Censoring All The ‘F’ Words On TV

[Milton] sent in a build that censors every ‘F’ word on TV, and not just the one that rhymes with ‘duck,’ either. His setup sounds the alarm every time someone inside the moving picture box says a word that contains the letter F.

The build is based around Nootropic Design’s Video Experimenter Shield. This neat little shield has been used as a video sampler and has analyzed what the talking heads are actually saying. The Video Experimenter Shield has support for closed captions, meaning a transcript from a TV show can be read in real-time. All [Milton] had to do so the ‘F word’ alarm could be sounded was strchr().

The F-Chip, as [Milton] calls his build, includes three outputs – a solenoid sounds a bicycle horn, sends some air through a whistle, and lights up an ‘F-word’ alarm. From the video of the F-Chip in action (available after the break), we can tell that this build is awesome, thoughtful, and annoying. The only way it could be made more annoying is by making an ‘E-word’ alarm, but there are ways around that.

[vimeo=33553853]

25 thoughts on “Censoring All The ‘F’ Words On TV

  1. “All [Milton] had to do so the ‘F word’ alarm could be sounded was strchr().”

    Trying to sound 133t?
    It is strstr() that allows you to locate a string in a string, NOT strchr()

  2. The ~beep~ thing that went though my mind was WT~beep~.

    However, gotta love the engineering that went into the whistle setup. Maybe it needs to be ported to the sports channel and address the decision tree of ~beep~ play.

  3. The background noise made it hard to tell what was being bleeped (honked) and the horn was a bit off with the mechanical delay. Maybe some compressed air and a sports whistle? Or…like the old laugh-ins a different noise for each beep (horn, whistle, cow bell, gong, etc)

  4. I actually stopped watching TV shows because of the insane US censoring.
    Nowadays they even do actual bleeps in drama shows, which is simply insane. It’s bad enough to do it in non-drama, but beeps in drama.. no that’s really way way way beyond any notion of a shimmer of acceptable.

    And that discovery actually fuzzes out the mouth too.. when I see that I also stop watching in disgust.

  5. Pretty smart, but somthing that always made me laugh was watching “Do the Right Thing” on TBS, the editing was a riot, they actually replaced the phrase “Motherfucker” with “Mickey Fickey”! The next iteration of this should look for foul (even mild) language and inject a nonsense Ned Flanderish phrase over the audio, watching HBO would be a laugh riot!

  6. Reminds me of “The Count Censored” and other “inappropriately censored” works. But not as funny. And is just what I would do with this gadget. F@#% “F,” go for “K.”

  7. Cute POC for playing with the shield.

    But WHY censor the “F-word”?!?!

    There are lots of other problems in US society than banning the “F-word”. George Carlin once said that the Pro-Life-White-Conservatives-Got-Jesus-stuck-in-the-ass of America are the ones to call for death penalty but call themselves “Pro-Life”.

    You can show people getting shot dead on TV as long as they don’t curse?!?!? No wonder why most Europeans consider Americans to be illerates babling fools.

    1. Now, that’s an argument for another forum. And no, most Europeans don’t consider Americans to be “illerates babling” (sic) fools; don’t buy into that. They do tend to consider us prudes, though.

    1. Better yet, I had the idea to make an MP3/Radio that would identify the song playing and sync/replace with the studio (non-radio-edit) version if the song existed in your library. It would put you a little out of sync occasionally; for example, the raving monologue in The Sickness is something like three times longer on the album than over the radio. You could have a setting to either truncate the song when it ended on the radio or play the song to its completion. For the win, you would buffer the radio stream after the song ended and resume. I gotta get on this!

  8. This will be interesting when the closed captions lag the actual audio, which happens most of the time.

    I’ve seen the CC’s lag by up to five or ten minutes in some cases, and a few rather amusing times I’ve seen it actually LEAD the actual dialogue.

    Not to mention the frequent times when sections of the closed captioning are re-written, as often happens in real-time captioning, as in news broadcasts and live shows.

    Fiunally there’s the always enjoyable times when we get a show where the bad words aren’t bleeped, but ARE rendered as ‘—-‘ in the closed captions, because apparently deaf folks have much more delicate sensibilities…

    (My wife and I are hard-of-hearing, and so always watch TV with CC on. )

  9. for those not paying attention this lil device censors out any word word with F in it not just FUCK, but dam would it be funny and you would gain an appreciation for how many words have an F in them say “Honestly ~beep~ I didn’t know my ~beep~ was out and I can’t ~beep~ another ~beep~”

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