quoting RQG to express how languages are bad and evil??
Stumbled upon an amusing little moment while relistening to some random RQG episodes. Iām totally using the phrase āWhere is the vernacular railway?ā (brought to us by Alex as an otherwise French-exclusively speaking gnome from ep.57) to describe how bad I am at speaking certain languages.
āSo you had Latin in university, didnāt you? Can you say something in Latin?ā
āWell I can ask you where the nearest horse cart stop isā.
āSorry?ā
āOh wait, I canāt. I donāt know how to turn it into a questionā.Ā Ā
āSo you had studied Ukrainian?ā
āYep. You interested in trains?.. Itāll still be mostly in Russian thoughā.
āSo you are learning German?ā
āYes, and I can tell you all about how trains work, but I donāt know what a ticket isā.
And while my German is a tiny bit better than all the others mentioned, the principle is sadly the same. The vernacular railway principle, where you know one specific phrase or one weirdly specific topic, but canāt understand anything unrelated to it. And in my experience this kind of thing happens way more often than a solid beginner level of speaking a language. Rusty Quill Gnoming: more relatable than youād think.
when your favourite character is the first one to leave the show
Relistening to Parting in Prague is so much worse than listening to it for the first time was. A lot of it felt genuinely funny back then, but now, knowing how it will end, knowing that we wonāt hear from Zolf again (or at least not for a very long time, but even thatās a question with no answer), it is so different. Even all the jokes sound so damn sad.
I actually ended up crying on the bus (which is the one way I deal with any sort of emotions, but still :D). I love and kind of hate the episode at the same time. Huge thanks to Alex for repeatedly switching focus between the scene in the restaurant and Bertie causing his own scene, it wouldāve been even more heartbreaking if not for those interruptions.
āDonāt try to stop me, Iām leaving for the fumes of revelry!ā
āStop, moron! Thatās the end of the picture there!ā
āOh damnation! My elbow!ā
Sadly I donāt remember where I initially found it, so no idea who wrote theĀ ādialogueā. The painting is a fresco by Philipp Veit called Joseph and Potipharās Wife.
I hate how I can't stop myself from checking BNC/COCA or Google every other turn of phrase to see whether it sounds natural, even knowing all the while that in the end, it won't really. Oh yes perfectionism when you're writing something not in your first language. I tell myself that what I actually need to do is to get my point across, that I've got countless remarks on how my speech and phrasing are weird even in my native language (and I seem to have survived that). Itās not even that I'm embarrassed to seem ...what? I know I'm not stupid for confusing tenses or drowning in the wrong articles, or for not knowing the best verb to go with that noun to most accurately express my meaning. But Iām still waiting for the day when I feel confident enough to write a damned reddit comment without spending half an hour researching (do I have time to spare? do I have an assignment due tomorrow? yes, why are you asking?)
I have veryā¦ complicated feelings on this one. The best way I can phrase it is how I feel about the movie Brazil. Terry Gilliamās Brazil is a well crafted piece of cinema with artistic merit I can respect and appreciate that I absolutely despised watching.Ā
I hated *listening* to the episode.The secondhand embarrassment I got from the extreme awkwardness of the various conversations gave me a visceral case of full body NOPE. I simultaneously wanted to curl up to die and throw my laptop across the room in a rage. Just thinking about it now is making me irrationally angry.
HOWEVER
Underneath the Big Pile of Awkward, I found the episode to be very narratively rich. It lodged in the back of my brain and I kept teasing new things out of it. I want to like this episode, and I do, in theory. In practice I just canāt listen to it without wishing for death in a way only Tim would understand.Ā
There are things I actively enjoyed. The cameos by James and Bryn were lovely. Peter Lukas is a highlight, Iām very excited to finally meet a Lukas and find out about the fallout from his meeting with Elias.Ā
And again, from a narrative and meta standpoint, this is a VERY juicy episode. I could (and have) spend hours picking apart the implications but GODDAMN I CANāT ACTUALLY LISTEN to this meandering pile of verbal pauses and awkward bullshit! Itās like nails on a chalkboard for me. It went on for Way Too Long.
Iām sure it wonāt bother me nearly as much in retrospect and 6 months from now if I do a relisten I doubt Iāll skip it. I understand why they did it, it is a very well crafted episode, it just clashes *hard* with my aesthetics.Ā
This episode was full of questions and exclamations for me. Very unexpected, very strange, at one point I thought the Spiral ate someone and there was a recursion, and a lot more funny than Iām used to from TMA. I was half asleep but trying to take notes, which I donāt usually do, but looking through them, they are mostly along the lines of āplease donāt kill this characterā and ānow I recognise James Rossās voiceā.
