I love this. This is what makes the internet the beautiful, amazing place that it is - anyone can publish and you get these highly specialized, well-written, informative articles on esoteric topics.
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Especially stuff you might have come across 40 years ago and it's been sitting at the back of your brain ever since.
I recently closed a 20-something year mystery to do with a weird TV advert from the UK in the late 90s. I could never figure out why a certain poster for a musician was on the wall in a room. Fast forward to 2021 and I managed to hunt down the writer of the advert who had some background info, and then put me in touch with the director and we figured it out and had a laugh about it. And I contacted the musician who was very happy to also have the mystery closed. It's nice to check off a 20-year-old item on your TO DO list.
There's a really good NPR podcast about this very kind of thing, where there's a guy who's been hunting down a particular "musical tone" for more than a decade, and it talks both about how hard it is to be the kind of person that needs those answers, the process of arriving at an answer (including many, many false starts and red herrings), and the satisfaction that comes from figuring it out.
I don't want to spoil it, but the tremendous tragedy/irony is that a certain class of people within the IT industry could have answered the guy's question (or at least put him definitively on the right track) after hearing it just one time, which I think is actually a really important lesson to fully internalize: whatever thing that's been haunting/daunting you, if you get lucky enough to just mention it in front of that one right person you'll be immediately closer to an answer than if you spent literally ten years chasing it without their insight.
I'm not a huge podcast (or any audio/visual media) advocate, but this one is worth listening to if you're stuck in the car or something:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/516/stuck-in-the-middle/act...
If you like that one, you may enjoy this one too (which has much more of a mystery to it imho)
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx
I was listening to that episode while riding a bus and I was almost screaming internally the whole time. I knew exactly what that song was and by whom, and had a dusty old low quality mp3 still on some harddrive at home, possibly acquired through less than legal means at least some 15 years ago.
Amazing! That must have been very interesting as the show did a good job leading one to think it was a dead end.
This is exactly why I miss IMDB's "I need to know" board. You could post a partially correct memory snippet from decades ago and someone would chime in with the answer. I had memories of movies I'd watched on TV as a young child. I had no name or context, but simply little moments stuck in my brain, and someone was able to resolve those to a title.
The closing of the IMDB message boards was a terrible loss IMO. You could visit an obscure actors message board, and you might run into someone who knew them. You could discuss a movie's intricacies with someone, and share theories, etc, on the specific board for that movie. It was a goldmine for movie fans, and I still miss it.
I wish there was something like that for books.
I remember reading a book in my youth about a kid that lived in a shielded city with an AI controlling it with the assignment to keep everyone ‘happy’ (= docile). He/she breaks protocol and gets ejected through a trash chute. Meets an old man. Crossed a wasteland and finds old ruins, learns something and then blows up the shielding of the city to make it free again.
In the Dutch translation either the old man or the main character was called ‘gull’ or ‘sea gull’. I’ve posted on a few subreddits and forums with people pretty much ignoring, and I have scoured Google without much results neither.
Try https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/story-ident... - they solve this kind of thing all the time.
Here's the one for books:
Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Fall_of_Night or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_and_the_Stars ? Also sounds similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run but doesn't quite match.
Logan's run was the first thing I thought of as well. Maybe a dutch adaptation of the movie that took some liberties?
The last two sound familiar. Further research is required. At any rate, I thank you!
Goodreads has the What's the Name of That Book?[0] group for identifying books based on a description.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/185-what-s-the-name-of-...
Haha, I have a memory of a movie I saw in the 1960s where there's a dream sequence with the guy in a stylized prison cell with pink mist and giant keys dangling in the air. I've never been able to figure out what this was.
You might want to try https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/
Many answers are low quality. Some participants will just Google and post their answers, something you've likely done before asking.
Now r/WhatIsThisThing, that actually feels like crowdsourcing.
There's also the NFSW version /r/tipofmyp** (I'll let you guess the last word)
And I also found out /r/tipofmyjoystick for games.
Ye it is impressive how good those type of forums work. Pointing out a movie from details.
I wrote in a similair local forum about a movie I was not allowed to watch as a kid, where people at a plane disappeared and their fake teeth was still there (only thing I remember) and someone could immediately point me to the correct kinda crappy Stephen King movie ...
The Langoliers
I've had the same with some music and even from pretty vague descriptions about tempo and content some people were able to find a couple of pieces that I thought I'd never hear again.
That sounds really interesting. Any chance you could share more details?
Sure!
So, this advert went out in I think, 1998, according to the writer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKS_yw4MqAA
It features a poster of Griff Pilchard on the wall.
Now, when I was 16 my crush loaned me a tape of Griff Pilchard which she treasured. It was totally bizarre, but I love it in its weird way. But, as far as the Internet was concerned in the 90s and into the 2000s, Griff Pilchard did not exist.
Even in 2022, very little exists about the man and his music. He is a ghost.
Anyway, when that advert aired in 1998 it was the only reference I had seen anywhere, outside the cassette, to the man's actual existence.
The man himself did finally turn up on Facebook, but he was as baffled as I was about the advert because:
a) No-one on Earth has heard of him b) He's never had any posters c) That isn't his face on the poster
So, to have "his" face on a poster on a major national TV advert that ran constantly for months was unexplainable.
Anyway, I recently managed to find the writer of the advert. He explained that the director had decided on the subject of the poster and had dressed up in a wig to make it. He'd mentioned Griff Pilchard to the rest of the staff, but they had no idea who he was talking about.
It was nice to get an explanation after 20 years of it bugging me. The advert would pop up from time to time in the media and each time it did I couldn't figure it out. Now I've been able to check it off. I sent the info to Griff Pilchard and he was very happy to also know what the fuck it was all about.
That's amazing! :-) Thanks for sharing!
Very much seconded!