Fake Documentary Q and Weaponized Pareidolia

Pareidolia
noun
par·ei·do·lia ˌper-ˌī-ˈdō-lē-ə
-ˈdōl-yə
: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern
Merriam-Webster Dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pareidolia

People who follow me on Mastodon might have seen me mention my recent experiences with the YouTube series Fake Documentary Q (Japanese with English subtitles) and the sleeping trouble it has given me.

In short, FDQ is a “mockumentary” series, though more in the Blair Witch vein than the Spinal Tap one. It poses itself as a product of real research, found footage, and interviews with real people (except, not, because it is, after all, “fake”) and presents many items without editorial comment or even much context.

There may be comments along the lines of “This video was found in the archives of a local television station. We do not know why it was never broadcast.” or “A viewer sent us a request to investigate this website.” There may be narrative discussing how the footage appeared. Or, there may not. Some videos (like the terrifying SANCTUARY) start in medias res. Some are framed as actual documentary footage with a film crew and interviews. Some aren’t even videos, only audio.

Many of them, though, terrify me. They gave me real, hair-on-end chills as I watched, and some continue to do so as I recall their imagery. Not because of anything so direct as blood or ghosts or monsters. No, it is their vague hinting and intentionally raw nature that is so effective. They use the unreliable nature of video—particularly outdated video media like VHS—to add such a thick layer of confusion and distortion that the mind seeks to fill in the gaps. And the only way we can do that is to posit a world that does not work the way we believe it does.

This is a key tenet of what I might call “classic horror.” The modern genre is scattered and meandering, with splatterpunk and slashers and various in-your-face monsters with clear identities and origins. But the roots lay in tales told around campfires by people who did not know what was in the dark around them. They deal in the horror that comes when the world you see and grasp is revealed to be a thin veneer over a gaping, bottomless chasm of the unknowable. This is the horror of Machen’s The Great God Pan, for example, which has no ghosts or goblins, only a brush with the truly unknowable reality behind the world we know.

When faced with that, we at very best feel humbled. At the very worst, as Lovecraft seems dead set on insisting, we are driven mad by the knowledge of our unbearable tininess in the face of all that is beyond us.

The chill we get from a deep scare, the “frisson of horror” as King puts it in Danse Macabre, comes from the merest glimpse of this. And that is what fills Fake Documentary Q.

All the videos are different. None of them offer any overt connection to the others. But as you watch, some shared threads start to appear that seem to lead to certain conclusions about what might be going on. None of them are comforting.

NOTE: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. If you ever plan to watch FDQ, go no further. Go in blind. Enjoy the mystery. You have been warned.

Take, for example, distorted faces. The video OBSCURE/オレンジロビンソンの奇妙なブログ reports on a strange blog left by a photo studio employee. He mentions how a certain customer keeps sending requests to overlay the photo of a woman whose face has been blurred and distorted over various family pictures. The requests continue until, finally, an email arrives that simply reads “Thank you” with a picture of the family, whose faces are now all distorted in the same way.

In the video House of Mirrors/鏡の家, a team member is asked to film all the mirrors in a person’s deceased relative’s house to allay his mother’s delusions that the relative is actually trapped in the mirrors. However, on later review, the video shows the figures of various people reflected behind him, all with faces obscured and distorted.

Another thread is the (possible) doorway to hell. In Film Inferno/フィルムインフェルノ, a young couple have disappeared. Their video camera is discovered miles away from where they had last been seen, in a filthy beach bag. The camera is broken and charred, but some of the video is restored. The recording shows the couple having a picnic at the beach, swimming and then—inexplicably—exploring a cave. They get lost. The video shows them growing increasingly panicked and disoriented, as they discover disturbing dolls and disfigured pictures (another common thread), even music coming from an unknown source. The final clip is simply a distorted, flickering red glow and the horrifying sound of screams.

This echoes Plan C/プラン C, which is possibly one of the most viscerally disturbing of the videos. It is an audio recording only, with images laid over to offer a visual aid. It records the final trip of a group of young people who seem to have made a suicide pact. They drive into the mountains, seal their car, and light a charcoal burner to suffocate themselves. The recording goes to the last minute, through their tortured breathing and coughs, until one member begins screaming in horror. The sound of screams amplifies until it becomes a chorus of the damned, then ends. The video concludes with a comment that, when the car was found, it was still sealed from the inside, but no bodies were inside.

In the video BASEMENT, we watch an elevator security video of a woman boarding on the tenth floor of a residential building. As she descends, the video begins to distort, showing other people getting on while she remains alone. The elevator shakes. It moves in odd ways. And, finally, it begins descending endlessly, far beyond the first floor or even any basement. The woman grows increasingly frantic, unable to interact with the outside world beyond a pleading look into the security camera—the eyes of the viewer—until the elevator stops. It opens onto darkness, and the woman, with no other choice apparent, steps hesitantly out into it and vanishes from sight. The elevator immediately closes its doors and returns to regular function.

Other threads touch on folk horror and curses, the terror of being alone in the mountains, the ominous power of photography, and the unease attached to video that doesn’t act like it should.

But all of these threads rely on only hints. There are things shown that seem meaningful, like countless bamboo spikes driven into the ground or crudely twisted twig figures, piles of clothing in the dark woods or a vaguely human shaped lump under a stained blanket, spreading clots of darkness that could be a face or just a shadow. And this is where pareidolia comes in. Because taken on their own, none of these things have meaning. The voice on the radio repeating “8673” in Sanctuary is simply repeating meaningless numbers, but when we see that they match the birthdate of a character in another video, we feel it must signify. We seek patterns to make sense of the senseless. Just look at the Subreddit or YouTube comments to see countless people desperate to understand more about things that are, inherently, beyond understanding.

The videos are so heavily layered with hints and ambiguity that we are desperate to attach meaning. We need to know if the woman in BASEMENT went to hell or if it was all just an elevator bug. But of course, there is no knowing. Setting aside the fact of these stories’ fictionality, they deal entirely with encounters with a realm which goes beyond mere fact. They offer awe inspiring/awful glimpses behind the curtain of knowing, and therein they find power.

The makers of FDQ seem well aware of this need for meaning and encourage viewers to keep trying. They not only engage by retweeting and liking every single explanation theory that comes at them, without comment or verification, their latest video MOTHER is built around the very idea. It is about a man whose mother disappeared from his house when he was a child. Now, as an adult, he has started receiving mysterious packages—old CDs, rocks, pictures of various places around Japan and, most powerfully, a video of a woman’s face in unclear closeup, who seems to be writhing in pain or fear in a dark, firelit space. This last, he is convinced, is his mother, and he begins to investigate all the other items for related meaning.

The piece of sedimentary rock must be connected to the pictures of Sakai city, which was once a coal port, and the city where he lived with his mother once had a coal mine. Does this mean his mother is buried, being turned into part of the earth like coal? Or does the picture of a pile of household items including a tennis racket indicate that she is living somewhere else, because she once played tennis?

What on examination is merely a random collection of items becomes, to him, a palimpsest layered with significance and depth, and he is convinced that if he continues to dig, he will find the answers he so desperately needs.

The video ends with no answers found.

The creators know very well what their viewers are digging for for, and are in no mood to give it to them. So, the search continues.

Book Review – Flavour

The cover of the book Flavour: A User's guide to our most neglected sense. By Bob Holmes.
At the top is a quote, "Endlessly fascinating. A terrific book" - Bill Bryson.

Flavour: A User’s Guide to Our Most Neglect Sense, by Bob Holmes (I read the UK edition, hence the spelling mismatches you might notice).

