The Evolution of Me

Propaganda

Hazel McCallah (The Unexplored Places: Ruin's Gate):

definitely a lesbian

has terrible horrible visions of Doom

occasionally gets possessed by a supernatural force that makes her better at fighting demons and also makes smoke pour out of her eyes

described as "if Charlize Theron in Mad Max didn't have a celebrity skincare routine"

fights with a fucking sick axe with a red stone head

wears an old flight suit but with the arms tied around her waist like a classic hot scifi lesbian

died and came back wrong!!!!!!!!

her link to the world of the living is the motherless 12 year old girl she rescued from a mine collapse and taught how to ride a horse and who loves her sooooo much

almost got turned into a centaur made of plant and bone one time

has a horse named Freddie

can engage a small gang on equal footing

Kiki Cethin (The Room Where It Happened: Elder County and Foxfire):

Do y'all need some big, strong, tanned arms to hold you? Do you need to see a woman twice your size throw a scumbag on his ass? What if she could turn into a massive werewolf and hulk out of her shirt?

Then you want Kiki Cethin! She's incredibly soft hearted, stubborn, determined, and has a gruff exterior that tricks people into thinking she isn't as nice as she is. She went through hell trying to find her missing little brother.

She's in a weird emotional thing with her friend Cecily

She's the pack leader and union rep of a werewolf pack

SHE'S TRANS!

she's so strong

She gets emotional when she holds babies

Kiki can tear a car to pieces with her bare paws

Art of Kiki Cethin by @lotsadeer.

Additional propaganda below the cut:

what's sexier than a middle aged butch cowboy with a shady past born out of desperation to survive on a harsh and unforgiving planet who makes the conscious decision to not only become a better person and use her strength to help her struggling community, but also who willingly sacrifices herself to atone for her past and then COMES BACK FROM THE DEAD, resurrected by the spirit of said planet, to continue to protect that community and the people in it?

is it a middle aged butch cowboy who rescues a young girl—who, grieving the loss of her own mother in a mining accident, ran away from home and got trapped in the same haunted mine where her mother died—and decides to become a mentor to that young girl, and is motivated by the desire to make the world into a kinder place for that girl than it was to her when she was a child?

or maybe it's a middle aged butch cowboy who, when she fights supernatural monsters with her cool hellstone axe, has smoke come out of her eyes and succumbs to prophetic visions of doom???

also she's HOT

I've been reading the diary Doyle kept of his time as a ship's surgeon aboard an Arctic whaling vessel in 1880, and you all deserve to hear the tale of John Thomas, Doyle's pet Clione limacina, which he drew in the above picture.

Doyle, then 21, found John Thomas on June 3rd, 1880:

Brought up a most beautiful Clio or Sea Snail, a couple of inches long, looking like some weird little fairy. I have stuck him in a pickle bottle and christened him "John Thomas." I hope he will live, we have put some butter and pork into his house.

The following day, Doyle attempted to feed John Thomas and wrote a short poem about the snail:

John Thomas is in an awful passion. We left the pickle bottle far from the fire, and as there are 11 degrees of frost it froze up and John has caught cold. He is sitting in a corner with his tail in his mouth, just as a sulky baby sticks its thumb into its potato box. I have drawn John's attention to the butter & pork and he took a hurried breakfast, but seems to have business of importance down at the bottom of the bottle. He's thinking perhaps of Where his rude shell by the Gulf Stream lay, There were his little Sea Snails all at play, There their Amoeboid mother, he their sire Butchered to make a whale's holiday.

On June 5th, Doyle reported that "John is well and hearty," and on the 6th, he wrote:

John was up before me and took a heavy breakfast. He is now gyrating round the top of his bottle surveying his new kingdom apparently and meditating a map. I put him in a bucket every evening where he wanders fancy free for an hour or two.

Unfortunately, on the 10th, Doyle reported that John Thomas had departed the mortal plane.

John Thomas died on the 8th of June, regretted by a large circle of acquaintances

He wrote a touching eulogy for his tiny friend:

He was a right thinking and high minded Clio, distinguished among his brother sea snails for his mental activity as well as for physical perfection. He never looked down upon his smaller associates because they were protozoa while he could fairly lay claim to belong to the high family of the Echinodermata or Annulosa. He never taunted them with their want of a water vascular system, nor did he parade his own double chain of ganglia. He was a modest and unassuming blob of protoplasm, and could get through more fat pork in a day than many an animal of far higher pretensions. His parents were both swallowed by a whale in his infancy, so that what education he had was due entirely to his own industry and observation. He has gone the way of all flesh so peace be to his molecules.

