I wanted to check in and ask how you’re doing. This is perhaps a selfish act, of attempting to find others feeling a similar way to me — that is to say, a little hopeless at the moment. Misery loves company, that sort of deal.

Calvin is seven, and is the son of my producer over on Flightless Bird, Rob — aka “Wobby Wob”. In today's podcast, Calvin watches and then immediately reviews Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. I hope you enjoy it. It’s Calvin, being interviewed by his dad Rob.

This week I started each day how I usually do: with a strong coffee as I read through your thoughtful comments. The stuff you shared around my piece musing about fate and destiny, chance and chaos, was particularly real and heartening.

“Even if it's down to random chance rather than some cosmic alignment, I find it so comforting to know you're grappling with the same questions and uncertainty in tandem.”

As I tend to do sometimes, I wanted to share some of it.

(If you have time, I’d urge you to read through all 170+ comments — it’s really good reading, and a reminder of this special corner of the Internet we occupy.)

For pictures and more: https://www.webworm.co/p/pureunadulteratedcharge

Over the weekend I revisited a podcast I really adore, Dead Eyes. It’s about a guy who got fired from Band of Brothers over two decades ago because Tom Hanks said he had “dead eyes”. Connor Ratliff had been up for a small part in episode five, and while it wasn’t a major role — at the time, for an up and coming actor, it felt like everything. On my re-listen over the weekend, something Connor and Tom Hanks said leapt out at me, as they reflected on what had happened in an audition room in the late 90s, and the critically acclaimed podcast decades later:

Connor: It’s been such a gift because we never would have arrived at this place if I had not had my little show business nightmare. It’s been a real lesson in terms of even a negative experience sometimes being the thing that is ultimately more rewarding than if I’d just had a lovely time for a day on Band of Brothers.

Tom: Well, isn’t that the serendipity that you must have faith in. There is a type of seasoning of “who knows what is going to happen!” — of pure unadulterated charge — that moves stuff along somehow. And it never stops happening.

That little bit leapt out to me because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the forces that shape our lives, and how much control we have over them. And what that means about how we live our lives, and interact with others.

How we measure our success, and how we measure our failure

Joshua Drummond has a theory about why so many of the loud voices we meet online are so fundamentally… offensive. You may remember Josh’s earlier pieces about being trapped by climate change, or what’s at the heart of Evangelical Christianity — two of my favourite old reads on Webworm. His idea is deceptively simple and something that’s easy to overlook — and yet it instantly explains so much of the online behaviour we’re seeing in 2024. I think after reading this, it may not enhance your internet experience — but it will offer comfort in explaining why it’s happening.

The internet isn’t just full of bad ideas: It’s dying. The idea of a dead internet isn’t new, and full disclosure — it started life as its own conspiracy theory. Dead Internet Theory posits that most of the internet is just bots — and that these bots are being used to manipulate the human population. While I don’t see some grand scheme playing out online to infect the internet with garbage, I think it’s happening organically and it’s happening fast.

America is a big like a deranged child, celebrating nearly every day of the week: There’s Pie Day on January 23, Burger Day on May 28, and Icecream Day on July 21. But “Transgender Day of Visibility” on March 31 hit a nerve, Republicans horrified that Easter Sunday had suddenly been taken over by trans people — a group allegedly not fit to consume neither Jesus, nor easter eggs. What the fuming masses failed to grasp was that the Transgender Day of Visibility has been running every March 31 since its inception, while Easter Sunday hasn’t been on March 31 since 2013 — and won’t be again until 2086.

True Crime is a genre I’ve certainly watched a lot of, and have dabbled in it myself with things like Tickled (true crime where nobody dies) and Mister Organ (some death, no murders). We’ve always been fascinated with hideous things happening to other people, either as a way to make ourselves feel better, or to try and understand the things we’re afraid of. To make sense of the world. Sometimes, there’s a social justice aspect involved — righting a wrong. Shining a light on injustice. These are my thoughts on the genre, and my top 10 True Crime examples.

In this episode I took at "Fatca" - the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. This particular act was passed in 2010, and means that if you live in America and are involved in its tax system (which I am, thanks to my podcast work) then America wants to tax everything you have, in any country. Only two countries in the world insist on doing this — America… and Eritrea, a country in East Africa.

This is a conversation between Webworm's David Farrier, and his friend Liv Tennet, talking about her time as a child actor in Lord of the Rings. It’s a conversation with a lot of giggles as she talks about falling off a horse, and becoming a meme.