#99% invisible

[thoughtportal]

this story is about a specific thing but also about how a system collapses when the keystone is removed

[chillinglikeashilling]

Petition for Kevin Perjurer and Brennan Lee Mulligan to be featured guests on The Power Broker podcast from 99% Invisible.

Petition for them to be included in the same episode honestly, I want to hear those two bouncing off each other on Robert Moses trivia, and I want to hear Brennan and the co-host Elliott get into all the ways Moses made New York a worse place.

Side note: I knew that I would already be biased against Moses because the first time I heard of him he was a literal BBEG in a DnD show but god he sucked so bad!!! So bad! And he wasn't even elected! How do you get to decide to displace half a million people without ever having been elected to public office!

[haveyouheardthispodcast]

Propaganda below the cut:

I highly expect this has been submitted before because it's excellent

It’s about all the little things in the world and how they’re made or what they’re for!!! It’s super slay and incredibly interesting

[flipjack]

Gillian on a new episode of the "99% Invisible" podcast

[shallowseeker]

You said one of your early metas sparked discourse. Can I ask what that is?

I rarely even know when Discourse is happening now. Through some miracle, I got adopted by the coolest mutuals, so. I usually only see the amazing stuff.

One day last year, I kept getting weird rando tags that said stuff like #wait is this the post that sparked all the discourse? #it can't be because this is so sensible and #I don't think the op is saying cas DESERVES to be homeless???? I didn't even know what "'Discourse" was at the time.

Anyway, Someone somewhere apparently called me a Republican. And some others said I blamed ppl for their own homelessness. Some accused me of hating the poor etc etc. And stuff. Anyway, someone was NOT having a good time on Tumblr! I can only imagine that I must have been a stand-in for something someone was Going Through in Real Life.

As for the post...

///

I can't actually find the post (it was on my vent blog, and I'm real bad at tagging, esp back then), but the gist of it was that Castiel is a stubborn asshole, but he's got keen emotional intuition, despite his "lost in translation" shtick.

After he knew the full scope of Sam's terminal illness and the Gadreel-hostile-hostage situation, he pretty immediately and intimately understood the bunker-kick-out situation. (He'd just been tricked by Metatron, too. I mean, hello? He gets it.)

I also mentioned that Castiel has, as far back as season 6 at least, had a tendency to want to be self-sufficient to the point of detrimental self-reliance. (I mean, dude hid key battle tactics from the rebel angels willing to go up against an archangel with him. *cough* Hello, Rachal. Balthazar.) And some ppl hated that. They wanted the root of all of his issues to be solely Sam and Dean.

Anyway, I don't think it's completely out of character for him to get a stiff upper lip about being seen as weak. Plus, he has a history of going radio silent and being cagey about situations, especially when his feelings and pride are hurt, so I simply mused that it's not outside the realm of possibility for him to stuff a bag with whatever cash and cards he's given and jump on a bus ASAP without telling them where he's going.

And Hell, it's not like Sam was never gonna get better. In 9x09, Dean refers to their separation as temporary. "Now, if that means that we keep our distance from you for a little while, then..."

Regardless, when Cas found out the deets of the situation, it all clicked for him.

///

I even pointed out that it seems like Cas walks away from the human experience...*gasp* proud of himself rather than weepy n' traumatized. After he fights the RitZien, he stares down death and says, "I want to LIVE." After that, he gets himself a lil' suit and a car and starts actively going out on cases.

I'll leave you with a thought by one of my fave little dudes: Rob Buckman. He wrote the incredibly famous Breaking Bad News and writes a LOT about weakness and resilience in the face of it. (I found out about him on 99% Invisible podcast btw.)

“The great thing about being ill from my point of view was that I found out that I could tolerate … a fair amount of pain and handicap … total ostracization from my friends and family ... and I didn’t collapse, and I didn’t turn into a different person. I didn't fold like a wet blanket. People can withstand a lot ... isn't that wonderful?"

That's Cas, on the other side of things, after dealing with the struggle of humanity. Sometimes getting to your lowest makes you feel weirdly secure. We get real hung up on, "Well, if it was ME, I'd have been traumatized and melted into a puddle of goo and held a grudge and had intense trust issues over it. " But it's not always a one-to-one-this-trauma-means-you-get-that-type-of-hang-up. Sometimes, we make good meaning from shitty situations, too.

