Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind listener mail.
Speaker 2: My name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Monday, the day each
Speaker 3: week we read back some messages from the mail bag.
Speaker 3: If you have never gotten in touch with the show
Speaker 3: before and you would like to, why not give it
Speaker 3: a try. You can email us anytime at contact at
Speaker 3: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. We get a
Speaker 3: lot of emails, so we don't get a chance to
Speaker 3: read all of it on the show here or respond
Speaker 3: to all of it, but we do read it all
Speaker 3: and we really appreciate all the messages we get, so
Speaker 3: thank you to all the people who have written in,
Speaker 3: who keep writing in, and if you've never done it before,
Speaker 3: give it a shot.
Speaker 2: All right, let's kick things off with a pretty cool
Speaker 2: monster fact listener mail that came in, and this was
Speaker 2: in response to one of the four episodes that I
Speaker 2: did on the Chaos Gods of Warhammer forty thousand. These
Speaker 2: are fictional gods, but there's a lot of neat little
Speaker 2: ins and outs to them, and this one is a
Speaker 2: response to the episode on Zinch which is the chaos
Speaker 2: god of change. Jay writes in and says, my name
Speaker 2: is Jay, and I'm a costume maker. I was just
Speaker 2: listening to your episode about the chaos demons of Zinch
Speaker 2: and thought maybe you'd appreciate a few pictures of my
Speaker 2: graduation piece from the twenty fifteen costume construction course at
Speaker 2: toy Wakari in Wellington, New Zealand. The task for this
Speaker 2: piece was to find a drawing or painting and recreate
Speaker 2: it as a wearable garment. I loved this rendering of
Speaker 2: a disciple of Zinch and Jay includes a photo and
Speaker 2: I think they incorporate a lot of the elements described
Speaker 2: in your episode. I tried finding the illustrator back when
Speaker 2: I made this piece and had a few leads and
Speaker 2: emails sent out, but didn't seem to find the right person.
Speaker 2: I would love for them to see their design come
Speaker 2: to life, so if you have some reach there, maybe
Speaker 2: they can see it. Since graduating, my job has given
Speaker 2: me the opportunity to work on great projects like the
Speaker 2: new Avatar movies and the TV productions of the Lord
Speaker 2: of the Rings and Sweet Tooth, and it has most
Speaker 2: definitely been full of change and chaos, so I feel
Speaker 2: choosing this piece was a good omen for me. Have
Speaker 2: a great day, Jay.
Speaker 3: Oh this is awesome. So Jay includes a lot of
Speaker 3: photos here of is I can't quite tell from the photos.
Speaker 3: Is this costume life size, like would fit on a person,
Speaker 3: not on a like a model or a figure.
Speaker 2: I'm assuming this is a full costume. If you'll look
Speaker 2: carefully at the picture, you can see that it's like
Speaker 2: a rolled white background. Yeah, and I only my wife
Speaker 2: is a photographer, so I see this kind of thing
Speaker 2: a lot, so maybe a little bitter identifying it, but yeah,
Speaker 2: this looks like a full, full body outfit. Just really brilliant,
Speaker 2: I mean to describe it. It's like, God, it's like
Speaker 2: what has a cowl kind of a thing going on,
Speaker 2: big shoulder extensions, there are these feather elements. It's blue
Speaker 2: and white and gold and multiple blues and purples there,
Speaker 2: with blue kind of being one of the primary colors
Speaker 2: of zench What is.
Speaker 3: It called in a garment where you take the concept
Speaker 3: of a collar, but you make it gigantic, like you
Speaker 3: turn it into basically a colosseum.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this big. You see this a lot of times,
Speaker 2: especially in fantastic art, and I guess maybe like high fashion,
Speaker 2: you know where it's beyond what is perhaps realistic for
Speaker 2: a person to wear. But if you're a supermodel or
Speaker 2: a wizard representing a chaos god's interest in the mortal
Speaker 2: realm and real space, then yeah, go for it. Go
Speaker 2: out there. It pays to be fashionable.
