Author Topic: EP503: Undeleted  (Read 18050 times)

bounceswoosh

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Reply #25 on: September 24, 2015, 12:59:34 PM
As much as I liked the concept of the story and enjoyed hearing it there were a few things that kept it from being great. Sure, the accent was not necessary but didn't take away too much of my enjoyment (perhaps because I'm not native english nor japanese). However the storytelling honestly felt a bit forced. The foreshadowing with the shoes were a bit too obvious and the scam went a little too smoothly and conveniently.

Also, even if you have been in prison, I would expect that you would know what a smartphone is and seen someone operate one - I would even guess that a hacker would have more opportunity than most to keep his crime skills up to date - at least on a theoretical level. That being said, I wasn't surprised that he went to the interview non-prepared, since he counted on being hired on reputation rather than skill.  Also, the final moment with the wife was well done and made me smile. The story could (maybe should) have ended there, really.
People convicted of hacking (cracking) are often not allowed to use computers as part of the punishment. I could easily see that applying to smart phones.



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Reply #26 on: September 24, 2015, 02:25:22 PM

People convicted of hacking (cracking) are often not allowed to use computers as part of the punishment. I could easily see that applying to smart phones.

I assumed that to be the case, yeah.



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Reply #27 on: September 24, 2015, 04:48:11 PM
Anyone who has issues with the narration here should never listen to the audiobook of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. I'm listening to it right now and I don't find this mainstream big dollar production significantly different from the one presented here for this story. The narrator for this NYT Bestseller is also an american of Asian descent with a long list on IMDB and the character accents are much the same.

I think this EA volunteer delivered an entertaining narration, and I enjoyed the story.

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Chairman Goodchild

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Reply #28 on: September 28, 2015, 09:47:22 AM

Let's not jump to the conclusion that the reader was trying to be offensive.  I live in Germany, do you know how many bad, fake German accents there are out there?  Actually let's go one further, did you know that people in the North speak totally different than people in the South?  Did you know that you can easily distinguish north German from Bavarian from Swiss From Austrian and that all of these regions sound different when speaking?  They may even sound different when they speak English, I don't know.  I've never studied it.

Let's cut the reader some slack, as I am sure he wasn't doing it on purpose to offend anyone.  

This deserves to get noted again.  It's a shame that this thread became so derailed by the 'that's racist' crowd.  What if the narrator were trying to do a German accent?  Or Scandinavian, or Slavic?  Or somewhere where white people make up the vast majority of the population?  Would there be a similar pile-on of racist or anti-ethnic accusations?  Of course not.  

I was going to compliment the narrator for his pronunciation of Japanese words.  I speak a fair bit of Japanese, and some of the Japanese on Escape Pod has been... not good.  Example: Episode 407, Mono no Aware.  That's AH-WA-RAY.  Not like how it was pronounced in the episode by host and narrator, like the English word in the sentence, "I'm aware of the situation." Gaaaah...  That was fingernails on chalkboard level right there.  

But here the narrator has a solid pronunciation of Japanese names and placenames where they appear in the story, and I was very satisfied that I didn't beat on my steering wheel on my commute to work, shouting, "NO!  That's WRONG!  You're making my EARS BLEED!"  

As for the accent, I didn't think it was perfect, but accents are difficult to get exact.  I thought it was a fairly good attempt, and I have experience with hearing Japanese people speaking English.  Giving characters accents of their own language is important to setting the feel of a story, especially in audio dramas, where audio cues are all the audience has to go create the scene.  Imagine the dialog in this story being done by the author in a standard Midwestern American English accent.  Tell me that the sense of scene wouldn't be diminished by this.  Tell me that it wasn't enhanced by trying.  

Make sure to think things thru before throwing around cheap accusations at talented people who've worked very hard on a project.  
« Last Edit: September 28, 2015, 09:52:23 AM by Chairman Goodchild »



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Reply #29 on: September 28, 2015, 07:13:11 PM

Let's not jump to the conclusion that the reader was trying to be offensive.  I live in Germany, do you know how many bad, fake German accents there are out there?  Actually let's go one further, did you know that people in the North speak totally different than people in the South?  Did you know that you can easily distinguish north German from Bavarian from Swiss From Austrian and that all of these regions sound different when speaking?  They may even sound different when they speak English, I don't know.  I've never studied it.

Let's cut the reader some slack, as I am sure he wasn't doing it on purpose to offend anyone.  

This deserves to get noted again.  It's a shame that this thread became so derailed by the 'that's racist' crowd.  What if the narrator were trying to do a German accent?  Or Scandinavian, or Slavic?  Or somewhere where white people make up the vast majority of the population?  Would there be a similar pile-on of racist or anti-ethnic accusations?  Of course not.  

