June 2, 2022

A New Episode, a New Milestone, and New Survey, and a New Interview.

First Things First, a New Milestone:

The show, she is exploding.

The exponential growth of the show ever since the beginning of the year has been pretty incredible. It took us a year to get 50k, 4 months to get 100k, and four more months to get 300k. Even as I type this, we’re already half-way to 400k. We are very grateful you’ve all found the show and we can’t wait for more people to discover it like you have.

Next Up, I was on The Beeb:

I was thrilled to be interviewed on Podcast Radio Hour on the BBC, of course I thought of much better answers to the questions right after the interview was over, but oh well.

Who Are You?

If you have a stray moment, would you mind filling out this survey? Podcast audiences can be swathed in mystery and we’d love to get a sense of who you all are. If you make it to the end (it’s very short) there’s all kinds of digital goodies from all the Fable & Folly shows for you to download.

Thanks!

Fan Art Round Up!

And then there was THIS humdinger:

TRULY amazing stuff. Several versions of this one are available for a donation, if you feel so inclined:

The Old Man and the Empire

So, a few weeks ago there was a brief skirmish on the internet and it somehow revolved around Snickers.

It was alleged that Snickers was removing the chocolate “veins” from their bars because they looked too much like a “sex thing”. The news was picked up by a long string of internet man-boys who feel that their masculinity is constantly under attack to the point where it was covered by avid testicle tanner Tucker Carlson.

All of it was 100% hilarious and, as it turns out, 100% fake.

A little internet trickster by the name of Juniper had made up the whole thing and it had gone viral in all of the fun ways. It poked fun at dudes freaking out about a ginned-up masculinity crisis AND poked fun at journalists who never fact check anything ever.

When I see “take that!” moments like this, that poke fun and feel like a victory without actually being one, I can’t help but think of our boy, Even Older Leif.

In Chapter 17 we got to see Even Older Leif, the oldest thorn in the side of Ted Empire, finally get a chance to give it a big old black eye and it was truly satisfying. Because The Teds are the worst. But the tragedy of all versions of Lief, is that they are a rebel with satisfying victories that effect no change. The Ted Empire continues to grind on despite the humiliations and property destruction. In the end, Leif can blow up all the buildings he wants but without the deep systemic change that Leif is always allergic to, blowing up buildings doesn’t do much more than a strongly worded op-ed in the paper of record.

We’ve learned a lot about Leif this season. He’s not just a brilliant engineer who took to the stars, he’s a criminal, a mischief maker, and a wanted man. He tried to climb aboard the diner and leave all that behind, but as we’re seeing this season, it’s all coming back to haunt him. In Chapter 17 we also met BertBert, the woman in Leif’s life for whom things are all-caps COMPLICATED. There’s a lot to be found out about what exactly went down between Leif and BertBert (and I’m looking forward to it), but what we know for sure is that BertBert thinks Leif had the potential to be a good person who did great things and instead he did… well you see what he did.

As I mentioned last time, I inexplicably made every show title a song title this season, so to play us out here are the finely dressed young men of The Jam…

We’ll be out there, somewhere, lookin’ for ‘ya.

-Joe


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