Author Topic: EP171: Fenneman’s Mouth  (Read 27076 times)

kid_entropy

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Reply #25 on: August 19, 2008, 02:58:58 AM
This brought to mind a recent post on Engadget about research on a new video editing technology. Video combined with high res still images allows enhancement as well as the editing out and in of three dimensional objects. While i knew that the technology existed to do so, it was the apparent ease with witch it was done with that made it creepy to me. It's one thing when media can beat the masses over the head with a message, it's another when they have video "proof" to back up that image. Long after the video is "proven" to be fake the impact of the images continue. What if there was video of Al Gore saying he invented the internet...or Dick Cheney eating a live baby?

http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/16/video-tech-uses-photos-to-enhance-alter-shots-its-the-photosh/

I also listened to this one twice, like other i got the characters mixed up as well as a sense that i had missed the Rod Serling "punchline" of this story. While i did get the characters straight i still didn't gain any insight that i didn't have before, though I think there's a clue in the details the protagonist notices. The new tattoo, belly button piercing. Perhaps i am reading to much into it?

~eriC



Talia

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Reply #26 on: August 19, 2008, 02:32:39 PM
Seems to me this is the type of story that could benefit from a second listen. I too feel I missed something somewhere, not so much that the story was incomplete but that something went over my head. I suspect it will be more clear the second time through.



Hatton

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Reply #27 on: August 19, 2008, 03:11:06 PM
It didn't seem like science fiction to me. There are already programs that claim they can imitate anyone's voice once given a sample of their speech. Video isn't quite at that point yet but we've already seen fake video of Elvis and a few others promoting products so we know the video technology is out there too, if still clumsy and difficult to use.

In the intro, the phrase "near-future SF" and the labeling as "far too plausible" category by Steve at the end explains away the question of "is it science fiction or science future?"  I honestly felt that the security guard was added in just to push it more into Sci-Fi.

Doesn't mean I liked it - I think it scores just above PE 170: Pervert.  So, that would be a "meh+"

On a different note - if you didn't listen to Playing for Keeps (and I doubt anyone that's been in this forum for a long time has not), DO IT NOW!

Normal is just a setting on the washing machine.


wakela

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Reply #28 on: August 20, 2008, 12:37:47 AM
Why were they editing old black and white TV shows?  Is there such a demand in the future that the existing supply won't be enough?  There is more money to be made inserting jokes into You Bet Your Life than making Angelia Jolie porn?

And I didn't find it all that chilling.  Once we developed the ability to alter photographs people stopped trusting them.  Same will happen/is happening with video. 



stePH

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Reply #29 on: August 20, 2008, 03:16:07 AM
Why were they editing old black and white TV shows?  Is there such a demand in the future that the existing supply won't be enough?  There is more money to be made inserting jokes into You Bet Your Life than making Angelia Jolie porn?

Long-dead people are less likely to sue.

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jrderego

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Reply #30 on: August 20, 2008, 05:48:23 AM
On a different note - if you didn't listen to Playing for Keeps (and I doubt anyone that's been in this forum for a long time has not), DO IT NOW!

No

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wintermute

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Reply #31 on: August 20, 2008, 11:46:26 AM
Why were they editing old black and white TV shows?  Is there such a demand in the future that the existing supply won't be enough?  There is more money to be made inserting jokes into You Bet Your Life than making Angelia Jolie porn?
There's more money to be made in Internet porn than there is in science-fiction podcasting, and yet this site exists.

There just needs to be enough money for one person to decide it's better to eke out a niche than to compete with thousands of others for a slice of the big pie.

Science means that not all dreams can come true


Void Munashii

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Reply #32 on: August 20, 2008, 09:06:31 PM
There's more money to be made in Internet porn than there is in science-fiction podcasting, and yet this site exists.

  So are you saying we get the occasional sex story as an attempt to boost revenue?  ;)

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Animite

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Reply #33 on: August 20, 2008, 09:17:21 PM
I found this story quite disturbing. An individual becomes what they use and the chilling message I found in this story is that if left uncontrolled, the same alterations and lies we insert into our imaginary works of art will eventually find their way into real events and personal relationships. If you make a plausible suggestion a few times about an idea or occurrence people can only speculate on, you can steer them in a completely different direction.  A web of lies and deception based on planting ideas that were never there has that kind power for its ability to corrupt by inches instead of miles at a time.