This is one of those pop-science books, written by a journalist, that catches the imagination but probably requires some caution. It appears well researched and has copious cited sources, which is very good, but also contains some dubious claims that do not inspire confidence. This, for example, seems relatively arguable:

Sometimes, these experiments point to another noteworthy fact: Smells and tastes often go together differently for different cultures. For example, caramel odor doesn’t enhance sweet tastes for many Asian people, who are likely more used to encountering caramel in savory dishes instead of the sweets that Westerners are used to. The same thing happens with benzaldehyde, the main component of almond aroma. It enhances sweet tastes in Westerners, who usually encounter almond in pastries. But for Japanese, benzaldehyde enhances umami taste, because almond is a common ingredient in savory pickles.
Flavour, page 93 (ebook edition)

I have never seen any “savory pickles” with almonds in Japan. I have seen savory snacks with almonds in them here, though, so perhaps it’s just a simple mistake of which savory thing?

That being said, the fundamental arguments of the books are hard to refute: that our sense of flavor is primarily focused in our nose, and that it is formed by a complex arrangement of genetically influenced physical sensory apparatus and a vast array of cultural influences, such that the likelihood of two individuals having an identical sensory experience of the same flavor is almost impossible, but that shouldn’t get in the way of enjoying and exploring it.

There are many points in this book where I found myself cackling with glee as they reinforced things that I had been increasingly seeing myself about the obsessions of the gourmet/wine/sake world, like how even the most vaunted experts are working with flawed apparatus that can only accurately identify three or four aroma compounds at a time (see p. 52), or how flavor really only exists in the head:

Gordon Shepherd puts it best: “A common misconception is that the foods contain the flavours,” he says. “Foods do contain the flavour molecules, but the flavours of those molecules are actually created by our brains.” Thought itself, in other words, is one of our flavour senses. The brain constructs flavour by piecing together inputs from virtually every one of our sensory channels, plus inputs from thought, language, and a host of other high-level processes like mood, emotion, and expectation. That makes flavour a remarkably complex and changeable concept. It’s a wonder we can talk about it coherently at all.
Flavour, p. 104

The changeability is the real crux. Tasting exercises try to turn this infinitely variable and subjective sense into something objective and reliable, but it just isn’t. And there is more and more evidence that even the “pros” are simply better trained at putting words to their sensory experience, not actually better at sensing.

One particularly fascinating episode comes from winemaker and former oceanographer (a scientific minded person, in other words) Bob Hodgson of California. He noticed that he was completely unable to predict how well his wines would do in contests.

With his scientific turn of mind, Hodgson started to wonder why the very same wine could garner a high score last week and a low one this week. Could you really trust the judges’ scores, he wondered? Hodgson must be a persuasive guy, because somehow, he managed to convince the California State Fair to let him find out.
Judges at a big competition like the California State Fair taste about 150 wines every day, organized into 4 to 6 “flights” of 30 wines each. The wines within a flight are presented in identical glasses marked with identifying codes, so that no judge knows the identity of any wine he or she is tasting. Each judge individually—no discussion at this stage of the judging—gives each wine a numeric score on a 20-point scale. (Actually, the fair uses a 100-point scale like the ones you sometimes see on the shelves at your local wine shop. But any wine that’s halfway drinkable scores at least 80 points, so for all practical purposes it’s a 20-point scale.)
With the collaboration of the contest organizers—but unknown to the judges—Hodgson arranged that for one flight per day (usually the second), three of the thirty wines would actually be identical samples, poured from a single bottle of wine but given different code numbers. If judges’ scores are a true reflection of a wine’s quality, then you’d expect these triplicate samples ought to receive identical scores—or at least somewhat similar scores, allowing for a little bit of imprecision in the judges’ ratings.
The results were shocking.16 “We did everything we could to make the task easy for the judge: same flight, same bottle. And nobody rated them all the same,” says Hodgson. Only about 10 percent of the judges scored the three samples similarly enough that they awarded the same medal to each. Another 10 percent gave wildly different scores, giving one glass a gold and another a bronze or even no medal at all, and the rest fell somewhere in between. And that wasn’t just because some judges are better than others: judges who were consistent in one year were no more likely to be consistent the next year.
Flavour, pp 105-106

Hodgson himself found that his experience of his own wine was often largely guided by outside influences as much as what was in his glass. So, in conclusion:

All this points to an uncomfortable conclusion: If trained judges and experienced winemakers don’t consistently prefer one wine over another, then maybe there’s no real basis for calling some wines great and others merely good. And that may be how it really is, though it’s hard to find many wine people who will agree.
p 106

The gist of so much of this can really be summed up by saying: our enjoyment of a thing is only partly contingent on the thing itself, and most of it is based on the situation around our enjoyment. Our mood, the weather, the glasses we’re using, the people we’re with, it’s all part of it.

