head full eskew thoughts

I've been staring at this question for about five minutes and I honestly don't know what to say for this. 😅

There's certainly been some changes, but most of them have been fairly superficial. (Venture capital and Hollywood money rushing in, then rushing out, that sort of thing.) The core of it remains fundamentally the same: it's an amazing medium for getting a story out there, but boy howdy it's tough to make a show that finds an audience that's big enough to pay for the cost of production, let alone make any kind of a profit. There's a lot more shows now than there were ten years ago, which I think is a net positive. We've all spent a lot more time listening to audio fiction, so our formal literacy, storytelling sensibility, and structural familiarity have all gone way up. That's a good thing.

At the same time, you do notice some interesting conversations happen around the peripheries of the medium. I feel like for the past two years I've been hearing a lot about increased spatial sound design, and the desire to hear scenes where everything sounds completely consistent to the way it'd sound if you were there all the way through the scene. Which is a great tool up to a point, but so much of audio drama's power comes from the way in which its elasticity conceals and then dramatically unfurls information. There's a point at which totally realistic, spatially realized design takes away from that voltage - imagine Wooden Overcoats if you always had to hear Antigone breathing and moving around if she was in the room, for example. It's a lot of sacrificing what's cool and powerful and unique about the medium in order to hit an arbitrary mark. I, for one, remain skeptical of its utility.

Tomorrow at 2pm CST, I’m going to be hanging out in the @podcast-bookclub lounge, listening through all of The Hundred House Street, our latest series on Tales From Wolf Mountain. I hope you join me.

The Hundred House Street is a surreal sapphic erotic thriller set in a neighborhood that repeats itself forever where nothing ever changes and there are only two people in the world. It’s four episodes long and runs for about 2 hours.

This story is intended for mature audiences.

Content Warnings: The Hundred House Street includes themes and explicit descriptions of sexual and domestic violence, gun violence, torture, sexual material, suicidal ideation, and strong language.

it's from a collection of worldbuilding pages released before the podcast started airing! to find them you go to www.ourwarshaveended.com/ and redirect to the following urls:

/carpenter

/faulkner

/paige

/hayward

/david

/riyo

Episode 2 of Our Wars Have Ended, More Than A Man, is out now!

Listen wherever you like to listen:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/our-wars-have-ended/id1894177222

On the outskirts of the Lick, the remaining Morel family wait for the inevitable to happen. Sore Morel finds a new target for his fury and denial. Lively makes rapid plans to exit the company. A new client arrives with an intriguing job offer. Please be advised that this episode contains contains violent deaths, violent and verbal familial abuse, animal death, ableism, references to queerphobia.

Transcript: https://www.ourwarshaveended.com/transcripts-episode-2

This episode features:

Bekithemba Mbondiya as the Nameless Historian

Rod Glenn as Sore Morel

Simon Alison as the High Mischief

Zoe Lee as Dogged Morel

Tosca Bell as Timmer Morel

Lin Schalken as Fann Arkhetarias

Edwyn Tiong as the Long King

Nyx Calder as Inkblot

Juniper Lee Thalia Watkins as Foal

Mollie Goff as Lively

MJ McGeachin as Peeve

Bastián Alarcón as Capo Celis