Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Interim 1

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

Our first non-book episode in which we talk about our experience with analyzing themes, other interim topics, and how we're all little pain pigs for Todd Howard. Follow the show @SwordsNSocPod or email us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69   patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

Hello everyone and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the themes and politics hiding in our genre fiction. As always, I am Darius and today with me is my co-host Ketho. How's it going? Howdy. Episode's going to be a little different today. I'm sorry there wasn't one last week. I had so many internet issues I couldn't even record audio over the internet And so At the top of the episode I'd like to say Spectrum, go fuck yourself But now we're back and we're going to do

Sort of a slightly different episode We don't have a book to talk about today We're just going to sort of do a little chit chat About Not like specifically how we started the podcast, but like how we both became interested in like obsessing over like themes and politics and fiction, like how we came around to being interested in looking at this sort of

thing. We thought it'd be just a fun little discussion. Also, we needed extra time to read for the next couple episodes. Cause it's big. Cause it's big. So we needed more time to read for the next couple episodes. Because it's big. Because it's big. So we needed more time to prepare for that. I'm barely halfway through.

Oh, my God. So we're doing this one in between while we prepare. So start off with, I think, let's start with you because you're the expert. Of the two of us, you're the expert um of the two of us you're the expert um as i said i speak i speak third most italian because i don't speak any um so you actually got a degree in or a minor in yeah it was it was a it was a minor. Our school didn't offer a major. I should have taken it. I should have made one. Not that I'd be doing much more with it than I'm doing with the degree I got. So it's like, okay. I mean, I'm not using mine either, so we won't even. Yeah, well, yeah.

Give my major out myself as the mockable nerd I am. Oh, yeah. Tell you what my major was. So, yeah, let's talk about what drew you. Like, did you when you're going into college, we were like, yes, I want to get part of my degree in writing stories. Was that something you discovered in college? No, it's something I did a lot of when I was a kid. And I regret to say I did more of as a kid than I have as an adult.

Just because, you know, when you're a kid, you don't have that little voice in your head telling you it's bad. Well, you're not like you're not self-censoring any of your ideas. Yeah. yeah so like i don't know i wrote like fake detective stories when i was like sixth grade fifth or sixth grade with characters with totally unpronounceable names because despite the fact that i was writing detective stories i had read no detective stories and had only read fantasy stories at up to that point so the names were fantasy style names in a pretty normal world a detective named like cliss clock pleth collect or something yeah and it had a bizarre like element of like the sort of reveal of like a

what would you say like a like a national treasure where at the very end it's like you find out there's an entire city of gold or some shit um i mean national treasure was about that stupid and it made a lot of money it it was about that stupid mine was a little dumber because something if i vaguely remember i think i mean the ancient city that was discovered was like the city of a bunch of people with triangle heads. Have you aliens with triangle heads? Again, you say your idea is bad. Have you seen Indiana Jones?

That's not that different than a secret city full of triangle heads. That's a set. Actually, that basically is a city full of people with oval heads. Yes. It's a, it's a city of people with, with oval heads. My detective's name was unpronounceable

though um so so shy labuff so whatever um but so yeah it started there and then you know i got into like fantasy world building a lot in high school it was a lot of because at that point i'd become obsessed with stuff like the legend of zelda like i was the biggest zelda nerd ever um but i still read a lot and that was the thing like you know i loved tolkien i liked um in general a lot of classics at the time was also the time of like a resurgence of low fantasy too with stuff like percy jackson becoming really popular um which is a series that i completely missed because it came around sort of after me yeah i where we we have to discuss again that i am just a little bit older than you and so like percy jackson came around after i was already past reading those kind of books we we actually read

it we read the first one for like i was in like an elective in like eighth grade and we read it because that was like the second or third year after it came out um and i really enjoyed it in class so i was like i'm gonna go read the whole series and i did see i was for me the series that was coming out when i was a kid was harry potter. I mean, I read a lot of Harry Potter. And a little bit, well, but like, I was like in the demographic as they came out. Like I remember going to like Barnes and Noble to get all those books as they released and the Inheritance Cycle.

I did read the Inheritance Cycle. Those were the ones that were like the hot new shit when I was a kid. Yeah. I actually met someone who no I didn't meet Paolini this is really bizarre and totally unnecessary but I met a

flight attendant that's the tagline for this podcast I met a flight attendant who was apparently if they were telling the truth a family friend of Christopher Paolini because i was reading inheritance on on a flight between i think pittsburgh and chicago it was like a layover

before we went to istanbul and she saw me reading it and was like hey like i grew up in the same town as him like we lived like three doors down it's like we've had dinner with his parents before it's like the elf queen is based on me yeah yeah he had a crush on me growing up and the elf it's based on it's based on me and not princess leia um uh so yeah but so you got to college and you're like i want to keep writing stories yeah i got to college and i was like i want to keep writing i didn't realize that they had them the first year and my first year of school was probably the worst year of my life so it was a really terrible year i had never i had never been bad at school before and then those two

semesters happened and i got like my first d on a test ever um you know like it was it was a bit of a downward spiral that year the years following were all way better like they were all significantly better but that first two semesters that i was a chemistry major of all things was horrible and then i decided you know what is there anything i can do as a minor that's like something i want to get out of bed for okay instead of skipping a final what what the audience obviously couldn't see it but you said you're you're a chemistry major, I made a face because in this house, we don't believe in hard science. college career, even though I didn't need them anymore. I took at least one creative writing, either intro course or specialty course or workshop course every single semester until I graduated.

You were just taking them because you wanted to. At a certain point, I was just taking them because I wanted to. It's like, I'm going to be a full-time student anyways. This fits in my schedule. Boom. Especially once I got to senior year and any, well, not senior year, any well not senior year technically like super senior plus you know because i was essentially there for like five and a half years by the time i got to the end there any class that was an upper division course counted towards my degree so it was like the college is like whatever just take something just take something to leave i was like okay uh so i was just taking all these like 3000, 4000 level creative writing courses, because it was just something I could take. And it was it would count.

Honestly, though, I hadn't really ever, like in high school, I had read the stories, but I read everything at a very surface level. And it wasn't really until I got to college, that those creative writing classes kind of forced me with other people's writing to read into things a little bit deeper and I like like I took like a youth novel writing course at one point and we read we read middle grade novels like I can't remember the name of the one it's like a Mo Ren book it's like what happened on something street and it's just a it's just a middle grade novel and we sat there in that classroom in a circle and talked about this this book for like three days just the themes the all this other stuff that i kind of honestly checked out on when i was in

high school because like some of the books we read i liked you know it's like i like to kill a mockingbird and i liked like brave new world and i liked but half the books we read, I liked, you know, it's like I like To Kill a Mockingbird and I liked like Brave New World. And I liked but half the books I had to read in high school, I despised. I remember distinctly having to read Robert Faulkner. Yeah, Robert Faulkner as I lay dying and wanting to strangle myself. That was that was my first encounter with any form of modernist like literature. And it was terrible. And it was it was pretty aggressive. Like modernism. that was my first encounter with any form of modernist literature. And it was terrible.

