#can we go back to one episode per week PLEASE

[legendaryrooftopscene]

hey why are we doing this. why are we releasing 2-3 episodes of a new show at once? why are we doing back-to-back release days? why are we going so fucking fast.

[stvrnioloslvt]

the estes method - Matt Sturniolo

bf!matt × gf!reader

PART TWO HERE

disclaimer: the following content might not be suitable for everyone. please, read the triggers list before reading this story. also, english is not my first language, but i hope you enjoy it nevertheless!

triggers: ghosts, shadow figures, the estes method, kinda scary? (not a lot though, i'm the first scaredy cat out there)

inspired by the trailer of this week's episode of hell week. and yes, sam and colby make an appearance in the story. enjoy!

「 ★ ★ ★ 」

i knew it was a bad idea. i mean, as much as i loved haunted places and acting like a ghosthunter, i knew it had complications that i was not prepared for.

but when the triplets were invited by sam and colby for their new episode of hell week they had no problem in tagging me along. and, frankly speaking, i was excited. the last time i filmed with them nothing much had happened, so i was curious to discover what would happen this time. however, nothing could have prepared me for what awaited ahead of me.

1:30 a.m.

"guys, can i do the estes method?"

"you really love that method, don't you?" the cam that sam was holding went straight to my face, startling me. i chuckled as colby gave me the ok to perform it.

"by the way, am i the only one that has been seeing things since i stepped foot in this place?"

five heads turned towards me, eyes wide open.

"what did you just say?" asked nick, turning pale.

"like, shadows that aren't ours moving on the walls, figures running from one room to another...is it only me?" at that point i felt like i was going crazy: the boys didn't have that much of a different reaction, and the camera was still in my face.

"so basically what you're saying is that you have been seeing things for over an hour and you haven't said anything?" sam and colby exchanged knowing stares, probably making a mental annotation to check the footage to see if they caught anything.

"i mean, even when i saw those shadow figures right in front of you, you didn't say anything, so i thought that i was hallucinating. but like...now it's worse" i ended the sentence with a whisper, as the camera panned to the triplets' faces.

"are they touching you? talking?" at this point chris just went back and forth, watching out in case he missed something.

"no, nothing, just circling us...or me. i'm not sure. hey, do you think it might be because i drew like tons of protective sigils on me?"

"YOU WHAT?" screamed sam and colby. i stumbled back, not expecting such a strong reaction.

"yeah, i figured that it could have been dangerous to come here without some sort of protection. i drew them on the triplets too, one per each, but no one is seeing what i am seeing. do you think that they're messing with me because they cannot touch me or whatsoever?"

"could be. messing with your mind instead of directly attacking you on a physical level is definitely an option. just...let us know if something happens, ok?"

i nodded. and, as we moved through the building, i prayed to whatever existed above us to keep us safe.

i turned towards matt, who was looking at me with a worried gaze.

"baby, are you sure you are ok? we can step outside if you need to"

i smiled and tiptoed to kiss him on the cheek. our hands brushed together as matt grabbed it to keep me close to him.

"eww disgusting"

"fuck off, nick"

"you too, bitch"

2:17 a.m.

"ok guys, now that the triplets have done the estes method it is y/n's turn" as colby spoke to the camera, matt put the blindfold on my eyes. he bent down to whisper in my ear a shy "i love you", then he put the headphones around my neck.

"y/n, are you ready?"

there was something heavy in the air. something wrong, something scary. i could feel the ways the boys were tensing up, anticipating something, anything. i felt my heart beating faster, my hands cold and sweaty as i saw pitch black in front of me.

with a raspy voice i replied to sam "yeah, i'm ready."

and so it begun.

the estes method

"chris is sitting next to you. if anything happens, tap on his leg"

i took a big breath in as the headphones fell snugly on my ears.

immediately i was hit with a multitude of noises: radio interferences, tv static noise, every once in a while i caught on the voice of a woman. she sounded like she was hurting.

"one"

the thing i hated the most about this method was that from the moment in which the headphones started blasting sounds it was as if you were alone in a parallel world. no matter how hard i squinted my eyes, or how much i tried to block out those noises, i just couldn't see or hear the people that were all around me.

"no"

"pain"

"hurt"

that voice, that woman...she was scared for her life. every time she spoke i could hear her whimper, almost crying.

"guys i think it is a woman speaking and she sounds like she is in pain. i don't know if it is related to what you've been asking but i thought you would want to know it"

the noise in my ears started getting stronger, higher. i put my head in my hands that were resting on my knees, then gripped the headphones so i could hear the woman better. there was something sinister about the new noise, it seemed like it was trying to cancel out the spirit in pain.

the best way i could describe it is as if a war had started and none of the two opponents could prevail on the other. i felt my head aching in an attempt to just focus on something, anything. but as soon as i tried to do so, the noises would get even stronger, leaving me panting as if i just ran a marathon. i felt someone's hand grab my thigh and shake it hard enough for me to feel it. somebody else tried to take the headphones out of my grip, but i held them in place.

finally, i managed to hear something.

"help!" screamed the woman.

and as soon as that word left my mouth, all the noise stopped, except for the tv static noise. my breath slowed down, and i loosened up the grip on the headphones. just as i was about to ask the boys if they unplugged the device, a growling, low voice screamed in my ears "go away!"

i screamed, terrified, as i ripped the headphones away from my ears and fell on the ground in front of me. i remember calling out matt's name, and he rushed to take me in his embrace as i cried terrified of what just happened.

chaos ensured: the boys scrumbled all around me to understand what i heard, but as soon as they did that colby called out a figure standing on the doorway.

"let's go outside, we can't stay here anymore!" someone screamed, and just like that matt picked me up bridal style and ran out with the others.

"nick, open the fucking car door so i can place her inside"

"on it"

the car

"baby, are you okay?"

"fuck, she's terrified. y/n. y/n! nod if you can hear us"

i nodded. just lightly, but enough for them to notice.

"baby, can you tell us what happened? what did you hear?"

i pulled matt inside the car so he could hold me while i tried to explain in the best way possible everything without being hindered by the fear that was running through my veins.

"that's crazy. guys, i've never seen anything like that before" said colby.

"for sure. it seemed like she was in a trance. y/n, did you feel us try to take those headphones off of you ears? you had a death grip on them, seriously"

"yeah, i felt it" i whispered, still shaking in matt's embrace. the poor boy could do nothing but hold me and caress my hair in hopes that it might help me to cool down.

"there was like...noise. a lot. at first i heard the woman speaking, then something else came up and started to try cancel out the woman. the last thing she said was help, and then..."

"and then what, baby?"

"and then there was silence. no noise at all, but i still couldn't hear you guys. i was going to ask if you had unplugged the headphones but..."

was i shaking again?

chills ran down my spine at the memory of that awful, awful voice.

"c'mon baby you can do it. say it"

"all of a sudden something growled in my ear. i don't even know how to explain it, it seemed like it didn't come from the headphones. he growled go away but i heard it so fucking clearly and strong that it felt like a scream right in my ears. i'm so sorry, i didn't want to scare you, i swear"

a heavy silence doomed upon us as the boys exchanged worried looks. matt held me tighter, in an attempt to protect me from my own memories.

"we believe you, y/n, we're just shocked that this happened...have we ever lived something like this before, sam?"

"no, never. i had chills, that was fucking terrifying"

"guys i think we should wrap it up here and go home"

"yeah. matt, do you want me to drive you guys home? so you can stay in the back with y/n"

"yes, please. let's go, i really don't want to spend another second in this place."

「 ★ ★ ★ 」

would you guys like a part 2? just pure fluff, matt taking care of y/n. let me know in the comments <3

all pictures were taken from pinterest. credits to the owners!

[adventures-in-the-mad-forest]

Voice Acting Volunteer Info

Taglist: @canvas-the-florist @awkwardqueercreature @bananaconda33 @prince-rowan-of-the-forest @bluebellieart

@dewberrybramble @strange-destinations @thewickedcompanion @duck-in-a-spaceship @kitkat4406

@general-kalani @astrowillscreamintothevoid

Kofi blog post (All the same information is located under the read more).

Please ensure that you read and understand this before signing up! If you have any questions, please ask!

Summary of the Podcast:

It's about Glacie, and their coworkers, who work at the Meeting Point. The Meeting Point is a restaurant/shop located near the Mad Forest. Coming back from a pretty long break, due to their own unreality problems popping up, Glacie is warned that the forest grows hungry. After some incidents, Glacie's hallucinations start getting real bad, and they eventually venture forth into the Mad Forest.

Content Warnings of this Podcast Include (but are not limited to):

Unreality

Ableism

Pain

Blood

Implied Death

Podcast Genre

Modern-ish (emphasis on the ish) fantasy horror/action

Some things to note:

This is Volunteer Work, while I will be doing my best to pay you all, I can not promise that this will happen.

You Must Be 18+ to Volunteer to Voice Act (Mainly due to the workload)

You do not need prior Voice Acting work to throw your hat in the ring! That is not going to be a factor in the form or a question I ask in the Zoom meeting

The form that goes out today is to schedule a Zoom Meeting where you’ll do your audition then on the characters that you selected that you want to attempt to Voice Act. You can try for multiple characters, and say how many you’d like to Voice Act for (maximum of 3 characters). Fill out the days and times you are generally available. We can schedule a specific date based on schedules two weeks before the meeting. (It is important to note that the form times are in MST, as I live in Arizona in the United States. That is UTC -7. Please convert to your time zone before saying you’re available.)

I’m going to state this again so it’s not too buried: Zoom meetings are when auditions will be held, I’ll be starting to schedule those in November and December, at least 2 weeks ahead of when I first email you!

One social media is required for me to credit you in the podcast officially! You may have up to three, (this is mainly so that intros aren’t too long). Yes, I will be annoying about this.

You may only work up to 20 hours per week on Voice Acting. Including practice and breaks of less than 1 hour. This is to ensure that, if money is made, I can pay you back for your time fairly without you overworking yourself for essentially no pay if no money is made from this.

Speaking of Making Money off of this

How am I attempting to do that? You’d be right to ask. Currently, early versions of the unedited script are available for early viewing for $6 each, and a bundle is available for $35 total. Only the first episode is free in the unedited version so that those who are unsure of their interest can find out if it’s their cup of tea or not! These are also currently on a 25% sale, as I'm about to get the edited script going up for early access within the next few days.

With the edited version, the first two episodes will be free for early viewing (since most of the main characters show up by that episode it will give a better idea of who they are), however the rest will be priced at $12/episode with a bundle available for $60.

95% of those funds will be going to back paying volunteers for this project. 5% will be for extra fees that may arise as we get further into the process of recording, editing, and uploading. (This is after Stripe takes out their fee).

There are also memberships available for anyone interested in supporting the podcast!

I also sell my own art on the side and will be opening up commissions! For these I will be putting 75% of the funds into payment, with the other 25% (after the stripe fee) going towards making more art.

Not only that, but after Voice Actors are picked, I will start building a kickstarter for the project that is planned to release in May or June. This is to give us time to record 1 or 2 episodes to share bloopers and behind the scenes with backers. As the max amount of time a kickstarter can be up is 60 days, I will be doing a lot of advertising for it when the time comes on different blogs. While I would recommend you share the kickstarter on different social medias too, it’s not a requirement. And it’s something I will be discussing in more depth with the podcast team.

How Will I Pay You if the podcast makes money?

If you have a kofi, I will be leaving some generous tips! If not, any app that takes card as payment (without me having to make an account) will do! I am not doing checks, as this is open to volunteers from around the world who speak english, and even if it was just the US, I’m scared that they might get lost in the mail!

If you don’t have a place I can pay you with a debit card, please be willing to find a way to do that before you fill out the form.

I am willing to teach you how to set up a kofi if you need help with that!

You will be paid back at $15USD/hour if this podcast starts making money

Again, this is not guaranteed! Voice Acting will be considered Volunteer Work unless money is made!

Now let’s get into the Available Characters for Season 1

Main Characters: 

Cameron - She/her, Cis, lesbian, works at the Meeting Point. Cameron is wonderful, she’s independent, but terrified of being alone. She’s sassy and protective, but she’d do anything for her friends.

Shaun - He/him Cishet, coolest straight guy you’ll ever meet. Gives everyone nicknames, even if they don’t stick. Doesn’t like being serious without room for whimsy, he enjoys having fun. Honestly, he’s just a silly guy.

Dwayne - He/him, transmasc, pansexual, aromantic. Single dad of two (Laila and Deon). Is doing his best to provide for his kids and give them the best life they can possibly have. Ms. Lemona is his babysitter, both of them feeling as if they owe the other for the help they provide each other.Priority for this role is for someone who is black and transmasc

Gerry - He/him, Cis, aroace. 19 years old, youngest member of the Meeting Point. He’s just been hired to work there and is finding his place, is closest with Dwayne at this point. Has a habit of calling Glacie boss for some reason (no he is not being forced to.)Priority for this role is for someone who is brown.

Side Characters:

Delmena - She/her, Cishet. Widow. She’s an older woman who uses a wheelchair. While she’s outfitted her house to be more accessible to her, the outside world isn’t as put together. This is why she hired Carmelita, a helper who lives with her but is mainly asked to do anything that requires going outside and dealing with jutting sidewalk, no pavement, things like that. While Delmena will go with her most times, sometimes she enjoys staying at home and doing things herself.

Carmelita - She/her, Transfem, Lesbian. Works as Delmena’s stay at home caregiver, while Delmena doesn’t need her most of the time, both of them provide wonderful company for each other. She recently (ish) moved to the area, after struggling to find a job in the bigger town of Campeal. Priority for this role is for someone who is Hispanic/Latina and transfem

Haeyl - She/her, Transfem, Straight. Shaun’s dogsitter, pretty mysterious. But she has a right to be. Wonderful to be around, Mellon (the dog) loves her, and she loves dogsitting for Mellon.Priority for this role is for someone who is black and transfem.

Laila - 8 years old, she/her. Dwayne’s daughter, and eldest child. She’s loves to tease her brother, and take his toys as she’s taller than him (she gives them back, she just likes to frustrate her brother). Really interested in dragons and magic, one of which she’s told doesn’t exist; the other one she hasn’t gotten a clear answer on.Priority for this role is someone who is black.

Deon - 6 years old, he/him. Enjoys trains and magnets, and is also interested in magic. Is tired of Laila stealing his toys and keeping them from him. Has a habit of accidentally leaving toys out on the floor, which caused the incident that happened to keep Dwayne from being in the first episode of the season.Priority for this role is for someone who is black.

Ms. Lemona - She/her, transfem, Laila and Deon’s babysitter as Dwayne works at the Meeting Point to provide for them. She enjoys watching these kids, and teaching them new things, even astounding them with the creations she makes. She’s a woodworker, and knows some basics on how to make some more mechanical bits and bobs.Priority for this role is for someone who is black.

Other Characters:

Glacie’s Guide - A hallucination of sorts, not much is known about it, but it claims in the beginning of Season 2 to be there to help Glacie navigate through the forest. (Although whether that is true or not remains to be seen).

Various Background Characters

This includes customers at the Meeting Point as well as, random chatter that is unintelligible in certain parts of the episode.

Audition Information

I have chosen lines for each character that I believe gives a good view of who they are!

See this google doc for those:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19LNLDZgUOYPCCF6i8nH2iQrXe5UXK-S_nJGmqJ-Hzvc/edit?usp=sharing

If you'd like access to the full script before viewing, DM me on tumblr!

Forms open today, and I will begin scheduling auditions as early as Early November/Early December! As auditions happen, I will begin casting in Late December/Early January, because of this, if there’s someone you’d like to play I suggest getting the form in early. I will Not recast a part unless someone drops out so do not ask! As people are cast, I will be editing the form to reflect this.

How does casting work?

I will be attempting to schedule zoom meetings to cast specific characters on specific days. After the last zoom meeting for a character is done, and there are no scheduled zoom meetings for this character for a week, I will contact the person who got the role and give them the link to the discord server with information on what role they got. Then I will be removing said role from the form. This will continue until all roles have been filled.

I will also be contacting those who didn’t get the role to let them know that they didn’t get the role.

I would recommend, trying out as many roles as you’re interested in! While you can be cast for multiple roles, depending on how many people audition, roles will be 1 per person with the exception of background roles.

The various background roles will have between 2-5 people voicing those characters, and due to the amount of lines, only count as 1 extra role!

Joining the discord server is mandatory for Voice Actors! This is because I have things set up to record in the discord server itself.

Any questions? Feel free to ask!

Voice Acting Volunteer Scheduling and Sign Up Form:

[sirenlulls]

get him back! → theburntchip

pairing , theburntchip x youtuber!reader

summary , where, in lieu of yours and chip’s reconnection, fans find out how it happened, and just why you ended things in the first place.

part one (bad idea, right?)

oh, i wanna get him back! 'cause then again, i really miss him, and it makes me real sad

🔴 Y/n L/n Talks On Breakup, Reconnection, The Launch Of Her Brand, & More! FULL POD EP.77 -Saving Grace

join premiere!

