After the Episode | S2E3 (Defying Convention)

Oct 5

Written By Perry Carpenter

[Intro] Welcome. You've got… Digital Folklore. [/Intro]
Perry Carpenter:
Hey, this is Perry Carpenter.
Mason Amadeus:
And I'm Mason Amadeus.
Perry Carpenter:
And this is Digital Folklore season two, episode three, After the Episode episode, where we discuss things within the episode. So if you've not yet listened to the episode, we're talking about episode three of season two, go back and listen to that episode now and then join us back here after the episode episode of season two, episode three.
Mason Amadeus:
I feel like I was just watching ChatGPT really not know what to say.
Perry Carpenter:
In a fairly episodic way.
Mason Amadeus:
Yes. So the episode that we just did was Define Convention. All about memes, and conspiracy, and belief, and community, and communication.
Perry Carpenter:
So tell us a little bit, what was the overall idea of that episode? Where does that fit in with the narrative arc of season two that you put together and some of the weird things that you were able to try?
Mason Amadeus:
Well, I guess what it's about is pretty much driven by the interviews, right? We got to talk to Josh Chapdelaine and Dr Kristina Downs. I was not present for the interview you did with Kristina Downs, so actually editing that was the first time I got to hear it.
Perry Carpenter:
Well, and she had a ton of fun stuff in that. But I think us trying to figure out how do we frame all of this as you and I being a little bit of slackerish, we know we want to get involved in this meme expo because there's going to be some good experts to talk to there. We've submitted a call for presentations. We were somehow accepted to that even though we didn't really have a plan. And we get there and we get to talk to great folks like Josh and Kristina as part of that, and I think both of them gave really, really good interviews that I'm looking forward to releasing the Unplugged episodes for each of those as well.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. Kristina's interview, there was a lot that is going to be in that unplugged. There was a whole nother section after the, because she primarily talked about the thefts from the Dallas Zoo and all of that. There was a lot in that that got left out that'll be in the unplugged, which would be cool. A lot of examples of the different posts and different things people were saying online as that was going on. But then also this idea of narrative kernels. I really wanted to work it in. That was one of those things that makes the second to last cut. I had to drop it at the last minute for time.
Perry Carpenter:
Well, that narrative kernel idea, this is a little bit off topic for people that have just listened to this episode, but it should make its way into a folklore curious if and when we start dropping some of those. That narrative kernel idea comes back over and over and over again because when it comes to things like urban legends, and we talked to John Lowden later on, I think he mentioned this as well, is that anytime something is being transmitted, whether it's an urban legend or a rumor or something, there's this idea of how much can it be compressed? How do you bring it down to its natural smallest form so it can be transferred from person to person extremely quickly. And I think Lynne McNeill even mentioned that. There's another term for that that I heard recently and I can't remember it. So we're going to do a folklore curious on that term as soon as I find it. I think it was something like a Memet.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, that's interesting.
Perry Carpenter:
Yes. Consolidated memory.
Mason Amadeus:
Just in case it's hard to follow, I think the thing that really made it click for me is like a narrative kernel is boiling something down to, you know the one about the guy who walks into the bar? It's that essence of the smallest possible thing. Or the example you give in the Unplugged was saying that you're a bit of a princess and the pea kind of person in that you like to have everything just right. It's that the smallest amount that can convey the entire meaning. It's like the atom.
Perry Carpenter:
Exactly. And I heard an interview with somebody the other day and they were talking about what I think I remember is being a memet, if we can look that up at some point and see if it is, and it's one of these things where a folklorist can actually cause more harm than good, or somebody can actually cause more harm than good when they go into talking to another people group, and somebody say, "Oh, and there was these weird lights in the sky and there was this figure that I talked to." And somebody goes, "Oh, well, that's clearly UFOs and aliens." And they're kind of bringing their understanding of that onto another thing, and then it catches on because now everybody, that's the vernacular that they know is UFOs and aliens.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, that's interesting. I'd want to talk to a folklorist about that because it is so context dependent, because you might have a kernel that you think you understand, has a context and subtext and all these things attached for you, but that's not necessarily the same as it would be for someone else. Is that an imperfect kernel? What is that?
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, and then when they don't necessarily have language or frame for that yet, you're accidentally giving them a frame that they then grab onto and then it starts to self perpetuate.
