Tag Archives: nurnies

Abidjan Operation

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Avengers_BartonCompromised

bartoncompromised

After Hawkeye is enthralled by Loki, agent Coulson has to call agent Romanoff in from the field, mid-mission. While he awaits her to extract herself from a situation, he idly glances at case file 242-56 which consists of a large video of Barton and Romanoff mid-combat, and overview profiles of the two agents. A legend in the upper right identifies this as STRIKE TEAM: DELTA, and a label at the top reads ABIDJAN OPERATION. There is some animated fuigetry on the periphery of the video, and some other fuigetry in windows that are occluded by the case file. 

Some things to note.

  • The four windows seem to be connected by content and by case file designation. But each has separate window controls in the upper right hand corner. (Not an aberration, we saw the same thing in Carrier Control.) If it’s a single case file, the layout ought to be handled automatically to save Coulson (or agent Stephen Morton, who appears per the text in the upper left to be the one actually logged in), from all that file management. It would even avoid the “error” of Barton’s profile being obscured by Romanoff’s, as in the image.
  • There are bar codes displayed on the agent profiles. Why would a computer operator need barcodes on a computer screen?
  • There is a miniature 3D rendering of a screw to the right of each of their portraits.
  • There are also three hexagrams from the I Ching on Romanoff’s profile. Each one of these is Ch’ien The Creative, which makes sense, she’s total Yang. Barton’s hexagrams are obscured by an overlap of her profile, but I really think it would be a lovely compliment if his were K’un The Receptive, or Yin. Also, OK, kind of weird that SHIELD would use the I Ching as part of official policy, but hey, crazier things have happened.
  • There is a snippet of text from a document about the fundamentals of lossy image compression in the background. It kind of makes sense given that there is clearly some face recognition going on in the video.
  • It must be hi-tech, as the container rule lines jog about semi-randomly. Nurnies to be sure.
  • The video controls along the bottom of the actual video are repeated in miniature along the bottom of the profile pictures, even though these profile images do not move. (Though if they were more like looping photographs in Harry Potter, that would have been cooler.)
  • Abidjan, you might know, is a large city on the Ivory Coast but the coordinates on the screen put this scene in the middle of the Gulf of Guinea. Which, though it’s 894 km east of Abidjan, is actually closer that I would have guessed it to be.

Glossary: Dunsels, Nurnies, Greebles, Gundans, and Fuidgets

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No I am not randomly typing on the screen. I’m taking a pause from the Starship Troopers review to establish some much-needed vocabulary. Oftimes in science fiction, details are added to things for the sake of feeling more real, but that don’t actually do anything and, more importantly to our interests in scifinterfaces, aren’t even guided by a design philosophy. They’re the equivalent of “bullshit” in the H.G. Frankfurt sense. They don’t care about the diegetic truth of themselves, they only care about their effect.

Collectively, I call these things dunsels. But don’t thank me. Thank the midshipmen in the Star Trek TOS universe.

Dunsels appear in three major places in sci-fi.

The surface of objects: Nurnies and greebles

When they appear on spacecraft or futuristic architecture, they’re called greebles or, interchangably, nurnies. These terms come to us from the folks at ILM, who coined the term while developing the style for Star Wars.

I think I’d also apply these terms to props as well, that get covered by details that may not do anything or have much design logic behind them. That means weapons and gadgets, too.

millenium-falcon

br2

Firefly_E13_010

The walls: Gundans

When this suface detailing is applied to sets, it’s called gundans. This after the Star Trek TOS pipes that got labeled “GNDN,” for “goes nowhere, does nothing.” Hat tip to Berm Lee for pointing me to this term.

GNDN

Interfaces? Fuidgets

Not surprisingly, we need to have a word for the same sort of thing in screen interfaces, and I’ve never heard a word to describe them. (If a competitor’s already out there, speak up in the comments.) So after some nerdy social media talk amongst my Chief Nerds and Word People, my friend Magnus Torstensson of Unsworn Industries (and long time supporter of the scifiinterfaces project) suggested combining Mark Coleran‘s acronym “FUI” for “fictional user interfaces” and “widgets” to produce fuidgets, which is pronounced FWIDG-its. I love it. I’ll high-five you when I get to Malmö in November for Oredev, Magnus.

Prometheus-093

This neologism appropriately sounds as awkward as “nurnies,” “greebles,” and “gundans,” and simultaneously conveys their abstract, fantasy, digital nature. It’s a tough thing to wrap into a single word and I’m in awe that my Swedish friend beat me to it. 🙂

Using “fuidgets”

The spirit of apologetics (which is, perhaps, the core of this project) asks that you don’t dismiss details as H.G.Bullshit. You try as hard as you can to find sense in them. That way we don’t get caught up in a spiral of second-guessing an author’s intent, and moreover, that’s where some of the niftiest insights of this sort of analysis come from. But try though we might, sometimes there is just no explaining odd details that litter sci-fi displays, surfaces, and gadgets, other than to admit that they mean nothing and are there only to give a sense of truthiness. So, now we have that word. Fuidgets. You saw it in Monday’s posts, and I’m sure you’re going to see it again.