LIVE CHAT !

user: stop i’m actually gonna cry ☹️☹️☹️

user: I KNEW THOSE TWITTER B WORDS WERE WRONG I KNEW THEY DIDNT END BADLY

user: that’s so lala land of them

user: “if i ever complained, i’d be the nagging girlfriend” NO BABY 😭😭😭😭

user: never thought i’d say it but i’m glad they broke up bcs if they hadn’t done it then, it would’ve been MESSY messy

user: off topic but can we please talk about how pretty she is :(

user: “if he ever complained about you, i would’ve given him a belting” YES GRACE 👏👏👏

user: WHY DIDNT WE GET Y/N ON HERE SOONER OMGGGGGG I LOVE THIS DUO SM

user: Sending love from Brazil! XX 🇧🇷🇧🇷❤️❤️

user: stop that’s so sad ☹️

user: she’s so real for the anxiety thing

LIVE CHAT !

user: i feel like i’m watching a tv show

user: “i don’t want to lose this again” and when i start sobbing????

user: ok but is the dick game good

user: HE SWIPED UP ON A COSTA TOASTIE ☠️

user: nah he’s down BAD me too but like 😭

user: he def would’ve thrown a temper tantrum if she didn’t respond

user: grace booing is so real i wanted a kissing in the rain screaming ‘i love you’ confession

user: her smile when she said she’s happy now man they’re literally my parents ☹️

user: Love you both X ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

user: ❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹

user: the world is healing

user: NAH MAN SWEAR THATS CHIPS BOICE COMING IN NOW

LIVE CHAT !

user: i’m actually gonna cry i missed them sm ☹️😭

user: the camera switching to her looking at him with heart eyes after calling him a bellend is so funny GET HER ASS 👏

user: chip is the new an*rew t*te 🙏

user: oh how i missed him calling her lady and missus

user: he’s the leader of the sassy man epidemic oh lord

user: OMG I FORGOT WHEN SHE YSED TO GO ON COFFEE DATES WITH HIS MUM

user: leave my girl and her spotify playlists alone

user: this has literally made my year

user: just in time for y/n’s fall vids

[tagged: savinggracepod , gkbarry_ , theburntchip]

❤️ liked by georgeclarkeey, georgebxggs, and 98,992 others

yourusername mum! mum! i made it! i’m on saving grace!!!!!! (and i figured i deserved at least one pic of chip from the launch x)

user that episode was the funniest thing ever i can’t even i nearly pissed myself when grace pretended to spank u with the paddle 😭😭😭

user mother ur so gorg i’m speechless

user you know the content is gonna slap when y/n l/n is there

user im so obsessed with u pls

user CAL AND CHIP AT THE FUNCTION SIR 👏🙇‍♀️

user best video in youtube history methinks

gkbarry_ loved having you on babe, even if the boss man gatecrashed 🫶❤️

yourusername he doesn’t like feeling left out smh

theburntchip oh alright then

max_balegde ICONIC!!!!!!

user MY ROMAN EMPIRE

user i hope you know that twt is in flames rn

user i gen teared up a bit when you talked about the breakup 🥹

user icons only

[tagged: ynapparel , nellarose , theburntchip]

❤️ liked by landonorris, behzinga and 97,872 others

yourusername self representing by wearing @ ynapparel the past (and every) week 😩🤭 featuring the love of my life & chip ig…

theburntchip wow alright

theburntchip i thought you were a g 😔

yourusername oops sorry babe

theburntchip we’re over smh

yourusername oh no… what a shame ☹️ anyway… hot girl winter!!!!!!

theburntchip the fits are fire though 😮‍💨

yourusername as always x

user EATING SLAYING DEVOURING

user OH MY GODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

user forever obsessed with u

user graduated from cuntingtion university with an phd in slaying

nellarose love you bae x

calfreezy chip looking dashing as per usual

theburntchip aye thank you brotha

nellarose AYYYY LOOKING SEXY 🔥🔥🔥🔥

yourusername ALL YOU BABY 💋💋💋

ynapparel looking good and dressed to kill 😉😇🩷

user face card NEVER declines

lissiemackintosh this barbie is my mother

user ur so real lissie

faithlouisak doll 🤩

alice_hez 😍🔥🖤

user WHATS THE SQUARE ROOT OF 64?????

user angel girl 🤍

centralcee 😮‍💨🔥🔥🔥🔥

user NAHHH HES BRAVE COMMENTING ON THE POST W HER BOYFRIEND

user CENCH GET OUTTA HERE MAN

user SIRENSIRENSIREN Y/N BABY RUN!!!!!

user OH??????

user wait am i missing smth why are we freaking out

user @ user cench has always been lowk flirting with y/n, like she interviewed him at some event last yr and he was being so flirty and obviously she was giving him blank wall back BUT when her and chip broke up he got even WORSE like man was always in her comments tryna chat her up and she entertained it a lil but now the bitch is back and he’s bold

user NAH MAN GTFO WE JUST GOT CHIP BACK IN THE PICTURE WE CANT HAVE U RUINING THAT

theburntchip just posted to their story

[raayllum]

Season 6 Trailer Breakdown

You all know what this is, although a quick note that I won't be drawing much from other teasers or clips released / a "this is what probs happens in each episode" amalgamation may come out later depending on motivation. There are some scenes I left out as 1) we know where those clips are from already (like the water funnelling shadowpaw clip) or they seem self explanatory (Karim and Sol Regem's plotline, etc).

Furthermore — there is one specific screencap with something I noticed that I'd argue is the biggest / most plot relevant spoiler in the trailer; I am enclosing it at the end for posterity. If you want to read the rest of the breakdown but want to avoid a potentially big spoiler, please stop reading after *** . I don't want anyone to be more spoiled than they'd like to be. Okay? Okay.

With that out of the way, let's dig in

First up: Kosmo's monologue overlaid with clips of the Starscraper and some kind of wintery storm. Kosmo is the male Skywing / celestial elf with vitiligo on the left in another shot

Kosmo: I see a thousand stars. A thousand eyes. Worlds one and myriad. All of us nothing, and all of us infinite.

This probably relates to his understanding of Star magic and possibly the arcanum itself. The wintery storm may be something from the past or present up here in the Frozen North, a lightning storm that Avizandum or Zubeia created, or it could even be from Callum pulling lightning down they face the large blue dragon we've seen in a few clips now (Luna Tenebris' "unsuitable" heir) and later on in the trailer.

Then we see Rayla, accompanied by Kosmo and Astrid, overseeing the beginning of Callum's trust fall 'trial' for lack of a better term with the blindfold over his eyes. It's clearly extremely cold and he doesn't seem particularly happy, but... willing participant, I suppose?

We're gonna come back to the staffs in a second, just you wait. To start, I want to affirm that there are multiple shots of this same location being unveiled, and make up the bulk of the Callum / Rayla + Starscraper portion of the trailer, such as these:

We see eight staff-holders, though it's not clear if one is missing. This could mean a 'Startouch' elf for each primal source + two others, or something unrelated to magic at all. There was "eight" singled out in the 5x08 poem ("eight in a line") though this is a circle, not a line.

The reason I highlight this is because 1) I've been confident that Viren's staff contained Star magic or extra power of some kind for years now and it seems that the answer is yes and (bonus points) it's not a quasar diamond, which also helps keep another theory of mine going and 2) we saw in the teaser some of the Viren-Kpp'Ar flashback fight scene, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were partially fighting over Viren taking the staff from Kpp'Ar, period.

Moving on, I'm speculating that the growing blast we see may be Aaravos (or another Startouch elf) being cast down to earth and creating the Sea of the Cast Out, given that Ripples describes it as, "The falling star plummeted, down and down and down, until it struck the breathless world below. With its impact came a long and terrible night: The earth bled! The seas churned! The sun and moon hid for weeks behind the sky’s screaming storm!" This may be what we've seen Aaravos weeping over additionally: not his own banishment per se, but the loss of someone else (Leola?).

the next main 'set piece' of the trailer is the big battle scene in the encroaching Sunfire civil war, and while there was speculation previously from a shot of Aanya and her arrow that she'd joined the fray, we now have confirmation. I am intrigued about what has Ezran being on the battlefield on foot without armour, weapons, or his usual dragon cavalry.

You can even see her in the background here on the stones, seemingly firing off her special flashy arrow in order to help Ezran get away from Karim's forces, which may be why he's caught up in the middle of things without a lot of preparation. This might be related to the closeup shot of her from this trailer with her bow and arrow, but given the nature of the arrow, it could easily be the other closeup shot of her with the fancy unfurling flower gemstone arrow we got in the Teaser.

For more individual shots:

Aaravos still has his chest piece in full and it doesn't seem like he's been expelled from the heavens yet. Looking very pointedly at my "his chest piece is out there somewhere and maybe in the cube as a quasar diamond" theory. I could see this being him on trial or something with the other Startouch elves

Then we have Rayla and some form of Runaan. He has red eyes like a corrupted Banther, but the green is completely base. This Runaan also doesn't have his canonically broken horn (just like Rayla's vision of him and her other parents in 5x01) so I'm willing to bet whatever this is is preying on Rayla's memory of Runaan > the actual Moonshadow elf himself. Could be a nightmare, or even some kind of illusion (maybe Luna's heir's moonstone collar has some messed up illusion stuff?). Rayla also seems to be underwater or in some kind of dark place, though the background for Runaan looks more fittingly like the Silvergrove. I certainly would not be opposed to Callum and Rayla having to face their worst nightmares, or something — stuff like that is always interesting angsty and juicy characterization.

Speaking of nightmares, that would also fit with this screencap of Callum. We know from 6x01 details that he has a nightmare regarding Aaravos, and we also know from people at cons that this screencap was not there. Looking at the scene itself, the deep purple lighting highlights that it's not quite 'real', nor is it necessarily possible due to the background being Finnegrin's office on the Sea Legs, where Callum last did dark magic. I could very easily see this being a dream where Callum is having horrifying visions of himself outside his body, and this is one.

I do find it interesting that, rather than black dark magic slug goop like I first thought on his hand, it's actually blood on his hand, and the changes this indicates of Callum's psyche / fears. Normally when Callum breaks things (primal stone, moon opal necklace, the green slug) it's with his other hand, for starters. But more importantly, I think it's interesting that this nightmare isn't about being flat out possessed, but of being more of a dark mage: the eyes, the corruption, the blood, etc. and how that may lead to Aaravos' will being further enforced over him. It speaks to a recognition of his own agency as well as growing fears of being not just controlled, but corrupted along the way.

Claudia on the beach probably after killing Sir Sparklepuff (hence the blood and corruption) having the worst mental breakdown of her life (which is saying something) so far, either upon realizing she's lost her father anyway, Viren being alive but leaving her, etc.

Then we have Callum the infamous Frozen Ship, now burning. Either he was in there with Rayla and escaped first, leading to him sadly thinking she's gone before she manages to get out on her own and they happily embrace... or he was vibing outside without her (by her request no doubt) and shit's hit the fan. I could see him mourning her and her reappearance is when they finally fully reconcile, and I could also see him running back onto a burning ship for her (or trying at least). Y'know, the way you do.

I am famously always here for Rayllum being desperate as fuck about each other's safety, so I know I'm gonna eat that shit up regardless and it will be Delicious.

Onto the less clear parts of the trailer, in some ways:

We have what seems to be Terry and Claudia presumably at the same place, the Valley of the Graves, back in Katolis, although for what reason is unknown. I could see them maybe coming back to Katolis to the Orphan Queen's grave, for some reason. I could also see the spell Claudia doing (hence the light hair and yellow on the chest) being a release spell for Aaravos — which asks when and how does she get the prison from Callum and co. — or some 'opening up the heavens' spell that'll come close to killing her; it could be something else entirely. It has to be something where Terry seems reluctant to let her go through with it and has probably tried to stop her (yes internal Terry turmoil!! Come back to me) and failed. I've kept meaning to make a post about it, but I could see Claudia post-6x01 come crawling back to Terry at Aaravos' beckoning ("He'll be a useful ally") and Terry realizing Claudia didn't come back to him out of love like he thought, but partially to use him because she's too far gone right now to see it and trying to keep her distance emotionally.

Which asks the question: we all thought this was maybe from the beginning of the season, with Viren or Claudia or something trying to get into Katolis. But what if it's closer to the end?

I posit this order of things for two reasons. The first is that we know in 6x01 Soren leaves to go look for Zubeia with Zym, reunites with Corvus at the Sunfire elves (6x02-ish?), Corvus and Ezran see Karim's forces at one point (the Teaser) with Zym helping Ez escape. We even have a shot of Soren leaving Katolis with Zym in the trailer.

The shot of Soren being bloody is clearly at Katolis on the battlements, so it seems that it has to be after the Sunfire battle has happened, and I doubt Janai and Amaya can win considering Sol Regem having his wings healed by the Sun seed, and it's S6 "everything goes wrong" time.

It could be that the Sunfire battle didn't end well (Karim as king or forces corrupted by Pharos-sleeper agent? Kim'Dael is free?) even with Aanya's help, and people have retreated to regroup in the stronghold that is Katolis... A stronghold that Claudia wants or needs to get to, for whatever reason. Soren would have good reason to look pissed. Maybe the big explosion from earlier on in the trailer is even just Claudia, making her presence known on her way into Katolis for some kind of scare-factor.

And, of course, Claudia could go to Katolis in the first half of the season (6x02—6x05) when bloodied and bruised Soren isn't there, and just Ezran in the rain. There could be some magical power-up, and then Ez has to flee and go to the Sunfire elves, the situation not much better. But this doesn't explain why we see Soren presumably at Katolis and looking as beat up as he does unless it's a shot from very near the end of the season.

And here's where we get to the Big Spoiler, imo, so please click away now if you don't want to see it!

Furthermore... we Know the Sunfire battle is happening near the End of the season (sometime 6x07 onwards) because there's no way Rayllum is leaving the Starscraper any earlier than the end of 6x06... and they're there, along with Astrid, at said battle.

Y'know this big shot of the Sunfire battle? Well, the trio is there in the upper red corner, when you zoom in.

There's Astrid (blue and white), Callum in between flapping his wings, and presumably Rayla with her borrowed wing bracelets from Kosmo (though I suppose it could just be Kosmo himself, but I doubt it). Why they're coming to the battle, I don't know — if Aaravos is out by this point, they might have bigger problems that they need to collect Ezran and co. for, and didn't realize the level of conflict had escalated — or somehow, we get through the Starscraper portion of the story without the prison breaking, though Callum is still presumably possessed (?) — and it is Claudia who releases Aaravos near the end of S6.

That could be possible, especially if Claudia, whose S6 plotline is a total mystery, comes sniffing around the Sunfire side of things and can steal the prison here and... take it back to Katolis because it needs to be? Orphan Queen had Aaravos' chest piece? Idk. But yeah, this is where things get kind of tricky, and if we did go this route I'd wonder why not let Claudia steal the pearl in 5x09 at all, but we'll have to see. It could work! My money is still on Callum possessed or otherwise having a hand in setting Aaravos free, but really anything could happen at this point

Just thirteen days to go!

[waitmyturtles]

I LOVE 4 MINUTES.

I love it! GAAAAAHHH, I love it. While Be On Cloud’s KinnPorsche was so BL-referential, I just love this juicy Dr. Sammon-mystery genre that takes us out of trope-land. Queer murder mysteries, my beloved.

I have no theories, per se, about where I think this show is going, but I am going to jot down some observations for my own posterity and memory. After reading some theories on Twitter (including one that Dr. Sammon herself retweeted), I went back and fast-forwarded through all the episodes so far, so here are my notes (and these VERY WELL may have been repeated in the tag, so I apologize if I’m just pooping what we’re already assuming here).

1) This Twitter account noted that Tonkla saw his cat in episode 1, after what-we-assume-to-be present-day boing with Korn. Tonkla sees this AFTER Korn rushed off after getting off the phone. After this week’s episode, we seem to be informed that said cat had died in the past.

We also know that Tonkla has a habit of lighting up after sex and during times of duress.

There might be more than just tobacco in those cigarettes he’s lighting up, I’m not sure, but we also know he hits the shabu, pipe-wise.

Besides Great being in what I assume to be, and what I call, a fever-state, or better phrased, a cardiac episode, I am assuming that Tonkla is transcending his own lines of reality through drug use.

1a) [(A quick aside: I just wanna say that I will be VERY. CURIOUS. as to how Tonkla’s drug use is positioned alongside his predilections for unprotected sex, and if I think there will be public health commentary in this. Drug use is, of course, generally not recommended by medical professionals, and at the same time, it’s a culturally important element of many facets of queer culture that many physicians who work with LGBTQ+ patients are trained to be aware of; for example, using poppers to ease the process of preparing for intercourse. I don’t know if the show means to indicate that Tonkla, vis à vis being on PrEP and meth at the same time, is an automatically unsafe person…but he also might be a murderer… so yeah, I will be curious about this underlying public health messaging.)]

1b) (Speaking of public health, yo, we needed those Durex bottles in episode 4, YOWCH.) (😬) (ANYWAY.)