Mason Amadeus:
Right. Oh, that's fun. So keep an eye out with the Unplugged with Kristina and the one with Josh. I can't speak highly enough of Josh and the folks over at Digital Void. I swear talking to Josh is like talking to someone who is prepared everything that's going to come out of their mouth. I don't know how he does it. He speaks so eloquently and so smartly and conveys all of these ideas. As I was editing the interview, I literally kept stopping it and playing it out loud for my partner to be like, you got to hear this. You got to hear what Josh said about this. It's so good. It's so smart. It's so succinct. And Josh is so nice too.
Perry Carpenter:
Absolutely. Well, in Digital Void, if you've not checked it out yet, they do have their own podcast that Josh hosts, and it is very, very intellectually stimulating and fun to listen to at the same time. There's a sense of academic rigor and social awareness that's very uncommon in a lot of these, a lot of podcasts that are out there right now, and I think that they bring something really special to the conversation.
Mason Amadeus:
Also, the theme music for their podcast is what played on the vendor floor when we were like, all right, let's look for someone. That music coming from the booth was their theme music. Just a fun little fact.
Perry Carpenter:
Oh, yeah. No, Josh and Digital Void is definitely something that everybody should check out.
Mason Amadeus:
100%. I think there's more collabs probably in the future. We don't have anything nailed down yet, but I feel like, between us and them, there's a lot of crossover that we can do.
Perry Carpenter:
There is a ton. And that brings up something else too. So in preparing different narrative bits of these or preparing different interview segments, there's a wide variety of quality of the audio that has to be prepped and cleaned. Getting to these things from the audio perspective to the point where they both sound like they're in the same space and the same amount of quality and everything else is a little bit of an undertaking all the time. Right?
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, and I'm going to just say we can't sometimes like, I think what it boils down to is we're talking to experts and academics and people who teach and people who study and research things and are not podcasters, so they just don't have a good microphone lying around, and it'd be weird to expect them to, right? So it's really tough because, on the one hand, you don't want to burden them with this extra technical challenge when they're already so busy and we're trying to get their time. And then there's only so much we can do with even the most advanced restoration tools. In our Discord in the internal side of it, we kick around six or seven different AI restoration tools. Actually, one of them even reached out to me about being interviewed, but trying to do everything we can to beef up this recording that was done on a laptop's internal mic, and sometimes you just can't. And it's tricky because I struggle with that in this episode. Kristina does not really sound like she's there with us. You can tell it's a recording.
Perry Carpenter:
But, at the same time, I remember what the audio sounded like.
Mason Amadeus:
That's true.
Perry Carpenter:
And, again, we're not complaining. I just think it's amazing when you have this wide variety of audio that comes to you and you're doing the best that you can. And in this, I was shocked at how clean and good it sounded when I heard it as a solicitor who hadn't heard the transformational steps there.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, well, I'm glad.
Perry Carpenter:
To me, it sounded nearly as good as somebody with a professional mic.
Mason Amadeus:
That was Matt's restoration job on that one. Matt gave me, because Matt helped cut down the interviews for this episode, doing that for future episodes, which is so helpful because the time it takes to do sound design and the writing and everything is a lot. And Matt crushed the restoration job on that. But there's only so much paint and polish you can put on a recording that was done with a laptop mic. And, again, that's not any kind of commentary on the other people we talked to. It's just that the fact of it is not everyone's got a podcast mic. I mean, even you're using a Neumann U87, I'm using a $200 mic that I stole from my previous job, and we make those sound pretty close to each other in post too. There's a lot of that kind of stuff that goes on.
Perry Carpenter:
The idea behind all of that is that we have a whole range of ways that audio comes to us. And through the magic of audio restoration tools and post-processing, you're able to make that sound like it's conceivably in the same, like we're sharing the same space. And I think that that's pretty amazing. One of the fun things that came out in that Discord chat that we've seen is that some AI tools do better the worse the audio that's given to it. And then some of them will wholly create things on their own, depending on the type of audio. And then some of them using a combination works out. When I do restoration, I typically use studio sound on Descript and I dial that back to like 80% instead of a hundred percent because it starts artifacting the higher it gets, where you'll still hear a little bit of the room noise that doesn't sound great, but then I run that through standard noise cancellation and it makes it sound pretty freaking good.
Mason Amadeus:
It's really interesting. And without getting too technical into it because I will get technical someday if people want, but I believe my, and I really do want to take those AI restoration company up on the interview. I believe that the way these models work to generate audio, similar if you've ever used the text to image generation and watched it happen, it starts with noise, and then it slowly resolves down to a picture as it decides, okay, here's noise and then what do I actually want? And at each stage it's saying, is this right, is this right, is this right, until it gets to what you asked for. I believe the AI voice restoration does the same thing. It's throwing noise out there or it's using the noise built into the recording and then building off of that and slowly resolving it.
