[production-notes] 13.6 & 13.7 (Patreon)

Back on schedule! My best-laid plans do get thrown sideways when I go on holiday, but it's much better since doing everything earlier! 13.8 released for you tomorrow, then we'll be back on track.

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I'm delighted to hear about the Station 6 Posters finally arriving for international folks! Wherever you are, you should have received your poster by now, if you have not, then please message me using Patreon messages, we'll figure out what went wrong.

If you were a Patreon on or before the 1st of May keep an eye out for your poster! (if not, then don't worry, print your own here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/station-6-prints-82387765 )

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13.6

I can finally reveal my inspiration for the ONI virus's propagation. It's not covid, as some of you guessed, (ugh, no thanks) it's the old computer worms of the 90s!

I was 14 or so when the ILOVEYOU worm propagated throughout the then-ubiquitous Outlook email network, and I remember it being in the news every night, with reporters warning us not to open email attachments, even from friends, and especially if it was LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs! Details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU 

Computer worms often focus on spreading, not on damage, and because of that focus they sweep through the network FAST. The biggest damage to the internet, as I recall, was that email broke for that day, or two. The email providers (we were all using Hotmail at the time) couldn't keep up with the huge quantity of emails flooding the system.

The congestion caused more widespread damage than the worm itself.

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OK, so Arctica's problem IS inspired by covid, sorry. Viruses, biological ones, shouldn't kill their hosts. In an ideal world they shouldn't harm the host at all, they should just replicate and spread. Killing the host doesn't make sense, right? So why do plagues happen?

It's because the virus evolved in one kind of animal, and has jumped to another, where the biology is similar enough for the virus to live, but different enough that the same processes that were safe-ish in one, are killing the other.

I won't talk further about this because I'm sure you're as tired as I am about this topic.

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13.7

"HELLO STATION 6 WE'RE NOT HAVING A VERY GOOD DAY DOWN HERE ON EARTH." is almost exactly what mission control transmitted up to the ISS on 9/11, and I've borrowed it here for the Collapse message, as you heard in previous seasons.

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At the end of the episode, Seth finds out that sometimes you just need someone to chat to. If there's a single moral to the whole show, it could be "It's dangerous being alone". We're social creatures, we don't work very well by ourselves, certainly not for long, I think.

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We're well into the home stretch folks, thank you so much for your support, talk to you next week <3