#i want another podcast thats just full episodic horror stories like that

[cinnabeat]

im not really into tma anymore but still incredibly upset over what happened to tim and sasha

[lameravigliadoro]

I'm a English native and I'm learning French I can have a short conversation in French but I'm really slow and takes time to understand some words. I used to be in French classes in highschool (I'm going to be a senior in highschool when it starts up) what would you recommend for me to use to help learn more? I'm currently using droplets and Duolingo for studying (Droplets for vocabulary and Duolingo for grammar, reading things like that) what would you recommend for me to use thats free or doesn't cost that much? It would help a lot thank you

Hi!

Duolingo and Droplets are good resources for starters.

there are several things you can do if you want to go further.

Check out RFI (Radio France International) : You'll find free listening and reading resources abt French speaking news. I highly recommend you listen and then read the podcast episodes of LES MOTS D'ACTUALITÉ (words that are the news - they will explain the origin and meanings of 1 word that is relevant these days in France). but be curious and check out the rest, they have lots of good stuff.

Read news articles for free on official news website France Info, RTBF (Belgium). you'll find some free articles on Le Monde, Libération, Le Parisien, etc.

find lessons and exercises on Francaisfacile.com to get a better understanding of grammar, conjugations, tenses, etc.

Read 19th Guy de Maupassanant's (King of French fantastique genre) short stories on Wikisource. Highly recommend "La Main" ("The Hand", kinda horror, but really famous)

-> when you're more confident abt reading novels in French, just search for any 19th writer + Wikisource and you should be able to find their works in full for free. My favs are Zola, Balzac, Victor Hugo (Les Misérables' writer !), Flaubert, Dumas (Les Trois Mousquetaires' writer !), George Sand, Stendhal (esp La Chartreuse de Parme) etc.

if you have doubts about how to say something like a native, ask someone on HiNative you'll always have some French speaking ppl to help you.

- Familiarise yourself with spoken French with youtube/podcasts/etc (anything that's material for listening skills). If you're on youtube you can check channels like

Vogue France and their street style, with subtitles and lots of fashion and slang vocab! I used it in my French lesson and it worked quite well.

Yes Vous Aime was a comedy skits channel, with French subtitles. They did parodies, you can check it out!

Paul Taylor is a British stand up comedian. He's doing skits and specials in both French and English, and he's honestly perfect at grasping and vulgarising French oddities either in the language or the french society.

Clément Viktorovitch and his weekly analysis on French politics/news on Franceinfo. As you may already know, we're very passionate about our political life in France. so you can get used to the vocab have a gist of it with these chroniques radio.

Karambolage - it's a bilingual channel (German & French - l'amitié franco-allemande is a big thing! 🙂) that explains social, cultural differences between the two countries. You can find illustrated explanations of Le Verlan, expressions like "Monter à Paris" etc etc. It worked so well with my students! they found it easier to understand.

Damon Dominique is a language American youtuber and he's good at explaining and vulgarising French grammar and slang. Sometimes you gotta look at a foreign point of view :)

Konbini (especially their Club Lecture, Vidéo Club where famous authors/film directors show their favourite works, their inspirations and talk abt it, you probably won't find any subtitles tho)

and ofc you have dozen of french youtubers like Squeezie, Seb, Lena Situation, Aurélien Prévaux, Zen (talkshow) etc.

And when you're more confident, you can pick a day when you'll try to think only in French, another day when you'll translate what's written on your food package/friends convos/emails etc etc

put your phone settings in french, follow vocab accounts on Instagram, follow French ppl on social media so that you get accustomed to read in French on a daily basis.

and find a book to read in french, or fanfics if you're into it, anything that'll make you read in French :)

I hope that answers your questions! and sorry if it looks like too much, I'm getting back at a language I used to learn in high school too, it's not easy and it takes time. so take your time with French, I just put everything I thought might help in the first months/first year!

good luck! bonne chance !

[rabdoidal]

are there any other podcasts youd recommend? im caught up on critical role & magnus archives and want more good fiction thats not rigidly hetero

as always ill shamelessly plug my gay podcast artificial ghost radio, but its not fiction based - these ones are! these are just from my personal library but theres plenty out there, but im mainly putting down ones you’d like based off CR and TMA

The Penumbra Podcast (sci-fi, fantasy)

There are two main universes with many different linear story arcs within each: Juno Steel and the Second Citadel. Juno Steel is a neo-noir set on Mars and focuses on Juno Steel, a private eye. If you like being sad, being gay and doing crimes, its for you. The Second Citadel is a fantasy setting following several different knights, trackers, scientists, and monsters and their experiences living in a not-so accepting world. If you like being sad, being gay and high fantasy bullshit, its for you.

Wolf 359 (comedy, drama, thriller, sci-fi)

Space crew full of unlikely characters trying their best to keep their ship from falling apart with a roll of tape and hope. Includes some horror and enough found family to kick your ass in half. Very emotionally distressing, but it’s the best in its genre - you can’t find a better space podcast that gets you like Wolf 359 does.

The Bright Sessions (sci-fi, drama, slice of life)

A therapist records parts of her sessions with super-powered people, helping them deal with mental illness, sexuality, and other problems while also helping with controlling their powers through mindfulness. It’s a super engaging and emotional podcast, and I only started it recently! 

EOS 10 (comedy, medical drama, sci-fi)

Another set in the future, another set in space. The podcast follows Ryan Dalias as he begins working as a doctor on a big-ass space hub, while also helping their head surgeon get sober. Oh, also there’s space pirates, bounty hunters, dimension and time travel, and evil organisations trying to fuck up Ryan’s day at every turn 

Welcome to Night Vale (comedy, horror)

A classic! My first podcast! It’s all a broadcast of a radio host (Cecil) in a small desert community somewhere in America that is full of the strange, cryptic and supernatural. It all reads more like poetry than prose in times - people die but they get better. Its almost like if a town actually existed like how a deranged conspiracy theorist thinks it does; all their theories are correct. 

Alice Isn’t Dead (thriller, horror, drama)

My favorite of the night vale presents podcasts; a woman quits her job to become a truck driver looking for her missing wife, who she assumed had died. Similarly to WTNV, it sounds very poetic and beautiful at times, but it is horrific, and terrifying, and beautiful. I can’t describe it any more or it’d spoil the whole thing.

Within the Wires (drama, sci-fi, dystopia)

Yes, half of these are night vale presents podcasts. Within the Wires has a few seasons now that are all different stories within the same universe; a society/world reformed after a big calamity/war that is supposed to be perfect, but the podcast follows the stories of those that can’t exist within the system (I’m being vague because everything is a spoiler). The first season is formatted like relaxation/meditation tapes found in an institution, the second is a series of guided museum tours. I highly recommend it if you like vague endings, being sad, but love being gay even more.

The Orbiting Human Circus of The Air (drama, comedy, magical but in a Christmas miracle way not in a Harry Potter way)

So the guy that wrote Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the lead singer/songwriter for the Music Tapes made a podcast set in turn of the century France about a janitor that dreams of being a radio host, but is painfully clumsy and awkward. The podcast features his dialogues as well as excerpts of the radio show The Orbiting Human Circus of The Air that is being broadcasted in a ballroom at the top of the Eiffel tower, where the janitor also works. It’s cheesy, its over the top, its theatrical, and its VERY holiday appropriate this month!

King Falls AM (comedy, sci-fi, found family)

I know we talk about found family a lot in this bitch but the two AM radio hosts in this podcast say “you’re like a brother to me, i love you” in almost every episode. It’s set in a small town, two people doing a radio show together and dealing with the weird people that live in King Falls. Ben is a local and Sammy just moved there, so he has trouble adjusting to the ghosts, werewolves and aliens.

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 53: Trees and Shadows (Transcript) - 6th February 2017

Credit for transcribing this episode goes to @laqueus-ludovicus! A big thanks to her for helping me with this project, it’s massively appreciated.  

tw: animal mutilation

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

Some of the things we see aren't what they appear to be. Heather Bowie and her cousins learned that lesson back in 1989. She was eleven at the time and according to her mother, Karen, it was a bright winter day, the sort of day where the sun reflects off every inch of snow, which always has a way of making dark objects like houses and trees stand out. Heather and her cousins were walking along a small country road that ran between their town and the next when they saw a dog sitting in a stream near the roadside. Well, stream might be too strong of a term, it was just a bunch of run off, the sort that passes beneath roads through those big metal tunnels. It was a drainage ditch basically, but kids love dogs, so Heather and the others veered off the road side and into the snow to walk toward it. They assumed it was a local pet that had wandered a bit too far from home, so they planned to check its collar and see what they could do. But even from a distance it looked a bit odd. To be specific it looked too big to be a dog. They took one more step toward it and then stopped. They stopped because that's when the dog turned to look at them. And as it did so, it did something they weren't expecting - it stood up on its hind legs like a human. Obviously frightened, the girls ran home as fast as they could. Humans have always had a connection to animals. We live with them in our homes. We depend on them for food and resources. We identify with them, sometimes even treating them more like people than beasts. We speak to them, we name them, and we project human personalities on them. For thousands of years, we've treated them as if they were more than animals. But of course, that's just our imagination. If we believe the stories, though, it might be more true than we expected. As I said before, some things aren't what they appear to be. Sometimes, they’re worse. I'm Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

Our connection to animals is nearly as old as humanity itself. We've almost always treated them as important parts of the world around us, although different cultures have expressed that importance in a variety of ways. The common thread, though, is that animals have always helped us better understand our world. Some cultures have revered them as gods to worship. Others have seen them as valuable sacrifices to offer to whatever deity they wanted to please. In many cultures, animals have served as our companions through daily life, and in others they journeyed with the dead to the afterlife. Just think of what we know of ancient Egyptian culture. There were entire cults built around specific animals, like bulls and cats, their dead were frequently buried alongside animals that held personal or spiritual significance, and many of the Egyptian gods and goddesses were represented through simple animal symbolism. Anubis, for example, was part man, part jakel. Sekhmet was a woman with the head of a lion. Ancient Hindu teachings for thousands of years have demanded deep respect for the animals around us. In China, the ancient philosophies of Confucianism and Daoism both stress the same thing. With the Hindus, that respect is founded on the idea of reincarnation, in China, it's rooted more in moral responsibility, but the result is the same. Animals are and always have been important to us, and yes, I know that ancient cultures focused a lot of their religion and practice around the sun and moon and stars, but they often framed those complex systems with simple animal language. Thats why so many cultures have their own zodiac symbol, where the major constellations are represented by animals. The Greek root of zodiac, by the way, literally means “circle of little animals”. Just an aside – the ancient Egyption word for cat was meu, which sounds a lot like the noise that cats actually make. And that classic stereotypical dog name, Fido? It comes from the Latin word fidelis which means loyal and faithful.

It's easy to see then how animals have helped us understand our world a little better. They help us find our bearings and keep us company in a big, wild world. More significantly, though, they've helped us understand ourselves by giving humans a sense of identity and purpose, a theme or a banner to unite around in a sense. Sometimes those themes are took the form of religion, as was the case in Egypt with the bull cult. Sometimes it's more of a totem thing, where an entire tribe or community built their identity around a significant animal in their environment. Sometimes they did it for a feeling of safety, sometimes it was a symbol of power. In Icelandic folklore the Norse warrior class known as “berserkers” were members of the bear cult. Berserkr in Old Norse literally meant “bear shirt”, but it also embodied tha fierce, powerful nature that they wanted for themselves as warriors. They were often depicted wearing bear skins and sometimes even bear heads as head coverings. That's a tradition that still survives, by the way. You can see it in the ceremonial military caps worn by some personnel in multiple European countries. The most common tribal animal, though, has always been the wolf. It's a global fascination, with examples found in Mexico, North America, India, Mongolia, and the Middle East, and this is probably because wolves represented so much of what early humanity identified with. They moved in packs, they hunted their food, and they have a distinct social order. Any hunter-gatherer community would instantly admire those qualities. And like bears, wolves were also seen as brave and powerful warriors. Ancient Persian and Hittite warriors were known to dress in wolf skins for battle. Interestingly, though, they also had a reputation for tossing their weapons aside and just jumping on their enemies, literally biting them like wolves. For a very long time, you see, humans have wanted to be animals, which of course led to stories where that was the case - animals that became people, people that became animals. It's an idea so powerful that we can find it hiding inside the folklore of dozens of cultures. The Native American skinwalker, the Nagual of Central America, and of course, throughout much of Europe, there's the werewolf. These are stories, of course, artifacts from another time, when animals were gods and humans desperately wanted to imitate the divine. And yes, these stories also address our dual nature, because we are in so many ways nothing more than animals ourselves, but those moral lessons have a way of distracting us from the plot. For thousands of years, people have told stories about mysterious beasts – and it turns out those stories might be more real than we care to believe.

In 1989, a woman was driving along the same country road that Heather Bowie and her cousins had just walked along weeks before when they sighted that strange creature. In Lorraine Endrizzi’s case it was well after sunset, so she was doing the responsible thing and scanning the edges of her headlights for wild animals. Wisconsin has plenty of deer, after all, and deer don't mix well with windshields and front ends. Lorraine worked as a manager at one of the local bars in Elkhorn and had just wrapped up a very long, very tiring shift. All she really wanted to do was get home safely, but when she did notice something unusual, it wasn't in the periphery of her headlights. It was right in the road in front of her. Seeing it early gave her the chance to slow down and swerve to avoid hitting it, but it also helped her get a good look at it. From a distance it looked as if there was an animal hunched low to the pavement of the oncoming lane. It's head was gently bobbing at an irregular rhythm. She couldn't tell for sure, but it almost seemed to be eating. As she slowly passed it, she claims she saw everything. It was eating, alright. Whatever it was, the creature was hunched over a pile of roadkill, pulling big chunks of flesh off the dead animal. Lorraine said she could clearly make out what appeared to be long, white fangs that protruded from a gray snout. Together with the pointed ears, she couldn't help but think of as a wolf. The trouble was this wolf was kneeling on the road, like a human. It's one story, I know, and stories that are born in the middle of the night after an exhausting day of work are often full of flaws. That might very well be the case here. I think we've all had moments where we've seen things that don't make sense, so Lorraine’s story could just be a bit of midnight confusion, I suppose – if it wasn't for the other stories.

Two years later – on Halloween night, in fact – it was Doris Gibson’s turn. She was just 18 at the time and had been driving out to pick a friend up for some trick or treating back in town. Like Lorraine before her, she was driving that same stretch of country road, named for the old Bray family farm that it passed. According to the story Doris later told to a local reporter, she’d briefly taken her eyes off the road to switch channels on the radio when she felt the car lurch. It was as if, she said, she'd run something over. Frightened by the possibility of what had just happened, she stopped her car, put it in park and then got out for a look. Doris, it seems, wasn't a big horror movie fan, because anyone who knows anything about horror films knows that you never, ever get out of the car. Ever. Still, there wasn't a scratch on her car. The bumper was spotless, there was no sign of blood or fur or anything else that might hint at fresh road kill. And even more convincing, there was nothing on the road, no dead animal, no unlucky farmer out for an evening walk, not even a pothole. There was no clue anywhere that could explain the bump shed felt. She was about to turn and head back to her car when movement caught her attention. There was something in the trees and shadows along the roadside. According to her, it was a large figure that stood upright like a man but seemed hairy and very muscular, which (as you might imagine) was a pretty shocking thing to see on a dark, lonely country road. So Doris did the smart thing and bolted for her car door. As she did, this thing, whatever it was, chased after her. Doris said she could hear the heavy thud of the creatures feet on the pavement behind her and the sound of the deep, panting breaths. Thankfully, she managed to get into the car and shifted quickly back into drive, but as she pulled away, she felt her car shudder once more. When she looked in the rear view mirror, all she could see was the dark silhouette of the creature filling her back window. It had jumped onto the trunk.