The questions I was asking myself most during the episode were:
1. Is everyone going to make it out of the interviews alive?
2. What are these stories?
(Longish, rambly and slightly spoilery further down.)
And, well, we got more or less definitive answers I suppose? Almost no one died. In particular, none of the assistants died. I really hoped they wouldnāt kill Bryn's character, and, I mean, technically they didnāt, but he got thrown into Isolation, didnāt he. (And I was worried about him most of all, especially after his 'w.h.a.t' which he said in such a way that it sounded like he in distraction and confusion was dropping individual sounds. Made me a bit more afraid for him. Also was kind of hilarious. And the stumbling was glorious too.)Ā
As for the stories, while listening I had three major ideas for what they could've been. My first thought was that they were mundane statements. It would sort of make sense narratively, they could serve as a way of showing how the same phobias, fears and sinister objects can be interpreted both as supernatural and as completely normal. That would've been a weird point to make for episode 100 though. And also in that case, why the recorder?Ā
Another thought, one I had when that woman asked about money, was that the people were lying. Can you lie on record in the Magnus Institute? Can you do that when the Archivist is not present?.. Most of them sounded genuine enough though, and one of them got eaten by an entity in the end, so this half-theory dissipated soon. It was still interesting to me, as Iāve thought about whether lying in a statement is possible, and my reckoning is āprobably notā.Ā
Or maybe these stories were different because they weren't compelled. The archivist wasn't there. All the assistants can do is ask questions, they cannot extract out of someone a story that would be magically neatly organised. I've had the theory that the Archivist is something of a story editor for a while. They don't just compel somebody to tell their experience, they lend them eloquence, help them highlight whatās important and donāt let them skip anything that is related, and ultimately turn the string of events into a narrative. Maybe part of why giving a statement feels good is the fact that you understand what happened to you a little better. It seems like this interpretation is quite likely to be true, and if thatās the case, Iām really glad to have my theory confirmed.Ā
As an aside, I think relistening to this episode will be more fun for me than listening for the first time was. This particular kind of unexpected didnāt resonate very well with me when I was half asleep and waiting for either drama or spookiness. I like the episode a lot more already in retrospect, thinking over my sleepily incoherent notes and quotes, and regardless of my initial feelings I think itās a really fitting one for this 100 episodes milestone.Ā
Bonus silliness.
When that woman Martin was interviewing went ominously silent, in the atmosphere of my general confusion (and mild dissatisfaction, I'll admit) I had a sudden terrifying thought that all the statement-givers in the episode were agents of the Stranger that came for the assistants now that they had the Archivist. I should've been paying attention to the dates of the statements. Or, in fact, I shouldāve just waited until morning to listen.
In my first year at Uni I had a course on Internet Technology, and at one point we were discussing machine translation. The main thing I took from that was that auto-translators, while undoubtedly useful, are also hilarious when theyāre dealing with... well, actually, with anything, but especially languages significantly different in grammar. Iāve been abusing this knowledge for my own enjoyment for a while now, and Twitter in particular gave me a lot of material.
Because of the fact that the language in the app is set to English while I only tweet in Russian, it automatically always suggests to translate. And it mostly does exactly what youād expect: it funnily messes up your grammar, so that as a result your subject divides in two, you become inanimate, your emotions become the thing that experiences you instead of the other way around, etc. And all that makes me kind of forget just how bad auto-translators are sometimes with things like homonyms. Thereās no consciousness behind the statistical method (as established by the tragic grammar transformations), so it wonāt stop to think that the participants in the situation itās constructing are sliiightly weird.
Now for what happened today. Thereās a silly Russian joke about a word that is both a Christian ritual and a part of speech: that word is ŠæŃŠøŃŠ°ŃŃŠøŠµ (translates as sacrament and participle). And someone who is a linguist might, you know. tweet about parts of speech from time to time. The auto-translator does not know what I study though and doesnāt think before it makes decisions. So what I ended up with was this:
Now, I donāt know where it got the wordĀ āmassā from either (hopefully not from Catholicism?), itās supposed to be formative, if Iām not mistaken, as there is such a thing in Russian verbs in the past tense as a formative -l- suffix. But the end of the sentence just kills me. What I meant to write was just a reference to the history of the language, where the verb form that uses the suffix in question used to be a different part of speech and now, due to some historical difficulties and dropping some copulae, stopped behaving like a participle and became a verb. Instead something way more ominous came out. Iām sorry, am I now supposed to assign letters to church rituals? As ifĀ āit used to be a participleā isnāt a bad enough thing to say about a word, weāll now claimĀ āit used to be a sacramentā.