2) So, speaking of Great and Tonkla living in their own realities, I also want to posit that Tyme has created his own sense of delirium by literally not sleeping.

Homeboy is on his shifts, he’s working out, he’s solving mysteries, he’s kicking literal ass, he’s investigating and courting Great, he’s following Korn. He’s doing a lot! We haven’t caught him sleeping yet, again, literally.

I wonder if this may be Dr. Sammon commenting on the culture of insanely long shifts for doctors, which impacts their mental and physical well-being. We’ve also separately learned that Tyme is driven by revenge, and by a need to support his grandma and save Nan. But how can he do all of that, if he’s physically depriving himself of the ability to rest? I don’t know if this is going to go anywhere, but I do notice the camera work, whenever Tyme is scrubbing out of a shift, re-centering from a tilt, which makes me wonder about what these shots are telling us about his mental state (and we saw comparable camera work when Tonkla thought he saw Dome).

(I’m also not forgetting that the show shows him stabbed at the very start of the series, and I’m constantly wondering about that.)

3) Finally, I want to offer that Korn, Great, and Tyme are not out. At least for Great and Tyme, does that contribute to a delirium mindset (and maybe even Korn, too) by way of the stress of holding in secrets? (Please note that this linked article is from 2004 and does not have fully updated terminology.)

I don’t know if this theory holds for Great, because a popular theory for him at the start of the series was that he may not have realized he was gay until he met Tyme. I don’t know that I saw that in my very-fast rewatch except for his surprised looks during the stitches moment in the hospital. Great’s comfort with Tyme in the car after the claw machines makes me think he knew more about his sexuality, and his physical separation from his family at the dinner table in episode 1 also makes me wonder if he realized his preferences were always going to separate him from his nuclear family. I’m not sure, but I’m chewing on this.

4) So, where I’m gonna go entering into episode 5 is that there isn’t a centered or accurate “present day” for anyone….mayyyybe except for Korn, who is certainly living his own fever dream of being stuck in a reeeeeeally bad job, but maybe isn’t being subjected to mental delirious psychoses (just, you know, the general stress of hating your work thoroughly). But I could be wrong there, too, because we know that Korn is driven by greed, filial piety, and a desire to take over the family business. So maybe that’s creating a delirium of his own, one that takes him away from his boyfriend for weeks at a time.

4a) (By the way, isn’t it interesting that we are not seeing NC scenes with Korn and Fasai? I know, I know, Be On Cloud does queer/BL content, but. I think it’d be interesting if the show ran the gamut of intimacy. Just a thought.)

Anyway! This show is so good, it’s making me babble. I absolutely love it, and it is the comeback that Bible Wichapas deserves.

[moominvalleysunset]

From the highest peaks of extasy to the deepest depths of despair - what a ride this episode was!

The beginning is where I'll set up camp for the next week. Amazing. Others have said better stuff about it than I ever could.

And the ending. Whoah. The ending is so impactful, because it is so fitting for our pair -- because while we all know that Joke is not the bad guy here, HE doesn't know and confesses to a betrayal that he objectively (at least in my opinion) didn't commit. But who can blame him? His adopted daughter's life is in danger, everything has gone to shit and he is utterly overwhelmed by anguish and his guilt, guilt that he felt even before Toi Ting got hurt so badly. I really feel for him. But I can't blame Jack for his reaction either. He just had to watch an old friend die, was betrayed by someone he trusted innately, now his adopted daughter is in mortal danger and his lover tells him he was working for Boss all along (objectively miscommunication, but Jack doesn't know that). No wonder he snapped. No wonder he yells at Joke to get out of his face forever. There is no room for nuance in his mind. He is not thinking straight (ha!), he is half out of his mind (for a character that is normally so calm and rational, this is a meltdown of catastrophic proportions). Once he calms down and can think and listen again, he will almost certainly immediately realise that his anger at Joke is misplaced and he will regret his harsh words, but of course by then Joke will be gone as per his wish. And that will hurt both of them horribly. (Epic reunion smoochies ahead, fingers crossed, just don't take too long, please!!) I'm guessing someone (my money is either on Hoy or on Arun) will do what Jack did with Jokes father and explain the situation to Jack, and hopefully he will realise that this time HE has to be the one to seek Jokes forgiveness if he wants him back, and not the other way round. Super dramatic high stakes, but oh so in character for the both of them. Thats why it hit so hard. These guys deserve only happiness, for fuck's sake. Now, how do I make time go by faster till next Monday?

[theflyindutchwoman]

SEASON 06 | What we know so far - Chenford Edition

This is merely an attempt to gather all the different spoilers from the past few weeks in one place. Please let me know if I missed anything or got something wrong.

// The Under Siege Storyline . 6.01 - Strike Back : in the aftermath of the assaults in the finale, the team must now try to understand why they were targeted and if there is a bigger plan in place.

// The Time-for-Lucy-to-get-promoted Storyline . 6.01 - Strike Back : Lucy is a bit on edge about taking the detective exam, so she asks to ride with Tim so that her onetime TO can give her a shift-long grilling like in the old days. One encounter with a literal clown might get her rethinking her logic. [x]

. I'm actually wondering if the encounter with a clown could be triggering for either one of them, in light of the recent attacks and the creepy doll masks. . There's a time jump of 6 weeks at some point in the episode : considering that in 5.19, the detective exam was two weeks away, I'm going to assume that this time jump happens towards the middle or the end of the episode (like in 4.01)… Unless of course, this detail has been forgotten / the exam was postponed due to the attacks (unlikely but why not).

// The Wedding Storyline . DANCE + KISS!!

. Shenanigans will happen at some point (might start in 6.01) - from the BTS videos, it appears that Tim will be wounded (doesn't seem to be too bad though)

// Lucy's Storyline . Lucy will be wounded / involved in a shooting that ends up with her staying at the hospital . Tim, Wesley and Sergeant Grey are with her at some point (officer-involved shooting?)

. She will also work alongside Angela to help Tim (not sure if it's related to the previous point or not). On the picture, she is wearing her badge but is out of uniform : she could be there as a detective or as Tim's handler if he's undercover (like in 4.07 and 4.22)… Or maybe something else entirely.

. If Tim is indeed undercover, one that lasts more than one day at that (which seems likely since he appears to be wearing different clothes), it could be interesting to see how Lucy deals with this role reversal.

// Tim's storyline . Per Eric's instagram post, Tim will spend some time out of uniform and without his badge. In light of the photos of him with Angela and Lucy at the Port of Los Angeles, he may be doing some undercover work, one that could be related to a human trafficking case (as suggested by the mattress in the container and the location).

// The LAPD Psychiatrist Storyline . It is unclear if this one relates to Tim and/or Lucy but it could be a very interesting arc for both or either of them.

[eriexplosion]

Here's How Shrimp Trooper Theory Can Still Win

This is as fringe as it gets folks.

I've done my very serious Tech lives essay now it's time for my actual wild theory. Plus @katara-stan-club wanted the shrimp trooper essay and I will take any opportunity to yammer. Please don't take this extremely seriously as it is just something that I'm spinning up for entertainment and is almost certainly not true. (Unless!)

So the opening to Confined is... Odd to me. I've mentioned this in a post before but just to recap, it is definitely the odd man out of the three season starters.

Season one of course we intro with Caleb, who then leads us directly to meet the batch and get our first character appearances, along with convenient introductions. A fun, action packed little scene before things immediately go to hell.

Season two we intro with the batch in the middle of a job, which gives us another fun action scene that shows us how much Omega has grown, as well as the current status of the batch itself.

Season three though? Season three starts us off with a ship going down in a lightning storm and all the stormtroopers inside assumed to be eaten by the giant monsters that lurk in Tantiss' jungles. (Going by Omega's tally marks later in the episode, we're about 20 days post plan 99.) Nothing to do with the batch at all, though we do get a glance at what's in the jungle, and a tiny bit more of Hemlock being a bastard of course.

Now, seemingly, this scene is the set up for episode three, when they make their escape and head for the downed ship.

Except it's completely unnecessary. When they get to the ship, it turns on but it's incapable of flight and the comms are still down and non functioning. The ship they end up taking and using to escape is the ship that came in pursuit of them. The plot would have gone down exactly the same if they had just picked a direction and fled without the downed ship. It's a complete red herring for how they ultimately end up escaping.

So why is it important enough to open the season on if the ship essentially functions as nothing more than a destination point?

Enter Shrimp Trooper Theory.

Going back to the stormtroopers. We have four of them inside the ship, the pilot and three others. We're going to be focusing on our boy on the far right of the second picture.

The pilot speaks before the ship goes down so we can confirm he's a rando. Our fellow in the middle speaks next, identifying himself as TK-343, another rando. The one on the far left talks about wild beasts proving himself, you guessed it, a third rando. But our boy on the far right doesn't talk at all through this whole scene, leaving his identity up in the air.

So we'll take a closer look at him and brighten the scene up a bit.

Now, seeing this guy hobble his way out of the ship, I thought that he looked somewhat familiar. Specifically.

That shitty ass posture. (Forgive the sloppiness of the edit I did this comparison once before and I am not remaking it)

We do not actually see the troopers all get eaten, we cut to the interior of Tantiss before it happens. Theoretically there is nothing stopping this shrimp shaped man from being Tech.

The timeline of shrimp trooper theory:

Tech falls from the rail car and manages to survive the landing but he's severely injured. He crawls away/gets scraped off the ground by Saw.

Roughly 3 weeks pass in which he is recovering and healing yet unable to comm out as, per episode 4 of season 3, Imperial planets monitor long range communications. But, he is able to gather information from the flights going in and out of Eriadu to determine which ones are being assigned to Hemlock's secretive lab. Once he is able to confirm this, he steals some stormtrooper armor and boards.

Ship goes down because gravity hates him in particular and he is almost eaten by a Beast.

Now stranded in the jungle on Tantiss, Tech finds his infiltration plan foiled by the fact that he is being continually hounded by even more Beasts.

Several months later, Batcher is released and for some reason goes straight for the wrecked ship. Somehow she survives out here, but we're not sure how - potentially she had help?

Tech IS the mystery clone X that we see but rather than being brainwashed he has finally managed to get inside Tantiss and yet again begins to Steal Clothing from others.

Crosshair and Omega immediately break out without him leaving him stranded in Tantiss where he presumably still is, attempting to avoid detection and continue to gather information that will aid in the eventual liberation of the other clones.

Is this unlikely? Yes! Is it overly complicated? Absolutely! Am I endlessly entertained by it anyway? You bet!

Benefits of Shrimp Trooper Theory include, but are not limited to:

A living, non brainwashed Tech! The most important feature one could have!

An extremely ridiculous Only In Star Wars series of events!

Retroactive explanation for why the ship going down was an important scene to start on.

Hemlock ruining his own life by not sending someone out to recover the team and just assuming they'd totally be taken care of by the wildlife.

More giant monsters than Wrecker could shake a stick at.

The possibility of Tech and Batcher offscreen shenanigans.

Tech thinking he's finally found Crosshair and making plans to retrieve him when, SURPRISE, OMEGA'S HERE TOO AND THEY'RE ESCAPING. RIGHT NOW.

Seriously just imagine the epic sigh Tech would let out as they flew away completely unaware of his presence. His life is a series of difficulties.

He can simply turn up with the coordinates to Tantiss because god knows how else they're going to manage to get them.

This is my conspiracy theory that I'm allowing myself to believe in as a treat. It will almost certainly not be what occurs but the thought of it makes me happy.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

So, to follow up on this post that I just made that details my thoughts on the Taskmaster s18 lineup: Jack Dee, Rosie Jones, Emma Sidi, and Babatunde Aléshé...

I’m totally kidding! Obviously I’m totally kidding. Obviously. Obviously I was kidding in that entire post, suggesting that I give one fuck who those other four people are. It doesn't matter! Obviously in reality, seats 2-5 of Taskmaster s18 could be filled by Leo Kearse, Jim Davidson, Jordan Peterson, and Suella Braverman, and I’d still consider this to be a fantastic lineup.

Okay. Finally, after several weeks of losing my God damn mind, sitting on the spoilers and being good about not mentioning it (mostly…), I can say this. Finally.

Let’s talk Zaltzman.

First of all, let me set the scene. I've just finished my work for the day. I'm waiting in the break room while my co-worker files her stuff so we can close up the building together. I check my phone, because it's Taskmaster lineup spoiler day, and I've been waiting on confirmation.

I read the words and drop my phone in amazement, scrambling to catch it before it hits the ground. I look again, trying to make 100% sure I am reading this right, because I refuse to get my hopes up that high just to be disappointed. No, it says what I thought it said. I jump up, bang my fist against my chest and then into the air and then back again, mutter “fuck yes fucking right holy fuck” under my breath repeatedly, and then look around and am pleased to see my co-worker has not come into the room. And then I’m not allowed to post about it for several fucking weeks.

Andy was top of my wishlist. Possibly the number one person on it even if I could have literally anyone, including the people who definitely wouldn’t do it. He was definitely the number one person on my Taskmaster wishlist, out of the people who would possibly ever do it. But I wasn’t sure he belonged on that second list. Every time I’ve posted about a Taskmaster wishlist in the last couple of years, I’ve said of course Andy Zaltzman’s number one, but I know it won’t happen.

I know Taskmaster casts people who aren't already TV famous, but they're usually young. Taskmaster casts older people who are well established in a TV career, and young up-and-comers. Not people who turn 50 this year and did an episode of 8 Out of 10 Cats one time in 2008.

I mean, Andy Zaltzman isn’t completely obscure. It’s now been several years since he took over as host of The News Quiz, which I think is Radio 4’s flagship comedy program. The Bugle has been going for nearly 17 years and is quite successful. It’s not fair to imply that 2008 was his last TV credit; he was on Alternative Comedy Experience in 2013, where he had some chats with Stewart Lee that are among the most socially awkward things I’ve ever seen in my life. Sometimes they let him on TV in Australia. He did Matt Forde’s TV thing a few times. He does actually have a very successful career as a cricket statistician/commentator. He wrote for Bremner, Bird and Fortune in 2006. He’s doing fine. He's doing absolutely fine.

And he has an impressive stand-up career. He's done tours in the States, off the back of The Bugle's international success. He's performed in Asia off the back of his cricket commentating popularity. He's sold out big rooms to hordes of Bugle fans.

Taskmaster has cast lots of people who were less famous at the time of casting than Andy Zaltzman is now. They're just not usually Andy Zaltzman's age. But it doesn't matter, he's there now. So let me tell you about this man.

Andrew Zechariah Zaltzman was born on October 6, 1974. He grew up in Tumbridge Wells, Kent, a place he has described as so right-wing that they think you're a bit of a leftie if you only cast one Tory vote per general election. Raised by his father Zechariah "Zack" Zaltzman, who was a sculptor and a Lithuanian lapsed Jew who grew up in South Africa. Along with his sister Helen and brother Rick. I don't know his mother's name and it's probably fine to keep it that way, as I'm pretty sure Andy Zaltzman attracts a lot of fans like me, who have my combination of information-gathering autism and a good memory, that means I did not have to do any Googling to write that paragraph. I could have included the name of his school without Googling just because I've read his Wikipedia page so much, but I'll refrain from doing that.

To be fair, it's not some obscure piece of trivia to know his sister's name, because Helen Zaltzman is one of the only people in Britain who's had a podcast for longer than Andy. Podcasting was quite new when The Bugle started, but Helen started her podcast Answer Me This just before it. Helen Zaltzman's not technically a comedian, but she's quite comedy-adjacent, her podcasts are funny and she's been in plays at the Edinburgh Festival. Hangs out with comedians. Was friends with Josie Long at Oxford, so that's pretty cool. Used to be flatmates with comedy flatshare expert Matthew Crosby. Did an episode of ComComPod.

Anyway, after being raised with a future comedy-adjacent podcaster, Andy went to study Classics at Oxford University, where he also worked for the sports page of the student newspaper. It was here that he discovered his love of made-up bullshit, as he once wrote an entirely fictitious article about a game that never happened. When told they couldn't print it because it was libellous, Andy tried to argue that he hadn't libelled anyone because none of the people he wrote about in that article exist. Andy Zaltzman swears that story is true, and I think it probably is.

Andy Zaltzman did one stand-up gig at university that went very badly, then didn't do any stand-up for a bit, and then eventually did some more gigs that went less badly. Ended up in the finals of So You Think You’re Funny in 1999, where he lost to David O’Doherty (other finalists included Jimmy Carr, Russell Howard, and Josie Long, the latter of whom beat David O’Doherty in the BBC New Comedy Awards in the same year, a year of traded victories that they still amusingly and adorably reference on social media sometimes).