[mysticdragon3md3]

You Are What You Watch - 99% Invisible

[bookgeekgrrl]

My media this week (23-29 Jul 2023)

📚 STUFF I READ 📚

🥰 The Rift (seapigeon) - 53K, modern college no powers AU - there's witchcraft and ghosts and curses and art student steve and science nerd bucky and it was all very good!

😍 Six Kids and a Winnebago series (Oddree13) - 91K, omegaverse Steddie - this series is a thoroughly delightful domestic omegaverse(lite) set post s4 - excellent characterizations, great sense of time/place & really fantastic music references

🥰 Longing and Belonging (enjambament) - 44K, geraskier - governess!Jaskier, lots of great family stuff with Ciri & Yen [reread, a definite fave]

😍 if I'm gonna get back to you someday (napricot) - 46K, post Endgame fixit with "a clusterfuck of Steves" from different multiverses - so many good emotions!

😊 Roommate Wanted (Lihhelsing, tinkerbclla) - 66K, modern Steddie roommates-to-lovers, part epistolary with a dash of identity porn

💖💖 +110K of shorter fic so shout out to these I really loved 💖💖

the premature awakening of Bucky Barnes [at the hands of stupid, sexy, Post-run Steve] (MaddieWritesStucky (Madeleine_Ward)) - MCU: stucky, 3K - modern no powers stucky, several months on in the relationship between stripper!Bucky & architecht Steve [reread]

Galatea (saltandbyrne) - Inception: Arthur/Eames, 16K - a very good and delightfully melancholic modern myth telling

Shelter Case (Coragyps) - Suits: Mike/Harvey, 7K - futuristic dark dystopian omegaverse [reread]

Let Me Keep You (LeeHan) - MCU: stucky, 4K - Steve's oral fixation PWP  [reread]

📺 STUFF I WATCHED 📺

D20: Adventuring Party - s1, e15-18

D20: A Crown of Candy - s5, e15-17

Good Omens - s2, e1-6

🎧 PODCASTS 🎧

What Next: TBD Plus - Why Tech Lays Women Off First

⭐ Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus - Julia Gets Wise with Jane Fonda

Fire Island: The Tea - Thomás Matos

50 Years of Hip-Hop - 1991: "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" by Geto Boys

50 Years of Hip-Hop - 1993: "Hip Hop Hooray" by Naughty by Nature

Hot and Bothered - Live from Pemberley: The 2005 Movie (with Helen Zaltzman and Jenny Owen Youngs)

Re: Dracula - July 24: There Will be Some Trouble

Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News - Episode 6: “Hello America, this is Addis Ababa.”

50 MPH - 7 MPH / A Crash Course in Jan De Bont (with Bilge Ebiri)

⭐ Endless Thread - Best of Summer: The Loudest Sound

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Mapping the Gay Guides

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Spaces for Spies

Switched on Pop - Barbie and the plasticity of pop

Shedunnit - Cricket and Crime

Re: Dracula - July 26: Just Starting for Home

Ologies with Alie Ward - Sciuridology (SQUIRRELS) with Karen Munroe

Stuff The British Stole - The Fever Tree Hunt

The Waves Plus - How a Drag Queen Recreated the American Dream

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Knight’s Spider Web Farm

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Amazon Night Hikes

Our Opinions Are Correct - Encore Episode: We're in the wrong timeline, with Connie Willis and R.F. Kuang

99% Invisible #546 - The Country of the Blind

50 Years of Hip-Hop - 1981: "Rapture" by Blondie

⭐ Decoder Ring Plus - A Brief History of Making Out

Twenty Thousand Hertz+ - Zelda: A Beep to the Past

Dear Prudence Plus - My Boyfriend Hid His Hobby From Me—Civil War Reenactments. Help!

⭐ Into It - Country Music’s Race Problem

What Next: TBD Plus - Washington vs. A.I.

Rivals: Music's Greatest Feuds - Robbie Robertson vs. Levon Helm: Broken Band

Re: Dracula - July 28: Four Days in Hell

Re: Dracula - July 29: Another Tragedy

Hit Parade Plus - The Bridge: Don’t Believe Me, Just Watch

⭐ Strong Songs - "Killing Me Softly With His Song," as sung by Lauryn Hill, Roberta Flack, & Lori Lieberman

Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! - WWDTM: Randall Park

Fire Island: The Tea - Bambi Sue: Dredging Up the Past

🎶 MUSIC 🎶

Presenting The Who

People Just Wanna Have Fun [Kool & The Gang] {2023}

The Beach Boys Radio • Popular

"One Thing Leads To Another" [The Fixx] Radio

Dream Theater

Presenting Bruno Mars

[o-the-mts]

A podcast spending an entire year breaking down The Power Broker?  Is this nerd heaven?

