What's the laptop screen in EoE's opening Misato scene about?

[Chainer3000]

Sorry if this has been covered - i've searched just about all the places I could think of and never found an answer... While rewatching again, I remembered it was a lingering question.

What's the laptop screen in EoE's Misato opening scene about? She says something to the effect of, "so this is the truth about the second impact" - Is this a reference to something? It seems like gibberish in some places but it talks about anime and otaku in others...? It doesn't seem like it actually has anything to do with Eva


http://imgur.com/YaBnXfy

[jcmoorehead]

The laptop screen is a history of Gainax from what I remember. Just a fun little easter egg that has been thrown in there I'd imagine.

[The Eva Monkey]

The laptop screen is a history of Gainax from what I remember.

It is indeed, although a bunch of names were changed from names of Gainax people to Eva terms to make it a bit less obvious.

Such nerds. As if Otaku No Video wasn't enough...

[Seven Fifty]

It is indeed, although a bunch of names were changed from names of Gainax people to Eva terms to make it a bit less obvious.

They seem to have changed the years too (the dates onscreen are all 21st century ones).

[BlueBasilisk]

Didn't they slip that same text into Episode 21 as the Second Impact report?

[Tumbling Down]

One thing that kind of bugs me about this wonderful film is that it wants us to ignore the English text on Misato's laptop, but the English text on Maya's laptop is thematically important.

[diwo]

Here is a better version of the picture if anyone is interested

[StrokeMeGoat]

One thing that kind of bugs me about this wonderful film is that it wants us to ignore the English text on Misato's laptop, but the English text on Maya's laptop is thematically important.

But they don't necessarily want us to skip the English text on Misato's laptop. Sure, it may not be something you read that has anything directly to do with what's happening, but neither does Maya's necessarily unless you believe in the theory of Ritsuko typing "I need you." preceded by "is this it, is this answer I've been looking for?" tells you what Gendo's silent words were, following "Honto ni/ I truly...". Which, btw, I more or less do. It is also thematically relevant in the sense of everybody unifying into a sea of LCL, but thematically important? I mean, the scene, other than possibly explaining what Gendo said to Ritsuko, isn't so important that you couldn't get away with leaving it out. I think I'm just arguing semantics here with thematically relevant vs. important, but in any case I think that the text is meant to be read in both cases.

I don't think it's all that fair or even normal to assume that the messages found on two separate laptops about two entirely different things would be all that similar. What the text represented in Misato's case was, at a quick glance, thematically relevant in that she was looking up what happened during the Second Impact. In that way, it's similar to what happened when we saw Maya-chan's laptop. When it's inspected more closely, it reveals a fun little easter-egg. When looking at Maya-chan's laptop message, at first it appears thematically relevant considering everybody is in the middle of getting tanged, and Ritsuko's apparition types what pretty much sums up why instrumentality happens in the first place: the loneliness a human is doomed to suffer as a result of having an AT Field means they need each other. When you look at the message more closely, and you believe the earlier stated theory about it being Gendo's silent words, then it too becomes a neat little easter-egg for the viewer. So, both messages have thematic relevance/importance at first glance, and both have a double significance in that they both provide us with easter-eggs upon further inspection. Really, the messages are more similar than they are dissimilar.

[invisaboi72]

The Binary goes as follows I hope someone can find a deeper meaning in it if there is one
0001001011 0111010100 1011011010 1101110100 0110100101
0010111010 1000101110 1011011001 1011010110 1010001110
1101110101 0000100011 0011010110 1101000100 0001000110
1001010011 1101010001 1010001000 4010001010 1101000000
1101011010 1101010100 1101010000 0010100101 0110111101
0010111010 1000101110 1011011001 1011010110 1010001110
1101110101 0000100011 0011010110 1101000100 0001000110
(It looks like a 4 on the screen It could be a 0 though)
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=ht ... gAegQIARAx

Merged the thread "The binary code" into here, for better context. The other two posts of yours has been deleted: since they refer to the same subject - JoelcrNeto

[JoelcrNeto]

They look like random values to me: to have a (coherent) message we need the binary digits to be grouped into 7/8 bits. We need 7/8 bits to get 1 byte, which is the size of a character, but in that screen they are grouped into 10 bits. Also, some characters need to be grouped into 16 bits (2 bytes), such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) characters -- Edit: I'm meant here about CJK characters in Unicode, sorry for confusion.

I developed a quick JavaScript tool to decode the binaries, but it returned “weird” characters:

Kǔ˚ʹƥȮ˙˖ʎ#Ö̈́F͑ʈŠ͔̀͐¥ƽȮ˙˖ʎ#Ö̈́F

Decimal:

75 468 730 884 421 558 729 726 654 35 214 836 70 849 648 138 832 852 848 165 445 558 729 726 654 35 214 836 70

I tried to do it in other ways, but with no results.

[pwhodges]

Remember back in 1995 Unicode was not yet widely used. For Japanese you'd need to be looking at things like [shift-]JIS, EUC, and EBCDIC as well as the ASCII-based options and Unicode you've doubtless been through.

[AWinters]

This was done in episode 21 too. Maybe there's fuller context between the two.
https://forum.evageeks.org/thread/20875/Episode-21-Third-Impact-papers/

[OutlawThirds]

Re: Binary

I tried it as Ascii and it's gibberish:
ÝKktiK¨ºÙµ¨íÔ#5´ASÔh‚+@ÖµM@¥oK¨ºÙµ¨íÔ#5´A
However, upon reflection, ASCII or Unicode might not be the right encodings to look for. This was the 90s and the creators might have used a character set like JIS or Shift-JIS. I don't have converters handy for those formats, but I'll do some more googling.

[OutlawThirds]

Ok, here it is in ShiftJIS:
Kﾔﾚt･ｺ.ﾙﾖ志#ﾖDFSQ�@ZTP･ｽｺ.ﾙﾖ志#ﾖDF

ISO Japanese seems to be totally busted:
K��t��.���u#�DFSQ��@ZTP���.���u#�DF

EUC-JP:
K壓tズ.掎�u#�DFSQ��@ZTPソ�.掎�u#�DF

UTF 16 Big Endian at least resulted in mostly printable characters:
䯔�ꖺ⻙횎産홄䙓冈詀婔傥붺⻙횎産홄�

I couldn't tell ya if any of that remotely makes sense.

Here's the converter I used:
https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/num ... ascii.html

The presence of 4 makes me think that this wasn't mechanically converted from anything, but rather the result of random typing on a numberpad, where the 4 is above the 1 and it's easy for your finger to slip. The groupings of ten instead of eight is also suspect, I'll have to see if any text encoding scheme uses ten bits.

[Blockio]

I put that string of characters into a few machine translation tools; most of them don't recognize it at all in any language, and occasionally you just get some complete gibberish.
deepL auto-recognizes it as Japanese, but doesn't actually translate it as anything until you manually pick Chinese, at which point it gives you this;
The hem on the bottom of the hem is a hem on the bottom of the hem.

So yeah, with all current leads we have, it appears to just be some random 8 bit sequences for aesthetics; that being said however, I could see it maybe being image encoding or something else that isn't text-specific

[JoelcrNeto]

No surprises. Like I mentioned before: that binarie codes are 10-bit based, thus none of these character tables will return anything coherent -- so I had the stupid idea to try Unicode before.
And even then I'm convinced that they're random values, merely aesthetic, precisely because of the incorrectly inserted 4.

[Blockio]

Probably, yeah. 4 is right above 1 on the numpad, so there's a good chance that it's just a typo while creating some arbitrary numbers