What’s Poppin’ Thegronis?!
We hope you enjoyed our latest episode, "Chapter 26: Brunch." It was (once again!) our biggest first-day downloads in our whole damn history. So, for those of you who posted “So great that I listened to it again!”, you did it! It was so great for us to delve back into the deep freeze and reconnect with Gloria's wolves. We miss them so much all the time.
In this episode, we took our time exploring the concept of brunch. I wanted to dip our toe in the brunch world because Brunch is terrible, and it is also wonderful. As a former bartender who has worked many a Brunch shift, it’s terrible. As a fan of breakfast who loves to see breakfast, in all it’s glory, splayed out across several steamer trays, it’s wonderful. Anthony Bourdain once said Brunch was a "horrible, cynical way of unloading leftovers and charging three times as much as you ordinarily charge for breakfast”, and that hollandaise was “a veritable petri-dish of biohazards”. But what I think Anthony didn’t realize is that we all know this about Brunch, we all accept this about Brunch. In America we Brunch fervently, we Brunch hard, we embrace Brunch despite it’s many flaws, as we do with most things. But it cannot be denied that there are two separate groups of feelings about Brunch divided between those who have to work Brunch and those who like to “werk” Brunch.
But this episode was not just about the trauma of having to clean out the steamer trays at the end of the shift, it was also about good old fashioned have-you-read-my-memoir-trauma. But this time, in contrast to season 2 where we had several revelations of characters living in their trauma, we attempted to do something else. It was time to move past it. A while back I read Parul Sehgal's New Yorker article "The Case Against the Trauma Plot." and it really stuck with me. In her essay she argues a for broader range of narratives that move beyond trauma, encouraging authors to delve into the complexities of human experiences and emotions. She advocates for a shift towards stories that embrace joy, love, and the ordinary moments of life, arguing that these aspects are equally important for understanding the human condition. This idea encouraged me to explore alternative narratives and delve deeper into the complexities of the characters. It’s important to talk about the things we’ve been through, but let’s never forget the important next step of moving past it, and experiencing joy despite it.
Fan Art Round Up
I have completely lost the ability to keep up on all the amazing fan art that’s out there on so many platforms but I’ll give it a shot anyway.
Whisperdan will not rest until he has made every character in the show hot-lava-sexy. Here’s Ava:
Despite Clementine being our villain this season, spacetravels is doing their best to find her humanity:
The Illustrative Interloper opens up their notebook to give us some strong Don Bluth vibes:
But let’s talk about Danny. He is obsessed with Leif. Just can’t get enough of him. It’s all Leif all the time in his head:
That is until he draws the diner staff as ponies…
Here’s his take on Verge:
But this recasting of Blade Runner 2049 with Leif in BertBert might be my personal favorite…
Chef’s kiss.
A Show About our Show
For those of you out there wandering in the non-subscriber wilderness, you may not know about Shift Notes. It’s a show about our show! Shift Notes is available for everyone on the 5 dollar level on our Patreon and it basically consists of Finlay and Myself and the occasional guest doing a deep dive on every episode… or at least we try to. Here’s a trailer:
We have a grand old time on Shift Notes and hope you can join us if you haven’t already. As you can tell from the trailer, the true stars of the show are the tangents…Oh, so many tangents.
Up Next: Young Leif vs. The Science Priests!
On May 30th, be sure and check your feed because there’s trouble on Moog!
What kind of trouble will our young weirdo get into THIS time, I wonder?
Thank you for reading this newsletter, and thank you for listening to the show. We couldn’t do this without you.
We’ll be out there, somewhere, lookin’ for ya’.
-Joe