[littledidiknow]

I refer to this episode in conversations all the time. The incredible movies from the 90s and early 2000s were largely possible due to the fluke of more theaters suddenly being available to show movies in. A sloppy summary below, but the whole ep is worth a listen.

"Back then [the 19060s], studios and theaters had a business arrangement: if a theater had a certain movie, nobody else in the area could play it. Seeing a film was kind of like seeing a painting or a Broadway show. It lived at one particular location, and you had to go there. But in the early 1970s, this began to change. Studios realized there was enough demand to release movies in the suburbs and the city simultaneously. Meanwhile, theaters divided their one big auditorium into two, three, or four auditoriums to make room for more screens.

Over the next six years, the number of movie screens in the United States increased by fifty percent. But these new movie palaces didn’t just pull moviegoers to the screen; they pulled movies to the screen.

Jack Foley was a distributor at Columbia and he says the megaplex was a Trojan horse for slipping strange, subversive movies into unsuspecting suburbs across America. If the latest teen movie was sold out, kids might end up seeing something like Being John Malkovich.  And Being John Malkovich was not an outlier. The year it was released— 1999 —was a year that many people believe was one of the best movie years ever. Not only did all these great movies get made, but they were able to find an audience in Megaplexes across the country.

But this mini golden age of interesting, unusual, original films didn’t last all that long. The megaplex building craze had been so fast and furious that by the early 2000s there were way too many theaters. As the theater bubble began to pop, the creative one did too. For a while, booming DVD sales provided another revenue stream for oddball movies with a niche audience, but as DVDs disappeared later in the 2000s, the major studios leaned more and more on their big, franchise blockbusters.

By the mid-2000s, the movies were becoming a “first weekend” business. Studios tried to break blockbusters wide, opening on as many screens as possible, and theater owners realized instead of putting a different movie on every screen, they could give the blockbusters multiple screens with a new showtime every 20 minutes. As blockbusters took up more and more screens, smaller movies got squeezed out."

[mysticdragon3md3]

Some of my favorite Scott McCloud stuff to listen to:

Scott McCloud’s incomparable “Understanding Comics”.

I swear you can open this book to any page and it’s amazing.

(ps it’s actually a digital image of a printed copy of a drawing of a painting of a pipe)

[thoughtportal]

Every fall, a vacant Toronto storefront is possessed by Spirit Halloween, the pop-up shop haunting 1,500 empty spaces across North America. What does this seasonal invasion say about the retail apocalypse? And why are people so drawn to its eerie aisles? Explore the spooky rise of Spirit Halloween—where the scares are temporary, but the obsession is real. Spirit Halloween (https://99percentinvisible.org/?p=42850)

[evanfordebarden]

for any fans of Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, i am putting up a new comedy show in NYC next week called The Power Joker. it's a "late night" talk show hosted my RM himself. the theme of the show is tolls and we've got a congestion pricing expert joining us, Charles Komanoff, along with the hosts of The Climate Denier's Playbook, Rollie Williams and Nicole Conlan. Plus a bunch of other great comedians and music from Zenizen. it's in NY, but also available to stream.

Sunday, Nov 3, 5pm

Caveat, 21A Clinton St

[flipjack]

Gillian kayaking in LA!

[eccentric-ocean]

Situated right near downtown Mumbai, India is an area of about 55 acres of dense, overgrown forest. In one of the most populous cities in the world, this is a place where peacocks roam freely — a space out of time. This forest is protected by a religious community. It has survived in a relatively undeveloped state in the middle of this gargantuan city. Importantly, it’s also home to an ancient tradition that’s in crisis — one that is central to the lives (and deaths) of a particular population.

There’s a certain point in this forest beyond which almost no one can step — only special caretakers of these grounds can go any further. They go by many names: khandia, nassassalar, pallbearer, corpse bearer. Their work here is holy.

