stories and sounds

World Gone Wrong is an audio drama masquerading as a podcast chat show, where two friends in their twenties discuss navigating the everyday ups and downs of life while also reckoning with the fact that their world has suddenly become fucked up in a range of fantastical ways as well as all the regular ways.

Our two co-hosts Jamie and Malik talk about how to respond when your pet is bitten by a werewolf, whether ghosts should be legally considered people, what to call the extra hour that has randomly appeared in the day, whether to trust the alien that's replaced your shitty ex, and what's going on with the Fae and the sewer alligators and unicorns and and the Pied Piper and the Bermuda triangle. And amongst this, they also talk about navigating the job market, dating, family relationships, the trials of working customer service, and dealing with mental health and grief - all in the context of their fascinatingly enfuckened world.

You hear their friendship develop and change as they deal with disagreements and difficult emotions and the highs and lows of long-distance friendship. They laugh and cry and develop inside jokes and fall out and talk things out and support each other. They do very much feel like two ordinary, endearing people who you get to hear hanging out and talking about a world that's messed up in ways that are at least more interesting and entertaining than the ways our own world is messed up.

World Gone Wrong has become a big comfort show for me. It's by turns funny, charming, relatable, moving, and surreal. It confronts the struggles of existing in a deeply flawed and confusing world but finds hope and joy and solidarity amongst it all. Go listen to it now! The appeal of friendship and apocalypse is calling to you!

Financially, it has a low barrier for entry, a low point of diminishing returns, and a relatively small potential market. It's basically impervious to being taken over by giant studios - even the "big" networks like RQ would be considered indie in the film or game dev industries. With the exception of the BBC, they tend to dip their toes into audio fiction, figure out quickly that, although it's beloved by its fans, there isn't that kind of money in it, and proceed to leave us alone forever.

Then there's the fact that it propagates largely by word of mouth. Audio dramas owe everything to obsessive nerds forcing nearly everyone they know to listen to that podcast they just discovered.

So it's more about the thing being actually good, plus a decent amount of luck and persistence.

There's no optimally marketable success formula being relentlessly enforced by gatekeeping jellybean-counters because they don't exist here. So people make whatever they want. So it draws people to it who are looking for something different. And the cycle feeds itself, and the medium gets weirder (in a good way).

It may very well ALWAYS remain the wild west of storytelling.

So listeners tell your friends about that podcast!

And creators, make the weird thing! There are no rules! It can be an hour long or Breaker Whiskey short, or Re:Dracula all over the place length. It can be another tape recorder framing or another voicemail framing or basically just an audiobook. It can be any genre or blend of genres. This creative space gives us the opportunity to be our own target audience in a way rarely found elsewhere.

If you enjoy the thing you're making, odds are somone else out there will enjoy it too. I've already found this to be true, and my time as an audio fiction creator is still just beginning.

Summary:

Summary:

Say hello to the abomination that is the cover art I made for my CD with my Static Man playlist on it

-Leave a fake audio drama here

-Leave a review for someone else’s

Moonshining, one of the two ways to get around the excise tax on alcohol. Our podcast follows a group of moonshiners dealing with competition with Rum Runners who following the American prohibition shifted their operation to bypassing the Canadian Excise taxes.

*and people who enjoy other indie stuff like games and animation and webcomics and whatever but like. We’re all the same category of fans tbh and I gotta cut it out because i’d honestly rather have people to talk to than have the nichest fandom like why would you want that you don’t know anyone who can share your joy for the media.

so, with my excellent taste in fiction podcasts, I’m giving back to the community here are some completely underrated shows more people should be talking about (in no particular order, im just looking at my podcast list):

imma highlight the ones that I think are the most underrated, like half of these there are at least a few other people who talk about it on here, but the others it seems like no one knows about it except me sometimes and its like. Go listen to it right this instant. Really you should listen to all of these but yeah.

Witherburn After School News

Neighbourly

Death by Dying

Leaving Corvat

The Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio

Nowhere, On Air

The Author’s Anathema

Hey folks!

Let's talk about Beck's End and why you should support it!!

In the UK historically, Northern voices and rural voices are too often left out of the conversation. A lot of this is just straight up classism - for Americans, think Appalachia or the Deep South.

It also has very deep historical roots here in the UK - the Northerners resisted the Norman invasion after 1066 and were punished for that by having all their woodlands and farmlands burned and then sown with lime (the mineral) to poison the soil so that they had to be dependent on southern agriculture for food. You can still see the effect this scarring of the landscape had on the land today (it's why we have the Yorkshire moors that Kathy and Heathcliffe are so fond of).

Much like the way this phenomenon plays out in many countries, even today Northerners are thought of as violent, small-minded and stupid: regardless of our contributions to culture (hi, The Beatles). The North of England is profoundly and unfairly underfunded by the government for things like state infrastructure - from transport to healthcare.

So for me, (Ella), as someone who lives in the North, making Beck's End isn't any old audio drama project. It's really meaningful to me that it's a series that's set in the North of England, starring a cast from the North and working with a crew from the North. That's actually kind of a big deal.

Right now we're 69% (nice) funded with 8 days to go. If you're able to lend us some financial support, please consider doing so. If you can't for any reason, please consider giving us a signal boost.

The people behind it are great and have made great things

Folk horror is at its best when it's voices you've not heard before (it makes the folk more folk and the horror more horror)

“Life belongs to the living”

Goodbye the the Penumbra podcast! It was a really sweet finale! (Quote is from season 5, episode 24)

my tpp ramblings below the cut

The Roses