Andy Zaltzman got in with Avalon management, and in 2000, he went back to Edinburgh as part of The Comedy Zone. Also in 2000, he supported Stewart Lee on a stand-up tour around the UK. A lot of the venues were not told that there would be a support act and couldn’t fit him in at the last minute, so essentially, it was less like doing tour support and more like Andy just followed Stewart Lee around the country for a few weeks. Stewart Lee got so exhausted by the effort of trying to hang out with someone as socially awkward as Andy Zaltzman that he quit stand-up for several years (that’s a joke, but he did actually quit – eventually going back to stand-up but never back to his agency – because he got frustrated with Avalon on that tour, largely because they kept doing things like failing to tell venues that he was bringing a support act). In 2005, Stewart Lee returned to stand-up, and shared a flat at the Edinburgh Festival with Andy Zaltzman that year. Across the next 15 years, Stewart Lee took several opportunities to marvel at how it was possible for one person to watch as much sport as Andy Zaltzman did, when on tour and in Edinburgh flats.

In 2001, Andy did his first full-length Edinburgh show, called Andy Zaltzman Versus the Dog of Doom, which got nominated for the Perrier Newcomer Award. It was mainly a solo show, and billed as a solo show, but it featured a few bits with a man he'd met on the stand-up circuit named John Oliver, who was performing in The Comedy Zone. In 2002, Andy went back to Edinburgh with a show called Andy Zaltzman Unveils the 2002 Catapult of Truth, which also featured bits of John Oliver. John did his debut solo hour that year as well, a show that Chortle’s Steve Bennett called “a fairly pointless concept, which is then tiresomely illustrated”. Clearly, John made the correct choice in deciding that in future years, he’d stick to the stuff with Zaltzman.

In 2003, Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver began writing more comedy together, and were both specifically interested in political comedy. They found this could be difficult on mixed bill gigs where the audience hadn’t come for political comedy, and wouldn’t take well to all the dating and travel mishap stories being interrupted by satire on the colonial immigration process. So they started a comedy night in London called Political Animal, where they would co-host with their own jointly-written political jokes, introducing other comedians who would do exclusively political material. This allowed them to perform to audiences who would get what they were expecting, and it led to them being chased off stage less often (okay, their stories about those years of terrible gigs only include one where they got literally chased off stage). Comedians who performed at Political Animal included Robert Newman, Al Murray, Stewart Lee, Jeremy Hardy, Daniel Kitson, Chris Addison, Frankie Boyle, Andrew Maxwell, Will Hodgson, and don’t worry about the other name on the list from which I've copied this (it was one of those Russells they have now, and by far the worst of the three, despite the other two’s flaws).

On these early Political Animal nights, Zaltzman and Oliver used to do a sketch in which they'd interact with God. If Daniel Kitson was part of the show that night, he'd join them for that sketch and Kitson would play the role of God, which is a little on the nose even for him.

They did Political Animal once a month in London for several years, and also took it to Edinburgh for quite a few years in a row. In 2005, they recorded a pilot for BBC Radio 4, a radio show that would broadcast highlights of each act in a Political Animal night, interspersed with little Zaltzman and Oliver sketches. This got picked up and ran for two seasons, ten episodes in total.

In Edinburgh 2003, Zaltzman and Oliver did Edinburgh and Beyond, a mixed bill with each other and Rob Deering. Some of Andy’s material from that show can be heard in the Radio 4 program 4 at the Fringe. It opens with “Are you all glad to be alive? About half of you. Good. Aren’t festivals fun?” Then he goes into a complex explanation of how King Harold threw the Battle of Hastings and he has proof. This also contains the earliest known recording of Andy Zaltzman's classic joke about how voters' commitment to apathy is a paradox.

Then he says the words: “There are more celebrities now than ever before, in the world. There are also more facts in the world than ever before, and that’s just one of them. There are more celebrities now, and if the current rate of the increase in celebrities now continues, then by the year 2052, celebrities will outnumber ordinary people. And if that continues then by 2142, 99% of the world’s population will be celebrities. At which point the market will implode, and all celebrities will be merged into one giant celebrity, known as God. And the process will start again from scratch. Only this time, God will make the differences between men and women even funnier, and comedians will be the most powerful race on Earth. And after a savage and brutal war between the observationalists and the surrealists, into the power vacuum will come the singing comedians, and the world’s only currency will be amusingly altered pop lyrics. So please, be careful.” And you can begin to see why audiences occasionally chased him off stages. I don’t know what John Oliver was doing with his portion of that shared 2003 bill. Probably some stuff about penguins, given what he was into at the time. He was also very busy ripping cows apart that year. 2003 was a big year for people giving John Oliver large facsimile animals that he did not want and making him deal with them.

In 2004, Zaltzman and Oliver decided to stop messing around with little sketches in each other's shows, and just do the joint stand-up hour that the world had been waiting for. They went to Edinburgh with a show called Zaltzman and Oliver’s Erm... It's About the World... I Think You'd Better Sit Down, which is a hell of a title. They filled in a questionnaire about it for the BBC, which is a lovely little relic. If you want to know what Zaltzman and Oliver were doing during the Edinburgh Festival in 2004:

What will you be doing with the other 23 hrs of the day? JO: I will assign around 8 of those hours for sleep. I'll try and eat three times, spaced out in the time remaining. I will insult my flatmate for a further 3 of those hours. And I will think about sport for the rest of the time. AZ: Table tennis.

(Note: I'm 95% sure the flatmate John Oliver was going to insult for three hours a day is Daniel Kitson.)

They took the show on tour the following year, including performing it one time in 2005 with someone recording the audio. They didn't do anything with that audio until about six years later, when they released it during a filler week for The Bugle. It contains many of their classic joint bits, like the immigration sketch and the state of political discourse sketch.

In 2005, they did another joint Edinburgh show, called John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman Issue a List of Demands and Await Your Response with Interest. Not big fans of titles that fit easily into blurbs. This show unfortunately has been lost to history, or at least, it had better be lost to history, because at this point I will be furious if it turns out Andy Zaltzman has a recording of it somewhere and has been holding out on us all this time (not really, please let me know if you have this, Andy, I would pay you money). Steve Bennett called it: "As a double act [Zaltzman and Oliver] bring out the best of Zaltzman’s towering intellect and Oliver’s  sneery cynicism, feeding off each other’s presence." Which is a pretty solid summary of their double act dynamic in general.

I know there are reviewers besides Steve Bennett, by the way. But Chortle, for all its other admin-related faults, does archive its reviews in a way that makes old ones easy to find, so it tends to be my go-to reference for times like this. I have read other old Zaltzman and Oliver reviews, and a lot of them can be basically summarized as "They have good, intelligent, and funny material, but God, those guys can be really annoying." Brian Logan called them "Better writers than performers", which is maybe technically true but also he can fuck off. We like the socially awkward lack of charisma, okay?

Anyway. Back on topic. While they were establishing their live double act, Zaltzman and Oliver also teamed up with their friend, the excellent comedian Chris Addison, to write a radio show called The Department. This is a fictional show set in a secret government department that secretly runs the entire world, and they spend each episode solving a different problem. It ran on BBC Radio 4 for three seasons and 14 episodes in total, from 2004 to 2006. It featured a bunch of old Zaltzman and Oliver stand-up bits, shoehorned expertly into the mouths of the characters. Zaltzman, Oliver, and Addison co-wrote it and played the three main characters (except Addison didn't write season 3 as he was busy with other projects, but he still did the voice acting), with the other major character being voiced by Matthew Holness, and Lucy Montgomery doing some additional voices (Matthew and Lucy were both in Cambridge Footlights with John Oliver a few years earlier).

They hoped The Department would translate to TV someday, but that didn't happen. Even as late as ten years later, Andy Zaltzman, according to one uncharacteristically vulnerable interview, was still holding out hope that it could someday get picked up as a TV sitcom. John Oliver, on the other hand, said years later that he looked back on The Department as something that wasn't any good. John is, in my accurate opinion, entirely wrong about that. There are some old Zaltzman and Oliver things that I can recognize were objectively not great comedy, I just like them as adorable historical relics. The Department is not like that. I think it was a really, really funny and well written show. It had good characters and dense jokes and I wish it had become more.

These were the glory years of Zaltzman and Oliver. The Department on the radio, joint stand-up shows, hosting mixed bill stuff at Political Animal. But that double act was just a small subset of a larger group called the Chocolate Milk Gang. The Chocolate Milk Gang was an international crime syndicate that sometimes organized soccer matches, to borrow a phrase from John Oliver (John was talking about FIFA when he said it, but it still applies). You can see one of these matches in The Greatest Video on All of YouTube, featuring a lot of comedians who are hard to recognize because it's got about 8 pixels per inch, but you can always pick out Andy with his curly red hair, and John Oliver as the only one wearing long pants instead of shorts. I'm definitely not going to go look at the building where they filmed that video when I go to London this summer. That would be a weird thing to do. I mean I can't confirm whether I'm going to do that, but I will say that one time on his radio show I heard Elis James say Crystal Palace isn't a tourist attraction, and I laughed and said "That's what you think."

Anyway, the Chocolate Milk Gang was actually a bunch of comedians who were all friends in the early 00s, they frequently appeared in each other's stand-up shows (and occasionally radio shows and things like that), told stories about each other on stage, played football on Tuesdays, shared mixed bills, ritualistically sacrificed cows together in the middle of the night, things like that. They got their name because they drank alcohol either not at all or not very much, and after late-night Edinburgh shows they'd go for milkshakes while other comedians were getting drunk, so some of those other comedians started calling them the Chocolate Milk Gang. Glenn Wool has been specifically credited with coining the term, Andrew Maxwell and Jason Byrne were also said to be involved. An absolute cunt who goes by David McSavage was a dick about it. Basically they were a bunch of nerds who got bullied by the Irish and Canadians (not really, they've said they were on friendly terms with those guys and it was friendly banter, except for David McSavage, who is genuinely a cunt). They go by other names sometimes. Stewart Lee apparently used to call them "The Hanging Around Guys".

Further information can be found in the weirdest fucking article I've ever read (on the subject of me knowing about reviewers besides just Steve Bennett - Jay Richardson, what were you fucking talking about?), but basically, they were known for differentiating themselves from a previous generation of showbiz shouty fancy comedians, by doing things like wearing t-shirts and listening to indie music and putting a modicum of creativity into their art and not being alcoholics. Membership lists for the Chocolate Milk Gang changes depending who you ask, but the main people involved, in general, were: Josie Long, John Oliver, Andy Zaltzman, Alun Cochrane, Russell Howard, David O'Doherty, Gavin Osborn, Demitri Martin, Flight of the Conchords. Taika Waititi - Cohen at the time - is sometimes mentioned in that mix. Isy Suttie was definitely around and fit the remit. And Daniel Kitson was their, according to those weird fucking articles about it, king.

To get that list of people, I've taken the name that Glenn Wool invented for people who got milkshakes in Edinburgh, and applied it to a slightly more general concept. Not everyone on that list got milkshakes in Edinburgh in 2002, but most did, and all were part of a larger group of nerds doing comedy who crossed over with each other personally and professionally in that era, which is generally what I mean when I say "Chocolate Milk Gang".

Andy largely ended up in this group because his writing and performing partner, John Oliver, was so close to the ringleader/king Daniel Kitson. John Oliver and Daniel Kitson had repeatedly described each other as best friends. John also brought in Gavin Osborn, his friend from school and/or youth theatre. Gavin was flatmates with John's girlfriend for a time. Basically, John Oliver tied all these people in his life together, and then he fucked off to America, leaving the rest of them behind to keep making stuff with each other. Which they did, but managing it without John in the middle clearly wasn't always their first choice. The number of Chocolate Milk Gang members who have performed art that I have heard on the subject of how it upset them when John Oliver left is... more than three. It's four. I'm thinking of four specific pieces of work right now, though to be fair one of them is just Andy Zaltzman shouting the words "Percy Primetime" at an audience (the others are a song about mix tapes, a show about an apartment that I'm definitely not going to go look at when I fly to London because Crystal Palace isn't a tourist attraction, and a song about a penguin). That's a lot, really. People really, really liked that guy.

Zaltzman and Kitson in particular were a funny combination; whenever they used to end up on stages (or in a radio studio) together, there would be this strong sense of "your best friend is my best friend but God, do we ever have nothing else in common". But they'd give performing together a go, even though Andy Zaltzman is the most socially awkward man in history and has chemistry with no one on Earth except John Oliver. Neither of them seem to "get" the other's comedy in any way, or find much crossover in what they found funny. They shared a flat together in Edinburgh in 2007, where they wrote a sketch for Late 'n' Live in which Andy would pretend to be Daniel Kitson's penis, so that's fun. Andy Zaltzman had a set of about four deliberately bad impressions, which seemed to be the only part of his act that Kitson found funny, but Kitson found them hilarious and made Andy do them every time they performed together.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm trying to tell this story chronologically, and I've moved right past what Andy Zaltzman has referred to as: “The day in June 2006 when [John Oliver] told me he wanted to do the Daily Show job in America instead of going with me to Edinburgh to talk to twenty-five people a day in a darkened room.”

At the time, Zaltzman and Oliver were in the process of writing their third joint stand-up hour, for Edinburgh 2006. This show had already been submitted to the festival, as evidenced by some screenshots of the 2006 Edinburgh program:

The 2006 Edinburgh program also advertised:

And it was the debut year for the Chocolate Milk Gang mixed bill Honourable Men of Art, also already in the program with John's name:

According to Andy Zaltzman, in June 2006, he learned three things very close together, on almost the same day. The first thing he learned is that the BBC had cancelled The Department. This radio show was the only consistent thing Andy had going in his career besides live stand-up. He was counting on The Department getting bigger and maybe picked up for TV, so losing it was a significant blow. The second thing he learned, at almost the same time, was that his wife was carrying their first child. And the third thing he learned was that John Oliver was going to move to America right before their Edinburgh run was set to begin. Andy Zaltzman has described June/July 2006 as not a particularly fun time (John Oliver, on the other hand, has described summer 2006 as the time he lost his radio show and thought his career was fucked, so it's a good thing The Daily Show job came along to save him, because otherwise he'd have ended up stuck in the career path he was on in England, which was terrible, it sure would suck to have to stay on that path).

Andy Zaltzman has even said that if it hadn't been for his marriage and having a kid on the way, he might have moved to New York with John to try to keep performing as a double act, since he didn't have enough of a career in Britain to be worth staying for, and all the success he'd had had come from the Zaltzman and Oliver partnership.

I see why Andy Zaltzman found that partnership and briefly considered whether it might be worth moving across an ocean to preserve it. They worked so well together. They got each other's style of comedy, they were similar enough to fit together but different in the right ways to complement each other. They had incredible chemistry together, of the type that Andy had with, as I've said, no one else in the world. Andy had had to start his own comedy night (Political Animal) just because his style was so offbeat that it didn't fit in on regular mixed bills and it annoyed audiences who hadn't come for that specific niche, and the Zaltzman/Oliver double act saved him from having to sell that niche by himself. He was, as he describes it, not excited to have to go back to doing it alone.

He was also not excited to have to turn their double act Edinburgh show into a solo show at the last minute. But he did it, going to Edinburgh 2006 and performing a show called Andy Zaltzman Detonates 70 Minutes of Unbridled Afternoon ("It's important work Zaltzman is doing, at least compared to most other comics, and deserves to be heard ­ if only he was a bit more fluid in its telling" - Steve Bennett, 2006). I guess it's a better title than Andy Zaltzman Goes By Himself to Edinburgh to Talk to Twenty-Five People a Day in a Darkened Room. In Edinburgh 2006, Andy also hosted Political Animal on his own, and turned up to Honourable Men of Art, where they occasionally had John Oliver via the best live video linkup technology 2006 had to offer.

After this, Andy Zaltzman spent a year performing on his own. In 2007 he performed at MICF for the first time, where one time he stayed up all night in a radio studio with Daniel Kitson, playing BBC sound effects and Boney M songs, and Daniel made him do his Marvin Gaye impression. He also went on the Triple M radio show Get This, and was very socially awkward. Then he won the Piece of Wood Award for having other comics vote his show the best one, so that's cool. Clearly he must have been doing something all right, in a year that he's since described in interviews as very rough overall.

And then he was approached by TimesOnline, a subdivision of The Times, to start a trans-Atlantic podcast. The idea was that John Oliver would go into a studio in New York City, and Andy Zaltzman would go into a studio in London, and they would talk to each other about the week's news, and someone would produce and edit it, and that would be a newfangled thing called a podcast. Like the thing that Andy's sister Helen had just started doing. Andy Zaltzman said yes because, in his words, he had "Jack K. Shit" else going on and it was a chance to reunite the double act that had been working for him. John Oliver said yes because, in his words, it is a treat to get to listen to Andy Zaltzman talk for an hour a week. I think John meant it when he said that, because John Oliver had a very good and very busy job as a writer and correspondent on The Daily Show at the time, in addition to a stand-up career in the States and an increasing schedule of events with major American comics, so it's not like he took the Bugle job because he needed the money or the profile boost. I think he really did consider it a treat to listen to Andy Zaltzman talk for an hour a week. And what a treat that is.

They set up a format in which they'd talk on the phone for a bit earlier in the week, to establish a list of topical subjects to cover. Then they'd go away and each write their own material on those subjects. Then on Fridays, they'd connect from their separate studios and discuss the subjects with their material ready. The best bits made it into their respective stand-up shows.

