What are
/r/RetroFuturism's
favorite Products & Services?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
The most popular Products mentioned in /r/RetroFuturism:
The most popular Services mentioned in /r/RetroFuturism:
Project Gutenberg
LibriVox
Dailymotion
CNET
Open Culture
MobyGames
Microsoft Bing
Ecosia
Wikiwand
Shout! Factory Tv
Wikipedia
GeekWire
Duolingo
Quora
Slashdot
The most popular Android Apps mentioned in /r/RetroFuturism:
Slick Rotary Dialer
Saturate - Free Icon Pack
VerbTeX LaTeX Editor
Void Pyramid
The most popular reviews in /r/RetroFuturism:
You can try Space Engine and see for yourself. It's not perfect but it does give you quite some beautiful vistas and probably not a bad approximation. A great way to relax, too.
There was a book written about this several years ago. See The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of. Subtitle is How Science Fiction Conquered the World.
And, this genre still can't get it's own section in the Times Book Review. They do mysteries, but nooooo, SciFi is too low brow.
Maybe, but probably not: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
If self-driving was a thing, then people could spend more time in their car doing work, watching a movie, etc. Next thing you know people are living farther away because land is “cheaper”, and driving more. Now you have more people driving than before, and city streets can only handle so many cars. So now all that city congestion is backing up onto the highways.
The solution is high-density infrastructure with more mass-transit options (subways, bus-rapid transit), while also making cities more walkable and bikable.
This is vector artwork, so it was created in something like Illustrator ($$$) or Inkscape (free). Vector art apps like that draw using shapes and lines and bezier curves instead of just laying digital paint down on pixels like Photoshop does. Once it was done he did import it into Photoshop to overlay the texture that makes it look like aged paper.
If you're a fan of old Archie comics, this is worth a read! It's basically just Archie in space (even down to the boy's name)! There's a nice coffee table style book that I think collects every issue. It's standard Dan DeCarlo stuff, by which I mean it's some of the best art in comics history. I'm a huge fan of his if you can't tell haha!
Lloyd Kahn (one of the creators of Domebook I and Domebook II) and a builder of many domes made this same revelation in 1973 and swore off domes forever with the publication of the book Shelter, where he advocates for simple usually rectangular homes using local materials. In his editorial/essay in the book he calls domes "smart but not wise", which pretty much sums up the issue.
More info here: https://www.shelterpub.com/domes/
His book Shelter is still in print and available on Amazon. Recommended and insightful reading: https://www.amazon.com/Shelter-Library-Building-Books/dp/0936070110
If you're interested, Shout Factory has the MST3k version for free.
While not quite the same thing, I bought one of these kits for my Reddit Secret Santa a year+ ago and he loved it.
I keep meaning to get one for myself...
Car is his first (AND even makes a cameo appearance in House); School is his latest, and one — like a 3rd Jasper Rabbit book — we’d been waiting a long time for the author to write!
There's a really good version of Triplanetary read by Mark F Smith ("of Simpsonville South Carolina") on Librivox https://librivox.org/triplanetary-by-ee-doc-smith/
He seems to be thoroughly embarrassed by it. Here's a comment he made:
>Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler. Wrong? Yep. At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems. Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury's orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn't possibly detect 'em. Heck - trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there's still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling) And, as I've laughed at others' foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions. Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff... Warm cheers to all
Russia and Russians have produced a lot of ground breaking animation over the decades. Alexeieff's insane pinscreen animations like this adaptation of Gogol's <em>The Nose</em> are examples, as is Yuri Norstein's endless project to film a version of The Overcoat using paper cutouts and glass panels.
We could look at the death rate per petawatt. Not to mention the fact that very little of our renewable energy sources are useful for baseload, except for CSP.
I fully suspect you've seen it, but just in case you haven't, you'll want to check out <em>Spider</em>, which tells the story of LOR and is my favourite episode of From the Earth To the Moon.
And that last line in the episode. Damn.
The book's Amazon reviews are amusing to read as well since Amazon only sold books back then.
