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cosmicpines · 11 months

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One of my favorite things about Greater Boston is that, sometimes, I don't know if it's the train or the podcast making noise. I listen to podcasts on my or when I'm going to see friends, so I often listen to Greater Boston on the T. The Red Line, usually, because I'm a MIT student and we have our own stop. I think about there being a secret lab whenever I get on.

It's the little things that make me know how much love is in this show, you know? It's listening to the season 3 finale and hearing the sound of the screeches and going "wait, are Dimitri and Mallory on the Green Line?" moments before Mallory says it. It's the one time I recognized the voice of someone being interviewed. It's Nichole saying she's going to get Pinocchio's, the pizza place I usually get pizza from when I decide to be fancier than Bertucci's. It's knowing that's the same pizza place that makes me feel fuzzy inside.

When Covid hit and I had to leave, I listened to Greater Boston just to hear the sounds of the T.

I never listen to an episode in one place. I never listen in one sitting, especially not one as long as this. I walk around my little bubble of Cambridge to go to work, to get lunch, to go out, and I hear the stories and they tug at my heart. I listened to the train. Smash as I arrived in Kendall. Oh, the timing wasn't that perfect; we could only dream of such things. But last sequence riding from Park Street to Kendall. I didn't plan on it; I was just coming back from seeing a movie with a friend. It meant something, though. Dancing as I stepped on the the T. Smash as I stepped off. It wasn't quite perfectly timed, but what in life ever is?

Greater Boston is about magic. Literally, in some cases, but so much more than that. It's that Bernie can always deliver a letter, no matter where it needs to go. It's that Louisa can figure out that narrative quirk and use it in the narrative. It's that Michael can understand every person he wrote a letter to and write them beautifully, even when he was starving. It's that Dimitri is always lucky to be in the right place at the right time (except the one time he wasn't). It's that Nika is always unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (except the one time she wasn't). It's Gemma, who never believed in herself but had to find the man she met and summoned and saved. It's... god, I'll be here all night if you let me. Greater Boston has some of the best character writing I've ever heard.

It's Leon. Oh, it's Leon. He willed himself to die and willed himself to live on. He snarked at an omniscient being and took over his job. He shouldn't have. He should have. He made so many mistakes. He made no mistakes. He cared, he loved, he fought, he won. He became the spirit of Boston itself; he touched every heart in the city just in a desperate desire to help. Not just his friends, not just his loved ones. He took a man everyone would have given up on and helped.

An incredible season. Thank you, @greaterblogston. Cheers to a phenomenal season.

also, just to ruin the mood a bit, there was an amogus on the tracks

#i could gush about this show all night #a bonus on the second paragraph is that i love how GENUINELY you can tell the writers are SUCH trekkies like theres some DEEP CUT reference #they make me laugh so so so hard. also dimitri is valid i also watched lower decks just for the tom cameo HAHA #greater boston #greater boston podcast #mary blabs #greater boston spoilers

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applebunch · 2 years

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i wonder if leon’s ever gonna tell gemma about the omnipresent demon lurking in the minds of the vast majority of the cast.

“btw there’s this guy (i like to call him “the narrator”) who has been inside of the brains of basically everyone involved with red line ever since my death AT LEAST, and he’s been putting thoughts into their heads and influencing their decisions this whole time.

i like to call him the narrator because he tends to narrate the innermost thoughts of the “characters” (that’s you and your friends and also every single person who exists in this world btw) to this “audience.” (i do the same thing btw. i’m a narrator. i’ll tell you about the audience later.) also, he’s the ceo of the largest mega corporation in the world, and i’m pretty sure he isn’t human.”

“...huh.”

#greater boston #greater boston spoilers #leon stamatis #gemma linzer-coolidge #like come on leon that's pretty important #narrator greater boston #unreality #can't think of anything else to trigger tag this as #greater boston podcast

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clonerightsagenda · 11 months

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(Greater Boston episode)

They killed Matt Damon??

#I am so bewildered by everything about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in this podcast #greater boston spoilers//#I mean I figured [REDACTED] was probably on his way out #kat listens to greater boston

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uss-hephaestus · 2 years

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leigion greater boston podcast would SOOOOO rainbow capitalism in june

#thoughts #i would run the narrator over with a steamroller given the chance #greater boston podcast #greater boston #greater boston spoilers

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tellnotalespod · 8 months

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Happy audio drama Sunday! I know I’ve been a little absent online recently, but there are some shows that I really need to yell about this week

First of all, @twinstrangersp are currently crowdfunding for Syntax S3, and need your help to reach their goal! https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/syntax-season-three#/

If you’ve heard the first two seasons, you KNOW they’ve got some fantastic stuff in store for us. And if you haven’t? Now’s the time to give them a listen before the crowdfund ends - their S2 crowdfund was what got me hooked on the show, and I’m so glad it did 🥰

Also, I’m still not emotionally recovered from @monkeymanproductions Moonbase Theta, Out finale. I won’t say too much about it yet because a) spoilers for anyone who hasn’t listened yet, and b) there are epilogues coming.

But god, this has been such a beautiful story from the start. MTO is one of the first ADs I ever listened to, and it’s the one that stuck with me most vividly. I remember exactly where I was when I was listening to the first season, what the weather was like, which house I was in (I’ve moved a lot), what I was doing during each finale.

It would be easy for a show like that to have a disappointing ending, but no. The finale beautifully reinforces everything this show stands for for - community, radical hope, small victories against seemingly untouchable oppressors. I’m forever grateful that this story exists for me to revisit (and I will be revisiting, often).

And finally, I know I’m late to this one but I’ve been powering through Greater Boston in time for their live-show at London Podcast Festival this evening! I don’t know why I waited so long to listen, this show is hilarious, chaotic as hell, and has made me cry an alarming number of times considering a main plot arc is “cheese robots”

I’ll be at LPF tonight watching @ameliapodcast @greaterblogston and @wefixspacejunk and idk about you but I can’t think of a more perfect way to spend my Sunday evening ☺️

#audio drama sunday

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greaterblogston · 1 year

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The Lonely Side of Salad: Writing Half of ‘Arugula’

Warning - This post will have heavy spoilers for Episode 44 of Greater Boston (Arugula).

Before the start of pandemic I was thinking about changing jobs. I had worked at the same college for nearly fifteen years. I loved it but things were beginning to wear on me in ways that were continuously frustrating. Then the pandemic grew to the point where quarantining was necessary and I found myself working from home, sitting next to my daughter, logging her on to Zoom kindergarten every morning. We did YouTube Yoga. I helped her learn how to ride her bike wearing masks in a nearby church parking lot. We even made a storytelling podcast.

Then my college started rumbling about financial shortfalls. They laid off my boss. They promoted me and then told me I had to help layoff 12 people. Then a job I had applied for before the pandemic hit reached out and asked me if I was interested. I interviewed and got the job and was so distraught about what was happening at my current college that I accepted.

I started a new job in June of 2020. I can not begin to explain to you how strange this was. We had meetings every morning to discuss what initiatives we were working on. I panicked about this every day. I was new. I didn’t have any initiatives. Nobody was talking to me. I’d get the occasional email, the odd request. But days would go by with no feedback from my boss or colleagues. I sat at home refreshing email and literally trying to Google what I should be doing for work.

Soon after, my new supervisor quit. Then several other colleagues quit, more than a dozen key college figures. There was talk of a toxic work environment driving people away. I would come to find out this was true later. As more and more people left, this particular person would become my supervisor. I logged into work every day assuming I would be fired. My new supervisor was mean spirited, critical, and vindictive. I had full-on panic attacks. And the whole time, I continued to try and help my daughter survive Zoom school. My wife works in healthcare and clinics never close.

I was writing Season 4 of Greater Boston at the same time and I was having a difficult time with it. The show we started was full of optimism and hope and I was sitting there thinking about how wrong everything was. The horrible day of letting people go over zoom was in my thoughts daily, and although I knew it would happen whether I was involved or not, my involvement left me emotionally devastated. These were colleagues I had tried to energize to buy into an unhealthy work ethic our college promoted - do more for the spirit of the place. We’re a family. We can do this if we pull together. And then seemingly overnight we were cutting costs, we were letting them go via a streaming service. Dispassionately. With tight legal wording.

Meanwhile communication continued to be an obstacle at my new job. When people were communicated with, it was with derision and division. Faculty felt cut off from their students. Students were having a difficult time learning in a forced learning environment. Without face to face interaction, with only emails and forced sterilization of Zoom calls (cameras off, mics muted), the different unions and working groups were assuming the worst about each other. Everything was broken. Nothing felt like it mattered.

At night I would sit and listen to music and ask myself this question. How did I get here? How did my life unspool in such a direction that was making me completely miserable? Obviously the pandemic played the biggest role but there was so much wrong beyond that. I felt completely cut off from my family even though we were spending more time than ever. I would break down into tears occasionally and it scared them. I would try to hide my emotions but then resent that I had to hide them. Even therapy wasn’t an outlet. It just felt like work. Zoom call. Discuss your feelings. Breakdown. (Nods sagely). See you in two weeks.

So it was with all this in mind that I sat down to write half of Episode 44. Every character is in a precarious place in this episode. Leon is struggling with having so many characters and people to deal with, and Ethan’s experiments aren’t helping. Gemma is struggling to disclose that she actually has the spirit of Leon in her possession all while Dimitri has joined her, despite Leon’s pleading. Dimitri is struggling to find his place in Red Line, helping Gemma. And he’s struggling to give hope to Nica. And Nica is struggling to find any sense of hope at all. The only hope here is Omi’s offer to take a few of them with her. There is a comfort in her decision to sink into her sadness, to own it, to wrap it around herself like a blanket. Hope, after all, is a struggle. It’s work. At the time even though I was only at this job for months, I was applying for new jobs, telling myself it could be better, that I still had control. And I was exhausted in doing this. Not only was it taking significant physical energy, the emotional energy was draining - forcing myself to focus on a better future during an unprecedented global disaster that had left me numb at best, overwhelmingly depressed at worst.

I knew I had to address these feelings with my writing. That’s how I best process most of the things I struggle with. I started Episode 44 over and over again and was not satisfied with it. It felt like the antithesis of what Greater Boston should be. There was no finding strength in community, no comfort in each other. I was reminded of a quote from one of my favorite writers, Richard Yates. “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

This is of course true. But I’ve always subscribed to the notion that what unites us is the fact that we are all cut off from each other, and that we’re all looking to each other for comfort, guidance, and love. *Spoiler Alert* - there is even a line that touches on this later in Season 4.

So this episode starts not with any of our main characters. It begins with people waking up, starting their days. And the only thing that unites them is that they are alone. They are alone and the sounds of their routines are being processed by Leon, who is also struggling to accept all the various characters thoughts and internal narrations. The sounds of people in isolation adding to a symphony of loneliness. In the episode description, I wrote the following:

[The morning routines slip back, one at a time. Someone is crying silently. We do not know who. Nobody speaks to one another. There is no talking. Nobody is together. Everyone is alone] LEON (pained) My head…I can’t —

And then to top all this off, I have a character we’ve never heard from call their partner and tell him they’re leaving. They can’t deal with it anymore. It could be they’re saying goodbye to their partner. It could be they’re saying goodbye to...well, everything. I wanted to leave that ambiguous, but also hint that the loneliness of a life surrounded by so much possibility, vitality, people was too much for someone who had all that around them all the time and still felt impossibly alone to their core. It just doesn’t seem right or fair. Their partner composes a song to deal with his sadness. This is a standin for me, writing this episode. He writes and sings these lines:

If you dug yourself a hole Unearth the lonely dirt below You still won’t find, my love Space for loneliness to grow.

Nica gets the submarine at the end of this episode. Dimitri means it to be a signal of adventures to come, but Nica takes it her own way. She’s sinking, settling into her cell, her loneliness. There was once a fantasy of her meeting celebrities and getting famous, a fantasy of what she would amount to. But at this point in time, she feels her cell - completely cut off and isolated - like a ship designed to sink in the water - is all she can amount to.

