Author Topic: Pseudopod 215: Man, You Gotta See This!  (Read 6326 times)

Bdoomed

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on: December 16, 2010, 06:50:34 AM
Pseudopod 215: Man, You Gotta See This!

By Tony Richards

Read by Ben Phillips

The exhibit reached its conclusion, you see, in a big square room which just contained one painting. A triptych, they called it. Three almighty canvases put together to form one.

It was water lilies, of course. Took up an entire wall.

And there were benches in front of it, so I just sat down. And then allowed my mind to fall forward into that weightlessness of pastel colour.

I didn’t realise Kara had gone wandering back to see the scenes near Tower Bridge again.

When she tapped my shoulder, asked me if I’d been sitting here all this time, more than half an hour had passed.

I had gone completely elsewhere. I’d been lost. Blissfully so.

And Jer would never understand that.




Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

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oddpod

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Reply #1 on: December 16, 2010, 11:47:14 AM
nice :-)
as a nearly art teacher i am loving this one. the idea of the entire planet sitting zombefide in font of their pc screens is not that far from the world we alredy live in .

i am left wondering about the guy who painted the pictures,  did he know what he was making? did he have any more choices in making them than the people who are traped by them? I know when i am working on something i can lose my self for howers, my conscious brain seams to shut down and when I come round I suddenly realise i am desperate to empty my blander and akeing from spending all day hunched over a workbench.

art can effect people in weird ways, i have a narcoleptic friend who passes out when she is looking at a piece that excites her, and on one when she found a REALY nice shade of orange :-)

card carying dislexic and  gramatical revolushonery


ElectricPaladin

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Reply #2 on: December 16, 2010, 02:27:09 PM
This one didn't really do it for me. I can't figure out exactly why. Perhaps I'm just not sufficiently bothered/scared by evil artwork. I can't actually say anything bad about the piece, though, because it was functionally very good, and I'm sure it was quite horrible to a lot of people. Just not my thing.

I will say that before it came to the end of the world - back when I was able to theorize that this would be a more personal horror - I imagined that this would be a prequel to Some Zombie Contingency Plans, explaining how its main character had become a hollowed-out null space. Perhaps I would have liked the personal angle better.

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iamafish

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Reply #3 on: December 17, 2010, 09:36:04 AM
this is probably by favourite pseudopod I've heard - only been listening for a month of two. I really liked the idea of art work that encapsulated people so much that they can't snap out of it. The characters were interesting enough for me to want to know what happened to them and keep listening.

The ending however, kinda got me. Here's the problem. If you have art that zombifies people as soon as they see it, how can it be spread? Unless a massive number of people are immune, there's no way that it could go viral quickly. You'd end up with strange, isolated pockets of people turned vegetable, but it wouldn't spread fast enough for it to bring the world to a halt. Wondering about how the whole virus spread really stopped me appreciating the end of the story, which was a shame.


Unblinking

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Reply #4 on: December 17, 2010, 02:35:56 PM
I thought this one was reasonably good, a different kind of apocalypse.  I knew that art appreciation would be the end of us all!  Like ElectricPaladin, it made me think of Some Zombie Contingency Plans, though I liked this one better.

The ending however, kinda got me. Here's the problem. If you have art that zombifies people as soon as they see it, how can it be spread? Unless a massive number of people are immune, there's no way that it could go viral quickly. You'd end up with strange, isolated pockets of people turned vegetable, but it wouldn't spread fast enough for it to bring the world to a halt. Wondering about how the whole virus spread really stopped me appreciating the end of the story, which was a shame.

Yeah, I had a problem with that too.  As far as the story told, there was only one person able to really function without outside intervention, and that's Jer, and he can email them to his whole contact list, but I doubt that's more than a couple hundred people.  Those couple hundred will likely be taken down, as well as anyone who stops by the office or house of those who've been taken down, but none of those people are going to be capable of sending it, so there's no way it would take down civilization, particularly not just in a few days.  It would be much more believable if someone with a more widespread influence, but he seemed like a regular guy.



deflective

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Reply #5 on: December 17, 2010, 10:30:46 PM
yeah, the ending was all sorts of illogical.  even in a worst case scenario (google replaces its logo with a mez-photo) laptop batteries run down and screen savers kick on.  all it takes is a few people in every city to figure it out and start turning off monitors.



Sgarre1

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Reply #6 on: December 18, 2010, 12:03:40 AM
But, as shown in the story, turning it off doesn't knock the people out of thrall if the exposure is longer than a minute or so.



Scattercat

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Reply #7 on: December 18, 2010, 12:15:01 AM
Indeed.  It's not just hypnotic.  There are lasting effects.

I got the impression that he wasn't just sending it to his contacts, but rather was setting up some sort of spammer program to get it out everywhere he could.  The narrator is probably still overstating his case, but I can't really imagine any way the proposed scenario could end well for civilization.



deflective

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Reply #8 on: December 18, 2010, 01:03:06 AM
it was pretty well established that terminal exposure time depended on the person.  we know that one person can spend days looking at them off and on without any real problem, the narrator spent five minutes looking at one before he was snapped out of it, another person permanently lost her mind after a full night of exposure.

with these rules there is no way for the final results to occur as described.  screen savers are alone would snap most people out of it.