It was pretty aggressive. Like modernism. My roommate in college, like my last year of college, he was an English major and he picked a goddamn idiot to do a report on Ulysses in the span of

three weeks. And I i'm like you dumbass he was like what he when he picked it his professor apparently was like i put that on there kind of as a joke he's like i don't think you should do that you don't need to pick that and he's like i you know i'm never gonna read it unless i do it for class and then he read like two-thirds of it and then had to like look up the spark notes for the last third because yeah um god knows if anyone can understand what james joyce is saying but yeah not when you have entire colleges of of school dedicated to studying james joyce and then his son shows up at a meeting and it's like you all

are idiots my father hated you shut up and i'm like to be fair a lot of people hated james joyce so that's true but um so it wasn't something i really thought about that much because it was something i reserved for like the books we talked about in class you know it was stuff like a brave new world that i would sit down and be like i'll analyze this but then once i got to college it was something i was more consciously aware of and i did a lot more often um just because the class is allowed for it i did a lot especially with short stories because that was the stuff our classes had the most time for i had this really great collection of stuff curated by the um contentious author james uh carol oats famous listen famous twitter twitter power user yes james carol

she um she has this uh i mean if you've been on twitter long enough you saw that picture she posted of like her her feet and her filthy keyboard. Did you see the one of her keyboard of my PC? I don't want to go out of my way. The one of her keyboard would not be out of place on a desk full of like monster cans and Cheeto bags. Like it was filthy. Well,

when you punch out like a novel a month, it's a filthy fucking keyboard disgusting there's a whole for other podcast heads like me there's a podcast about posting called 10k posts and they did a whole they talk about the culture of posting online and that's they did a whole episode well joyce carol carol oats they did a whole episode about her and just the way she posts. Hey, she curated a very good collection of short stories. I'll give her that.

Including a story of hers that I had to do a report on. We are not denying her power. We're just questioning her public-facing persona. Oh, yes. Anyway. And her extremely lit politics. She's British, so at least she's not a TERF. I don't...

As far as I know. As far as I know, but I don't really want to crack open that can. You've got to find out. Yeah, I don't really want to know. So it was something that he did more and more as I got older. And now that I'm out of college and I started reading again for fun yeah for fun because I think I read one book and it was a young adult novel for fun when I was in college and it was I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson which is a pretty good YA novel if anyone is interested and or knows anyone between the age ranges of like 14 and 20 that wants kind of a supernatural tinged kind of teen

romance novel that's really creatively written the prose is insane um it's really bizarre um she has a lot of parentheticals so that might throw some people off but it was like the only book i'd read for myself in like ah jesus like probably two years at that point and then it was probably three or four years before i got back into reading again with yeah and and it started up probably about a year or two ago where i i read like slaughterhouse five and then i read canticle for Leibowitz. And I read Dwayne Dredd's Dream of Electric Sheep. The sort of sci-fi and fantasy that I wouldn't have read in high school and middle school. Because I read almost exclusively Tolkien-inspired high fantasy stuff. Well, yeah, you wanted elves and dwarves and people getting stabbed with swords.

Yes, that's what I wanted. And then by the time I got out, I read a lot more sci-fi that was more overt about its politics so when i think as we sort of discussed on the podcast generally sci-fi is an exploration of like politics openly fantasy is like an exploration of theme subversively yeah there's a there's a couple things i could say on that where you have like i think it's it's what this it's this sort of thesis i'm i've sort of come up with over the short time we've done this is that like generally with sci-fi what it's about is pretty on the face of it because that's kind of how the genre well sci-fi is about the present more so than anything else

like even if it's about the future or if it's about some alternate it's saying something about now where fantasy i think often is saying something about the past yes or about things that are somewhat more esoteric like fantasy isn't isn't making a commentary necessarily about politics of the now but they might be making commentary on the politics of social of like social factors or like human evolution or not human evolution but like human society or theology i feel like it does theme as heavily as sci-fi but it does it in a much a more circumspect way and it's about more esoteric things yeah it's it's i mean a lot of times the themes and the politics you can get out of fantasy mostly has to do with how it feels about morality is my impression. They're more morality tales.

I guess I guess I'll kind of steal a little bit from Matt Colville. If anyone is knows anything about D&D who's listening. Yes, absolute king and also me if i were born like 30 years ago and learned how to code you like 30 years you would you 30 years from now yeah um when i have a giant board of modular synths behind me um i don't actually have that right now if anyone's wondering i just want one of those we have we all have dreams anyway but like he um he talked about it where um he was talking about a specific set of fantasy novels i can't remember the specific ones he was talking about something like lord of the rings being or not not necessarily lord of the rings but um certain stories being moral um to an extent

lord of the rings is a bad example because there's a lot more to it but like about some stories being moral especially what he would what he called fiction instead of fantasy not um and then but he said that oftentimes fantasy is about morality it's not a story imposing a moral it's a story about the concept of morals and morality yeah um and i agree with him to an extent especially about the stuff he was talking about and i think it applies to the stuff for the most part that we read because it's not like it's not like a wrinkle in time or it's not like a red wall we're simply moral even even in the case of red wall which is pretty direct about good and evil it's like they're they're a bit like broader than that when you actually start to break it down and of course that's the sort of crap we do is we break things down further than they probably

were intended to be broken down which honestly has been super interesting especially with the younger the stuff geared towards younger readers that we've been reading because it's like how much stuff in there did the writer not even realize that they were putting in here and i think that's like honestly one of the more can be one of the more interesting parts isn't what story i mean because there's what is the writer telling us? And then there, then like intentionally, and then there's what is the writer telling us that about themselves that they didn't mean to tell us, right? Like what are they telling us about their own beliefs that are just coming through in their writing without them like telling us directly about it?

Like, like Madeline Angle listing all those people that were considered fighters against the darkness and she included, for example, Gandhi. There's like Jesus, Gandhi, and also Einstein. And you're like, hmm. Well, first of all, one of these things is not like the other. Right. It's interesting to me because we are now here at this point where we're having these discussions, and I came at it from almost the completely opposite direction. To be fair, I grew up reading fantasy books.

