to shorten multi gate trips and make the power demands more reasonable

The destiny's gate works like that because Voyager did well a few years before so "trapped on a ship far from home" was a viable concept

Partial things travel through frequently, I'm positive they've severed baddies this way in the past

Gravity waves are also inexplicably a 2 way force

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed True Blood, but I was always annoyed about one thing in particular: The whole setup is that scientists came up with a way to make artificial blood, but the only time we see this miracle advancement is in a bottle marketed to vampires. This is incredibly myopic, as this would be one of the most significant medical advances in history.

First of all, the Red Cross spends $2 billion a year collecting blood-- a majority of its operating budget. That money would no longer be needed, and would be spent on other causes. The Red Cross itself would become a considerably less influential power, which would probably be good for everyone (including the Red Cross).

In a world where blood is available by the keg, the average human lifespan would probably spike by 20 years. There are plenty of ailments, illnesses, and conditions that can be treated quite effectively with blood transfusion, but aren't, because blood isn't really available on that type of scale.

Every ambulance would be carrying a couple of gallons of O positive. In large hospitals they'd be working out of 50 gallon barrels. (This sounds like an exaggeration, but you'd be amazed how many different fluids are used in medicine because you just can't have that kind of blood on hand-- and because they're NOT blood, they have limits that unlimited transfusions would not.)

You would literally have a new class of licensed medical professional-- a transfusionist, falling somewhere between a phlebotomist, a paramedic, and a nurse. And they would be in incredibly high demand, because oh, buddy, we now have a world with elective blood transfusions.

Getting an "oil change" would be part of the spa experience. There would be teams doing housecalls out of a van ambulance, and blood boutiques in every shopping mall. Wealthy people would get transfusions the morning after a night of extreme partying.