So if the audio isn't noisy enough compared to what it's trained on, it won't really know what to do and how to restore stuff. Sometimes I have taken a file that was not the worst audio and tried to run it through one of those tools and made it sound worse. So then I took the original file and I ran some pretty severe saturation on it like a lot of second harmonic saturation makes it sound really grumbly and even thrown a little extra noise in there, and then run that through the AI restoration and gotten better results. So it's a very interesting technology to work with because it's not as linear of a process as you expect from a lot of audio tools.
Perry Carpenter:
And what you're describing makes me think of that old quote about, oh gosh, I don't remember who it was, but it's like, how do you look at this thing and create this magnificent statue? It's like, well, I have the block of granite or the block of marble and I just chip away everything that is not that. And I think that that's a little bit what these restoration tools are. But you talked about them every now and then hallucinating and bringing up syllables of words, and I was wondering if ghost hunters are going to start using stuff like that, just sending in static and seeing what these things hallucinate in coming out with these demonic sounds and saying, well, that's clearly evidence of a haunting.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, I wonder if we can include this. I was tasked with cleaning up a recording from a stage play, and I ran it through one of these tools and all of the audience murmuring, curtain rattling, footfalls before the show, it turned into this demonic…
[sound clip of AI generated syllables],
…and it was awesome.
Perry Carpenter:
If I was a ghost hunter on YouTube or something, I would be using that is flagship evidence.
Mason Amadeus:
I never thought of that. That is so good. That's so fun.
Perry Carpenter:
It's like the electromagnetic resonance type of recorders.
Mason Amadeus:
And also, I know Mark won't mind me pointing this out. On Mark's episode, episode one, we're trying to do some restoration of his audio because there was a bit that was a little bit messed up and studio sound made him sound drunk, which was the most amusing thing. I don't know why. I don't know if it struggles with English accents, but it took Mark's voice and he was speaking perfectly eloquently, but then he started slurring when it was run through this restoration tool. So that was a funny thing to encounter.
Perry Carpenter:
Any other fun facts about this episode that come to mind for you?
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. As I was putting this one together, there's all of those bits where people at the con are passing by quoting memes.
Perry Carpenter:
Oh, I love those.
Mason Amadeus:
Those are all Jordan and Lindsay and Tucker and AD. It's four people. And I reached out, I was originally going to reach out to a bunch of people, but it's tough to coordinate getting voices from a lot of people. So I was like, okay, these are all people that I know are just like, will riff. And so I was like, hey, can you just send me 20 minutes of you and you... Jordan and Lindsay are a couple. Tucker and AD are a couple. I was like, "Can you just sit down together and quote memes with each other and laugh and talk for a bit, and then just send that to me?"
And then they did, and I chopped that all down. And there's so, so many in there. They're interspersed all over the place. Some of them are a lot harder to hear than others. I almost made a little scavenger hunt list to say, can you find where in the episode each of these meme references are? I have not seen it yet, but it's fresh. The episode just came out as we're recording this. I haven't seen anyone pointing out which ones of those they did catch because there's a lot of meme references from various eras.
Perry Carpenter:
I heard quite a few. I'm wondering if, in a few weeks, if we can just drop some cleaned up versions of those files on Patreon or on our Discord.
Mason Amadeus:
That would be fun. I could even pull out the, because I took them and I chopped them up just to the bits I was going to use, and then lined them all up in a row so I could pick from them and I still have those, so I could put those up-
Perry Carpenter:
That'd fun.
Mason Amadeus:
... and just rapid fire all of the little interspersed bits.
Perry Carpenter:
That'd be fun. And then you've not yet talked about the extreme sound design that you did for this. I mean, it's stuff that people that are not familiar with sound design processing might not think about. But I mean, you're thinking about proximity of voices and room simulations and tons of stuff, and even when you're fading in and out of the interviews the way that you did that and some of the interesting things that you did with EQ and reverb and so on, there's a ton of that that I could hear, but I'm sure that I didn't pick up on half of what you did.
Mason Amadeus:
Well, you picked up on, what you just said actually. You picked up on a lot of the things that I was personally really stoked about doing, and then was like, oh, I don't know if anyone will notice. So that makes me happy. In the Kristina interview when we go up on stage bumping up the low mids to make it sound like a stage mic, like an SM58.
