Mockup of giant TV screen that shows what was behind it months earlier

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/27/723013.html

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Big plus: It doesn’t suffer from the problem of what happens if you break a pane of slow glass with 10 years of light energy stored inside of it.

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I see 2 potentials…

Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt, where people go missing, or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where visual artists have no marketplace.

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It’s not a mockup of a TV screen, it appears to be an actual TV screen.

Wouldn’t that show nighttime during the day?

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imagine the hacks doing these rounds and no blue screen envy

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It’s also not subject to Snell’s Law.

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At first I thought this was incredibly cool, but then I was struck with a saddening thought; what happens when someone dies in the viewscreen? The people who cared about them would be tempted to watch it for one last glimpse of their loved one, going about their usual life in the past, blissfully unaware of their impending doom.

As an art idea, it is tremendously powerful, but for me I think the past should stay in the past.

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But people keep recordings of deceased loved ones?

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Not everybody, but you make a fair point.

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Spoilers: that’s what the Shaw story is ultimately about

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When someone dies, do you immediately delete them from your contact list?

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That could actually be a really cool effect if you have shards of glass where the light coming out is from all different times. It might have alternating bright and dark lines along an edge where you see the day and night cycle directly on the glass.

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I’ve kept a dead phone in my nightstand for the last 6 years because it has a voice mail from my dad on it that I’ve never been able to transfer.

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I’m imagining a row of skylights, where every other one is slow glass, and the remaining are regular glass.

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This made me think of the title The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson’s book about Black Americans moving north in the early 20th century, which in turn make me think of the historical value a concept like this could have. Historical map overlays are already really powerful, but to have a window into a historic period in a spot could be very moving.

Also the Jose Gonzalez song “Open Book” that has the line “warmth of other Suns” in it. I’d post the youtube but the music video is…not for everyone (including me, I’d only listened to the album, and went to the video to post the song just now, but the video is kind of mumblecore body horror…)

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Before your phone suffers unrecoverable hardware failure, you might want to use an adapter cable to connect your phone’s headphone jack to your computer, and record it there, if you want to continue to preserve it.

I understand, though, it may be preferable to let the message go when the phone naturally fails.

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Even better, a row of skylights, each one one hour apart.

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It would be a scene where a person goes to watch the (pen)ultimate time that they saw themselves with a dead parent or lost lover.

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I like it.

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Bob Shaw’s “Light of Other Days”, nominated for a Hugo award in 1967

OMG I’ve not thought about that story in decades. Now I have to find it again and reread it.

Now I really wish the Library had not been subjected to the Great Component Hunt to Fix the Water Pump Fiasco of 2019.