I was exposed to them at a young age. My mom was big on her kids reading books. And I read a lot because my mom also had this specific thing where when it was time, when it was bedtime, right, it was time for children to go to bed. She realized that I wasn't all my sister. I weren't always sleepy when it was bedtime, but she figured it was important at least just to get us up into bed at the proper time. But she knew she couldn't force us to sleep. Right. So what she did is she's like, she's like, it's time for you to go to bed. If you're not tired, read a book, read a book until you're sleepy, go to bed. Once you get tired, like fall asleep, once you get tired. And so me as a young

kid, I would go to, you know, go to bed at whatever bedtime was. And I was a kid nine 30 or whatever, 10. And then I would just stay up until like 1230 every night reading because I wasn't tired. And so like every night I would just be reading because I would rather do that than go to sleep like that as a kid. And so I burned through a lot of books, not always because I was reading fast or because I was absorbing them deeply. It's just because I had the time. always because I was reading fast or because I was absorbing them deeply. It's just because I had the time. Like, like I didn't, I didn't have a TV in my room. I didn't have game. I didn't have a computer in my room. I couldn't play games. Like I didn't,

even if I wanted to, I didn't have the option. So like I would just sit there in bed and be like, well, what have I got? Well, I got a bunch of books by Lloyd Alexander. I've got the whole Artemis Fowl series. Got a bunch of books by Gary Paulson, you know, RIP man who passed away just recently, the renowned Gary Paulson.

And so like, I just read a bunch as a kid. Did I specifically liked, obviously the high fantasy Tolkien stuff. Like I wanted, I wanted dwarves to kill things with axes. Cause it was cool, right? It was very base level, like, ah, this is cool.

Once I got into high school, though, and you got to your English classes, I hated them. I despised English class with every bone in my body. I didn't like anything we had to read, by and large. Anytime I had to read, like, Dickens made me want to commit seppuku. I'm so surprised you had to read like dickens made me want to commit seppuku i'm so surprised you had to read dickens i read great i had to read great expectations jesus christ in school my british lit like bit this wasn't even a british class this is this was just this was just like an english class this is what i want to say it was like sophomore year of high school that's awful great it was all i hated it

like we read the killer mockingbird sophomore year that's actually good i mean we might have read that i also read that too at some point i don't remember what year and to be fair i also didn't find to kill a mockingbird to be super interesting to me as a kid i've heard that book like three times in high school like obviously now i understand the impact of it, but me at like 15, I was like, okay, yeah, racism is bad, fam. Like, okay, why do we have to, like, why is it so weird? It's absurd how many books I had to read in high school that the end statement is essentially racism bad. Well, I mean, at least you're reading those. those well that's true but at the same time it obviously went over all the heads of everyone in my school because it's where we were a a 99 white school in the middle of a rural area like

and so like my my greatest sort of like antithesis moment for this was my senior year of high school. I took AP English lit. And that was the year I had a teacher who looked the class in the eye, like the first two weeks of school and was like, you have to take notes and write everything down. If you don't write everything down, you will not, you will not pass the we go. You have to take notes. And I took offense to that. I took it as a personal challenge. And I spent the entire year not taking a single note because I did not like the teacher. I was an ornery bastard as a student. And she was like, if you don't write this down, you will not pass.

And I was like, if you don't write this down, you will not pass. And I was like, bet let's go. And so I wouldn't, I didn't take a single note the entire year because I felt like that's just, was it? I even told my mom, like at home, I was like, I told mom, like I'm not taking any notes in this class. And even she was exhausted by that point. She's like, all right. Okay. As long as you get, as long as your grades are fine, do whatever you want. I also got to cheat because my sister had had the same class four years before me with the same teacher who never updated her lesson plans.

And so I literally lived out the plot of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince because I just used the books my sister had used and she filled the margins with notes. My sister, when she went through, wrote all the notes in the margins of the books. So when I had to read Tessa de Uberville's, all of the notes were in the margins. So when the teacher said, you know, what is the symbolism of this action? I literally just would look at the page and she'd already have it written. And it was already written down because my sister was, my sister was a good student and was a diligent note taker. And so I would just read it off the page. And the teacher was like, could tell she hated it, but she couldn't do anything about it. I could go on and on. We'll get there eventually.

I got some stories about my English teachers. They were some psychos. It attracts some strange people. They were either the best teacher I had that year or the absolute most nightmarish individuals I've ever encountered. Objectively, as an adult, I don't think the English teacher that I'm speaking of was a bad person. I'm sure she was fine.

If I ran into her now, I could probably have a really fun conversation with her. But at the time, it just grated on the stupid little student that I was. Oh, no. I've got some stories of people I would still punch in the face if I entered the same room as them, I would want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them. So that year for me actually started off on a pretty high note because we started with Beowulf

which was really cool. I love Beowulf. It's a great story. A lot of good translations out there. And as you'll hear me repeat ad nauseum, especially once we get to them my favorite work lord of the rings is littered with beowulf references and the themes of beowulf are pervasive throughout lord of the rings because tolkien was a huge fucking nerd for the same stuff loved it beowulf great then we read uh the canterbury tales which i thought at least found entertaining i'm gonna say that's that's, that's pretty, uh, those that I found, that's pretty contentious for a lot of people.

Those I found, I found them interesting. At least they were entertaining to me. And also my teacher could read a little bit of whatever that was like middle English or whatever that was. So she could read some of the passages in middle English, which sounded cool. Neat.

That's right. And then it was after that that i started to have issues because then we got into like english lit like we read macbeth which i hated because i never read any shakespeare that i enjoyed i didn't like i didn't like i said i will go to the great defending macbeth specifically i didn't i didn't i didn't findbeth specifically. I didn't find Macbeth interesting. It's okay. It's better as a play. I didn't find any

of his comedy that we had to read interesting. I didn't like A Midsummer Night's Dream. I just didn't like it. Then we moved on to the stuff which I find to be the most distasteful of all literature which is like what do i call i don't know if it's early modern english early modern english lit i

mean that's like like no i don't it's gonna sound bad i say it but i specifically despise all of the writing that sounds anything like the kind of books the Bronte sisters were writing. I found them all. I found them all obsessively boring, like to like to the point of tears. I found them boring. I hated Pride and Prejudice. Thankfully, I didn't really have to read that one because my sister and my mom both liked it. And I'd seen every movie adaptation that had ever been made. My sister was the same way.

So I didn't even need to read Pride and Prejudice. I already knew it all because I'd seen the movie so many times in my family. But then we did like Wuthering Heights, which was awful. We did Tessa de Uberville's, which was absolutely awful. Like even the story of Tessa ubervilles was terrible it's like a woman who wants to marry a guy but then doesn't and then a guy rapes her and she runs away and then she eventually ends up getting back with him anyway and then they kill someone it's stupid i hate it i don't even remember what we read at the end of that year like what like what near the end of the year was so like i don't even remember what we read at the end of that year. Like what, like what near the end of the year was. So like, I don't even remember what I was doing at the end

of my senior year, like of my English class. I just remember, I just hated it. I didn't like all of it. And I had become that annoying guy who, when they're like, you know, what is the, what is, you know, this thing happened in the scene well what does that action represent and i had become that like well represents that the author wanted that to happen man who gives a shit like well what does it mean that the dress is red well he likes red dresses fuck off like i had become that guy like in retrospect fucking annoying if i met 18 year old me i'd slap the shit out of him he sucked like straight 18 year old me, I'd slap the shit out of him. He sucked.