Also, it belongs in /r/surrealmemes
You can buy Uranium ore on Amazon those days. So, you can re-create your radioactive lab even today.
Surprisingly, there are already discussions on the subject on Quora:
and the problem existed already, when Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor went to the orbit.
For 1970s 'sci-fi paperback cover art' style spaceships no-one is better than Peter Elson.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=peter+elson+art&FORM=HDRSC2
So matter of fact i just made a game i have been working on all year this week. It is a retro futurism RPG game set up like those old early 90s RPG games. Set in the "future" of 2016. You play as Lazer Eyes out to defeat his brother Blue Ray before he can defeat him.
Windows http://www.gamefront.com/files/25455552/Lazer+Eyes+PC.zip
Mac http://www.gamefront.com/files/25455550/Lazer+Eyes+Mac.zip
If anyone else is sitting here musing about how you have a vastly more powerful computer in your pocket right now and yet you can't just pull it out and write a program in BASIC on it... can you? It turns out you can. Although you'd probably be better off using a real language like Python or something, and why did it never occur to me to try to install Python on my phone before?
Could be, I just remember the comics as a kid, and this was the first picture I found online. This may be from the book collection of reprints - I believe they are colored.
https://books.google.com/books?id=JOQDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=june+1993+popular+mechanics&source=bl&ots=0CwIwhbRk0&sig=gL7BnWSSSkse5n1mvT8QuM4h95c&hl=en&sa=X&ei=1YMMVZ3AHKqKsQTVxoL4Bg&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAw#v=... I don't think this painting was in there, just very similar.
It certainly frees up the composer when music doesn't have to sound good or have any recognizable structure.
I recommend this docu-drama which is currently on Netflix:
https://www.netflix.com/title/80138278
"Space Race is a BBC docudrama series first shown in Britain on BBC2 between 14 September and 5 October 2005, chronicling the major events and characters in the American/Soviet space race up to the first landing of a man on the moon. It focuses on Sergei Korolev, the Soviet chief rocket designer, and Wernher von Braun, his American counterpart. The series was a joint effort between British, German, American and Russian production teams."
If you want stuff that is actually from the age of retrofuturism, try some space age pop. A lot of it is directly influenced by that aesthetic and ideas of space travel and unimaginable luxury.
A popular album commonly associated with this is <em>I Hear a New World: An Outer Space Music Fantasy</em> by Joe Meek and the Blue Men, and it's really solid.
You can buy it for $10! https://www.amazon.com/dp/0760716994/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_AQZ2CPYG7F6Q08KPQ0KF
He also has a website and a museum exhibit going on right now. Apparently you can buy original paintings of his too! I love this guy. Brucemccall.com
There's a whole lotta stuff just on Amazon. I have this one.
This illustration is from a book called Whitman World Library: Astronomy (Amazon link). The illustrator goes by the name of Giannini, but I couldn't find out more about him or her.
You can find more images from the book here: Dreams of Space - blog
Well, Amazon has copies (of course). The used ones look rather a bit tattered -- not surprising as it was published in 1974 -- but if you're feeling flush you can score a "new" copy for $60 USD or so. If you've barking-mad-money to spend, there's a "Collectible" copy signed by McCall for $185 USD -or- one signed by Asimov for the ostensibly-reasonable price of just $250 USD. O_O
It's a coffee-table book, to be sure, a good sized volume chock-full of loads and loads of lovely color plates.
I'm a huge fan of the book, so the usual disclaimers apply. :)
Found and watched this "movie" on Amazon last night. A bit hit-and-miss, but fun to watch.
Rat in the skull is a collection of short stories by Rog Phillips, the cover art is done by J. L. "Frankie" Hill.
You can find the book on Amazon
I was referring to this one:
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Sansa-e280-Player-Black/dp/B000HZ9CCA/
The clip probably could, too, in terms of computing power, but the OLED display wouldn't have made for a meaningful display. The e2x0 series could play video, so the screen did a passable job at displaying Doom.
It'll probably just be stuff like this.
