Sorry to be so demanding, but I just feel that these little details can add volumes to our understanding and fascination. Thanks!
So after three weeks of pretending to actually do all the stuff FarmVille players only pretended to do, I realized I needed a new angle. But what?
Dave Cicirelli
I’m really beginning to hate it here. I mean, I guess it was naive to think they’d accept me into the community considering how I got here. But still…is it possible? Am I not as charming as I thought?
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Erin Brennan Hanson impossible!
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Joe Moscone Very possible.
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The days of engaging my audience just by taking naps at furniture stores or camping out on playgrounds were clearly over—they needed something more. But the possibility of a new destination had been taken off the table: I was stuck at the farm.
Once again I was confronted with the challenge of real-time storytelling. To maintain that delicate balance between the outlandish and the plausible, there needed to be gaps between the marquee events. But to maintain audience interest, I had to keep up the momentum. So how does one spend time between hate crimes?
I did what any creative hack would do. I brought in a sexy dame.
Everyone loves gossip. Even the suggestion of a fight between my father and me gave Fakebook’s audience a petty thrill. People like seeing things they aren’t supposed to see, especially if what they see is something they could have an opinion on.
And what could be a better engine for gossip than one of your Facebook friends dating an Amish girl? You’d be instantly invested in his story, waiting and wanting to see how it played out. You wouldn’t be able to resist talking about it. And it would be so unexpected that you’d have a hard time coming up with a reason why it couldn’t happen—especially if you’d already accepted Fakebook’s story so far, as all of my followers seemed to have.
And best of all, the Amish have no digital footprint. She’d have no Facebook profile, no Facebook friends, no AIM account, no history at all. As far as the Internet was concerned, she’d be invisible.
It was so wonderfully clean. All I needed was a handful of photos from some random, willing girl no one could possibly know.
Yeah…that was a pretty creepy thought. So I called Jeff Shaw.
Jeff was a friend from my sole semester at Syracuse. It was surprising to me that we’d kept in touch, given the fact that we’d only spent four months in the same state—but we’d bonded. I felt like I could trust him to understand what I was doing.
And fortunately, because our close proximity had been so brief and so isolated, he knew hundreds of people who didn’t know anyone that I knew. He was the perfect matchmaker to help me find a make-believe girl.
He e-introduced me to his cousin in Chicago, Kate.
Jeff Shaw → Kate Moulton, Dave Cicirelli
Subject: SWM Seeking SWF…To Pretend to be Amish
Kate, meet Dave. Dave, meet Kate. The only problem I foresee—Kate you’re Amish here, so do you have any photos of yourself where you’re NOT drinking? *rim shot* Oh, he’s such a ham.
Dave Cicirelli
Actually, I’m quite interested in the pics where you are drinking. *another rim shot*
First, thanks so much for agreeing to be a part of this, Kate. The storyline that’s going to play out is that I run away with this Amish girl (who will be created using your photos). None of the pictures will be in poor taste, scout’s honor, just your standard party pic fare. The captions will be used to fill in the blanks about the story that will—fair warning—not always show her in the best light, but nothing crazy! Ultimately, I just need a consistent likeness.
I’m going to login as Jeff to pull pics from your profile. Thanks so much, again. My profile is public, so please check it out and enjoy!
Kate Moulton
Hi Dave, Jeff,
Yes, I’m afraid I am seriously lacking in the being photographed around wooden furniture and butter churns department…but feel free to use whatever you can. This is hysterical.
Kate was perfect. And she agreed to pretend go out with me. I’d thought of everything…except my uncanny ability to blow it with even the surest of shots.
I think I need to make something clear…I’m actually a very good Photoshop artist. Honest!
Creating images in Photoshop is something I do for a living, and something I do well. I’ve studied illustration for years, and my experience with Photoshop’s suite of tools has been one of the cornerstones of my career. But producing high-quality, convincing work requires time, preparation, and a healthy respect for the software’s limitations, especially when combining several images into a single picture.
The most important consideration is the horizon line. Every image has one—it’s the vantage point of the camera lens and the viewer’s eye. It dictates the angles of every object in an image, determining if you’re looking up, down, or straight at your subject. Combining photos where the horizon lines don’t closely match will never produce a convincing image.
There are also basic lighting considerations. Every image has a light source that creates any and all highlights and shadows. If your background’s lit from the left, and you put a subject who’s lit from behind on that background, it’s going to look fake. If you take a figure from low light and drop him into a sunny day, he’ll look flat and out of place. If the photo was taken using a flash…forget it. All of the subject’s details will be washed away.
If you’re photoshopping parts of people onto other people, anatomy becomes a major concern. The body only moves in certain ways, and if you place a subject’s head at one angle while the neck is moving in another, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb (placed at a third, even weirder angle). And then there’s the camera and the files it produces. Matters of focus, exposure, resolution, and flash photography vs. natural light. All of these need to match closely.