From the beginning, they both contributed a lot to the podcast, but Andy drove the dialogue and tended to come a little more prepared, as is reasonable, given that John Oliver had other shit going on. The Bugle ran in its original form from October 2007 to March 2016, and in that time, Andy Zaltzman turned over an incredible amount of material. It is honestly amazing how much new stuff he came up with every week. Yeah, he had some ideas and concepts that he re-used, and yeah, not 100% of it was solid gold. But a lot of it was very funny. Funny, dense comedy that was new every single week.

Andy Zaltzman is the most creative comedian I've ever heard. I mean, obviously I guess that depends on your definition of "creative", I've seen some comedy shows where it's so creative that I have no idea what's going on (these are called "clowning"). But within the parametres of just writing straightforward stand-up material, I have never heard anything as creative as Andy Zaltzman. He hits a topic from so many directions that no one else would think of. He reaches for absurd comparisons, turns of phrase that make me run back the recording because I could never catch all the meanings at once, five or six different jokes embedded into one sentence. The number of obscure references to history and/or sport and/or Greek mythology (he didn't study Classics for nothing) he can get into any paragraph is blinding. He's fucking amazing.

More than that, The Bugle with Zaltzman and Oliver was an amazing piece of media. It is incredible how they blended interactivity with tightly written material. Comedians riffing with each other is fun because it feels real and immediate and unrehearsed. Carefully written stuff is good because writing something with care gives comedians the time to make it funnier. The Bugle was Zaltzman and Oliver taking their jokes that they'd crafted to be as funny as possible, and using them as the basis for otherwise spontaneous interaction, so they got the best of both worlds. And it worked, every time, because they have the best chemistry I've ever heard in all of comedy. They were like athletes who could always tell where the other was going to end up, they could take their bit and make sure it would land in just the right spot to work with what the other person would have. Even though they didn't know exactly what the other person had, because they didn't write it together. But they knew each other so well that they could anticipate. It's amazing. It's a fucking amazing feat of comedy and it should be in some sort of hall of fame.

In 2008, Andy Zaltzman wrote a book. It's called Does Anything Eat Bankers? and it's a collection of absurd comedy mini-essays about the credit crunch. It's the most 2008 thing I've ever read. It made me laugh out loud a lot. It's available on eBay for insultingly cheap prices and is an excellent summary of Zaltzman's offbeat sense of humour.

From 2007-2014, Andy Zaltzman hosted Political Animal in Edinburgh every year. Usually on his own, though in 2011, John Oliver flew to Edinburgh and they did a few reunion Political Animal gigs, featuring Daniel Kitson reprising his role as God in their God sketch. Andy also kept up his Chocolate Milk Gang membership over those years, doing the Honourable Men of Art gig when it came back in 2008, appearing at some Kitson-compered Late 'n' Lives in the 00s, and at some Kitson-compered Chocolate Milk Gang reunion shows in later years (ZOCK, Fuckstorm 3000, Fuckstorm 3001). Andy did the impressions when Kitson told him to, even though by then he'd long dropped them from his regular act. Andy also performed new Edinburgh solo shows nearly every year from 2007 to 2019 (missing 2009, 2012, and 2015), usually with long convoluted titles in the style of Zaltzman and Oliver ("Life is convoluted, my comedy merely reflects that" - Andy Zaltzman).

In 2014, Andy started doing Satirist For Hire, a show he continued touring off and and on until 2022, in addition to his regular stand-up shows. In Satirist For Hire, the audience could write in with the date they were attending and a subject for Andy to satirize, and the show would consist of him satirizing audience-requested topics. It wasn't improv or anything, he'd get the topics in advance and write stuff about them, new stuff for every show. Which sounds like a ridiculous amount of work, but he was already doing that kind of thing for The Bugle, writing new stuff constantly. Some of these got recorded and released on filler weeks of The Bugle. Topics he got asked to satirize included all 721 Pokemon by name, the autumn equinox, the rebellion in Syria, and his own mother-in-law. He released a DVD of Satirist For Hire that was filmed in 2014, in which he performed the bespoke satire as well a "best of" his other old and new jokes, including some stuff that dates back to the Zaltzman and Oliver catalogue of the early 00s. It also has a DVD extra that's Andy just telling a weird story with no punchline, it's really annoyingly rambling and pointless, even for him. It's great.

During the original run of The Bugle, there were a lot of jokes in which John would tell a star-studded story about his life with celebrities in New York City, and Andy would say he'd had a good pastrami sandwich that week. There were slightly less funny parts at the end of the episodes, in which John would plug some big American event he was doing, and Andy would make a vague plea about small-time stand-up gigs that he couldn't sell. As The Bugle went on, Andy started doing slightly bigger stand-up gigs and sounding slightly less concerned about lack of tickets sold (due to him building up an audience of Bugle fans), though it still didn't look great when put next to John Oliver's projects.

Alongside this, Andy Zaltzman started getting jobs in the world of cricket as well. He was a massive, utterly obsessed cricket fan, made a lot of cricket references in his stand-up and on The Bugle, and at some point some people took notice and started inviting him to do cricket things. Spots on sports shows in which he'd analyze cricket. Cricket commentary. Collation of cricket stats. After several years of this, he started getting to travel for it, announcing on The Bugle that he'd be doing stand-up gigs in Bangladesh because he was going there anyway to attend cricket games and be paid to commentate on them. He doesn't have personal social media, but he does have a Twitter account that Tweets nothing but obscure cricket stats that he has personally worked out. What a weird guy, spending all his own time gathering information about one niche subject and then collating all the stuff from various sources and posting his findings on the internet. Nerd. You wouldn't catch me doing that.

Off the success of The Bugle, he started getting some other stuff. He was a regular host for a while on the Radio 4 panel show called 7 Day Sunday, where he worked with Chris Addison and Al Murray and Rebecca Front, I have frustratingly never been able to find episodes of that show. He got a Radio 4 mini-series called Andy Zaltzman’s History of the Third Millenium, which I have also never been able to find. He started appearing as a guest on The News Quiz somewhat regularly. He did that one episode of 8 Out of 10 Cats one time, and it was very awkward. Stewart Lee put him on Alternative Comedy Experience.

In 2008, John Oliver released a stand-up DVD called Terrifying Times. Andy flew to New York to appear in the recording of it. He came on stage a couple of times, for a few minutes each time, interacting with John so they could include some of their joint sketch material in the DVD. There's also a DVD extra that's a conversation between Zaltzman and Oliver, which is hilarious.

In 2012, Andy Zaltzman again went to New York, to perform some stand-up on John Oliver's New York Stand Up Show (along with Chocolate Milk Gang's David O'Doherty), a confusingly titled American television program with various comedians doing short sets compered by John Oliver. After years of relentlessly making fun of John on The Bugle for how he started saying "gotten" once he'd been in America for a bit, Andy got on American TV and immediately said the word "sports", which was adorable. He tried to fit in. It didn't really work and the crowd didn't know what to make of him, but he tried.

In the original run of The Bugle, Andy Zaltzman really honed his trademark style. It was marked by absurd analogies that treat any of the following like each other: sports, politics, Greek mythology, religion, current events, and occasionally a movie or something. He started doing "pun runs", where he'd spend several minutes doing one coherent monologue in which he'd make as many puns as possible themed around a single subject, usually while John Oliver screamed in agony in the background (you'd think it would stop being funny but it didn't, at one point he started using a little bell to mark each pun). Jokes with footnotes. Jokes where the joke is that the story is pointless. Everything he said carefully and tightly wrapped in at least 18 layers of irony. A running joke in which he'd introduce each Bugle episode by discussing something obscure that had happened in history on the day they were recording. So many cricket and snooker references.

An audio cryptic crossword that ran for the first thirty or so Bugle episodes, in which he'd read out a clue every week, but the clue wasn't to anything that made sense, it was just to some shit he'd made up in his head, and he never released a visual to accompany it. Yet it did work, some people at home actually solved it all and wrote it all out and it all fit together perfectly (that is how you do a crossword, Pemberton).

Massive truckloads of absurdity dumped with increasing urgency all over current events, as though he thought he could bury the dark realities under it. Zaltzman and Oliver's name for this absurdity was "bullshit"; it used to be a running joke that they'd advertise The Bugle by promising it would be completely free of facts, providing the best bullshit you've ever heard. Long, intricate bullshit that all ties together and keeps going just when you think there can't be any more to this story that Andy has entirely made up. Like the athletes he wrote about at university, no one can sue him for libel because they don't actually exist.

One time their producer Chris Skinner accused them of having an especially sweary Bugle, so far containing "twelve fucks and one cunt", and Andy said that's the Jewish view of the New Testament, and they (rightly) talked for like three years about how good a joke that was to come up with off the cuff. Andy's lapsed Jewish-ness is also a frequent topic of his jokes, usually how incredibly lapsed he is, being a massive fan of bacon sandwiches and one time his sister gave him an entire dead pig as a Christmas gift, a story that made it into a Daniel Kitson stand-up show as well as a lot of Bugle jokes about how in most cases that would be a hate crime.

There were also jokes throughout that Bugle run about John Oliver's increasingly high-profile career; Andy gave him the nickname Johnny Showbiz and cheerfully kept telling stories of pastrami sandwiches after John's stories about meeting Samuel L Jackson or whatever. I first listened to The Bugle a few months after I listened to the old Russell Howard/Jon Richardson BBC 6 Music shows, and those were basically an audio documentary of a friendship slowly cracking apart due to one party's jealousy of the other's increasing success (I mean, there were other issues too), so I found The Bugle an odd contrast at first. Because Andy made those jokes, but it sounded like there was absolutely no genuine jealousy behind them. If anything it went the other way, he seemed to vaguely pity John's weird hectic life, and John seemed to generally agree that this was too much celebrity and Andy was better off in his shed. I started wondering: how is Andy this okay with the disparity? Is he hiding the jealousy really well or is he made of stone?

A while into my the first listen-through of The Bugle, after wondering this for a few weeks, I came to the conclusion that the reason Andy Zaltzman sounded unbothered by John Oliver meeting Samuel L Jackson is that Andy Zaltzman truly, deep down to his core, did not want to meet Samuel L Jackson. That man was not impressed by anything in the world that's not a cricket stat or a bad pun, and he entirely meant it when he mercilessly mocked John for the embarrassing transgression of winning an Emmy. That wasn't masked bitterness, he just thought winning an Emmy was genuinely embarrassing. And John Oliver, once again, seemed to basically agree.

In 2011, there was the News of the World scandal, owned by News International, owned by The Times, which owned The Times of London, which owned TimeOnline, which funded The Bugle. Andy and John decided to really go after everyone behind the phone hacking scandal, for several weeks in a row. They didn't just talk about the shit journalists, they went for the entire system of tabloid press and its collusion with government, the people at the top of the both sides of that, everything that allowed this to happen. While doing this, they had a running joke in which they'd tap their mic and ask "Is this on?", implying that their overlords at The Times would cut their mic in retaliation for talking shit about Rupert Murdoch. Then The New York Times wrote an article about what they'd been doing, and they started to sound slightly more genuinely worried that this might get them in trouble.

A couple of months later, for what both sides called unrelated reasons, TimesOnline fired John and Andy, pulling The Bugle's funding. In a Bugle episode in December 2011, they said this might be their last one, they were scrambling to find alternative funding sources but might have to just end the podcast. The tone in that episode made the discrepancies in their careers clear. John repeatedly emphasized how much he loved The Bugle and everything they'd built together, and how he'd like to save it. While Andy had a lot more genuine desperation in his voice as he again used the term "Jack K. Shit" to describe what else he had going on in his career, he actually needed to #SaveTheBugle. You can see that as well in how careful they both were. John and Andy both said they were dropped for apolitical reasons, just lack of funding. But John messed around a bit and implied that this may not be the whole truth, while Andy sounded less willing to possibly get them in more trouble. Years later, in a 2023 episode of the rebooted Bugle, the subject of The Times came up, and Andy offhandedly mentioned that The Bugle used to be funded by The Times, until they were dropped "suspiciously shortly after" they made a bunch of Rupert Murdoch jokes. This was the first time Andy had acknowledged a possible connection, and I liked that, like a sign that he'd finally achieved enough success independently so he could afford to talk like that a bit too.

I made a compilation of this situation a couple of years ago. Most of the Bugle bits in it are John Oliver's lines, because the compilation was meant to contrast John Oliver's running joke on Last Week Tonight where he'd talk shit about HBO's parent company AT&T, referring to them as "business daddy" and gloating about how he could do that without getting in trouble, with the time in 2011 when he went on The Bugle and talked shit about their business daddy and did in fact get in trouble. Andy had a lot of good jokes about Rupert Murdoch and The Times during those episodes, they mostly aren't in this compilation because they weren't as relevant to the Bugle-LWT John Oliver Versus Business Daddy narrative, but the compilation still tells the story. Also I illustrated it with a bunch of amusing old Zaltzman and Oliver pictures.

In early 2012, they came back and announced that they had managed to sell enough listener subscriptions to keep The Bugle going independently. The Bugle continues to run that way to this day, free to listen to but funded by optional listener subscriptions, no ads (aside from a short time in 2018 when they partnered with Radiotopia and Andy had to read out those mattress ads and stuff, and you could hear his soul sinking into the floor, luckily that didn't last long), just because they created a product that's good enough to be worth its audience paying for. It also gets funded by merch sales and things. They have hats and socks.

The Bugle ran for a couple more glorious years as an independent podcast fronted by Zaltzman and Oliver. Then in summer 2013, Jon Stewart went away to film a movie and John Oliver filled in as a guest host for The Daily Show. John Oliver would do a fantastic job fronting America's flagship topical comedy show all week, and then come on The Bugle on Friday and lament how badly it was going and how he couldn't wait to get back to the sidelines where he belonged. But after that, as he'd proven his abilities as a host, HBO offered John Oliver his own weekly show. In December 2013, John Oliver proceeded to have a breakdown, but still left The Daily Show to start Last Week Tonight.

As shown in the compilation I've just linked, which is entitled Johnny Showbiz Gets His Own Show and Has a Breakdown, they promised at the time that this would absolutely not affect The Bugle. They promised! Repeatedly. I mean, they sounded at the time like they were trying to convince themselves and each other as much as the listeners, but still, they promised.

They mostly kept that promise for about a year, taking a few more breaks than usual throughout 2014 to accommodate John's busier schedule, but I don't think The Bugle declined in quality when it did go out. And given how few weeks off they'd had since October 2007, even The Bugle with extra breaks was still a hell of a lot of comedy material for them to turn over. They took a break for the whole summer in 2014, their first time taking more than a couple of weeks off in a row, but came back with a great run of episodes in the fall.

Andy did mention to Stuart Goldsmith, in a 2014 interview, that he was hoping he might be able to be involved with Last Week Tonight in some way, at some point. It's not clear whether he ever mentioned this to John Oliver. Seems like the sort of thing he should have maybe mentioned to John Oliver, instead of saving it for an uncharacteristically vulnerable podcast interview. But maybe he did ask John Oliver for that and it just didn't work out. He doesn't say. It certainly didn't end up happening.

Then, throughout 2015, The Bugle died a slow and incredibly painful death. They kept doing filler episodes, in which Andy would explain that John was busy, but promise he'd be back next week. Then, often, nothing, not even a filler episode, for weeks. Before 2015, they always put out an episode every week, usually a new episode, but if they didn't have one, there would be filler: an outtakes show or a best-of show or some recordings of stand-up or something. One time the producer Chris Skinner strung together a whole filler episode by doing things like interviewing their friend Alun Cochrane (back when Alun Cochrane was cool, Alun Cochrane is now no longer cool). But in 2015, they began to hit the limit on the number of weeks in a row when they could do filler episodes, so they started just putting out fuck all.

John Oliver did turn up for Bugle episodes occasionally in 2015, but when he did, he sounded increasingly distracted and like his heart wasn't in it. Which is fair enough, because we now know that he spent 2015 trying to write and present a research-intensive weekly HBO show, as well as caring for his wife while she had a high-risk pregnancy. It's as good an excuse as I've ever heard to not be able to talk shit about Bashar al-Assad or the band LMFAO with Andy Zaltzman every week (also, you have to give John Oliver credit for the fact that he did The Bugle very well for years despite never actually needing it, and was just in it for the love of the game). But he probably should have just said that, rather than clearly telling Andy all the time that he'd be back soon, which we know he was doing because Andy sounded like he believed it when he relayed that message to the listeners, and then it kept not happening.

To be fair, Andy also should have called time on the podcast way earlier - at the very least announcing an extended break, if not just acknowledging that it's not going to work anymore and ending it. Instead, Andy kept coming back to introduce filler episodes and promise us John would be back soon. And every once in a while he'd do a frustrated new episode with a checked-out John Oliver. I listened to the worst of this period of The Bugle within a couple of days, and that was rough, hearing it all at once like that. Had me yelling at my phone, "Oh my God, stop it! Just put it out of its fucking misery! This is an ex-podcast! Stop nailing it to a perch and trying to sell it back to us!"

