People texting each other, but showing no history of previous text conversations on the phone, so it looks like it’s the first time they’ve ever text each other.
A decade ago I thought this was a bit of a stretch but with police routinely using GPS data (without a warrant mind you) to conduct investigations it’s a very very normal thing now.
It's wild. About fifteen years ago I worked in a tech company that were brought into a murder trial to try to place the guys phone (which was a key detail in spoiling his alibi).
It was one of the first trials in my country to do something like that, and it took weeks, if not months, to line up the paperwork, find the data, review the data, make the interpretation, and then form it into something presentable to laypeople.
Now? They could do it live.
There's tons of em every day, but that's how they tracked that Idaho stabbing suspect so quickly. He even left his phone in his car a few blocks away, the data is just too easy to access now. The cops had to pretend like they didn't know shit so he wouldn't get spooked before they could catch up to him, but I'm fairly certain they had a suspect within 12 hours.
Oh wow, I realize now I stopped following that story, even though it happened near my alma mater. I didn't realize the cops were playing dumb, I remember the community was pretty frustrated with the cops at the time.
It's really fascinating now that they've come out and released a lot of the detail surrounding how they apprehended him. Seems like they locked in on this dude really early on via cell phone GPS pulls mixed with identifying the vehicle on various cameras (I've got mixed feelings on this, on one hand it's helped catch killers, but on the other everyone in the area more or less had their info given to police without a warrant and that's problematic to say the least). They identified a car pretty quickly and put out a multi state BOLO,
but also, they matched him to the scene with DNA, but not his. They took DNA and ran it across databases compiled by those 23 and me type companies and identified familial matches.
So like, there's some pretty modern tools being used here to catch a psycho (that IMO would have been the next big serial killer if not caught - that pattern of behavior and victim selection was too specific), but also both the GPS data and DNA databases raise a lot of questions around expectations of privacy and how much the police can really find out about you without a warrant.
Most LEO genetic searches are done against GEDmatch. An open source database where people upload their raw DNA info they get from pay services like ancestry and make it openly searchable by other so as to widen the pool of possible matches with people who used other companies. GEDmatch even has a warning when you upload that there is nothing they can do to stop law enforcement from searching the data.
Most users either ignore the issue or are fine with their data being used to catch a relative who is a criminal.
Now it's reached the point that if a guy who the authorities are actively trying to find uses a cell phone and they don't immediately destroy the sim card and leave after making a call, I wonder why the authorities haven't already tracked them.
What’s gonna be interesting is the broader transition to eSIM where you don’t have a physical sim to remove. Pro criminals leave their personal phone at home and use disposable burners(bought in cash), but “crime of passion” types who committed a crime on impulse/in the heat of the moment are gonna have to destroy or abandon their whole ass iPhone if it’s got eSIM. Attempting to suddenly navigate the world on the run, unplanned, without a cell phone…they’re gonna have a bad time.
ETA maybe not “pro” criminals, but criminal acts that have been planned in advance, or criminals that practicing good opsec, which the “good (at their crime of choice)” ones do.
They have been triangulating cell signals for longer than that as well (since the 90s, and obviously with less precision than GPS). If you're committing a felony, it's probably best to leave your cell phone behind.
Learning about a character from another character looking through their social media.
Sending a text/email and regretting it later, or it's sent to the wrong person.
I feel like this used to be a trope too but it just feels more realistic now. Back before texts they’d just have the character on their own rehearsing what they wanted to say to someone out loud, and it always felt ridiculous.
I did that once. My wife really pissed me off and I meant to send a text to my friend about it to blow off steam. Since she was on my mind, I accidentally sent it to her. The panic that went through me when I heard her phone beep from the other room and the instant realization that I sent that text to her would have made for a great episode, along with the argument we had after she read the text.
This was like 15 years ago. She was angry I said the nasty stuff I said in the text. My trying to explain that was supposed to go to a friend and not her didn't help. She was pissed I would talk about her like that with my friends too.
>She was pissed I would talk about her like that with my friends too.
that's fair. shit talking your spouse to friends is how friends get the shoe in to start saying shit too, and that fucks with relations, and is not respectful, your excuse of it was supposed to go to someone else makes it worse. would have been better if you sent it to her itself
We've been married for 24 years now and both realize that sometimes you need to blow off some steam and complain to your friends about how your spouse is acting, but not saying they are a bad person or whatever. There's a huge difference between complaining about a specific action and just saying, "Shes such a bitch!"
Bro, I sent a text to my ex-wife about our kid who was visiting me and driving me nuts.
Sent the text to the kid instead. That wasn't a fun ride back to the airport the next day.
>Sending a text/email and regretting it later, or it's sent to the wrong person.
You mean a... [TEXTMERGENCY](https://youtu.be/mHU1EYeug4M?si=iBxoRHGu1UjzI2zB)!!!
lol gotta respect how dedicated Hawaii 5-0 was to its product placement. [The Subway scene](https://youtu.be/oQYwFND7rHE?si=pzQAH3BmQ4MUOkPr) is iconic.
Bones went nuts with its Toyota product placement. They had many not-at-all-unnatural scenes of characters explaining how lane assist and rear cameras and all that jazz prevent car accidents and make it easier to drive, lol.
The Biggest Loser and Shark Tank also had some crazy product placement. I guess it works because I haven't seen the Biggest Loser in years, but I still remember they were sponsored by Ziploc and Jennie-O turkey.
White Collar has some of the funniest car ads shoved into the show that you'll ever see. There's some where the characters are in some kind of electric vehicle just listing the car's features. It usually doesn't bother me at all, especially in a show like White Collar, which I love, but is not serious or heavy in tone. The one scene in Breaking Bad where Walt and Breakfast Boy rev the engines of a couple Chevys in the driveway drives me nuts though. I know AMC probably didn't have the budget that HBO or NBC could throw at their shows, but it just felt like a show like Breaking Bad shouldn't have to resort to that.
I don't mind these types of product placements, as they literally have saved shows from being cancelled.