I was going to compliment the narrator for his pronunciation of Japanese words.  I speak a fair bit of Japanese, and some of the Japanese on Escape Pod has been... not good.  Example: Episode 407, Mono no Aware.  That's AH-WA-RAY.  Not like how it was pronounced in the episode by host and narrator, like the English word in the sentence, "I'm aware of the situation." Gaaaah...  That was fingernails on chalkboard level right there.  

But here the narrator has a solid pronunciation of Japanese names and placenames where they appear in the story, and I was very satisfied that I didn't beat on my steering wheel on my commute to work, shouting, "NO!  That's WRONG!  You're making my EARS BLEED!"  

As for the accent, I didn't think it was perfect, but accents are difficult to get exact.  I thought it was a fairly good attempt, and I have experience with hearing Japanese people speaking English.  Giving characters accents of their own language is important to setting the feel of a story, especially in audio dramas, where audio cues are all the audience has to go create the scene.  Imagine the dialog in this story being done by the author in a standard Midwestern American English accent.  Tell me that the sense of scene wouldn't be diminished by this.  Tell me that it wasn't enhanced by trying.  

Make sure to think things thru before throwing around cheap accusations at talented people who've worked very hard on a project.  

For what it's worth, I didn't think the attempt was racist, nor intended to be offensive, nor (to me personally) actually offensive.  At the same time, I think it would've been better without.  I was still able to listen to the story and enjoy it.  I expect there's probably a spectrum of opinions on the subject, not just one extreme or the other.



Chairman Goodchild

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Reply #30 on: September 29, 2015, 11:36:25 AM
For what it's worth, I didn't think the attempt was racist, nor intended to be offensive, nor (to me personally) actually offensive.  At the same time, I think it would've been better without.  I was still able to listen to the story and enjoy it.  I expect there's probably a spectrum of opinions on the subject, not just one extreme or the other.

You have a different opinion on the accent than I do, and that's fine.  It's just the racism accusations that bothered me. 



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Reply #31 on: September 29, 2015, 12:45:08 PM
I'd like to discuss the story itself.  I thought it was fantastic, and one of the better episodes I've listened to in a long while.  A very layered, deep episode, and it really hit home for me.  

Alasdair weighed in on his favorite parts of the story.  Here's mine:  Kentaro, a used-up computer hacker in his mid-sixties, standing on the sky deck of Tokyo Skytree and quoting Neuromancer.  Just think about that juxtaposition.  The cyberpunk future of the 80s, where the sky is the color of a television turned to a dead channel, everyone is jacked in to cyberspace, snorting designer drugs, and showing their off their hacking skills in an underground club at 3 A.M.  The cyberpunk future of the present: a lonely, single man well past his prime living at an internet cafe, scheming to steal a cell phone so he can afford nursing care for his elderly mother.  And he's standing on one of the tallest, most futuristic structures on Earth, in Tokyo, Japan, used for high-speed data transmission across all of central Japan, accessible via high-speed subway station about three stories under the island where it stands.  Gibson could have written about this.  Except when you get out of the subway car, there's 7-11 staring you in the face and after you take the escalators up to ground level the whole place is a family-friendly tourist trap and shopping mall with overpriced gift shops and cafes.  And how could it be anything different?

We're all jacked into cyberspace, just like Gibson prophesied.  Only we use it for Facebook and videos of cats and porn, and maybe not in that order.  I'm such a cyber-criminal, I have a copy of uTorrent on my computer that I use to jack into Game of Thrones episodes.  Despite this, I still haven't gotten a nose piercing or dyed my hair purple.  We're all walking around with supercomputers in our back pockets, and we use them for playing Flappy Birds.  

The future has come.  And the sky isn't the color of a television turned to a dead channel.  It's just cloudy today.  
« Last Edit: September 29, 2015, 01:36:00 PM by Chairman Goodchild »



wintermute

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Reply #32 on: September 29, 2015, 01:27:11 PM
The future has come.  And the sky isn't the color of a television turned to a dead channel.
It's worth noting that in 1982, when that was written, it referred to a grey static. Today, a TV tuned to a dead channel will just show solid blue.

Science means that not all dreams can come true


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Reply #33 on: September 29, 2015, 01:43:20 PM
I loved that the hero inhabited that time honored tradition of the plucky thief just trying to support his mother. But this was a lot less Oliver Twist and more firmly pointed at aging. That was really great. Characters in cyberpunk are usually leave a young, beautiful corpse. Retirement is often not part of that package. Hell, Dixie Flatline's retirement was to an external hard drive.

The future has come.  And the sky isn't the color of a television turned to a dead channel.
It's worth noting that in 1982, when that was written, it referred to a grey static. Today, a TV tuned to a dead channel will just show solid blue.

