The Ghost distribution system... He really is like a stray cat, or a bear that learns minivans have food in them, he just keeps coming back no matter how many times you try to send him on his way. It doesn't matter how it happens but any scrap of kindness and he just determines he's going to attach himself to you.
Maybe he offers you a hand moving your couch when he passes your place and hears you swearing. You offer him dinner and Ghost has never been the sort to turn down a free meal, so he sticks around. It's weird that he doesn't even pretend to refuse, just takes you up on it immediately and even offers to help cook. You send him home and he's... there again the next day, waiting on your doorstep with a box of pasta asking if you could do anything with it. He's going to come back, he's going to keep coming back.
Maybe it's from meeting you at a bar. He's the biggest guy you can grab when your ex walks in, and somehow he seems approachable despite... well, everything about him. Fake boyfriend for a few hours at the bar is one thing, having him show up the next day to fix your sink because you mentioned offhandedly that it was leaking the night before is another. Having him sit in your kitchen and peal an orange for you because you said you were hungry is really driving home that this guy isn't leaving.
Hell maybe it's just a one night stand that never seems to end. You wake up and Ghost has already made breakfast. The two of you sit at your little table and eat quietly, Ghost scrolling his phone while you eye him warily, trying to figure out his game. He asks what you want to do today and somehow you can't find the right way to ask when he's planning on going home. He just sort of moves in, you realize he's printed a key for himself while you're grabbing groceries. It's nice he offers to pay, but you don't know when having him around became your normal.
Ghost sees you, he wants you, you're his. He's not leaving, he'll come back. He knows that this house has food and warmth, he knows that families forget to tie their trash up off the ground. He's a man of instinct, and you are going to be his perfect match.
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The 141 have a ridiculous run of inside jokes that is continuosly ruining their lives, such as;
1.) If someone says, "You love it really," to you, you immediately have to agree with them, no matter what the circumstances. Otherwise, you lose the ability to do it back. This has resulted in many weird fake confessions, including one time in which Soap got fed up with people making your mom jokes at him and went on a rant about it. Ghost glanced at him in front of a room full of cadets and just went, "You love it really, though," and Soap almost died as he sadly nodded and replied, "Yeah, I do."
2.) If something even remotely sexual sounding is said about you, you must always say, "You're damn right I do/am/will," back. This backfired once when they were in a defreif and Price said something about Gaz "coming through the back door" and Gaz, without think, winked and replied "You're damn right I did," In front of everyone and got in trouble for mild insubordination. (The others almost died laughing as he realised what he'd done, who he'd done it to, and who he'd done it in front of (aka Price's bosses))
3.) When talking about Roach, they will always act like he's died. He hasn't, but none of them can stop the joke, and it always makes all of them crack up, even Roach. This once caused major panic, as once when Ghost was discussing their latest mission with Laswell, he said, "It was fine because Roach - God rest his soul -" and Laswell had about two minutes where she thinks Roach has dropped dead and she didn't fucking know.
4.) They will always make up bad stories for how they met Ghost, if anyone ever asks. It doesn't matter what the truth is, or who they're speaking to, when asked, all three of them will reply with some made up, overly dramatic or down right boring story on how they met. These stories ranged from Ghost, saving them from a shark attack (Gaz), Ghost selling them assorted drugs as a teenager (Roach), and most devastatingly is when Soap told a distant relative of his that he met Ghost after "finding him with my older brother, behind his wifes back" he does not have an older brother, and so there is no wife.
5.) They always reference the "Malibu incident." None of them have ever been to Malibu. Nothing bad has ever happened there, but now they've created a whole conspiracy in the British Army about a coverup that happened in Malibu. Price knows about this one and finds it endlessly funny, so he goes along with it, never directly mentioning it but refusing to deny it when someone asks. If anyone ever asks about the details of it, they just give a deadpanned look as if the other person should already know and say; "Don't make me say it." There are rumours. Like, a lot of rumours.
6.) Roach claps every time someone says, "I'll be there for you" because once he clapped at the wrong time during the friends intro and had been paying the price ever since. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes you'll just hear him clapping - not even in the tune to the friends theme. Just random clapping. If any of the others hear it, they almost always reply with "That's a fuckin' joke" in a really disappointed tone. It's confused a lot of people.
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We need to talk about Sending Rocks.
You probably don't understand what that means. That's fine. It's a weird little example I made up, and I'll explain.
I'm the creator of the near-future cyberpunk podcast SINKHOLE. SINKHOLE is weird, short-form, nearly impossible to explain to people, and utterly unmonetizable. It's also got a very healthy listenership for something so esoteric. (I promise season three is coming; life just keeps happening, constantly.)
Because of that, I have a reputation as a weird little indie creator. And if I were to run a crowdfund, I could set up a donation tier that was literally just
"I will go outside, find a rock on the ground, and mail it to you."
and most people would find that funny and charming. I think, at worst, people might find it puzzling, but they'd still opt in out of curiosity.
