#The Lightning Bottler

[thelightningbottler]

Those Within The Manuscript - out now Listen now wherever you find your podcasts

[alegocarmadein]

team, especially my kane and feels enjoyers, you HAVE to listen to the lightning bottler.

It's a podcast of original spoken poetry by oliver morris, it has some of my favorite poems of all time *cough* boltz 3 - dreams: Rags *cough cough*

but there's a beautiful ost, and amazing voice actors, many of whom you'll recognize from kaf, and the way it's put together is truly wonderful.

I cannot sing its praises enough.

like IM NOT A POETRY PERSON (mild lie) but this shit is straight up magical how well it flows into your ears. And it's like....interesting poetry. Like *really* interesting poetry. I mean, one of my favorites is about mulchin' boys, that alone should have your attention.

It ALSO has Night Life on it, and jesus fuck, I'm going to have to make another post on night life alone because AHHGHH

anyway. Listen to it?

The most recent episode is Where the Wild Things Roam which is a tale for cats, by cats (in the context of the narrative)

please....i beg you people. You listen to so much garbage in search for good podcasts and here I am TELLING you about a golden one and you're not even listening to it yet!

i need people to talk to about it please

[tincanaudio]

3 from the Podcast Creator Ask Game

'What are some audio dramas that inspire you? Both in general and for your podcast.'

There are a couple of show-specific inspirations that I'll talk about first and then I'll go a bit more general.

For The Tower I was massively inspired by The Far Meridian, I first heard it back in 2017 and it was first time I'd heard a podcast be so quiet, it made something click inside my brain for making things.

The Dungeon Economic Model took a lot of cues from Quid Pro Euro. The idea had been in development for a while and I remember being furious when it first came out as my reaction was 'that's what we were going to do!' but it also showed me that this kind of frenetic public information style audio comedy could work as a series.

On a more general note: I'm really interested in shows that fuse audio drama with something else.

Chain of Being has become this delightful blend of sci-fi drama and noise music.

Soul Operator takes solo TTRPGs and fuses them with audio drama. (a concept I love and experimented with with Anamnesis).

The Lightning Bottler is a beautiful mix of poetry, wit and jazz music.

Between Heartbeats is a gripping urban fantasy that incorporates meditative practices into it's narrative and scripting.

There are other interesting shows that I'm enjoying and taking inspiration from for projects that are still incubating. I'm only just catching up to Me & AU which is a delightful listen, Paddleboat is a brilliant, completely minimalist microfiction series, and I love the freewheeling approach to Breaker Whiskey.

That was a lot, thank you for the question!

[geekeryisafoot]

Oliver Morris has the insane and unique skill of making things sound adlibed and casual and chill with zero of the draw backs of adlibbing. It's gives the vibe of a dude just having fun bullshitting into a mic except all the bullshit is perfectly curated. It's the vocal equivalent of sitting in the living room playing an fps while your roomate idly plays Wonderwall flawlessly.

Which is all to say, I am marveling at the fact that the ad reads on the Lightning Bottler are fun to hear even though it's the same words every other podcaster in the history of podcasts have said, but they're entertaining based purely on vocal cadence and shit. How the hell do you pull that off as an actor?

[lucifer-kane]

Listen to Night Life for sappic vampire hunter/vampire

[thelightningbottler]

The lightning bottler is an experimental anthology series that mixes poetry, prose and sound design into odd little stories.

There’s the lightning bottle: an abstract hunt for meaning an slight

Towns: a meditation on the places we live, with guest writer Dave Pickering

Human Resources: they be mulching boys.

Rainshod: a very wet episode, following folk eve travel through the rain,

Night life: sapphic vampire dramady starring Beth Eyre (Wooden Overcoats) vmùMare de Bruin (The silt verses), Karim Kronfli (Magnus Archives) Graham Rowett (th no sleep podcast) and Conrad Miszuk as the mayor(Kakos Infustries)

Then there’s a set of poetrykThen there a where the wind roam: that follow the adventure of a cat💪 and a fox 🦊 🐱.

Share and enjoy this mad pod.

Oli

xxx

Ok folks, we're going to try this out and see how it goes!

It's midday UTC and it's

✨Fiction podcast self-promo Saturday!✨

Reblog this post with your audio fiction related self-promotion, or send me an ask, and I'll do my best to reblog every one I see!

[sylvestris123]

How Aziraphale and Crowley deal with stress

[Sorry, no gifs, this is my first Tumblr post and I don't know how to drive it yet]

There are big differences in the ways that Crowley and Aziraphale deal with unwanted feelings and stressful situations. They have both witnessed and sometimes had to participate in a number of horrible and traumatic situations over the millennia, and they’ve both had to develop coping mechanisms so as not to end up suffering the occult/ethereal equivalent of PTSD.

(N.B. these are not necessarily healthy coping mechanisms, though).