I've actually seen commentary that the bright unnatural blue was what Gibson was aiming for. I might have to dig that up again. I always pictured it as static.


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Reply #34 on: September 29, 2015, 01:50:15 PM
The future has come.  And the sky isn't the color of a television turned to a dead channel.
It's worth noting that in 1982, when that was written, it referred to a grey static. Today, a TV tuned to a dead channel will just show solid blue.

Just a nitpick, but today what happens when you tune to a dead channel really depends on the model of the TV and on the TV provider - people with cable may see something different than people who don't, for example. On my TV, if I tune to a dead channel, I get a black screen with a grey box telling me that it's a dead channel.



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Reply #35 on: September 29, 2015, 03:21:34 PM
The future has come.  And the sky isn't the color of a television turned to a dead channel.
It's worth noting that in 1982, when that was written, it referred to a grey static. Today, a TV tuned to a dead channel will just show solid blue.

Just a nitpick, but today what happens when you tune to a dead channel really depends on the model of the TV and on the TV provider - people with cable may see something different than people who don't, for example. On my TV, if I tune to a dead channel, I get a black screen with a grey box telling me that it's a dead channel.

True!  One of my TVs that has no cable shows blue, the other one   shows black with a grey box.

It is interesting that the "color of a dead channel" is not only different now than it was when that story was written, it's pretty ambiguous looked at based on only today's technology rather than being the universal element of random noise shown visually.

Honestly I miss the ability of analog TV to fail more gracefully in low signal conditions.  With analog TV you could watch/hear something with a fairly low signal and still get something out of it. With digital TV it's perfect signal right down to the point where it's completely incomprehensible for audio/video scrambling or complete lack of signal recognition.  Especially annoying when it storms because storms cause interference and also present the most urgent time to watch TV (for storm warnings on local news channels)
« Last Edit: September 29, 2015, 03:23:44 PM by Unblinking »



Aidan

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Reply #36 on: October 01, 2015, 11:26:35 PM
Quote
If he was a "superhacker" then he would know that, without having spent significant time and effort in-prison (somehow), or since his release, he would be massively out of date.

Kentaro knew he wasn't prepared. His mistake was that he assumed he would be given back his previous position without challenge.

Quote
That he bought the exact same brand and style of shoes and then wore those exact same shoes while he was going through the security line where he had to remove his shoes and put them on the rollers next to the people who might have seen the shoes.

Ha! Just last week I bought two pairs of the exact same shoes (anything that cuts down on shopping time is good!)

Quote
I was going to compliment the narrator for his pronunciation of Japanese words.

Yes. I had another of my stories with some Japanese words in it read (not on Escape Pod) and that reader managed to mispronounce almost every word.

Quote
Kentaro, a used-up computer hacker in his mid-sixties, standing on the sky deck of Tokyo Skytree and quoting Neuromancer.  Just think about that juxtaposition.  The cyberpunk future of the 80s, where the sky is the color of a television turned to a dead channel, everyone is jacked in to cyberspace, snorting designer drugs, and showing their off their hacking skills in an underground club at 3 A.M.  The cyberpunk future of the present: a lonely, single man well past his prime living at an internet cafe, scheming to steal a cell phone so he can afford nursing care for his elderly mother.  And he's standing on one of the tallest, most futuristic structures on Earth, in Tokyo, Japan, used for high-speed data transmission across all of central Japan, accessible via high-speed subway station about three stories under the island where it stands.  Gibson could have written about this.  Except when you get out of the subway car, there's 7-11 staring you in the face and after you take the escalators up to ground level the whole place is a family-friendly tourist trap and shopping mall with overpriced gift shops and cafes.  And how could it be anything different?

Thank you! This is exactly the effect I was going for. It's also true that Japan was promised the future (especially in the 80s) and has now been overtaken by China is economic terms and world focus.

It's a cliche that so many travel articles about Japan start off with: "Japan is a land of contrasts....High-tech wonders... Women in kimonos", but I haven't found anywhere else in the world where the ancient and the modern collide in such a fascinating way.

The other thing is that there are parts of Japan - especially the banks and offices - that aren't as modern as some people think. My workplace still used punch time cards and faxes. Faxes are important because people want to put their personal stamp on them. And even in 2008 we were still using cassette tapes (rather than CDs, let alone mp3s!) in the classroom.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2015, 11:31:55 PM by Aidan »



El Barto

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Reply #37 on: October 10, 2015, 01:29:34 AM
I had a totally different take on the wife at the end.  I think she was having an affair and had been terrified that her lover somehow left his shoes at their house and then realized it was the old man who was actually doing something to take on her jerk of a husband.

