Audio – The Once And Future Nerd

This week’s bonus content is an interview Christian did with author, musician, crafter, and self-described jack of all trades Margaret Killjoy. It’s about power in Fantasy (among other things). So, right up our alley.

You can find out about all of Margaret’s various projects at birdsbeforethestorm.net, or follow her on Twitter @MagpieKilljoy.

The transcript for this episode can be found here.

Our partners this week are:

We’ll be back again on June 14, with a new format of bonus content we’re trying out. See you then!

In today’s bonus content, Producer Zach Glass interviews author Liz Kerin, whose novel The Phantom Forest is available now through Inkshares or wherever you get books.

And – as mentioned in the episode – you can watch Colleen Scriven (creator of Lesser Gods) interview Liz at The Strand here!

Our sponsor this week is Marvels – a podcast from Marvel, set in the background of the Fantastic Four’s showdown with Galactus. Written, directed, and produced by some of the best talent in podcasting. Go to marvelspodcast.com to learn more. And if you want to listen, go to stitcherpremium.com and enter the code FUTURE to get a month of Stitcher Premium for free!

Today’s bonus episode is the audio from our #AskTOAFN livestream for Book 2 Chapter, originally broadcast on November 17. It’s been cleaned up and lightly edited for clarity, but you can watch the full original stream over on our YouTube channel.

Thank you to everyone who submitted questions!

Our sponsors this week:

Other announcements/shout-outs:

This week – to hold you over until our #AskTOAFN livestream, we have an interview with three brilliant podcast creators. Sarah Shachat, Gabriel Urbina, and Zach Valenti are the production team behind Wolf 359, No Bad Ideas, and Time Bombs. In this interview, they talk to Christian about their latest endeavor, Zero Hours.

Update: The promo code for Audio Fiction 101 given in this episode has since expired. Thanks to everyone who used our code and everyone else can still take advantage of the course at its regular price.

And last but not least: Our #AskTOAFN livestream for Book 2 Chapter 6 will be on Sunday, November 17 at 4:30pm New York time, on our YouTube channel. If you’d like to submit a question, please do so by Wednesday, November 13. You can post on Twitter or Tumblr using #AskTOAFN, or use the #AskTOAFN threads on our Facebook page or subreddit.

See you then!

Here’s the audio from our #AskTOAFN livestream for Book 2, Chapter 5. It’s been edited for clarity but you can still see the unedited (and severely technologically challenged) video stream on our YouTube channel.

Links to topics discussed in this episode:

TOAFN is brought to you in part this week by Plus One Balms. Go to plusonebalms.com/TOAFN and use offer code TOAFN to get 10% off your order and help support our show.

Thanks for listening!

Today’s bonus content is a conversation that Zach and Christian had with Amanda McLoughlin, Julia Schifini, and Eric Silver of Multitude fame. We talked about the role that storytelling plays in society and how that intersects with roleplaying and self-conception.

We’re also pleased to announce that we’ll be in production for our next chapter November through early December. We’ll be announcing official release dates once we’re a little ways into post-production, but hopefully early 2019.

Here’s the audio from our #AskTOAFN livestream for Book 2 Chapter 4. It’s been lightly edited for length and clarity, but you can still watch the full video stream on YouTube.

Some shout-outs and announcements:

Thanks to everyone who sent in questions. See you soon!

Today’s bonus content is the cleaned up audio from our last end-of-chapter livestream (along with the Chapter 3 blooper reel). You can watch the video of this conversation here.

Podcast Shout-Out’s this episode:

Chapter 4 of our tale will be released some time in the first few months of 2018. We’ll post release dates as soon as we know them. Hope to see you then! And Happy Holidays from all of us to all of you.

CONTENT NOTES below.

CONTENT NOTES:

End of listed CONTENT NOTES.

Today’s bonus content is an interview with the one and only Zach Valenti, star and co-producer of Wolf 359 (among many other things), who took on a cameo role as Merril in our last few episodes.

This conversation was originally broadcast in May as part of Zach’s ongoing “Self Care Sunday” livestream project. You can watch video of the interview here (Christian starts at right around hour 2), and subscribe to the channel at zach.live.

Release of Chapter 3 is delayed slightly, for reasons explained at the head of the episode. We will announce release dates as soon as we can, and we’re sorry for the delay!

Hit the break for a full transcript of Christian’s statement.

Statement transcript:

Hey everyone,

Christian here. Got some more bonus content for you this week, and the reason for that is we’re still waiting to see when we can release Chapter 3. You have our apologies for that.

I’m sure this has been a really rough week for a lot of us what with the events in Charlottesville. Speaking personally – though I’m definitely angered and saddened and frightened – as a straight white guy living in New York City, these things tend not to hit me as viscerally as they might hit some of you. So I try to use that position of relative safety to hunker down and do what I can to help. That includes but is by no means limited to hopefully getting this show out in time for anyone who counts on it as a little spot of fun in their week.

Unfortunately, in addition to everything else, Jess and I had a pet pass away this week, and being perfectly honest I wasn’t really able to focus much on work. So in the interest of transparency, that’s meant that editing is delayed on Chapter 3 and writing is delayed on Chapter 4. And I want to take just a moment to say for posterity that our rabbit Bebe was a sweet little spot of light and good in a world that too often lately feels dark and shitty. She was loved and will be very dearly missed.

I know it’s a small thing in light of what everyone else is certainly feeling this week, dearly beloved though Bebe was. So I’ll just add this, because I’ve been thinking about it a lot: The first words spoken in The Once And Future Nerd are “Imagine, if you can, what life is like for a rabbit.” At the risk of saying the subtext out loud, that was us trying to p rime our audience to think about what it would be like to be much more vulnerable than they are. That’s always been a core principle of the show. A lot of people are very vulnerable right now. Do what you can for them. Be excellent to each other.

I hope that our fandom is a fairly wide tent. I’m glad we have writers who don’t always agree with me. I hope we have fans who don’t always agree with us. I want our show to affirm but I also want it to teach, and you can’t teach if everyone agrees. And right now with tensions running so high, I think those of us who are relatively safe could do better at having patient, good faith conversations with people whose views frustrate us.

Having said that, if your stated belief is that some people are inherently inferior to you at birth, you have thereby forfeited your claim on patience and good faith. The Once And Future Nerd, as a project and an organization, is Black and Brown and Jewish and female and queer and disabled. Nazis and white supremacists and their ilk can fuck off, now and forever. And to be clear, because I don’t want it to seem like I’m just calling anyone I disagree with a Nazi, if you walk around next a Nazi flag saying Nazi shit like we should have a white ethnostate, you’re a fucking Nazi, and you can fuck off.

End transcript.

This episode is the audio from our latest #AskTOAFN, which we did as livestream. It’s been cleaned up a little and lightly edited. And you can always watch the original, unedited and with the video right here.

Thank you so much to everyone who wrote in with questions! We tried to at least acknowledge receipt of everything even if we didn’t answer it, so if you believe you sent in a question and you didn’t get any kind of a nod from us, let us know. If you won a book, we’ll be in touch shortly.

We’ll be back soon with some more cool bonus content, and we’ll announce release dates for Ch. 3 as soon as we can commit to something. See you then!

Cool stuff mentioned in this episode: