Zooier Than Thou
- Author TogglesHappyZoo
- Creation date
- Featured
Listen @ zoo.wtf- YouTube
W YouTube możesz cieszyć się filmami i muzyką, które lubisz, przesyłać oryginalne treści i udostępniać je swoim bliskim, znajomym i całemu światu.youtu.be
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Thoughts About the Episode
Hi folks! This is Tarro, you might know me from the magazine Zooey Dot Pub. I'm writing this production blog because I got the chance to produce my very first Zooier Than Thou episode! It was a lot of fun, but wow is it ever easier typing words on my laptop than it is doing a podcast, so it feels nice to be back in my element!
I didn't realize I was the show runner for this episode until it ended up in my lap, and with Anthrocon just around the corner, it was a bit of a rush, although I think it ended up okay! This episode was about zoo pride in real life. I think it's a pretty important topic, especially lately. There's been so much online discourse about this and that, and I think it can be really easy, especially if you're on social media, to lose sight of the reason that we're all doing this, and so getting the chance to talk about what kinds of efforts people are making to help the zoo community to grow offline was a breath of fresh air for me to be able to dive into.
As soon as I figured out the concept for the episode, I knew that I wanted Steeeeeeeve to cohost it with me. Not only is he the zoo stickers guy, which is very much a real life thing, but also Steeeeeeve also just has really great energy for interviews, which is what the majority of the episode ended up being. He's fantastic at hitting all the points you want to hit, while still making it conversational, and making it feel like we're just going with the flow. I also had first time guest Zoey on, and that was really cool! She's heavily involved with setting up a lot of the furry convention zoo parties that I've had the pleasure of attending. At the MFF party we had an absolutely rediculous turn out, and it was such an absolute shock being in a room with that many other zoos just being open and myself. The experience was really special to me. It's not like I don't get the chance to hang out with zoos in real life fairly often, I'm pretty lucky to have a few close zoo friends in my area, but at that scale it really reminded me that there are SO many of us out there. And, a lot of them were just totally disconnected from the online zoo spaces. They didn't know about the magazine, or the podcast or anything. And because of that, I got to turn off the Twitter part of my brain (helped by a fair amount of alcohol) and just have fun. It was awesome.
We also had Lazuli on as another first time guest. I wasn't familiar with him, but he came highly recommended by Zoey and runs his own local group that's a little bit more low-key. It was great having him there because so much of my own experience meeting zoos has been facilitated by the furry fandom, and so having someone totally disconnected from that who still manages to meet and make zoo friends was really valuable, and I think that the non-furry zoos out there don't get enough representation anyway!
I was pretty nervous going into the recording session. I've been on the show a decent number of times at this point, but it felt different in my head when I was the one who put everything together. When I'm writing articles, it's very easy to make a typo and then just erase it, or come back to it a couple days later with fresh eyes and reassess what I've got. I just deleted a sentence just now that I didn't like and put this one in instead, and it took a whole 5 seconds of effort. But when you're recording, while you do still have the power of editing (thank you Ryder) at the same time once it's done it's done. You don't really have control over it. But, as soon as we all joined the room and started talking, even before pressing record, I knew we were going to make something pretty good. Everyone clicked really authentically, and it was hard actually starting the recording because we were just all having fun chatting. I think that translated well to the episode as well, it felt very conversational. In my opinion anyway.
We didn't have much in terms of extra content this month, partially because we didn't have time, but also partially because I think we said everything we wanted to say about pride, which is a big topic, and making it all fit felt fairly important to me. I didn't want a just okay skit taking up air time when I felt like the points we were hitting were generally so important.
Also, it was cool being part of an episode that was decidedly not about tech. I feel like most of the time I'm pulled in it's to talk about online culture, or I'm there as the social media apologist, but being able to show that yes I do go outside was nice.
My biggest concern going into the episode was safety. I was really worried about giving away the secret sauce, so to speak, and opening up these avenues for zoos to meet other zoos to bad actors that might want to cause problems. We had a pre recording meeting a few days prior and that was one of the things I really wanted to talk to Zoey and Laz about, because the last thing that I would want is for someone (or a lot of people) to get outed because we talked about exactly how to meet other zoos, but I think they both had really great responses about how to avoid that danger. Meeting in person is always going to be inherently more risky than just joining an online zoo space, or just DMing someone, but in my opinion so long as you're following best safety practices it's well worth it.
One thing that we talked about a little bit on the episode was the idea of community bottlenecks in real life, and that's something that I'm cautiously excited to see in the future. How big can zoo spaces get before it starts becoming more of an issue? How many people can you cram into one room at a furry convention before it's just too big? What does the future of real life zoo events look like? It's stuff that there isn't really a definitive answer for, but it's something I think about more and more as the community grows and grows. At what point does it just become economical to run our own little zoo conventions, rather than rely on furry conventions to be a common meeting point? I'm going to a zoo event later this summer where a bunch of my friends are renting out a cottage and everyone's just congregating there. I can imagine a world where that just keeps growing and growing until eventually there's 50 person zoo events happening every weekend. At least, while the weather's good. Who knows though, the future is an exciting thing, and I'm curious to see how it shapes out.
Overall, I'm really happy with how this episode turned out. It was a lot of fun, I think we said some good stuff, and I really hope that people who are in online spaces that feel isolated listen and know that there's a whole world of zoos they can actually drive to and see and hang out with.
Anyway, I'm going to turn this into an article if I keep writing, so check out Zooey Dot Pub if you want more of that (sorry Toggle I needed to plug at least once). I think the next month I've got no roles so I'm going to kick back, relax, and go for a hike. Thanks for listening, and thanks for reading!