Like straight 18 year old me was a terrible person. I think we would mostly as a collective go back in time and slap our 18 year old selves. Yeah, that's that's fair. But like, yeah, I would slap my 18 year old self and tell him to get the hell out of bed and go to that final instead of skipping it. And so like after that, like getting out of high school and dealing with that sort of shit like i don't think i read a single book in college not even my textbooks by and large like yeah i skipped most of those readings too like uh i mean i was one of those kids that like i don't know high school was pretty easy i didn't have to try that hard and i got that's why i never learned to like study or anything i got to college and was like oh damn this shit fucking sucks I have to try and then so I just

didn't bother to do so uh and it got bad grades for it but so like I didn't read anything for fun or education the entire time I was in college so it just like just never occurred to me I didn't do anything like it it wasn't until probably like three or four years ago or so that like I started reading books again because my job, I changed jobs and I got a job where I could read audio, listen to audio books at work. And so I was like, oh, I'm going to start doing a lot of books again. And along with that, I was like, these are interesting. I either want to talk about them or listen to other people talk about them. And so that's when I like, I found a podcast about Lord of the Rings where they go through,

they're going through, you know, like paragraphs at a time discussing ad nauseum, all of like the details and all the words and all the symbols and all that sort of stuff. And I was like, damn, this is cool. Look at all this themes in all these books. And that made my brain start whirring. And I started thinking back to all the books I'd read and being like, damn,

that shit was full of ideas, huh? Like these authors had things to say. Yeah. You know, Tolkien was talking about more than just elves and dwarves. Yeah. Like,

obviously it's like, so yeah again it seems like a pretty basic observation to make for like an adult man but i was like holy shit all this stuff i've liked my whole life has a lot going on in it i think that also partly came out of um for the further developing my political theories like political thoughts mine is very similar like developing and practicing analyzing the world around me through a political lens sort of led me

to then turn that lens on other things like the books I was reading and being like holy shit this shit's everywhere yeah ideology is everywhere and being like, holy shit, this shit's everywhere. Yeah. As, you know, ideology is everywhere. Which, again, pretty basic observation,

but it was established I'm pretty dumb. So it took a while. And so, like, that sort of awakened in me the desire to be like, I need to go back and analyze all the stuff I didn't sort of like deprogramming yourself from government propaganda in a way. Like you need to go, you need to go like go back and reevaluate your social stuff. You're going back to reevaluate all the things you thought you knew and discovering what was hidden in there that you were being taught that you didn't know you were being taught gender roles, societal roles, propaganda that sort of thing suddenly my brain just started like applying that stuff to books i'd read right that sort of analytical lens and i was like oh

this is cool i actually like this it's a lot of shit to do there's a lot to look at yeah and then you know being the insufferable nerd i am uh i had to fulfill um the white man's burden of having a podcast so i it's like i need to find someone to like talk with me about all these themes that i'm discovering for the first time like a newborn babe. And your boy posted incessantly about Ursula K. Le Guin on his Twitter. I decided to pick you because you and I were ending up in a lot of the same threads

on Twitter and then you started the Le Guin quote account and I was like I bet this person has a lot to say about themes. That Le Guin quote account of which I haven't posted a quote on for about a month and i need to post again but it was just like because i was looking for someone who was doing something similar and then you were posting something similar i just like slid into your

dms on twitter and i'm like hey you want to have a podcast you slid right up in my dms i was like hey you want to do a literature podcast talk about books let's talk about books and stuff well i mean i'll be honest at the same time like it's it's bizarre to me how much the analytical lens of looking at like you were saying like looking at literature and stuff like that actually changed the way i looked at everything but it's funny that you mentioned you had a job that gave you the ability to listen to audiobooks again because that's kind of the whole reason that you know i'm of the specific political persuasion that i am now is the same general situation. Well, because someone ran up to you and he screamed Google Murray Bookchin at you enough times.

Oh yeah. But I, back in, this was like during COVID, I lost my first, I lost my job. I started reading a lot more because I had time. I thought you were about to say you lost your virginity. And I was going to be like, how does that have to do with anarchism just the way you phrased it i was like oh okay um couldn't be in it couldn't be an ml anymore because he started getting bitches all right um but then um you know

no it's a good thing i did uh i did lose it before i started reading so much theory because uh now i couldn't possibly um too much of a nerd now yep um as though i wasn't a giant nerd before um which but like um i i worked at a supermarket and was a good enough worker that I could just pop an earphone in and the bosses wouldn't say anything about it. So like on top of the fact that I had been reading so much, I was like, oh, I'm going to start listening to the audiobooks. And I got interested in anarchism because of Le Guin. You know, it was like, oh, I listened to this stuff and then listened to The Dispossessed because I wanted to listen to Le Guin and was like, holy shit. And then I went out of my way to listen to audiobooks of Kropotkin, of Goldman, specifically with the big ones, Malatesta, a lot of Malatesta.

And it was Mutual Aid, really, the book, Mutual Aid, that shuttered some foundations. Like, I know the moment really when it happened and of course it was around the 2019 2020 uh it was the 2020 election um you know perfect time for a lot of people to get radicalized um really and you know it was just turning that analytical eye that i had been developing towards literature, towards film, towards music even, which was something I was always obsessively analytical about. Yeah, I mean I wouldn't have the politics I do today if it weren't for music. I didn't notice how much music – like when you think about certain mediums certain mediums are dominated by in in essence are often dominated by like specific political persuasions in my experience

and music is a very like 80 at least center left like leaning space depends on the genre it does but like for the most part it's like how many bands you don't realize have at least anti-capitalist themes in their music i mean chumbawamba baby everyone was like man tub thumping's a cool song and you listen to the rest of the album and they're like what if we ended capitalism right now with violence? And you're like, Hmm. Well, God damn. But even stuff like I listened to a bunch of like fucking like prog rock and shit from like the seventies and like finally was getting into like

post-punk and shit from like the late 70s and the early 80s and and that sort of stuff definitely colored my perception people like like like gang of fours entertainment it's a very anti-capitalist record which i won't say anything but the band is certainly sold out um as time went on um their Their last couple records were... Capital collapse everything. But in the end, it's like all of that kind of got turned inward towards just how I saw everything.

