Many fans complain about Lwaxana Troi’s StarTrek episodes but there were always those of us who loved her. Yesterday, Matt Baume shared his explanation of his own love for this character brought to life by the wonderful Majel Barrett.
Matt is a queer journalist. Much of his work focuses on how queer people influenced popular culture. His latest book is Hi Honey, I’m Homo.
(And Matt has no idea who I am or that I’m sharing his video on Threadiverse. 😹)
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Q-in-Law
I’m not a giant fan of the books, but this one is great.
Q gives Lwaxana a portion of his powers, with results that suprise even him…
RIP Peter David, who died yesterday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_David
Oh shit! 😭
I haven’t gotten all the way through it yet, but I have very occasionally come back to it as a hobby project over the past year because I have been trying to collect a dataset of Majel’s lines in order to train a text to speech voice.
Usually, I’d find that a bit unethical, but in this case, they literally tried to collect a dataset before she died, which I think is as close to consent to such a reproduction as most passed actors could give. Also, it’s mostly for fun for something like HomeAssistant on Raspberry Pi.
It is an interesting point. I once heard an anecdote that Jimmy Cagney hated being impersonated in Warner’s cartoons, but Bogart got a kick out of it. The same with Weird Al, some folks love getting parodied and others refuse to have him touch their songs.
Personally, I think it would be pretty sweet if some spaceship three hundred years from now was using her voice .
I view satirical voice impression and speech synthesis of a real person as two different ethical issues entirely.
I find impressions intended for satire fall within the real of the first amendment, while the latter can be an unwelcome appropriation of identity when done wrong.
Technology changes everything. Thee were “Tijuana bibles” showing famous folks for years; Deep Fake tech changes that entirely.
It’s more than you and I can settle. Good night.