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Do you have zoo friends you hang out with in real life? How do you make sure you're staying safe while meeting people? What do you think the future of meeting other zoos is going to look like? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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W YouTube możesz cieszyć się filmami i muzyką, które lubisz, przesyłać oryginalne treści i udostępniać je swoim bliskim, znajomym i całemu światu.
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Thoughts About the Episode
(This is a placeholder — No blog has been written at this time)
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How did this episode speak to you? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
_________________________
You can subscribe to our RSS feed using your favorite podcast application: rss.zoo.wtf
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You can contact us using the anonymous web form at zoo.wtf
Listen @ zoo.wtf- YouTube
W YouTube możesz cieszyć się filmami i muzyką, które lubisz, przesyłać oryginalne treści i udostępniać je swoim bliskim, znajomym i całemu światu.youtu.be
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Thoughts About the Episode
First off, apologies that I forgot to post last month’s blog. It is up and available, so feel free to check out Aqua’s show notes!
So, we’ve been wanting to do this episode for a little while now, but we wanted to make sure we were prepared. I think we learned about Constructing Canine Consent from Lovecat, who had picked up the book last year. LC posted some pages from the book in our podcast chat that felt particularly relevant to the types of things we’re interested in, and Mike the Dog picked up the book shortly after. Later on in the year, after talking with Mike the Dog about potential December episode topics, Constructing Canine Consent came up again, and we decided we wanted to push it off a little bit so we could be more prepared.
Originally, I’d hoped that Lovecat and Mike the Dog could host this episode, but LC has been extremely busy and wasn’t able to contribute the way he wanted to. So I took on the task and bought the book. I honestly didn’t think I’d have time to read it, but it’s actually short enough I was able to get through it in a week without having to dedicate too much extra time to it. We had an initial discussion where Mike laid out what he wanted to discuss and I gave suggestions, while Eggshell stood by and listened to get a sense of what kind of cold opening she wanted to write. Originally, we were just going to do a skit we had sitting in backlogs and a random Shiv song, along with a cold open. We also decided to play with the typical episode format and see what would happen if we broke up the topic into two parts and put emails at the end. Let us know if that was successful!
Later in the week, just as I was going to sleep, I had the thought that a Dog Science skit might actually be perfect, because those are really always a satire of human exceptionalism, so they really fit the theme. I texted this to Eggshell just before I went to sleep, so she got some very confusing texts at like 3 in the morning. Fortunately, we had a meeting to hash things out. I liked the symposium idea she had come up with, but there was space for a quote from the book at the end to tie everything together. I didn’t have a quote yet that I thought really captured what we wanted to talk about, so I agreed to go hunt something down. (It would turn out a few pages later in the book I’d find exactly what we were looking for.) We also talked about skit possibilities, and I was more than a little insistent that a Dog Science skit was the direction I wanted to go. Eggshell wasn’t really familiar with the characters, so I took that on. We then took a listen to Shiv’s latest album to find a track we wanted to use. Eggshell was really pushing for Anti-Me Alliance, which is essentially about a man getting cucked by a dog, but I didn’t think it was a very good fit. “I am known to favor more controversial choices,” she joked. After going through everything, The End of Humanity felt like it was a better fit, since part of Jones’ book talks about the idea of what life for dogs would be like without humans on earth anymore.
I had no idea what I was going to write for Dog Science until I sat down to write, and I was worried I might struggle to make something relevant. I put on my meditative writing playlist, had a big think, and then the idea just came to me, and I wrote it. Originally, I’d thought of a symposium for Doctor Schnitzel where he was answering questions, but that was too close to the cold open. I took a look over the original scripts before writing, and I think that helped a lot in pointing me toward the dissertation direction. I thought it came out nicely! How about you?
We were SUPER nervous about recording the discussion, because we didn’t want to fuck up such an important topic. We literally recorded the first half at like 8 am on a Sunday, which suuuuucked, but sometimes that’s when people are available! I think we kind of stumbled our way through it at the beginning, but once we hit our stride, I think we did an alright job, especially with a little bit of editing to clean everything up. I do feel like a lot of the themes of the book echo things we’ve talked about consistently on the show, and I really liked that it put dog-indexed consent in terms we could actually define and discuss, while also addressing the general condition of dogs in human society. If there’s anything we really wanted people to come away with, it’s that even as zoos our relationships with dogs are often colored by human exceptionalism, which leads us to limit the choices our dogs (and by extension other animals) have to what’s convenient for us. Opening up those choices and being aware of our own motivations for the decisions we make on behalf of our animal companions will help to improve their lives, and ultimately that’s what should matter to us as zoos.
We avoided talking about sexual consent during this discussion because we didn’t want to paint the impression that Erin Jones’ work supported sexual interactions with animals. We also really wanted to focus on everyday interactions and think about the idea of consent more generally. So often it’s locked away as a sexual concept, but it’s something that we should be applying liberally outside of the confines of a bedroom.
We were also keenly aware that it’s an episode focusing heavily on dogs. It may not seem like it, but we talk a lot about how we really need less dog-centric content. I felt that given the book and how important I felt the topic was, this time was unavoidable, but we really need more horse-centric and other-animal-centric zoos to help us write stuff. We don’t have Fausty’s wealth of knowledge about other animals as a resource anymore, and while we’ve tried to have different characters who, for instance, like cetaceans, I don’t want those to just be token acknowledgments toward other zoo orientations. I had someone write in recently that Fausty spoke about horses with a depth that hasn’t really been seen since season 1, and that is really a shame. Come help us fix that!
I guess that’s about it for this time. I’m off for the next couple of months, so it’s someone else’s problem now!
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Was there anything eye opening about our discussion of canine agency and consent? In what ways do you provide salient choices for the animals in your life? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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Thoughts About the Episode
(Toggle Note: Apologies, I didn’t realize I hadn’t posted this blog post from Aqua!)