And then stuff like Mutual Aid specifically really cracked the egg on that one. And then hopped online, tried to get in contact with people that were similar and posted a lot about laguin and that kind of landed me here because i'm insufferable and i'm like i need someone to talk to about all these things i think because i can only talk to you know my you know close friends and romantic partners so much before they're like shut the fuck up yeah it's like it's like there's only so many people i can actually talk to about this it's like

some of the few of my old friends group i mean sacrilege sacrilege i guess would you people would be like they they certainly are not like radical to the same extent i am so it's like who am i going to talk to about this sort of stuff without immediately tipping off to just how left-leaning I am? Even if, you know, we just necessarily dislike or like or dislike the terms left or right in terms of classic spectrum, I'm like, you know, we're flat on our face on that side of the spectrum. So it's like face um on that side of the spectrum so it's like trying to talk about this sort of thing without being like oh you notice this message about alienation and capitalism and blah blah blah without someone being like um that sounds a little communist to me and i'd be like um so and then you have to go in and explain to someone who thinks communism is when the

government does stuff that there's actually distinctions in multiple different forms of this in multiple different areas and it's a broad category of things that mean different things different people um it's like so yes not everyone who aims for a stateless, classless, moneyless society is trying to be the next Stalin. So it's like trying to have to go through that conversation with someone is a pain in the ass. So I just try not to do it. even though I know that these are people that, that I've spent enough time with to know that they wouldn't be like alienated from me really in any way. Like these are people who put their friends before,

you know, but I'm like, I'm glad we can do this just because it, it makes it so much easier to talk to someone of the same political persuasion. I solved that by only having like two friends well i mean most of these people were friends i made in college and still still somehow clung to being friends with despite all of us moving to completely different places

i've got like three friends and i'm like and i'm like yeah this is well yeah i i recently well i'm old i'm old i'm old now so like having more than that seems like work well I recently moved so I know essentially no one in town just because I I'm not from here I don't know anybody so it's mostly keep in contact with your old friends or be lost and alone that's fair but yeah it's like I I went from being like a retail manager, which was a job so stressful, it like made me want to, you know, commit die myself. Like not that's not even really a joke. I hated it so much. And it made me a bad person. Like it made me an angry, bad person. And so I eventually quit. I put into, well, I tried to quit and put in a two week notice. And then my boss instead was like, Hey, we have a different job opening. You want to do this instead. And now I basically spend my day like using a pressure washer most of the time or like banging wrenches together to like fix stuff. And so I'm alone all day. And so I just

like, it started off when i first took the job i was like oh shit i gotta listen to a lot of music now and i was doing it i'm like oh that's when i learned that podcasts were a thing yeah it was it was 20 what almost four what's basically four years ago from now what year would that be 2017 yeah it was like 2017 when i learned what podcasts were and like i was like oh this is pretty neat this is pretty handy for my work day and so i just started like googling podcast about insert topic that i wanted to that i wanted to listen to people talk about and so i ended up i ended up with like politics podcasts sports podcasts and like dnd and lord

of the rings podcasts like that's where i ended up and if i had a job like that i'd actually be caught up on critical role oh god i mean that's how i got through like all of like their first campaign is listening to the podcast i just gave up on campaign two because i was three quarters of the way through and was like i'm just gonna start with campaign three and be caught and campaign three just started so i am caught up now so like i was listening to a pile of podcasts and again that's i listened to a tolkien one and that really got me into like the headspace of really analyzing media. And then I got started doing audio books because I essentially ran out of podcasts that I could

listen to in a week. And I was like, I have more dead air I need to fill. So I don't have to listen to my own thoughts for more than like five minutes. So I need to fill it with a narrator reading books to me because like we've established i can't read so i need someone to read it to me and so i was like what are all these that's when i just started like asking my friends or like googling lists of you know best fantasy books best sci-fi books and just like adding them to lists and going through them one at a time. Like, that's why I like, I, I had, I didn't read, I read Dune for the first time in like 2019.

Cause I just, I didn't know. I'd never even heard of it. Like I'd never, I'd never even heard of the first movie that got made. Oh yeah. That one's, that one's a cult. Yeah. But like you'd, at least you'd have heard of it, but like I've watched so many movies, I thought I would have heard of it. I may have heard the name in passing, but it meant nothing to me. Just completely missed me. And then everyone was like, oh, I'm looking at all these lists,

and all these lists had Dune on it. And I'm like, I guess I should give that a go. And I made it two chapters in, and it was like, this is one of the best things I've ever read in my entire life. And again, I was just like, I need to talk to people about stuff. And I actually the first person I reached out to was our guest from the first two episodes was Nicole, a friend, Nicole. I was talking to her about like the Redwall books and stuff and I was like would you talk to me on a podcast about Redwall and she's like sure I was like cool I need to have

a podcast for that to happen on yeah I just I want to talk about it but like I don't have a thing and she's like well I'll be a guest but she didn't want to like be a permanent like host or anything and like she made that clear off the bat and i'm like well i need i can't just like talk about these in a vacuum yeah just talk about it straight to a wall yeah i mean that just like eliminates the whole purpose yeah you'd have to for that sort of thing you might as well write a script and then do like a youtube video essay i'm not mike duncan like i can't i'm not writing writing scripts and reading them. That's not my thing. And so that's when I found you

on Twitter. You would have to do Matt Colville's Dune videos. Oh, they're so good. But Colville also, you don't know this, he dry runs a lot of his videos on Twitch with a live audience. Especially his running the game videos for D&D.

He'll read the like the mostly finished script live on his streams and then what he does is he like he'll work through some of his thought process while he's reading it and then he says he goes back and watches the vod afterwards and reads the comments and then will like improve his script based on the twitch comments that he got while he was reading it. He's such a Chad. I'm sorry. He's so good.

And his hair is fantastic. It is. It's absolutely. Yeah. There were people who were really confused about it when he came back from like hiatus with this. It's just like a full mane of hair. And I was like, dude, that's like awesome.

And he's like, I don't care. It's staying. And you're like i don't care it's staying you're like yeah again chad move yes um and for people who have you know read certain books like june you may know that like colville one of colville's quotes about himself is you need to be a river under your people which you know you know where his his fantasy background lies yeah yeah so like for me it's been interesting i i went from being sort of like a jock that was like please never make me learn about a theme ever like i'm gonna go do sports now quit talking to me about themes and now i'm like sitting in a hot room and like on a Saturday night being like,

we have more themes, please. Or more. I need more themes. We're going to get it. Oh, God. That's going to be. I mean, should we spoil it? Should we spoil the next episode? I mean, we're probably getting close to. I mean, I think we

can spoil it so people can be prepared. I think. Yeah. So our next episode, probably next couple episodes, maybe, are going to be about Dune, obviously. Because we have our finger on the pulse of hot culture.

