just existing here :)

the concept of star-eating microbes causing a crisis and the solution being the introduction of space wolves to space yellowstone to control the space elk population. i love a good trophic cascade

dr ryland grace immediately pitching "turn the spaceship into a giant centrifuge to generate gravity" and then not balancing his actual centrifuge later on

the entire "life is reason" scene really

grace forgetting to open the mystery alien container in a fume hood AND immediately sticking his nose in it. if we did this in chemistry lab we were executed on the spot

academia drama being one of the cornerstones of grace's character

grace switching through every spectrum setting on the microscope to try to see into the astrophages and not being able to (relatable)

also: the astrophage dying and grace going "ohhh it died..." (very relatable)

grace having his not-scientist buddy Carl to give him frank solutions when he's overthinking. yes, often the solution is just to put the box in another box

copious duct tape usage

just sticking a filter into the path of the petrova line to collect astrophage goop

eva going "so it's alive" when grace tells them the astrophage are moving, and him being like "WELL ok that could be for a lot of reasons" in the tone of someone who doesn't even know where to start explaining why that's a hasty assumption

grace referring to the first new astrophage as his and carl's baby multiple times (HIGHLY relatable)

its on the news

mom, how do i...?

and dad, how do i...?

^ there are tons of other resources but these two will teach you some personal hygiene, home or apartment repairs, easy recipes and basic cleaning techniques, even how to schedule doctor's appointments

if youre a renter i cannot recommend the trans handyma'am enough, mercury is a lifesaver, and her channel and accounts are always accepting new questions

and then on the day of the show, my friend asks, "where is the camera I requested?"

gallerist: "you didn't request a camera"

my friend: "I did, and you confirmed that you would have one here."

gallerist: "that isn't true."

and then she proceeded to pull up the email thread, and my friend could see that every single email they had sent had been summarized by AI, and that the gallerist had then had AI write a response to them based on the AI summary, and that the AI had detected that they needed a camera, and confirmed on behalf of the gallerist that they would bring a camera, but because the gallerist had offloaded the work of actually reading and responding, she simply hadn't actually made any note of it herself, therefore didn't bring it, nor did she even know one was needed.

so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.

this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.

And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:

“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”

I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.

And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!

they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.

obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.

the phone immediately began to ring.

“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”

“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.

I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.

@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.

My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:

me: hi there, you’ve got TST-

him: *strained, wheezing dutch laughter*

me: hey, is everything o-

him: pfffHAHAHAAH YOU MAKE THEM SO MAD. THEY THINK SO LITTLE OF YOUUUUUUUU BUT THE MEN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE FOOLISH! HA! HA! HA! YOU HAVE DUPED THEM!