Perry Carpenter:
That was great.
Mason Amadeus:
I grabbed my microphone. I fully... that kind of sound by grabbing my microphone too to get it to sound like we were picking up a stage mic.
Perry Carpenter:
That's super easy to do. I was wondering if you pulled that from a sound library. But why would you, right?
Mason Amadeus:
I almost did. I had a moment where I was like, okay, I'll just type... wait. I don't need to set anything up to folly this. I just hit record and grab it. The room simulate, like the ambiance and stuff was really tricky and I'm still not super happy with it. I could play with it forever, but there's 12 different ambiance tracks that are going on. There's different room reverbs for each of the zones that we're in. And then as we're moving through them, they'll be panning around each other in a way that's kind of imperceptible, but I was trying to imply a sense of movement. So there's two or three different tracks that are just different Walla tracks, which is just people talking, and those are moving left and right each time we're walking and then you have different room tones. I spent way too much time on that and trying to make the people walking by sound like they were walking by. There's a little bit of artifacting that's in there that I'm not super happy with, but that's just me being way too picky.
Perry Carpenter:
I didn't notice that.
Mason Amadeus:
It's the last one, Tucker walking by and saying macaroni with the chicken strips.
Perry Carpenter:
Oh, okay.
Mason Amadeus:
I don't know why I didn't real- well, it's because I stayed up till 3:00 in the morning. I didn't remember to modulate down the convolution reverb that makes him sound like he's farther away as he walks up. I have an equalizer that is bringing the high and low end down to make him sound like he's far from a mic, and then a convolution reverb fully 100% wet, which means 100% just the reverb set to a small room just to make it, because that makes it, it makes it sound a little more like someone's not on the mic, but I forgot to dial that down when he got closer to us because there's already four or five moving parameters and I just missed that one, and that's bugging me. I might fix it.
Perry Carpenter:
All right. Anything else that you want to cover in fun facts?
Mason Amadeus:
Just how many memes there were. I think, really, I wonder if anyone will get every single meme reference. I was hoping that there'd be enough of a Y range that most people would get at least some, but I'm wondering if there's at least a couple people out there who are like, every single one of those.
Perry Carpenter:
There were some that caught me by surprise because I wasn't expecting them and they took me back.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, which?
Perry Carpenter:
Oh, I wish I wrote them down. I'd have to go listen to it again. But I will do that for you especially, but the listeners don't get that. But I remember every now and then just going, oh man, that is so amazing.
Mason Amadeus:
That's how I felt when I listened back to the tracks I got from Tucker and Jordan and Lindsay and AD. The Badger song was the one that stands out for me. Badger, badger, badger, badger, mushroom, mushroom just goes by at one point. And when they did that, I was like, I had completely forgotten. That was integral to my childhood. But so that's about it for fun facts. I really want to hear from our listeners which memes that stuck out to them.
Perry Carpenter:
And we will, as long as Mason has time, we will grab the files and we'll drop those out in our Discord and on Patreon.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, I do want to give a shout out to, their username is Zillion. Their name is Jace. They're the voices of the loudspeaker person and they're one of the fans of the show. They're one of the people who's in our Discord and messaged me like, "Hey, you said you wanted voice parts, so I want to do some voice parts." And so I was like, "Oh, awesome." And we went back and forth. I gave them that line and they crushed it. They sounded so good. They actually gave me a bunch of takes including a Super Smash Brothers announcer take and a crazy taxi driver take, and that was just really fun. I love that we got to have one of the people listen to the show voice a little character in it.
Perry Carpenter:
And I think we're going to continue to look for ways to do that as well because it's just a ton of fun.
Mason Amadeus:
And I also want to shoutout Eli Chambers, the person who composed our theme music, and also took the role of the Expo employee to another level.
Perry Carpenter:
That was great.
Mason Amadeus:
When I got his, I'm sorry, I'm laughing just thinking about it because the first time I listened to his audio when he sent it back, and he is just screaming Morbin Time and over 9,000 and all of that stuff, I didn't know that Eli was going to do it to that level, but I should have expected it. Eli's great. Super talented, super nice, super funny person and really made that role my favorite.
Perry Carpenter:
Nice. One other thing before we move on, I don't remember if I mentioned this in the episode or not. I know I've mentioned it at some point. But whether it made it in or whether we cut it, I forgot, but Kristina Downs, who we interviewed in that, did have a podcast called Crimelore that everybody should check out if they haven't yet because she sits at this intersection of folklore and criminal science and has a podcast that she's not doing anymore, but all the episodes are really, really interesting and she looks at the folklore of things like the Vanishing Hitchhiker or-
Mason Amadeus:
A Hook Hand Man.
Perry Carpenter:
A Hook Hand Man or the Person in the Backseat of the Car, all those kind of things. And then gets into cases where that may or may not have happened and where ostension or quasi-ostension or pseudo-ostension played a part of it and so on.
Mason Amadeus:
That's super cool. I forgot to put that in the show notes. I'm going to do that right now.
Perry Carpenter:
Great show. Wish she was still making it, but I understand time constraints and everything else.
Mason Amadeus:
Making podcasts is hard.
Perry Carpenter:
Making podcasts is hard. Okay. A couple other shoutouts. These are comments that came in, one on Spotify and one on Castbox, that I want to read. This was in the last episode, The Links Between Us Algorithmic Identity, Goncharov, and Tumblr, and this was on Spotify. And this is from Louis Cruz, and said, "Really great work, folks. It's in that perfect sweet spot of entertaining and informative without dumbing down the content. Keep up the incredible work. It's worth it."
Mason Amadeus:
That's awesome.
Perry Carpenter:
I like that.
Mason Amadeus:
I love that. That says to me like everything we aim for.
Perry Carpenter:
Exactly. And then Katie, the Book and Yam Dragon on Castbox. Katie the Book and Yam Dragon, or no. That says yarn dragon. Katie, the Book and Yarn Dragon. A yarn dragon and a yam dragon would be two different things.
Mason Amadeus:
A yarn, see book and yarn together makes a lot more sense than books and yams, but I love just... There's two things I like. I like books and I like yams.
Perry Carpenter:
I like yams, and yeah. That's what I thought is, somebody that's fan of books and some potatoes.
Mason Amadeus:
What did Katie say?
Perry Carpenter:
Katie the Book and Yarn Dragon says, "Excellent episode guys. As a Tumblr user, I can attest to what you said about our beloved hell site. The frame grows evermore intriguing, especially now that you're in the second season. I enjoyed the frame in the first season because it kind of felt like a GM establishing the campaign setting with broad strokes. As a GM, I mean this in the best possible way. I'm waiting eagerly to see how your character selves and the story interact with this eerie, mysterious setting that you've made."
Mason Amadeus:
Hey, that's awesome. That makes me so happy.
Perry Carpenter:
Absolutely.
Mason Amadeus:
Because that is very much how it feels from this side, so I'm glad that it's being perceived that way. That's awesome.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, and we talked about the way that you're sketching this out from a script perspective really does sound like a game master setting the stage.
Mason Amadeus:
I started thinking of it like, oh, I'm running a D&D campaign. That I'll write it like I'm prepping a D&D campaign for you and our guests.
Perry Carpenter:
Exactly.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, and I want to shoutout, not specifically a comment and not a listener per se, although I think he does listen to it given that he's helping edit it. Matthew Bliss, really coming in and, coming in clutch and lending a hand, cutting down... these after the episodes and then helping doing the interview cleanup, like chopping down the big long interviews we do for the main episodes. Matthew is amazing. And also, is he still running the video game news podcast, Dead Drop?
Perry Carpenter:
No, he is not.
Mason Amadeus:
No. Oh, I haven't listened to podcasts in so long, and so I haven't checked up on it.
Perry Carpenter:
No, he does one with his wife though, called From My Home To Yours.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, how did I- did he say something about that because I must've missed it.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, you just didn't care enough.
Mason Amadeus:
No, no. All right, I'm going to subscribe to that right now. Matthew's awesome and super talented, just a wonderful human being and is coming in clutching and saving particularly my butt here with some of the editing going on.
Perry Carpenter:
It is. It's called From My Home to Yours, and it is about Matthew moving from Australia to Ireland, which is where his partner's from.
Mason Amadeus:
I love that. I'm subscribing to that right now.
Perry Carpenter:
I'll read the description. It says,

[Perry coughs to clear his throat… soft music starts playing]
"Moving across the world to another country can be hard, but it's easier when your significant other is a local. From my home to yours follows the journey of,"
[music stops]
I cannot read that name. It is an Irish name.
[music resumes]
"And Matthew, Australian. Moving their lives from Australia to Ireland. They leave no stone unturned as they discuss the logistics and planning needed to make the journey successful, and the emotional upheaval of making a new life together halfway across the world." And I'll say is as they're leaving no stone unturned, that's really, really dangerous when you live in a place with stone circles that have magical properties that have not been unlocked for centuries or millennia.