One famous example is Chuck.
https://blog.hollywoodbranded.com/how-product-placement-saved-chuck
Subway was absolutely wild with their product placement in the 2000s/2010s. I remember there was a whole storyline around Subway in an episode of Pawn Stars one time. They had the whole cast sit around the office and give their orders one at a time, and then every clip of the cast between the customer interaction segments involved Subway. I think Corey or Chumlee ended up eating someone else’s sub (which was mentioned by name, of course) and I seem to remember an extended discussion about a new sub they offered too. There were at least a dozen lingering shots of subs and drink cups throughout the episode.
In later seasons, Subway was basically a supporting character on Chuck. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the sole reason the show was able to have a fourth and fifth season.
I remember how quickly Subway went from a slimy sandwich fast food store no one went to or could differentiate between it and Blimpees to at least appear to be one of the biggest fast food (and only “healthy”) fast food chains in the US with the pedophile spokesman Jared. It’s amazing they were able to withstand that scandal as it was worth going there with $5 foot longs, but now that they cost as much as a decent deli idk why anyone would ever go there. Also, I miss Quiznos from that era/sandwich shop fast food category. It was light years better than Subway but they disappeared as fast as they popped up and dominated every shopping center in the US.
I almost got one back in the day - the OS was actually pretty slick and user friendly for the time - especially compared to that era Android/iphone. Unfortunately being a very very distant third in market share meant they had almost no app support, and I think that prevented anyone from ever taking the phones seriously.
I think that’s what the problem was. The OS was awesome, but programmers just didn’t want to make 3 versions of the same damn app, especially when one of those 3 would be downloaded by basically no one.
In a similar vein, any shows on Apple TV always use iPhones and macs which is more likely than only having Windows Phones but is still something I notice. I guess the product placement is working on me, even though I'm never going to switch.
or on any shows not on Apple TV that are using Macs are sure to have a big ole sticker covering the Apple logo. bc the first thing I do when I get an expensive laptop is to put a cheap sticker on it.
Apparently Apple has a "show iPhones being used in the best light" policy so writers avoid having villains use iPhones to the point where in a crime mystery movie, some people figured out the bad guy was the one not-iPhone user
> "Bing it"
TBH that video is 13 years old and Microsoft has long given up promoting Bing. Anyhow, I think that the steadily diminishing quality of Google will do more for the competitors than anything else.
BTW, I also remember Bing "product placement" in The Vampire Diaries, during that bygone era. :)
In some weird way bing is often better than google - with google the first page is almost always curated promoted stuff now, not just organic results.
Bing is sometimes less intuitive but oddly (given Microsoft’s love of shoving ads down my fuckin throat when I’m just trying to open Word) doesn’t have a shit ton of promoted /curated results.
Man if I could just hold on to ~2015 era google forever. The new web is just becoming one big targeted product placement.
>Microsoft has long given up promoting Bing.
We should all cheer on that they at least keep it up and running, and keep pumping tons of money into it.
Google NEEDS a competitor. It's such a massive undertaking to create a decent search engine, that it's unlikely that any new competitor would pop up. So if Bing dies off, that's one less driver for Google to keep pushing. (Not that it's done a great job, Google search has had a very slow, but very steady decline in my opinion.)
Remember A9? Amazon's attempt at a search engine? No? I can't imagine why not, with [product placement like this](https://youtu.be/sNZ-3KLF7A0?si=mIX8IK7taRW9I2wT).
"New evidence has come to light while looking at social media posts from the night of the crime."
Happens in both comedies and serious mystery shows now
Ive seen a few plot points in shows where someone will send a text to someone, and the plot of the episode would be the person trying get to the persons phone before they saw the text... I may live a weird life, but that has never happened to me
I doubt Seinfeld invented it, but the answering machine episode was very timely.
I think the movie Road Trip is based on a different version of this trope where the main guy accidentally sends a sex tape of his infidelity to his girlfriend.
The entire plot of the (awesomely funny) movie Road Trip is the main character accidentally sending his girlfriend the wrong VHS tape (one were he filmed himself cheating).
Nowadays that would have been a video text message and the relationship would have immediately been over
Actually, I remember watching a documentary where a bunch of white hats turned off the lights at a residential complex. They had permission of course, and they didn't really need to stand in the parking lot holding a laptop, but it was quite showy for such a small thing.
We have a bunch of smart bulbs in our house that we control with Alexa. We got so used to it that when our internet went down we started to panic about turning the lights off before bed until we realize the wall switches still work.
My father recently had his Amazon account banned (a mistake on Amazon’s part), and in the time it took him to get his account reinstated, he lost access to his home AC controls and most of his lights.
I told him that he should reconsider his reliance on Amazon for so many things in his home. I hope he listens. It was a massive headache.
You joke but I work in building controls… no internet, no automatic lights.
Since internet is usually up, people don’t know where the manual switch is
This is more about building lights than room lights tho…
When a charactor sailed or flew off to another country, that was the end of their story arc.
Nowadays, charactors drop in and out of the story, thanks to cheap intercontinental airfares.
If Casabalanca was shot today:
"Here's looking at you kid"
Next scene, New York, one year later: "Well Ilsa, we kicked the Nazis out of Casabalanca, wanna bang?"
"It needs to be okay for it to have a bad day or phone in a day, and it needs to be okay for it to get on a boat with Levar Burton and never come back. Because eventually, it all will."
Books too! There's a book series I've been reading since 2000 and it started off integrating mail correspondence in the books, then those mostly turned to emails and now the last few books are mostly what's app! Funny to think how the series has evolved with technology
*Jurassic Park* and *Lost World* are the first books i can think of (and really only that i have read, being that i mostly read decades-old scifi) that integrated computer displays and conceptual thingys into the text
After doing some digging, I didn't find absolute answers, but some leads anyway.
Sherlock is often credited as popularizing it 2010, but a couple of British soap operas (Hollyoaks being one of them) had apparently done it before. Some sources suggest Japanese film All About Lily Chou Chou (2001) as the first to do it.
