t4tjonmartin

[t4tjonmartin]

this is what i sent

this is what i got

[t4tjonmartin]

podcast characters who would hold on to the amulet for dear life

jonathan sims

ramses o'flaherty

gwen bouchard

brother faulkner

renee minkowski

rudyard funn

bryony halbech

peter janusdescending (forgor if he had a last name)

ava maddox

[t4tjonmartin]

things jon missed while stalking his colleagues:

the fact that sasha had been half lined up for gertrude's job and how that would be a pretty good murder motive

the discrepancy between elias's hiring in 1991 and how he said he was working as a filing clerk in 1972

tim's brother's mysterious disappearance/death directly preceding his change in careers

martin's real age and literally any of his academic or employment history

conclusion: he's bad at this <3

[t4tjonmartin]

there is a wasps nest in my attic. and by wasps nest i mean podcasts.the attic of course is my brain

[t4tjonmartin]

Hello! Writing first to thank you for such an extraordinary creation - as a piece of writing and even more so in performance. Every episode manages to somehow build on and outdo the last; you navigated that transition from a smaller scale story of grisly mysteries and personal crises of faith to a grand scale of war, revolution and political satire with absolute aplomb, and never lost that throughline of exceptional characterisation and sharp writing, always steering to the most interesting conflicts. You are always very humble in your public comments, but I hope you allow yourself a little pride, because this is absolutely top notch stuff.

I was struck by Paige's final words, that she hopes what they left would be found 'flawed, inadequate, yearning'. As the show went on, I was surprised - in a good way - that the show's politics gradually crystalised into a full-on nihilist anarchism, something perhaps even along the lines of Monsieur Dupont. (Muna used the 'a' word in one of the Q&As but it was pretty evident even before that). Taking these gods as a metaphor for ideologies and social systems, the scope of it becomes pretty universal - and unsparing. And, equally, hard to answer.

I wondered when the Many Below/Wound Tree was introduced what answers they would find: what political movement could truly resist cooption or becoming its own horrible self-sustaining egregore. And in the end the answer you express I suppose is a negative one: that even Paige's god of victims is a tool, one that must eventually be discarded to go into some unknown place beyond it all (to walk away from Omelas), towards something that narrative fiction - as a form of the 'endless words' that are derided so much in the third season - can no longer address. Which I respect - to pose the question is vital, even if the tools can't reach any answers if they even exist.

I think this struggle exists in many stories that address themes of making a break from the rapacious society that created them (and take it seriously) - your Baru Cormorants and Mononoke-himes. We can describe the problem vividly, but since we do not have a counterexample to hand, any story we tell about ~what is to be done~ and what it will look like when it is feels like it will be just as hollow as the spins and angles and parasitic fantasies that so many characters advance in the Silt Verses. (How could there possibly be a time where it finally works out, after we have seen all this? But then, what are we living for?)

To try to make this a question and not a ramble, I wanted to ask - what do you see as the role of fiction in addressing the horrible machinery of this world? Is it enough to pose the question particularly sharply, skewer the bad and inadequate answers, and leave the readers/listeners to figure out how to make the killing of gods concrete? How do we punch through the bounds of it all being Content, another product to be bought and sold? What does it mean to sit here and fantasise about people making that revolutionary break when there is no revolution to be had?

I don't know what answer I'm hoping for here, but given the themes of the show, I feel like this must be a kind of thing you've thought about, and probably have a far more developed line of thought than I do. And if this is a bit too much to drop in your inbox on a Saturday morning, I will say again thank you for writing this story and all the actors for making it so strikingly concrete - it truly means a lot, and I will treasure it.

Hi, and thank you for listening and for a beautifully written and thoughtful ask! ('Horrible machinery of the world' stopped me dead in my tracks.) And I am very proud, genuinely.

I don't have a good enough answer to your questions, and for me a lot of TSV is very much about trying to figure those answers out, but let me try and sum up my perspective bit by bit.

Is it enough for fiction to pose the question, without also proposing the answer?

I don't think it's enough for fiction as a collective body of work.

I'd argue there's probably a tendency towards open-endedness and irresolution in these individual narratives simply because it feels like a more honest acknowledgement that in real life, the foe has yet to take a real body blow and will not go down easy; that the foe, in fact, is the marketplace for the work itself and ironically profits from the popularity of stories with easy heroic victories over villains who represent capitalism. That these stories inevitably become a pleasant consumable that serves our complacency within the belly of the beast, a kind of daily tonic to reassure us that good always triumphs and regular people always come out on top.

I also think that the sheer scale and scope of the topic creates its own challenges; you probably can't engage thoroughly enough with both the dystopian question and your ideas for a utopian answer all in a single story, without ultimately turning the latter into that false reassurance, a quick handwave of a happy ending.

You mention Omelas, and I think we could illustrate the problem by looking at how LeGuin handles her two successive masterpieces:

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, which gives us the titular resource-rich u(dys)topia built on invisible suffering, and the dissidents who turn their backs on that world and walk out into the inhospitable wilderness in search of something better.

The Dispossessed, which as its premise gives us Anarres, an imperfect but sympathetic anarchist society whose adherents turned their backs on a neighbouring world of capitalist plenty to live out in the inhospitable wilderness in search of something better.

Anarres can very reasonably be viewed as LeGuin's direct answer to the question posed by Omelas, and she would have likely had it in her mind already as she wrote Omelas. But if the short story had ended with 'I hear that against all odds, the ones who walk away have successfully founded an anarchist utopia where hardship is everywhere but it's shared as equitably as possible. THE END', the amount of lazy shorthand and empty comfort involved in that happier ending would inevitably make it a dishonest and unserious offering.

Instead, Anarres is a starting premise to be interrogated at length over the course of a separate story, rather than a happy ending to simply reassure the reader that better things are possible - and even at the end of the novel LeGuin's unresolved questions are still very similar to the ones that we're left with in Omelas (and the same questions that I feel like we were knocking about in The Silt Verses, and which I guess you could argue are all lingering concerns at the end of Mononoke, as well): how and where can we find space to create and sustain a genuine alternative when the narrative environment of capitalism is so powerfully all-subsuming and constantly growing to fill the space? Do we need to disconnect entirely, vanishing as if dead? If we disconnect, how can we possibly survive and what inhumanities or ethical compromises will be required of us? If we do survive, is our isolationism a dereliction of human responsibility to those left behind?

All of which is to say that I think present-day fiction absolutely can make the attempt to meaningfully explore potential alternative-utopian solutions in more depth and with far more tangibility than we attempted with TSV - but that dystopian fiction like ours which concludes with the unexplored promise of a revolutionary utopia and the vague reassurance that the irrepressible human spirit will figure things out from here on out (Chewbacca gets a medal, everyone's in the streets wearing a Guy Fawkes mask) doesn't do much more than dramatically undermine its own goal of disrupting the audience's comfort.

That said, one of my big regrets this season was that we didn't succeed in more engagingly exploring and articulating the Woundtree camp's development into a flawed but functioning society in Dispossessed fashion ahead of the ending. That was my intention, but what quickly became clear was that in a dramatic format, with a limited cast, it was just endless static meeting-room scenes with Paige and Elgin discussing difficult responses to impossible challenges, while everyone else was out having dynamic and exciting adventures with lots of fun and exciting gods. Dystopias remain too entertaining for utopias' own good.

What do you see as the role of fiction in addressing the horrible machinery of this world?

I believe that absurdist horror fiction specifically, founded on the principle of 'people in a world that makes no sense, deluding themselves that it definitely does make sense' can play a very powerful role in that stated purpose.

Many horror traditions carry the baggage of inbuilt or inadvertent conservatism - the concept of a peaceable, passive, safe, middle-class Normality which is then disrupted by a terrifying outside threat (alien, ultra-foreign, ultra-low-class, underworldly, wild, etc). But absurdist horror very directly identifies Normality as the true source of our terror and very directly confronts our human response to it. It creates the right environment for us to ask all of the good questions. Isn't this an unsustainable nightmare we're living in? Why are we expending so much energy pretending it isn't? How do we get out and what do we do if we can't?

Probably the only listener reaction that's genuinely frustrated me about both of our shows is the folks who come away turning their noses up at the bluntness of that approach and acting like they've Solved The Art simply for figuring out where our broad sympathies lie. "Hm, just listened to The Silt Verses and I understood it at once; it's clearly trying to say that capitalism is bad. A little heavy-handed in its messaging for my liking, hm-hm!"

Not to go full Garth Marenghi, but for me the directness of the provocation and the obvious outrageousness of the nightmare is the point; it then allows us to go to places that other genres (or more understated critiques) generally can't.

How do we punch through the bounds of it all being Content, another product to be bought and sold? What does it mean to sit here and fantasise about people making that revolutionary break when there is no revolution to be had?

God, I don't know.

Maybe it means nothing; maybe we can't punch through; maybe there is no story unruly enough to be truly unco-optable, and therefore even the most radical fiction ultimately serves as a distraction, a placebo, a reassurance (that we are not alone, that better things are possible) which will impact the wider world more by keeping us subscribed to the Kindle app than by any action we might feel inspired to take.

Amazon is paying Boots Riley to make TV shows. Disney won much praise for delivering a revolutionary fantasy in a Star Wars shell. Apple is funding excellent, discomfiting and furious corporate satires about how we happily ignore invisible worker abuses for the sake of our own lifestyles, but they also cannot be considered accountable for the deaths of Congolese child-labourers in the global cobalt supply chain. The Dispossessed is in development as a limited series and the LeGuin estate are closely involved.

The master doesn't just own the tools, he's been buying up the guillotines as well.

What if, as with the unknowable nothingness outside of Omelas, the only art that cannot be reduced to product in net service of the status quo is the art that's so invisible and inaccessible and disconnected as to not exist at all? Does being relatively small and ramshackle really lend us any ideological purity, any genuine detachment? You can listen to The Silt Verses on Apple and Spotify and Amazon Music. Brought to you by Acast.

Chapter 36 with Dev and Seb was to a large extent intended as an articulation of that worry. To what extent can we still trust in the integrity of a sincere love story (one that we want to believe in) it if takes place in an insincere and predatory environment? Can any meaningful story be told honestly within such a space?

This stuff really worries me. I think it's probably right to worry. I don't know the answer. I do know that there are some folks for whom the show has made a tangible difference in terms of their life's direction, and that's a huge comfort to me.

There was someone who said it helped them find their faith, strangely and wonderfully. Someone else who said it contributed to their decision not to go down a more lucrative career path within what they view as an exploitative industry. (I hope they don't regret that decision; I hope it makes them happy.)

So there's something there. Maybe.

[t4tjonmartin]

coming in under the wire for the fiction podcast zine fest - a zine of 8 space-themed podcasts. (i had to limit myself to podcasts i'd listened to all the way through to keep to a sensible number lol)

zine text under the cut:

Fiction podcasts... in space!!

Wolf 359: Comms Officer Eiffel's attempts to not do his job are foiled by stickler Commander Minkowski, malfunctioning AI Hera, dubiously ethical Dr Hilbert and... aliens?

The Strange Case of Starship Iris: Violet Liu is rescued after an explosion kills the rest of the Iris crew. Her rescuers may not be... above board, but they're her best chance to figure out what happned - and to stop a war.

The Pasithea Powder: Voicemails between Sophie, war hero, and Jane, scientist, traitor, ex-friend and the only person Sophie can turn to when a "friendship delegation" goes wrong.

Janus Descending: Horror following Chel and Peter as they explore an apparently lifeless planet. Chel's story starts from the beginning, Peter's from the end.

Second Star to the Left: Gwen has 5 years to explore a planet all alone - except for a long distance caller.

Girl in Space: X has lived alone on this spaceship (except for an AI and a Jurassic Park DVD) - until now.

We Fix Space Junk: Two repair women travel the galaxy fixing space junk. Planet of the week, quick and funny

The Adventure Zone: Amnesty: Not tecnically a space podcast? You'll get it. Minerva [heart]

Happy listening [smily face]

[t4tjonmartin]

Carpenter my beloved 🫶🫶

[t4tjonmartin]

The Magnus Archives is like the SCP Foundation if they didn't Secure. Or Contain. Or Protect for that matter. So really they're like if you went to the SCP Foundation begging for help with the monster that had been tormenting you and some tired British academic just sort of nodded and said "Fucked If True." And then proceeded to Kubrick stare at you every night in your sleep for the rest of your life.

[t4tjonmartin]

cutter was born in the 20s, and he'd become "arthur keller" by the early 70s, so obviously pryce's story at the beginning of brave new world can't be taken literally - that's not even an old man, much less "older than anyone she had ever met." it's also inarguable she was an adult already working on her... ideas for the human body when cutter sought her out; "i want you to make a doll for me" and "i found people who had some very bold ideas about how to... tune up the human body [...] i funded their work, and provided them with a willing test subject" are pretty definitely referring to the same events. so, it's fairy tale language, but the question is: why? why frame it this way?

one part of it is the "fountain of youth" in connection to immortality, strength, and health. the implication isn't literally that cutter is very old and pryce is very young; it's that she represents this power, and that he wants her to bestow it upon him: "then you and i will fix the world. i will be young and you will be whole." cutter and pryce choose to look eternally 28, while referring to and conducting themselves as if they're very old: it's not just vanity, it's part of their self-mythology. simultaneously young and old, having overcome the natural order.