Speaker 3: So you're the one of us that knows about Warhammer,
Speaker 3: I know nothing about zench. Here what is the deal
Speaker 3: with these creatures? To me, this looks like a skexis,
Speaker 3: except whereas the skexes have sort of connotations of decay
Speaker 3: and slime and filth and decadence, this looks like a
Speaker 3: sort of glorious, clean, well manicured Skexis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Zinch is all about appealing to like, well, there
Speaker 2: are various interests that can lead you down the path
Speaker 2: of heresy to Zinch. But essentially, if you're the type
Speaker 2: of wizard or heretic who wants to acquire a great
Speaker 2: deal of knowledge and wisdom, and also you want to
Speaker 2: maybe you're very ambitious and you want a lot of change, well,
Speaker 2: Zinch is all about forming a pact with you and
Speaker 2: giving you just more wisdom and more change than you
Speaker 2: can possibly imagine. And some of the major avatars of
Speaker 2: Zench often have bird like features, which is interesting, like
Speaker 2: a lot of things in Warhammer and Warhammer forty thousand, Like,
Speaker 2: there are a lot of influences that clearly have gone
Speaker 2: into these designs and these factions over the years, and
Speaker 2: you can often pinpoint some of the major ones, like
Speaker 2: you wouldn't have Warhammer forty thousand without Dune, for example,
Speaker 2: And the same can be said of a lot of
Speaker 2: sci fi franchises. But it's also been its own thing
Speaker 2: long enough that it's hard to track down all of
Speaker 2: the influences, and everything kind of takes on this novel
Speaker 2: feeling of being its own thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Again, I don't know much about Warhammer, but when
Speaker 3: I look at it, it seems to me to have
Speaker 3: absorbed a lot of influences from other sci fi and fantasy,
Speaker 3: Like it just straight up has orcs in it.
Speaker 2: I think, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, do you have the
Speaker 2: The orcs of Warhammer forty thousand are like, you know,
Speaker 2: they're green skins, and they're there. They're a lot of fun,
Speaker 2: They're they're very punk, I guess to a large extent,
Speaker 2: like you know, like old school British punk. But then
Speaker 2: they also reproduce via spores, and yeah, there's a there's
Speaker 2: a there are a lot of elements to it that
Speaker 2: are like really grim and dark and other stuff that's
Speaker 2: a little more whimsical. Anyway, though, this costume is incredible.
Speaker 2: So great job, Jay, and congratulations, I'm getting to work
Speaker 2: on these pretty awesome product I've seen at least some
Speaker 2: of all of these, and yeah, the production designs are amazing.
Speaker 3: Now, Jay, as to your thing about helping you maybe
Speaker 3: get in touch with the artists, I don't know exactly
Speaker 3: the best way to do that since this is an
Speaker 3: audio medium, but hey, if you are listening and you
Speaker 3: are an illustrator who has I don't know, done illustrations
Speaker 3: of these Sorcerers of Zinch and you are wondering if
Speaker 3: this is your illustration, you can contact us and we'll we'll,
Speaker 3: you know, try and help you figure it out.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I always happy to hear from artists either way.
Speaker 3: All right, This next message is about our episodes on
Speaker 3: the Telephone Game. This comes from Sky Sky says Hi,
Speaker 3: Joe and Robert. I just finished the first episode and
Speaker 3: had a few follow up thoughts. First of all, the
Speaker 3: alternating picture slash text version of The telephone game is,
Speaker 3: as you suspect, a fantastic game. I've never heard of
Speaker 3: it by the name mentioned on the podcast, but have
Speaker 3: seen it go by many others telephone pictionary, illustrations, draw seption,
Speaker 3: and drawful. It's one of our standards for board game nights.
Speaker 3: When a where a few too many people are invited,
Speaker 3: just find a pencil for everyone, rip up some paper,
Speaker 3: and hilarity ensues. Second point, I appreciated the reference to
Speaker 3: the Chinese Room thought experiment, and particularly its relation to
Speaker 3: recent large language models like chat GPT. When self driving
Speaker 3: cars were getting a lot of attention, it seemed to
Speaker 3: me like the trolley problem got enough attention such that
Speaker 3: most people have now probably heard of it and somewhat
Speaker 3: understand why it's a tricky problem for that technology. I'm
Speaker 3: somewhat frustrated seeing the ill informed debates about whether or
Speaker 3: not large language models are conscious and hope dearly that
Speaker 3: the Chinese Room can also enter the zeitgeist and get
Speaker 3: more people involved in the interesting parts of the idea.