One particularly visceral section is a long quote from flavor chemist and wine expert Terry Acree on the subject of wine pairing, which I think almost certainly has much to teach us about sake pairing, as well:

What does it mean to “go together”? My mother was an interior decorator, and when I was about five, I walked in and said to my mother, “My favorite color is red.” And she said, “No it isn’t, kid. That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of. Nobody has a favorite color. Color has a place, and you have to find out where it belongs and where it doesn’t belong. It can only be your favorite if it’s in the right context.” So the first thing I’ve got to say about wine and food pairing is that it’s completely contextual, and almost entirely individual. It makes no sense to write a book on wine and food pairing, except to say there is such a thing as wine and food pairing, and go figure it out for yourself, because it’s your own pairing that counts.
Flavor, p. 192

If flavor truly is this complex experience influenced by almost countless variables both internal and external, ranging from genetics to mood to the weather, then trying to build bedrock principles to guide that experience is a futile thing that only works if everyone involved agrees to just nod and go with the flow–an experience I often find myself having during guided tasting.

The ending message of this book is exactly what I find myself trying to tell people about sake: Be mindful, and enjoy it in your own way. Or, as he says

Remember, even expert perfumers and flavourists can’t accurately identify more than three or four aromas from a mixture. In something as complex as wine, that means the experts’ flavour identifications miss the mark pretty often. (You can easily verify that by comparing two critics’ reviews of the same wine and noting their lack of overlap.) The bottom line is that accuracy doesn’t matter. What’s important is that coming up with a description forces me to pay attention, and paying attention enriches my flavour experience. It slows me down, so that meals become a time for dining, not merely for eating.
There’s a world of flavour out there waiting, and it’s ours to enjoy.
Flavour, p. 224

Book Review – A Sense of Place

The cover of the book A Sense of Place by Dave Broom, featuring a picture of whisky casks on the cover. In front of the book is a small glass with some amber whisky inside.

A Sense of Place: A journey around Scotland’s whisky
by Dave Broom
Photography by Christina Kernohan

I first saw this book mentioned on the author’s Instagram, where he used something like the phrase “sense of place, not terroir.” That is what grabbed me. The growing ubiquity of “terroir” usage in drink writing is puzzling to me, because it is such a wine-centric term. Its core meaning, “the taste of the land,” makes sense for grapes but not for much else. That has encouraged people to make it mean, basically, whatever they want if it helps them sell some kind of very expensive processed agricultural good—from chocolate to, well, whisky. I am immediately suspicious of any use of the term outside wine, because it’s just become a stand-in for “this is different for reasons” as part of a sales pitch.

A sense of place, though? That, I can get behind. It’s not trying to dress itself up in fancy clothes. It’s honest about being a story. A story about a place, which has room in it for all kinds of things. People. History. Water. Land. Plants. Rocks.

A place is what we make of it. What we say about it. It’s a story.

And that is what this book is all about.

In this incredibly beautiful book (and it is among the most beautiful I have ever held—Kernohan’s photography is glorious), Dave Broom writes two hundred and fifty-odd pages worth of ode to Scotland. Its people. Its history. Its water. And yes, its rocks. He writes about whisky, yes, but what this book truly does is delve into what makes Scotch special to him, and that is its position within the communities around each bottle.

It’s a celebration of Scotch as more than a drink, as something else than the icon of capitalism it has seemingly become: it is a product of a community bound by shared land, shared history, shared culture, shared language. A cultural artifact.

The book is lyrical. Rhapsodic. At times gloomy, and at times filled with hope. The language is unabashedly Scots English—I have to admit I was grateful for the glossary in the back—and that is a lovely thing. The book touches on that, on how Gaelic was taken from so many Scots and how that was part of the Clearances that not only scarred Scotland’s culture, but in so doing shaped modern Scotch whiskey and the places it is from, and also how words influence not just how we speak, but how we perceive. How we taste things.

In a way, this book has fundamentally changed the way I think about whisky. I have to admit that, as a thoroughly common person with stubbornly low-class tastes, the fetishization and hyper-valuation of whisk(e)y turns me right off. As a beverage, I like it fine. It’s a delicious, complex, nuanced and exciting thing to drink in and of itself. But so much of the modern placing of it is about image, status, and wealth. At both ends—production and consumption—whisk(e)y has become a rich man’s game. And I mean all three of those words. The history of whisk(e)y in Scotland and Ireland, in particular, is one of capital, empire, and the forceful transformation of a common culture to a private one.

But here, Broom pokes at the cracks in that, revealing the humanity and love that maintains in even the largest of distilleries. Yes, they’re still massive monuments to capital, but there is also a reverence for craft, and a (re)growing respect for the farmers that once would have been making the drink. I found myself actually wanting a sip of single malt on finishing this book, something I very rarely feel these days. (Sorry, Dave, but it was Miyagikyo. No proper Scotch in the house, I’m afraid).

And he did it with such style! What a writer the man is. I found myself snapping pictures of sentence after sentence, almost wanting to shout with glee at the beautifully made points.

Let me also add, I am so happy and in favor of his persistent cheerleading for blended whisky. The fact that “whisky lovers” persist in looking down on 98% of the market is not only silly, it reeks of classist arrogance. Never poo-poo the cheap stuff.

It is no exaggeration, not even a hint of a lie, to say this is the book I wanted (want?) to write about sake. I am not the writer Broom is, nor is the English-language sake book market mature enough to have room for such a departure, but maybe someday.

Until then, I am grateful for this wonder of a book.

Review – Unsouled

Unsouled by Will Wight

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Unsouled by Will Wight

In this fantasy, a vaguely East Asian-based society is rules by people who can use a natural force called “madra” to fight, create, and manipulate the works arrive them. Everyone is tested for their affinity to one of the various paths of usage and are assigned a future: except the Unsouled, who show no affinity and this are only objects of shame and pity.

Wei Shin Lindo is one such, but he honers to break out of this rigid system and show that he is every bit as capable as his peers.

What occurs carries Lindo far beyond anything he found have imagined, with the fate of worlds moving around him.

This is a great, fun adventure reminiscent of Avatar, the Last Airbender. The practice is great, the characters fun and the working is interesting without being overwhelming in detail.

It’s definitely a pleasure to see Lindo use his wits to overcome his weaknesses, although I can see a definite Dragon Ball Z possibility of endless power creep if the writer isn’t careful.

But I hated to put the story down and I looked pretty much every choice made. What a fun read!

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Review – The Dragon’s Banker

The Dragon’s Banker by Scott Warren

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Dragon’s Banker by Scott Warren

For merchant banker Sailor Kelstern, money is everything. He’s a walking embodiment of the Month Python Money Song. He has had a minor business setback with a very powerful Lord, which means his reputation is down but not out, but business goes on. And then a new client appears, asking him to manage the accounts of a very, very wealthy patron in the transition from hard currency to fiat based economy. The client, as you might have guessed from the title, really REALLY likes gold, and is not at all happy about this new paper money.

This book was a hoot. Seriously, it was so much fun. It was refreshing to see a decent protagonist who didn’t use a bit of force, just cleverness and skill, to get through truly difficult situations.

The main character was built perfectly. His motivations, actions, and values all clicked just right to create someone unique, but relatable at the same time. The pacing of the story never lets up (it might actually have been better sometimes if it did) and the plentiful turns paid off well.

The writing was fluid and clever without falling into the trap of “witty banter,” and the editing was very solid. This book showed a lot of care and thought, and I really appreciate the author sending me a review copy.

There aren’t many economic heroes out there (Discworld’s Moist von Lipwig and Cithrin from the Dagger and Coin books are all that spring to mind) but I’m of the growing opinion that we could use a lot more!

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