I saw his newest one, Object Compendium. Can't say what the image quality is like.
If you think Heinlein was over-authoritarian, check out the blatant racism in the book I linked above... lol...
Here it is just to make it easy.
Armageddon 2419 AD by Philip Francis Nowlan, Published almost a hundred years ago when Scientific Racism was a thing and Authoritarians roamed the Earth.
...wait... oh, shit.
Nope The Art of Ron Cobb Hardcover by Jacob Johnston, it just came out last week
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1789099587/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
​
I have to say I am very happy with the print and style, I preordered it for 60 dollars but its down to 49 now, so I should have just waited for it lol, but still I am very happy with the book
McCall's paintings were used as the front and back of the official 2001 soundtrack LP. This moonbase image is the back cover.
https://www.amazon.com/2001-Odyssey-Picture-Soundtrack-Pressing/dp/B07TBSNKQN
My grandson had the earlier, better, WAY cheaper but better made version of the smartcycle. There were game cartridges you could buy and he loved it and it was awesome and I wanted an adult version with more sophisticated games, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-Think-Learn-Smart-Cycle/dp/B01NAS2UED
Sorry for posting an evil empire site but the other one was for another evil empire so whatevs.
Happy to help. Another good one is Unbuilt for some megastructure concepts.
The first thing to know about getting into retrofuturism is that it's not a singular subject, there are tons of little subareas based on stuff like time period and architecture styles. Go down some Wikipedia rabbit holes and you'll find useful keywords to search for.
The book series is a good read and better than the movie (which I love).
Available here:
https://smile.amazon.com/Logans-Run-Vintage-Classics-Classic/dp/1101911379/ref=sr_1_8?crid=2JPWGJQ541VH4&keywords=logan+s+run&qid=1661551872&sprefix=Logan%E2%80%99s+run%2Caps%2C70&sr=8-8
There are still some tritium vials available in the US, but you need to get creative, and the colors are limited. For example, Amazon has shotgun sights
I got you. How about one knob? took me forever to find but couldn’t be happier. you have to look for light industrial. this one’s got a internal rotating antenna so no spinning plate. I love it.
https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-Light-Duty-Countertop-Commercial-Electronic/dp/B081V8SW8M
I got you. How about one knob? took me forever to find but couldn’t be happier. you have to look for light industrial. this one’s got a internal rotating antenna so no spinning plate. I love it.
https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-Light-Duty-Countertop-Commercial-Electronic/dp/B081V8SW8M
"Part of our desire to keep The World of Tomorrow black and white was because we hoped to take its sequel into space. We planned to open the next film inside Cap's same spartan office, still dimly lit and sapped of color. Only now, when the intercom buzzed, Joe would walk from behind his desk, into and through the hangar, to the base of a launchpad, and his own really big rocket.
"At the moment Sky Captain's ship pierces the stratosphere into outer space the whole film would suddenly burst into color — specifically Three-Strip Technicolor.
"[ . . . ] [W]e were going to lean heavily into 1950s science fiction as a logical progression from the first film's pulp influences [ . . . ] we would establish a world where we could go virtually anywhere. Getting into space meant we could go to alternate dimensions, alien worlds, even back (or forward) in time."
—KEVIN CONRAD, design honcho, SKY CAPTAIN and the WORLD OF TOMORROW from his (highly recommended) book SKY CAPTAIN AND THE ART OF TOMORROW
Void Pyramid is a post-apocalyptic RPG set in the spacefaring Egyptian empire.
In the far future, the maniacal Prime Pharaoh rules the wastelands of Earth. Any who oppose him are exiled to the Void Pyramid. This outer space prison is populated by criminals, beasts, and mutants. No one has ever escaped, but you must try...
Keyboard is a complete item: https://www.amazon.com/Azio-Retro-Mechanical-Keyboard-Switch/dp/B01LY32G54/
I've got nothing for the mouse though. I thought it'd be part of a set with the keyboard, but I haven't found anything that looks anything like it.
> alien is not just a horror thriller. it's an art film.