I mean, I guess if we really had our finger on the pulse of hot culture, it would have been like four weeks ago. We would have had it come out when the movie debuted. But, you know, I mean come on but like obviously we're not unlike our other series we're not going to cover all of dune in like two episodes because they just can't no it's not a thing i have the capacity to do you could do a two-hour show on the first chapter yeah so what we're going to do with dune is kind of what I have planned for when we eventually start talking about like Lord of the Rings stuff is we're just going to sort of take pieces. Like we're going to talk about a specific theme, like we're going to have an episode about this theme or an episode about that theme or like, all right, today we're going to do an episode, but it's only going to be about the Bene Gesserit.

And what they mean and what their philosophy is and like where they come from like we're going to do a do you know or like we're going to do an episode on lord of the rings but it's simple it's only going to be on hope like what hope means what it is where it comes from the different kinds we could talk about Tolkien's greatest Valar. What's her name? Who cries. That's her whole shtick. Nienna. Absolutely the best.

The Valar of empathy and compassion. Like the absolute best thing he came up with ever. Actually, I mean, yeah. Objectively, yes. Personally, the best Valar tolkis whose whole thing is being big and strong and basically body slammed more goth into subservience and then tolkis also canonically the only valor that got married and then had so much fun and excitement on his wedding night that he had to sleep away the exhaustion at his wedding night so tolkis canonically the only valor that fucks so yeah for big books like those we're gonna sort of like do piece

meal episodes about different themes like we're not gonna have a run of like six dune episodes in a row because that would just be a little excessive we'll do a couple and then we'll do a different book and then you know a couple months later we'll probably come back and do another one because it's impossible for me to not talk about them and like you know it's just a lot there's a lot going on Lord of the Rings

Dune are the big ones yeah they're like for any of these really massive series we're gonna like you know not just do an overview we're gonna you know sort of break down specific bits there probably should come a time when you know i don't know this there's a lot of books we could do this with but i think lord of the rings and dune are probably the biggest ones the only other one i could think of happening is if is if we did like an overview of lion the witch in the wardrobe at the very like we did like all of them and then the very end

The Chronicles of Narnia Yeah, I mean, because actually we'll have to think about that because I don't each book of The Chronicles of Narnia might not quite be enough for its own episode I mean, most of them probably would be We probably, I mean, we could make it one for how much we talk

but like, no matter what we talk about the last battle is going to be its own thing because that's just a whole can i gotta tell you when i read i read those as a kid um but i'm all my mom had like an ancient edition of them like an old box set that i think might've been printed in the sixties. Like, yeah, my dad had the, the version of Lord of the Rings that I've read was a box set from like 1969, 1970, which is real fun.

Cause if you read those Lord of the Rings, there's probably some differences from the version you would read now. Cause Tolkien like edited it a couple of times. But like, so I had this, these ancient, they were beautiful. from the version you would read now because tolkien like edited it a couple times um but like so i had this a these ancient they were beautiful like the art and it was good but they were ancient copies of chronicles in arnia i loved them all the last battle confused me to some degree as a kid i found it confusing because i didn't know enough to really understand like the theology behind what was going on. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Like I am really curious to read it again because the last time I read it, I was like 14, 13. Yeah. Yeah. Like I remember generally what's going on, but like there's some complicated sort of or maybe not complicated, intense theology going on. Yeah. In that last one.

Makes me wonder if he was a, just nevermind. We'll talk about that when we talk about that. Well, I mean, there's literally like an antichrist figure. There's essentially the revelation happens. There's people that don't believe and get left behind when everyone's going on to paradise. Is C.S. Lewis a dispensationalist? Good question.

Like offhand, offhand there's like an antichrist figure that all the people are following. That's not the truth. And then there's essentially a cataclysmic world ending event. They have to go through a door into the next world and then everyone kind of makes it through. But then some people and then everyone kind of makes it through, but then some people don't believe they've made it through and like only in their minds,

see the old world and don't open their eyes to the new world that's around them. And so they never move on any further. And then they eventually go further up and further in through levels until you reach Eden in the middle. And like, it's that's just my rough remembrance. And Susan gets left behind because Susan, I guess. Well, it's cause she, she gave up believing in fairy stories. But there's not really a, but there's, yeah, we'll get to that.

There's not really much precedent for that one for her. Just suddenly not. Yeah. Well, again, as, as, as Tolkien said, I'll leave the proselytizing to C.S. Lewis. Yeah, I also I own C.S. Lewis's On Christianity and A Grief Observed. So that might help. Yeah, you'll have those. on fairy stories and mythopoeia which are his essays about why fantasy is important for adults

and like what fantasy means to culture good stuff like the whole things about like what fantasy stories mean for a culture and like why it's important to have them and that sort of thing on a personal note i personally just got my own copy of the dawn of everything so that's probably what i'm going to be reading i'm going to be reading dune feverishly as i hope and pray i can make it to the end by this weekend um uh yeah because yeah we'll be recording that one next weekend, I believe. Ideally. I can check right now. I am currently have about 10 hours of audiobook

left. Like 12 down, 10 to go. But then again, I can listen for like 6 hours a day at work. Yeah, I think I might have mentioned this before at some point, but my library has, because of the stupid copyright nonsense bullshit laws that companies impose on libraries, there's only a certain number of digital copies of the audiobook that they can loan out. And that's why I definitely never encourage anyone to procure audiobooks in other ways.

I definitely wouldn't do that and i definitely don't encourage anyone to get a good vpn but i've got i will say these are two totally unrelated things people this is the second time i've listened to the dune audio book the first time i got the copy from like my local my library like audio version this one i listened to now it's audiobook, the first time I got the copy from my library audio version. This one I've listened to now is a different narrator. It's an American narrator as opposed to an English one, I think. That's what you were posting about on Twitter

the other day. Yeah, the first time I listened to Dune, it was always pronounced June. Oh yeah, and now it's Dune. It was like June, Arrakrakis desert planet june and now it's like welcome to dune i'm like ah an american well i mean i'm sorry that's i think maybe one of the last points for this episode we can make is how many audiobook narrators are english so many why

do they always pick english people as narrators for audiobooks? Is it because they think their accent makes them more serious and fancy? Because so many audiobook narrators are English. That when I finally got an American one, I was like, whoa, this is weird. People are pronouncing words properly. They're a little bit disconnected, but absolutely in the same vein. a little bit disconnected but absolutely um in the same vein um i listened to the audiobook back when i was still working at um the supermarket i was i listened to the audiobook of mark bray's antifa the anti-fascist handbook um good book by the ways anyone was it's not really if you're already you know consider yourself pretty

deeply anti-fascist um it's interesting but not necessarily critical this would be more for like a lib who's like and chief is not some easy organization but it's it's it's it's a good book for that but um but it was read by keith sarabica who voices freaking you you haven't played fall in new vegas who voices joshua who voices joshua motherfucking graham in in and and his voice is just it's something else. I just, if you ever get the chance to just look up just Joshua Graham quotes or something on YouTube, Joshua Graham is a character who quotes, like, lines from the Bible. Oh, he's Gurney Halleck. He's Gurney Halleck.