Mason Amadeus:
Hey, Matt, be real careful with those stones. All right, dude?
Perry Carpenter:
Be careful with the hinges.
Mason Amadeus:
Was the name Bernadine?
Perry Carpenter:
It is Bernadine.
Mason Amadeus:
Bernadine.
Perry Carpenter:
And follows the journey of Bernadine, Irish, and Matthew, Australian.
Mason Amadeus:
Also, not really related to anything except for just a fact. Matthew has a wonderful voice.
Perry Carpenter:
He does.
Mason Amadeus:
I could listen to Matt read nutrition labels. So check out his podcast. Matt's also done some voices for PodCube.
Perry Carpenter:
Matthew should do a podcast where you just list nutrition labels.
Mason Amadeus:
But yeah, so just huge thanks. Can't thank Matthew enough. Listen to his show.
Perry Carpenter:
All right. So last thoughts from you then. What do we look for in the next episode?
Mason Amadeus:
A little bit of a change of frame as things start to pick up. We're kind of at in the narrative arc of this season. We are at the bit where when you look at the hump of a story, what is that called? The Curve, the rising action, the climax, and the denouement. We are at the bit where we are lifting into the rising action. This was sort of the turning point where we've laid a lot of groundwork that is going to be coming up through the rest of this, and the next episode starts the rising action that builds towards the climax in the penultimate episode of the series, so.
Perry Carpenter:
Awesome. That sounds so sophisticated.
Mason Amadeus:
It does. For something so silly, right?
Perry Carpenter:
Well, and actually that is an ostension of what we were talking about earlier before we hit record, that we somehow have the fun job of finding the smartest people in the world that can talk about the most weird inane things.
Mason Amadeus:
Yes. Like we talked to the world's foremost expert on Halloween candy panics.
Perry Carpenter:
Exactly.
Mason Amadeus:
Genuinely the world's foremost expert.
Perry Carpenter:
I mean, we're going to speaking the world's foremost expert in creepy clown panics.
Mason Amadeus:
It is so funny to, because it's also fascinating and there's so much value in studying these things, but it's really funny when you step back from it and you say, we're talking about clowns. We're talking about Pepe the Frog. We're talking about the most inconsequential looking things.
Perry Carpenter:
Macaroni with the chicken strips.
Mason Amadeus:
Macaroni with the chicken strips. Academically.
Perry Carpenter:
Exactly.
Mason Amadeus:
What does it mean when pregnant Sonic kisses Mario and they're both crying? Who knows? Someone does. Someone's an expert on pregnant Sonic.
Perry Carpenter:
Exactly.
Mason Amadeus:
We have not talked to that person yet, but if we can find them, I want to. And talking about the writing structure like that, I really, I don't know if I've mentioned that I am not a writer. I have not written scripts, I have not written things in... I used to write ad copy.
Perry Carpenter:
You're faking it really well.
Mason Amadeus:
Thanks. I spent almost literally the majority of the season pinging content on writing and theory of that, and masterclass type stuff, and articles and blogs, and doing exercise, trying to figure out how to do it because it's not a skill I had.
Perry Carpenter:
You threw all that out and used ChatGPT.
Mason Amadeus:
I clawed actually.
Perry Carpenter:
Nice. Clawed is the more creative of the two.
Mason Amadeus:
Actually, I have not yet, I've used ChatGPT when I'm looking for a specific word sometimes because it's a little faster than be like, what's a word that means fancy, but it also means this? And that's fun.
Perry Carpenter:
Oh, nice. Very, very cool. So over the next few days or so, if you are on our Discord or Patreon, look for some fun stuff that Mason should have time to prepare. As soon as he gets it to me, I'll throw it up there for everybody. And thank you so much for listening. A lot more fun in store and it gets weirder.
Mason Amadeus:
It gets weirder.
Perry Carpenter:
It gets really, really weird.
Mason Amadeus:
I want to make a Vulfpeck reference for the four people who would get it. “It gets funkier.” Thank you so much for listening and for being on this ride with us.
Perry Carpenter:
And thank you for listening to our After the Episode episode, which hopefully you listen to after the episode.

[Ending theme music kicks-in]
Mason Amadeus:
Tune in after the next episode, to the after the episode of that episode, and we'll see you there as well.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah. After that episode. Later.
Mason Amadeus:
Later.
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