[production notes] 13.8 13.9 (Patreon)

The 13.10 finale is nearly here! A reminder to everyone that I'm hosting the regular finale party livestream on Sunday, details here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/season-13-finale-90237256

13.8

Pawel is a saint, isn't he! Sometimes the best support from our friends is just companionship and a little distraction.

The 'perfect yeast' that he introduces here is fictional, but the name is something from my own friend group. Every year my friends and I go camping for a week, we have cooking gas and river water, but everything else must be brought with us.

Some years ago, we started brewing alcoholic drinks on the trip. I don't drink, but the weight of all the bottles my friends were bringing to a remote location was getting too heavy! Someone discovered Turbo Yeast, a fast strain of yeast original developed in the 60s by the army to convert water and sugar into large quantities of alcohol, which could be distilled and used for medical purposes. It can brew a 5% drink in just a few days, but it does not, reportedly, taste very good! The best option was a sweet mead, made with honey, and so Turbomead was born!

Brewing and baking is so vital to our species, we've basically co-evolved our society with them, and so I wanted to show that even after The Collapse, life goes on.

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13.9

ONI's existence is quite strange, being spread across thousands of devices. If we could invent such a thing today, there's plenty of computation in phones and computers all over the world that human-level intelligence could be simulated. But not in real time.

ONI is inspired by computer viruses, yes, but he's also very alien, as Seth says in this episode. Hyper intelligences would be incomprehensible to us, though, worryingly, they would find it trivial to predict every move and thought, very much like we might control an ant. 

My pattern for ONI, rather than the Aggressive Menace, is more like an abstract threat. The link is finally made clear in this episode, I hope, when Seth says that "When the stars are right he could not live" A direct quote from Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu. 

Problematic author notwithstanding, this book introduced me to the Cosmic Horror genre, where the alien entities aren't violent little green men, but so unknowable they're almost forces of nature. In these stories, our protagonist isn't being attacked by the monster, the monster is just going about its normal incomprehensible business, and happens to cause terror and destruction in its wake.

I am very pleased with how this all came together in this episode.

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My apologies for the delay in 13.9's video, which I only just published, my IRL timetable once again stopped me keeping my schedule. The solution is simple, and I will implement it from next season: Videos must ALSO be produced early, along with the audio and text.

An obvious solution, and I don't know why I didn't do it earlier. I think perhaps it's a legacy of me thinking that the videos are second to the audio. That's not right, as looking at my statistics, just as many people watch on YouTube as listen in podcast clients. I will bring them up to the same high standard as I have with the audio.

Looking forward to seeing you if you can make the discord Finale Party. Well, you'll see me anyway, my camera will be on!

Thank you all so much, I'm excited to share my plans for next season...
<3