It's like Jaws. The pacing and story is so slow, because it's not about the monster, it's about how the characters react to the monster. There are huge stretches of both Jaws and Alien where the story slows down so we can see how the characters react to their situation.
Unlike all movies now where they mechanistically follow that rigid the cat dies formula- (sorry, Amaz*n link) where once you see it, you see it in every movie. The characters are trapped in a vehicle that makes them follow a rigid, predictable path every time.
Alien was a high water mark in film, both horror and SF, and few films have come close to it.
Hello, I'm a bot! The movie you linked is called Hotaru no haka, here are some Trailers
Northrop-built reproduction of the Horton 229 V3 at the San Diego Air and Space Museum. It was used for Radar-testing. A Messerschmitt Me 262 also in the photo. Taken by Tomás Del Coro. Creative Commons license
Chess is not a solved game. There's no such database, at least in real life. We don't yet possess the computing power to stimulate every possible chess game. In fact, the most advanced chess engines play each other in yearly tournaments and continue to improve.
It is true that, at this point already, humans are incapable of defeating even simple chess programs. So I would imagine even a Vulcan would have a hard time against Data.
See this article on solving chess and this one on the chess engine world championship.
I see your Lost Empire and raise you one <em>Forbidden World</em>, also available streaming on Amazon. It's a combination of Aliens, Life Force, and a Swedish porno, and I've watched it several times and I have no idea what it's about.
Wow, that wide, low car was pretty prescient, considering the tall, narrow, upright 'box on box' style that dominated other cars of the period.
It wasn't until post WW2 that cars lost their fenders and running boards.
I've got some more recommendations of software that can scan and sort your files:
If you have lots of movies, TV shows and music on your machine, a media center software like Kodi or Plex makes a ton of sense. Direct the program to the directories where the media is stored and it'll scan it and collect information like cast, crew, year, genre, etc. from the Internet. Combined with the ability to stream these files onto any device in your home network, this allows you to have your own private Netflix. After having used Kodi for years, I switched over to Plex, which feels a bit more mature:
For photos, there's the open source marvel digiKam. It can quickly sort and edit vast image libraries and has advanced features like facial recognition:
There's a little program called Everything that can find any file on your computer within fractions of a second. It takes maybe a minute or two to scan the drive(s) on startup and then can instantly index and sort everything (pun not intended). This program totally changed how I'm using my PC, making it utterly irrelevant where a file is located, as long as I know what it's called. I've even started adding tags to file names (holiday, taxes, family, etc.) to make the search more efficient.
https://www.amazon.com/Future-Then-Fascinating-Predictions-Popular/dp/168188299X
Basically a compilation of art & predictions from the long history of the magazine Popular Science (which began publishment in 1872), showing various trends in science and technology over the decades and what predictions and inventions panned out and which didn't.
Or buy them on Amazon - I got the picture from a group discussion in a model enthusiast forum:
DUDE! This is the artist I've been trying to remember for years!
My middle school library had a copy of his book Space Wars that I checked out repeatedly because I loved the art so much.
I have a copy of Dr. Seuss Goes to War. He was a political cartoonist during WWII. Seeing his style paired with pro-war political cartoons is jarring.
It’s from a pulp magazine; Imagination : Stories Of Science Fiction And Fantasy
Image from Amazon with the full text : http://tinyimg.io/i/aE22pWB.jpeg
Holy shit, I know this from the album "Space Baby Blast Off", I randomly bought from a music store budget bin in college decades ago. Some good tunes. Crazy to see the full picture here all these years later. Thanks OP!
I used to have a copy of a Patrick Moore juvenile fiction book with this as a cover... a bit of time down a google-hole reveals: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0006913792/
Anyone else remember his Scott Saunders books? I barely do tbh, but I think they were fun at the time.
Oh my god I loved this book as a kid! I was constantly checking it out of the library (though they did not let me keep it!).
You can apparently get a copy from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-picture-atlas-universe/dp/0870446444
Amazon sells all three. For a little over 20 each.