A lot of you would let me send you rocks.
Now we need to talk about the re: Dracula crowdfund- about the zines. A handful of people got very upset about the perceived lack of quality present in the zines.
That caught me off-guard. To me, a zine should always be kind of janky. You should be able to tell exactly how far down the pile your specific zine was based purely on how committed to hitting the fold lines the person folding it was. Zines are handmade and should feel handmade.
So it seemed like people were complaining about the zines being zines, and I didn't get it.
And then I realized something: it's not about the zines. It's about the fact that they were coming from Tal Minear.
If Tal Minear ran a crowdfund and set up a donation tier that was just
"I will go outside, find a rock on the ground, and mail it to you."
I would give it about a day before someone found a way to turn that specifically into a talking point about how Tal doesn't respect the audio drama community.
Tal Minear cannot send rocks. The zine was never the problem. The way people think about Tal is the problem.
We need to talk about how this community keeps trying to reinvent classism based on nothing but vibes and follower numbers.
I'm going to tell you something you already know but probably don't want to admit: the independent audio drama scene is to the independent film scene what a fish tank in a dentist's office is to the ocean.
The biggest names in this community are just a step up from being nobodies.
If you went outside right now and spoke to the first person you saw on the street, the only non-BBC fiction podcasts you would have any realistic hope of them knowing are Welcome to Night Vale or Archive 81- and the latter only because it got turned into a Netflix show, which means that they might not even realize it was a podcast first. There's also a chance they'll have heard of The Magnus Archives, but it's not a guarantee by any means.
Now, this last one I've mentioned to a few people, and was surprised to get a lot of pushback. There seems to be this thought that no, of course everyone has heard of The Magnus Archives.
No. No, man.
You're doing the Homestuck thing. I hate to hurt you like this, but you're doing that thing people did where they assumed everyone had at least heard of Homestuck.
There are people in your life that have never heard of Homestuck.
The Magnus Archives was a mini-zeitgeist in which the fandom engaged in wild speculating, plentiful shipping, and lots and lots of aligning yourself with a specific Fear.
And it was never as big as Homestuck.
I'm sorry. Jonny Sims is not a household name. That's simply the truth.
He is also in this fish tank with us. As far as I am aware, he has not escaped to begin acting in feature films or begun voicing characters in massive video game franchises. Slay the Princess was pretty cool. It's not exactly fucking Assassin's Creed, though.
He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.
And notice how my metric for breakout success involved going to other, better-known mediums? That's because a breakout success in this community involves getting a blurb on Buzzfeed or in Cosmo. There is no audio fiction podcasting elite. The idea is hilarious.
Even Markiplier doesn't count, because he's YouTube royalty. He's not famous because of The Edge of Sleep. The same is true of any celebrity. They're visitors. They didn't get their break here.
Tal Minear is not your landlord. They're a slightly bigger fish in the same tank as you that likes to poke around in the muck a bit more than you personally enjoy. And, well, you cannot argue that Tal's position as showrunner of re: Dracula justifies framing them that way.
Because the thing is, I'm not just the creator of SINKHOLE. I'm also the showrunner and head writer of Mayfair Watchers Society as of season two. Showrunning and writing is most of my income these days. Tal and I are very comparable in terms of the material power we wield. This isn't a secret.
And yet, a lot of you would still let me send you rocks.
Now the actually important thing.
We need to talk about how this exact illusion, this fanciful idea that there are real industry goliaths in this fishbowl, has already been used to justify the mistreatment of marginalized people.
When Tonia Ransom brought up the issues she had with how the AnonymousAD tumblr had characterized her crowdfunding campaign, this is the reason why people felt they could dismiss and ignore her. Because yes, she's a black woman speaking out about having been wronged, but she's also a "Big Creator," and therefore it evens out.
It doesn't even out.
A lot of the most successful creators you know in this space still have day jobs. I spent yesterday and today doing inventory at my retail job. I spent hours poring over shitty little badly printed tags and biting back swear words because our owner will not let us close, so there were still customers in the store, actively buying the things we were trying to count.
This Us vs Them shit has got to stop. It's nothing. It's a parody and a sham. If you tried to explain it to your grandmother, she'd give you the exact same reaction as if you had tried to tell her about drama in the Homestuck fandom.
Because it's the same.
And you don't get to use it to justify being shitty to someone who you know perfectly well would deserve your humility and understanding if you weren't pretending they were your boss.
Who can send rocks is not and has never been a reflection of real power or privilege. Deciding someone cannot send rocks is just a convenient excuse to disregard their perspective when it makes you angry or uncomfortable.
At best, it's tilting at windmills. At worst, it is punishing your peers for daring to defend themselves or speak out against injustice while being marginally more successful than you.
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