TBSN is a radical new concept in news broadcasting to an eager and massively-gullible world: tell the audience straight-up that everything you say is complete bullshit. They won't leave because they like what you say.
Programmatically, it wouldn't be such a tough thing to simulate as basic ingredients, every day has:
30% chance of a car bombing. Pick a location, body count, bullshit story about who did it. The background stories are always the same so the software doesn't have to think at all.
10% chance of a hideous plane crash. Pick location, body count. Spin for a random winner to throw in the possibility of sabotage.
100% chance of a politician saying something stupid. You don't even have to be a programmer to see how simple it would be to simulate that. Mitch McConnell said today the taxes on dairy farmers are intolerable. The statement is vacuous, requires no action, everyone agrees with it ... plus who knows if he's ever been anywhere near a cow ... and he didn't say it.
65% chance of some young celebrity trying to show the world in some garish way that she now has nipples. Simple table look-up for the story. Spin the wheel for a name. Katy Perry sues photographer who took pictures of her topless beach party.
20% chance of an uprising in a place no-one can find on the map. Pick an African country at random as hardly anyone does anything when they burn up.
100% chance of multiple pundit editorials. No thought required on these either. Here's one on global warming is real. Here's another on global warming is bullshit. Doesn't matter what you pick as people know it's all bullshit anyway. The global warming isn't bullshit, the editorials are bullshit.
This really is intriguing me as a programming challenge, to create an online news system that looks as credible as I can possibly make it while inventing every damn thing it does. This has some resemblance to The Onion but those are one-off articles whereas the intention with TBSN is to write them such that they can be used multiple times. For example, the pundit's analysis of what the ceasefire in Gaza means. Set that one on a two-week bounce and use it as many times as you like.
How many stories would you need to keep it interesting enough that people would come back to look at it a second time. It's vaguely like a musical jam in which you throw out lots of musical bits and stick them together into something that hopefully sounds like more than just a bunch of musical bits stuck together.
The weather would be a mathematical exercise as the program knows the date, season, etc so it can pick a number for high / low, spin a wheel for rain, cloudy, etc. The interest part there would be in how often it got it right. This part would need a memory as you need to make some trends from your fake data.
Stock market simulation is interesting. How about if the DOW Jones follows, hmmm, some baseball team. Make the DOW performance take a track up or down based on whether the team wins or loses and make the spread dependent on that of the score in the game.
I am really am getting interested in writing this for a news channel that guarantees everything on it is complete and utter rubbish.
Update:
What's more, there's a musical relationship as well as the profile for a sound is given in attack, sustain, fade, etc. There is a similar relationship to news stories. Plane crashes have a sharp attack, long sustain and a slow fade, etc.
Programmatically, it wouldn't be such a tough thing to simulate as basic ingredients, every day has:
30% chance of a car bombing. Pick a location, body count, bullshit story about who did it. The background stories are always the same so the software doesn't have to think at all.
10% chance of a hideous plane crash. Pick location, body count. Spin for a random winner to throw in the possibility of sabotage.
100% chance of a politician saying something stupid. You don't even have to be a programmer to see how simple it would be to simulate that. Mitch McConnell said today the taxes on dairy farmers are intolerable. The statement is vacuous, requires no action, everyone agrees with it ... plus who knows if he's ever been anywhere near a cow ... and he didn't say it.
65% chance of some young celebrity trying to show the world in some garish way that she now has nipples. Simple table look-up for the story. Spin the wheel for a name. Katy Perry sues photographer who took pictures of her topless beach party.
20% chance of an uprising in a place no-one can find on the map. Pick an African country at random as hardly anyone does anything when they burn up.
100% chance of multiple pundit editorials. No thought required on these either. Here's one on global warming is real. Here's another on global warming is bullshit. Doesn't matter what you pick as people know it's all bullshit anyway. The global warming isn't bullshit, the editorials are bullshit.
This really is intriguing me as a programming challenge, to create an online news system that looks as credible as I can possibly make it while inventing every damn thing it does. This has some resemblance to The Onion but those are one-off articles whereas the intention with TBSN is to write them such that they can be used multiple times. For example, the pundit's analysis of what the ceasefire in Gaza means. Set that one on a two-week bounce and use it as many times as you like.
How many stories would you need to keep it interesting enough that people would come back to look at it a second time. It's vaguely like a musical jam in which you throw out lots of musical bits and stick them together into something that hopefully sounds like more than just a bunch of musical bits stuck together.
The weather would be a mathematical exercise as the program knows the date, season, etc so it can pick a number for high / low, spin a wheel for rain, cloudy, etc. The interest part there would be in how often it got it right. This part would need a memory as you need to make some trends from your fake data.
Stock market simulation is interesting. How about if the DOW Jones follows, hmmm, some baseball team. Make the DOW performance take a track up or down based on whether the team wins or loses and make the spread dependent on that of the score in the game.
I am really am getting interested in writing this for a news channel that guarantees everything on it is complete and utter rubbish.
Update:
What's more, there's a musical relationship as well as the profile for a sound is given in attack, sustain, fade, etc. There is a similar relationship to news stories. Plane crashes have a sharp attack, long sustain and a slow fade, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment