Beth (she/they). Podcast blog. Previously @the-empty-man . Mostly Wolf 359, with a sprinkling of other audio dramas. Likes and follows from @imstillturningout . More info in pinned post.
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Prior to the revelation around the aliens receiving his logs, Eiffel's logical expectation is that the only people who'll listen to his logs are people at Goddard Command. And yet the way he speaks in those logs is often not really addressed at Goddard staff. For example, in Ep8 The Empty Man Cometh, he says:
Oh, hell, speaking of logs... I guess you caught all of that, so you might be able to pick up the effect your twisted experiment had on us. Hint: IT WAS AWFUL. Sorry if things got a bit crazy for a while there, dear listeners, but... well, you see the kind of things we have to deal with.
The first part of that quote is obviously directed at Goddard staff, at the people who create many of the situations Eiffel and the rest of the Hephaestus crew have to deal with (such as the empty man panic). But the second part - the part addressed to Eiffel's "dear listeners" - feels like a switch, like it's directed at a sympathetic audience who are witnessing Eiffel's plight without having any role in it. In other words, it feels like it's directed at us. Before the aliens come into the picture, we are the "dear listeners".
There's no logical reason for Eiffel to make this kind of switch between the listener he blames (i.e. Goddard Command) and his more sympathetic "dear listener". He's mentally constructing a listener to his logs who is on his side, when he has no in-universe reason to believe that there is one. It's an interesting kind of coping mechanism - potentially linked to the unconscious, perhaps misdirected, desire for connection that led him to transmit his logs into deep space.
There are other signs that the "dear listener" Eiffel directs his logs towards has very little to do with Goddard, such as the way he explains things that Goddard staff would obviously know (which is obviously useful from a storytelling perspective, but also feels in-character and in line with his other behaviour), as well as telling the listener things that could land him in trouble with Goddard.
Eiffel is the kind of genre-savvy character who is regularly on the brink of fully breaking the fourth wall. He doesn't know he's in an audio drama, but he's so prone to narrating his life that he might as well know. He's always constructing the narrative of his life in his head, so perhaps he finds that it helps to imagine someone on Earth who is listening sympathetically to the story he's telling himself. In his world, at the beginning of the show, he doesn't have that listener, or doesn't believe he has. But his words reach across from the universe of his story into ours. And his voice finds the kind of dear listener he was imagining without hoping for - someone who has no role in anything that happens on the Hephaestus but who is willing to listen to his story. In pressing play on your podcast app, you become the listener he was longing for.
#wolf 359#w359#doug eiffel#This might be better with more examples but I haven't posted in so long so this will do#I know it gets a bit overly meta at the end but I hope you get the sentiment#Also obviously there could be lower-level staff at Goddard Command who would be sympathetic to the crew's plight#but I think Eiffel understandably just views Command as an overall concept as generally awful. as evidenced by that Ep8 quote#There's nobody there that he'd address as 'dear'#Obviously he does have a sympathetic listener in Hera at the beginning of the story#but I don't think he fully appreciates that at the point#There's obvs lots more that can be said about how Eiffel as a character is perfectly constructed to be the protagonist of an audio medium#But that's a tangent from this#the empty man posteth
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The great thing about audio drama is that it gives you a little secret. There you are in the supermarket, buying a green bell pepper, and in your ear somebody is just tearing your heart out.
#Audio drama#fiction podcast#Me visibly crying/laughing in public: 'this is just a fun secret between me and my headphones... Nobody knows'
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mother program 🛰️ (by @rosenkranz-does-things)
#Ooh this is beautiful#The colours are so good!!...#and the look of her clothes and hair and hands#like that stylised texture#Anyway I love her#She deserves a rest#hera w359#wolf 359#w359
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I relistened to Ep4 Cataracts And Hurricanoes the other day and I'm thinking about the similarities between the events of that episode and the events of Fisher's death (as heard in the recordings from Lovelace's mission in Ep18 Happy To Be Of Assistance).
In both cases, a Hephaestus crew member - a man who doesn't know that the Decima virus is running through his veins - is on a spacewalk. It should have been fairly routine, just adjusting something on the outside of the station. But weather in space can be unpredictable. There is a sudden unexpected emergency. Solar flares or meteors are about to hit the station - and the officer outside of it. The commander orders the officer to get inside immediately. He protests at first, not appreciating the danger (Eiffel: "What’s the big deal? There’s been like a hundred flares since we got here." / Fisher: "I'm almost done with the-") But soon it is clear that the situation is life-threatening. So the commander puts on a spacesuit and goes out into the danger, because she wouldn't even consider leaving her crew member out there to die.
One commander comes back with her unconscious officer in her arms. The other comes back with a broken arm and the weight of grief. Fisher dies, and it's the first of many deaths on Lovelace's Hephaestus mission. Eiffel survives, and it's the first of many life-or-death situations that we hear him making it through against the odds. And really it's just down to luck. Both Eiffel and Fisher had a skilled Commander willing to risk their life to save them. Both of them just needed to make it inside, and one did, and the other didn't.
Eiffel almost died the way Fisher did. Later he'll almost die the way Lambert and Hui did. It's another echo between the two Hephaestus missions, like the comparisons Lovelace reflects on in Variations on a Theme: "New people [...] Same hell. Same star." / "the new gang. [...] Same as the old gang." / "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Fisher's death reinforces how close Eiffel comes to dying in Cataracts and Hurricanoes; like all the deaths of Lovelace's crew, it reinforces the idea of the Hephaestus as a place of danger and chance and ghosts, a place that holds cycles of suffering.
#I know that spacewalks are probably one of the most dangerous things you could do on a space station#So it's not surprising that we hear multiple life-or-death scenarios involving them in this show#But the fact that it's the first time we hear Eiffel in danger of dying and the first death of Lovelace's crew#That feels significant#I am aiming to work my way through relistening to w359 atm btw#And am hoping to have more thoughts prompted by it to post on here#We'll see...#wolf 359#w359#doug eiffel#Mace fisher#The empty man posteth
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Yesterday, my brother's girlfriend randomly played a 10 second clip from an Enid Blyton Malory Towers audiobook and I recognised the narrator's voice immediately because it was Beth Eyre. And of course by now, I expect to randomly encounter her voice when I am deliberately listening to a fiction podcast, but now it's happening when I'm just chilling on Christmas Day and my non-audio-drama-listening family members are talking about audiobooks meant for children. Beth Eyre will not stop until she has jumpscared me in every piece of audio I encounter. The second I heard the clip, I blurted out "I know her" and my family looked at me slightly oddly, but sadly no one wanted to listen to me talking about the many podcasts in which I have heard Beth Eyre's voice.
#Not expecting anyone to care particularly#and this will make less sense to people who haven't heard of Enid Blyton#but I had to share this experience#Beth Eyre's voice acting domination is getting increasingly out-of-hand#I'm sure I was jumpscared by her in something else relatively recently but I can't remember what rn#'I know her' was an odd thing to say because it sounded like I knew her personally#I just meant that's my good friend Antigone Funn#I like to imagine someone somewhere having the reverse experience#of first hearing Beth Eyre narrating children's school stories from the 1940s#and then hearing her playing everyone's favourite horny weirdo Antigone Funn#Incidentally I don't know why my brother and his girlfriend are listening to Enid Blyton audiobooks as adults#but me and my brother had audiobook CDs of Malory Towers when we were kids#so I guess this is still a fun circularity or something#the empty man rambleth
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merry dougmas birthday commission for @commsroom!!!!!!!!
a contemplative doug in the afterglow of the party, if you will
#This has such a lovely soft warm feel to it#I particularly like the colour palette#The red and the turquoise blue feel very Wolf 359. reminiscent of the star etc#but then the yellow light from the doorway and the lights on the tree and round the frame give it this safe earth-bound feel to it#Nice to think about Eiffel having happy safe birthdays with people he loves#birthdays that feel like his#birthdays where he's getting older and he doesn't mind so much#That's what I like to think he's thinking about in this art#He didn't think he'd make it to this age. But here he is. And maybe its alright actually#wolf 359#w359#doug eiffel
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Everyone say happy birthday Eiffel
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It's so important to me that Minkowski and Eiffel and Hera spend December 25th together to celebrate Eiffel's birthday post-canon. And the hope that they spend that day together is a sentiment shared by Gabriel Urbina.
But Minkowski canonically cares about Christmas itself. Minkowski has people in her life whom she could spend Christmas with. And so there will probably have to be a difficult conversation at some point after the Hephaestus crew return to Earth, when someone says how good it will be to have Renée there for Christmas Day again. And Minkowski will have to look at her husband, or her relatives, or her in-laws - people who loved her and mourned her and celebrated upon her return from the dead - and she'll have to tell them that she won't be there on Christmas Day. And if the person who asks knows her at all, they'll see the look on her face and know that there's no negotiating to be done here.
It's not exactly that she doesn't want to celebrate Christmas with the people she used to celebrate Christmas with. But she can do that on any day near the end of December. Spending December 25th with Eiffel and Hera is something she absolutely cannot compromise on.
The main reason she'd give for this is that December 25th is Eiffel's birthday. Whether or not it matters to him as much as it used to, Minkowski wants Eiffel's birthday to get the recognition it deserves, because it was so important to him and he never expected anyone else to care or remember.
A second reason - one she might never speak aloud - is that she's always thought that Christmas is a time for family, and nowadays that means that spending it with Eiffel and Hera feels right to her.
But I think there's a third, perhaps equally important, reason underneath those two. Maybe she doesn't admit it to herself consciously, but I think part of Minkowski believes that the only people who can really understand the complicated way she now feels about December 25th are the two people who were there with her when everything went to hell on Christmas Day.
It was December 25th when they realised they'd made contact with aliens, and when Hilbert locked Minkowski outside the airlock and tried to incapacitate Eiffel and tore out Hera's personality hardware, and when everything Minkowski had thought she knew about the Hephaestus mission fell apart.
How can she exchange gifts with people for whom it isn't the anniversary of the one of the worst days of their life? How can she gather round a Christmas tree with people who've never feared for their lives at the hands of Alexander Hilbert and Goddard Futuristics? How can she eat turkey and trimmings with people who weren't there when the Christmas dinner was never eaten because there was a murderous mutiny from one of the intended guests? How can she spend December 25th with people for whom it's never been a day of betrayal and fear and loss and uncertainty eight lightyears away from Earth?
Eiffel doesn't remember that awful Christmas and that brings its own kind of pain for Minkowski. But he was there, and so was Hera, and so (no matter what anyone else expects) Minkowski needs to be with them on that complicated day.
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I was just minding my own business listening to the latest episode of World Gone Wrong podcast and thinking to myself "I'm getting big Empty Man vibes from these random bizarre but ominous messages, sent from a powerful source of authority, warning about the coming of a mysterious threat. I bet the writers were influenced by Wolf 359, it's fun how you can spot little influences like that..." And then I get to the end of the episode and only then do I learn it was written by Gabriel Urbina the man himself. I feel like I've fallen for some kind of trick. He's hiding in plain sight. He's The-Empty-Man-ed me in two separate podcasts. The empty man is coming for me and apparently his name is Leonard...
#*Shakes fist at sky* Urbina!!#I now realise that other people have already said all this in the World Gone Wrong tag#but I still feel the need to express it#As the Tumblr user previously known as the-empty-man I think I have a right to feel uniquely attacked#Anyway I would recommend World Gone Wrong :)#It's a fun heartwarming time about friendship in a world that is fucked up in different ways to how the actual world is fucked up#The dynamic between the two main characters is excellent#world gone wrong
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I'm sure Minkowski never forgot that Cutter was the first person ever to call her Commander. After recruiting her in Once in A Lifetime, he starts to call her Lieutenant, then breaks into laughter, before correcting himself: "What am I saying? Commander Minkowski." He draws attention to himself granting that title, stressing its significance. By initially calling her by a lower ranking, then conspicuously correcting himself, Cutter emphasises that he's the one granting her that title. Right at the beginning of Minkowski's employment with Goddard Futuristics, Cutter plants the seed for his line in the finale: "People cared about you because of what I made you: A soldier. A leader. A commander. I gave you that, and now? I taketh away."
And he does take it away. Cutter makes a point of calling her Commander in that first meeting, but he hardly ever calls Minkowski Commander after that. He almost always calls her Renée. He makes the point in that first interaction that he has the authority to grant her that title, and then in every subsequent interaction he tries to make the point that she doesn't have command over him. Having called her Commander once makes every time he doesn't call her by her title seem more deliberate. It's not that he never uses titles - it's that he uses them selectively. He gives her a taste of that sense of authority, but he doesn't want her to feel worthy of it.
In the liveshow, he cuts her off by shouting "I AM SPEAKING, LIEUTENANT!". Minkowski is the Commander of the Hephaestus in official terms at this point and Cutter even refers to her as "a mission commander" later in the same episode. So there is a deliberate malice to Cutter calling Minkowski Lieutenant here. Not only does it emphasise the use of authority structures as a means for control and the abandonment of first-name-basis false friendliness, calling her by another title makes his choice not to call her Commander even more explicit, denying her that authority.
Apart from when he recruits her, the only other time I can think of when Cutter directly calls Minkowski Commander is in Ep60, when he lays out his offer to let Minkowski leave on the Sol: "How does that sound to you, Commander?" Again, calling her Commander is a kind of power play, an attempt at manipulation, highlighting the sense of responsibility that motivates so many of Minkowski's actions. Cutter is prompting her to ask the question she would be asking herself anyway: what choice would a good Commander make? Just as he did when he recruited her, Cutter offers Minkowski something she desperately wants, and the use of her title here only draws attention to the idea that Cutter is the one with the power, choosing what to give her.
#Digging this out of my drafts in an attempt to make a return to actually posting here#Rambling about Minkowski name / title symbolism is sufficiently on brand for a comeback 😅#Anyway. I think this is the exact kind of manipulation / power play that Minkowski is particularly vulnerable to#Even among the worry about having made such a big decision without consulting her husband#I have no doubt that she enjoyed being called Commander#The emphasis Cutter put on it felt right to her#It matched the significance she felt that new title held#It pleased the part of her that craves recognition of her authority from someone at the top of a hierarchy#The memory obviously holds a sour taste for her now#perhaps particularly the moment of Cutter calling her Commander for the first time (and one of the only times)#She feels sick now at the memory of how proud she felt to hear him call her that#Thinking about this alongside all of the other significance that people calling Minkowski Commander takes on:#Eiffel's insistence on it as a indicator of his increasing respect for her#the SI-5 calling her Lieutenant#Hera being prevented from calling her Commander...#Everything that all of that signifies#and all of it beginning with that laugh of Cutter's. that pointed emphasis#wolf 359#w359#the empty man posteth#wolf 359 spoilers#w359 spoilers#renee minkowski#renée minkowski#marcus cutter
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communications officer 📻
#That's the guy!!#Genuinely so impressed with how you collaged this together#It looks v convincing!#and very much captures the Hephaestus vibes#The cigarette in his hand is such a good detail as well#And generic Star Wars t-shirt of course#Also really like how the room is all kinda dark and grungy and then the orange of the star and the jumpsuit are the main points of colour#I think the composition works well to emphasise that#Wolf 359#w359#Doug Eiffel
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8.15.2024: Happy [ Ten Years of Wolf 359!! ] 💫📻
In celebration, @avesmonster and I have spent this year organizing an anthology of fanworks, and I'm so happy to finally be able to share it. It's such a labor of love from everyone involved, and it's incredible to see how passionate people still are about this show. We received over 50 (!!) submissions, both old and new, so please, please check it out, let everyone know how awesome their work is, & leave a comment on our guestbook, while you're there!!
#HAPPY 10TH BIRTHDAY W359!!#This whole site is a Absolute Masterpiece and I know that so so much work has gone into it#I'm very excited to look through it all!#GO LOOK NOW#GO BOOKMARK IT#GO SEND IT TO ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS
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may the 4th be with you, commander. (<- minkowski's birthday, and she's never gonna hear the end of it. the audacity to be born on star wars day when she doesn't care about star wars even a little bit and some people have to share their birthdays with holidays that are way less cool. it's tragic really.)
#I know that he's so annoying to her about it and the thought brings me joy#I'm letting her down cos I haven't Minkowski-posted yet today...#Gonna reblog some of my Minkowski essays just so I have marked the occasion
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Books and reading are really important to Clara Entwhistle. She bonds with Jasper the cabbie over having read The Grey Book, with Titus Byrne over Captain Swift novels, and with a random pickpocket over Figgler's Prestidigitation. She sees the right reading material as a potential solution to any uncertainty in her life. Trilling's Arts of Detection can teach her how to be a detective. Posner's A Guide to Business for Gentlemen can tell her how to make Fleet-Entwhistle Investigations a success. She only moved to London in the first place because she read Horrocks' Tales from the City in the Harrogate Herald.
I find this particularly interesting because we have significant evidence that Clara's access to reading material has been tightly controlled and subject to judgement for most of her life. She tells Fleet, "once, when I was young, Mother caught me reading a sensation novel and threatened to send me to the Mesmer Institute". She considers this a formative enough experience that it's one of the first facts she lists when wanting to share information about herself with Fleet. As a child, her reading choices were something shameful, something that indicated she wasn't the kind of young woman her mother wanted her to be. And even as an adult, arriving into London for the first time, she is chastised by her mother for wanting to buy a newspaper: "What need have you for a newspaper?... You can read my copy of this month's All a Lady Need Know. Disagreement resolved." In the world Clara has been trapped in, the ladylike thing is to only access a very limited sphere of appropriate information and not to read anything that falls outside of that sphere. And those boundaries of ladylike-ness will be rigidly enforced.
So perhaps it's no wonder that after Clara arrives in London, she's devouring everything from taxi regulation manuals to adventure novels, repeatedly calling the librarian for recommendations in the middle of the night, taking out 20 books at a time and then realising she's underestimated how long it will take her to read them. No wonder she's so often telling people about books she's read. For Clara Entwhistle, being able to do any of those things openly is a new and thrilling kind of freedom.
#Victoriocity#Clara Entwhistle#I think the way she views books also speaks to a fairly lonely childhood / young adulthood#where she didn't necessarily have a lot of people she could trust to talk to or ask for information from#(not that a love of book always indicates that#just that her particular kind of reliance on them coupled with other things we know about her point in that direction)#I hadn't heard of the Mesmer Institute previously#but according to Encyclopedia Britannica#Mesmer's work was 'the forerunner of the modern practice of hypnotism'#The words mesmerism / mesmerise are eponyms from him#Basically I think we can assume Clara's mother was viewing her reading choices as an ailment#to be cured through (practices similar to) hypnotism#which is deeply sinister#Anyway Clara deserves to get to read all the books she wants#victoriocity spoilers#the empty man posteth#victoriocity podcast
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Just a little half-assed free-handed painting I did for shits and giggles tonight. I'm hoping I made it the right size and shape that I'll be able to cut this into a cover for a hardback book I'm making tomorrow.
#This is really cool#I love all the different fonts#The way it reflects the idea of the numbers being spoken by different people in different tones#Greater Boston podcast#greater boston
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Leon Stamatis
from the fiction audio drama podcast i've been listening to non stop on my semester break: @greaterblogston
#It's my guy in his crystal (glass) ball...#I love this#Something about the intensity of his expression... I want to befriend him#And the sinister shadowy face and hand behind creep me out in an excellent way#Leon Stamatis#greater boston#Greater boston podcast
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the u.s.s. horrible unending nightmare 💥 (once again from the incredible @hehearse)
#Urgh this is so....#I still can't get over the composition and the emotion and the symbolism of it#And it's also just beautiful art separate from all of that#Makes me feel insane#Doug Eiffel#hera wolf 359#hera w359#wolf 359#w359
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