You can tweak and manipulate an image to compensate for slight differences, but the magical Enhance button is pure spy-thriller fantasy. You can’t manipulate data that isn’t there. So taking a lousy thumbnail off Google Images and fitting it into a professionally shot background won’t work. That’s why the key to pulling off a successful Photoshop image is collecting as many pictures as you can. In hindsight, pretending to live in a community that is morally opposed to photography was a bad idea.
Dave Cicirelli
Everyone, meet Kate. We made out, and she baked me a pie.
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The relationship was off to a rocky start—the image was awful. I’d committed every Photoshop sin at once—bad angles, mixing flash photography with outdoor lighting, attaching faces to heads that were tilted the wrong way—it was horrendous. So obviously, inescapably horrendous.
But at 2:00 a.m. when I’d made it, I somehow hadn’t seen the problems. I wasn’t looking at the image; I was looking beyond it—toward all the storylines it was about to open up.
So I hit the Upload button the next morning and went to work completely satisfied with my wit.
Dave Cicirelli
Everyone, meet Kate. We made out, and she baked me a pie.
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Elliott Askew Wait a second…Why is it that you BOTH look like cardboard cut out people…WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOU!? That is a fake person right?
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Joe Lennon Photoshop?
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“Photoshop.”
There was the word, right on my wall. It was the answer to a question I couldn’t afford to be asked. Elliott, Joe Lennon, and anyone else watching were all just a little mental effort away from considering that none of my story was true. And the moment they considered that possibility would be the
moment it all became obvious. I mean, what sounds more likely? Either I was an Amish indentured servant who’d abandoned his life so he could toilet-paper a horse and buggy, and whose pictures sometimes looked really fake…or I was just an asshole.
I spent the whole workday distracted by that feeling in the pit of my stomach. It made designing a website for a frozen-food sweepstakes seemingly impossible and increasingly trivial because all I could hear was the ticking of the time bomb I’d left on my wall.
I had no good options. Leaving the Amish Kate post online would just give more people time to see it and doubt it. But pulling it would be suspicious, too, and only confirm their suspicion.
Tick, tick, tick.
I heard it in every click of my mouse. It was torture—realizing I was investing more time and care on this dumb website for a frozen macaroni client than I had on the most pivotal piece of artwork for the biggest personal project of my life.
Ultimately, exposure was inevitable. I knew Fakebook was unsustainable and that people were going to find out. But for any of it to be worthwhile, Fakebook’s destruction had to be a spectacular crash that revealed something new—like an early jet smashing into the sound barrier. Instead of going out in a blaze of glory, this post was making Fakebook simply sputter toward the ground.
All I could think to do was use the old “shine a spotlight on it” trick. If there’s a giant flaw in something you made…own it. I’d call attention to what an awful photo it was and hope and pray that people believed me—that they’d blame it on the shittiness of my third-generation iPhone camera.
Dave Cicirelli
Everyone, meet Kate. We made out, and she baked me a pie.
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Elliott Askew Wait a second…Why is it that you BOTH look like cardboard cut out people…WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOU!? That is a fake person right?
11 minutes ago via mobile · Like
Joe Lennon Photoshop?
less than a minute ago via mobile · Like
Dave Cicirelli Hahaha. Oh man, poor girl gets like one photograph a year and we look like cardboard cutouts. If I photoshopped that pic, I’d be embarrassed. This girls mad cool too. I’ll have to take a better pic of her tomorrow (iPhones have no flash, and Amish have no lightbulbs.)
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I looked at what I wrote. It was desperate. I looked at the picture. It was terrible. The bomb kept ticking, and every second was another opportunity for someone to stumble upon the photo and put it all together.
It killed me. All afternoon I weighed the risk of keeping the photo up and the risk of pulling it down. I changed my mind a hundred times before the workday ended.
After work, I found myself sitting on a bench outside the Flatiron Building. It was starting to get dark earlier and earlier, and the buildings were lit up. I faced north, looking at the Empire State Building over the trees in Madison Park. There was a chill in the air that my jacket wasn’t keeping out. I just sat there in a cold daze.
I thought for a second that maybe the photo wasn’t that bad. Maybe I was overreacting. I told myself it would be fine. Then I pulled up the photo and looked at it again. It was even worse than I’d remembered. So I pulled it.
Dave Cicirelli
Yikes. Jonathon didn’t realize I put his daughter’s picture on the internet. He’s making me pull it—he thinks Facebook is some sort of pornography.
What a nightmare.
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Matt Campbell How did he find out? Do the Amish employ net-able people as spies?
less than a minute ago via mobile · Like
Dave Cicirelli I know…I keep half expecting to stumble onto the Bat Computer. Gossip man, like anywhere else. They’re an insular people, and I’m this big X factor around here. Plus I’ve been flirting with Kate (the girl in the pic and Jonathon’s daughter) like crazy. People talk man…people talk.