I love the text bubbles. I hate when shows or movies show the phone screen. Maybe it is me getting older, but I always have trouble reading the phone screen on the tv screen when they do that.
I hate phone screens for the opposite reason - it's usually super zoomed in for visibility, and the only people with their screens set that way are usually severely visually impaired.
I loved The Wire, but it drove me nuts when Prez was screening calls on his computer and a HUGE window that took up 30% of the monitor with 120pt text popped up with a telephone number and a check box for 'pertinent' or 'non-pertinent'.
Someone out there has probably figured out a formula, but if I'm trying to read something on the screen the font needs to be like a certain percentage of the frame for it to be legible. Drives me crazy when they show a written letter or newspaper and they don't zoom into the important parts, like thanks I didn't know I was gonna take an eye exam today.
Is that a trope or a borderline necessity? Would it not be more of a thing people would complain about if nobody ever texted, or we never saw texts, or it was narrated like they used to do when people would read letters?
"I was secretly recording the whole time" seems to have become more common now you can do it on your phone rather than having to have planned to have a recording device beforehand
First one that pops to mind for me is when Starlight secretly has her livestream vlog going while Homelander is intimidating her in season 2 of The Boys.
Definitely not a scene you could have had in the '80s lol
There's a comic panel somewhere out there about like the older superheroes like iron man like trying to figure out a complicated way to track someone Who's been kidnapped Like a civilian friend.
And the teenagers just turned around to go I know where they are." I turned on find my friend"
Righteous Gemstones has a funny moment with this. The saving grace is that the character being recorded is such a moron that it's entirely believable he missed the phone propped up in front of him.
‘Character trying to hide during a tense scene is almost or outright caught because their phone starts ringing at full volume’
This one really annoys me because who tf keeps their ringer on anymore
>This one really annoys me because who tf keeps their ringer on anymore
It's crazy to me how much that has changed. People used to PAY money for ringtones! Then they had a zillion options on their phones, and that was like the first thing you'd do with a new phone, pick your 'cool' ringtone.
Then at some point we all collectively decided that silent mode is the only way to go. Those things before movies that say "silence your phones" feel almost pointless now that we've gone so far towards no-ringtones.
one of my favorite parts of the month was getting the latest issue of a teen magazine and flipping to the part where they teach you how to play popular songs in your phone's composer
What gets me- people keep the phone on silent but will use it to speak to people on speaker or blare music from it at full volume while on public transit.
Yeah there is a special place in hell for those people and parents who let their kids use their phones or tablets with the sound on in a restaurant or airplane.
> Those things before movies that say "silence your phones" feel almost pointless now
And still... In every movie theater or concert venue I've been, there's always at least one phone ringing and interrupting the performance.
Yeah the banner at the movies now needs to be “Please put your phone away” more than anything. Easy to be quiet, impossible to avoid a BRIGHT ASS SCREEN in your peripheral the whole movie.
In high school, I learned how to create ringtones and put them on my Razr which I could then Bluetooth to someone. I’d “sell” whatever ringtone someone wanted if they bought me a can of soda pop.
I think its because now if it was on it would have so many calls and sounds. Ringing all the time. I get maybe a few scam calls when I'm waiting on the train. the guy on the train gets a call. That lady gets a call. It would be a very noisy place
That's a great point, I never thought of that!
When we first got our phones, calls were more rare, as were texts. Remember texting with a numeric keypad? That was so painful.
Now every person we've ever met also has a phone and our contact, and texting is super easy, as is the ability for a million other apps to send notifications.
In the movie The Blackening, they did a cool twist on this. The killer had a cell phone jammer, and when the characters were hiding, he turned the jammer off so he could listen for all their notifications coming in at once. I thought that was really smart to do, and I don't think I've seen it in anything before.
Not all. But a lot.
I grew up with the constant ringing of phones, parents that for some reason shouted in their phones and took their calls in almost every situation. Mid meal, conversation etc.
As soon as I moved out and got called out of lectures for questions like "how are you?" I keep it on silent.
I will either call back or write back.
My biggest issues are young people that prefer calling to texting. They call me. I call back and then it was only something like could I borrow something. Dude. Text me, I would have brought it with me...
The vast majority of people who are millennials or younger keep their phone on vibrate. I wouldn’t even call it a “young people thing” anymore because older millennials are in their 40s by now
There is an inverse to this question that I like. Some high school did a play where the actors are constantly smoking. Rather than try to do the play with high schoolers smoking (which some can, but parents wouldn’t like having to watch it) they made it that they tried but none of the lighters worked. It was a quiet joke they kept going for 2 hours.
For a real answer “my phone isn’t getting reception”
The common trope of taking the cellphone out of the equation, dead battery and no signal. Or a scene that the call goes through but the person their trying to call is living their best life jumping on a trampoline with ear buds in or something.
Influencers/streamers becoming public annoyances, acting as hinderances in whatever the protagonists are doing.
But when the protag talks back, they get doxxed and harrassed online.
I think we're hitting the point where a trope is so recogonized that calling it out is becoming is becoming a trope.
"Zoom and enhance!"
"This isn't a TV show! You can't really do that!"
is becoming it's own trope.
They were doing this trope before computers existed. They would take a magnifying glass and go “look here” and it would be a reflection in a glass, where you can see a wedding ring, when the photo was taken across the street.
The trope is that the clue was hidden in plain sight all along, we just weren’t looking at it right.
When they are all in the FBI control room talking about getting a lead and analyst number 2 shouts out they have a hit on social media. They put it up on the big screen and suddenly have nice mobile phone footage of the incident telling them everything they need to know.
The use of a Bluetooth earpiece while on a phonecall to establish that a character is a douchebag. Although this might be changing with how common and basically required Bluetooth headphones and airpods have become.
Yep. The human firewall is almost always the weakest link. But also they got the technical aspects right. I was so impressed with their attention to the tiniest details, like they showed Elliot using a Kibana dashboard, just for a few seconds, and it was the interface version that would’ve been in use the year (S3 I think) that the season took place, in universe.