Andy mentioned the "Jack K. Shit else going on" thing a couple of times as a reason for why he kept trying, but I don't even think that was true anymore. He had a big stand-up audience garnered by the success of The Bugle. He had his cricket career. He had regular radio work. He didn't have some big TV career or anything, but he had enough to be getting on with. Enough so he did not have to be as desperate as he got about trying to keep a podcast going when it was clearly over.

I think he was scared to try to do his comedy career without basing it around bouncing stuff off John Oliver. As his comedy career did have a history of spectacularly not working when he wasn't working with John.

Throughout 2015, Andy's increasing frustration could be heard in his voice during intros for the podcast filler episodes, and in the recordings of his 2015 stand-up that got released as said filler. He developed a joke in which he'd ask the audience who's heard of John Oliver, find the one or two people who said no, and shout, "Fuck you Percy Primetime, everyone in this room has heard of me!" "Percy Primetime" was a nickname spat with quite a bit less affection than the old "Johnny Showbiz". For the record I don't think they had a real falling out or anything, but there was some genuine bitterness there for the first time after all those years of fame disparity, it finally became clear that Andy Zaltzman's not actually made of stone.

In early 2016, The Bugle came back with one full episode that was actually very good, John and Andy were both really into it. John Oliver apologized for the many jokes he'd made in previous years about how funny it would be if Donald Trump ran for president, and they announced that The Bugle would be continuing for the forseeable future, just going once a month instead of once a week, so they could stop with the filler stuff and be more realistic about what was possible around new schedules. Then two months later, they came back and admitted this was not, in fact, realistic, and John was leaving The Bugle. Andy announced his plan to reboot the podcast in the fall, with John Oliver replaced by a rotating series of co-hosts from around the world. Andy sounded fairly terrified of this prospect.

The last episode of the John Oliver-era Bugle was number 295, and for reasons that Andy Zaltzman finds funny, he made the first episode of the new era episode 4001. This came out on October 24, 2016, and featured Hari Kondabolu as the guest co-host. Hari's a New York comedian whom I assume was recommended by John Oliver, as I can't imagine how else he and Andy would have crossed paths, and they sure didn't sound like two people who had ever encountered each other before. It was fucking awkward. It didn't help that it was a couple of weeks before the Donald Trump election, so a pretty intense time to try to just jump back into topical comedy with a "get to know the rebooted podcast" episode.

Basically, if Andy Zaltzman feared that his offbeat niche humour would not work without the one comedian in the world who was tailor-made to fit into it... those fears were not alleviated in that first episode. Hari Kondabolu is awesome, he has since become one of my favourite Bugle guests and I've gotten into his own stand-up, but that first time, he had no fucking idea what to make of Andy, and not much of an idea of what he'd signed up for with The Bugle. Andy had no idea how to talk to anyone in the world who isn't John Oliver. It was weird.

Episode 4002 featured Nish Kumar, who came in and immediately shouted "Fuck you Chris!", which was a running joke from the John Oliver-era Bugle (referring to producer Chris Skinner, John and Andy and the listeners would affectionately say "fuck you" to Chris a lot for reasons that made sense at the time), an instant way to assure the audience that he knew exactly what he'd signed up for. Nish had been listening to The Bugle since it started when he was still doing student comedy, and as far as I can tell, he'd pretty much climbed the ranks of the comedy industry in the hopes of someday getting to touch the garment of his heroes Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver (he might have had one or two reasons besides that, but it was mainly that one). And he got his wish. He's now the second most frequent co-host of the Bugle 4000-series (after Alice Fraser), and one time he got to play football with John Oliver and they got into fights on the pitch.

The Bugle continued on shaky ground for the first 25 episodes or so, really for the first 50. Andy has said since that he knows those episodes were rough, that he'd got so comfortable in his familiar rapport with John Oliver that he just couldn't generate the same thing with people he didn't know as well, and he didn't know anyone as well as John. Though it clearly wasn't just about who he knew as well as John, but who he could comfortably work with as well as John (which was no one). Helen Zaltzman came on a few of those early episodes, and she was a fantastic guest, really funny and took Andy to task and held her own on every subject, but it is incredible how little chemistry Andy Zaltzman managed to have with his own sister. He brought in Anuvab Pal, a comedian from Mumbai whom Andy knew from his time covering cricket over there, they were friends in real life, but they often sounded like they'd never met before. The only person Andy sounded like he knew how to talk to at all was Nish, whom he'd known for a few years through stand-up by the time the Bugle 4000-series started. The Nish Kumar episodes were the best ones, especially early on, but it wasn't anywhere near the levels of Zaltzman and Oliver chemistry.

Andy has said in interviews since that he was struggling during that time, and that started occasionally making its way into the Bugle content, which previously had rarely been particularly personal. At the end of 2016, Andy Zaltzman did a year-in-review stand-up show (something he did every year for a while, a whole stand-up show written to only be performed one time to mark the end of the year), and (on the subject of reviewers who aren't Steve Bennett), Dominic Maxwell in The Times (fuck off, Times) wrote a review in which he called Andy "John Oliver's left-behind sidekick". Andy brought that up on The Bugle several times, citing the "sidekick" line with real bitterness, and rightly so. Partly because he has never been anyone's sidekick (except maybe Daniel Kitson's once in a while at old Late 'n' Live gigs), and partly because that was a solo stand-up show that was not affiliated with The Bugle and definitely had nothing to do with John Oliver, so he shouldn't have been put in John Oliver's shadow in a context like that. It was actually a 4-star review, Maxwell liked the show. But the review's first paragraph was:

Why has John Oliver become a star in America while his old partner in seemingly shambolic yet secretly serrated political satire, Andy Zaltzman, remains a cult comedian with a sideline as a cricket stats man? Is it because Zaltzman, with his receded Harpo Marx explosion of hair, is less telegenic than Oliver, with whom he co-hosted the podcast The Bugle until last year? Is it because, although he is every bit as grounded in reality as Oliver, Zaltzman is a more devotedly loopy joke-writer, so that he always adds his own twist of wry absurdism to our leaders’ already skewed logic?

Starting a four-star review with that is one hell of a backhanded compliment, no matter how positive you go on to be about the show itself. I assume that review was the main one - probably among plenty of other reviews that had built up Andy's resentment over time, but that Maxwell one was clearly the straw that broke his back - that led Andy to record this "interview with himself" to put in the "in the bin" section at the beginning of a Bugle episode in early 2017.

So the stone was starting to show serious cracks at that point. At one point in 2017, Andy plugged his upcoming run at MICF, saying it would be good to perform in Australia because his career could "flush down the toilet in the other direction" for a bit. Nish Kumar laughed way too hard at that, I remember saying to my phone, "Nish, stop! Can't you see he's having a breakdown? Stop laughing at that and give the man a hug!"

It was hard to listen to the most stoically-dedicated-to-irony-and-bullshit man I'd ever heard have a breakdown, but things eventually got steadier. Andy did some episodes from MCIF in Melbourne, and on Bugle episode 4023, in April 2017, he brought in Australian comedians Tom Ballard and Alice Fraser. Tom and Alice both became Bugle regulars, but Alice especially started doing it all the time. Alice, like Nish, told stories of how she'd been a dedicated listener to the original run of The Bugle since before she'd started stand-up, and you can see Andy's influence on her comedic style (you can see it in Nish's too - John and Andy both influencing Nish a lot, while Alice is a lot more like Andy than she is like John).

The inclusion of Alice Fraser changed the game for the rebooted Bugle, as she quickly became a very frequent presence, and Andy developed as good a rapport with her as he could have with almost anyone. There are some sweet moments in her early episodes when Alice would pull out some Zaltzman-esque puns or absurd analogies, and Andy would sound genuinely touched that someone else was into his weird niche humour. He immediately started including her in some bit parts of his stand-up shows too, whenever he was in Australia or she was in England.

The Bugle also got better once they started doing two guests at a time instead of just one. Andy has said since that at some point he realized he and John Oliver had good enough chemistry to carry an entire episode, but he couldn't manage that with anyone else. However, he could do it if there were three people, so the guests could interact with each other too, and the three different types of interactions could get them through the 40-45 minutes more easily. They also started doing Bugle live shows, which went well, got toured in England and even in America.

Since then, The Bugle has grown into a thing that is new and very different from its original form, but also very good. As of May 2024 they've just hit episode 4304, having recently passed the 295 episodes that Andy did with John Oliver. Its format has changed. People still turn up with pre-written stuff, but it's not the same perfectly choreographed/somehow improvised dance of tightly written material that it used to be. It's got a wider range of guests, more diverse topics, fewer insular in-jokes. Some other format changes too, like dropping the listener correspondence. But a lot of the guest co-hosts breathe new life into it, bring different perspectives and styles of humour, contribute more than the original version with only two people ever could. It's introduced me to lots of great comedians from various countries (well, mainly Britain and America and Australia, but a couple from India, a couple from Ireland, one I really like from NZ), I've gotten into a lot of people's stand-up because I liked them on The Bugle. They've also created spinoff podcasts, like The Gargle, hosted by Alice Fraser.

The Bugle 4000 has brought in a bunch of comedians from the younger generation, but also let Andy bring in some old friends. David O'Doherty and Josie Long of the Chocolate Milk Gang have done it a few times, they make top quality episodes. Mark Steel's been on a bunch of times, who used to do the earliest days of Political Animal and of course is a king of Radio 4 along with Andy. Mark and Andy are great together, you can hear how much they enjoy each other's company, to the point where part of me dreads the day when Andy decides to be nice to his buddy Mark and let Mark bring his son to work. I don't think they'd do that though, The Bugle has standards. No Elliot Steel, please.

A big highlight of Andy bringing back old friends is Chris Addison, who worked on The Department back in 2004-06. Addison stopped doing stand-up years ago as he got a bigger career in acting and directing and things like that, and he's said he loves doing The Bugle because it gives him a chance to write comedy material the way he doesn't anymore. And because it's the only time he does that, he's not throwing his scraps at a topical podcast while spreading ideas across multiple platforms. He's coming up with solid gold, and letting The Bugle have all of it. Every time he comes on, he does his homework so well beforehand that the other comedians, including Andy, have to raise their game to keep up.

As for Zaltzman himself, he had some shaky times for his comedy material in those early reboot days. He started seeming burned out from writing so much without getting anywhere, and was re-using a lot of concepts for a while. It wasn't bad, but he did stop innovating for a while after John Oliver disappeared. The absurd scenarios in his monologues got a bit by-the-numbers.

However, as The Bugle found its feet in the new era, Andy broke through that and started writing better than ever before. He, as they say in sports and video games, jumped levels. Suddenly came out of a plateau and immediately jumped to a much higher spot than one would expect, like the slow and steady escalation of talent suddenly caught up to him all at once. Like magic. That is one of my favourite things about sports, when an athlete suddenly jumps levels, like magic. Andy jumped levels a couple of times in the late 2010s, and it was so cool to listen to. A big part of it was the way he'd tie together lots of ideas at once instead of hitting them one at a time, the way he'd make connections that turned his monologues into more than the sum of their parts.

He really, really hit a stride in 2019, as the world went to shit around him, and he started incorporating a bit more genuine emotion than he ever had before. So many emotions, all of them various flavours of searing fury at the state of the government. At first the bits of emotion were added unexpectedly, like he was experimenting with it, but then he learned how to blend it seamlessly into his previous knack for absurd ironic bullshit, it was amazing and I think he was growing into one of the best comic writers there is.

I sort of have a theory about that, which unfortunately gets me into a sports analogy so I hope I can be indulged in that briefly. As a coach, I am very familiar with the phenomenon where two athletes work with almost no one but each other for years. In some ways it makes them much better than they could be otherwise, because they're constantly being challenged by someone who knows their style inside and out, so they have to constantly evolve in order to stay ahead of the other person figuring out how to counter what they do, pushing each other to higher levels of the sport. But in other ways, they often end up with big holes in their game, because they never learn to respond to anything their main training partner doesn't do.

I think that may have slightly happened with Zaltzman and Oliver. And more to Zaltzman than to Oliver, because John was doing all kinds of other things, writing for The Daily Show with lots of people who weren't Andy Zaltzman. While the main thing Andy did was write for The Bugle. Even in his solo stand-up career, most of his shows were the best bits of what he came up with for The Bugle, so they were still written first for the purpose of bouncing off John Oliver.

So much of the beauty in the original Bugle was the way John and Andy found each other so funny, they were writing to make each other laugh. But this meant Andy Zaltzman was restricted to material that would fit his established role in a double act. The role of being the intellectual one who comes at things sideways while John tackles them head-on. That role did not leave him space to experiment with things like genuine emotion, even in spots where that could make a routine stronger. I can think of a few Zaltzman routines from 2019 that wouldn't have worked on the original Bugle, not because they wouldn't make John Oliver laugh, but because they wouldn't really have complemented John's stuff in the right way. The original Bugle had a perfect balance of comedic styles, which was what made it great, but you can't go throwing curve balls at a balance.

So my theory is that, once Andy got away from being restricted to the perfectly chosen double act role, and he then got over his slump from when he was upset about losing the double act/possibly worried he couldn't do it on his own, he had a couple of levels that were ready to be jumped. The Bugle released a bunch of the recording from Andy Zaltzman's year-in-review stand-up show from the end of 2019, and it's incredible. The "best of" from an absolutely stellar Bugle year, taking the strongest bits from all those weeks he'd spent writing, and tying them around some structure. It's one of the best fucking things I've ever heard. Andy Zaltzman does everything at once in it.

In 2019, Miles Jupp left The News Quiz, a major topical comedy panel show on Radio 4 (I'm pretty sure it's the major comedy show on Radio 4). Angela Barnes, Nish Kumar, and Andy Zaltzman - three of The News Quiz's most frequent guests at the time - each spent some time guest hosting it, as they applied for the role of permanent host. Andy got the job. He mentioned this on The Bugle during the week before his first episodes of The News Quiz as permanent host, and did it with his usual flair for self-promotion, which is almost none, he just said it's happening. Fortunately Nish Kumar was on that Bugle episode with him, and Nish insisted on interrupting Andy to tell the listeners what a big deal The News Quiz is, that Andy won't brag about it but he got a huge job on a flagship show after years and years of smaller spots on radio shows and earning his place there, and it's really cool. It was adorable to hear Nish hyping up Andy for getting a job for which (Nish didn't mention this part) Nish Kumar had also applied.

In October 2022, John Oliver came back for a special Bugle 15th birthday episode, just him and Andy for half an hour, and it made me have to pull my hat down on the bus so people couldn't see that I had tears in my eyes from laughter (honestly, I should have anticipated that and not listened to it on the bus). It had been years since they'd worked together, and they mentioned during that episode that they hadn't seen each other in years and hadn't even had much contact since the end of The Bugle, but somehow they fell right back into the perfect rhythm. It's nice to know the magic's still there, even if they're not using it anymore.

So that pretty much brings you up to speed with where Andy Zaltzman's at now. For the last few years, his career has been hosting The Bugle in its expanded form that includes live shows sometimes, hosting The News Quiz, collating cricket stats and still doing lots of cricket-related work. He hasn't done a new Edinburgh hour since 2019, but he toured Satirist For Hire in 2022. He definitely can't describe his career with the term "Jack K. Shit going on" anymore.

Quick question, just asking for a friend - how many thousand words do you have to write before something goes from being "quite long for a Tumblr post" to "quite short for a biographical book"?

In fall 2023, Andy Zaltzman mentioned that he "might" have some new stand-up to announce soon. That surprised me, because to be honest, between The News Quiz and The Bugle and the cricket, he's fucking busy these days, and he must be making enough money to not need stand-up. He turns 50 this October. He's been slowing down the stand-up over the last few years, after about twenty years of doing it constantly. I thought he might be winding down that side of his career.

But suddenly, he's mentioning possible new stand-up in 2024. He mentioned it briefly in the fall and then didn't bring it up for so long that I started to think he must have changed his mind about it. But then, in spring 2024, he suddenly started talking about live gigs again. He booked some WIPs in May and June and plugged them on The Bugle. He slowly, with his usual level of self-promotional skills, barely admitted to the fact that he has a whole stand-up tour planned for November 2024. "November 2024?" I thought. "That seems odd. Andy rarely plans so far ahead, he's usually scrambling to plug gigs he forgot he has next week. And now, when I'd thought he might be leaving stand-up behind, he's planning an entire tour many months in advance. Why did he suddenly decide to do a whole big stand-up tour again, and once he did decide that, why did he plan it for so late in the year? I mean, I'm not complaining. More Zaltzman stand-up is great! But it's a break from his usual pattern."

That is what I thought, to myself, as I listened to his updates on The Bugle. And then I sat in the break room at work and I refreshed a page and saw the Taskmaster season 18 lineup and I jumped into the air and all became clear. He's capitalizing. Andy "No Commercial Promotion Skills Whatsoever" Zaltzman is going to capitalize on his fall 2024 Taskmaster bump in popularity by following it up with a tour. I'm so fucking pleased for him.