For what it is worth, I liked the accents, they gave the story more character than just having them read in normal boring English.  Sorry to hear that some people found it grating or offensive.



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Reply #38 on: October 14, 2015, 09:27:22 PM
I am not Japanese, but I speak Japanese, and lived there for a couple of years.  The narration grated.  It wasn't just the incorrectly stereotyped accents, he didn't even get the pronunciation of the protagonist's name right.  I tolerated it hoping the story would be worth it.  I liked the protagonist enough that I don't want that half hour back, I guess; but the ending didn't do it for me.

I think I was hoping for a more spectacular resolution.  I'm not sure if the techno-jargon was the limit of the author's knowledge on the subject, or the presumed limit of the audience's combined with the limitations of a short story re: explanation.  I guess that kind of precludes what I was hoping for: some SF speculation on the future of mobile security.  I'd have settled for something a little more complex than the same problem that's been preventing me recovering my damned Weixin account.  


The narrator is half American, half Asian, though not Japanese. It was a lot less of a caricature than I could have mustered.

By this logic if I attempted to do a German accent based entirely on the Medic from Team Fortress 2, that would be entirely unoffensive. 
« Last Edit: October 14, 2015, 09:50:22 PM by Chicken Ghost »



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Reply #39 on: October 15, 2015, 02:58:55 AM
 

The narrator is half American, half Asian, though not Japanese. It was a lot less of a caricature than I could have mustered.

By this logic if I attempted to do a German accent based entirely on the Medic from Team Fortress 2, that would be entirely unoffensive. 

Would you be intending to be offensive? If not, I promise I wouldn't be picky about it. I certainly wouldn't accuse you of being malicious without knowing anything about you.

I think a fairer comparison would be to say that, as an American, just by merit of proximity my imitation of a New Yorker, a Chicagoan, a Pittsburgher, or even a Mexican or Canadian would be several shades better than someone from Israel or Malaysia. Would a Chicagoan know I wasn't authentic? Very likely. Would the Israeli? Probably not.

Would I have preferred a Japanese narrator? Absolutely. Were any available when I put the call out? Nope. Would it have been better if I or anyone else on staff had done the reading? Most assuredly not. We took the best option from what was available at the moment. If that offends, so be it. We're not so far ahead that we could afford to table it and wait for better options. We're working on getting there, though.

Here's to better next time!



Chicken Ghost

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Reply #40 on: October 15, 2015, 03:57:43 AM
Just read it in your own accent, guys.  The setting and characters are established sufficiently by the text, and if you want to get creative you've got plenty of room to do it in your own voice.  It's okay, we can suspend disbelief for that. 




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Reply #41 on: October 20, 2015, 10:17:52 PM
I thought the narration was great. The accents weren't even a concern for me, the real joy of the narration was the amazingly distinct voice that each character was given.

If you had a problem with the accents, grow up and just read the text. Good job Mr. Learned!



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Reply #42 on: October 29, 2015, 04:35:10 PM
Ha! Just last week I bought two pairs of the exact same shoes (anything that cuts down on shopping time is good!)

I don't find it implausible to rebuy the same pair of shoes.  I find it to be a rather stupid character moment to buy the same shoes and then wear those same shoes while trying to pull a sneaky switch at an airport next to a person for whom that specific size and brand of shoes would be the only possible way for them to recognize you...  I thought it worked well enough for the sake of the narrative, but it did strike me as a big stupid moment for the character who otherwise was not stupid.  :)

but I haven't found anywhere else in the world where the ancient and the modern collide in such a fascinating way.

I think the only place I've been to that might fit the bill would be Rome.



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Reply #43 on: November 04, 2015, 04:10:19 AM
I really enjoyed this story, but I also found the "Japanese" accent distracting and silly.



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Reply #44 on: November 05, 2015, 04:50:05 PM
I liked this episode well enough, though many of the mentioned implausibility problems did stick out at me. It was the interaction at the security line with the wife that really clinched it for me, though. Her sarcastic "I'm so useless" was spot on, as she took back a small measure of control in her life. The whole listen was worth it for that one element.



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Reply #45 on: October 31, 2017, 06:12:25 PM
While I enjoyed the story (the accent wasn't my favourite, but also didn't bug me), my biggest problem was what adrianh said:

* The SFnal elements felt tacked on to me. You could take a few years off the setting, change mom's illness, and the story would work just as well. 

In fact, I was expecting a whole "this isn't science fiction" debate on the forums, because I firmly thought this story *was* contemporary, having somehow forgotten about the mother's memory reboot.

It didn't detract from my enjoyment of the story, though. Like others have mentioned, I really liked the wife's act of defiance at the airport when she chose to do nothing about the shoes.