"Hey we have no idea what we're doing next month"
Every year around the holidays we get together and plan the next season's episode calendar. Some of them have a formula, like October and December, and a few others have themes like pride month for June and zoo pride week in July. That leaves the rest of them to play with alternate formats and recurring segments that are fun to make. And cool guest interviews, and a couple topics chosen from a long list of suggestions by listeners and staff that matter to them personally, and that they hope other zoos will think about and find interesting.
By way of --sheer--luck-- our combined dedication, extraordinary skill, and professionalism, April --was-a-problem-- became available to cover something that is very important to me, and happened to be mentioned by a listener who wrote in asking for our opinion about KOSA and similar legislative efforts. And I sure do have an opinion about that.
Actually, April was pretty good timing for a KOSA episode. Past presidents signed similar bills into law around this time, and the ones that don't make it out of congress get abandoned, or shelved awhile, or reintroduced in the new session. That's where we are with KOSA right now. It's obvious that it's not dead but with everything else that's happening, it may not get much coverage when it reappears.
And besides, our long suffering producer needed an easier workflow this month so they could attend to other projects.
So that's how myself, Tarro, and Mikethedog set about untangling KOSA and similar legislation to understand what they do, why they exist, where they fail, and whom they affect. We picked one angle out of many possibilities to discuss that is common to all of them--age verification--and try to make it interesting and relatable. More palatable than uncooked spaghetti noodles, and more substantial than astronaut ice cream. I think we got there in the end.
Shortly after recording and before release, Utah's App Store Accountability Act was signed into law. And about a week later, Colorado's own age verification bill, which would have required sites to ask users for ID or to submit to AI age analysis with their face or hands, is dead for now. Colorado would have been the 20th state.
At the federal level, the Take It Down Act, which tries to prevent abusive intimate deep-fakes using a DMCA-style takedown process, is about to pass the house and will probably become law this year. But the law is written so poorly that it's possible it will apply to forms of protected speech, threatens encryption in private messaging (here we go again), and unlike the DMCA, does not contemplate any kind of abuse prevention for the takedown process.
It's... a lot, I know. It's way too much at once, and that's the point. To blot out the sun with nonsense so that anybody paying attention is stunned into despair and inaction. To make you feel like there's too many things to care about, and not enough of you left to be effective anywhere, while just trying to live.
Well that's not how things work. Even a small amount of planned action gets noticed. If you're in the United States, head over to 5calls.org. There's an app, too, and it makes it super easy to find your elected representatives, pick issues that matter to you, and, you guessed it, make five calls. Get a few of your friends to do it, use the call group tracking feature, and suddenly your five calls turns into a hundred.
It works. Stay defiant and Do The Thing.
aqua
Colorado would have been #18 but their own state bill rejected
Colorado won’t become latest state requiring porn sites to verify their users’ age after lawmakers abandon bill
Senate Bill 201 would have required pornographic websites that are accessible in Colorado check to make sure their users are of age either through government-issued ID or artificial intelligence examination of user photoscoloradosun.com
UK OSA
Online Safety Act: explainer
www.gov.uk
Apple's solution
Google's very similar solution
Google’s legislative proposal for keeping kids safe online
Legislation pushed by Meta would share kids' information without parental consent or rules on use; here’s a better way to protect kids.blog.google
KOSA
The Kids Online Safety Act isn’t all right, critics say
Critics warn KOSA could trigger widespread censorship, privacy concerns.arstechnica.com
Congress Is Pushing An Online Safety Bill Supported By Anti-LGBTQ Groups
Advocates say the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) will be weaponized to censor LGBTQ content.www.vice.com
Blumenthal So Eager To Bring Back KOSA, He Admits Its Purpose Is Censorship
Senator Richard Blumenthal is at it again. The long-time Connecticut Senator, who never met an internet regulation he didn’t like, is eager to reintroduce his Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) — …www.techdirt.com
FOSTA
The Human Cost Of FOSTA
As you’ll recall in the run up to passing FOSTA last year, supporters of the bill — backed in secret by Hollywood lobbyists whose sole goal was to create liability for internet companie…
Reddit wins fosta suit requiring actual knowledge
Reddit Wins Against FOSTA Lawsuit: 9th Circuit Says FOSTA Requires Knowledge Of Violation
There’s this weird thing that people who hate Section 230 continue to ignore: that if you just take away Section 230, it doesn’t magically make companies liable for the actions of their…
Take It Down Act is close to becoming law. Basically DMCA takedown process but without any consideration for abuse prevention for the system like DMCA sort of had
Take It Down Act nears passage; critics warn Trump could use it against enemies
Anti-deepfake bill raises concerns about censorship and breaking encryption.
5CALLS.ORG
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What are your thoughts on KOSA and other bills like it? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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W YouTube możesz cieszyć się filmami i muzyką, które lubisz, przesyłać oryginalne treści i udostępniać je swoim bliskim, znajomym i całemu światu.youtu.be
Listen @ zoo.wtf
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Thoughts About the Episode
Awoooo hi :3 Eggshell here again. Do you ever have an idea where you're like, "This is an awful idea. Well actually it's a good idea, like, the result of this idea would be amazing, but in terms of ACTUALLY having to make the idea happen irl, this idea is completely unrealistic, there is no way we should go ahead with this idea."
That was pretty much how this episode got started. Me and Toggers were chatting about not-zoott stuff, and at some point we did drift onto the topic of zoott, and he wondered out loud, "What are we going to do for episode one of this season?" And I was like, "Okay, I am the LAST person who should be pitching this right now because I am way too busy already, BUT, with zoo stuff seeing a lot more general attention lately, I think episode one of a new season would be a really good time to put out an episode that's an entry point for the topic of zoosexuality, for non-zoos or someone zoo-curious or just anyone who may have some reason to want to know more." I kind of pictured the target audience of this episode as, either a) people who have googled "What is zoosexuality," or b) people who have just had a friend/family member come out to them, and that friend/family member has given them this episode as a possible starting point if they want to learn more. It was important to me that this episode set the right tone, in that sense: positivity, being on the front foot, and also actually being informative and illuminating.