But it’s important to remember that this is a choice she’s making, just like Gemma is making a choice about not disclosing Leon to his siblings. To lead back to the conversation Michael has with Chelmsworth in Episode 11 - choice really does govern everything, even how you feel.

Speaking of Michael, it wasn’t originally intended this way, but we ended up pairing the sadder aspects of this episode with something completely different - Michael and Louisa going to meet Autumn West. Originally this was going to be parts of its own episode Alexander was writing, but we combined them not only to give people a break from the bleaker stuff, but to show the other side of this choice. Michael is with one of his best friends. He is apprehensive about meeting the wife of the man who attempted to kill him, but focuses not on that aspect. Instead, he focuses on the connections they share. He gets excited by what they have in common, not what divides them.

It’s obviously not always that easy, but I think for me writing this episode helped reinforce that two things can be simultaneously true. We are all, in the words of Richard Yates, inescapably alone. But that by itself isn’t reason to despair. Hope and human connection? It is challenging, difficult work, but in choosing to look for our commonalities, even if they exist only in the way we are all isolated? We chose to not give in to something that can never grow for the sake of something that may. Loneliness is easier because while everyone says there are no guarantees in life, being sad and isolated absolutely provides one. I urge you to gamble on believing in something greater.

#greater boston #greater boston spoilers #season 4 #arugula #tw self harm #tw suicide #tw #tw: suicide #tw: self harm

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marblejams · 1 year

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I will finish these podcasts, mark my words. If I don’t that means I quit on one or all of them.

Update: I added two more podcasts and I dropped one because they had to stop because of personal reasons

Update 2: I added more podcasts again. Will I do this again? Maybe. I don’t know? Podcasts both don’t speak to me and speak to me at the same time

Here’s the list:

Unprepared Casters - I finished arc one and it is everything to me.

A mutual on Twitter swears by the show

Dice Shame -

I saw an animatic about this on YouTube so yeah

Steeplechase - STARTING (HAD TO RESTART TWICE BECAUSE I ACCIDENTALLY SKIPPED THE SETUP EPISODE AND THE BEGINNING OF EPISODE 1)

QUITTING FOR NOW because my phone storage is full.

I’m on episode 5, it’s pretty rough but it will get better

Dumbgeons and Dragons but only the episodes where Kyle guest stars - SKIP

skipping this one for now

I’m going to audio drama marathon mode starting with a horror sci fi show and ending with whatever Welcome to the Nightvale is

Janus Ascending - COMPLETE

The ending is what I thought it would be. It’s a horror podcast, everyone was either going to die or go mentally insane and both happened.

The Vesta Clinic - COMPLETE

One of my favorite podcasts so far, it’s short and sweet to the point. I like hearing about all these aliens across the universe.

Waiting for season 2 but not excepting it or I’ll hurt my heart

Starship Q Star - COMPLETE

Season 1 was great and I was kinda shocked when they said the c word but they’re Australian so I knew it was coming.

Where the Stars Fell - COMPLETE

Fun 2 seasons. Hoping season 3 is the final season, also Brian David Gilbert is Jesus next season which kinda suits him

Greater Boston - QUIT

The beginning is too boring and I feel no connection to the host whoever they are

Welcome to the Nightvale - IN PROGRESS (MIGHT QUIT) - DID QUIT

Cecil is meh but the world is interesting. I don’t understand why he’s a Tumblr sexyman, he’s so boring minus that he wants to date Carlos the scientist which he should so he can get his heart snapped in half.

Astronomica - STARTED & QUITTED

I like the concept, but the first few episodes were too slow. The player being the AI was the best part for real

Fawk & Stallion - at the bottom

Please be gay Sherlock Holmes

Intra Quest- at the bottom

iHeartRadio keeps doing limited series podcasts and they end up being pretty good. I really enjoyed Blood Thirsty Hearts and Maxine Miles. They’re making a season 2 for Maxine Miles which is fantastic and I’m excited.

