For The Mercury Theatre on the Air, Welles and his colleagues would take well-known books such as Treasure Island and Dracula and The Man Who Was Thursday and essentially rip them up and remix them into radio dramas. They’d perform these scripts live with a full band and foley artists for the sound effects and the 17th episode of the series was an adaptation of H.G. Welles War of the Worlds. It is famously remembered now as The Panic Broadcast.

I responded to my friend who was asking for tv recommendations, and I got carried away making what I think is too big of a list. Just gonna write a few sentences for each one and I dunno, I guess send it along. 

The first time I heard about Game of Thrones, I was in the driver’s seat of a Toyota Camry with some idea of how to drive. My driving instructor was in the passenger seat telling me and the student in the back about this really crazy series. He mentioned that it was a political fantasy book with kings and knights and magic that was referenced but rarely ever shown. He continued to summarize the first book while I tried to focus on keeping us all on the road.

The Great Displacement is a compilation of reports that describe concrete ways that climate change is affecting the U.S. and provides lenses to be able to think about these changes culturally, economically and humanely.

Jake Bittle’s tour of America showcases the wildfires of California, the sinking Florida Keys, Arizona’s disappearing river water and the increasingly inevitable flooding happening throughout America. At the center of these shifting environments are people. Rich people, poor people, resilient people, vulnerable people.

Cult of the Lamb is an incredibly cute rogue-lite game about a demonic lamb prophesied to overcome the false prophets and restore “The One Who Waits” back to power. But before that, you have to grow turnips, build beds and amenities for your followers and occasionally commit ritual sacrifice to keep morale high.

Love in this movie is an elusive thing to try to understand. At times it's abusive. Other times it’s unreciprocated. But in this movie, it is always a hot mess. And for me, the viewer, I like it.

Over the past few months, I’ve tried to drastically reduce the amount of projects I’m working on to reflect on and think about Martian Radio Theatre as a whole, thinking on the question what is Martian Radio Theatre?

The Empathy Exams is a series of essays by Leslie Jamison that complicates our understanding of what it means to try to understand other people and ourselves.

My immediate concern when picking up this book was that it was going to be some kind of self-help text. A kind of instruction on how to be kind. But kindness, from what I remember, is a topic that is rarely touched on in this text. The recurring theme throughout is pain. Physical pain. Mental anguish. Bodies imprisoned. Self-loathing. Partial or total disassociation. Second-hand sympathy. Nostalgia and forgetting, and even joy derived from endurance. Pain, and our relationship to it.

“First off, language is wild. I mean that literally. It’s an old animal that has seen species long since extinct.

As a medium, it is the most collaborative art form, requiring people to make weird sounds with their mouths, with sibilants (s sounds), plosives (b’s, p’s and g’s,) fricatives (v’s and z’s) and all manner of linguistic gabagool, so that we might be heard, and hopefully understood. I imagine a humorous scene with a neanderthal, perhaps with a broken leg, gesturing to a companion to pass the stone. Their companion is a bit thick and doesn’t get what the gesture means as a symbol. Typically the broken legged neanderthal would simply get up and get it, but having lost their individual agency, they must now use symbols, and since gestures alone don’t quite convey their meaning, perhaps pairing them with sounds will. Point to stone, gunk. Point to here, gob. Point to stone, gunk. Point to here, gob. Do this until understanding dawns on your hairy companion, or until you’ve created German or something.”

“In an alternate future, we’ll collectively break the link between personal productivity and worth. In fact, we’ll just go ahead and break capitalism while we’re at it. Nobody hustles in post-pandemia cripland, because creativity is more important than brand. Nobody needs to work a side gig to pay medical bills, because there are no medical bills.”

“When I was in Portland, I stopped by a few book shops to pass the time and got into conversation with a shop owner about Boss Fight Books. He mentioned that he had contributed to the Kickstarted of this small publisher who wanted to make books about video games, and after the company succeeded in publishing several sessions of books, the store owner bought batches for the store. One of these was a review of Red Dead Redemption by Mark Margini.”

“There is often so much negative noise and perception around harm reduction that the real narrative is completely stifled. Harm reduction, by definition, is “...a set of practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use. Harm Reduction is also a movement for social justice built on a belief in, and respect for, the rights of people who use drugs”

“I have been thinking about love lately. I have been thinking about how I love, and what I seek in love.

Love is obviously important. It was present in all of the stories I read and watched growing up. A parent’s love. A lover’s love. Comradery. Friendship. Loyalty. Compassion for small things. I have experienced hundreds of stories about love and its varieties, but I’m still hazy on the details.”

Checking out their Bandcamp, they describe their sound as “classic and sincere” as it’s “slowly processed through a loner medieval-tonk machine and then captured on cassette 8-track.” Knowing how silly they can be in interviews and in describing themselves, I wonder if the medieval-tonk machine is a fabrication. When asked how the band met, Ribbons replied that they all attended a town meeting and got into a heated debate regarding the font sizes used on local signage. But then again, I can absolutely imagine that cassette recording is part of their mastering process.

Awaking in the cold October light, nestled under velvet quilt, . The day coos and calls for attention, yet I nuzzle my head in the comfort of my pillow seeking a second night. Or at least another few fleeting seconds of sleep. Sweet sleep. Like hot chocolate poured on marshmallow. 

“There’s a 168 hours in any given week. I work 40 hours a week give or take some change bringing that down to 128 hours. Okay that’s plenty to work with though I should probably get some sleep and ideally full nights of rest so factoring that in, 8x7=56, so then we are down to 72 hours, which is still plenty of time to be writing. But of course I don’t just work and sleep do I? What other essentials are necessary?”

“And when those stones were blown up into somewhat more manageable sizes, another method for displacing them was to connect to the swinging end of a device commonly referred to as a catapult and launch that sucker into kingdom come. Similar with dynamite, you can only ever approximately know what you’re doing so you may find headlines in the local paper exclaiming that a boulder has landed on your neighbors house, which is a mildly amusing statement to read. Less amusing perhaps were the instances in which the boulder would fly straight up and fall straight down, crushing the workers below.”

When my father would take me on road trips, he would often put a large atlas at my lap and tell me to navigate. Opening the manifold I was quickly confused by the vast array of lines, webbed roads and concentric topological patterns. This was the equivalent of giving a baby a plastic steering wheel and saying “Follow that taxi.”