In some sense it sounds like it should be the easiest episode in the world to write: this is an INTRO to the topic, it is the MOST BASIC stuff, so that should all come really easily and we'll get that done really quickly, easy peasy bulbus squeezy, the episode will pretty much write itself.
TURNS OUT, the episode did not write itself. When actually tasked with putting words down for the episode, it became apparent that "What is zoosexuality?" is a really abstract topic, and it desperately needed some kind of context, grounding, friction, SOMETHING, to make it work at all as an episode. Tarro and I bounced around some ideas. I kinda started off wanting to contextualize it by having a zoo character and a non-zoo character get taken on a tour of a Museum Of Zoosexuality, but I worried that that might be kind of high-concept for a 101 and would lose people. Tarro pitched a more fantastical idea sort of akin to A New Home For The Holidays, where a magical host would show a cast of skeptical characters that zoosexuality is actually neat - That idea did end up getting rolled into the Zoo Cereal skit that's in this episode, but it didn't feel right to me to do as the conceit of the entire episode, for the same concern that it might lose people and also maybe not really set the right tone.
The idea that I finally ended up liking is that, myself and some other cast members will explicitly just be trying to do a Zoo 101 episode for everyone, but the conflict comes in from other cast members interjecting that we're doing it wrong and that we need to include more things that we're not mentioning, and so there's this meta through-line of making everyone happy and seeking to get it all right.
This episode came out LATE, as you might have noticed if you're listening to these episodes in real time as they come out. That is very much my fault. I didn't have a script out to everyone until much later than would have been ideal, which then knocks everything else back: without a script nobody can record anything, and without anything recorded production can't start. I think it was ON the date of the full moon that we finally even had everything recorded and production could properly begin. There was absolutely no way that the episode was going to come out on time, given that, and I would like to say sorry to everyone who does like listening on the full moon, and a HUGE sorry to Ryder, who actually was the producer for this episode and now had to work on it with a huge crunch, since it was a) late for reasons beyond his control, b) an important episode to get right, c) an episode we can't really do extensive retakes on since, again, we're already behind, and d) an episode that calls for a lot of effects and editing.
Ryder did an AMAZING job here, in my opinion. I was worrying that we had really botched this one. But, when I got all of the ready-for-proofing files sent over and had the chance to put on some headphones and grab a leash and go out and walk and listen, I was SO relieved to hear how it turned out. That goodness is definitely on Ryder doing a great job of putting it together and getting the production touches right, and, again, thank you, especially under the crunch that this one was done in.
I would also like to say thanks to the Zoo & Me team for tackling the Zoo Cereal voice acting hehe, and Tarro and Kyon for being my 101 team, and Aqua for jumping in on the harder-hitting topics. I had written lines for Aqua, and Aqua went in and punched everything way way way up, and I was like, thank you that is why those lines were yours, thumbs up this is all great.
But yeah! Season Seven! Cha cha cha!
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Is there anything you would want to see covered in a Zoosexuality 499 episode? What kind of job do you think a bachelor's in Zoosexuality would prepare you for? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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W YouTube możesz cieszyć się filmami i muzyką, które lubisz, przesyłać oryginalne treści i udostępniać je swoim bliskim, znajomym i całemu światu.youtu.be
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Thoughts About the Episode
It’s the season finale! That’s the end of 6 years of ZooTT! Insane to me we’re still cranking out fun stuff! This time, I wanted to do something fun and light after an episode about suicide, so I reached out to Brass Bulldog to assist. Brass has been pitching a zoo podcast version of game shows like Game Changer and Make Some Noise, so I asked if he wanted to pilot the idea as our season finale. One condition: I was going to be a contestant, so I had to be kept completely in the dark. Brass worked with Eggshell to come up with a game. He asked me how long it should be, and I said 30 minutes to an hour. Brass came back at the end of the planning period suggesting he had enough content for about an hour.
I pulled in Tarro and Milk, because I felt like they would be fun contestants. When it came time to record, it turned out that Brass and Eggshell had significantly over-prepared. Almost three hours into recording, Brass still had some 30 questions left to go through, and I was like, “No, we need to just wrap this up, hahaha!” Apparently we gave a LOT more answers than expected. What else do you expect from content creators but CONTENT?
We had a blast recording, and I think we all learned a lot. For one, there’s no need to have too many questions — the contestants will generate the content for you. For another, Spelling games are fun to play, but isn’t quite as fun to listen to if it goes on for too long. And for a third, a zooey game show podcast a la Game Changer could totally work! Brass just needs someone to edit it, because uhhhh this would be too much work x3 Or maybe just make the episodes 30 minutes instead of 2 hours.
I will say I laughed my ass off the whole time I was editing this episode, so I hope you laugh, too. This one got pretty horny at times, but all in good fun x3
Season 7 starts next month. We have some episode ideas, but we haven’t planned the order yet. My goal this season is to plan 4 episodes: May, August, October, and January. Slowly tryin’ to give it up to other people to plan and produce, but sticking around until I know it will keep going without me and still be good. Very excited about some of the ideas pitched for Season 7, though!
Anyway, I think that’s it. See you next month!
