Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - a holiday hello, and a fun prophecy fulfillment

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

Happy holidays from us (Alex and Katie)! Please enjoy this holiday hello, plus the surprising and fun fulfillment of a long-ago prophecy. And see you in 2024!There's also a special new bonus show, released last week, where Alex interviews an expert about Hangeul. That's on top of weekly bonus shows for supporters every week. Visit maximumfun.org/join to support the show and hear that BoCo.Come hang out with us anytime on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Hey, everybody. This is Alex. I'm here with Katie and here to tell you there is not a full new SIF episode this week. We have a mini tradition where the show skips the Monday closest to Christmas, which this year is Christmas. Yes, it's Kringle times. Yeah, we're Kringling and that means no full episode. There's another one next week, but we just want to do a message to say that and also to say thank you because it's been an amazing year and thank you to absolutely everybody who listens to this show. Yeah. I'm so grateful to people who are listening and I'm so excited that I, I mean, this is the year that I joined the show and it's been so amazing. Yeah. It's been, I hope people

can tell how awesome it has been for me as a human and a podcast maker and everything else to get to tape with Katie every week. And the shows are awesome as a product of it, too. It's just amazing. I thank you so much. And I just am so happy to be able to be here and do this show. And the fans are so great and sweet and wonderful. If anybody's not on the Discord, you'll see it every day. It's great.

And then there's also comments on social media and people send us emails. I'm so thankful to everybody and especially anybody who supports the show. There's a lot of people who've done it for a long time. There's people who are new to it, especially through this wonderful Maximum Fun thing that we get to be part of. So it truly makes the whole thing exist. I know I say that and I really mean it. Yeah.

And I mean, it's really cool that we get to be part of Maximum Fun. I've listened to their podcast for like a long time. And so when Alex was like, I'm thinking of trying to join and, you know, it's just like, well, that's exciting because I love them. Right. Like, yeah, that's how I heard about them was being like plugged into the Flophouse for 10 years and so many other shows that so many other people there make. And yeah, it's a real treat. Yeah. They became an employee on Co-op this year, which is just like a bonus miracle that we didn't have anything to do with, but we're just glad about and benefiting from. There's zero other podcasting organizations like it. So it's a real privilege and treat to be part of that. They've been doing it for as long or longer than anybody and doing it right the whole time. It's awesome. And they also sent me Cajun seasoning as a nice

welcome gift that I'm still using. And it's so good. It's very much part of the official Maximum Fun drive they did. But when you say that, I sort of imagined like an envelope of loose seasoning, which would be great too. It comes in a little container. It does come in a little container, But if someone just sent me an anonymous envelope full of loose seasoning, I'm not going to say I would not use that. I probably would. I mean, it's Cajun. It's great. Yeah, I use it, too.

I put it on eggs yesterday. It was good. If you want to poison me, hide it in Cajun seasoning and I will imbibe it. Yeah, we're the most assassinatable in Louisiana. We're just having a good time eating Zatarain's and Zapp's chips. And then vulnerable. This Cajun seasoning tastes a little bit like raw almonds. I'm sure that's fine.

Yeah, seriously, this seasoning I have made sounds strange. It was part of a wonderful Maximum Fun drive this past March. Thank you to absolutely everybody who did that. And there's another one coming this coming spring. I don't know the dates yet, but they do it once a year and it's really special. And so it was a real treat to jump into one right away this year. And then we'll get to do it again next year, too. Yeah, yeah.

You will know about it because we will tell you. Yeah. Through excitement and promos and everything. And as part of that, we got a new character poster for our latest

50th episode milestone. Thank you to artist Adam Covert for that. Amazing. Thank you to Chris Souza for mastering our audio every week,

making us sound extra great before I go and edit. Thank you, Chris Souza. Yeah. I should have you two meet. That's never happened. So that would be good. But yeah, he's the other from jump of this show helping and making it a thing person.

But yeah, engineering skill. The thing is, I actually sound like Gilbert Gottfried and Chris Souza somehow wrangles my voice into submission. So I sound, you know, less like Gilbert Gottfried, which is really good for the quality of the show, for the listenability. So he is a hero. And my voice actually sounds much better than this, but he puts the Gottfried filter machine to about a 5%. So I could be a lot handsomer on air folks. I'm sorry. percent. So I could be a lot handsomer on Airfolks. I'm sorry. The problem is, is people would be wooed too much to absorb any facts or learning. So like it's a necessary thing. It's sort of like how the keyboard has to be a little bit uncomfortable so you don't type too fast and

clog the typewriter. Alex's voice has to be toned down a little bit. Otherwise you would go into a trance and crash your car. That's right. We would have to tie you all to the mast of your ship. So my siren song does not lure you into the water. Yeah, that's right. So Chris saving lives. And I also lately last few weeks, I've begun taping out of space here in my new hometown, the Beacon Music Factory.

Thank you so much, guys. And I said at the top of it, but again, like, thank you, Katie. This has been, we really started doing this every week at the beginning of January. It feels like it's been a 2023 feature and it's amazing. It's just great. And I also, I'm going to pull a clip later. The second episode of SIF about cattle was actually the very first taping, me and Katie. So that's, you're on the first one really. Wow. And then in people's experience, the second taping

was the first episode. It was about U.S. post offices. Nobody needs to worry about these details. It's just what happened. But like on that one, Caitlin Gill was on the U.S. post offices one, and she predicted that like in the far away year of 2023, there would be new listeners finding the episode again and hearing the back catalog of it. So I'll put the clip of that in here. It's going to be so funny when somebody in the after finds this podcast in 2023. And after three years of building an amazing library and a huge, huge legion of fans, someone new is going to be like, you know what, I'm going to start at the beginning and just be instantly thrust back into the memories of the before of the during, I should say, there's the before the during and then the after

we're all conjecturing on what the after will be and when but i don't know are you like on the road or are you like you're thinking it's gonna go great oh god yeah like throughout the year i've been getting little notes from people just saying like i heard that caitlin gill thing it's neat that this 2020 free prediction came true, that there's still a show and it's got a whole run. And I'm like, yeah, I'm just like profoundly grateful about all that. So thank you all for getting us there.

You're why we're there. And I like to think about that at the holidays. Caitlin Gill's words made it a reality. She put that into the universe. She did. She manifested this moment right now. It's great. She manifested this.

Thank you, Caitlin. And yeah, and also I also in hindsight find it funny that she picked 2023 because that was not very far in the future when she said it. So like we're blowing through that prophecy next week. Your show will last at least a week from now. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like kind of a new show in my head still, even though we've been doing it for a while.

And so, yeah, her near future prediction came true and now we're going to surpass it. It's exciting. Yeah. Hooray. Next Monday is New Year's Day right on the dot. We'll have a whole new episode then and a bonus and everything. Until then, thank you so much and take care. Happy holidays.

Yeah, happy holidays. Get all cozy and snuggly. Hope you guys are all enjoying your time out there with the Kringles and the New Years and everything. My brain was like, can we make snuggly a topic? Maybe. I don't know. Blankets for sure. Being cozy in wintertime is like my favorite thing.

A cozy core. Oh, a cozy episode. I'd be down for a cozy episode. Let's talk. Let's caucus about that. Yeah. I'll book the sleepy time to you, Bear, and then we can do it. We need that guest.