podcast sideblerg

I think Welcome to Night Vale is kinda the Tumblr of Tumblr. Like obviously it’s this huge, load-bearing part of Tumblr culture. It was one of the tentpole fandoms on this site and WTNV and the WTNV fandom did a lot to codify what the tumblr brand of media engagement would look like. But it feels like very few people actually engage with WTNV as a living fiction. It’s still releasing biweekly, but I personally have never seen anyone reference any WTNV plot lines or jokes from later than like 2018 (but then again I could be missing them since I’m also not caught up). It’s so similar to people on twitter or bluesky talk about Tumblr as though it’s a totally dead platform and fondly reminiscing about the good old days (sometimes while while sharing screenshots of posts from that last year even). Tumblr is dragging around a memory of what WTNV’s used to be, the way the rest of the internet is dragging around Tumblr’s supposed corpse.

finding out what all the wolf 359 cast do while they weren’t VAing their characters is wild. Zach Labresco does improv clowning. Scotty Shoemaker runs a renewable energy non-profit. Cecilia Lyn-Jacobs is a professionally trained dancer. Alan Rodi is a substitute teacher who teaches music with hand puppets to kids. Emma Sherr-Ziarko is in every single audio drama ever. Noah Masur is a software engineer. Zach Valenti has 15 side gigs. Michaela Swee has a PHD IN CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY ??

And they're all college friends who have stayed in touch which is even wilder tbh

This doesn’t come up as much in later seasons but I suspect the Hephaestus’s shifting architecture, objects moving around, and the feeling that there’s more people on board comes from the aliens fucking with time so I’m convinced at least once Minkowski opened the door to the observation deck, saw Hui and Fourier there, shut the door, counted to ten, and opened it again to see an empty room and just never brought it up because she thought she was losing it.

#ah yes the ghost passengers we’ve all seen them #Maxwell: which of you assholes drank my protein shake #Mace Fisher simultaneously 5 minutes and 5 years in the past: #huh I wonder who put this in the fridge. oh well #Eiffel: sometimes you can unlock the secret chill Lovelace but she always seems really confused

“i asked chat gpt” “i asked grok” yeah well i asked the dear listeners and they told me i must cowabunga, dude. and soon

also crazy how wolf 359 was the passion project of like four people like a year out of college.

i think the most entertaining recurring instance of wolf 359 writers occasionally forgetting about gravity is any time a character shatters glass in a large open space. idon't care how angry you are. you just killed everyone. you are never cleaning up all of those itty bitty those glass shards. "officer eiffel's lung just collapsed!" that's probably not even decima. he just inhaled tiny pieces of glass and is going to die before you can even say "blood transfusion"