Crowley (to me) is a bottler. He experiences big emotions and then shuts them away deep inside.

(It’s the equivalent of when you find that you have visitors imminent and you haven’t tidied up the house. Sweep everything into a cupboard and shut the door on it. All clear, nothing to see here).

We see this most heartbreakingly in the final 15 of S2E6 when, having poured out his heart to Aziraphale and not got through, he puts his sunglasses back on and speaks in a totally different, flat calm tone.

This method of managing big feelings doesn’t always work. Sometimes the cupboard door gives way and spills everything out. Then you get shouting or thunderbolts and lightning in the street. Aziraphale gets to see it quite a lot (probably because he’s frequently the cause or catalyst), and then he gets slammed against a wall or a Crowley right up in his face. Judging by his reaction when this happens in both S1 and S2, the times we see it are not the only ones, as he’s singularly not bothered by it.

Aziraphale is an avoider. His coping mechanisms are more akin to tiptoeing across a minefield. There are warning signs (“Danger”; “Here be dragons”; Keep out”) and we just Don’t Go There.

(In the house metaphor this would be like there being whole areas of the house that are off limits).

What this means for Aziraphale is that there are great swathes of subjects that he can’t think properly about, and he ends up circling around in smaller and smaller regions of his own head.

When this goes wrong I think that he suffers quite an existential crisis (going back to the increasingly overworked house metaphor, it would be akin to going in to a room and thinking “What is this place? Where am I? I don’t recognise any of this…”). We see this in S2E2 (A companion to Owls) when he believes that he must now be a demon having lied to the other angels.

In the whole of Season 2 they are both pretty stressed (from even before the Jim situation). But we only see it indirectly, with Crowley being on a very short fuse and Aziraphale retreating more and more into a fantasy world.

[justforbooks]

Morgan Spurlock

American film-maker best known for his acclaimed 2004 documentary Super Size Me

Few film-makers can say that their work has made a change to the real world, but Morgan Spurlock had a stronger claim than most. His 2004 documentary Super Size Me, an exposé of how the fast food industry was fuelling America’s obesity epidemic, appeared to have direct repercussions for the world’s largest fast food chain, McDonald’s.

Shortly before the film came out in May that year, the company introduced its Go Active! menu, which included salad items; six weeks after its release, the company abolished its supersize portions entirely.

McDonald’s claimed these menu changes were a coincidence. But the director, who has died aged 53 of complications from cancer, struck a timely blow at the business when awareness about fast food’s corrosive role in public health was on the rise.

Super Size Me’s high-concept premise – eating three McDonald’s meals for 30 days straight – was key to conveying Spurlock’s message. With the director gaining 11kg, plumping out his body fat from 11% to 18% and inflicting heart palpitations, impotence and depression on himself, his gonzo approach put him at the forefront of the early noughties boom in cinematic documentaries instigated by Michael Moore. “There’s real power in a documentary,”Spurlock later said.

Doubts later emerged about Spurlock’s experiment in bodily attrition, after he refused to release his diet logs from the period; and then when it later emerged that he was an alcoholic who had also imbibed during the shoot.

An inveterate attention-seeker and twinkly-eyed showman, he was not going to let these details affect either the purity of Super Size Me’s marketing line, or his emerging career as a documentary star; a budding Moore for the Jackass generation. He would consistently target totems of modern capitalism and consumerism, though none of his subsequent works had the same kind of influence as his 2004 lightning-bottler.

Spurlock was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and grew up in Beckley in the Methodist household of his auto-repair shop-owning father Ben and mother Phyllis, an English teacher and high-school counsellor. Though his parents later divorced, he credited his mother in particular with instilling in him a sense of activism: “She was one of those people who speak up when she didn’t agree with things. She was a collector of people too: if you had the ability to help people, you should,” he told the International Documentary Association.

A childhood fan of British humour such as Fawlty Towers and Monty Python, he was already exercising his entertainer’s streak doing “funny walks” around the house aged six or seven.

Rejected five times by University of Southern California’s film school, he graduated from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 1993. “I wanted to be Spielberg. I wanted to write and direct scripted movies,” Spurlock told Interview magazine. He originally showed promise in this direction, winning an award for his stage play The Phoenix at the New York international fringe festival in 1999.

After stints as a personal assistant on Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway and Luc Besson’s Leon (both 1994), Spurlock first stepped in front of camera as a promotional spokesman for Sony Electronics. But his breakthrough came though hitching himself to the reality TV bandwagon with the self-created internet webcast, and, later (in 2002), MTV show, I Bet You Will. As one of the presenting team, Spurlock goaded members of the public into humiliating themselves for money – with stunts such as being “wedgied” or eating a worm burrito.

Super Size Me grossed $22m on a $65,000 budget, making it one of the most profitable documentaries of all time. Spurlock believed his body never fully recovered – though he lost the weight thanks to a special diet concocted by his then girlfriend, the vegan chef Alex Jamieson (the pair married and had a son, Laken, in 2006, before divorcing in 2011; Spurlock had been previously married to Priscilla Somer between 1996 and 2003).

He also later expressed doubts about the longer-term impact of Super Size Me on fast food corporations, later reflecting: “People say to me, ‘So has the food gotten healthier?’ And I say, ‘Well, the marketing sure has.’”

Spurlock could not skewer the zeitgeist again to create a second “doc-buster”, despite tilting at big-hitter topics such as terrorism (in 2008’s Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?) and product-placement and advertising (POM Wonderful Presents: the Greatest Movie Ever Sold in 2011). With his trademark handlebar moustache, he settled into a reliably affable front-of-camera presence nosing around socio-cultural issues and foibles – sometimes fatuously.

In total, he directed and produced nearly 70 films and series, including a One Direction hagiography in 2013 and a Super Size Me sequel in 2017. But he retained keen business sense and marketing nous throughout this prolific output. “He taught us that we have to be chief executive artists,” his fellow documentary-maker Ondi Timoner told Variety.

Towards the end of Spurlock’s life, his career was on hold after he confessed in a 2017 blogpost to sexually abusive behaviour, including an allegation of rape while at college and paying off a production assistant he had harassed. “I have been unfaithful to every wife and girlfriend I have ever had,” he also wrote, explaining he had been sexually abused in his youth. He divulged all this possibly pre-emptively in anticipation of future accusations in the up swell of the #MeToo movement.

Making himself the focus of the story was true to his modus operandi, and his professed desire for self-improvement could indeed have made a fascinating documentary.

But the mea culpa proved an effective self-cancellation, with him resigning from the production company, Warrior Poets, he had founded in 2004 and being sued by Turner Entertainment Networks for an aborted project.

He divorced his third wife, the producer Sara Bernstein – with whom he had a second son – in 2024. His final documentary credit was for a mockumentary creating a fake history around the classic 1992 Simpsons episode Homer at the Bat.

Spurlock is survived by his children, Laken and Kallen, by his parents and his brothers, Craig and Barry.

🔔 Morgan Spurlock, director and producer, born 7 November 1970; died 23 May 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[uhode]

been listening to the lightning bottler again it’s spectacular i don’t know how i’ll cope when i finish it it’s the exact type of media that scratches the itch

[seaweedsawyou]

Vampire hunter BETH EYRE and vampire MEABH DE BRUN????? How were girl likers ever supposed to survive that????

Everyone listen to Night Life on The Lightning Bottler podcast

[thelightningbottler]

New LB - Available on Patreon and Apollo, available everywhere on October 14th

[alegocarmadein]

I'm sitting here carmalizing onions and boiling eggs for my salad and just....thinkin about the most recent lightning bottler.

It didn't strike me as a favorite the first time I listened to it, but on my second listen, it's really sticking with me

there's just something about Richard being writers block in an amusing but very real way and the narrator being dedicated to their craft and determined to write this story (which is inside a story) and I have been really struck by it all.

The description of the ritual at the end was so eloquently done in an almost memerizing way. My first listen I sat in my car. Listened to that scene. And then rewound it once. And then rewound it another time.

Like it FELT so very...not real, but I think vivid would be a good word for it. The image of the black ink and richard and emily rushing in afterwards was so very good.

damn. I really like the lightning bottler. Someone else listen to it so i can ramble about it please.

[tincanaudio]

7. What’s your favourite piece of music from any show?

Oooh I'm going to cheat and pick 2:

Shatter from In Strange Woods, gives me chills every time I listen to it. Podcast musicals don't really work for me but this series was the exception, and this song in particular was the point I realised this was something truly special.

The title music for Rogue Runners, it goes hard.

Bonus! (I cannot be contained apparently) all the music from The Lightning Bottler, a beautiful synthesis of poetry and music

[samuel-laurence-art]

Godot: I love you

Karlos: I love you too, my sweet. Until time runs out.

[geekeryisafoot]

Update: I would have 3 nickles

If I had a nickel for every story featuring a mysterious amnesiac maybe evil brain demon who forcibly takes up residence in the main character's head, grows attached to them, and proceeds to help them through their upcoming trials and tribulations, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice in a row

[kaneandfeels]

is it right to assume some people from kane and feels will be working on Nightlife?

Correct! The Lightning Bottler is made by Oliver Morris (the voice of Feels) occasionally features Jack Fitzpatrick (The Voice of Kane) as well as other members of the Kane and Feels team such as Jude Hodgson Hann, Greta Clarkson, Dave Pickering, George Offori-Addo, Conrad Miszuk lend their voices.

It's also recently been introduced into the Skadi's Symphony Productions family, previously being a solo project by Oliver Morris