The only thing I know about Intra Quest is that it’s a limited sci-fi series and I’m waiting for it to be finished so I can binge all of it

The Last Echos - at the bottom

I don’t know if I’ll like it because it’s going to be political and I don’t understand politics and I can’t ask for help on that.

I’m just going to hope that it’s LGBTQIA+ and cling to that

Auricle -

I know this is a sci-fi thing I just not touching it until the season is over. They need to tell me it’s over.

Lavender Scare -

A few friends from Dimension 20 Twitter or on this but I don’t I think it’s finished. I will eventually get to it, none of them follow me on Tumblr so they can’t yell at me about it.

Kingmaker Histories -

a YouTuber I like has this audio drama podcast

Mansfield Mysteries -

A bunch of audio dramas I follow did a promo on it, but I didn’t listen to the promo. I’m just going in blind, not solving the mystery. I never solve mysteries; I’m not smart enough for that.

Breaker Whiskey -

I’m pretty sure Lauren Shippin, the creator of Bright Sessions is on this and she’s a genius.

Update

3/23/2023

Wait, I saw an out of context spoiler for Night Vale. Are there going to be other voice actors? That can’t be right, they can’t do that. I’m not attached to Cecil, I’m just shocked that they would hire more people to voice act because they doesn’t seem like their jam at all.

Update

4/13/2023

I added tags because yeah

Update

5/15/2023

I added a new podcast to the list again

8/28/2023

I actually updated this list earlier with different thoughts, but I didn’t save it because I had a the app did not save my draft so now it’s here

9/6/2023

I replaced the old video with a new video. That broke this post for a bit but it did update properly.

This list is for me versus anyone else

#taz steeplechase #Janus ascending #the vesta clinic #starship q star #where the stars fell #welcome to night vale #wtnv #astronomica #fawk and stallion #Intra quest #the last echoes #mansfield mysteries #auricle #lavender scare #lavender scare podcast #kingmaker histories #breaker whiskey #unprepared casters

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blog-of-frontiers · 5 years

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Best parts of To Seek Out New Life and New Civilizations

Dimitri and Mallory have no business hanging out now unless they’re friends. They are friends. I didn’t know I needed this but I really, really did. They’re such perfect nerds who annoy each other but they’re cool with each other, whatever, don’t mention it.

Gemma not giving half a shit about Star Trek and being very displeased about having to cosplay. She’s bread cat.

Louisa’s new boyfriend (Wallace? I looked it up and it’s Wendell) actually kind of kicks ass?

Marlo is finally getting a piece of that main story pie and I love him so dearly

Isabelle? Reconnecting with her friends?? Being shown unconditional love and support??? Receiving words of wisdom from someone she admires and respects???? Being APPRECIATED????? It’s What She Deserves.

Tyrell is BACK.... and he’s Tyrell-iffic.

We had to hear Chuck Octagon feverishly deliver his fandom opinions and now we all have to live with it. But his and Andy’s couples costume was insanely cute.

Gemma and Louisa: Freeze, motherfucker, we’re the wizard subway cops!

The letter is finally making its way home...... the conclusion to this arc is going to shove my heart through a paper shredder.

In conclusion

#greater boston #greater boston podcast #greater boston spoilers #greater boston podcast spoilers #gb spoilers

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peterofthedrakes · 2 years

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this line actually made me start sobbing so of course i had to draw it

[Image Description: a one-page monochromatic comic, split in two panels. The first panel shows many skeletons, jumbled together, surrounding the words "what'd i find?". The second panel shows dimitri crumpled up in the arms of fake nica, who looks shocked. They appear to be in a hallway, and dimitri is saying "what'd i find, after all this?" End ID]

#art #graphic art #digital art #fanart #podcast #podcast fanart #greater boston #greater boston podcast #greater boston fanart #comic #greater boston spoilers #dimitri stamatis #fake nica #greater boston people stop actually acknowledging my goofy fanart and completely incapacitating me challenge #im just small!!!#i cant cope with that!!#i cant cope with positive feedback!!!!#i simply smile so big and stop responding to outside stimuli for several minutes!!#peterofthedrakes