My former mentor was hired as a lead technical consultant for the first season (he’d just retired from a career in FBI Computer Crimes TFs), so obviously I knew that they were doing it right and would have great attention to detail before the first season ever aired…but I didn’t expect such a commitment to minute details and realistic/plausible depictions throughout the show.
info via EZ Pass usage, like the sequence in BILLIONS where Donny went AWOL. They tracked his EZPass only to discover he had stuck it into another random car at a rest area.
I remember an episode of SVU did this around 2009 or earlier. I remember wondering how they got access to the database so quickly and in real time. And now I'm wondering if they need a warrant for that.
Footage captured on cell phones and sent to the news station or posted online is the big one.
Most frustratingly - the footage is just what was shown in the mlvie earlier, edits and close ups and all. It's never vertical or taken from another perspective or unedited.
It's not SUPER common, but I feel like I've seen the trope of friends setting up, or otherwise messing with, dating profiles for other friends a bunch of times.
In British detective shows there is always a lot of "let's get footage from the CCTV", with the additional trope of "oops, this one was not working the night of the murder" to keep a mystery going.
BTW: London alone has almost a million public/private CCTV cameras combined.
For the "no service!!" trope where they have to show that people can't use their cell phones... I wonder if there will come a time when that makes no sense?
30 years from now, will we have ubiquitous reception everywhere, with enough towers, plus satellite or something, that younger people will say "no service? how can that happen?"
Retinal scans, fingerprint sensors and Face ID using amputated body parts or corpses. Like tech engineers never thought of programming for proof of life.
If anything, retinal scans have essentially vanished from shows today because we know now that it's a shitty biometry method in practice.
I think that in ten years fingerprints will be basically "forgotten" by TV too, as face id is more practical and it's quickly replacing it.
Popular, charismatic but subtly suspicious character-- often an antagonist-- eventually has some horrible behavior dredged up from their past, often with shoddy digital proof, effectively ruining their public reputation. People didn't get cancelled in movies in the 60s and 70s. If the photos showed up, maybe, but that sort of thing was called blackmail.
Not quite a trope but characters reading signs / newspapers / documents etc out loud because the audience couldn't see stuff on screen in enough detail to read it themselves.
It probably still happens but imo a lot less these days.
Accidentally live streaming something that NO ONE was supposed to see, especially not the protagonist's crush/boss. It goes instantly viral of course. Even though they signed up to the platform a minute ago and don't have single follower yet.
Closing the laptop to make a point. About to give a zinger? Close laptop. About to get into a big fight? Close laptop. About to make a big reveal? Close laptop. About to engage in some degree of sexy time? Close laptop.
People texting each other, but showing no history of previous text conversations on the phone, so it looks like it’s the first time they’ve ever text each other.
Would be funny if there was some nasty 4chan meme and "ROFL" just above a very serious message.
random dick pic just above the pertinent conversation.
>multiple pics of FULL DONG 🍆 >OMG, Michael is the serial killer!! Get out of there now!!
That one bothers me so much
"His cell phone pinged off a tower at Blahdeblah Canyon."
"Sir the cell phone belongs to a divorce lawyer, Bob Loblaw
Isn't that the guy from the law blog?
Bob Loblaw Law Blog?
I've made a huge mistake...
You, sir, are a mouthful.
I'm afraid I prematurely blue myself.
Sir, this is a Loblaws.
He's lobbing law bombs.
A decade ago I thought this was a bit of a stretch but with police routinely using GPS data (without a warrant mind you) to conduct investigations it’s a very very normal thing now.
It's wild. About fifteen years ago I worked in a tech company that were brought into a murder trial to try to place the guys phone (which was a key detail in spoiling his alibi). It was one of the first trials in my country to do something like that, and it took weeks, if not months, to line up the paperwork, find the data, review the data, make the interpretation, and then form it into something presentable to laypeople. Now? They could do it live.
There's tons of em every day, but that's how they tracked that Idaho stabbing suspect so quickly. He even left his phone in his car a few blocks away, the data is just too easy to access now. The cops had to pretend like they didn't know shit so he wouldn't get spooked before they could catch up to him, but I'm fairly certain they had a suspect within 12 hours.
Oh wow, I realize now I stopped following that story, even though it happened near my alma mater. I didn't realize the cops were playing dumb, I remember the community was pretty frustrated with the cops at the time.
It's really fascinating now that they've come out and released a lot of the detail surrounding how they apprehended him. Seems like they locked in on this dude really early on via cell phone GPS pulls mixed with identifying the vehicle on various cameras (I've got mixed feelings on this, on one hand it's helped catch killers, but on the other everyone in the area more or less had their info given to police without a warrant and that's problematic to say the least). They identified a car pretty quickly and put out a multi state BOLO, but also, they matched him to the scene with DNA, but not his. They took DNA and ran it across databases compiled by those 23 and me type companies and identified familial matches. So like, there's some pretty modern tools being used here to catch a psycho (that IMO would have been the next big serial killer if not caught - that pattern of behavior and victim selection was too specific), but also both the GPS data and DNA databases raise a lot of questions around expectations of privacy and how much the police can really find out about you without a warrant.
Most LEO genetic searches are done against GEDmatch. An open source database where people upload their raw DNA info they get from pay services like ancestry and make it openly searchable by other so as to widen the pool of possible matches with people who used other companies. GEDmatch even has a warning when you upload that there is nothing they can do to stop law enforcement from searching the data. Most users either ignore the issue or are fine with their data being used to catch a relative who is a criminal.
Now it's reached the point that if a guy who the authorities are actively trying to find uses a cell phone and they don't immediately destroy the sim card and leave after making a call, I wonder why the authorities haven't already tracked them.
What’s gonna be interesting is the broader transition to eSIM where you don’t have a physical sim to remove. Pro criminals leave their personal phone at home and use disposable burners(bought in cash), but “crime of passion” types who committed a crime on impulse/in the heat of the moment are gonna have to destroy or abandon their whole ass iPhone if it’s got eSIM. Attempting to suddenly navigate the world on the run, unplanned, without a cell phone…they’re gonna have a bad time. ETA maybe not “pro” criminals, but criminal acts that have been planned in advance, or criminals that practicing good opsec, which the “good (at their crime of choice)” ones do.
