~A little fae around the edges~

“Excuse me, Mr. Snape?”

“Its professer Snape.”

“Do you have a doctorate degree?”

“…No”

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

you probably heard that the mars opportunity rover died today. 

it was hard news to hear. i cried at my desk at work. it doesn’t make it easier that it was only supposed to run for 90 days at all; it doesn’t make it easier that it lived 14 years longer than it expected to. it lived a full life. it lived a very good life. it was the first set of eyes on miles and miles of mars. it was an explorer, it was tough, it was very, very brave. and none of that makes it easier, none of that makes it okay that it is not going to sing happy birthday to itself again.

about a year ago, my childhood cat died. i loved her more than anything. i don’t live near my family any more, and i wasn’t there for it, but my parents were, and they held her while her body gave out, and they say she knew she was with them, she knew she was loved.

i know opportunity was a computer inside a movable body, and not a person, or even an animal. still, i wish it had had people to hold it. i wish it had been with the people who cared for it. it seems very hard to me, to die so far from home.

but i think - to the extent to which we can say computers “know” things, which i think is a great deal; i think knowing is most of what computers do; i think if they have a consciousness, knowledge must be nearly all of it-

i think opportunity knew it was loved. 

every couple of months i dream that i’ve gone home and my cat’s there. even now, even though my grieving is over and done with, i visit her in my dreams, and i hold her, and every time, she purrs. she missed me. she’s so happy to be with me again.

Thanks for bringing us along.

MAKING AUDIO

free audio production stuff

Audacity is an open-source audio editing program. I think it’s what Griffin McElroy of My Brother My Brother and Me uses? Here’s a guide if you get stumped.

Here’s a few collections of sound effects.

As long as you credit, you can use any of this music for free.

audio production tips

How to make a pop filter (it will stop your audio from popping on B and P sounds) from common household objects

They say that munching a Granny Smith apple between takes will reduce unwanted mouth sounds

Getting better sound without a recording studio

Getting better sound, pt 2 

Make sure that dialogue can be heard over music, sound effects, etc. When in doubt, listen to your current mix with your eyes closed and see what stands out.

a relatively cheap mic, if you’re okay investing a little bit

This is the microphone the leads use for Starship Iris. It’s got a USB cable that plugs straight into your computer, and it’s under $40.

WRITING SCRIPTS

I’d recommend working in Google docs. It lets you share files quickly with others for easy editing, it saves automatically, and you won’t have a trillion different versions of your episodes floating around your computer.

Outline your whole season before you start writing. Write your whole season before you start production. I know, it will feel a little labor intensive. Trust me, though–I started production before finishing the season scripts and it kneecapped the show for months and months.

Consider keeping things simple for your first effort. We all have gigantic, sprawling narratives in our heads featuring casts of hundreds (we do, right?) but you’re gonna be learning so much in this process, it’s way less overwhelming if you can scale down. Maybe find a way to tell one aspect of the story, featuring a handful of characters, but to tell it in a compelling way.

Think realistically about the voices that will be at your disposal. If you want to just use your friends and all your friends are female, keep that in mind when creating characters. (See “if you don’t want to act” below for advice finding actors.) 

Read everything out loud. If anything feels clunky, change it until you can say it naturally.

When you think you’re done, invite over a bunch of friends for pizza (or other foods! I don’t know your life, dude) and have an informal table read. Don’t take a role. Sit back and listen carefully. You may find stuff you want to fix. Ask your friends for feedback. They may give you valuable perspective.

A good way to stay motivated is to find a friend who also wants to write a script, and then keep pushing each other and reading each other’s stuff.

IF YOU NEED WRITERS

Approach your writer friend(s). Tell them that if they write you a script, you will produce it into a radio play. It’s worth a shot.

Approach your creative writing teacher, if your school has one. Tell them that you want to produce a script, and ask them to tell their students to submit scripts to you. (Set up a gmail account for this purpose.) It’s worth a shot.

If all else fails, honestly, I’d say go through your lit textbook (or short story anthologies) and find a poem or short story you like (or say, an act of a Shakespeare play), then record/produce that. Then show it to your lit teacher. They will be confused. But maybe also happy? If it’s something they covered in class, they’ll probably feel like they Got Through To You and Made A Difference, and adults love that shit.

IF YOU NEED ACTORS

The obvious go-to is to ask your friends. If you do table reads (see writing section above) you will get a sense of who is suited to what role.