Guys. It's going to be so good. He's so good, you're all going to love him, I promise. Do you know what it will do to Taskmaster to have someone who can run circles around Alex Horne in the field of analyzing everything via obscure statistics? He's going to make Alex look like an amateur. He's going to have an explanation for every single thing that happens and none of the explanations will be rooted in any kind of reality but they will all make internal sense.

Oh God, people are going to have to talk about him. It is so funny to listen to people try to work out what to make of Andy Zaltzman, particularly if they're not in Andy's carefully curated niche of people whom he's decided he can manage to talk to. Ed Gamble is going to talk about Andy Zaltzman. 17 years after sharing a stage with Andy at Late 'n' Live where Andy declared Marek Larwood the most fuckable member of We Are Klang (he was incorrect, but not for the reasons Tumblr thinks, I would like to immediately apologize for saying that), Greg Davies will have to judge whatever absurd bullshit comes out of Andy's brain. There will be so many cricket references.

Have I mentioned that a cornerstone of Andy Zaltzman's comedy is turning everything into a sport? That's part of his absurd analogies, he analyzes everything as though it's sports. And I love people who analyze Taskmaster as though it's sports. Andy Zaltzman is going to go on Taskmaster and treat it like sports. Oh it's going to be so much fun!

I cannot wait. I cannot fucking wait. I've just realized he's going to have to plug Taskmaster on The Bugle. That'll be weird. Who's on TV now, Johnny Showbiz? I mean, still John, still very much John Oliver, but Andy as well now! You did it, Andy! It only took 17 years!

[kl125]

I’m a bit tired of the criticism surrounding the Percy Jackson show. Not the fact that criticism exists, because I agree with a lot of what’s being said, but people acting like there’s an intellectual superiority linked to hating the show. This is long, so here’s a “keep reading” for you.

No one said it would be a perfect book to TV adaptation. Even Rick said they would change some stuff, because he was given a chance to go back and reevaluate the original story. Personally, I think Rick’s writing is better suited for books, and doesn’t translate well to a TV show format (referring specifically to his writing for the screenplays), and there’s some jarring pacing issues moving from scene to scene. Not to mention, of the whole series, The Lightning Thief is one of the weaker stories, simply because Rick wrote it early in his career, and he had the chance of slowly improving with each new release. And I agree that simply saying, “Well, Rick approves of this adaptation,” does not excuse it from having flaws.

That being said, I still very much enjoy the show. Walker, Leah, and Aryan are carrying the story fairly well. I like their dynamic, and it gives a new perspective on Percy being an unreliable narrator, seeing as PJO is written in first person, but the show is portrayed in third person. Also, for people saying, “$15 million per episode, but where did it go?” The salaries for the cast and crew, the props, cameras, costumes, makeup, royalties for using certain songs, and some decent CGI, among other things. It adds up more than you think.

Now, if you don’t like the show, that’s fine. If you want to voice your criticisms, that’s fine. But please don’t act like your opinion is the only one that matters, and that anyone who actually enjoys the show is dumb or blind to the problems. People can enjoy things just…because. For me, there are MANY things I like which have TONS of evident problems, but those problems aren’t enough for me to give it up.

Also, “show don’t tell” is a good philosophy to have when telling a story, but we need to remember that this first season has to do a LOT of heavy lifting exposition wise. It has to cover a number of Greek mythology stories and character backstories, and weave them into the plot, in a relatively short amount of time. Yes, we have the benefit of eight episodes, but even then, there’s not enough time to dive deep into ALL of the intricacies of mythology and backstories. I think the episodes could stand to be a bit longer, and I think some scenes need have more breathing room so that the audience has more time to process what’s happening. As for why Percy seems to know everything, it’s stated multiple times outright that Sally told him the Greek mythology stories. They are ingrained in his brain, and Percy is very smart and quick.

Finally, there are a NUMBER of shows that had a pretty disappointing first season, but went on to improve with each new season. We should treat these criticisms as suggestions for improvement, instead of completely writing off the show. It’s not perfect, and that’s to be expected, but it’s still so early. We need to give shows time to grow and improve.

Anyway, if you’ve read all this and still hate the show, that’s fine. No one is stopping you. I fully respect that opinion, and I’m not here to change that. I just think there are more constructive ways of handling things like this than going on TikTok and being like, “Hot take, but the Percy Jackson show is actually garbage.” It’s about open conversation and constructive criticism and the hope that things will improve with time.

P.S. The irony of me writing this whole post portraying myself as intellectually superior is not lost on me. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, I just hope we can be more productive when sharing them. That’s all.

P.P.S. If you really don’t like the show, and you think it’s objectively terrible, then don’t watch it. No one is forcing you to keep up with it each week.

[gentlebeardsbarngrill]

03/16/24 Daily OFMD Recap

TLDR; Cast & Crew; Samba Schutte; Megan Vertelle; Save OFMD 3rd Tier Survey; In Soup Now; Stun Move Sunday; AdoptOurCrew; Rhys Madness Party; Request Uproar!; Pirate Radio/BoatThatRocks; Fan Spotlight; A to Z Ed Teach Zine; Cast Cards; Love Notes; Daily Darby/Tonight's Taika;

== Cast & Crew Sightings ==

= Samba Schutte BTS =

Samba definitely delivered with the BTS today! Today was shout out to the set design folks regarding The Floating Market! Source: Samba Schutte's Instagram

The Floating Market BTS - Video Part 1

The Floating Market BTS - Video Part 2

The Floating Market BTS - Video Part 3

The Floating Market BTS - Video Part 4

The Floating Market BTS - Video Part 5

The Floating Market BTS - Video Part 6

= Megan Vertelle =

Brilliant Set Designer Megan Vertelle added some more bts for us in regards to the floating market today!

Source: Megan Vertelle Instagram Stories

The Floating Market BTS - More Stills

The Floating Market BTS - Video Part 7

The Floating Market BTS - Video Bonus

== Save OFMD Crew - Survey ==

Please vote on the final stretch goal of the London Ad Campaign! It closes Monday 4 pm GMT / 12pm EST / 9am PST Link to the Survey

= StunMoveSunday =

Time for another #StunMoveSunday! Join SaveOFMDCrew on Instagram!

= In Soup Now =

Up to $1640 on the InSoupNow Fundraiser In Aid of Team HAVEN!

For an extra bit of fun:

== EVENTS ==

= Adopt Our Crew: Rhys Madness Party =

Our crewmates over at @adoptourcreware hosting a celebratory even for Rhys' birthday week! More details tomorrow!

SRC: AdoptOurCrew Twitter

== Request Uproar at your Local Theatre! ==

Today we heard back from @BlueFoxEntertainment and they have been kind enough to give us some instructions on how to request Uproar at our local theatres! Please go to: Blue Fox Entertainment Linktr.ee and follow the instructions below!

== Watch Parties ==

Mar 17th: The Boat That Rocked AKA Pirate Radio Watch Party

7:30 pm GMT / 3:30 pm EST / 1:30 pm CST

Watch Party Hashtags:

PirateRadio 

AdoptOurCrew

SaveOFMD

OurFlagMeansWatchAlong

Mar 18 - Mar 22: Wrecked Season 3

Season 3 watch from March 18th to March 22nd. 

Times will be 10pm GMT / 5pm EST / 4pm CST / 2pm PST. Watch two episodes per day. Episodes are 21-22 minutes each. Use the following Saturday for the tags/watch if interested but not able to make this time.

Hashtags: 

#WreckedPirates

#SaveOFMD

#RhysDarbyFaction

== Fan Spotlight ==

== Ed Teach A to Z Charity Zine ==

I've been meaning to post this for a week or so and I kept forgetting! So please please please check out the #AtoZofEdTeachZine! You can still get it! Visit the following link. Just donate to an LGBTQ+ charity, $10-15 depending on which version you'd like and they'll email you the zine! Great cause with AMAZING ARTISTS AND WRITERS! Please please check it out! Thank you @xray-vex!

= Cast Cards =

Another wonderful card for the most forgiving chief, Gary Farmer! Check him out in Reservation Dogs! Awesome show! Thank you as always to @melvisik for keeping the case collection coming!

== Dedication to Matthew ==

For Matthew One of our dear crewmates, Stephanie, lost her son back in 2022. They both watched S1 together, and tragically he passed away not long after. Stephanie has been an active member of our crew for years now, and she reached out to Rhys and he made a lovely Cameo for her. Some of you may have already seen it as she's been kind enough to share it with us previously, but after talking with Stephanie and hearing about who Matthew was, I wanted to put together a small dedication to him, and share Stephanie's words with you with her permission.  Please visit this post here on tumblr for the whole story or here on the Repo for those of you not on tumblr.

== Love Notes ==

Happy Saturday Lovelies! It's already Sunday for all the folks over on the other side of the Earth, and the weeks starting up again.

Today's been a bit of a long day, and I've been bad about not getting enough sleep lately so I'm gonna leave a couple notes from other folks. I hope you have a lovely evening or morning and know that you are incredibly loved as your imperfect unhinged self. Love you all <3 Night.

== Daily Darby / Tonight's Taika ==

Tonight's theme-- SWEATERS! Darby Gif Courtesy of @kiwistede Taika Gif Courtesy of @/Lightyear on Tenor

[kybercrystals94]

Resilient

By KyberCrystals94

Read here on Ao3!

Whumptober 2023 | Day 30 | Prompt 31: “I thought I was getting better.” | Setbacks | “Take it easy.”

Rating: T

Words: 935

Summary: Echo thought he had gotten past these episodes.

Author’s Note: I swapped the prompts for today and tomorrow, because I was going to post Part 3 of Regroup today; however, I needed a little more time with it, so it will be coming tomorrow!

“CT-1409, do you experience these episodes often?” a soft, even, expressionless voice asks.

Echo turns his head and finds himself face to face with a Kaminoan lab assistant, large orb eyes blinking slowly, expectantly. Waiting. They had asked him a question.

“What?” he asks, shifting awkwardly where he sits on the end of a medical cot, metal legs dangling.

The Kaminoan sighs but repeats the questions. “Your night terrors. Do you experience these episodes often?”

“No,” comes the automatic lie, “I don’t have night terrors.”

“That is incorrect, CT-1409,” the Kaminoan refutes, “Our records indicate that you experience night terror episodes between two and three times per week.”

“What records?” Echo demands. He’s never confessed his nightmares to anyone, let alone a Kaminoan medical facility. The only ones who know that he wakes up some nights with a scream being torn out of his lungs are...

“We receive reports from Clone Force 99,” the Kaminoan replies coolly. “It is troubling that you would find it acceptable to lie about your condition.”

Echo’s mind is reeling. The Batch told them? They’ve been reporting to the Kaminoans all this time? He trusted them...

“It isn’t a condition,” Echo protests weakly. His mouth and throat feel like he swallowed sand.

“Fully functioning clones are resilient to mental and emotional disorders such a post-traumatic stress. However, seeing as you have been altered extensively by the Techno Union, it is understandable that your cognitive constitution has been compromised.” The Kaminoan turns away from him, picks up a syringe filled with a silvery blue substance.

Echo stares at it. “What is that?”

“The cost of treating your condition far outweighs the benefits,” the Kaminoan tells him. “Please lie back and remain calm.”

“You’re going to decommission me,” Echo breathes out. He doesn’t move to lie down, he can’t. Even if he wanted to. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to die. “I need to speak with my commanding officer. CT-99...”

“There is no need,” the Kaminoan interrupts him. “Your commanding officer is fully aware of our decision.”

“No!” Echo shakes his head. “Hunter would not allow this. I demand to speak to him immediately.”

“You are Kaminoan property. Your commanding officer has no say. Please follow my request, or I will be forced to have you restrained.”

Echo wills himself to move, but it’s as though his muscles have turned to stone, heavy and unyielding. He can only watch in horror as the Kaminoan approaches him, puts a hand on his shoulder and pushes him back. The needle of the syringe glistens in the haunting white light overhead.

“It is a painless death,” the Kaminoan assures him.

“No, please,” Echo begs, and he realizes he is crying. “Please, I don’t want to die. Please.”

“You have served your purpose and are no longer a valuable or viable resource.” The pinch of a needle.

“Please...”

“Echo!”

The cyborg sits up with something between a strangled scream and a gasp. He is breathing hard, lungful after lungful of air doesn’t seem to be enough. A hand grips his bicep hard, and Echo pulls away wildly, swinging out with his scomp arm.

“Hey, hey, take it easy,” Hunter’s voice sounds startled, and Echo turns to see the Sargeant looking at him from several paces away.

“Stay away from me,” Echo chokes out, “Don’t come near me.”

“Echo,” Hunter soothes, “you were having a nightmare. You’re safe. You’re okay.”

“No,” Echo cries, “I’m not okay. I’m not!”

“Alright,” Hunter says.

Echo nods, still breathing hard. He can’t decide if his face is wet from sweat or tears. Maybe both. Either way, he rubs at his face with a shaking hand.

Hunter takes a step toward him, and Echo swallows, averting his eyes to the tangle of blankets only half covering him now. “Can I sit next to you, vod?” Hunter asks.

Brother.

Echo nods again, but Hunter still approaches slowly, like Echo’s a wounded animal about to lash out with teeth and claws. He kneels next to the bunk and puts out his hand, palm up. An offering. Echo takes it, gripping Hunter’s gloved hand so tight the fabric protests. “This is real,” Hunter murmurs. “You’re safe.”

“I’m safe,” the ARC echos softly. He sniffs. He is definitely crying. Kriff.

“This hasn’t happened in a while,” Hunter comments gently.

Echo tips his head back against the wall. “I thought I was getting better.” He glances at Hunter. “Did Omega hear anything?”

“Yeah,” Hunter admits, “she came and got me.”

Echo curses. “Hope I didn’t scare her too badly.”

“You didn’t,” Omega says from the doorway, her body pressed against the frame. “I was just worried about you.”

“I’m fine, kid,” Echo says. He releases Hunter’s hand and tries to wipe the dampness from his face again. “Just a bad dream.”

Omega smiles at him. “It’s okay if you’re not, though,” she says.

Echo blinks. Damn it. The kid was going to make him start bawling again. He returns her smile shakily but doesn’t trust himself to say anything, so he gives her a tight nod. That seems to be enough, because after another flash of a smile, she’s gone, called away by Tech in the cockpit, by design, Echo thinks distantly.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Hunter asks.

Echo shakes his head, the residual emotions of betrayal lingering in the corners of his mind. That wasn’t real, he reminds himself firmly. This is real.

“Okay, that’s fine,” Hunter says. He stands up, puts a heavy hand on Echo’s shoulder for a moment, then follows Omega out of the room, leaving Echo alone.

He focuses on the sound of the ship around him, takes a steadying breath. This is real.

END

Tag List: @isthereanechoinhere96 @followthepurrgil @amorfista @mooncommlink

✨Let me know if you’d like to be added to the Tag List✨

[cupidarchived]

Love Sea Thoughts

So, after watching episode 3, my brain is full. I have a lot of questions and a lot of thoughts. I'm going to try to organize them here. If this comes out a jumbled mess, please forgive me.

Let me preface by saying I love love love FortPeat. I think they are both talented in their own rights. I absolutely adore what they gave us with PrapaiSky. I adore them together, I think their chemistry is amazing.

As with any piece of anything, but especially media, there are going to be flaws and things we like and dislike. Differing opinions, views, feelings, experiences, and interpretations. But that's not what this is about at all. I do feel like the first two episodes, something felt off for me and I thought it was the pacing. I believe that's a small part of it. (I also believe that this might be another one of those shows where the plot is lacking, unless I have sorely missed something, and our actors are doing the heavy lifting.) I think a lot of the time we don't always get a grounded plot, more like a genre and a few tropes and that's kind of what we have to work with. Romance, 'hate'-to-love, and the couple just kind of getting together. Which is fine, but it can cause things to seem off in some areas.

Anyways, after watching ep 3, I feel that things are supposed to seem fast? It's supposed to be a simple, one-off, whirlwind vacation romance. They barely know each other. Tongrak disliked him a lot in the beginning, etc. But there is a time limit on what they have or it should be. (Judging by the preview for episode 4 and the fact that we have very many episodes left, we have way more drama and romance to come.) Tongrak seems traumatized by his home life/family dynamic. He spoke about his mother as if she was the last thing he wanted to be like and yet.. he shows some of the exact same traits, and also some opposing traits, that have made him all the more worse as a result. He buys Mahasamut, tries to control him with his money. And although he apologized, and Mahasmut seems fine with it, it has to hurt, having someone treat you like nothing or as if you're beneath them. Those were Tongrak's first instincts, he does apologize and show sympathy later on in the episode, but it says a lot about what he's probably experienced. Both of their familial stories sound intense and heartbreaking and it's really the first (or second, if we count the auntie's restaurant by the sea date) time we get to seem them sort of connect and get to know each other better, beyond just their physical attraction and sex.