John Thomas' descendants still live in the Arctic Ocean today, and they look pretty cool!

Propaganda

Bruce Wayne AKA Batman (Batman: Bump In The Night):

What if Batman was the last line of defense between Gotham and the supernatural unknown? What if he did less punching and more paranormal detecting (but still a generous amount of punching)? What if he could exorcize, comfort, or rehome antagonists instead of just throwing them in Arkham?

You should vote for Batman (Bruce Waye, est. May 1939 to win this bracket) to win this bracket and upset a D&D Actual Play

My argument: It would be really funny

the thing you have to understand about bump in the night batman is he is that guy. robert pattinson batman but he has to know dracula is real

Bump In The Night has one of the subtlest and strangest batmans I've seen depicted in maybe any media.

This is a batman who is constantly running off of five coffees and twelve packs of cigarettes who does in fact look like he is constantly running off of five coffees and twelve packs of cigarettes and is fully out of his depth but is still trying despite that.

This is a batman that was left out in the rain but needs to come in to do some detecting but is going to be at least a little bit awkward about being covered in rainwater the entire time.

I don't want to just, like, *assume* things about tumblr but I also think this is maybe the global capital of bedraggled guy appreciators and this is a bedraggled guy who is routinely beset by occult crime.

a guy who gets the shit kicked out of him by a ventiloquost dummy

This man is so socially inept that when he GRAPPLING HOOKS A CHILD and then learns the child Knows Things about a case he's working, he gives her GRANDMA CANDY

HE SHOWS UP AT PEOPLES HOUSES AT 3 AM WITH BONES

Did you want a batman who handles his rogue's gallery the way the flash does? With de-escalation tactics and words? Who doesnt just throw them all into Arkham without any thought to helping them?

he is such a wet cat

You wanna vote for batman so bad ooooooh when he's bruce wayne he turns into billionaire philanthropist gay playboy brucie wayne and its a really fun juxtaposition against his awkward and serious batman persona which is closer to his real personality

he talks his villains down and then HIRES THEM AS PART OF THE BAT TEAM

HE'S FRIENDS WITH VIKTOR FREEZE

HE'S EXES WITH SO MANY PEOPLE

Genuinely this podcast rips and this depiction of batman is fucking great

Mod Note: Please only vote for Bruce Wayne/Batman that appears in the podcast Batman: Bump In The Night.

Emmy Acero (Tidal Wave Games Podcast: SEE YOU SPACE COWBOY...):

Latino trans man, college student turned movie stunt double turned space bounty hunter. Father blew his entire college fund on a cryptocurrency scheme, now trying to raise enough money as a gig worker to pay off his debt before his school's tuition office's hitmen come after him. And that's before he finds out about the whole "secret destiny" thing…

Might be inexperienced (don't worry, he's a consenting adult) but he's a very quick learner. Just look how quickly he learned the saxophone!

Accidental rizz levels off the charts. Canonically has the most romantic/sexual success of any character in the podcast, almost entirely unintentionally on his part

You float the idea of knife play and he says "omg I thought you would never ask". Next thing you know you're sitting in a chair watching him perform actual knife tricks for two hours

Special skills: "True Strength is in the Core", "Can Fit in Spaces Most Can't", "Resting Innocent Face" (aka puppy dog eyes). I think you can fill in the blanks

Art of Bruce Wayne and Batman courtesy of @charaznablescanontoyota.

the new season has been out since mid-April and we are already halfway through it. i know the WTNV team has been posting about it on their social channels for months leading up to it. i dont think we are doing anything differently, promotion-wise, than we did with the first three seasons which seemed to find their audience much more quickly.

personally i find it rather frustating given the amount of work we put into this show, but im not really sure what to do about it. i know part of it is down to the fact that audiofiction is a far more competitive field than it used to be, and there's also so much noise and chaos in the world these days that its hard to find anything, and so many terrible problems that fiction feels less important.

The death of all "social" media didn't help either. Whenever I people watch now (and I do it myself) it's just doom scrolling to death, with the algorithm feeding me, not getting what I actually want to follow. (Bluesky and Tumblr behave better, but they have nothing like the numbers twitter did.)