Approach your school’s drama teacher, or the teacher who directs the school play, or the forensics coach. Let them read a copy of your script so they know you’re not, like, using it to promote meth or anything. Ask them to tell their students about the opportunity, and/or ask them if you can hang fliers (first, make fliers).

As a former drama kid, I can promise you that we are always hungry for available roles.

OTHER PEOPLE TO CONSIDER REACHING OUT TO

The school paper might be looking for things to write about.

Local bands might let you feature their original music in your intro/outro, in exchange for plugging their website, etc, in your credits.

If you’re having sound engineering problems, consider asking the computer lab teacher, or the video production teacher.

If you have multiple friends who want to make podcasts, consider forming a network! There’s strength in numbers.

Just generally, if you think of someone in your life with relevant skills, don’t be afraid to ask for help.

IF YOU ARE UNCOMFORTABLE ASKING FOR FAVORS

Ugh, it’s so scary, right?

My honest advice is to get really good at baking something relatively simple, like brownies. Now you’re not asking for favors, you’re conducting a transaction!

Also, even if they’re not available to help, like, 9 times out of 10, people will be flattered you thought of them.

PEOPLE NOT TO APPROACH FOR PRODUCTION HELP

Me

Not because I don’t care (I am seriously rooting for you) but because I probably won’t be able to give much advice. All my advice is right here. Hell, I even asked for help putting this together.

FURTHER READING

Not all of this may be relevant to you, but definitely worth checking out

“So You Wanna Start A Podcast?” by Wolf 359’s Zach Valenti

Multitude Productions has some great resources on podcasting.

One thing I think is not talked about very much is that straight men live pretty much desexualized lives if we’re not actually having sex at that moment, and then there’s not much room to be the object rather than subject.

As I’ve said before, we men don’t have clothing options for “dressing sexy” in masculine clothing (there is cross dressing but that is different). There’s no male equivalent to the short skirt or low cut top. There’s no male lingerie that isn’t seen as a joke.

Further, we just don’t get validation for our sexuality outside of a sexual partner. We are almost never complimented for our looks or sexiness from platonic friends like women are, especially same sex friends.

There really aren’t many straight male role models for raw aesthetic sexiness in mainstream culture (besides unnaturally muscled men). In fiction, male characters are almost never attractive for embodying sexiness but rather for doing things (saving the world, being extremely witty, being a genius, winning the tournament, etc.). Their sexiness is non-aesthetic and sometimes is in spite of their aesthetics.

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of men aren’t even called physically hot and sexy by their own sexual partners, who themselves focus on personality. There’s not much room to fulfill the role of passive sexism object for you partner for many/most men.

I think it is telling that a lot of porn for men ignores the man’s personality and has a woman just throwing themselves at the man, overcome with lust.

Also there the fact that women seem to rarely approach men and some seem to often expect the man to do most of the sexual escalation, especially in the early stages.

The answer always seems to be some combination of slot machine mentality (“maybe this one will like it, and make the other 50 worthwhile”) and a desire for witness. Surprising numbers of people admit that it’s validation even if the reaction is negative, simply because they’re still being viewed in a totally sexual context.

At the very least that has obvious consequences for people trying to reduce dick pic sending. There’s some core of people who can’t possibly be reached with “it’s not attractive to women” because that was never their expectation.

More broadly, I think efforts to get (Western?) men to emphasize with objectification wildly underestimate the challenge they’re facing. It’s not just a sympathy shortage, it’s a totally unfamiliar feeling. Making things even harder, it’s a feeling a lot of men say they wish they could have.

The usual narrative on not (politely) complimenting the appearance of unknown women is “sure, it’s nice if it happens once, but think about how annoyed you’d be if it happened all the time”. Fine in general terms, but I think a lot of men don’t have any way to intuit the emotional difference between too-frequent compliments and being pestered with too much of something totally innocuous like requests for the date.

The comments on those articles are frequently from men saying they’ve literally never received a single compliment from a stranger on their appearance, and can’t imagine what it would be like. The ones who have are often talking about a single, years-old compliment they still cherish. That’s not a framework that supports more than a purely theoretical understanding of what’s it’s like to be valued for your appearance too heavily - or at all.

https://www.thrillist.com/sex-dating/los-angeles/we-sent-a-preemptive-v-pic-before-dudes-could-send-dick-pics-heres-what-happened

Let’s be honest: while I enjoy penises, I don’t necessarily want unexpected visual boners intruding on my day. I wondered, “What would guys do if I turned the tables and sent them an unexpected vagina pic?” And so, in my own twist on revenge porn, I sent 40 unexpected vagina pics to men on Bumble.

