I apparently was too subtle before? Please take the discussion of product placement in movies and TV shows to the TV & Media forum.
Assuming product placement in books is still OK in this thread, I will note that I've also placed brand-name products in my books in such an utterly unfavorable way that the manufacturers of those products wouldn't have any reason to pay me. 
Assuming product placement in books is still OK in this thread, I will note that I've also placed brand-name products in my books in such an utterly unfavorable way that the manufacturers of those products wouldn't have any reason to pay me.
It's a lot more common to see trademarked terms like brand names or fictional characters referenced in prose than in film or TV. I guess that's because companies don't think books have as large an audience, or don't have as much profit potential to be worth demanding a cut. And it's probably also because it's just the names and not trademarked logos or character likenesses.
Brad Ferguson's Trek novels in the '80s had a weird habit of assuming that 20th-century brands would still be in use in the 23rd century, like in the opening scene of Crisis on Centaurus where there's a reference to a Coca-Cola vendor and an American Express Traveler's Cheque dispenser at the Alpha Centauri spaceport. He could get away with naming them in a book, but a screen production would've needed their permission to use their logos.
The really hilarious part was that he thought traveller's checks would still be a thing.......
Ferguson's 23rd century was basically the 20th century with starships and aliens.
Don't leave Earth without them . . . .
I was a very late abandoner of travelers' cheques. To the point where I didn't actually do so until I could no longer obtain the $20 denomination at all, anywhere, period.
And in the case of referencing a brand-name product in the most unfavorable way possible, well, I refer (more than once) to a certain instrument of dubious musicality (involving a synchronous motor spinning "tonewheels" in magnetic fields) as "Laurens Hammond's Noisome Little Noisemaker."
And in the case of referencing a brand-name product in the most unfavorable way possible, well, I refer (more than once) to a certain instrument of dubious musicality (involving a synchronous motor spinning "tonewheels" in magnetic fields) as "Laurens Hammond's Noisome Little Noisemaker."
I didn't even know travelers' cheques were gone, but then, I don't think I ever used them. I'd say never, since I've never traveled outside the US, but I have a vague memory that I may have used one once. Did they have domestic uses?
I never left U.S. soil myself until some years after they'd become difficult or impossible to obtain.
But their utility was the same, domestic or foreign: as long as the signatures matched, the issuer (whether American Express, Thomas Cook, Visa, or MasterCard) guaranteed them as cash-equivalent, and as long as they had only the initial signature, they were essentially worthless to any thief who wasn't a skilled enough forger to reproduce a signature while being watched.
As credit card processing went from a paper-based system to one based on real-time interactive computing, though, TC processing ceased to be something that was buried in a whole bag of cash and credit card chits dropped off at the bank, and became a nuisance exception. And likewise, as having a maximum of one major credit or debit card per person went from being the norm to being an exception so rare that merchants simply could not wrap their minds around a person not having multiple pieces of negotiable plastic (precisely my experience the one time I went on a cruise, probably the only time in my life when having $100 in TCs would have saved me a great deal of unpleasantness), the use-case for a form of payment that was guaranteed-good, yet worthless to thieves, shifted to plastic.
But I think we've found yet another way to annoy our friendly mod by dragging this thread off-topic.
Honestly, I'm surprised this topic didn't devolve into lock-worthy sniping or drop off the front page in awkward silence immediately, never mind that it managed to go 37 pages and counting.
So, um... every time I see the word "stygian" used in a Trek novel (which happens with surprising regularity), I suspect it's either an in-joke or being used out of spite. Either way, it has started to draw attention to itself beyond just being a bit unusual. Also, I've never been to Styx (I guess I need to come sail away sometime), but ironically, I do imagine it as bright enough to see because of, I don't know, lava or something. Like the movies.
So, um... every time I see the word "stygian" used in a Trek novel (which happens with surprising regularity), I suspect it's either an in-joke or being used out of spite. Either way, it has started to draw attention to itself beyond just being a bit unusual. Also, I've never been to Styx (I guess I need to come sail away sometime), but ironically, I do imagine it as bright enough to see because of, I don't know, lava or something. Like the movies.
I'm gonna have to potentially reveal my ignorance by asking...what is the problem with using the word stygian?
"Stygian" is a perfectly good word. It makes me think of Grignr the Ecordian.
A long time ago, someone complained here that it was used fairly frequently (at least, compared to how often it's used in general) by a specific author, which seems to have led to it being used even more frequently.
Wow, "a long time" is right. It was fourteen years ago.
No, strike that. Eighteen years. I'm going to stop looking at the search results page now, it's making me feel bad.
Hades is not Hell, just the afterlife in general, with various different regions, including the Hell-like Tartarus and the Heaven-like Elysian Fields, and other more neutral areas. The Styx is sometimes depicted as its border river, hence Cheron's ferry crossing it. (Although Dante's Inferno did portray a version of the Styx in Hell.) The use of "stygian" to mean forebodingly dark and gloomy probably comes from the notion of the Underworld being, well, underground. Hesiod's description of the Styx's waters springing forth from a rock suggests that it's at least partly underground.
Uh, they have ferry service on the dead planet where absurdly long-lived bigots who are black on the right side and white on the left oppressed those with the opposite color scheme?
Oh. Maybe you mean Charon's ferry.
Okay, it's a fair cop. But why wouldn't they have ferry service on Cheron? They must've had rivers.
Nobody left to ride the ferries? Nobody left to run them?
It could have permanent rivers, but just no bodies of water in a size between "small enough to build a bridge" and "big enough to require a ship."
Every time Charon is referenced, I think of that episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, "A Commercial Break," in which the station staff produce a commercial for Ferryman's Funeral Home, only for Carlson to decide he didn't like the idea of a hip, upbeat ad for an undertaker, and canceled the contract, keeping outright ownership of the ad and its jingle (in the tag, the jingle got rewritten for a tire dealer). I immediately got the joke about the undertaker's name being "Ferryman"; evidently enough people didn't that the IMDB entry for the episode has a FAQ about it (which I found a bit insulting, as it characterized the joke as being elitist).
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