Speaker 3: You've focused on consciousness and many of the relevant thought
Speaker 3: experiments in previous episodes, but I wonder if a timely
Speaker 3: discussion of language models in relation to those topics could help.
Speaker 3: I'd certainly listen three. Robert's voice of the mind when
Speaker 3: talking about alterations to the boy hides from his father's
Speaker 3: story are hilarious. I love modeling part of your subconscious
Speaker 3: as a bunch of study lit critics. Cheers Sky. Well, yeah,
Speaker 3: thanks for the thoughts guy. You know, I've thought recently
Speaker 3: about whether we should do something about like chat, GPT
Speaker 3: and all of this new these recent explosions of AI.
Speaker 3: I feel like my inclination is it's exactly when there
Speaker 3: are a lot of takes exploding on a subject, is
Speaker 3: when I feel disinclined to talk about it, you know,
Speaker 3: because I feel kind of like, is my take here
Speaker 3: going to be just a kind of transient, ill informed
Speaker 3: thought that will blend in with all these others and
Speaker 3: then fade away. I always kind of feel like I
Speaker 3: want to give it some time and then look back
Speaker 3: on it and then figure out what I think and
Speaker 3: say that Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, We've had a couple of guests on the show,
Speaker 2: including David Eagleman, and we've we've we've chatted with these
Speaker 2: experts and about the topic. But I'm of the same
Speaker 2: mind a lot of this seems to be still developing,
Speaker 2: and I've I've waffled a lot just with my own
Speaker 2: experience with say, like some some of the image generators
Speaker 2: and the chatbots, you know, Like I found that I
Speaker 2: initially find them really exciting and get into using them
Speaker 2: a little bit, but then, like two things occur at
Speaker 2: once generally, or they have occurred at once, I'll sort
Speaker 2: of the more I use it, I'll sort of discover
Speaker 2: the soullessness of the experience and find that it's not
Speaker 2: creatively satisfying me, and in fact, it feels like it's
Speaker 2: causing a void to grow in me creatively, and then
Speaker 2: again I sort of push it away.
Speaker 3: That's interesting. I've had a similar experience recently. So Okay, well,
Speaker 3: I just said I'm not going to give a take.
Speaker 3: Maybe this is not a take. I'm just explaining an
Speaker 3: emotion more than a strong opinion. And it's hard to
Speaker 3: put my reaction into words, but it's just kind of
Speaker 3: a revulsion at the idea of a kind of explosion
Speaker 3: of convincing insincerity in all of the content domains of
Speaker 3: human life. And I don't know, there's something I've I've
Speaker 3: found kind of disturbing about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now, now I do want to drive home that
Speaker 2: you know, this is what I've just said was based
Speaker 2: on my experience toying around with it. It's it's likely
Speaker 2: these tools are just not for me. I don't want
Speaker 2: to steer anyone else away from enjoying them. But and
Speaker 2: it's you know, it's also possible that I just I
Speaker 2: am not technically proficient enough to make the most out
Speaker 2: of them. I don't know. There are various ways to
Speaker 2: cut it. I'm not saying I'm right on the matter,
Speaker 2: it's just my opinion. The other side of it, though,
Speaker 2: is that, you know, I've seen plenty of artists that
Speaker 2: I either know personally or I follow on Instagram or
Speaker 2: something speak out against like AI art specifically, and you know,
Speaker 2: I feel like I need to listen to them. I
Speaker 2: need to you know, support them and here them out.
Speaker 2: And so I've tried to do that as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree with that. I feel like I'm feeling
Speaker 3: the poll. I'm feeling the poll to like keep blabbering
Speaker 3: on and just get into get into the takes. I
Speaker 3: said I wasn't going to give, So I'm not going
Speaker 3: to give them. We'll just let's move on to something else.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, but you know, discussion continues if you have
Speaker 2: thoughts about this rite in. We'd love to hear from
Speaker 2: everyone out there if you agree with us, disagree with us,
Speaker 2: or have more information.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, We've still got plenty more messages about
Speaker 3: childhood amnesia. We're going to do a couple here. This
Speaker 3: one comes from Jay. Jay says, Dear Robert and Joe,
Speaker 3: I recently listened to the Before You could Remember episodes,
Speaker 3: and I have a memory to share. I have a
Speaker 3: somewhat fuzzy childhood memory that doesn't feel like a memory
Speaker 3: of an event, but more like a feeling or a dream.