This … didn’t work out the way she apparently expected it to:

Overall, I was surprised that I didn’t get my, “Gotcha!” moment. I’d initially hoped the guys would see how invasive it is to receive such intimate photos from a stranger. When I’m excited to get to know a guy, his penis isn’t the first part of him that I want to know. But given that men like to send dick pics, I suppose their enthusiasm for v-pics makes sense.

So, basically, women experience dick picks as a net negative, as an intimacy violation, while men experience v-pics as a huge positive, as validation and an indicator of interest.

This seems consistent with the above discussion, where it’s a pretty common male experience to basically never receive any sexual attention ever and thus respond really strongly positively to whatever scraps come their way (or to start trolling for attention - with the point of some of these dick pics apparently being to get any attention at all, no matter how hostile), while a common female experience seems to be more like being flooded with unwanted sexual attention and wanting a way to make it stop -

resulting in an absolutely massive inferential gap - with the result that if you’re on one side of the gap and try to describe your feelings and experiences to the people on the other side, whatever words you have will just fall on deaf ears because the feeling and experiences you describe are … not just unfamiliar, but outright alien, to the ones on the other side.

For women, it feels like all women are sexy to men.

I compliment women and I get a thank you, a description of where what I complimented her came from, and a happy chat about related topics. I compliment a cis guy and I’ve drawn attention to myself forever because now I’ve noticed him and that means I’m fuck able.

i too am part of the “Twilight Is Wild’s Guardian Companion” Club as well 

“What? No, someone will see me someday, it’ll end up all over tumblr or something.”

“Oh come on, no one’s ever going to find this one picture.”

When I was younger, I read a lot of Christian books. In high school, I wrote a paper on Christian literature, specifically, what it is about Christian literature that makes it often flatter and less compelling than other genres. I’m not saying it all sucks, but I am saying that somehow, I’ve noticed through my life that Christian books suck more than their secular counterparts on average. I found them to often be juvenile, one-dimensional and derivative, and I didn’t think it had to be that way. I didn’t think that being Christian made a book bad, but I observed that the genre was stuffed with a lot of bad books, and the bad books were far worse than bad books outside the category. 

I’m not intending to start a discussion about Christian literature; I’m not alone in feeling this way or noticing this phenomenon if you believe it’s a thing. Online, you can read a lot of articles discussing the same thing: that Christian lit tends to be lower quality. So I wanted to know why. 

To answer the question, I looked at interviews of Christian authors and submission guidelines for Christian publishers. I wished to understand the intent behind writings in the genre and what might lead to the difference in quality. And what I found was very illuminating. 

Essentially, many Christian authors and publishers feel that: 

1. their books have a responsibility to promote morality in their readers, and authors are somewhat responsible for the moral fiber of their readers  

2. there has to be a strong delineation between “moral” and “immoral” behavior in books 

3. many topics either can’t be addressed at all or must be very clearly pointed out as “bad” if they are 

4. certain topics and ideas ought to be brought up in a book and pointed out as good as part of the purpose or meaning of the book

The conclusion I came to was that these ideas were resulting in flat, one-dimensional characters and dull plots. The responsibility of promoting moral integrity, and having to make absolutely sure that nothing you write could condone or promote immoral behavior, was of paramount importance. 

And what that caused was preachiness, one-dimensionality, a lack of compelling moral conflict, flat characters, and intellectually numbing stories. 

Why am I talking about this? 

Because a lot of the ideas I’ve been seeing spread around in writeblr and in the online writing and reading communities as a whole are identical. 

A lot of the posts I see online now about writing are almost exact echoes of the ideas I wrote about in my paper. 

Nowadays, I see posts constantly urging people to think about why they want to write their stories, and whether they are good or helpful or edifying. I see authors being slammed for not condemning characters with disgusting beliefs hard enough. I see people being dragged for liking characters that are not morally and ideologically pure. I see posts telling people to approach any difficult topic with extreme caution and crisp, unmistakable condemnation. Media is widely vilified when its fandom becomes toxic or nasty, assumed to be at fault for the moral fiber of its fans.

I see authors and publishers advertising their books as “feminist”, as if that makes any sense at all (is the author feminist? Does it just handle female characters well? Are the characters feminist? Is it focused on women’s issues?). I open a book and see poorly-integrated lines of dialogue dropping ideas about prejudice or gender that seem like a Tumblr post or part from a nonfiction book on racism inserted directly into a character’s mouth. I don’t think feminism is bad. I think feminism is great. And I don’t think talking about prejudice or gender is bad. I think these things need to be talked about. I definitely don’t think these ideas can’t be expressed in fiction. On the contrary; I think fiction is one of the best ways of expressing important ideas. 