anyone has actual play RPG podcasts to recommend that are not too hard to process? with good audio, tight editing, limited crosstalk, reasonable episode length? preferably with a not-all-cis-straight-white-dudes cast?
itās a genre i love in theory but in practice itās just. so. fucking. cognitively inaccessible
i keep trying new ones and dropping them pretty quickly because i have no idea whatās going on, or itās costing me all my brainpower just to sort-of follow, and iām having, like, the opposite of fun
the only two iāve managed to stick with and really enjoy so far are Rusty Quill Gaming and Join the Party. iām sure there are others iād love just as much but trying to find them on my own is starting to feel like a major waste of time and spoons :/
Itās been such a problem for me too :/ I think Iāll take your post as a recommendation and go try Join the Party. So far Iāve had little luck trying various APās. Itās like you read a lot of good stuff about a podcast but then someone casually mentions in the comments that thereās players loudly eating and drinking. Or you read a lot of good stuff, subscribe, and then the introductory episode has two sexist jokes in the first 25 minutes. Or you read a lot of good stuff, and then the first player introduced describes their characterās appearance using the worst cliches possible. Or you click playā¦ and stop, because the quality is so bad itās near unintelligible.
Iāve genuinely never had this much trouble searching for something listenable in any other genre, as picky as I am. Maybe the problem is that I started with RQG and they just spoiled me?Ā
ā¦Rant over, so, for what itās worth, IāveĀ read really a lot of good stuff about Wanderquest. Only listened just now to about 5 minutes of 2 random episodes to find out about the audio quality. Itās not ideal, they seem to be playing over the internet rather than everyone at the same table, but editing feels good enough to me. Theyāre playing 5e, an original world from what I understand. And, among other things, theyāve got an all-female cast (and quite distinct voices!). Episode length is ~50 min. The backlog is only 20 episodes including origin stories (which they have 4 of, for every PC, each one labelled episode 0), and they seem to release new episodes often enough (approximately once a week?). So Iām planning on listening sometime soon.
oh yeah, the content itself being objectionable is an other major issue i didnāt think to mention
i think the worst iāve ever encountered was a fucking rape ājokeā two hours (out of three) into the first episode of a podcast i had seen highly recommended. the DM said he didnāt endorse it and they were only leaving it in because of their no-editing policy, but if your friends feel comfortable joking about sexual assault on mic, itās clearly something you normally tolerate from your group, soā¦ fuck those guys
i also feel like having started with RQG is at least part of my problem but at the same time, i hate the idea that having standards is a problem, and Join the Party has proven to me that my standards being high doesnāt make them unattainable. itās also different enough from RQG to make it clear that my problem with other APs isnāt just that theyāre not RQG
itās overall pretty light-hearted and wholesome and very queer (the first arc revolves around a gay fantasy royal wedding). the three players + DM (one woman and three men) all have distinctive voices, the acting is good, and you can tell theyāre good friends. sound-wise, it feels closer to scripted podcasts than any other AP iāve listened to, while still being clearly unscripted. the day after each biweekly gaming episode (~50 minutes long), thereās an afterparty episode (~30 minutes long) where they discuss whatever just happened (+ what could have happened, behind the scenes stuff, tabletop gaming in general, whatever feels relevant), so even when thereās stuff i have trouble processing, i donāt end up missing anything important. they also have official transcripts of their gaming and afterparty episodes, which i donāt know if you use (i donāt) but feels worth mentioning
Wanderquest sounds promising, thanks for the recommendation! iāve downloaded the origin story episodes and will give them a listen later this week
That sounds really awful. Good thing it became apparent soon at least :/
I absolutely agree. I like to joke sometimes about RQ shows being an inadvisable place to start because of how good they are, but, first, that's more in relation to the actual content quality (plot, acting, and such), and second, it still doesn't mean high standards or just pickiness can't be a good thing when you're a listener. It may help you recognise what's worth your time and what isn't, it might also reduce the number of situations where you regret how much energy you spent on a show you realise you didn't enjoy that much after the fact.
(What especially upsets me is the notion that wanting a show not to be, for example, sexist is already 'standards'. But, well, that's where we are.)