Speed is important, I think, or at least something to take note of. Two weeks Tongrak spent there and Mahasamut is already asking him to stay (and Tongrak asking him to go back home with him, as per the preview). They seem to like each other, and yet, Mahasamut is ready to jump in full force, while Tongrak has stated multiple times that love is imaginary, not real. Our leads are not on the same page at all, which would probably give us more conflict down the line. But they also seem to not be able to stay away from one another. Which must be nerve-wracking for Tongrak, being that his mother was obsessed with his father who seemed to want nothing more to do with any of them other than her money (I felt those same vibes after the phone call with his sister, too. Dad must be lurking around after their money, but creeping on your granddaughter's school is an even more horrible way to do it). And Mahasamut has been tossed aside by his father, too. He's poor, working multiple odd jobs to make ends meet; he's been alone since he was 15, never daring to ask anyone for anything. He must be no stranger to being looked down on but he wants to be more for Tongrak clearly, but he's afraid he won't ever be enough, no matter how hard he tries.

I'm not sure where I was going with this but yeah. If I think of anything more, I'll come back and add it.

[lu-undy]

If your asks are still open, what would you think about Splniper comforting Spy after he wakes up from a nightmare by cuddling him and making him hot cocoa?

Here it is, I hope this checks out!

It is reasonable to imagine Spy having trouble sleeping. After all that he has done, all the lives he ended - directly or indirectly -, all the secrets and hearts that he stole, after all the deceptions and lies, it is fair to say that the man had a lot to feel remorse and regret for.

So the nightmares were frequent, the sleep babbling - one could hardly call it talking given the lack of more than a noise or syllable per few words - was incessant sometimes and of course, the clenching of his jaw and his limbs was exhausting.

On the other hand, Mundy could sleep anywhere in any, possibly uncomfortable position imaginable. But sharing his nights with Spy had shown him a side of the man that very few knew about him.

At first, the nights were peaceful. But as Spy grew comfortable with his lover, Mundy gradually got exposed to more and more of these episodes of nightly restlessness.

The first time it was only a babble. It woke the Aussie up and he had smiled about it, thinking this was in fact priceless ammunition for his little teasing games with the spy. But the smile soon disappeared when he saw the frown on Spy's sleeping face and the sweat dripping from his brow.

Sniper did not know how to react, much less how to ask Spy for guidance on this. But one day, before he managed to gather the courage, Spy himself opened up about this.

"I would understand if you preferred sleeping on your own."

The sentence had been the opener to a conversation that caught Sniper so off guard, he nearly spat his coffee out.

“What? No, why're you sayin' that?"

"I know my sleep is at the other end of peaceful and I can only imagine how painful it is to share a bed with me. I also know that after a nightmare that forced me to wake up last night, you pretended to be sleeping but you saw and heard everything. No need to make this more awkward than it needs to be." Spy puffed out some smoke, sat on his end of the sofa. He was staring at the cigarette between his fingers, which Sniper now knew was a habit he had to not look whoever he was addressing in the eye.

"Spook, I-"

"No need." Spy cut him and raised a flat hand. "No need to elaborate. You can go back to your van and meet with me for breakfast here or whenever you feel like it."

“No, you idiot." That's when Spy's eyes flashed to his lover who was sat at the other end of the couch. "I don't care that you wake me up at night. But now that we're talkin' about it, I've always wanted to ask you a few things about it."

Spy waved his hand in an inviting motion, for Sniper to ask away. "You didn't used to have these… uh…”

"Episodes." Spy filled in.

"Yeah, those episodes, you didn't use to have them when we first started seein' each other. So I'm thinking that it's somethin' I do or say that makes this happen. And whatever it is, it’s really gettin’ on your nerves.”

Spy shook his head, sighing.

“Spook, please. Just tell me what it is and I’ll stop doin’ it.”

Spy chortled.

“Don’t give yourself any credit, Bushman.”

“What’s that mean?” Sniper asked.

“It means that you are not the cause of any of this. It started way before I knew you.”

“How come it didn’t happen at the beginnin’ then?”

“That is because I hardly slept at the beginning, precisely to avoid this issue. But after weeks of being sleep deprived, I couldn’t fight it anymore and I now sleep at night.” Spy took a drag of his cigarette. He was speaking coldly, which he usually did, but Sniper could tell that this was a bit colder than usual which meant that Spy was trying to hide his emotions.

The Aussie let the silence hang for a second before he found the right way to respond.

“I just wanna know how to help you.” He answered and put his now empty coffee mug on the coffee table in front of him. “I don’t want to go away from you just because you have trouble sleepin’, that’s stupid.”

Spy did not say anything.

“So d’you know what I can do to help you when you have these nightmares and things like that?” Sniper asked.

“Non.” Spy answered. “As far as I know, nothing helps.”

“Have you tried tablets to help you sleep? Maybe that can work?”

“I am not sick.” Spy replied. “This is not an illness. It is the result of my life choices.” He stood up and left the sofa. Sniper understood that it was not personal, it was not against him. It was against himself. Spy hated having a problem that a gun or a knife could not fix.

Mundy made a decision as his eyes followed Lucien going to his bathroom and locking the door, and the decision was the following: he would try different things and see what would work best, if anything did.

He started going to Medic for medical advice.

“So when did this start?”

“Can’t remember a night where I could sleep right to be honest.” Mundy lied. Obviously he slept like a log but he would never compromise his lover’s reputation and tell anyone that Spy had a problem.

“Interesting. And why come to me now? If this is something you have dealt with all your life, what pushed you to seek help now?” Medic asked, pushing his glasses up his nose.

“If you can patch gunshot wounds and broken bones within seconds with that medigun of yours then I reckon you can probably help with this too, eh?”

Medic smirked.

“But,” Sniper added. “I don’t wanna take tablets or stuff like that. I want you to tell me how I can fix it and go back to sleeping like I was when I was a kid.”

“Even more interesting.” Medic nodded to himself. “I can give you a few methods, but I can guarantee they won’t be as efficient as taking some prescription medicine.”

“That’s fine.”

“The other thing you should know is that you will need someone to do those things to you when those fits happen. I trust this is not an issue?”

Sniper slightly blushed. Of course Medic knew that he was spending his nights in Spy’s room, but this was the first time he heard it from him. He nodded.

“Yeah. Well, thanks, Doc’.” Sniper stood up and left.

The second person Sniper went to was Engie.

“So, where’s Spy? Usually you two come together on Friday nights?” The Texan asked.

It was true. To escape the ruckus of the Friday evening team celebrations, Sniper and Spy usually hid away in Engie’s garage. The beer tasted better when consumed in a quieter environment.

“D’you know what to do when someone has night terrors?” Sniper asked bluntly.

“You have night terrors?”

“Yeah.” Sniper lied. “I can’t sleep properly, I talk in my sleep. Sometimes I wake up in a sweat, and my whole body is tense.”

“Well, you’d better ask sawbones for these things. Can’t fix it with a contraption, I’m afraid.”

“So you don’t know?” Sniper asked and deep down, he was hiding a smile. He had learnt from Spy that if you wanted anything from Engie, it had to challenge his intellect; or if that failed, question it.

“From what I know, it really depends on what provokes the night terrors. I just know that for some people, it’s trauma; no easy fix for that.”

“What’s the hard fix then?” Sniper asked.

“Again, I don’t know much but here’s what I know…”

— Later —

Spy was reading in bed, his night lamp was on. It was past midnight and sleep started to fall on him gently but he could hear Sniper still in the shower. Ah, nevermind, the water just stopped.

The Frenchman distantly heard the bathroom door open. He switched his light off and put his book away before sliding down in his bed to lie down. He shut his eyes and waited to hear Sniper leave his suite.

Instead, the mattress lowered down. Spy rolled to see what was happening.

“What are you doing here?” He asked the tall, lanky man who was slipping in bed next to him.

“What does it look like? Fryin’ eggs?”

“I thought we agreed that you would sleep in your van?”

“Nah, you agreed on that on your own, I didn’t.” Mundy scooted closer to his lover and held him close.

“Mundy, you don’t have to-”

“Good night, luv’.” Mundy cut him and Lucien felt a kiss on his temple.

The Frenchman sighed and held Mundy’s hand in his.

That sense of peace vanished a few hours in the night, and Lucien started to babble and spasm. Mundy woke up and waited to see if his lover was calming down.

“Non…”

Mundy waited and listened.

“Non… Non!”

Lucien was definitely not calming down. The Aussie then applied his teammate’s advice. He rolled Lucien to make him lie on his back and lay on top of him, crushing him with his own weight.

“Nnh…”

The babbling subsided almost instantly, the spasming took longer but Mundy was patient. He grabbed some tissue from the bedside table and wiped Lucien’s sweaty brow.

“It’s alright… You ain’t alone anymore… I’m here with you…”

The spasms became less frequent, only the breathing was irregular now.

“Sssh… it’s alright.”

Mundy grabbed the bottle of water and hand towel he had brought on his bedside table and wet it before putting it on Lucien’s forehead. He immediately lay on him again afterwards.

Lucien’s breathing calmed down, and he eventually opened his eyes. The night light was on and he realised his brow was nice and cool.

“Mundy…?”

“You’re alright.”

“What is…? Wait…” Lucien gently pushed Mundy away and the Aussie obliged. “What is this doing on my forehead? And why were you sleeping on me?”

“You won’t believe me, but it worked.” The Aussie sat on his side of the bed, his back towards Lucien.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Sit up, luv’.” When Mundy turned to face Lucien again, the Aussie had a glass of water in his hand. “Here, drink this.”

Lucien obeyed without a second thought.

“I tried some stuff to help you calm down. It worked, with a bit of time.”

Lucien stopped drinking sharp.

“What did you do? Just crush me with your body?”

“Yeah, and cool you down.” Mundy answered.

Lucien sat up straight and put the now empty glass away.

“How did you know what to do?”

“I asked Medic and Engie.”

“You did what?!”

“Relax, I told them that it was for me.” Mundy answered. “And in any case, we trust Medic with our lives, which is mad enough. Can’t hurt to ask the crazy nurse.”

Lucien sighed.

“I suppose you are right. And it worked.”

“How d’you feel?”

“Different.”

“How?”

“Usually when I wake up after an episode, I am out of breath and exhausted. But now, I feel much better, barely any sweat, I am not breathing as if I just beat a sprinting world record… I… Thank you.” He looked Mundy in the eye.

“Yeah, no worries. It wasn’t hard.” Mundy answered and Lucien yawned. “Ready to sleep again?”

“Oui, I think so.”

“Right.” Mundy switched the night light off and slid down under the sheets. Lucien did the same.

“Mundy?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you, really.”

“You’re welcome.”

The darkness made it easier for both of them to communicate, verbally and otherwise. Lucien rolled on his side and grabbed Mundy’s arm to pull him in. The Aussie found himself spooning his lover. He could not see it but Lucien rolled his eyes up in bliss before closing them. He could not get enough of the warmth, the embrace was comforting as much as it was calming for his nerves.

“Mundy?” He whispered.

“Yeah?”

“I…” Lucien cleared his throat. “May I be hugged please?”

“Course.”

With the weeks passing by, Lucien’s episodes became overall less violent. It was only on occasions that he would need to fully wake up. Most of the time, Mundy would lie on top of him and Lucien would barely wake up. The sleep talking and spasming became less frequent too. Not only that, but Lucien would ask for hugs more often in bed. And Mundy came to realise that the Frenchman, even with all his love conquests, was starved of any meaningful touch. No one held him for more than a few minutes after intercourse, and no one made him feel as safe as in Mundy’s arms.

“I owe you my peace of mind.”

“Can you do introductions with bits of context?” Mundy asked at the breakfast table.

“I could.” Lucien answered. “But I believe what I said is clear enough.”

“Makes no bloody sense to me but alright.” Mundy gave a chuckle.

“Yesterday night was the first night in more than forty years that I slept through without any stress.” Lucien said.

“I’m happy for you.” Mundy bent on his side and left a kiss on his lover’s temple before resuming the buttering of his toast.

“If there is anything I can do to repay this, please let me know, whatever it is.” Lucien answered. “Even if you think it is impossible to do it, I will make it happen.”

“Well,” The Aussie put his butter knife down. “There’s one thing I’ve really wanted but I’m not sure you or anyone can do it.”

“Please.” Lucien asked him to say whatever it was.

“Could you pass me that apricot jam over there?” Mundy smirked and Lucien rolled his eyes, nevertheless he passed him the jar.

“Mundy…”

“What? I really want that jam, y’know how much I like that on my toast, eh?”

They both chuckled and Mundy got caught off guard. Lucien himself initiated a kiss.

[bullet-clubs-bitch]

can you please write an Christian Cage X Fem Reader Story, (age gap couple 22 years apart)

Reader is fighting insomnia and he recognized that her bed side is empty and when he's looking for her, he finds her on the living room windows sill watching the rain and he asks what's wrong and she tells him she's fighting insomnia from time to time and she didn't wanted to bother him, he guides her back to bed let her know that he is there for her every sleepless night and tug her under the blanket and let her lay on his chest and make sure that she feels comfortable and she hugs him tightly listening to his heart beat and she's slowly drifting of to sleep while he holds her tight in his arms, after she thanks him for always being there for her

Insomniac

Christian Cage X FemReader

Christian Cage Masterlist Main Masterlist

One thing I hated about the spring was the weird in between weather we got. It was too warm to snow and not cold enough for the rain droplets to form into ice. The past week had been nothing but rain, all day everyday it rained. I was never one for the rain, it was cold, it was wet and it was miserable. Y/n loved the rain, she loved the way it felt on her skin, the way it smelt, the way it sounded as it hit the roof she adored it. So it made me happy when I saw how happy Y/n was with the rain.

Sometimes I worried about her, she was one of those people that were always so happy and kind to others but you knew deep down inside something was wrong. I knew she had depression and anxiety, I knew she had sleep problems but she always hid it from the rest of the world. I was one of the few fortunate people to know of this. I remember when I met her for the first time when I joined AEW, she was a writer for the show. I remember thinking she was a bit young for such a professional job but she was quick to show that her age didn’t define her skills. The ideas she came up with, the creativity she had was truly amazing. Maybe that’s why I fell in love with her.

I knew it would be scandalous, people would talk. How would you feel knowing that the two of us shared a 22 year age gap as she was 28 and I was 50. I knew how wrong it was, I knew I was too old for her but she was unlike anyone I had ever met before. We didn’t need to have a romantic relationship per say but I needed to get to know her, I had to know every detail about her. Somewhere along the line we fell in love and here we are, together in our shared home enjoying the rain on a miserable Tuesday night. 

I could tell something was up from the moment Y/n and I returned from last week's episode of Dynamite. I offered for the two of us to go on a mini vacation since there was no Collision this week but Y/n claimed she had to get work done for Revolution. That was fine, I knew she had a lot of work but sometimes I worried that she was doing too much. Y/n had all her paperwork spread out on our large dining room table as she sat working on her computer and sorting paperwork all day. She would have the fireplace on for warmth and had the calming rain in the background as she worked nonstop. It got to the point where she was up before I was and went to bed after me. Some nights I don’t even think she went to bed. Tonight was no different, as I twisted and turned in my sleep I rolled over and felt the familiar empty cold spot next to me. I checked the time and it was around 3am, how is she still up? As I slowly crept down the stairs I assumed Y/n would be in the kitchen still working but when I checked she wasn’t there. I searched the house and was starting to get scared when I couldn't find her. 

Just then I noticed a pile of blankets sitting on the window sill. “What’s wrong honey?” I asked Y/n gently as I carefully sat next to her. “I can’t sleep” “Why don’t you come up to bed and just lie down” “I can’t” “Why not honey? What’s the matter?” I knew not to push too hard in this situation but In order for me to help her I needed more details. I noticed the open computer and knew that this was due to all the stress she was under. “How can I help? Tell me what I can do to help you. I need to know what’s wrong in order to help you!” “I just can’t” “Can’t what honey?” “I can’t do this. I’m so tired but I can’t sleep, I have so much work and everytime I finish one thing five more new things show up” Y/n was now facing me and I could tell how tired she really was. Poor thing looked exhausted and I knew with Revolution being two weeks away this would only get worse. 

“Do you want me to talk to TK-” “NO!, no ...sorry, I shouldn't have said anything Christian. I’m sorry I woke you up. It’s nothing really…I…” “Don’t ever apologize alright. That’s what I’m here for Y/n. I don’t care if you wake me up at 1am or 3am, I will be there for you during every sleepless night alright. I love you so much, I can’t even explain it. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I promise you I will be there for you for every second of it okay?” I noticed a few tears fall from Y/n’s face and I was quick to wipe them away. “You alright?” I asked her “I’m just so tired” I hated seeing Y/n like this but unfortunately this is part of the job. “I know baby, I know. Let’s go to bed” “Can you carry me?” How could I say no to that? I carefully carried Y/n upstairs before tucking her securely under the sheets. I held her close as I waited for her to fall asleep before even attempting to fall asleep myself. “Thank you Christian” “Anytime my love, now get some rest. We have a flight tomorrow”