#litmus testing the audience...

[ghastigiggles]

... do you think theyd fw a third

edit: i appreciate the support but im gonna go ahead and turn off rbs because im a little too self-conscious about this lmao. but i appreciate the people who liked this enough to rb it, thank you so much 🥹

[crow-caller]

started playing fallen london cause of your blog and i absolutely love it! Thank u :)

Excellent!!! If I have any power, let it be used to get people to play fallen london and its related games (sunless seas, sunless skies = Survival exploration, mask of the rose = visual novel)

[syblei-art]

stop praying for the strange wizard in the tower he's gotten too strong

[fathermulcahyofficial]

Idk I find it kind of endearing that fans of the book tend to call him The Creature rather than The Monster

[sapphodera]

I remember seeing a post on here about Veilguard that was like "people complain Rook can't be mean but you can call Neve/Harding a liability after they get hurt" which is not a bad take necessarily but it's like. yeah you were the audience they were aiming for if you think gently calling an injured person a liability (when it comes to fighting) is mean.

[ovaryacted]

Seeing some early reviews about Materialists and despite it being good (deserved), my anxieties have been confirmed. Oh well, I’ll still go watch the movie anyways cause I’m more curious about seeing the themes of this movie and how Celine Song’s direction towards our modern approach to romance & dating mirror the shifts in our current social climate and the correlation of marriage being used as a mechanism to secure class mobility.

[mauricemylittlemeowmeow]

back in the city. watched It Ends With Us with my roommate.

[centaurianthropology]

Murderbot as a ‘Cringe’ Litmus Test for the Audience (a.k.a., we are culturally the Corporation Rim)

One of the more interesting things I’ve seen in discussions of ‘Murderbot’ are how many people are not happy that the show made the Preservation team more explicitly hippies.  After all, per our current cultural zeitgeist, hippies are silly, over-earnest, over-feeling, over-EVERYTHING. Why is this team of scientists holding hands and humming?  Why are they taking breaks in the middle of a tense situation to reassure a colleague that they love him? Why do they stand around playing music and dancing during their downtime?  Why did the show make them “Cringe”?

And that got me thinking again about the current cultural antipathy toward sincerity and openness.  People who are seen as open and sincere beyond a fairly narrow scope of emotional expression are treated as deeply weird, off-putting, and most importantly for this conversation, as INCOMPETENT.  You can’t be goofy and competent.  You can’t believe in the power of love and friendship and holding hands and taking a dance break, and still be a good scientist.  You can’t have one of the unsexy sorts of mental health problems (panic disorder) and be a good leader.  In our current cultural moment, you have to be Cool.  You have to be unaffected by both the horrors of the world and the day-to-day joys. 

I think that a lot of people see themselves in ‘The Murderbot Diaries’, and a lot of them understandably love the very anticapitalist tone of the books.  And they wanted Preservation to be Cool Space Communists.  Hypercompetent at all times, serious, without flaw.  Because any personal flaws might be taken as flaws in their cultural and political leanings, right?  And we can’t have silliness or goofiness or fun in our Communist Utopia, or people won’t take us seriously.

But to me, the tension is so much better, so much more real and human and FUN. And it makes the audience question their own implicit biases as much as SecUnit is going to have to contemplate its implicit biases.  This team is comprised of highly talented scientists from a culture that values emotions and, yes, activities that we the audience have been culturally trained to think are Cringe.  They do have a humming consensus circle—so that anyone in the team can have veto power over a decision that has major ramifications not only for a research project, but for their own ethics.  They do like to play music and dance when they’ve got some free time, even if that music would be considered embarrassing or offputting to outsiders.  They do openly love one another and support one another, even in—no, especially in—challenging times.  It’s good to have that tension, both to tell the story and to give the characters and the AUDIENCE an emotional and thematic arc.

Let’s use Dr. Mensah as a the best example so far of this tension. Mensah is a good leader.  In every scene where she’s with the group, she’s the heart of it.  She’s always weighing the fears, the thoughts, the feelings, and the arguments of her friends to come to a decision.  She doesn’t feel like Gurathin’s right about not trusting SecUnit, but she’s also very aware that he knows more about the Corporation Rim than she does, and that his arguments, while rooted in his fears, are rational.  So she ends up deciding that they’ll leave the SecUnit behind for their mission. 

And it’s the wrong call. Going out to the dark site in the map without the SecUnit almost gets her killed. But her decision to climb the scree pile alone makes sense, because she doesn’t want to further endanger Bharadwaj, and if she doesn’t climb up there with her equipment, they won’t get important information about what’s going on with their survey data. And yes, while she’s climbing she has another panic attack. But she keeps climbing through it. Hell, she even takes a moment to encourage the teamwork between SecUnit and Gurathin, because that’s an important part of being their leader.  And, yes, they both roll their eyes because they still don’t like one another. But the important thing is that she’s created this sense of openness, of acceptance, of love.

Being a good leader doesn’t mean making the right call all the time.  It means learning from both right calls and wrong calls.  It means creating an environment where people can be wrong, and learn from their mistakes, and try again to get it right.  And it works!  Gurathin may roll his eyes, but he also has the space to apologize for getting it wrong. He has the space to fuck up and try again. And that is created by her encouragement, by her openness, by her caring even when it becomes embarrassing to a man raised in our culture the Corporation Rim, where open emotion is something to smirk at.

And when she’s alone, Mensah falls apart.  When no one can see her, she has panic attacks, because things are starting to go pear-shaped for these people she loves.  Because one of her dear friends nearly died, and she wasn’t there, and apparently that could happen at any time because their maps are faulty, and the only real rescue is an untrustworthy bond company that is a week away at best.  That’s a perfect recipe for a panic attack, but she hides them because she knows what she needs to be for her friends and colleagues.  She is the leader, and damned if she’s going to let something like her panic disorder stop her from doing that.

That’s not incompetent, that’s incredibly courageous.  Her bravery lies in being afraid and pushing through, not being flawless from the off.  The bravery and the competence and the things that eventually are going to win Murderbot over to loving these humans ARE their flaws and the fact that they don’t let those flaws stop them from trying to be the best people they can be, while also being true to a culture of being open and loving to the point that they can come across, to the jaded construct or audience member, as Cringe.

I think we’re going to see more and more of that as the show unfolds.  We’ve only just laid the groundwork, and established the initial impressions of all the characters.  They are being set up for arcs, and by electing to let the Preservation team be more out-there, more earnest, more Cringe, they’re setting the audience up for an arc too.

Anyway, loving the show, can’t wait for the DeltFall storyline to kick off tonight.  And I love this crew being highly-competent space hippies with realistic human flaws, who love and support one another.  In an unrelentingly Cool, Bleak, and Edgy television landscape, it really is nice to have kind characters be free to be their kooky selves without the show judging them for it.

[secretmellowblog]

i think it's extremely unfair for you to say the actors are spineless. the producers and directors, yes. but the actors were literally having their livelihoods and future career prospects threatened if they spoke out or refused to perform.

grennell, the president of the kennedy center said, “Any performer who isn’t professional enough to perform for patrons of all backgrounds, regardless of political affiliation, won’t be welcomed. In fact, we think it would be important to out those vapid and intolerant artists to ensure producers know who they shouldn’t hire - and that the public knows which shows have political litmus tests to sit in the audience. The Kennedy Center wants to be a place where people of all political stripes sit next to each other and never ask who someone voted for but instead enjoys a performance together.”

and, i want to point out, that acting in Les Miserables is a job, not a life commitment or a political statement.

I stand by what I said: every single person involved in putting on the Les Miserables Kennedy center performance was either a spineless coward or a Trump supporter, and they should ALL be utterly ashamed of themselves. They're an insult to the novel's legacy. I'm shocked people are defending it. I used to sometimes wonder whether Victor Hugo's actions-- speaking up against Napoleon III's attacks on democracy-- were genuinely that important. After all, it's not like Hugo literally shot Napoleon III in battle or raised barricades against him with his own two hands-- he just used his platform to publicly criticize Napoleon III's attacks on democracy, knowing that he was doing it at a great personal risk. And he was right about the risks-- publicly speaking against Napoleon III did radically change Hugo's life, it did radically alter the course of his career, he did lose a lot of the power he used to have, and he was forced into exile away from everything he knew.

And Les Miserables was the product of that sacrifice. it is the novel he wrote from exile, and it is thematically about his exile. It is a novel that was written as a defense of the principles of a democratic republic, and as an encouragement for people to speak truth to power and stand against tyrants even when it came at great personal risk. But like... I'm honestly starting to respect Hugo's sacrifice a lot more now that multiple people have reached out to me claiming that it's ridiculous to ask that people starring in a musical adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel accept any level of personal discomfort to stand up to a modern dictator. I'm obsessed with the idea that Les Miserables shouldn't have to mean anything-- that these performers can cosplay as revolutionaries Risking it All to stand Up to Powerful People, while also being spineless cowards claiming they can't accept any personal discomfort/risk whatsoever to stand up to an actual modern dictator. Even when- again!-- they are starring in a story that is literally the product of Hugo's personal sacrifice standing up against Napoleon III! No, I wouldn't care as much if it were some piece of hollow corporate trash like "Back to the Future the musical" or some other garbage. I wouldn't' even care as much if it were another hollow "stick it to the man musical" like Wicked, where all the revolution theming is just hollow window dressing. I do care when it's Les Miserables, because the original novel was written by a man who WAS willing to make that personal sacrifice, and wrote the novel ABOUT that sacrifice. I care that now these people are making their living off of Victor Hugo's legacy-- but start crying about how "they're just poor smol beans who can't do anything uwu" when asked to make even a fraction of the sacrifice that he did, the sacrifice that Les Miserables is about, the sacrifice it exists to encourage. Thousands of people were out on the street demonstrating this weekend to send a message to Donald Trump-- and when this group of artists had a direct line to make a statement to him, the thing thousands of people are out on the streets trying to get, they cowered in fear and refused. Instead they sang to make him feel good, like he was the Hero of the musical--something he already believes-- all while playing pretend as brave revolutionaries making big risks. A democratic lawmaker was shot to death this weekend, but asking a performer to care about the meaning of the art they're profiting off of is "too big of a sacrifice." give me a break. Despite everything, I do think art means something. I think art is more than "a job," I think art is more than a hollow corporate product and vehicle for profit. Les Miserables means something, and it's important that it means something.

But that means it's also important to call out the shocking hypocrisy of what the story has been warped into. The novel does have meaning and even the musical does have meaning-- and that's why I am so outraged that people are dismissing that meaning as irrelevant. It's like Orwell's description of art in dystopia as being a simply "a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces."

Honestly, if the actors wanted to sing songs about how it's ridiculous to ask them to take any personal risks or sacrifices to speak truth to power.... they shouldn't be in Les Miserables. Instead they should just get onstage and sing this song from The Sound of Music about compromising with Nazis for three hours:

[lizamezzo]

At least 12 cast members of the US touring company of Les Mis are choosing not to perform on June 11th, when 🍊💩 will be attending for a fundraiser.

Important: even if you know the names of any of these actors, please DON’T name them or even speculate “I bet it’s xxxx”.

Richard Grenell, the 🍊💩- installed Executive Director of the Kennedy Center, has said “In fact, we think it would be important to out those vapid and intolerant artists to ensure producers know who they shouldn’t hire - and that the public knows which shows have political litmus tests to sit in the audience.”

Don’t let these artists be targeted for harassment. Please, in solidarity, keep their names out of this.

[mewvore]

gotta get writers to start watching wrestling so we get way more interesting villains in movies and games again. the audience reaction at a wrestling show is one of the most incredible litmus tests ever devised. no other entertainment around will give you a visceral reaction to characters nobody likes or characters people love to hate the same way several hundred people in an arena can

[teleit]

I don't know if I'll find any supporters, but this has been driving me crazy for three years now, and I have to say it.

The scene from season one with Luke and Rhaenyra where Luke expresses his insecurities as the heir to Driftmark is bullshit, and a litmus test for what's wrong with this show.

It all starts out relatively normal, with Luke again expressing his insecurities as the heir of Driftmark and offering to give the position to someone else, and this personally pisses me off because Luke could have said this at any time, there was a whole trial about it, but it's ok, at least kid gets some kind of personality, cool.

And then fucking Rhaenyra goes on about how she realized that ruling takes work, and she had a duty and must earn her inheritance. Like she's ever done anything unselfish in her life, really.

And then that line. No, not like that. THAT FUCKING LINE. Luke, breathlessly muttering, "I'm not like you. Not so perfect."

OH MY FUCKING GOD I HATE THIS SHIT SO MUCH

That sounds just as fake and useless as half of TB's lines extolling Rhaenyra's greatness, because God forbid we forget for a second that that woman is about to be canonized by Twitter any day now. TB's characters are underdeveloped, they feel fake and hollow, designed to kiss the ass of the one woman the audience is allowed to love, because if you like anyone else, you're obviously sexist and deserve to be publicly humiliated.

Luke is already an unpleasant little shit, he hasn't shown a single redeeming quality. He's selfish, arrogant, spoiled, and privileged even among royalty. And you take away his two miserable minutes of screen time to praise Rhaenyra again, and remind us that it turns out she actually sacrificed and worked for something in her life, and didn't just expect things to go her way because she's daddy's special girl. And she's perfect. Perfest, perfect, perfect. Love her right now, or you will be canceled on every social media.

Those two minutes should have gone to Luke and Rhaena. That's his fiancée, for God's sake! Those two haven't said a single damn thing to each other! Instead of whining about Driftmark again, let Luke comfort Rhaena when she expresses her concerns about the upcoming marriage - at least then I'll know he cares about his betrothed!

But no, that would be too complicated. Instead, we have someone praising Rhaenyra again, because what if not everyone realized that she's *gasping* perfect.

[roselites]

i think we've gotten so used to tv dialogue being expository or a device to move plot along that we've forgotten that people.......talk like that. us. we. we make stupid jokes and cross the line and don't realize until 0.5 seconds later. we deflect. we're cranky because of reasons unrelated to the person we're speaking to. we lash out. we say shitty things because we're feeling defensive or had a lapse in judgment or are plain scared. we have conversations that go nowhere, interrupted conversations, conversations where two people are having fundamentally different conversations and therefore have no hope of understanding one other in that particular moment…

the pitt respects its audience enough not to tell us what it wants to say in every single scene. some of the messaging is pretty clear: hey. we're in the middle of a hellish medical crisis. hey. your doctors and nurses are still not over 2020-2021. masks are good. stop listening to fuckass "wellness" quacks with a podcast. but other things aren't so cut and dry. and the beautiful thing? is that it doesn't place an explicit moral value on what the main characters say or do. santos is allowed to push past javadi's explicitly stated boundaries without being portrayed as evil. because most people like that aren't. they're just mildly annoying, and then you get to know them better and realize that they're so much more. (and when they report shit? believe them.)

robby gets to preach the merits of grieving and looking out for yourself while absolutely not doing it himself and what the narrative doesn't do? frame him as a hypocrite.

it puts the issue of david in front of you and doesn't tell you to be team robby or team mckay because you have both povs in front of you.

langdon is his own litmus test.

basically, the pitt operates under the assumption that we - the people watching the show, the people interested in this story - are both objective and compassionate viewers. some of us are really letting down the side, but you know what, that's fine. we live and we learn and we grow. and it's freaking cool that the people behind this show believe it enough to challenge our assumptions.

(but also... maybe start realizing that the characters are all subjectively speaking from their own interests, perspectives, backstories, etc. and not every interaction has to end in a tally of "who is right & who is wrong in this scenario." good tv writing doesn't work like that and neither does life.)

[mariacallous]

Kyle Brett had a feeling Sinners, the new supernatural horror from Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, would have a big opening weekend—but he was also hyper aware of the consequences of failure.

“It’s already extremely hard to have a successful original horror movie or just any original movie,” Brett, a former Netflix lawyer who works as a creative executive at Blumhouse, the production company behind M3GAN, Get Out, and the Insidious franchise, tells WIRED. “If that shit had bombed, original film would have truly gone away.”

The night before its US release, Brett predicted on X that Sinners would clear $60 million, based “on nothing but the number of Black folks who have asked me about it.” In the business of Hollywood, nothing is guaranteed, least of all a hit movie that’s based on an untested story. But not only was Sinners a hit, breaking multiple box office records, it’s becoming a full-on cultural phenomenon, complete with memes and literary deep dives.

Perhaps most importantly, it has challenged what’s become conventional wisdom in show business: the idea that audiences won’t respond to original stories.

Sinners has almost everything you could possibly want out of an original film: sex, vampires, a haunting score by composer Ludwig Göransson, and Michael B. Jordan in maybe his best performance yet. The movie opens in Jim Crow–era Mississippi during 1932 and follows identical twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Jordan, who have returned home after time away in Chicago, where they moonlighted as gangsters for Al Capone. They’ve come back to start a juke joint but are put to the test when a coven of vampires encroaches on their new business. Across its two-hour-plus run time, what unfolds is classic Coogler: a lush, complex story about family, community, and survival that dares to reinvent the horror genre into something new altogether.

The premise has resonated with audiences in such a powerful way that Sinners opened with $48 million domestically and $63.5 million globally, making it the biggest debut for an original film since 2019, when Jordan Peele’s Us opened to $70 million. (The anticipation surrounding a new Coogler project likely also played a role.) Sinners likewise surpassed Nope, also by Peele—which pulled in $44 million its first weekend in 2022—as the biggest opening for an original film since the pandemic began. It is now the only horror flick in over 35 years to receive an “A” on CinemaScore.

“IPs are a comfortable, safe bet, but originals, when you have something that right out the gate can connect with audiences, they can have as big a punch,” says Daniel Loria, an analyst at the Boxoffice Company. “That’s definitely what we’re seeing.”

It can still be hard to pinpoint exactly what kind of movie works best in Hollywood these days. The success of big-budget blockbusters—Dune, Barbie, Wicked—aren’t exactly a litmus test of how well the industry is faring or what audiences are ultimately satisfied with. Certain IP, like The New Mutants from 2020, bomb or never take off for a number of reasons; often it has to do with earnings, but poor reviews and studio mismanagement can also be a factor.

“Some franchises are past their best and haven’t performed. This happens every decade or so, which means the studios are looking at new franchise stories to take forward,” says David Hancock, an analyst at Omdia. “A Quiet Place did this. Minecraft may do it.”

Minecraft, a Warner Bros. property, currently holds the top spot at the worldwide box office, with $720 million, and is estimated to eventually top $1 billion. Video game IP is especially hot right now. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, released by Universal Pictures in 2023, topped $1.3 billion. Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog has yielded major dividends for the studio. Until Dawn and Mortal Kombat 2 are also slated to drop this year.

One of the things Sinners got right, Brett says, “is that they treated themselves like they were IP.” That means, per his agreement with Warner Bros., Coogler gets the rights to his film back in 25 years—the type of deal that’s mostly unheard of today. Some studio executives believe it sets a “very dangerous precedent” for copyright ownership and distribution entitlements, Vulture reported, saying it will crater the current power dynamics of the studio system, “effectively imperiling the cinematic back catalogue: the core asset behind all movie-studio valuation.” But “that’s the kind of attitude you need with an original,” Brett says. “It's like, No, this is my intellectual property.”

For a time, a new Marvel epic was a proven seat filler, but the fatigue and declining critical reception around superhero movies that has bubbled up in recent years—a consequence of Marvel flooding the market with comic book IP—means that is no longer the case. Marvel is currently in rebound mode. It dropped Jonathan Majors, who was a rising star in the MCU, in light of his domestic assault case (he was found guilty of two out of four charges), and The Marvels became the studio’s lowest-grossing film across its 33 titles, earning $206 million globally, well below its $374 million budget.

It’s “hard to reinvent that form, and I think this next generation is looking for ways to tell their own stories that service their own sort of collective ADHD,” Avengers: Endgame codirector Joe Russo told GamesRadar+ last year, likening young moviegoers’ communication style to “memes and headlines.”

Not all original films are seeing a huge demand, as the age of streamers has reshaped consumption habits. As of March, movie sales in the US and Canada were down 7 percent this year compared to the same period in 2024, according to Comscore.

In a recent interview with The Independent, director Steven Soderbergh bemoaned that very reality. His latest feature, Black Bag, a spy thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender that was released in theaters last month, has yet to turn a profit; it pulled in $37 million worldwide on a budget of $50 million. “This is the kind of film I made my career on,” Soderbergh said in the interview. “And if a mid-level budget, star-driven movie can’t seem to get people over the age of 25 years old to come out to theaters—if that’s truly a dead zone—then that’s not a good thing for movies. What’s gonna happen to the person behind me who wants to make this kind of film?”

Still, the success of Sinners offers a beacon of hope. It’s currently on track to have a second weekend increase, which “would be much more impressive for a non-IP April release,” Erik Anderson, the founder of Awards Watch, noted on X. It also belongs to a cohort of original films, many centered around identity, from directors that have also found audiences, commercial appeal, and critical acclaim in recent years, including Celine Song’s Past Lives, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, Lawrence Lamont’s One of Them Days, and Sean Baker’s Anora, which won Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards.

Hancock predicts the “next decade will see a return to original stories” as a bid to bring in a wider range of audiences.

But the takeaway from Sinners and other movies like it go beyond just IP fatigue, says Brett, noting that these films—and their unique audiences—need to be adequately marketed and prioritized.

“If there is anything Hollywood misses it’s how much Black audiences will continually engage with them,” he says. “It’s not just like this one-time-customer type of thing. People will return to Sinners. The excitement of it, to me, shows that it has a long shelf life.”

[dapperd3m0n]

Hypnosis as a symphony.

I saw some discourse on here recently (link here) about a good litmus test for a skilled hypnotist is whether they've had discipline in another art form. That really stuck with me, and I began wondering about my art form of choice, music, and how studying and pursuing music and composition creates my particular flavor of hypnosis -- and I found something interesting.