600south

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Reply #9 on: December 18, 2010, 11:45:26 AM
I agree, the varying degrees of immunity to the paintings' effect were explained in the story.

I liked the premise but I thought the telling was a bit light-hearted. Like the ending of the world with a whimper like that should have been a lot darker, more depressing, more horrific. I think as Pseudopod listeners we could handle that. The scenario reminded me a little of Jeff Noon's novel 'Falling out of Cars', where everyone in the world just loses it somehow and can't function or relate to images properly, and society degenerates... very slowly and painfully. The resulting utter despair provides the horror element, not just the fact that it's happening.



kibitzer

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Reply #10 on: December 18, 2010, 11:41:23 PM
Similar theme to PP152, "Hometown Horrible"? The ending was reminiscent; obviously the execution varied vastly.

Loved the story. Loved it. There was something about Jer's refusal to believe it was the painting causing trouble that stuck. Ben's reading for this one was particularly good. It would be crass to say he does slacker dudes really well, so I won't ;-) but really great reading.


Loz

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Reply #11 on: December 19, 2010, 01:33:40 PM
Ahh, a plague story. I have a real problem with this story, both in how it spreads and how it affects (or doesn't affect) people. The paintings seem to have one of two possible effects on people. Most people, like the narrator and Kara, they mesmerise into coma and eventual death. Other people, like Jer, they make unable to understand that when they show paintings to people and their eyes glaze over and they become non-responsive to everything until they are no longer looking at the paintings and that there is anything wrong with this. By his own admission the narrator doesn't seem to try particularly hard to explain to Jer what's happened but it does seem as if he is so thick that he has to be kept away from sharp objects in case he tries to scratch his own brain with them.

So Jeremy emails them to people and those on his friends list that aren't affected nevertheless feel it necessary to spread them around? I'm not sure why the narrator feels it necessary to commit suicide-by-painting at the end, it's not like a lot of people on the planet use the Internet, so the worst case scenario is probably that it takes out a chunk of civilisation and them, combined with the people who don't have email, can probably rebuild the world without too much difficulty.

Worst plague evar.

That said, I didn't dislike the story as much as the above suggests. It was okay and I would certainly listen to more stories by the author in future.



FrankOreto

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Reply #12 on: December 29, 2010, 04:15:35 PM
Merry Xmas Happy New Year etc..
Really enjoyed the story.  Sure, a few words here or there might have beefed up the apocalypse but I didn't get knocked out of the story by how it was done. (Maybe because I'm so ignorant of all things technical). Just a really nice play on the end of the world, and I love a good end of the world story. 



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Reply #13 on: December 29, 2010, 06:38:59 PM
Others have already touched on the method of the paintings influence spreading, but there's another really subtle note to this story that I spent a lot of time thinking about - the concept of beauty.  Our two main characters mention several times that they have different views on the subject, and seeing the two compare them and change their opinions was part of the thrill of the story for me.  Can beauty be objective?  Can it be inflicted on someone in a way that they can never unsee it, and therefore never be the same?  That was the true point of the story for me.

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empathy44

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Reply #14 on: February 07, 2011, 01:38:15 AM
This reminded me of Lovecraft's story The Terrible Old Man. Not in execution so much but in some of it's barest bones.

The dialogue was excellent--its greatest strength. For me though, there was a disconnect between the realism of the main characters and the art. The presence of the art wasn't as solid as the dialog.



Bamchug

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Reply #15 on: March 17, 2011, 02:47:11 AM
Yea, I realize I'm a little tardy to the party on this one, but I'm new to the site and I'm catching up on all the podcasts and while this story was decent, Ben's read on it was friggin' phenomenal....."I can't be doin' no B and E in my condition".  Just hearing Ben roll that line off makes me laugh....Spot on dude, spot on....



kibitzer

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Reply #16 on: March 19, 2011, 08:05:38 AM
Yea, I realize I'm a little tardy to the party on this one, but I'm new to the site and I'm catching up on all the podcasts and while this story was decent, Ben's read on it was friggin' phenomenal....."I can't be doin' no B and E in my condition".  Just hearing Ben roll that line off makes me laugh....Spot on dude, spot on....

Ben iz The Biz -- he is a friggin awesome reader.


Fenrix

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Reply #17 on: May 26, 2011, 03:51:21 AM
Similar theme to PP152, "Hometown Horrible"? The ending was reminiscent; obviously the execution varied vastly.

Loved the story. Loved it. There was something about Jer's refusal to believe it was the painting causing trouble that stuck. Ben's reading for this one was particularly good. It would be crass to say he does slacker dudes really well, so I won't ;-) but really great reading.

That's cuz he's a fucking rock star.

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