It was linked elsewhere in this thread, but it's on amazon, pretty cheap compared to normal prices, I paid about $240.
https://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Art-Ralph-McQuarrie/dp/1419717936/
Edit: I have this one too, but it must be nearly sold out cause I think it was like 200ish as well when I bought it. It also contains a lot of non-Star Wars art.
http://www.dreamsandvisionspress.com/artofralphmcquarrie2007.aspx
I wasn't able to find the service manual for this, but your going to need to open it anyway and get at the belts in the cassette player. They tend to get loose at best and turn into sticky sludge at worst. Replacement belts are fairly easy to find online though.
Honestly, I'm having trouble finding out of the tape mechanism is stereo or Mono. Given that it's single-speaker, probably mono and the headphone jacks wired in parallel so the mono sound comes through both sides. It's consistent for the era, but I'm also seeing it referred to as "audiophile" which would suggest stereo. It could also just be because modern cassette tape mechanisms are hot garbage, and even a mono 1980s tape head sounds better.
This is only important, because there are mono and stereo Bluetooth chips. You could just tie both outputs of the stereo Bluetooth module together, so we'll do that.
Here's a random Bluetooth module I found, it's almost too nice.
All you would need to do, is solder the outputs of the Bluetooth board to the output of the cassette mechanism, and fine a 5v-35v power line and ground to connect to the Bluetooth board.
In theory, all you would need to do is put it into tape mode and connect your phone. If the unit is off when the cassette deck isn't being used, then pressing down play and pause on the deck should work.
Not too complicated of a project at all!
They basically acquired GE's computing systems group and became King of the Seven Dwarfs
​
https://www.amazon.com/King-Seven-Dwarfs-Electrics-Ambiguous/dp/0818673834
A producer of butter making scrapbooks of widely different themes completely unrelated to their product to promote their product?
Interesting. Never heard of them before.
Here are a few more pictures I found by googling:
https://www.amazon.com/Wustenschiff-Echte-Wagner-Moderne-Verkehrsmittel/dp/B07K1V462Q
If you're willing to pay the price, you can still get his first book, Sentinel. If you were smart enough to have bought it for $29 when it was first published you've made a nice profit.
https://www.amazon.com/Steel-Couture-Mead-Futurist-Sentinel/dp/9063325916
There is a book of Eagle cutaways https://www.amazon.com/Eagle-Annual-Cutaways-Daniel-Tatarsky/dp/1409100146
I was given a copy about 6 years ago. I had grown up (1950-60's) waiting for The Eagle to arrive through the postbox every week. It was an amazing comic, not just Dan Dare, but Jeff Arnold, Luck of the Legion, Harris Tweed and many others.
I still have some of the Annuals from those years
If you like this style, also check out Spacecraft 2000-2100 A.D.. It's part of a 4 book series that consists of art by Chris Foss and similar artists accompanied by elaborate technical specifications and/or worldbuilding lore. The whole setting (Terran Trade Authority) is just overflowing with that optimistic, adventurous vibe of retrofuturistic sci-fi.
Well, that's so cool!!
There is a decent book about the 1939 World's Fair;
https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-World-Tomorrow-Genius-Madness/dp/B008SLPMZ6
It's obviously cashing in on the success of The Devil in the White City, but it's entertaining.
There are a few other books too, but I hadn't read them. "The Lost World of the Fair" is full of illustrations and stuff that'd probably be appreciated by users here! I think there's another called "The World of Tomorrow" as well.
This book came out a few days ago. It's not exactly aligned with what you mentioned but you may find it interesting. I'm almost halfway through and I am enjoying it.
All Our Wrong Todays: A Novel https://www.amazon.com/dp/1101985135/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_YRhNybQZ30Z74
I think that the phone you depicted is the divine way of calling comfort without speakerphone.
Great feel all around. There's a reason I have this beautiful accessory:
They still make the exact same model.
They still make the stainless Data Bank watch. I just bought one about a week ago.
Here's a link to buy the XL version if anyone's interested.