Well, he's a bit of a complex character, so I'm not really going to go too far into it. He's like a post-apocalyptic Mormon. To be fair, all of our listeners who are trans will know exactly what you're talking about because you're talking about Fallout New Vegas. Yeah. But yeah, so that legitimately shocked me

when I heard the deep, gutt smooth voice of joshua graham explaining to me how you know anti-fascists helped stop the rise of the alt-right in uh greece for example yeah yeah meanwhile like all the audiobooks i'm getting or someone who's like it's like some posh guy being like no i bring you to the world of june we're going to look into the spice worlds and it's like why i why am i listening to some some posh oh the only ones that i've listened to that have had like crazy people i've recognized there was that one from kisarabika and And then I listened to Malcolm X's autobiography with Lawrence Fishburne. Oh, well, okay.

Which is pretty legit. But that's because for a hot minute there, I was using Audible like an idiot. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, the one audio book that's an outlier for me was listening to the Redwall books. Which the Redwall books were like full audio productions with like casts of characters. Like every character had a different voice actor. Well, generally, there were like a audio productions with like casts of characters where like every character had a different voice actor well generally there were like a few different voice actors but the narration was done by the author by brian jakes so the narration was done in like this massive

scouse accent and so like it took me like a few chapters of the first book to even be able to understand him half the time because again you know all respect to my my liverpool friends your accent is something and so it took some getting used to for me you can always tell you can always point him out of the crowd yeah it took some getting used to for me when i was listening to those audiobooks but like i don't i just i don't know there's a i i think it might be a hangover of the American obsession that thinks that like, you know, your sort of standard posh British accent sort of conveys elegance or something, or class. So I think a lot of narration is done by them with a very soft English accent, because it sort of carries that like, you know, that air until you learn anything about England. And then you're like, Oh,

that doesn't work at all. It doesn't compute at all. But I'm just imagining the dune guy, like eloquently saying Duncan, Idaho. It's like this book was meant to be read with an American accent. Don't even try. That's right.

It was. I look. All right. I'll probably get into a tangent. I'm'm just gonna say everyone who's out there dunking pun not intended dunking on the name dunk in idaho can go because if you're going to talk about it in universe it's a future universe which is populated by people from all different cultures in the modern world. So you've got people with names that are based off like Arabic or based off of Greek or whatever, but yeah, you're also going to have people whose names came from like American English.

So you're going to have a guy named Paul and a lady named Jessica while sitting in the same house with a guy named Thufir Hawat like because they come from wildly different cultures that's no different than if I went to the other side if I went to like Egypt right now like I'd be sitting with people whose names are nothing like mine but we could be in the same room together yeah so like the the fact that in the future there's a guy named Duncan I think I think the issue is mostly weird i think it's mostly with the name idaho attached to that yeah but at the same time they can all go shove it they're not the ones writing a giant you know you didn't write you didn't write a giant

you know space epic with worms in it yeah or as i like to call it you know the the prequel the tremors um dude otherwise known as tremors without kevin bacon turns out arrakis is just earth yeah arrakis planet of the apes bullshit arrakis is just like new mexico or wherever the hell tremors was supposed to take place. No, I mean, so it's, we figured we'd just hang out a little bit, talk about it. We, uh, we'll do these bonus episodes. Um, you know, occasionally, mostly for now, they're just going to be filler when we need time to finish up like the book we're working on, you know, when it's something big or complicated or,

you know, life gets in the way. Cause we still want to try to do an episode every week when possible so you know sometimes we're going to fill in the gap with episodes where we just you know talk about some shit yeah this would be a good way for you guys to get to know us a little bit um we're probably going to do some episodes about other things we like like you know video games or movies other things that we can pull themes out of things that we might not necessarily need to do a lot of homework, other things that we can pull themes out of. Things that we might not necessarily need to do a lot of homework on. Yeah, things that I don't need to do a bunch of homework on, the themes from like some video games or whatever.

But like, it'd be fun to talk about. Yeah, I mean, we could probably sit here for a couple hours and talk about KOTOR 2 at some point. You know, it's like stuff like that. Pretty much any Obsidian game could give you a lengthy treatise. Again, that's like the handshake meme for us is Obsidian. Because for me, it was like, you know, KOTOR 2, but like I never played New Vegas. It hurts me every time it comes out of your mouth.

I call this every time by saying I've never played New Vegas and I've never played a Zelda game. See, that's literally like two halves of my entire personality. It's like my entire like when i admit that the only fallout game i've ever played was fallout 3 it's like my entire experience of fallout is just fallout 3 were you did you see my minor like there was the guy who was like oh josh sawyer from the lead designer for fall of new vegas was um on a pro-communist podcast uh have you listened if you have you did you play new vegas my man and then he had like follow like like uh liberty prime standing there and i'm like do you take liberty prime seriously? You realize Liberty Prime is satire,

right? It's so over the top that you're... It's supposed to be insane. It's a giant robot that's like better dead than red while it's like shooting laser beams. It's supposed to be kind of a symbol of

the wastefulness of the military industrial complex yeah because i actually got deployed yeah and also the brotherhood of steel could be doing so much stuff and instead they're just getting liberty prime running again so they can to be fair they don't exist to be fair they are booting up liberty prime to fight fascists in that game in fallout 3 yeah um in fallout 4 it's a bunch of fascists booting up liberty prime to try it which makes more sense for what the brotherhood actually is supposed to be does make a lot more sense but yeah i own that i only ever my old fallout game was fallout 3 uh where you have to you know go start a reactor

that you don't need to start. You could send in a ghoul who's allergic, who's immune to radiation, except he just looks at you and goes, no, I don't want to. So you have to do it yourself. So you die for plot reasons. Whatever.

It's fine. Yeah. Listen, Bethesda is never going to be able to pull off Fallout very well. Like, they're never going to be able to. Hey, speaking very well like they're never going to be able to uh hey speaking of bethesda judo they just released another skyrim i know am i gonna buy it maybe i know that's the problem am i am i todd howard's little bitch maybe i think i think todd howard has such a bizarre are we all little pain pigs for todd howard we might be todd howard is such a bizarre case to me because it's like how many and i think it's almost almost bites more when

you realize like what's happened to him because this dude is 50 of morrowind it's like this this wasn't this wasn't some guy who is just a face for a company that knows. He wasn't just like, it wasn't just like a corporate head. Yeah. No, this guy is, he knows the lore of this setting incredibly well because he wrote half of it. It's like, um, it's, I mean, who knows who wrote the Lusty Argonian Maid? Maybe him. But like, like on Morrowind, it was between him and Michael Kirkbride.

