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I am looking so much forward to this; please help it become reality!

do YOU like horror podcasts? do you like your horror podcasts queer? have you ever thought, I love this horror podcast, it'd be so cool if it had a musical episode?

Shadows at the Door is one of the best horror podcasts around, made by just the loveliest people - and they're currently crowdfunding for their musical episode, Earworm.

You can listen to the whole show right now, for free, in your podcatcher of choice. Meet Earworm's protagonist, sceptic Professor Troughton, in episode one, and listen on for the most distressing museum audio tour, a scheme against the Mona Lisa, a pair of video games podcasters making their worst last episode, and much more, including, one day soon, mothman. If you like what you hear, please consider supporting Earworm here.

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hi, you've reached the marriam Webster hotline. marriam Webster is not in right now.

if you'd like the definition of aardvark press 1

if youd like the definition of aardwolf press 2

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HELLOOOOOOO MY DARLING FELLOW ADORERS OF SPOOKY AUDIOFICTION

Hello hi it's me I'm back on my bullshit! Remember a while back I talked a lot about how fantastic the podcast Shadows at the Door is? They're still amazing, they're in the middle of producing season 3, and they are working on a WHOLE-ASS MUSICAL.

As in, multiple songs, a fantastic cast, amazingly talented people writing and producing it, it's going to be phenomenal.

Fan of shows like Re: Dracula? David Ault (Re Drac's very own Friend Arthur!) voices the protagonist, beloved fan favourite Doctor Geoffrey Troughton.

Professor Elemental (Fighting Trousers, anyone?) is writing several songs and voicing the production's deeply creepy antagonist.

Did you like The Silt Verses or The Secret of St Kilda? Shadows has got Erika Sanderson and Michelle Kelly on the cast, as well as a slew of other phenomenally talented voice actors.

Please check out the production's kickstarter page for more details about this beastie, and if you're interested and can spare a few bucks to help get it off the ground, please consider doing so! Shadows is well-made queer media created by hugely talented queer people and will more than meet expectations if they can meet their funding goals.

THANK YOU I LOVE YOU MUAH

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This is the romantic comedy I want for summer.

TIL there are only around 120 anonymous Michelin restaurant inspectors in the world. They spend 3 out of every 4 weeks on the road, and must vacate a region for 10 years if they think a restaurant suspects their identity.

via reddit.com

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Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!

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What’s your opinion on the contrast between “silly” and “serious” spaces? Do you think people can have very serious interpretations about a genuine piece of media and also be goofy about it? I’m asking this particularly because I’ve seen people in the Magnus podcast fandoms fight about people “misinterpreting” characters you, Alex, and the many other authors have written. Are you okay with the blorbofication or do you really wish the media you’ve written would be “taken seriously” 100% of the time?

And follow up question, what do you think about the whole “it’s up to the reader (or in some cases, listener) to make their own conclusions and interpretations and that does not make them wrong”, versus the “it was written this way because the author intended it this way, and we should respect that” argument?

This is a question I've given a lot of thought over the years, to the point where I don't know how much I can respond without it becoming a literal essay. But I'll try.

My main principle for this stuff boils roughly down to: "The only incorrect way to respond to art is to try and police the responses of others." Art is an intensely subjective, personal thing, and I think a lot of online spaces that engage with media are somewhat antithetical to what is, to me, a key part of it, which is sitting alone with your response to a story, a character, a scene or an image and allowing yourself to explore it's effect on you. To feel your feelings and think about them in relation to the text.

Now, this is not to say that jokes and goofiness about a piece of art aren't fucking great. I love to watch The Thing and drink in the vibes or arctic desolation and paranoia, or think about the picture it paints of masculinity as a sublimely lonely thing where the most terrible threat is that of an imposed, alien intimacy. And that actually makes me laugh even more the jokey shitpost "Do you think the guys in The Thing ever explored each other's bodies? Yeah but watch out". Silly and serious don't have to be in opposition, and I often find the best jokes about a piece of media come from those who have really engaged with it.

And in terms of interpreting characters? Interpreting and responding to fictional characters is one of the key functions of stories. They're not real people, there is no objective truth to who they are or what they do or why they do it. They are artificial constructs and the life they are given is given by you, the reader/listener/viewer, etc. Your interpetation of them can't be wrong, because your interpretation of them is all that there is, they have no existence outside of that.

And obviously your interpretation will be different to other people's, because your brain, your life, your associations - the building blocks from which the voices you hear on a podcast become realised people in your mind - are entirely your own. Thus you cannot say anyone else's is wrong. You can say "That's not how it came across to me" or "I have a very different reading of that character", but that's it. I suppose if someone is fundamentally missing something (like saying "x character would never use violence" when x character strangles a man to death in chapter 4) you could say "I think that's a significant misreading of the text", but that's only to be reserved for if you have the evidence to back it up and are feeling really savage.

I think this is one of the things that saddens me a bit about some aspects of fandom culture - it has a tendency to police or standardise responses or interpretations, turning them from personal experiences to be explored into public takes to be argued over. It also has the occasional moralistic strain, and if there's one thing I wish I could carve in stone on every fan space it's that Your Responses to a Piece of Art Carry No Intrinsic Moral Weight.

As for authorial intention, that's a simpler one: who gives a shit? Even the author doesn't know their own intentions half the time. There is intentionality there, of course, but often it's a chaotic and shifting mix of theme and story and character which rarely sticks in the mind in the exact form it had during writing. If you ask me what my intention was in a scene from five years ago, I'll give you an answer, but it will be my own current interpretation of a half-remembered thing, altered and warped by my own changing relationship to the work and five years of consideration and change within myself. Or I might not remember at all and just have a guess. And I'm a best case scenario because I'm still alive. Thinking about a writers possible or stated intentions is interesting and can often lead to some compelling discussion or examination, but to try and hold it up as any sort of "truth" is, to my mind, deeply misguided.

Authorial statements can provide interesting context to a work, or suggest possible readings, but they have no actual transformative effect on the text. If an author says of a book that they always imagined y character being black, despite it never being mentioned in the text, that's interesting - what happens if we read that character as black? How does it change our responses to the that character actions and position? How does it affect the wider themes and story? It doesn't, however, actually make y character black because in the text itself their race remains nonspecific. The author lost the ability to make that change the moment it was published. It's not solely theirs anymore.

So yeah, that was a fuckin essay. In conclusion, serious and silly are both good, but serious does not mean yelling at other people about "misinterpretations", it means sitting with your personal explorations of a piece of art. All interpretations are valid unless they've legitimately missed a major part of the text (and even then they're still valid interpretations of whatever incomplete or odd version of the text exists inside that person's brain). Authorial intent is interesting to think about but ultimately unknowable, untrustworthy and certainly not a source of truth. Phew.

Oh, and blorbofication is fine, though it does to my mind sometimes pair with a certain shallowness to one's exploration of the work in question.

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capybara

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Someone I followed on tumblr posted a tma fic they’d written, and I got curious and looked up the podcast. This was early 2018, mid-season 3, and I was more or less obsessed up until the finale in March 2021. So I guess this counts as “cool fanart”?

Tma fandom i have a question for you

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What made you decide to change the name of good omens from “William the antichrist” to “good omens”?

Well, for a start the boy in question was now called Adam.

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the songs Beyoncé writes about that man are crazy it's like watching someone build the sistine chapel for a possum they found in a gas station parking lot

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Reblog if you've made at least one friend because of a fandom.

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sometimes I wanna reply “bitch me too” to my mutuals posts but I’ve never talked 2 them so they might not see it as friendly joking so i just dont

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2.0 whispered, That’s targetControlSystem.