This story should be considered as a cautionary tale rather than an attempt to mess with classic television shows.

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slic

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Reply #34 on: August 20, 2008, 09:55:48 PM
...An individual becomes what they use and the chilling message I found in this story is that if left uncontrolled, the same alterations and lies we insert into our imaginary works of art will eventually find their way into real events and personal relationships...This story should be considered as a cautionary tale rather than an attempt to mess with classic television shows. 
I'm sorry to say, Animite, that this is more pervasive today than you realize.  In politcs it's called "staying on message".  Spin doctors make a very good living doing just this for whatever well-heeled athlete, actor, etc needs it.



ieDaddy

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Reply #35 on: August 20, 2008, 09:58:53 PM
I thought the premise was good,  the relationship portion just fell flat.  In the end I couldn't tell if the video editor had gone back and edited actual CC footage from his office to fit how he thought things should have gone or was self-editing his memories somehow.

It also took me a while to figure out who Alex was and then the lightbulb went off about him being the video editor's intern at one point, and was now a spin doctor/video editor for the senator.  So in my mind's eye, this character's place in the story sort of jumped all over the place.

The story was chunky, and I found myself having to go back and rethink what I thought was going on at the time as I listened in order to get the story straight, which was very confusing.  If this was intentional, it was genius.  A story about altering the truth, which makes the reader go back and re-think what it was they thought they read.  I think I have 4 or 5 versions of what I thought the story was about in my head at the moment.



Roney

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Reply #36 on: August 20, 2008, 10:21:12 PM
I feel pretty 'meh' about this story, I really enjoyed all the references to old tv urban legends

What Void Munashii said, less the bit about enjoying the references to US TV urban legends.

Elements of the story threatened to work for me at times but it never came together.  The subject matter got too parochial or the characters got too thin or the exposition got too heavy-handed.  Jared's reading made the best of the material and the last couple of minutes were definitely more interesting but my overall impression was still "meh".



DKT

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Reply #37 on: August 20, 2008, 10:46:25 PM
I liked Axelrod's reading. A lot. 

The story itself I mostly enjoyed, although I was surprised when it ended -- I thought there was going to be more to it.  I liked that it was basically a story about faking a gag reel instead of faking something political, yet how the politics thing was a sub plot.  I really dig the idea that another poster brought up about Zell and Pam engineering/faking their own history.  There were some things that threw me off that others have brought up but overall it was a good listen.


Ersatz Coffee

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Reply #38 on: August 21, 2008, 03:21:59 PM
I'm interested by people's response to the relationship angle. I may be wrong, but I thought the story was trying to make the point that relationships become cliche-ridden, vacuous affairs when reality has been effectively abolished by selective editing. So what others found a weakness I thought was actually an intentional rhetorical device.



eytanz

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Reply #39 on: August 21, 2008, 04:06:43 PM
I'm interested by people's response to the relationship angle. I may be wrong, but I thought the story was trying to make the point that relationships become cliche-ridden, vacuous affairs when reality has been effectively abolished by selective editing. So what others found a weakness I thought was actually an intentional rhetorical device.

Being intentional and being a weakness are not mutually exclusive - I admit it hadn't occured to me to analyze it at the level you propose, but the fact that it hadn't occured to me (or most of the posters here) seems to indicate it wasn't done entirely successfully.



Void Munashii

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Reply #40 on: August 21, 2008, 05:11:02 PM
I'm interested by people's response to the relationship angle. I may be wrong, but I thought the story was trying to make the point that relationships become cliche-ridden, vacuous affairs when reality has been effectively abolished by selective editing. So what others found a weakness I thought was actually an intentional rhetorical device.