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What’s your favorite part of the episode? Would you listen to an entire podcast of just zooey game shows like this one? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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W YouTube możesz cieszyć się filmami i muzyką, które lubisz, przesyłać oryginalne treści i udostępniać je swoim bliskim, znajomym i całemu światu.youtu.be
Listen @ zoo.wtf
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Thoughts About the Episode
Eggshell here, just a sheep with a pen in her mouth who wrote some of the scripted parts of this episode. We're almost at the end of Season 6! Some real highlights this season for sure. Dear Non-Zoos - After Dark Radio might be my new favorite episode of the show (biasedly,) and I would also (biasedly) say I love how the Office Gods skit in s6e4 came out. I wanna say, unless I'm mistaken, that this is also the season we got the new podcast art! We got to include SO MANY voices on the show this season, some coming back again from previous seasons, others making their debut. I am continuously in love with how we have continued to get to do so many cool things with the show, just for fun and also constructively.
Steve was the one who pitched this episode to the team, wanting to address the topic of suicide on the show head-on. Suicide is already one of the top leading causes of death in the general population, and the statistics become even more grim when looking at queer populations, and so it certainly is relevant to our community. He had an interview lined up with a licensed professional councilor, Renee, who would be very well-positioned to speak to this topic. Steve laid out a bunch of the ideas he had for what the episode would look like, including the overall thesis of what we're trying to do with this episode, an idea for an opening skit, and the interview.
Steve's idea for the opening skit, generally, was that suicide baiting messages are building and building for someone, starting as isolated, and progressing to the point they're all overlapping and it's awful to listen to. I was really into it. I took the idea and wrote out a script, with a furry artist who starts receiving hate comments for their work. The script called for a lot of voices, and a lot of those voices would be delivering lines we wouldn't necessarily want to associate with our core cast saying. We kind of outlined some ways we might want to tackle that, but unfortunately without an actionable specific plan established for this, we didn't get any voice work actually recorded for the skit until days before the episode was supposed to go up. I remember when Toggle saw that we hadn't recorded any voice lines yet, he said, "Wow, thank you for this opportunity to use my puzzle solving skills to work out how this is going to be acceptable for the show, I LOVE puzzles! This is the best thing ever." No, in honesty it was not the production pipeline we're trying to get nailed down at all, and thank you Toggs for sliding in and going through a lot of effort to make this work. I think the cold open skit turned out good, which I am especially grateful for for this episode.
Thanks Mal for jumping in with emails!
I thought that Steve's interview with Renee was really good and was exactly what an episode with this topic needed. The team could talk about our own layperson intuitions on this topic all day, and I'm sure we could pull together plenty of anecdotes and hot takes, but that really wouldn't be what this episode calls for ultimately, we needed someone who could speak with extensive knowledge on the research that has been done here, the statistics and factors, and the things that you learn through helping people with these types of crises as a career. I think Renee was able to help give us a lot of insight, and give advice that is much more reliably helpful than what the rest of the team might have come up with on our own.
To lighten the mood a bit at some point in the episode, I wanted to include something from the 2024 Zoo Concert that Zipwok and Shiv did this last September in Hamburg—I believe this is actually the THIRD annual concert they've done, but this was the first time that I could be there. I thought that the mood in that room was a lot of fun, and really showcased that there is a world out there where being a zoo is chill, cool, normal, based, and celebrated, because I know that for me personally, this would have been something really powerful to hear when I was younger and didn't conceive that such a thing was out there. We got permission from Aki and Zip to use some of the Zoo & Me recording of the concert, and as I was figuring out what exactly to include, I also decided it would be good to very briefly say how uplifting the whole experience was, which turned into a less-brief-than-intended essay. I hope it comes across as an offering of optimism, like I intended—I do realize, especially as I listen back and after having heard the interview with Renee, that some people could listen and be like “YEAH I DID COME OUT AND THAT WAS THE FUCKING PROBLEM! EVERYTHING BLEW UP IN MY FACE AND MY LIFE GOT WAY WORSE!” I do think if I was writing this blog more than a day or two before the episode comes out, and we had all the production time in the world, I probably would go back in and add a mention of the fact that finding more stability in life as time has gone on has facilitated this positive outlook too: it's not just that I'm out that has made things better, but also cultivating a stronger, healthier support network in which to be out, and having (sometimes unexpectedly) grown to have better strengths and tools within myself to navigate all of these things as well. Some things come with time. Thanks Zip and Shiv for the show, and lots of love to everyone I met at EF!
Ultimately I think we pulled this together as a good episode, and I (along with the entire team I'm sure) really hope that it's helpful to someone.
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What are some emergency help resources from around the world that you’ve heard of? What are some zooey things that you’re looking forward to in years to come? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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Thoughts About the Episode
It’s been a heck of a week! I had a great time at MFF, getting to see my good friends and meeting people at the zoo room parties, but I got the con crud from Hell. Thanks to some careful pre-planning, we got the episode out on time, despite me being knocked on my ass for two days during production week.
We knew that MFF and holiday travel were going to get in the way, so we planned light and got stuff done earlier than normal. Mike and I originally had a completely different topic planned, but our planning document has completely disappeared, and we couldn’t remember what it was in detail. Mike had the idea of having Ask Zooey letters for the holidays, and separately, Eggshell had the idea of holiday letters as well. Ask Zooey is a bit more involved, but I ran with the idea of holiday letters and asked a few people from different parts of the globe to write a holiday letter to a friend — could be any winter holiday, and any type of zooey relationship. Not everyone was able to get something in, but we got letters from England, Germany, and Australia, in addition to two we’d already had pre-written. I’d wanted to get more perspectives — other holidays, different non-euro, non-white perspectives, etc. — but I was pleased not everyone went with dog relationships — we got pigs and cats in the mix, too, which we never hear a lot about! And frankly, all the letters were just lovely, with reading performances to match. Even though this episode is really low-key, I think it’s just good audio and good storytelling. It should be nice. Way to go everyone who contributed <3
As a joke with her friends, Eggshell asked ChatGPT to write a Zooier Than Thou holiday episode. I thought it was silly enough to include in the episode. So yes, that’s a real ChatGPT response. Mike added the bit about two festive meals, though. The dog knows how to celebrate the holidays!
