Wait....what?

Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6

so like, I’m not even going to go into the quality of the humor of the show (which I just generally strongly dislike. it’s patronizing and annoying and I don’t like it) – what I will do is address the fact that Bubble is not a good audio drama. It’s not. It was incredibly unsurprising when Jesse Thorn made those obnoxious tweets about how the BEST thing about HIS SHOW was that it made HIM, a SMART PERSON who knows that audio drama is BAD, actually like an audio drama! It was unsurprising when, in his pathetic attempt to walk this back, he named several of his “favorite pieces of audio fiction” and some of them weren’t even audio fiction! Because he clearly doesn’t know what audio fiction is. He doesn’t know how it works. And so he can’t write it.

This is pretty clear in Bubble’s origin story: it was the first script he did in The Dead Pilots Society, meaning he meant it as a TV script. Nobody bought it (because it sucks). But he’s convinced it’s brilliant, so he’s made it as a podcast because he can’t get it made as a TV show, and that’s a really bad idea. Because he doesn’t think of it as audio, and he doesn’t know how to script audio because he apparently thinks it’s an inferior medium and beneath him, so the whole fucking thing has an annoying-ass, pointless narrator essentially reading script directions, because he doesn’t know how to show things without telling in audio. (There’s even a “joke” where the narrator comments that “I’m gonna be quiet here because there’s nothing for me to narrate.” Why would you write that how can you write that and not know that the narrator is not something that should be there.) And that’s only the most obvious of the problems with his ability to write audio drama. It’s repetitive and unclear, and has none of the sense of action or the surroundings within a scene that well-written, well-put-together audio drama does. He doesn’t respect the medium he’s working in, he’s just using it as a cheap way to get what he wants, so he hasn’t put any thought into how to make his show sound good or how he should be writing to make audio entertaining, so the show isn’t entertaining. It’s either hard to follow or hammering its concepts into your face like you’re three years old and it’s painfully unfunny the whole time –

(as a quick correction because i hate bubble + fought w jesse on twitter Back In The Day–jordan morris, the other guy behind maxfun, created bubble, not jesse. he was hyping up his co-founder’s work, which is still… fairly egotistical, like, money in his pocket, whatever)

man you’re right. I don’t know why I had mistaken his producer credit for writing involvement. fair is fair enough.

So what can we do to make this end? 1 — a rule or whatever this is that the server is supposed to be private is just silly an obviously unenforceable but I mean, how it could it not be? A Discord server like this is not private, and no amount of insisting that it should be will make it so. If you say things on there that you’re upset that get back to me or another cast member (and it has, on all fronts) I don’t want to hear anymore about how it’s just oh, I’m sorry, you weren’t supposed to see that or we have this rule and it’s the person who shared it’s fault. No, you said it. It really stops there. You post something online, you posted it, they are your words and your thoughts. If you’d be upset if I saw it then maybe don’t say it in the first place? That’s not a hard principle to govern your online conduct by and then everyone doesn’t have to run to flood my inboxes telling me about it.

2 — that said, you’re not hurting my feelings. You’re seriously not. One billion percent not. I’m a little more emotionally healthy than a few of you seem to think I am. But I’m mightily annoyed about how I have to almost everyday sort through tons of messages about this server to get to things that are actually important.

How are some of our fandoms such a mess? Especially since so many of us are in multiple podcast fandoms and they all overlap— but not all of them get this bad?

Somehow I missed all of this.

I thought it might be nice to have a place where we can share stuff we like about podcasts and their fandoms. So if you want to give a shout out to a podcast or a fan whose art/fic/meta etc you enjoy, you can send it via an ask or submission and I’ll slap it on a template like so:

[You are the bee’s knees!]

and post it here. Please let me know the fandom and also who to tag clearly to make sure that they will see it!

Salt is awesome, and we always encourage being critical and aware of the things you consume... but it’s absolutely not healthy to solely be salty /negative. ❤️