#good audience

[yastaghr]

I was at an Imagine Dragons concert a few-ish years ago (time is complicated) where something like this happened (twice!) During the show.

For context, this was in Denver.

The first time in the show that it happened, they were setting up the audience to sing along with a wordless tune in a few places. They sang it, and they were clearly not expecting it when the sold out crowd of thousands of people not only repeated it on rhythm, but we're pitch perfect. I am not kidding, I was there; the shock was so clear in their body language.

So they decided to see if we could do another little tune for the song, a longer one with a tricky jump in it. Same result, shock increased immensely.

I'm not sure if it was a challenge to their own disbelief, to us, or to whatever deity or spirit was watching us, but they did a third tune. This was one that was long enough that you really needed to have had breath training to get through it. Really good breath training, too.

The sheer overwhelming emotions that we all had, them and the audience of thousands of people (looking it up gives me more than 20,000 of us), when we did it? When we got everything right– tones, jumps, pitch, tempo, rhythm, everything?

That silence was almost as powerful as the music was when we got to join in on the song with those tunes.

But? That wasn't the only big moment in the concert. They had a song (maybe two) in the lineup from their early days, one that wasn't on any recording you could really get access to. I think it was partly because of nostalgia for them, and also the hope that a few people might vaguely remember it.

It was more than just a few people, guys.

It was at least half the audience, and enough of them knew it by heart that the band stopped singing partway through and we carried it for them while they got through the tears. Even those of us who hadn't heard it yet were singing the chorus by the end of it!

I'm a musician, I grew up singing and was in a small-group children's choir that got invited to compete in the a cappella world stage (it was in Wales that year, but I caught a cold that almost went into double pneumonia the week before we were going to leave, so I stayed back).

That concert was at with Imagine Dragons? That was the single most profound musical experience I've been at.

We weren't just watching the concert, a room full of people with tickets to a show. No, we weren't just watching a show. We were a part of it, we were an Audience that was so much more than just the individual people there that night.

It truly was a perfect moment.

couldn’t stop thinking about this post

[noperopesaredope]

I wish we had more female characters like Eleanor Shellstrop. One of the most unlikable people you've ever met. Read a Buzzfeed article on most rude things you can do on a daily basis and decided to use that as a list of goals. Makes everyone's day worse just by being there. Dropped a margarita mix on the ground and tried to pick it up, only to get hit by a row of shopping carts which pushed her into the road where she was hit by a boner pill delivery truck, killing her instantly. Cannot keep a romantic partner despite being bisexual. Had a terrible childhood but will die before she gets therapy. Best employee at a scam company. Just the worst but also can't help but root for her to improve.

Absolute loser. Girl-failure. Bad at almost everything. Literally perfect female character.

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[nipuni]

the snake of eden 🥰

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[bloominglegumes]

happy halloween :)

(rough and doodles below)

[sparrowlucero]

dr who is (apparently) redesigning this turtle from the classic series to be just a green human elf lady instead and twitter is eating it up because "no one would take the show seriously otherwise" and "the audience isn't able to empathize with something that doesn't look human". another fascinating data point in the psychology of doctor who fans.

[samwwise]

mum said it’s my turn to do the good omens + text posts meme pt. 5 (pt.1 / pt.2 / pt.3 / pt.4)

[redeemed-wren]

I do find it facinating how Dracula Daily has turned Dracula into a different kind of myth now that we're in its third year running. I've seen a few people compare it to Hadestown, or a timeloop. The enjoyment isn't JUST from engaging with the story now, it's engaging with the experience, and while the emails are still the same as previous years, we've been through this before.

The way we as an audience interact with this story and this way of telling the story changes the genre. Its no longer a gothic horror, classic lit story. It's become a mythology, a tragedy, a repeating loop. Jonathan Harker returns to the castle every year. Every year it happens again. And that changes it, builds up new mythos around it, even if the words stay exactly the same.

[deadandphilgames]

still cannot believe dan and phil are acknowledging everything now. the phondage bar,,, they could’ve ignored it but no they included it. the situationship memes, the his and his toilets, the yaoi cocaine. GoldenPhil gate. before those memes would’ve been skipped or scrolled past without an acknowledgment, now they are joking about them and giggling

[jonnywaistcoat]

Greetings Mr waistcoat

So I run these ghost story periods at the summer camp I work at. Last time I read Do Not Open (with a few tweaks because kids) and the cabin was not impressed (no taste ig). What statement would you reccomend for 10-13 year olds for ghost stories?

I dunno, mate, honestly. I wrote Archives for depressed, burned out millenials like me and the fact that it took off in a bunch of high schools will forever be slightly baffling to me. I try to write good, interesting Horror and I like to think I broadly succeed, but as far as figuring out whats gonna be a hit with The Demographics, your guess is as good as mine!

I would say you don't need to tone em down, though. Kids are absolute sickos, in my experience, and can't get enough of the gruesome shit.

[jounosparticles]

every now and then i think about how asagiri literally said bsd was made for people who aren’t good at living. like he was onto something with that

[eaissilyy]

Someone’s playing music.

Hello you can’t expect me not to feel anything when you placed Mogh the Sewer Guy™ and Morgott’s seal (sealed by Morgott the grace-given btw) in front of Frenzied jumping hell. There is no way they didn’t explore every corner of the sewer (so they can find the safe and least cold place to sleep… not to find the melting eyes disease) and found this abandoned catacombs with thousands corpses by accident.

Also this is perspective practice and then I found put that 1) I have no idea how it works 2) I make it up just to look believable enough and not look at it again 🙏🙏

[therenaissancedungeonmaster]

Tom Cardy released a new song and I think it'd be really funny if we started yaoi shipping the DJ and the Guy from the song.

[turtleblogatlast]

AU where Leo is trapped in the Prison Dimension for months instead of minutes and the only way he gets by with his sanity intact is through recording himself talking to his wrist comm.

When they finally manage to get Leo back and make him rest up to heal, Donnie can’t help but listen to the recordings left behind.

He’s not sure what exactly he’s expecting, only that his subconscious is screaming at him that it has to be heartbreaking, that it has to be torturous.

Instead, what Donnie is subject to is a full thousand hours’ worth of Jupiter Jim and Lou Jitsu crossover fanfiction. More than one part in the series. Spanning well over a million words.

(The worst part is that it’s actually good.)

[vamp-bites]

Woah cant believe i almost missed michaelmas… anyway happy birthday to Adam Milligan<3 and happy michaelmas to Michael too i guess. Take this quick doodle of Adam and his guard dog of an archangel