Speaker 3: I remember laying on my back and above me is
Speaker 3: a pale brown surface, and on that surface is a bird,
Speaker 3: and there is a voice without a body that again
Speaker 3: and again says the words tweety bird or rather a
Speaker 3: peepifogo in Swedish. As I grew up, the memory popped
Speaker 3: into my mind every now and then, but I never
Speaker 3: thought much about it. But when I was in my
Speaker 3: late teens, I asked my mom what she thought about
Speaker 3: the dream, or what she thought the dream meant. She
Speaker 3: looked amused and told me that when I was a toddler.
Speaker 3: We used to live in an old house and the
Speaker 3: bathroom had an inner, rough cut natural wood roof, and
Speaker 3: every time she needed to change my diapers, she took
Speaker 3: me to the bathroom, laid me on my back on
Speaker 3: the bathroom mat, and distracted me by pointing at the
Speaker 3: roof and said, look at the tweety bird. The bird
Speaker 3: she pointed at was a sawed off branch on the
Speaker 3: wood roof that looked like the outline of a flying bird.
Speaker 3: I've always wondered if this was a real memory or
Speaker 3: if it was something I picked up as a child
Speaker 3: when I after bedtime listened to the adults talking in
Speaker 3: the living room to my bedroom. If it's a real memory,
Speaker 3: it probably stuck because of hundreds of times I must
Speaker 3: have seen and heard the tweety bird. Anyhow, thank you
Speaker 3: for a great podcast and keep up the good work.
Speaker 3: Kind regards, j oh And to be clear, this is
Speaker 3: this is a different Jay than the other j who
Speaker 3: just wrote in That was j Y. This is just
Speaker 3: the letter J. But thank you J.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I like this term peepe fogo's that's very nice.
Speaker 2: But yeah, this this whole topic of early childhood memories.
Speaker 2: I think has stirred at a lot of discussion. I
Speaker 2: know that I ended up talking about my like vague
Speaker 2: childhood memory of my pediatrician being Gene Shallatte. I talked
Speaker 2: about this with my mom and she of course confirmed
Speaker 2: that Gene Shallott was not my pediatrician. But and at
Speaker 2: first she was like, there was you know, your doctor
Speaker 2: looked different. It didn't look anything like Gene Shallett. And
Speaker 2: then I'm like, well, no, maybe it was, you know,
Speaker 2: further back, and she was, And then she did confirm
Speaker 2: that I did have a doctor pretty early on at
Speaker 2: a mustache though I'm not sure exactly what age I
Speaker 2: was at that point. So I think this mustachio doctor
Speaker 2: was the Gene Shallatte of my memory.
Speaker 3: Oh that's very interesting.
Speaker 2: All right, here's another one. This one comes to us
Speaker 2: from Josh, Rob, Joe, JJ and letter writer Scott. We've
Speaker 2: got listener mail folks talking to other listener mail folks,
Speaker 2: which is great. While listening to the podcast regarding childhood amnesia,
Speaker 2: I wondered over my earliest memory with no satisfaction. However,
Speaker 2: during Rob's reading of a letter replying to the episode
Speaker 2: about a sort of first moment of consciousness from Scott.
Speaker 2: My mind was absolutely blown. A memory came back to
Speaker 2: me that I haven't thought of in what must be
Speaker 2: like thirty five years. I remember waking up in the
Speaker 2: morning and having a memory of the previous day, of
Speaker 2: which I doubted the trustworthiness. I remember believing that I
Speaker 2: began existence upon waking and stepped into oblivion when I
Speaker 2: went to sleep. Remember devising a test wherein I resolved
Speaker 2: to send myself a message and decided that if I
Speaker 2: would remember this specific message from myself, I would lay
Speaker 2: the question to rest and believe in yesterday. I figured
Speaker 2: that through repeating the message many times as I fell asleep,
Speaker 2: I created the greatest likelihood of remembering it, and that
Speaker 2: I should keep it simple, I told myself, remember thinking this,
Speaker 2: I did in fact remember the message, although there is
Speaker 2: no way to know if it was the first time
Speaker 2: I tried this experiment, and if my experiment is to
Speaker 2: be trusted, every day since I have believed in Yesterday.