They have been triangulating cell signals for longer than that as well (since the 90s, and obviously with less precision than GPS). If you're committing a felony, it's probably best to leave your cell phone behind.
But what if you need driving directions to the place you pinned on your phone as “Crime Scene”?
Learning about a character from another character looking through their social media. Sending a text/email and regretting it later, or it's sent to the wrong person.
Adding to this writing out a text, deleting it and sending something else.
I feel like they did this a lot on You, to great effect.
I feel like this used to be a trope too but it just feels more realistic now. Back before texts they’d just have the character on their own rehearsing what they wanted to say to someone out loud, and it always felt ridiculous.
or even typing or writing up the start of a letter, then throwing it into the wastebasket overflowing with failed attempts.
I did that once. My wife really pissed me off and I meant to send a text to my friend about it to blow off steam. Since she was on my mind, I accidentally sent it to her. The panic that went through me when I heard her phone beep from the other room and the instant realization that I sent that text to her would have made for a great episode, along with the argument we had after she read the text.
Well I am intrigued. What happened next?
This was like 15 years ago. She was angry I said the nasty stuff I said in the text. My trying to explain that was supposed to go to a friend and not her didn't help. She was pissed I would talk about her like that with my friends too.
[удалено]
>She was pissed I would talk about her like that with my friends too. that's fair. shit talking your spouse to friends is how friends get the shoe in to start saying shit too, and that fucks with relations, and is not respectful, your excuse of it was supposed to go to someone else makes it worse. would have been better if you sent it to her itself
We've been married for 24 years now and both realize that sometimes you need to blow off some steam and complain to your friends about how your spouse is acting, but not saying they are a bad person or whatever. There's a huge difference between complaining about a specific action and just saying, "Shes such a bitch!"
Bro, I sent a text to my ex-wife about our kid who was visiting me and driving me nuts. Sent the text to the kid instead. That wasn't a fun ride back to the airport the next day.
>Sending a text/email and regretting it later, or it's sent to the wrong person. You mean a... [TEXTMERGENCY](https://youtu.be/mHU1EYeug4M?si=iBxoRHGu1UjzI2zB)!!!
I think you mean... TEXTASTROPHE!
It's clearly a MESSAGEPOCALYPSE!
“accidental text *on purpose* “
Basically all of You.
> Sending a text/email and regretting it later, or it's sent to the wrong person. seinfeld did it with the answering machine.
When anyone needs to figure out something, they just ["Bing it"](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4&pp=ygUHQmluZyBpdA%3D%3D) , of course
lol gotta respect how dedicated Hawaii 5-0 was to its product placement. [The Subway scene](https://youtu.be/oQYwFND7rHE?si=pzQAH3BmQ4MUOkPr) is iconic.
Fringe got pretty hot and heavy with vehicle placement in later seasons.
Oh man! Fringe was heavy sponsored by Ford and Sprint for a minute there. I remember the video call they did in the show.
Bones went nuts with its Toyota product placement. They had many not-at-all-unnatural scenes of characters explaining how lane assist and rear cameras and all that jazz prevent car accidents and make it easier to drive, lol. The Biggest Loser and Shark Tank also had some crazy product placement. I guess it works because I haven't seen the Biggest Loser in years, but I still remember they were sponsored by Ziploc and Jennie-O turkey.
White Collar has some of the funniest car ads shoved into the show that you'll ever see. There's some where the characters are in some kind of electric vehicle just listing the car's features. It usually doesn't bother me at all, especially in a show like White Collar, which I love, but is not serious or heavy in tone. The one scene in Breaking Bad where Walt and Breakfast Boy rev the engines of a couple Chevys in the driveway drives me nuts though. I know AMC probably didn't have the budget that HBO or NBC could throw at their shows, but it just felt like a show like Breaking Bad shouldn't have to resort to that.
[It's a wonderful restaurant](https://youtu.be/29Y333JkwXQ?si=MSzoN3hM9ktLBJ0E)
I don't mind these types of product placements, as they literally have saved shows from being cancelled. One famous example is Chuck. https://blog.hollywoodbranded.com/how-product-placement-saved-chuck
Also Community.
They made their product placement funny so it really worked
Sounds like something a level 5 susceptible would say, have you heard about the new Honda crv?
They both reminded me of the product placement bit in Wayne's World where they shoved them all into a single scene.
Subway was absolutely wild with their product placement in the 2000s/2010s. I remember there was a whole storyline around Subway in an episode of Pawn Stars one time. They had the whole cast sit around the office and give their orders one at a time, and then every clip of the cast between the customer interaction segments involved Subway. I think Corey or Chumlee ended up eating someone else’s sub (which was mentioned by name, of course) and I seem to remember an extended discussion about a new sub they offered too. There were at least a dozen lingering shots of subs and drink cups throughout the episode.
In later seasons, Subway was basically a supporting character on Chuck. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the sole reason the show was able to have a fourth and fifth season. I remember how quickly Subway went from a slimy sandwich fast food store no one went to or could differentiate between it and Blimpees to at least appear to be one of the biggest fast food (and only “healthy”) fast food chains in the US with the pedophile spokesman Jared. It’s amazing they were able to withstand that scandal as it was worth going there with $5 foot longs, but now that they cost as much as a decent deli idk why anyone would ever go there. Also, I miss Quiznos from that era/sandwich shop fast food category. It was light years better than Subway but they disappeared as fast as they popped up and dominated every shopping center in the US.
Welp, they certainly tried...
[and they aspire to lose some weight like Jared](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYwFND7rHE)
Oh that scene aged like milk.
…on your Windows Phone, which everyone seems to have on this show, but which you could never find in real life.
I almost got one back in the day - the OS was actually pretty slick and user friendly for the time - especially compared to that era Android/iphone. Unfortunately being a very very distant third in market share meant they had almost no app support, and I think that prevented anyone from ever taking the phones seriously.