Whatever her attacker was, she claims that it fell off when she got her car moving quickly enough, but she wasn't willing to stop for another look. She did, however, continue on to her friend’s house and eventually they both headed back to town for some Halloween fun. Later that night, on her way back along Bray Road to drop her friend back off at home, Doris swears she saw the figure one more time. It was far off in the distance, at the edge of her headlights, but it was the same unmistakable shape. Tall, thick and very animal like, but standing upright on two legs. It wasn't until the next day in the safety of her own driveway and by the light of the noon day sun that she took another look at her car. There, on the trunk, she found evidence that something very unusual and very dangerous had taken place the night before: long, vicious scratches all grouped together as if they were made by claws.

This is the point in the story where you're probably expecting me to clarify what the creature was. All of the physical descriptions certainly point toward the folklore regarding werewolves, but almost no one in Elkhorn made that connection. Maybe that's because there were never any stories of humans transforming into the monster, or perhaps it's because the sightings weren’t limited to full moon nights. In the end, whatever it might have been, the people of the area took to calling it the Beast of Bray Road. There were other theories, of course. One common suggestion was rooted in the Native American folklore about a giant wolf known as the Shunka Warakin, which was described as sort of a hybrid between a wolf and a coyote. Others have made comparisons to the Inuit stories of the Amarok or the Waheela, both of which were enormous, monstous wolves. But honestly, there are far too many human charactristics attributed to Bray Road creature to make the comparison stick. Then, that’s without taking into account the additional sighings. Because Lorraine and Doris weren’t the only witnesses to see something strange along that stretch of country road and once they spoke to a local reporter, others found the courage to come forward with their own tales.

Marvin Kershnick was one of them. According to his testimony, he had his own encounter way back in 1981, a full decade before Doris Gibbson. Unlike the others, though, his sighting didn't happen in the dark. He'd been driving along Highway 11, which runs just north east of Elkhorn, and as he approached the turn off for Bray Road, he saw an unusual animal in the trees along the side of the road. Kershnick slowed down when he saw it and then pulled over to get a better look. The way he described it, much of the creature was obscured by the underbrush, but it was clearly wolf-like. They stared at each other for a moment before the beast moved toward the car. Frightened, Kershnick drove away quickly. Five years later, in 1986, Diane Koenig was traveling in the same area, returning home after a day in nearby Berlington. From a distance, her headlights didn't give her a very clear view so at first it just looked like a tall man was walking along the side of the road with something heavy in his arms. As she drew closer, though, all of that came into focus. According to Koenig, this man had the head of a wolf, and the heavy burden that it held in its arms turned out to be a full sized deer. Unlike Kershnick though, Koenig didn't stop for a closer look and instead sped up, just in case the creature decided to give chase. She kept the story to herself for years out of fear that she’d be considered a lunatic.