Speaker 2: Thanks for the memories, cheers, Josh.
Speaker 3: That's interesting, Josh. This sounds like the kinds of thoughts
Speaker 3: that I think I had when I was a little kid.
Speaker 3: Weird psychedelic childhood thoughts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I engaged in a bit of that,
Speaker 2: a lot of closing the eyes and looking at the
Speaker 2: starscape and so forth.
Speaker 3: All Right, maybe we should do some weird house cinema email.
Speaker 3: Are you ready for that? Rob, Let's have it? Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm going to do this one from Emily Hi, Robin Joe,
Speaker 3: Whether you're finished experiencing the smorgasbord of late twentieth century
Speaker 3: three D cinema, here's a suggestion for a non three
Speaker 3: D but still deeply weird film. My husband and I
Speaker 3: just watched Sunshine two thousand and seven, starring Killian Murphy
Speaker 3: and Chris Evans. The tagline on IMDb is a team
Speaker 3: of international astronauts is sent on a dangerous mission to
Speaker 3: reignite the dying Sun with a nuclear fission bomb in
Speaker 3: twenty fifty seven, which is already compelling, But I would
Speaker 3: further describe the experience of watching this film as like
Speaker 3: trying to watch two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey, Alien,
Speaker 3: and Solaris at the same time by flipping back and
Speaker 3: forth between TV channels. Indeed, the director names specifically those
Speaker 3: three films as direct influences, and it shows. I think
Speaker 3: the film is plenty weird enough to be featured on
Speaker 3: Weird House. But it also, I think prompts a broader
Speaker 3: discussion of science fiction as a genre. Does it become
Speaker 3: more or less difficult to write hard sci fi as
Speaker 3: we as a global society learn more and more about
Speaker 3: the world we inhabit and how it works? Will general
Speaker 3: public scientific literacy ever reach a point at which the
Speaker 3: average person will struggle to enjoy or engage with stories
Speaker 3: like this because of all the scientific liberties taken for
Speaker 3: the sake of the plot. Keep up the great work, Emily, Okay,
Speaker 3: I'll respond to both points. On the second point, If
Speaker 3: you know, increasing scientific literacy, I guess it's debatable whether
Speaker 3: that is really going on overall. I want to see
Speaker 3: some information, some stats on that. But to the extent
Speaker 3: that is true, I don't know. I don't really see
Speaker 3: that causing much of a problem because I don't feel like,
Speaker 3: as in my life my personal scientific literacy increased, that
Speaker 3: made me less able to enjoy unrealistic science fiction. In fact,
Speaker 3: it's almost been exactly the opposite, Like the more kind
Speaker 3: of scientific literacy I've had throughout my life, kind of
Speaker 3: the more I've enjoyedid absurd nonsense and as you know,
Speaker 3: the pseudoscience and sci fi plots. I don't know, it's
Speaker 3: you know, you can suspend disbelief, it's just fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, I mean they're always going to have to
Speaker 2: suspend disbelief to some level with a science fiction motion picture,
Speaker 2: I think. I mean, I think even the more the
Speaker 2: hardest examples of sci fi you could point to, you're
Speaker 2: still you know, you still have to immerse yourself in
Speaker 2: the movie viewing experience and certain elements of the plot
Speaker 2: and and you know, certain conveniences of storytelling. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I tend to not think that's the problem. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's probably a larger, more complex discussion to be had
Speaker 2: about the role science fiction could play in both increasing
Speaker 2: scientific literacy and also dulling it perhaps in some cases.
Speaker 2: And that's that's probably more you know, the danger as
Speaker 2: opposed to people, you know, losing out on appreciation for
Speaker 2: films that get it a little bit or a whole
Speaker 2: lot wrong. You know what.
Speaker 3: There is though, an area where I can see this
Speaker 3: maybe being a problem, which is like a film that
Speaker 3: is trying to be hard sci fi, like it is
Speaker 3: going strongly for realism and fails at that, Like that
Speaker 3: can kind of be a problem. But as long as
Speaker 3: a film is just you know, committing to some kind
Speaker 3: of pseudoscientific absurdity, you know, Yeah, I don't care, that's fine.