There’s not a lot to say this time! Things came together relatively smoothly. Here’s hoping we can close out the season with more of the same!
Happy Howlidays, friends! See you next year!
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What’s Christmas like where you’re from? Do you celebrate a different holiday? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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W YouTube możesz cieszyć się filmami i muzyką, które lubisz, przesyłać oryginalne treści i udostępniać je swoim bliskim, znajomym i całemu światu.youtu.be
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Thoughts About the Episode
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(written by Aqua)
It's only been two weeks since the last episode but for reasons we think should be obvious, it felt like two days. The rest was a blur while each of us processed events, took care of ourselves, and our nearest and dearest, and helped them do the same. We hope you have too in your own way. For now, there's no need to say anything more about that.
October is always a high effort production, so this month was a perfect chance to take another look at human-animal relationships in our traditional discussion format, and try to keep things simpler and lighter. This time we wanted to focus on society's awareness of working animals, the kinds of jobs we task them with, and the ways we honor them or ignore them. Working animals can fall anywhere on the continuum from irreplaceable partner to invisible and disposable, which is fraught with ethical and moral challenges.
By the end we had only just scratched the surface and were scrambling to look for a hopeful way to wrap up, and found a bit of a silver lining in the way humans honor (belatedly) a few animals with extremely difficult jobs who performed far beyond what was expected from them. From one perspective those honors are performative and phony, and just another example of anthropocentric thinking applied where it doesn't belong. But from another perspective, that recognition brings overdue and badly needed visibility to animals' lives with us. And you all know how we feel about visibility.
One area we did not discuss was animals in entertainment. This is well covered by Peter Singer in his book Animal Liberation, but there is another story happening right now that we invite you to listen to: The Good Whale, a 6-episode podcast looking back on Keiko's life as a captive orca, star of Free Willy, and what he meant to all the people lucky enough to be part of his life. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. -aqua
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Any animal jobs you think we missed? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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Thoughts About the Episode
Man, this month has kicked my ass. Between closing on a house and having to move in the middle of a production cycle, to my mom ending up in the hospital during production week, we’re lucky that this month we can just say, “Oh, we decided to put it out on Halloween since it’s the Halloween episode!”
So yeah, this was production hell for me, and I’m so glad to be finished, like you wouldn’t believe. It was hard to keep my head in the game, and I really just want to not do this again for a few months. Alas, December has to be finished before MFF, and everything sucks.
But I think this came out pretty well. Shout out to Brass Bulldog for giving a very nice performance, and for redoing lines over and over for meAnd also my friend who did Crispy did so friggin’ good I had to laugh while I was working on it. Also, Shiv released an album and let me use a track! Finally, check the show notes for a really great link about animal activism that I was thinking about while helping write the end of the episode. The rest is coming from the writer, Argus. Ciao!
(From the Eigen Ground Writer)
Hi. Writer for The Eigen Ground here.
Let me begin by saying I'm in a bit of an awkward position. I'm not part of the usual writer's space for Zooier Than Thou - I'm an outside contributor. So. I hope Toggle covers the stuff on that side of things so I can cover my side of things.
If that wasn't weird enough, I have to write this without having heard the episode yet. Which should be interesting enough.
This episode really starts with last year's Howloween, which in turn starts with the events of last year. Last year I couldn't write an episode because I was too depressed due to events in my personal life. Right as I was giving up on Eigen Ground making it in for Howloween, a script came in written by someone else that tried to put together The Eigen Ground concept with Welcome to Nightvale. The draft was sent to me, I sent feedback, and they decided that the direction and intent I have in mind for Eigen Ground isn't the direction and intent they had for the episode. And that's okay! The community got 2023's Howloween episode instead with its framing, and honestly, having seen the original draft, I think it worked better as a Welcome to Nightvale sort of thing.
The notes from that exchange left some material on the cutting room floor. Toggle and I had, to some extent, come up with a framing story where a convention goer would get stuck in the Eigen Ground and we'd track them through this zany experience in a Nightvale inspired space. I decided this year to pick that concept up, dust it off, and rework it.
You've not heard from me in two years on the podcast. I know that people seemed to appreciate "Eigen Ground: Come Out and Play,” which I'm grateful got to exist in an already stellar Howloween episode, back in 2022. It's hard to follow that one up. (It was inspired by a meme, of all things, at the last minute that year.) Oftentimes I feel bad because I don't do horny and I don't do humor - the two things that I think Zooier Than Thou skits often cover. But - then again - this is why I'm sort of relegated to writing a horror story as an ongoing commitment annually to the podcast.
The topics that I feel needed a sharp prod and surfacing are the last two years of events. I've been depressed and lost, sure - but there are also a lot of other people in the community that I've talked to along the way who have been feeling very lost, too. Events have taken strange turns several times, and it's often hard to know what or who to trust. Those conversations and the things that people who sit with me frequently and just talk greatly influenced this episode - to the extent that some of those conversations made it almost verbatim into the interrogation scene.
This episode won't be for everyone. I recognize that. It's not very funny, but it is sincere and heartfelt in what it tries to address. There were at least five sets of hands involved in writing it (I suspect more) as drafts were passed around, cleaned up, completely rewritten (almost an entire script on the cutting room floor this time! Not just a concept!), segments were cut, and other things abounding. The writing team worked hard on this. I worked hard on this. Many of my friends worked hard on this.
Hopefully it helps some of the hopeless feeling zoos out there, if they're still listening. And hopefully you enjoy the story.
I'll give just some brief notes about each segment and some questions I've already been passed here, for those interested.
"What is an Unspun Record? Why is that the title?" - In the first draft of this episode, Todd would have been in charge of the radio and spinning the dial for us. A radio station's DJ spins records; an unspun record must then be one that wasn't played by the DJ. (A very opaque play on words.) The title stuck, but oddly works better in this version of the script.