[bookgeekgrrl]

My media this week (22-28 Oct 2023)

📚 STUFF I READ 📚

🙂 The Golden Spoon (Jessa Maxwell, author; full voice cast narration) - a perfectly cromulent book: totally predictable to anyone who's read more than 1 mystery but still entertaining in both characters and plot. Gerald, my autistic king, you were definitely my fave. [I did like the idea of having a different voice narrator for each character, since the chapter POVs switch, but the narrator for Stella sounded like the Tiktok automated voice about 90% of the time. I could tell I was going to get annoyed with that & with the way audio draws things out when I can read text so much faster and it became clear the plot was going to be so predictable, so I switched over to reading text ~35%.]

🙂 The Sleeping Beauty Curse (who_la_hoop) - 152K, drarry, accidental soulbond

😍 i come back to the place you are (pizzabones) - 211K, steddie canon-divergent post s4, extremely satisfying slow burn, loved the dual POV structure with eddie in a coma for the first 10 months the fic covers

💖💖 +79K of shorter fic so shout out to these I really loved 💖💖

soldier keep on marching on (waiting on that morning sun) (songofswiftsunrise) - LOTR: gen, 4k - lovely 'Boromir Lives' AU, inspired by emily martin's incredible art

Pursued by Bear (Zenaidamacrouras1) - MCU: shrunkyclunks, 19K - reread, forever fave, inspired by that tweet about the UFC & Shakespeare conventions occurring in the same hotel

A Tricky Bit of Spellwork (AidaRonan) - OFMD: gen, 1K - legit the only way I'll accept Izzy not being dead is this

Ready for Love (idiopathicsmile) - Singin' in the Rain: Cosmo/Don/Kathy, 13K - the Singin' in the Rain OT3 fic I didn't know I needed

📺 STUFF I WATCHED 📺

Mock The Week - s21, e2

The Graham Norton Show - s31, e3 (Laura Linney, Dawn French, London Hughes and Adrian Edmondson)

Taskmaster - s16, e5

QI - series J, ep 12; series T, ep 1-2, 4

Shakespeare & Hathaway - s1, e1

Murdoch Mysteries - s15, e18-24; s16, e1-5

Dirty Laundry - s3, e4

D20: Burrow's End - "Last Bast" (s20, e4)

D20: Adventuring Party - "The Bast of Us" (s15, e4)

Our Flag Means Death - s2, e8

🎧 PODCASTS 🎧

⭐ Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Oil and Blood: The Osage Murders

Shedunnit - Spooky Sleuthing

Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals - Teaser 11: Shirley Jackson

⭐ Decoder Ring - The Fast Decline of the Slow Dance

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame

⭐ Twenty Thousand Hertz+ - Auto-Tone

⭐ Song Exploder - Kesha "Eat The Acid"

⭐ Hit Parade - This Ain’t No Party?! Edition

Re: Dracula - October 24: Not Yet Reported

Into It - Britney Was Always Trying to Tell Us Who She Was

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Venturing Into the Twilight Zone with Susan Casey

Pop Culture Happy Hour - Frasier

Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals - Teaser 12: Bram Stoker

Ed Zitron's 15 Minutes In Hell - Episode 12 - Kari Byron

Simply Reflecting - Are We Back?

Re: Dracula - October 25: To His Doom

Vibe Check - I Put A Spell On You

Shedunnit - Bonus: A Haunting in Venice Review

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Great Plains Dinosaur Museum

⭐ Decoder Ring - When Art Pranksters Invaded Melrose Place

Switched on Pop - Chartbreakers: Mitski tops the TikTok chart

⭐ Today, Explained - Why does the US always side with Israel?

Ologies with Alie Ward - Teratology (MONSTERS) with W. Scott Poole

Re: Dracula - October 26: Continue Our Watching

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - The Art of the Heist with Noah Charney

99% Invisible #557 - Model Village

Off Menu - Ep 211: Steve Coogan

Into It - We Will Never Recover From What Justin Did to Britney or: the End of 'Into It'

Dear Prudence - I’m Making Bitchy Comments to A Dog! Help!

What Next: TBD - Self-Driving Cars Crash Into Reality

Pop Culture Happy Hour - Naked Attraction And What's Making Us Happy

Endless Thread - Endless Dread: Campfire Chills

Re: Dracula - October 28: Awful Straits

Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Killers of the Flower Moon: Osage Chief Jim Gray In Conversation

Overinvested - Ep. 287: The Exorcist

Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! - Bernie Taupin

Hit Parade - The Bridge: Down at the Rock n’ Roll Club

🎶 MUSIC 🎶

Land (1975-2002) [Patti Smith] {2002}

Presenting Talking Heads

Presenting Blondie

Mania [Ramones] {1988}

Nightmare City Punk