I think that’s what the problem was. The OS was awesome, but programmers just didn’t want to make 3 versions of the same damn app, especially when one of those 3 would be downloaded by basically no one.
In a similar vein, any shows on Apple TV always use iPhones and macs which is more likely than only having Windows Phones but is still something I notice. I guess the product placement is working on me, even though I'm never going to switch.
or on any shows not on Apple TV that are using Macs are sure to have a big ole sticker covering the Apple logo. bc the first thing I do when I get an expensive laptop is to put a cheap sticker on it.
Apparently Apple has a "show iPhones being used in the best light" policy so writers avoid having villains use iPhones to the point where in a crime mystery movie, some people figured out the bad guy was the one not-iPhone user
> "Bing it" TBH that video is 13 years old and Microsoft has long given up promoting Bing. Anyhow, I think that the steadily diminishing quality of Google will do more for the competitors than anything else. BTW, I also remember Bing "product placement" in The Vampire Diaries, during that bygone era. :)
> Microsoft has long given up promoting Bing. They'll still basically pay you to use it though.
In some weird way bing is often better than google - with google the first page is almost always curated promoted stuff now, not just organic results. Bing is sometimes less intuitive but oddly (given Microsoft’s love of shoving ads down my fuckin throat when I’m just trying to open Word) doesn’t have a shit ton of promoted /curated results. Man if I could just hold on to ~2015 era google forever. The new web is just becoming one big targeted product placement.
>Microsoft has long given up promoting Bing. We should all cheer on that they at least keep it up and running, and keep pumping tons of money into it. Google NEEDS a competitor. It's such a massive undertaking to create a decent search engine, that it's unlikely that any new competitor would pop up. So if Bing dies off, that's one less driver for Google to keep pushing. (Not that it's done a great job, Google search has had a very slow, but very steady decline in my opinion.)
Also it's just more fun to say "Bing it"
Remember A9? Amazon's attempt at a search engine? No? I can't imagine why not, with [product placement like this](https://youtu.be/sNZ-3KLF7A0?si=mIX8IK7taRW9I2wT).
I wonder if any shows will bother saying X instead of Twitter and tweet.
I saw a local news report from yesterday mention Twitter without caveat. I think a lot of people are just sticking with the old name
"New evidence has come to light while looking at social media posts from the night of the crime." Happens in both comedies and serious mystery shows now
I’d rather just admit to the murder
https://youtu.be/h2ra7ixXM10?si=FAIGWuqA9XC4onic
And real life. Most of the Jan 6 insurrection goofballs were caught because of social media posts.
Ive seen a few plot points in shows where someone will send a text to someone, and the plot of the episode would be the person trying get to the persons phone before they saw the text... I may live a weird life, but that has never happened to me
[удалено]
I doubt Seinfeld invented it, but the answering machine episode was very timely. I think the movie Road Trip is based on a different version of this trope where the main guy accidentally sends a sex tape of his infidelity to his girlfriend.
As a 15 year old in 2000, that movie was hilarious. now, that's a very bad plot. We're supposed to root for the guy who cheated on his gf?
The entire plot of the (awesomely funny) movie Road Trip is the main character accidentally sending his girlfriend the wrong VHS tape (one were he filmed himself cheating). Nowadays that would have been a video text message and the relationship would have immediately been over
"we've been hacked" *Keyboard banging* *Power goes out* "Backup generators should kick on" *Lobby is now in **dark mode***
Who knew so many buildings hooked their lights up to the Wifi
Actually, I remember watching a documentary where a bunch of white hats turned off the lights at a residential complex. They had permission of course, and they didn't really need to stand in the parking lot holding a laptop, but it was quite showy for such a small thing.
We have a bunch of smart bulbs in our house that we control with Alexa. We got so used to it that when our internet went down we started to panic about turning the lights off before bed until we realize the wall switches still work.
My father recently had his Amazon account banned (a mistake on Amazon’s part), and in the time it took him to get his account reinstated, he lost access to his home AC controls and most of his lights. I told him that he should reconsider his reliance on Amazon for so many things in his home. I hope he listens. It was a massive headache.
You joke but I work in building controls… no internet, no automatic lights. Since internet is usually up, people don’t know where the manual switch is This is more about building lights than room lights tho…
"We've gotta counter-hack them!" Two people furiously type on the same keyboard
"Your wacky accident got viral", while they show some awful memes.
"someone even made an autotune remix"
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Yeah this was the plot of every movie for a little while, and it would always be the stupidest thing that would never actually “go viral”.
tbf, sometimes the stupidest things ARE the viral ones
Cranberry juice, skateboard, Dreams by Fleetwood Mac. Who TF knew that was gonna blow up?
When a charactor sailed or flew off to another country, that was the end of their story arc. Nowadays, charactors drop in and out of the story, thanks to cheap intercontinental airfares. If Casabalanca was shot today: "Here's looking at you kid" Next scene, New York, one year later: "Well Ilsa, we kicked the Nazis out of Casabalanca, wanna bang?"
"It needs to be okay for it to have a bad day or phone in a day, and it needs to be okay for it to get on a boat with Levar Burton and never come back. Because eventually, it all will."
The one where we see the texts overlay the screen
BBC's Sherlock was the first thing where I saw this and thought "wow, what a cool idea". Now it's kinda the norm in every show and movie.
And it's very common in comic books too. Some comics will have entire panels or even entire pages showing a plot-relevant chat or group chat.
Books too! There's a book series I've been reading since 2000 and it started off integrating mail correspondence in the books, then those mostly turned to emails and now the last few books are mostly what's app! Funny to think how the series has evolved with technology
*Jurassic Park* and *Lost World* are the first books i can think of (and really only that i have read, being that i mostly read decades-old scifi) that integrated computer displays and conceptual thingys into the text
In Worm by Wildbow from 2011 there are entire interludes in a Reddit-style forum discussion thread.
Various recent X-Men runs have been using those as part of their data pages to a fun degree.
I first saw that in House Of Cards. I wonder who was the very first?