Thank you for your extended recommendation! A gay fantasy royal wedding sounds wonderful. And I usually really love behind-the-scenes stuff, so that's excellent news as well. As are transcripts. While I tend not to use them in general, for another AP podcast I might do. If RQG had transcripts, I certainly would turn to them from time to time, if only because of things like jokes I don't catch and just stuff that gets lost somewhere between slang, crosstalk and me being a non-native English speaker. I can't imagine the nightmare of transcribing long unscripted AP episodes though. It's incredible someone does that.
anyone has actual play RPG podcasts to recommend that are not too hard to process? with good audio, tight editing, limited crosstalk, reasonable episode length? preferably with a not-all-cis-straight-white-dudes cast?
itās a genre i love in theory but in practice itās just. so. fucking. cognitively inaccessible
i keep trying new ones and dropping them pretty quickly because i have no idea whatās going on, or itās costing me all my brainpower just to sort-of follow, and iām having, like, the opposite of fun
the only two iāve managed to stick with and really enjoy so far are Rusty Quill Gaming and Join the Party. iām sure there are others iād love just as much but trying to find them on my own is starting to feel like a major waste of time and spoons :/
Itās been such a problem for me too :/ I think Iāll take your post as a recommendation and go try Join the Party. So far Iāve had little luck trying various APās. Itās like you read a lot of good stuff about a podcast but then someone casually mentions in the comments that thereās players loudly eating and drinking. Or you read a lot of good stuff, subscribe, and then the introductory episode has two sexist jokes in the first 25 minutes. Or you read a lot of good stuff, and then the first player introduced describes their characterās appearance using the worst cliches possible. Or you click play... and stop, because the quality is so bad itās near unintelligible.
Iāve genuinely never had this much trouble searching for something listenable in any other genre, as picky as I am. Maybe the problem is that I started with RQG and they just spoiled me?Ā
...Rant over, so, for what itās worth, IāveĀ read really a lot of good stuff about Wanderquest. Only listened just now to about 5 minutes of 2 random episodes to find out about the audio quality. Itās not ideal, they seem to be playing over the internet rather than everyone at the same table, but editing feels good enough to me. Theyāre playing 5e, an original world from what I understand. And, among other things, theyāve got an all-female cast (and quite distinct voices!). Episode length is ~50 min. The backlog is only 20 episodes including origin stories (which they have 4 of, for every PC, each one labelled episode 0), and they seem to release new episodes often enough (approximately once a week?). So Iām planning on listening sometime soon.
So the audiodrama subreddit is talking about the Black Tapes being back, while I kind of hoped not to hear from PNWS ever again?..Ā
(Here are some of the reasons why. Spoilers ā negativity.)
If thatās their damage control, good for them. Not that I would call it the ultimate right thing to do, but I understand. If thatās what they were planning all along, well, I personally amĀ reallyĀ not a fan of this particular type of ARG. Not here for it. Also, surprise, it does not help you make a good story. And my disappointment with the last season didnāt go anywhere, and from the comments Iāve seen, Iām, while not in the majority, not alone in this.Ā
Iāll keep half an ear out in maybe a year in the case itās been suddenly good stuff, but for now, Iāll probably spend my time and energy engaging with other stories and listening to other podcasts. Thereās a lot of great ones out there, ones that are really worth your time and will not try to play a weird game with you or fool you with actual real-world release troubles. When itās the plot thatās trying to fool me into thinking Iām hearing what Iām actually not, thatās fair game. When itās the creators... I feel that is disrespectful.Ā
And most of all, a dramatic performance like that isnāt worth anything at all on its own. Itās not especially clever, itās not suspenseful (more like making people upset or angry), and the chances of the Black Tapes universe to pass for the real world are long gone anyway, so itās not even actually immersive. It will not fix the story, because it does not have the powerĀ to make the plot coherent and interesting. The last six episodes, letās be honest, were not good listening. Infodumps in general usually arenāt compelling, and neither is jumping to drama thatās trying too hard. And why should the supernatural suddenly be so real that every cult it actually the same?..Ā And I can go on, and on, and on about this (but itās likely not going to be very compelling either). The point is, trying to resurrect my interest in the story of the Black Tapes isnāt something I care for. Iām still sort of glad for the people who are still invested. But Iām a bit concerned as well, because I donāt want so many people to get disappointed with TBT again, and I canāt not expect that to happen. So I just hope theyāll get at least as satisfying an ending as there can be.
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