But, I see some kind of preoccupation with the ideas your writing promotes, prominently including the idea that you must promote and you must condemn certain ideas, and that everything you write makes a statement about morality, and you’re responsible for edifying your audience and making them better people. And it’s really, really familiar. 

The conclusion that my paper came to is that you can’t clean up the reality of humanity. You can’t make the messiness of existence crisp and clear so you can feed your readers the ideas you want them to absorb bite by bite. You can’t have light without darkness, and you can’t have either without shades of gray. 

In life, racist people will not always be obviously horrible. (Even though sometimes they are…) Sometimes they will be people who love their spouses and kids and are generally “nice” and adopt dogs and love kittens, and they will still be racist. Sometimes even “good” people will say or do racist things and have to realize their mistakes and then make mistakes again and have to realize THOSE mistakes. Sometimes getting out of ideas you grew up hearing is long and difficult and you have to catch your brain repeating them even years after you tried to change. Racism can be passive, subtle, it can exist in people who are “good” in some ways. Sometimes people make progress toward changing but still have problems. How do we show this in books? Is it an author’s responsibility to solve all this and sort out everything? 

Is it racist for a racist character who is seeking redemption  to not have entirely overcome their prejudices by the end of a book? Is it the author’s responsibility to make sure racist behavior in the book is clearly labeled? Is it a reflection of the author’s views if a character says something racist? 

Note that I’m asking these questions. I’m definitely open to and would like perspectives from other people on this, people of color foremost and especially. The idea I am exploring is, does giving an author the responsibility of making sure their book clearly and unequivocally promotes certain ideas and condemns others impair them? Could it make it more difficult to address the ideas they want to? 

When I analyzed Christian literature, the conclusion I had to reach was that it does. I found christian lit as a whole to be excessively black-and-white, simplistic, shy of tackling anything with complexity, and almost dishonest about human nature. Is there an analogy in this situation? 

In life, relationships aren’t always pure and unproblematic. People don’t fall neatly into “people who have never done anything to hurt their partner” and abusers. People can sometimes have problems in their relationships and have to change their behaviors to preserve their relationships. Relationships have difficulties and arguments. Sometimes a person needs to change or become better in order to have a healthy relationship. Sometimes a relationship can be unhealthy without being abusive, and sometimes relationships are abusive. Must the author draw lines about “toxicity” and “problematicness” in super clear neon spray paint so people know the difference? 

These arguments come up about all sorts of morality-related things in books. And on some level I agree, you shouldn’t promote racism, and you should be careful and sensitive about portraying some things, but I am also extremely apprehensive about certain aspects of this culture that has sprung up. 

It’s really almost totally identical to what I noticed about Christian literature, and imo there it has done a lot of damage. I don’t really believe that authors are totally past being responsible for damage their ideas do, quite the opposite. But there is this expectation of dictating what’s bad and what’s good on a very clear level. 

That was part of the problem i noticed in Christian literature, the teaching of ideas rather than forcing readers to consider them. 

I’m not trying to talk over anybody at all, esp with things about racism, I’m white after all. And I really urge and ask my white followers and people-who-see-this-post to listen to the opinions, ideas and feelings of people of color who reply on the topic of racism. What I really want is everybody to consider this: is it an author’s job to make sure all “bad” and “good” things in their book are clearly delineated? If not, what is the best practice for an author? If not, might this cause problems? The culture I am seeing in the writeblr community seems to hold that it is, and rejection of redemption for villains, morally ambiguous situations and characters, addressing of complicated topics, and portraying anything “bad” without making absolutely certain that it’s clearly wrong is growing. 

Personally, I have a bad feeling about it. 

That’s what I find, although my primary lens isn’t race; I come from the domestic violence prevention world, and have been watching frothing about “unhealthy” and “abusive” ships with alternating bemusement and dismay. I do care, deeply, about preventing intimate partner violence; but I think the current mania for pure, unproblematic relationships is honestly getting in the way of honest conversations about abuse.

Part of this is because, if you can only show good things as good, you cannot talk about the appeal of an abusive relationship, about why people stay in it. You have to deny the power and magnetism of loving a flawed person, and can’t talk about the profound yearning to be loved despite our flaws. If you don’t understand why people repeatedly return to an abusive partner–if you can’t empathize with their feelings and reasoning, and acknowledge their motivations as often being deeply compassionate and altruistic–then you cannot help them ever decide to walk away for good.