Disclaimer - I believe Toggle rescued this entire segment by rewriting it. Originally it was a reference to We're Back! (a movie about dinosaurs) While I'm sad to bid adieu to the nightmare fuel that is the Brain Drain, it is true that Monster House released roughly 18 years ago and that it is a horror movie.
Cold Open - How do you take over an entire episode and still play the Zooier Than Thou theme? This stumped me for a while, and the notation in the script is a mess here. ... Betty's Bestiality Brothel is a crowd favorite, and I'm no exception. Somewhere deep inside of a parallel universe there's a script based on that instead, I suppose. ... Dave's name wasn't originally "Dave.” Toggle approached me with a "We've got a problem" kind of message that required his name to be changed. I had been writing and making jokes about the robotic interaction between Todd and Dave before then. It fit together naturally through the magic of committing to an idea for lack of a better one being proposed and rolling with it to see where it goes. Although I do love Arthur C. Clarke, it was someone else who ultimately wrote the Dave/Hal jokes here. ... 950 - Dave's parking bay - is also the decimal value for lowercase zeta (the symbol generally used for zoophiles) in several text encodings.
A Troubled Bridge Over Water - This is inspired by a real world location, and a wall that I've actually walked in early Autumn after the seasonal droughts. It's also inspired by a Dungeons & Dragons session where the players had to cross a body of water and one of them (the "barbarian") crossed the water first with a rope to tie off to give the other players and advantage trying to cross the water. This "now it's not so secret" homage to those two things I think works well. ... Crispy is not based on anyone, I just liked the concept of calling someone "Crispy.” You're stuck with it now, the same way Toggle stuck me with the name Todd for The Eigen Ground's narrator in 2022's episode. ... The name, if anyone isn't familiar with classic rock or folk music, comes from "Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a song by Simon and Garfunkel. (A non-opaque play on words.)
Garage Mirage - Toggle wrote almost the entirety of this, I think. Originally I had written it with a crow falling out of the sky, but later discussions showed that neither of us was sure about crows despite a mutual love of corvids, so it had to be scrapped for something Toggle knew. By this time, I was in the midst of "yet another tragedy" in my life and pretty much read over it, said "it works as well as anything falling out of the sky", and told him to run with it. I think he did better than I did at writing the concept of this segment, but a later joke about "attempted murder in the desert" and a smooth segue to a raven joke for fans of 2000s animation gets lost.
Interrogation Seat - Originally, I wrote the script with no real conflict for Dave. He would just walk down this road, as Todd told him, and not encounter anything from the hayfield to the woods where he'd encounter the Samhain Ritual. This means that at some point, Dave would do his "everything feels hopeless" rant and it sort of came out of left field. That version of the script was left on the cutting room floor (almost an entire episode worth!) and recut into the episode you hear. ... Dave's two sort of longwinded things here - the "confession" and the "everything feels hopeless" bits - come from actual conversations I've had over the last two years and were both in the original script draft. (Much love to Mike the Dog for tolerating me well into 3 AM phone calls for things like this.) ... I don't feel like there's too much else to say about the script version here. It's largely recovered from the later scenes in the original script, and carries their intention well, I think. ... Oh, yes. Some explanation here. The dates are: December 1950, date on the first House of Mystery (modern home of John Constantine, originally a horror and suspense anthology series); October 1959, debut of The Twilight Zone (which greatly inspired Todd's character and is another anthology series); September 1963, debut of The Outer Limits (another anthology series); April 1977, debut of Heavy Metal Magazine (an anthology magazine generally best known for the movie and Taarna's stories); October 1981, the release of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (a book full of nightmare fuel for countless schoolchildren, I'm sure); August 1992, debut of Are You Afraid of the Dark? (Nickelodeon's horror anthology series for children and an influence on I believe 2022's Howloween episode); June 2003, debut of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy (a very weird, horror-esque cartoon series full of bad ends). A reference to Sir Raven, the recurring storyteller from Billy and Mandy, immediately follows the last date.
Into the Nexus - We needed a small bridge piece between the emails and the Samhain Ritual. I forget what I originally wrote here (other than Dave sneaking up on a gathering in the woods in the original script), but the version here was almost blow for blow lifted from 2023's Howloween segment for entering the Nexus at Toggle's direction. It was apparently so well done it saw no major edits, so I'm sort of proud of that.
Returning Home - If the community loves this story enough, I am open to writing longer form ones in the future, but not for at least a few years. I have often complained that I have taken over the show or nearly done so incidentally, and I never submit a eulogy alongside my segments because I want other people to have their time. I am perfectly content trying to come up with one half-hour-at-most story I believe in and writing that for each Howloween. Maybe we'll revisit the "Bright Future" timeline at some point and show that world? I've been itching at it some. ... The "vegan fast food" was changed somewhere along the way to avoid mentioning a specific restaurant chain with a specific mostly-vegan burger on the menu that I'm quite fond of. ... As I recall, Toggle wanted to shout out efforts fighting against cockfighting rings, and I suspect he wrote that line. You should thank him; the original script section there mentioned something far, far worse that I've heard along the way in the last two years, with far less hope involved for people to do something themselves about it. ... The "lesson line" for The Eigen Ground was at least initially written by Toggle. Geez, I think he's written every single one so far, or at least edited them to be better. ... My notes have things he's supposed to do in the episode credits, so hopefully he does that. ... We are not trying to tell you to adopt late life shelter pets (although they do need it and you could!) and we aren't trying to tell you to fight against cockfighting rings (although it is something you could do). It's literally just two things you could maybe do to help animals. The real intended takeaway here is: if you are lost in the zoo community's happenings, ignore the human aspects and just do something for animals. The politics and everything are a waste of time if we don't just do things for animals along the way. "Do good recklessly" and all that.