that mythology of "overcoming" natural limitations is especially significant for pryce: characterizing herself as a "little girl" within her own story is both self-victimizing and self-aggrandizing. pryce does not see herself as disabled so much as temporarily inconvenienced; even the usual limitations of the human body are something she hopes to transcend. "instead of being wretched or afraid, the little girl decided to be clever." she was put at a disadvantage, but overcame it all by herself because she was smarter and better than other people. by extension, anyone who can't do what she did just isn't good enough, even as she's closing doors behind her and making it harder for others like her. and at the same time: it's an underdog story that requires her to have been an underdog. she hasn't been in a very, very long time, but the power she holds over others remains justified in her self-perception by this image of a sick little girl who was hurt by the world. there's an implication of inherent worthiness, and even a sort of expected assumed innocence in characterizing it that way. the first thing people notice about pryce is her eyes, and... sure, maybe it's the technology, but if cutter can catch bullets without any visible signs, it seems likely to me that, like her age, this is at least in part an aesthetic choice. it intimidates people. she's turned this point of hurt and vulnerability into a power play, and remains attached to it.

and that's the other part of the mythologizing that's going on: presumably, pryce was not the only person who worked on all of this. cutter funded others. but the story retroactively simplifies it, in a childish fairy tale way, and paints an image of them as exceptional, uniquely capable and so uniquely deserving, people.

i think there's something interesting to consider here about pryce in contrast to hera: that pryce is a woman who self-justifies her cruelty via a mythologized girlhood, while hera is a woman who was never a girl, who was never considered innocent or even allowed the same recognition of the ways she's been a victim. pryce resents humanity and all it represents, resents her body and its limitations, feels that being human has only caused her suffering, but still clearly believes that she has more of a claim to humanity than hera does by nature of her biology and upbringing. pryce's "bootstraps" attitude re: disability and her own self-victimization are the crucial things here, but i think that is also particularly interesting if you read hera as a trans woman.

(incidentally, this is part of why i have a particular love for hera designs where she's just a regular woman, more angular, and maybe even older looking - a natural 30-something in contrast to an unnaturally maintained 28 - than pryce. they're both women who have chosen how they want to look, and it highlights something.)

[t4tjonmartin]

interest check: wolf 359 relisten club!

hi all! myself, @kazoofiasco and @airshipvalentine have been craving a wolf 359 relisten (since its ten-year anniversary was in august!) and wondered if folks would be interested in a chill community listen-along, book club style. no formal gathering place, just a tag and a schedule of 2 or 3 episodes a week so that folks can post and engage with each other, whether relistening or listening for the first time! if there’s interest, further updates and a tentative october start date will be @wolf359radioclub :)

[t4tjonmartin]

rough jontim animatic as a little treat

[t4tjonmartin]

annual wolf 359 binge time to draw my favorite girl < 3

[t4tjonmartin]

Hey, guys! Big fan, thanks so much for all your hard work on this incredible series! I am am running a game of The Silt Verses TTRPG and I wanted to ask how you imagine the calendar works in TSV Universe? I've been looking for how TSV months and years map on to our real-world Gregorian calendar and have come up a bit short. Much love and support and good luck with future projects!

Thank you! We did put out a rough calendar on Patreon years ago which might be helpful, but it's very much a "do whatever you like with this, but please don't ask me any searching follow-up questions about how astronomic bodies actually function in the TSV setting, because I don't want to get into that shit" situation, so your discretion is appreciated.

[t4tjonmartin]

Such a big, big universe and you only gave yourselves the tools to speak about a tiny portion of it.

happy 10th anniversary to Wolf 359! here's some art I did for this occasion (and waited like two months to post it). this is an illustration of Am I Alone Now?, the first episode I listened to in the distant year 2017. this podcast is very dear to me, please listen to it if you haven't already!

(no text version is under the cut)

[t4tjonmartin]

Welcome to Night Vale no. 13 

[t4tjonmartin]

*turns a perfect 180 degrees so that my cutting board-flat ass is facing you* *i walk away with feminine swagger but masculine contempt*

[t4tjonmartin]

nothing personal but this kind of comment rlly exemplifies to me a disconnect between canon and popular fanon jmart characterization because they almost literally had this conversation in canon - except, their lines are swapped!

jon, for all his scared grouchiness, is a secret romantic, while martin, for all his forced optimism, is at his core a pragmatist