The horrible truth is that the image we have of any given decade's design aesthetic is actually false—the truth is actually the aesthetic of the previous decade, with grime and tobacco stains on top.
@cstross I remember having a discussion about British Rail vs Privatization, I wasn't exactly pro-Privatization but I argued it was more complex than "Utopian government-run system vs Greed" which, you know, is too nuanced so people took at as meaning I was pro-privatization.
Anyway, the person I was arguing with came up with a long list of ways in which British Rail was "better" (faster, more on time, cheaper, the usual things people are sure happened) including, amazingly, that the trains were "cleaner".
I pointed out exactly what you're pointing out - he was looking at BR with rose tinted glasses. The reality was every train before the early 1990s was basically caked with cigarette ash - and that was in the no-smoking sections. My first memory as a kid was riding the train from Aylesbury to London, with ash on the floor, on the doors, on that weird metal dotted thing attached to the doors that smokers were supposed to use to stub out their cigarettes, and that yellow haze on everything.
It wasn't that BR was bad because of that of course, had BR survived to the 2000s then, yes, quite possibly the trains might have been cleaner than those today. it was that BR lived in a naturally dirty era. So somehow remembering the trains as "clean" means you don't really remember the trains back then.
(On a related note, was rewatching ET recently and thought "Wow, they got it close", the communal areas of the home in that film had that dirty haze around them even if I don't think anyone are actually shown smoking, the kids bedrooms were a realistic mess.)
@poundquerydotinfo@cstross Younger folks simply do not believe me when I explain that in the 1970s, because at least 25% of your uncles and aunts smoked, every single place you could exist in including the house of your non-smoking parents, smelled like stale cigarette smoke (or, if you were really unlucky, stale cigar smoke) 100% of the time. Your car. Your clothes. Your hair. Everything. Always. All the time. Forever.
@peterb@poundquerydotinfo@cstross and coming home from a night out your clothes smelled of smoke. We used to hang the clothes out the window to get rid of the smell
@cstross Yeah, whenever I watch an old movie, the thing I remember from the days is the permanent stench, yellowing and slime of tobacco smoke everywhere.
And every other kid was into martial arts because of that one movie. And brag about whatever colour belt they had in whatever-fu course they got their parents to pay for. And how they sadly couldn't use it because that wasn't allowed, so they had to lose every fight anyways :blobcatthink:
@yngmar The brown cafes in Amsterdam used to be brown due to nicotine stains. These days there are paints designed to produce the effect, without the stink.
@cstross Maybe for you, but I'm pretty sure I haven't been influenced overly by the media I consume. My childhood in the 80s was exactly as rad as I remember it.
Until that time we had to move in with Gramps and my brother started acting weird about bright lights and garlic and I hooked up with some comic book nerds and we rid the town of vampires.
@davetansley You were a kid in the 80s? I was a student/newly-working professional and all my furniture was second-hand and beige as ass. Also, computers were beige. And slow. (And slowly beige.) Cars were beige. The air was beige with pollution.
@cstross But it was a rad kind of beige, right? The kind of beige that would roll up the sleeves of its sports jacket and peer at you slyly over the top of its sunglasses?
@cstross@davetansley One of the reasons why I became a goth in the 80s was precisely because it was the only colour that could be relied upon to cover that very beige.
@cstross@davetansley Computers were beige but usually with rainbow coloured logos; except Sinclairs, being radical with techno-black with rainbow coloured logos
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