BUT WAIT, THERE's MORE!
Brush Ratpaw - I used to listen to Alex Jones, in passing, from time to time, on Fox News. This was in the mid-aughts, when he wasn't considered a total lunatic yet, before Sandy Hook and all the things that followed for him. Brush is greatly influenced by Jones somewhere between there and the InfoWars era of his career, and is named loosely after Rush Limbaugh, who sort of precedes Jones in that general space. ... This segment was written in collaboration with Chocobo13, who agreed both to be directly mentioned and made it his darling when asked for help. If cat lovers appreciate this, you should mostly appreciate Chocobo13, as I'm not a cat lover - I just took his scattered notes and arranged them into a Jones-esque rant.
The Glory of Dog - Charles Coughlin was before my time, and this isn't at all about him, but it felt like a strong play on words to change his name to "Charles Doglin" for the sake of the bit. ... This segment I wrote pretty much entirely alone, with a proofreading by Chocobo13 to fix pronouns from object to person in addressing non-humans, and that still had one slip to the eleventh hour when I was patching up the script for final copy. ... Hug your dogs for me, okay? Or your cats, or whatever.
War of the Wools - The famous broadcast production of War of the Worlds, featuring Orson Welles, changed the landscape of radio after it incited a mass panic. This joke entirely relies on that and the following question: "What did the alien sheep say?" ... They can't all be winners. Hopefully it's at least a good presentation of the joke. (And, yes, this one is entirely my writing and by extension my fault.)
Zoovale - This concept is actually Toggle's. I think he almost completely rewrote the original version of this. Ah, well. Any time I write a line for Toggle the Rat as a character, I go to pains to admit it's just a suggestion, so I'm glad he wrote something he was comfortable saying. ... "Who is Argus?", I hear you shouting furiously at the radio, "and what's the cut segment?" ... Perhaps that will get off the ground in a later year ... Just kidding! ... For several years now I've had a second series concept that would be my stab at comedy, called Ratman. Ratman would tell a fictionalized version of the events from just before the Zoosadist Leaks to today. Featuring Toggle the Rat as Ratman (played up as an airheaded superhero) and his faithful house servant Argus. ... I will eventually get it off the ground, but the research load is heavy to do something like that in parts equally funny and correct, and I've been bogged down in our history and how convoluted it really gets in that span, trying hard to filter the noise and get at what really happened and when. ... Anyway, the cut segment was just a Ratman Movie Commercial. I've been wanting to do some sort of soft pilot for the concept just to gauge if it elicits any strong reaction from anyone not in the rogue's gallery for our intrepid hero. Things have gotten a little weird in recent history, and Toggle was somewhere between "I don't want to poke current events with a stick" and "I don't think this concept works without a chance to actually get the joke first in a full length skit.” So it was scrapped at his request before it was even past the pitch stage. ... Argus's character is meant to be the dry, "you have to know this is kind of messed up, right?" ongoing voice of reason in the series, so of course he'd be the narrator when one is needed there. ... I could talk on and on about snippets that are already written but I think I'll cut chattering about that concept here and hope I make it see the light of day before too long.
Gill's Human Diet - Did this one get cut? [Toggle’s note: Yes.] This concept was great, I think, and I'll die on that hill: human food designed by fish, sold like we sell pet food. The execution, however, is so finicky and it's so hard to write, and I'm not proud of it. At the last draft exchange, Toggle expressed a simple "not getting it,” I expressed "yeah, it requires oddly specific knowledge and isn't working,” and I'm not sure if it made the cut because I'm writing this without hearing the episode. ... Look up a Hill's Science Diet commercial. ... Not my best. Probably my worst. ... Entirely my fault.
Numbers [Secret Decoder Ring] - "Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine!" ... Okay, now that someone said it, this is actually solvable. You'll probably need a sheet of paper. But full warning - it was greatly inspired by the scene in A Christmas Story, and it's not much of a payoff. I just wanted one that actually could be decoded, and went for the shortest reasonable message I could think of. ... It's hard to remember now but old radio shows did have kids clubs and the like, and they'd have little bonuses like this in them. This was thrown in here both as a love letter to radio's golden era and for "one more distinct segment" for the episode. ... "The numbers Mason - what do they mean?!?" (You're welcome.) [Toggle’s Note: I laughed at the Christmas Story reference, but I decided to change it to something different at the very last minute. Get out your decoder rings!]
Temple Grandin - I have a copy of her autobiography on my "favorites shelf,” picked up one day secondhand from a library's pull pile because she was autistic and I was curious. She's certainly a bit out there, but she does generally mean well in that pragmatic sense. Anyway, this is written based on memory of what she said and wrote. I'm pretty sure this one is entirely my fault, and I'm shocked it passed the approvals process for Zooier Than Thou skits. ... The punchline felt mandatory with how people would be going "but isn't this a podcast..?" while the DJ's waiting on calls. ... I won't lecture you on the merits of doing what we can and still working towards veganism, I just felt Temple Grandin was a person worth knowing the existence of for zoos and autistic people alike.
Emails - I did provide the premise pitch, but Toggle wrote that because I was too afraid to touch it. I don't know anything about it. [Toggle’s Note: This is Tabby Talks. These were real emails!]
Anything else - I did encourage any send-ins to be randomly flipped to, as well as any songs and such. So. I don't know if they exist, but if they do, that has nothing to do with me, and I can't tell you anything about their production or history, sorry.
FINAL THOUGHTS
"Radio, someone still loves you." ~ Queen, "Radio Ga Ga"
I hope you enjoy this journey through snatches of the golden age of radio and this journey through the doubts and fears we're often not talking about that I felt needed a moment in the light.
Please - hug your companions.
Every day.
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Is there someone you were thinking about during the Samhain ritual who’s special to you? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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