Speaker 3: I think the problem is when it's insisting, no, this
Speaker 3: is real, this is really how the world is, and
Speaker 3: it's still getting it wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I mean generally, I think a lot of
Speaker 2: sci fi are going to take those real things that
Speaker 2: are happening and just and use those as as a
Speaker 2: springboard to get into other fantastic ideas.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Now, the other thing about Sunshine, I haven't seen
Speaker 3: this movie in a long time, but I remember liking
Speaker 3: it when it came out. Though. It's funny about the influences,
Speaker 3: so it's like two thousand and one Alien Solaris. I
Speaker 3: can see all of those influences in it, but in
Speaker 3: my memory definitely more in the first half because spoiler
Speaker 3: alert if you haven't seen this, doesn't it sort of
Speaker 3: turn into Friday the thirteenth in space in the second half,
Speaker 3: like it becomes a slasher movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it goes a little bit of then Horizon Eate,
Speaker 2: which I remember. I think I saw this in the
Speaker 2: theater and I remember everyone was pretty excited for it
Speaker 2: because I mean, it's Danny Boyle and you know, he
Speaker 2: was riding really high at that point, could do no wrong.
Speaker 2: Alex Garland, you know, could do no wrong. A great cast,
Speaker 2: even outside of the people we've already mentioned here. Underworld
Speaker 2: worked on part of the music along with John Murphy.
Speaker 2: So all these things were lining up, and then the
Speaker 2: movie itself is kind of a mess, kind of and
Speaker 2: you know, kind of just you know it is. The
Speaker 2: idea of switching channels definitely was part of the experience.
Speaker 2: So I remember being a little underwhelmed by it but
Speaker 2: finding it interesting. So in a way that makes it
Speaker 2: the perfect kind of film to discuss on weird House cinema.
Speaker 3: Orbit of Mercury, Chainsaw Massacre.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Like there's a guy who goes nuts because
Speaker 2: he's like, I love staring at the sun.
Speaker 3: Well, I liked that element, actually, I thought that was cool.
Speaker 3: So one of the themes of the movie is that,
Speaker 3: like as the ship gets closer to the sun, there's
Speaker 3: like a viewing deck I guess where you can see
Speaker 3: you can look at it with reduced intensity, and some
Speaker 3: people just get like hypnotized by it. It's almost like
Speaker 3: it's a you know, it's an ancient god and they
Speaker 3: become worshipers of it, and some become so obsessed with
Speaker 3: the sun god in front of them that they lose
Speaker 3: their minds. I thought that was cool, but yeah, the
Speaker 3: slasher element, I thought, I don't know, Yeah, I'd watch
Speaker 3: it again. I mean it's been a long time, you know,
Speaker 3: most movies I watched like fifteen years ago. My opinion
Speaker 3: could be very different now.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so we'll have to put it on the
Speaker 2: list of potential films for Weird House for sure. All right,
Speaker 2: here's another one. This one comes from Anna. Hello, Robert, Joe,
Speaker 2: and JJ boy. There are a lot of j's and
Speaker 2: JJ's in this episode. Anna continues in your recent Weird
Speaker 2: House Cinema episode about the never Ending Story, you talked
Speaker 2: about a scene in the book where bast is in
Speaker 2: a bookshop. This brought back a very strong memory of
Speaker 2: reading the book Matilda by Roald Dahl. Near the start
Speaker 2: of the book, she Matilda wants to escape her horrible family,
Speaker 2: and she finds refuge in the library. She sits for
Speaker 2: hours in the library reading books. Then one day the
Speaker 2: librarian tells her she can take books home. She can
Speaker 2: take as many as she likes. As long as she
Speaker 2: brings them back. This was a pivotal moment in her life.
Speaker 2: This huge, magical world had opened up. I think part
Speaker 2: of the magic of the scene is also that someone
Speaker 2: has recognized her own sense of imagination and encouraged it,
Speaker 2: rather than try to suppress it like the other adults
Speaker 2: in her life. I remember when the movie came out.