  I'll admit that a lot of the relationship stuff went over my head when first listening, but that was mostly because I thought it was going to go somewhere, I thought it was part of the journey, not the destination. I'm not sure my missing this is entirely due to my own lack of awareness/intelligence though, as a number of people who seem a bit more with it than me seemed to miss it as well.

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Darwinist

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Reply #41 on: August 21, 2008, 08:29:52 PM
Hated it!

Hated it!  II

Hated it! III

I thought the narration was good, but that was about it.  The story fell flat for me, maybe not enough of a stretch of reality, I don't know.  Like the nice meow-meow kitty said - "PLEH". 

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.    -  Carl Sagan


Schreiber

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Reply #42 on: August 22, 2008, 01:43:20 AM
I thought the Lea / Zell scene at the end was them just playing around, inventing a shared history. Of course, they might end up believing this, if they keep it up, but they seem to just be playing with what they do for a living.


Let's pretend that any amateur with a PowerBook could have done it in under an hour.  What kind of precedent would that set?  Video evidence would be completely useless in a court of law.  You could mug a little old lady in front of a security camera and then claim that Industrial Light and Magic has it in for you.  You could commit crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing right in front of CNN, then say it never happened.  Long story short, I'm less horrified by what the media will tell us has happened than I am by an easy and automatic excuse not to believe it.
Chain of evidence. In the first example you give, the government agencies involved in managing, keeping and reviewing the video tapes would have to have procedures in place to ensure that they can be trusted not to have been altered. With CNN footage, yes, it gets a bit more thorny, but it's been a long time since video or photographic evidence has been accepted without suspicion or challenge. Expert witnesses have made a lot of money by arguing about whether or not an image has been manipulated. The manipulations are getting more subtle, which makes detection more difficult, but not (yet) impossible.

And in the R. Kelly case, I have to admit I've not been following the case, but I understand that either his likeness as superimposed on footage of someone else, or moles were digitally removed from his back. Either seems possible, so I default to assuming that the jury probably got it right.

Yeah, the chain of evidence issue did cross my mind.  But the point is that if anyone can edit the footage, who's to say the tape wasn't tampered with by the security guard, or the security guard's cousin.  I mean seriously, how can you prove no one had access to a surveillance tape?  More surveillance tapes?

As for the R.Kelly case, the disappearing mole probably had a lot more to do with the crappy resolution of the camcorder than it did with any ingenious morphing techniques.  Don't really want to get into that debate.  I feel that you could (conceivably) make the case that we should not be criminalizing sex that is ostensibly consensual.  Or the argument that courts should not go celebrity pelt hunting.  But the idea that what looks like a low-budget home video was digitally created to smear the reputation of R. Kelly slips well past Occam's Razor.



Personman

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Reply #43 on: August 22, 2008, 08:42:21 PM
I liked it fine. I'm surprised how many people are reading way more into it than I did (and than I think the author intended them to). What I took from it was that everything, not just video, is malleable, not because the story took place in some crazy science fiction world, but because that's how it is, and has been. The sfnal elements in the story highlighted the fact that our culture is moving further in that direction, and becoming more accustomed to it as technology makes the apparent line between the real and the fictional more and more blurry.

I'm not sure how well supported this is by the story, or if the author would agree, but my own take on it is that this blurrification, rather than indicating that it has in fact gotten easier to move between fiction and reality, indicates only that now we're more aware of it, since we are losing are (always false) perception of media as authoritative. Certainly it is becoming easier for anyone to deceive the gullible, but the numbers of the gullible are shrinking as those same techniques that enable deception become available to (or enter the consciousnesses of) those who used to be gullible. So rather than chilling, I found this story to just be a pretty well-done and fun bit of insight into an important fact of modern society, one that can and will be used over and over for both good and evil.
 



nojoda

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Reply #44 on: August 22, 2008, 10:14:49 PM
The end justifies the means. its ok to lie, cheat, steal and kill if you are going to make the world a better place.

By the way the punch line that Johnny Carson used when Arnold Palmer's wife said she kissed his balls before a tournament, was "I bet that makes his putter stand on end".