And of course, Michael Kirkbride did it all on like some Coke vendor over a weekend because he's a lunatic. Wasn't he the guy that like locked himself into his house and did a bunch of drugs and then wrote it all? Yes, absolutely. And it did come out with some of the most. And that's how they like they had to go find him at home. It's like drug got like high out of his mind um what's what's really funny about it is that when you read the stuff that he wrote to me it reads like the most real world um the the spiritual stuff that he wrote while in that

feels like the most real like something that someone in the real world would have written um in a spirit like like the stories he wrote about vivek and mulatra's spear and all this other stuff and you're like this reads like an actual piece of greek mythology yeah it's because everyone in the past was high also so it's like it's it's like well but but todd is such a bizarre thing because he's like he's both you you can sense a small iota of like himself dying inside as he does this stuff as he keeps releasing new as he keeps releasing new editions of skyrim because the guy like elder scrolls is half him um and and it's just like, oh Jesus ever since Morrowind it's been him again, am I going to buy it? maybe

well not right now well I get it for free so not right now because I just I just spent like $50 on the new version of Football Manager because I want to do a management sim for a while.

And I'm saving up a little bit of money so I can buy Strixhaven, A Curriculum of Chaos when that comes out. You know, over the last two weeks, I bought FM22, and I also spent the $50 on the 50-pack pre-release of the latest, uh, magic expansion for arena.

We both just give Watsi money. Apparently. Do Watsi has, there is literally sitting next to me. Let's see. A stack of, of nothing to Watsi. One,

two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 10 times 50. Is that 500? Yeah. 10 times. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. 10 times 50. Is that 500? Yeah. 10 times 50 is 500. I have within arm's reach of me $500 worth of Watsi D&D books. Like within arm's reach of me. Yeah.

D&D is such an expensive hobby if you actually i mean to be fair i've had some of it like compensated like a couple of my friends would chip in and like pay me back for part of some of the books because like i would buy them because they needed them for their character builds that we're doing but like i still have them and they're still you know like wizards of the cost um maybe that's a bonus episode we should do which is about like the hidden themes of like dungeons and dragons because then we can get the whole conversation about how they've recently been revamping our race in dnd yeah just lineages in general lineages and race to make it less problematic because people were like hey maybe it's weird that your source books are like

this is this race they're inherently sneaky yeah there's there's like an i mean i mean it's weird that your source books are like, this is this race. They're inherently sneaky. Yeah. There's, there's like an, I mean, it started big with the module I'm taking players through right now, which is the curse of Strahd. Because one of the groups of people in curse of Strahd that you interact with are a lot or a group called the Vistani who are pretty clearly like Roma stand-in that's always the easy one for people to fall in I think and a lot of the

stereotypes about the Vistani in like the first printing of Curse of Strahd could be a bit problematic for the way the Vistani are treated like entertain are like, are like entertained as like they're traveling circus people who are tricksters and will rob you with the slightest provocation. And like the way they're described, like it's pretty clearly just like a Roma stand in and it can be kind of racist.

So like they've gone back and revamped that and that led them to like then revamping race as a construct in dnd with like racial stat bonuses and stuff to like change it all up to make it less sort of like race essentialist well like if you're if you're an orc you're strong if you're an elf you're wise or shit like that they did i mean they did smart stuff i think with it but i think they're doing... I give them credit for, like, they're doing better. Yeah. Like, for uncertain things. It's just something they've never really had to analyze before

because of who the audience mostly was. The audience was mostly white male nerds. Yeah, I mean, if anyone was actually interested in, like, from a DM perspective especially, this sort of thing, the one Matt Colville video about the sociology of dnd is a fantastic video it's really good um where he just that's gonna be the lesson of this episode is all of you should go watch a matt colvo video yeah that's that's you know that's even if you're not a huge dnd person like a lot of the points he brings up in a lot of the videos cover a lot of other stuff. Like,

even if you're just into like story writing, like a lot of his running the game videos, when he's talking about how to do, how to handle politics, his politics videos are excellent. Yes. He's got a series of videos about politics in game, which you could also use if you're just like doing creative writing

yourself. And don't worry. It's not like about like political views or anything it's about how like power politics works yeah it's like how to handle explaining politics in a created setting like how to make them real and but and like impactful and intriguing to players or if you're writing a story readers they're really quite good but good. But no, I think D&D is one of those things where there'd be quite a bit to look at there with how they've handled that sort of thing

and how they're handling it now to try and make it better. I don't think there's much else. Like I said, everyone should be prepared for some, I'd say at least two, maybe three. We'll have to talk about it. Dune episodes coming up about some various topics. Probably have a guest or two. I think we, depending on

schedule, we might have the returning champion, Nicole, back for at least one episode, maybe another friend or two. If any of you have suggestions for bonus topics you want us to talk about for these kinds of episodes

or even book suggestions. There's no guaranteeing we'll do them all, but book suggestions are also cool. We've had a few suggested that I never thought of like the Witcher series. That will be really interesting. We'll probably be covering. So a friend of mine wants to come on and like talk about them. Speaking of race essentialism. Okay. We know we can see. Yeah. Whoa, buddy.

Yeah. No, I want to, again again thank you all for like you know finding our podcast hanging out with us hopefully you know us a little bit better feel free to contact us at any point on twitter the podcast twitter is swords and sock pod. So it's like swords, the capital letter N and sock. Hold on. I should honestly probably change that. In sock pod. I think it's swords and socialism.

I think the Twitter handle, I think it's just sock. Yeah. The Twitter handle sock. It's swords, swords in sock pod on Twitter. The email is swords and socialism pod at protonmail.com uh you please give us feedback if you know there's i mean if your feedback is just to tell me i suck i mean you can tell me if you want but i prefer you didn't but like suggestions or

critiques are cool we're both pretty new at this. Otherwise, you know, other questions I'll happily answer any questions you guys have. Yeah, you can find me on Twitter at himbo underscore anarchist. And you can find me on Twitter at stupidpuma69 because I'm a child. I mean, we're all on Twitter.

And one day, again, like I think I said this last week, but one day someone will... It's an in-joke for somebody. No, what it's a reference to, it's really not that obscure. But. I mean, I don't know what it is. It's obscure enough. I don't know what it is.

And I'm not going to look into it because that would ruin the surprise for me when someone else like sends, like DMs the pod to tell us what it, tell me what it's about. Yeah, everyone. Thanks for hanging out. We appreciate it. Yeah, get ready for Dune. Then after that, who knows?

Who knows, but we'll work on it. Yeah. Okay, yeah. If you like us, do the podcast stuff. Go to iTunes and give us all the stars. Likes, reviews, whatever. Yeah, I guess that's important for algorithms because algorithms run our lives. Uh,

yeah. Thanks a bunch. The internet. Yeah. Uh, thanks a bunch. I'll talk to you next time. Adios.