Speaker 2: This is alluding to what the nineteen nineties adaptation. There's
Speaker 2: a wonderful new adaptation of the stage musical that my
Speaker 2: son is super into, and I've seen it twice already.
Speaker 2: It's great, But I also finally remember what the nineteen
Speaker 2: nineties adaptation. Anyway, Anna rites, I remember when the movie
Speaker 2: came out. It seemed like a different story. There was
Speaker 2: some controversy because it was depicting supernatural themes. I was
Speaker 2: so surprised because I had completely forgotten about the parts
Speaker 2: of the book where she moves things about with her mind.
Speaker 2: The magic in the story of Matilda was always the
Speaker 2: books and imagination, not the telekinesist stuff. The villains were
Speaker 2: the people who had lost their sense of imagination, people
Speaker 2: who had forgotten what it was like to be a kid.
Speaker 2: This was a common theme in the Doll Books. A
Speaker 2: lot of the books you were given as a kid
Speaker 2: felt like just some adult contriving a story in order
Speaker 2: to teach you a moral. But with the Doll Books,
Speaker 2: it was as if he was sharing a secret with us.
Speaker 2: Using funny words and using Quinton Blake's simple illustrations was
Speaker 2: part of this. It felt like he was one of us. Okay,
Speaker 2: now a side note about childhood amnesia. One of my
Speaker 2: strong first memories is of putting on my own shoes.
Speaker 2: There was a feeling that if you had to put
Speaker 2: shoes on to do something, that meant it was important. Anyway,
Speaker 2: I should end this email now before I ramble on
Speaker 2: too much. Thanks Anna, Thanks Anna. It reminds me of
Speaker 2: the Simpsons when they go shoe shopping for a good,
Speaker 2: stiff church shoe. But also it's for doctor's appointments, piano recitals.
Speaker 2: I don't remember all the other things, but yeah, you
Speaker 2: got to put him on for anything important.
Speaker 3: But also, Anna, yes, this thing about the never Ending Story,
Speaker 3: I assume you're picking up on the things we were
Speaker 3: talking about in that episode where I think my comment
Speaker 3: was Strangely, what stuck with me most about the never
Speaker 3: Ending Story was the most fascinating to my imagination was
Speaker 3: actually not any of the fantasy stuff, but it was
Speaker 3: the book stuff. It was the scene in the bookshop
Speaker 3: where Bastion speaks with the guy about, you know, the
Speaker 3: other books being safe in this book being dangerous. And
Speaker 3: then the scenes where he is hiding up in the attic,
Speaker 3: just hiding all day, where nobody can find him and
Speaker 3: he doesn't have to do what anybody else's teme telling him.
Speaker 3: He just gets to be alone and read.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, really connecting with it was something that I
Speaker 2: think a lot of us can relate to in our
Speaker 2: childhoods Now, as far as Doll goes, yeah, this whole
Speaker 2: idea of kids essentially being at war with adults. This
Speaker 2: is a common theme in his work. You also see
Speaker 2: it in The Witches, which, by the way, I mean
Speaker 2: there was a nineteen ninety adaptation of The Witches, which
Speaker 2: of course was pretty fun, had Jim Henson. It was
Speaker 2: Jim Henson production, I believe, and Angelica Houston plays the
Speaker 2: High Witch. A lot of people did not like the
Speaker 2: twenty twenty adaptation. This is one that was directed by
Speaker 2: Robert Zemeckis, and also the screenplay on that was at
Speaker 2: least partially by Gimmel del Toro and Anne Hathaway plays
Speaker 2: the High Witch. You know, this is very much a
Speaker 2: modern take on it with a lot of computer effects.
Speaker 2: But I thought this was pretty fabulous as well. I
Speaker 2: enjoyed it. I thought Anne Hathaway was amazing in it.
Speaker 2: I have room for two high Witches in my life.
Speaker 3: Well, I haven't seen either one. Maybe this is one
Speaker 3: of those gaps. I will, I will, I will close
Speaker 3: once I'm watching movies with my daughter as she grows up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, we're gonna go ahead and close the
Speaker 2: mail bag there, But we'd love to hear from everyone
Speaker 2: out there if you have thoughts on anything were discussed
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Speaker 2: What's throwing a little rerun over the weekend.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our audio producer JJ Posway.
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