Interesting premise and sadly the idea of his subscribers logging off when he wasn’t doing something explicit was an all too accurate commentary on modern western society.

Not quite sure how the robots fitted in or who was behind them but a fun read.

Thank you as every escapepod – I’ve only been on board since The Baby and the Bathwater but I love the show.

Regards from Britain.

Archie

I would say that the protagonist had good intentions, but that his fault was ignorance (if not stupidity) for agreeing to engage in a program where everyone watching could sense/feel his emotions and desires. He was just asking to be caught in the thought (so to speak) of thinking something that someone close to him would object to.

This is my first post ever, so pardon me if I’m prolix. But I wanted to note how many wonderful moments I’ve had listening to your podcast–moving, weeding, painting, brewing beer, folding clothes, driving. I’m trying to write up a summary and study questions for the philosophical stories I hear and read for future use with my philosophy students. Many times Escape Pod has sent me scrambling across the yard or house in an attempt to track down my note pad. So many ideas, so little time.

Oh, I’ll paypal you soon, Steve. Mark my words! I absolutely love Escape Pod. I’m getting ready to move alone cross-country from MI to CA, and I’ll look forward to listening to you and your commentary on the road.

As for this week’s Escape Pod, I found the premise much more interesting than the story itself. It presents a very plausible extension of reality TV in the future. I don’t watch reality TV myself, but it fascinates me from an economics perspective.

Take Survivor for example. Standard 24 episode season. Take a bunch of people, stick them on an island. Make them camp out, feed them bugs, etc. Pay ONE of them $1,00,000.00 at the end of the show. Talk about a low overhead to produce.

For comparison, to make a single half hour episode of Friends, producers paid out $6,000,000.00 in salaries alone. That’s a $144,000,000.00 per season for casting compared to the $1,000,000.00 for the entire season of Survivor (yes, a 144:1 ratio). And Friends is only a half hour show. You can have more ad sales for a 1 to 1.5 hour long Survivor episode.

It is a wonder all shows aren’t reality shows.

I stopped listening to this one about ten minutes into it. I just lost track of where it was going, and couldn’t figure out what was going on. Maybe this is the kind of story that works better as something to read instead of something to listen to.

I wish Escape Pod could pick up the story “The perfect man,” from Salon.com, about the techie woman and her virtual boyfriend. It starts out as a “Sex and the City” style dating confessional and ends up, well, it’s worth reading it to find out. Mur would be perfect as the reading voice of the narrator, and then the guy who does the intro for “Does My Geek Look Big in This” would probably be perfect as the voice of Pritchard.

Thanks for the feedback!

Not one of my favorites…but not a bad story at all! Took me a while to get into it is all. I was more interested in the talk of Guild Wars to be honest. The story just seemed to start off a bit slow. I did get into it eventually and enjoyed what was left of it.

Also, Steve, I’m wondering when this story was originally published. Do you normally say that at the beginning on the podcast? I know you always say where, but I don’t recall you saying when. I would be interested to know when some of these stories were written.