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hephaestuscrew · 11 months

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Assorted Thoughts about the Greater Boston Season 4 finale

I'd assumed that Leon would 'move on' at the end of Season 5, the end of the podcast as a whole. But now we're going to have a whole season of the podcast without him. It's strange to imagine. There's never been a Greater Boston podcast without Leon Stamatis. There's never been a city of Red Line without Leon Stamatis. We began Season 1 confronting the gap that Leon left behind. We learned that he wasn't quite as gone as we might have thought, but there was still the loss, the grief, the consequences of his death. In an interesting narrative symmetry, at the beginning of Season 5 we'll have to confront him being more fully, completely gone. But I think we'll continue to see the ways in which his life and afterlife have rippled outwards.

Immediately after Nica said Leon had brought people together "like a family", Louisa exclaimed that she needed to call Michael. I can't help wondering if it was Nica's comment that triggered that thought for Louisa. I'm emotional about Michael being family for Leon, Michael being family for Louisa, Michael being someone who was brought into Louisa's life by Leon…

There were two moments of Nica and Dimitri sitting with Gemma in the middle of them holding the crystal ball. First, in the back of Lucia's car, when Nica reached out to touch the ball and Dimitri took her hand instead. Second, on the Ferris wheel as they prepared to say goodbye to Leon. Leon was in the middle between his two siblings - he is what divides them and he is what unites them. They held hands over him, finding awkward togetherness in the presence of their loss, stopping each from succumbing to that loss. Leon was in the middle between his two siblings, but he also wasn't; it was Gemma occupying that space for him.

On a related note, I can't help but wonder whether the Stamatis siblings had habitual positions when they'd sit in the back of a car together as children. I think that's a fairly common sibling thing, and it seems likely that it would appeal to the order-loving Leon. I can't decide if it makes me more emotional to imagine that they usually sat with Leon in the middle like that, or to imagine how they sat on that ferris wheel wasn't their typical childhood order.

The lack of narration and the high number of monologues from a range of characters this episode meant that sometimes I wasn't initially sure whether a scene was an interview snippet from a real person or a monologue from a character. I think there's something significant in that blurring of reality and fiction, in real stories of loss mixed with the fictional. Those interviewees are a part of this story, or this story is a part of our world too.

I loved Michael's mantra being spoken by the group, with each person taking one word. For Michael, that sequence of numbers was a way of asserting his own agency in spite of circumstances and his ideas about his nature. It was a way of saying 'my choices matter, even if I can't change the outcome'. And this moment showed how that idea can be upheld within through community and togetherness.

Michael spoke the word "Eight". And perhaps he wanted other people to take over, trusting that the people around him would complete his mantra, believing that they'd understand what he needed in that moment. Or perhaps he was intending to speak the mantra by himself until Louisa interrupted to support him. Either way there's a uniquely powerful kind of choice made against an indifferent world - the choice for people to stand against that world together. It's a contrast with Michael's often self-isolating tendencies for that mantra to become a shared thing.

#Greater Boston #Greater Boston podcast #I was going to make these into separate posts but I don't want to flood the tag or people's dashes #And I'll probably have more thoughts about this later #I listened to the last half hour of this episode on my way to work today #because I have not learned my lesson about being emotionally devastated by GB right before I need to do work #But anyway I mistimed it slightly so I had to take a bit of an extra walk around the block to experience the ending #Btw I thought about the Stamatis siblings maybe having habitual seats in the back of a car #because me and my brother have always sat on the same sides when we're in the back of a car together #For us it's the ghost of a sticker I had on the window of our family car when we were kids #That car is long gone but I still sit on the right in the back of a car #I imagine Leon might have been in the middle because Dimitri and Nica would want to look out of the window and would be more restless #And Leon was a generous big brother #Urgh the idea that he's properly past tense now 😭#greater boston spoilers #Greater Boston podcast spoilers #the empty man posteth

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