JoeFitz

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Reply #45 on: August 23, 2008, 07:20:06 PM
This story just didn't work for me. I didn't like the "let's make fake videos for money" story; I didn't like "let's make fake videos for politics"; and, I didn't like the "let's make a fake relationship replace my last fake relationship" story. And the fake security guard was just silly.

In part, I don't think the "fake video" story works is that I cannot imagine anyone today, let alone "in the future" paying any great deal of money to see those types of television "bloopers" - real ones or fake ones. We're supposed to believe that a studio - on the bleeding edge of technology (if the skills are so in demand that only _one_ political campaign has stumbled upon its power to persuade) - would pay for the time to edit a few seconds of fake video footage for 13 hours using 3 people and a studio in a high-security building with an android security guard?



zZzacha

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Reply #46 on: August 24, 2008, 11:36:52 AM
I'm interested by people's response to the relationship angle. I may be wrong, but I thought the story was trying to make the point that relationships become cliche-ridden, vacuous affairs when reality has been effectively abolished by selective editing. So what others found a weakness I thought was actually an intentional rhetorical device.

Yes, I got that from the story too. The story left me with a creepy feeling, trying to think if someone close to me is doing that to me, someone leaving me with certain memories. When well used, this must be a very powerful tool to help you 'shape the world' for people around you.
Especially for me, because my memories and thoughts are very very chaotic and fragmented. It is so easy to give me different memories, if you talk with enough zeal, you can make me believe almost anything.

Yeah, that's my paranoia speaking for me now... I may have to start recording everything I do and think. For future reference.

The story itself didn't leave a big impression. But I may have completely different memories of this event when you ask me about it in a few months!

It is never too late to be what you might have been.


thomasowenm

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Reply #47 on: August 25, 2008, 12:12:01 AM
This story at least made me think about my own recollections.  (Are they real events or just dreams seeming real?)  So i guess,  :-\ it was successful at least on some level.  Overall the story however was poorly crafted.   I could not keep the characters straight  (Maybe I wasn't supposed to).  The AI guard was just disjointed from the rest of the story.  It felt like it was put in to give it a Sci-Fi credential.  Overall, meh!!!



WillMoo

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Reply #48 on: August 25, 2008, 07:12:39 PM
Seems to me this is the type of story that could benefit from a second listen. I too feel I missed something somewhere, not so much that the story was incomplete but that something went over my head. I suspect it will be more clear the second time through.
I too thought that I had missed something so I listened again and it didn't help. I hate to sound like this but to me the story wasn't even good enough to register in the "hated it" column.



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Reply #49 on: August 26, 2008, 02:29:33 AM
Hi, y'all. Long-time listener, first-time poster.

I'm interested by people's response to the relationship angle. I may be wrong, but I thought the story was trying to make the point that relationships become cliche-ridden, vacuous affairs when reality has been effectively abolished by selective editing. So what others found a weakness I thought was actually an intentional rhetorical device.

I differ with most understandings of the "relationship story" in this story. I assert most posters here have missed the boat on that. The video editing--alarming and arresting though it is--sets the backdrop for what's really happening, which is a trope as old as storytelling itself: our narrator learns something.

The clue comes out of the ex-girlfriend's mouth: "It was always your version." Remember, this is a guy whose whole craft is the building of versions of things. It's what he does.

And it's a nice analogy for what we're all doing at every moment of the day. To think that what we see around us is the "real world", and that we see it as it truly is--without any interpretation or filtering--is the height of arrogance and blindness. And yet every last single one of us is guilty of it practically every moment of our lives. We actually really think that "our version" is The Truth. We know better, most of us, but that knowledge makes no difference in how we actually live. We know that we have a point of view. It's just that my point of view actually really is the right one, and everyone else's is wrong unless it agree with mine. And that, friends, is the death knell for relationships. We all know somebody like that; the bad news is, it's each of us, too.

As our narrator is escorting his new friend out to dinner, he's realizing this. He's willing to set down the alleged-rightness of his version of their history, to let her have it her way. He's learning to give up having to be right. Which is a huge thing for any human being.

The execution may have been inelegant (and I'm not saying it wasn't) but the theme touches on nothing short of the basic paradox of human beings.