(production-notes) Episode 3.10 & special (Patreon)

Spoilers for the episode, season AND special here:

Well, here we are, another season in the bag! I am astonished and grateful to be able to continue making these for you lovely people. Thank you!

Lots happened in the last week here in LT Productions / NAMTAO HQ / my house. 

IVAN's new human-focussed sermon is inspired by a company I had a meeting with a few years ago, WeFarm. They provide a sort of farmer social network where one farmer (in any language, such as Swahili) can text WeFarm and ask for help with growing a certain crop, and WeFarm's systems work out the topics they are talking about and text them out to farmers they know might be able to help, who reply directly. Genius, really amazing! For me, a really interesting part of their technology is a machine-learning algorithm (which is a kind of simple AI) that recognises farming topics in difficult-to-translate languages. Brilliant!

The Ana special was a pleasure to record. Oriel did a great job, as you have heard. A few days before recording, I had a moment of panic: though I planned to record with Oriel, I realised that Ana must speak with Alexander's voice. The accent could be her own, but it would sound male! What an oversight - in my own head, each of Alexander's family have their own voice, but that wouldn't exist outside my (and Alexander's) head, and I had forgotten!
I employed the technique you heard at the top of the special: Alexander's voice (played by my good friend Dan Yilmaz, chosen because they're both WELL POSH) fades from his to Ana's. I hoped to evoke the effect you get at the start of some films: where a narrator's voice fades into a character's voice. I'm very pleased with how it turned out!

Let's talk about Cloud Seeding:

If you've visited Singapore, you've seen these huge artificial plant-like structures in Gardens By The Bay. I saw these impressive structures in-person in the mid 2010s, as I was visiting for a friend's wedding. They. Are. HUGE! And in my mind, The Council's diffusers look like this! Your image of them is just as valid, of course, but this was my inspiration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding 

The Council. Have you guessed where it is? It's the ruins of CERN. For those not familiar, the C in CERN stands for Council (or, Conseil: The full name is Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire). The Large Hadron Collider is one of CERN's greatest achievements, the collider itself is 27km in length! Just amazing.
In a desert, one does not need to dig very far down to find a cooler climate, and where could be better than an underground facility to weather the heat!

Oriel gave me NO THANKS for the difficult-to-pronounce place-names Ana mentioned around the Novamediterra, but they're all real places! Samoylov, Hornsund, Svalbard, Thule, Utqiagvik! I realised in choosing them that English-speaking places (us, uk) are REALLY out of luck come the climate apocalypse! I'm thinking that as the population moves north to escape the heat, they would naturally populate these previously-small scientific outposts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_stations_in_the_Arctic 

Phew! OK, you've heard enough of my secrets. As I mentioned in my end-of-season wrap-up, we're going to find new places and people, and I'm finally going to write some new background music. The old album, Supervised Learning, will still make a comeback, but we'll have a fresh one too.

Thank you so much, do spread the word (people love to binge full seasons!), keep an eye on Twitter for ad-hoc updates, and I will see you on the 5th of April! <3