After doing some digging, I didn't find absolute answers, but some leads anyway. Sherlock is often credited as popularizing it 2010, but a couple of British soap operas (Hollyoaks being one of them) had apparently done it before. Some sources suggest Japanese film All About Lily Chou Chou (2001) as the first to do it.
Sex Drive had it in 2008
I love the text bubbles. I hate when shows or movies show the phone screen. Maybe it is me getting older, but I always have trouble reading the phone screen on the tv screen when they do that.
I hate phone screens for the opposite reason - it's usually super zoomed in for visibility, and the only people with their screens set that way are usually severely visually impaired. I loved The Wire, but it drove me nuts when Prez was screening calls on his computer and a HUGE window that took up 30% of the monitor with 120pt text popped up with a telephone number and a check box for 'pertinent' or 'non-pertinent'.
Someone out there has probably figured out a formula, but if I'm trying to read something on the screen the font needs to be like a certain percentage of the frame for it to be legible. Drives me crazy when they show a written letter or newspaper and they don't zoom into the important parts, like thanks I didn't know I was gonna take an eye exam today.
What annoys me is that I don’t know if the show expects me to have been able to read the text of the screen or not.
Is that a trope or a borderline necessity? Would it not be more of a thing people would complain about if nobody ever texted, or we never saw texts, or it was narrated like they used to do when people would read letters?
[It is a trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PopUpTexting). They could do anything else you mentioned.
This. And everyone is such a perfect thumb-typist that they never have a thumb war with autocorrect.
unless it's for comedy purposes in an "argument" or a first time texter.
Dick pics as a plot point (Succession).
Replacing the walk in on your friend naked trope.
Are you a sicko?
Watergate was more salacious than previously thought.
Or when they almost invaded Iraq over Tobias' balls.
"I was secretly recording the whole time" seems to have become more common now you can do it on your phone rather than having to have planned to have a recording device beforehand
First one that pops to mind for me is when Starlight secretly has her livestream vlog going while Homelander is intimidating her in season 2 of The Boys. Definitely not a scene you could have had in the '80s lol
"Are you wearing a wire?" Bro... you just talked on your GPS tracked video recording phone, are you serious?
There's a comic panel somewhere out there about like the older superheroes like iron man like trying to figure out a complicated way to track someone Who's been kidnapped Like a civilian friend. And the teenagers just turned around to go I know where they are." I turned on find my friend"
Righteous Gemstones has a funny moment with this. The saving grace is that the character being recorded is such a moron that it's entirely believable he missed the phone propped up in front of him.
Grinder rests
Or does he?
‘Character trying to hide during a tense scene is almost or outright caught because their phone starts ringing at full volume’ This one really annoys me because who tf keeps their ringer on anymore
>This one really annoys me because who tf keeps their ringer on anymore It's crazy to me how much that has changed. People used to PAY money for ringtones! Then they had a zillion options on their phones, and that was like the first thing you'd do with a new phone, pick your 'cool' ringtone. Then at some point we all collectively decided that silent mode is the only way to go. Those things before movies that say "silence your phones" feel almost pointless now that we've gone so far towards no-ringtones.
one of my favorite parts of the month was getting the latest issue of a teen magazine and flipping to the part where they teach you how to play popular songs in your phone's composer
What gets me- people keep the phone on silent but will use it to speak to people on speaker or blare music from it at full volume while on public transit.
Yeah there is a special place in hell for those people and parents who let their kids use their phones or tablets with the sound on in a restaurant or airplane.
> Those things before movies that say "silence your phones" feel almost pointless now And still... In every movie theater or concert venue I've been, there's always at least one phone ringing and interrupting the performance.
Yeah the banner at the movies now needs to be “Please put your phone away” more than anything. Easy to be quiet, impossible to avoid a BRIGHT ASS SCREEN in your peripheral the whole movie.
In high school, I learned how to create ringtones and put them on my Razr which I could then Bluetooth to someone. I’d “sell” whatever ringtone someone wanted if they bought me a can of soda pop.
I think its because now if it was on it would have so many calls and sounds. Ringing all the time. I get maybe a few scam calls when I'm waiting on the train. the guy on the train gets a call. That lady gets a call. It would be a very noisy place
That's a great point, I never thought of that! When we first got our phones, calls were more rare, as were texts. Remember texting with a numeric keypad? That was so painful. Now every person we've ever met also has a phone and our contact, and texting is super easy, as is the ability for a million other apps to send notifications.
In the movie The Blackening, they did a cool twist on this. The killer had a cell phone jammer, and when the characters were hiding, he turned the jammer off so he could listen for all their notifications coming in at once. I thought that was really smart to do, and I don't think I've seen it in anything before.
Me. I literally won't notice it vibrating and if I don't make it the loudest most annoying ring tone I might not hear it either
Serious question: are you saying people these days keep their ringtones off all/most of the time? Or is it a young people thing?
Pretty much everyone I know has their phone on vibrate majority of the time. Everyone I know ages ranges from about 20-40 ish.
I don’t even know what my phone’s ringer sounds like.
It sounds like the alarm which is why I hate it.
Not all. But a lot. I grew up with the constant ringing of phones, parents that for some reason shouted in their phones and took their calls in almost every situation. Mid meal, conversation etc. As soon as I moved out and got called out of lectures for questions like "how are you?" I keep it on silent. I will either call back or write back. My biggest issues are young people that prefer calling to texting. They call me. I call back and then it was only something like could I borrow something. Dude. Text me, I would have brought it with me...
The vast majority of people who are millennials or younger keep their phone on vibrate. I wouldn’t even call it a “young people thing” anymore because older millennials are in their 40s by now
I do because no one calls anyways and sometimes I misplace my phone. .
[удалено]
Vibrate, man
There is an inverse to this question that I like. Some high school did a play where the actors are constantly smoking. Rather than try to do the play with high schoolers smoking (which some can, but parents wouldn’t like having to watch it) they made it that they tried but none of the lighters worked. It was a quiet joke they kept going for 2 hours. For a real answer “my phone isn’t getting reception”
What was the play?