(Forgive me, it gets a bit rambly from here.)

I found that, to me, effective hypnosis has a lot of the same qualities as effective music. I'm a bit more biased toward a classical approach, as in, symphonies and sonatas as opposed to pop music, but the same principles apply.

At a bird's eye view level, good music is well structured. Whether you're writing something in sonata form or a song for your first album, there are certain conventions that are expected and, for the most part, adhered to. Sonata form is strict and rigid, with rules on rules (and heaven help you if you break them). But even with pop music, we have a generally expected format: intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, outro. It's nearly like clockwork.

Coherent hypnosis, too, also has a similar sense of structure, though not quite as rigid as sonata form, and even not as rigid as pop music. But the way that the hypnotist establishes rapport, sets the tone, cadence, and rhythm (all of these music words coming up so naturally, I love it), drops the listener like EDM, and brings them back up again, whether on the listener's own time or in a guided manner, reads to me the same way.

Of course, these expectations can always be subverted. Maybe we start with a chorus. Maybe we change keys, change tempo, change styles halfway through the piece. Maybe we pull a Beyonce and have several key changes. Done effectively, this isn't a jarring effect (at least, not in a negative way), but can greatly enhance the piece or hypnosis session.

Getting into the weeds a bit, great music to me makes use of motifs, or uniting ideas throughout a piece. It can be a hook, a lyric that comes back, or even the four notes that open Beethoven's Fifth (the universally recognizable dun dun dun duuuuun). I love listening to symphonies or large scale works, and finding hidden instances where these ideas come back. It's such a treat, and even when I know it's there, the piece doesn't lose any effect -- in fact, I have a deeper appreciation for it.

In the same way, we see this similar "motivic" idea with great hypnosis. The repetition of a word or phrase -- even, to an extent, the idea of triggers as motivic material -- makes the listener feel like they know the tune, can hum along, can dro-- ahem, be lulled into that sense of familiarity. Those who can do this on the fly and make it sound natural have the same virtuosity to me as jazz greats, who use the exact same principles of structure and repeated, recognizable ideas in their solos. And that's the key, isn't it? Repetition legitimizes, and it should be recognizable enough that one could get that lightbulb moment (or, you know, that dizzy, glassy look in their eyes) even when it's not in the exact context presented originally (think a trigger out of trance, for example).

Finally, a piece of music to me is truly exceptional when you can tell every note is crafted with intention. Some of these instances the audience may never know. For example, why did they choose a particular key? A particular time signature? Why this specific set of notes for the recurring idea? Was it someone's name? A word? And how does the changing of that idea reflect the story arc of the piece?

I'm reminded of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, and the Idee Fixe (fixed idea) that occurs throughout the work. The occurrence, reoccurrence, and manipulation of the Idee Fixe isn't immediately recognizable. I didn't get it my first few listens. But after reading it (being forced to read about it) in school, I developed a newfound appreciation for the piece and the story that it follows, even if Berlioz was a total nut.

Exceptional hypnotists, those who seem to command the craft like it's breathing, do exactly this. Some of these things, again, the listener may never know -- how the hypnotist is analyzing changes in breathing, or using imagery that they know will resonate with the listener, or even using details about the listener that they don't consciously realize, but the hypnotists includes it in their composition anyway because they know the resulting effect is one they will want to listen to again, and again, and again. Of course they will. Of course they will.

If this all comes across as gobbledegook, oops. I've been tossing this idea around for a while, and it could be that it sounds better in my head. I would, however, be curious to hear how these ideas translate to painting, sculpture, or hell, even computer science. I'd love to hear what gets you excited about your craft and hypnosis, and how they come together to form something truly unique. That's what makes this world so special, after all.

[queerly-autistic]

I'll say it again, even if we're barking up the wrong tree with our speculation about the YouGov thing (and the theory that it's a streamer gauging interest and using the BBC release as a litmus test), the advice to keep pushing the numbers on iPlayer and the live BBC screenings, and trying to boost interest in the UK as much as we can, is still good advice.

These things will only be a net positive for us because all three of the streamers we are currently targeting have a presence in the UK. We are an audience they want, and are aiming for, and proving that the show is potentially lucrative in the UK is really important in terms of making it viable for pick-up. If they're not using it as a litmus test already, then we can make it into one anyway, and show them the potential that the show has here.

So keep pushing, keep streaming, keep getting your friends and family to watch, and keep making noise in the UK!