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I sat there, staring at the screen until it went to sleep. It was a clunky, transparent fix.
I found myself back at square one. Amish Kate was off the table, over before it began. Fake Dave was still on the farm. I was back in the boring holding pattern I’d been trying to break out of, in even worse standing with my audience than before. Sensationalism was off the table for the foreseeable future.
A week after I’d pulled the photo of Amish Kate, I met with Elizabeth at the mega-deli on the corner of Madison Park. Her office was around the corner from mine, so on the rare occasion that we shared a slow day, we always made an effort to grab lunch.
I was still reeling and had spent the week rereading the boring FarmVille posts I’d put up to defuse my Photoshop photo bomb. At least they felt safe. There was no momentum to Fakebook anymore. My thoughts were scattered and my heart wasn’t in it. I was scared to make another wrong move, and for the first time since I’d started, I wasn’t getting any reaction—there were posts with no likes and no comments.
Fakebook lived on voyeurism, and disinterest was the worst end of this project. As Oscar Wilde once said, “If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.”
Elizabeth grabbed a container of lettuce and handed it to the guy working the salad station, ordering the usual—beets, cranberry-raisins, walnuts, goat cheese, and balsamic.
It was too healthy for me and the funk I was in, so I grabbed a tray and wandered around. Sushi, pizza, Korean barbecue, tacos, wraps…all of it looked pretty good.
“Pretty good” is a low standard in a town where the “very good” version of anything is just a few blocks away, but variety is what made the Manhattan food courts an easy compromise. Besides, the cafeteria setting was appropriate for lunch with a school friend.
The art school bond is a special one. You spend thousands of hours together working on projects, exchanging ideas, helping each other figure them out. You live with each other’s frustrations, triumphs, and failures, as you try, as Van Gogh put it, “to break through that iron wall between what I feel and what I express.”
It was over one of these lunches that I’d first told Elizabeth about Fakebook, back when it was still just an idea. She’d loved it and promised to help, and of course she had. Her comments brought a balance to the testosterone-driven ballbusting from Ted and Steve—something I thought would be especially important after the introduction of Amish Kate. If only I’d gotten the chance.
“Dave…” she said, drawing my name out in her endearing, girlish way. “That Photoshop was really bad.”
“I know…” I looked down at the unwieldy piece of barbecue chicken I’d settled on.
“I mean, even the resolutions didn’t match. You should always scale things down to the lowest quality image.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking.” I scooped up a forkful of runny sweet potatoes. They were pretty good. “The really scary thing is I loved it when I made it. I thought it was really funny. It was late—and I think I was just blinded by the joy I get out of doing ridiculous things. I know what you’re saying, though. I could have been much more careful. Turns out I can blow it even with a girl I made up.”
Elizabeth was looking back at me with her involuntary compassion.
“Well, maybe the margin of error is over. If you really want to keep doing this, you need to take it seriously. You need to set a shot list and give yourself a library of photos you can use with all sorts of different light settings. Be professional about it.”
“This thing is really…” I tried to get out. “It’s sort of a knot of a thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…it’s hard to explain. There are all these threads, and each one I feel a different way about. Part of it is funny, part of it is twisted, part of it is mean or interesting or silly. Like…I feel guilty when people take it
seriously. I feel excited and thrilled when people really believe it. I feel empowered when I create a new post and someone goes for it—when I’ve made something that makes their version of the world a little stranger. It’s a crazy feeling.
“But then I feel powerless when I can’t control their reactions. This version of myself I created as a joke is more important to people than the real me ever was. It’s insane to become jealous of yourself. It’s this strange feeling of rejection. At the same time, now that people are turning on him, I feel betrayed. It doesn’t make any sense.
“And every time I sit down to write a new Fakebook post or make a new image,” I continued, “I just feel crippled. I tug on any one of those threads, and the whole thing becomes more knotted.”
“Maybe,” Elizabeth said, “you just need to not think so much about it. If it’s torturing you, I think you need to either stop doing it or stop worrying about the things that are making it difficult.” She paused. “But I think you should keep doing it.”
She sat there, collecting her thoughts. “It just feels…”
“Yeah…”
We shared an unspoken understanding. We’d spent hours and hours of studio time together. Fakebook, for all its frustrations and headaches, was unique. We both knew the value of a truly original idea. We both knew how rare those ideas were—and how delicate.
After work, I kicked off my shoes, plugged in my laptop, and sat on my unmade bed.
Dave Cicirelli
Here’s another picture of a horse. Hope you like it.
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Joe Moscone I’m bored by Amish country, perhaps even more than you are. Go somewhere with hot women and share those photos. Horses…carriages…children…enough already.
Fakebook Page 8