More stories flooded in. One unnamed girl told the authorities that she'd been chased up a tree by a wolf then had to stay there for over an hour while it paced around, trying to find a way to climb up after her. What struck her as odd, though, was that the wolf walked around the tree on its hind legs. When she led her parents back to the tree the next day, they found large claw marks on the lower portion of the trunk. Even Scott Bray, who lived on the family farm that gave the road it’s name, claimed to have seen unusual things, including enormous wolf tracks on his property. Local animal control authorities were called to several homes in the area to examine and collect a large number of mutilated animal corpses. A few townsfolk tried to blame that one on Satanic cults, but everyone else agreed it was just the Beast of Bray Road. There was a good amount of fear in town, as you might expect, but the sightings were also creating something else that's lasted to this day. A reputation. The bar where Lorraine Endrizzi worked created a menu item called the Silver Bullet Special. A bakery in town started making wolf shaped cookies. Think Roswell New Mexico and UFO collectables but with wolves, and I think you'll get the idea. Even Chuck Coleman, a local state representative, got involved by using the Beast of Bray Road in his election marketing. He ran an ad that showed a man dressed up as the Beast casting his vote for Coleman. Perhaps proof of the popularity of the Bray Beast stories, Coleman won his election. Doris Gibson's encounter also seemed to have been the last sighting of the creature by travelers on Bray Road. After that, Elkhorn Wisconsin sort of became quiet – for a while, at least. You see, in the spring of 1992, county animal control officer John Frederickson was called to a field outside of town, to the east near Bray Road. This is a man who was used to the occasional road kill or injured farm animal. He’d seen a lot in his career. But when he arrived at the field, he was well out of his depth, because there, laying in the pasture, were the bodies of five horses. Their throats had all been slashed.

It seems that people are drawn to animals and we always have been. And if the internet’s collection of cat videos and dog tricks tells us anything, it's that our passion for these animals isn’t fading any time soon. Perhaps they meet a deep, unspoken need in our soul or maybe they just trigger the right pleasure center in our brains. Whatever the reason might be, animals are significant to us. But every time I see someone dress up their dog in a sweater, I can't help but think of how, for a very long time, humans used to be the ones dressed up as animals. We envy their grace, their strength and their power, and that envy has woven itself into the very fabric of global folklore. But what if there's another reason why we tell stories of animals that act human? What if, deep down, we fear the possibility, or that our ancestors told just enough stories about human-like animals that we wonder, just a little? Whatever it was lurking in the trees and shadows of Elkhorn, Wisconsin back in the early 90s remains a mystery to this day. No answers have been uncovered, no unusual corpses have been found in the woods or along the roadside, no nests or dens, or whatever sort of dwelling a creature like the Beast of Bray Road might have lived in. All we have is story. Sometimes all we ever have is story. All of the witnesses who came forward to tell their stories seemed to agree on the details, and surprisingly all of them appear to be telling the truth. When a documentary on the events was being produced in 2008, all of the witnesses agreed to take a polygraph exam, and each of them passed. It's not irrefutable proof, I know, but it's enough to make you wonder.

Sometime after the events of the early 90s, a local who lived along Bray Road looked out his window to see a man standing in his driveway with a handgun. Obviously frightened by the sight of an armed stranger in his yard, he called the police, who quickly arrived. José Contreras was immediately arrested and his handgun, along with 50 rounds of ammunition, was confiscated. He eventually went to trial and his lawyer attempted to build a case around self defense. Contreras, he told the judge, was looking for the Beast of Bray Road, which he believed was a werewolf. That meant, according to his defence, he wasn't a danger to anyone else. The judge, though, dismissed the notion and convicted Conteras anyway. His reason? Apparently none of the bullets in the gun had been silver. Maybe it's fantasy, maybe it's real, but it's amazing in the very least how parts of fantasy can become so accepted that they play a role in something as significant as a criminal trial.

One final tale. Just six years ago, more witnesses came forward about a new sighting. One night in October of 2010, six people were driving together down Bray Road. Down the road ahead, they watched as shadows seemed to move across their path. As they drew closer, they watched the shape run into the open field to their right. What they say might seem hard to believe, so we’ll have to take them at their word. They claimed it was an animal, covered in fur, and similar in appearance to a wolf - except it was running on two legs and not four. Once it reached the field, the beast dropped to all fours and bolted off into the darkness. One final detail sets this report apart from all the others, though, because unlike every other encounter dating back over 30 years, this one finds a way to make the Beast of Bray Road even more frightening. According to the witnesses, it wasn't a single creature. There were two of them.

[Closing statements]