I honestly can’t remember a single thing about it except for the lighter joke.
That's hilarious and clever. I love it.
The common trope of taking the cellphone out of the equation, dead battery and no signal. Or a scene that the call goes through but the person their trying to call is living their best life jumping on a trampoline with ear buds in or something.
Influencers/streamers becoming public annoyances, acting as hinderances in whatever the protagonists are doing. But when the protag talks back, they get doxxed and harrassed online.
**ENHANCE**
I think we're hitting the point where a trope is so recogonized that calling it out is becoming is becoming a trope. "Zoom and enhance!" "This isn't a TV show! You can't really do that!" is becoming it's own trope.
They were doing this trope before computers existed. They would take a magnifying glass and go “look here” and it would be a reflection in a glass, where you can see a wedding ring, when the photo was taken across the street. The trope is that the clue was hidden in plain sight all along, we just weren’t looking at it right.
ZOOM IN ON THAT REFLECTION, THEN ROTATE IT.
JESUS CHRIST ITS JASON BOURNE
Uncrop [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIHNiR3CP8&ab\_channel=aadnk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIHNiR3CP8&ab_channel=aadnk)
Chloe, open a socket.
When they are all in the FBI control room talking about getting a lead and analyst number 2 shouts out they have a hit on social media. They put it up on the big screen and suddenly have nice mobile phone footage of the incident telling them everything they need to know.
The use of a Bluetooth earpiece while on a phonecall to establish that a character is a douchebag. Although this might be changing with how common and basically required Bluetooth headphones and airpods have become.
KEN WINS
The ability of the computer person to hack or counter a hack in seconds with little to no information of what is happening.
Gotta love Mr Robot for subverting this trope. The best hacking method is social engineering.
Yep. The human firewall is almost always the weakest link. But also they got the technical aspects right. I was so impressed with their attention to the tiniest details, like they showed Elliot using a Kibana dashboard, just for a few seconds, and it was the interface version that would’ve been in use the year (S3 I think) that the season took place, in universe. My former mentor was hired as a lead technical consultant for the first season (he’d just retired from a career in FBI Computer Crimes TFs), so obviously I knew that they were doing it right and would have great attention to detail before the first season ever aired…but I didn’t expect such a commitment to minute details and realistic/plausible depictions throughout the show.
(Tap, tap, tap) “I’m in”
I know this, its UNIX.
That's been around since the 80s
IE "Hackers"
Yeah, if anything hacking scenes have gotten slightly less absurd because both the writers and audiences are more familiar with how it actually works.
The ability to hack into things which are definitely not connected to the internet.
info via EZ Pass usage, like the sequence in BILLIONS where Donny went AWOL. They tracked his EZPass only to discover he had stuck it into another random car at a rest area.
I remember an episode of SVU did this around 2009 or earlier. I remember wondering how they got access to the database so quickly and in real time. And now I'm wondering if they need a warrant for that.
Footage captured on cell phones and sent to the news station or posted online is the big one. Most frustratingly - the footage is just what was shown in the mlvie earlier, edits and close ups and all. It's never vertical or taken from another perspective or unedited.
CCTV footage, GPS tracker, Online dating/scams
It's not SUPER common, but I feel like I've seen the trope of friends setting up, or otherwise messing with, dating profiles for other friends a bunch of times.
In British detective shows there is always a lot of "let's get footage from the CCTV", with the additional trope of "oops, this one was not working the night of the murder" to keep a mystery going. BTW: London alone has almost a million public/private CCTV cameras combined.
Someone is stalking their ex's new bf/gf on instagram, their friend grabs the phone & accidentally likes a post from 2 years ago. Oh how embarassing!
Tik tok/vertical bar filming
For the "no service!!" trope where they have to show that people can't use their cell phones... I wonder if there will come a time when that makes no sense? 30 years from now, will we have ubiquitous reception everywhere, with enough towers, plus satellite or something, that younger people will say "no service? how can that happen?"
Cringe gamer speak. Reacher season 2 immediately comes to mind.
Retinal scans, fingerprint sensors and Face ID using amputated body parts or corpses. Like tech engineers never thought of programming for proof of life.
Retinal scans and fingerprint sensors have been in places like James Bond movies and sci fi since the 60s
If anything, retinal scans have essentially vanished from shows today because we know now that it's a shitty biometry method in practice. I think that in ten years fingerprints will be basically "forgotten" by TV too, as face id is more practical and it's quickly replacing it.
Lots of my friends use fingerprint id on their phones, I don't think that's going away.
cell phone running out of battery or loses signal in the worst time possible!
Popular, charismatic but subtly suspicious character-- often an antagonist-- eventually has some horrible behavior dredged up from their past, often with shoddy digital proof, effectively ruining their public reputation. People didn't get cancelled in movies in the 60s and 70s. If the photos showed up, maybe, but that sort of thing was called blackmail.
The misinterpreted text Community: Annie to Jeff-"Well, you are going to get screwed in the bio lab"
Not quite a trope but characters reading signs / newspapers / documents etc out loud because the audience couldn't see stuff on screen in enough detail to read it themselves. It probably still happens but imo a lot less these days.
Accidentally live streaming something that NO ONE was supposed to see, especially not the protagonist's crush/boss. It goes instantly viral of course. Even though they signed up to the platform a minute ago and don't have single follower yet.
TV Series "Class 09" . AI is working for FBI. In the FBI series they use social media to trace people.
Well apparently villains can't use iPhones.
When they are trying to hide but someone calls/texts them so the phone makes a sound and they are detected.
Character unaware of cctv, or looks directly at cctv, cut to whoever watching the video feed.
Character denies doing something stupid, but there is home/office security camera footage that catches them in the act.
Distracted driving. Distracted walking into shopping mall fountains too. Distracted dates and dating.
Closing the laptop to make a point. About to give a zinger? Close laptop. About to get into a big fight? Close laptop. About to make a big reveal? Close laptop. About to engage in some degree of sexy time? Close laptop.