Imaginary Worlds - 200 Imaginary Worlds

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

When I began this podcast in September 2014, I couldn’t imagine myself someday celebrating 200 episodes of Imaginary Worlds. It feels like a momentous occasion, a moment to reflect and celebrate. So, I put together a super-sized episode where I check in on creative people that I’ve interviewed in the past. We also hear from listeners about where they listen to the show, and how those places evoke imaginary worlds for them. Featuring Caro Murphy, Jason Suran, Tim Lapetino, Shari Spiros of AdMagic, and Scot and Jane Noel of DreamForge magazine. You can learn more about Jason's show Reconnected here. This episode is sponsored by Backblaze and Squarespace. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now.

This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils so whether you're going for a run or just running late do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't find secret at your nearest walmart or shoppers drug mart today

do you remember the names of these guys well Well, I know some of them. Yeah. R2D2. Oh, this guy. I don't know. The Stormtrooper. Is that the Stormtrooper? Yoda, of course. Chewbacca, of course.

Who's this guy? Oh, these guys. Oh, this is the bad father. This is Yobi Kenobi or whatever his name is. Obi-Wan Kenobi or whatever his name is. Yobi Kenobi. He was good. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. I'm Eric Molenski.

And that is how I began my first episode in 2014, by opening up my childhood action figure case with my mom, who bought every one of those figures for me. I cannot believe I've hit 200 episodes. It feels like a momentous occasion, something to reflect on and do a supersized episode about. And when I thought about what I want to do for my 200th episode, I decided I wanted to check in with some people who've been on the show before. People whose work really inspired me, and I wanted to follow up with them and see what they were doing. The first person on that list was Caro Murphy. Caro was a listener who wrote me in 2016 and asked if I'd ever thought of doing an episode about

LARPing. I ended up doing several episodes on LARPing, including one of my personal favorite episodes, How I Won the LARP from 2018. In that episode, I did a LARP with Caro, where we played an estranged couple in colonial Massachusetts. Between fighting off attacks from witches, we had this incredibly emotional and totally improvised scene together. Hi. Hi. So excited to talk to you.

So like the last time I saw you... I was excited to talk with Carol because they have an amazing new job. They are an immersive experience director at the Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser. Now I had read that this was a very expensive Star Wars themed hotel at Disney World in Florida. at Disney World in Florida. It is so much more interactive than that. So imagine, so you make a character, you make up where you're from, and you come and you wear a costume. And when you first walk in, like everybody's, you know, all the crew and cast and everybody are totally immersive in character. And you get missions and you experience a whole bunch of fun shenanigans and you even do a planet side excursion where you go and fulfill a whole bunch of these missions. You know, it's like two full days of interactive content. Wow. So you're the whole time you're on you're in this you're in a building, right? Or is it is it like where does the whole, do you feel like you're on a ship or are there times you feel like you've gone to another planet

or how does that work? When you, so the first entire day you're there, you're on the ship. And so the ship will travel to various places via light speed, but you don't get off until you reach your kind of port, your destination port, which is Batuu. You can take transport shuttles that'll bring you to Batuu, where you have a planet side excursion. And then when you're done with that, you come back up to the ship and the rest of the evening there

is on the ship. That's kind of when things culminate. Is there, so I know with different eras of Star Wars, it's like, is there a first order or an empire? Does this sort of take place after all that and you're not being chased by stormtroopers? This is between movies eight and nine in the most recent films. So there is a first order. Kylo Ren is the supreme leader. The Grey is kind of known galactically now as this kind of last jedi resistance hero on the galactic cruiser are there droids like are there like cool animatronic disney

type things yeah we do have an astromech droid sk620 like an r2 type of looking unit astromech droid um they're gray and orange and they have a very big personality oh nice wait so can they interact um on the fly i assume yeah oh cool yep so then what's your what was your job like in terms of did they bring you in to develop the story and then like what is your day-to-day job like supervising this ongoing LARP? I was brought in in November and much of the story and a lot of the different elements were already kind of designed at that point. Not to say that I didn't have a hand in the story because there are definitely things that have my fingerprint on them.

A lot of it was, you know, it was a huge team effort over like six years of development for this to be created. Most of what I do is kind of overseeing story, making on-the-fly decisions about things that need to happen because it is a living breathing art form. So there are things that will just go off the rails at times and we just have to adjust. And then I do a lot of training of cast. So a lot of it's rehearsal process and getting new cast up to speed, giving actors notes, doing lots of other director things as well. So like, what's a great day at work? What's a day where you come home and you're like, well, that, you know, whatever happened at work, that was like amazing and has not happened before.

Oh, man. I think that for me, probably some of the best days at work are in rehearsal. So we have to cast very deep. Like each role, we have to have more than one person who's in the role because if you didn't, people would burn out. It's a lot of energy to output. And I just love rehearsal. Like for me, a really successful day

is that we were able to get through and have everybody understand all the different moving parts of this show and that everybody had fun while we're doing it and that they feel like they're in a place that's safe to be able to explore and do these things. And then on the Star Cruiser, a really good day is when you can tell that the audience is just so invested and that they are truly living their story and they're making decisions that they maybe never would have made. And there's so many stories that I can recall from cast members, as well as my own experiences of people having really amazing life-changing moments by being able to connect with somebody new and form trust and form bonds together.

So do you think this is going to go beyond Star Wars? I mean, obviously this is doing well, but could you end up maybe someday working on a Marvel thing, like an interactive experience where people are, it's like they're staying at the Avengers headquarters or something? It's like they're staying at the Avengers headquarters or something. Yeah. And I think that a lot of folks are looking at Galactic Star Cruiser right now and saying, wow, that's really successful. How do we replicate that? How do we improve that?

How do we make the next one of these things that's going to be super cool? This is so great because you were doing amazing work, but an independent theater scene in Boston. And now you're doing the same work, but getting really well paid for it. Getting paid for it, period, is awesome. I'm so happy for you. This is so awesome. It is. It's really, honestly, it's a dream come true in so many ways.

It's, I get to play pretend with people as my job and make pretend things come to life and do it in Star Wars, which I have loved since I was four years old. So it's really wonderful. As you probably know, I recently did a call out for you listeners to leave messages and let me know where you listen to Imaginary Worlds and if that place is somehow evocative of Imaginary Worlds. And we'll be hearing these voicemails throughout the episode. So I've been listening to Imaginary Worlds for a really long time now. And I often listen when I'm out for a walk in the evenings once my kiddos are sleeping. I'm in the northeast of Scotland and one of my favourite places to walk is at a local stone circle. So kind of like what Stonehenge is, but much smaller. It's like four and a half thousand years old, which is from the Bronze Age.

It's one of my favourite places to go, especially whilst listening to imaginary worlds, because I like to imagine all of the stories that connect people who have lived near or on the stone circle, going back so far through time and all the way into the future. And it makes me feel significant and insignificant all at once. One of the most enjoyable things for me about this podcast is how international the listenership is. I used to work at New York Public Radio and the show that I was on was broadcast across the US, but most of our listeners tended to be on the East Coast. So I love knowing that somebody is listening to my show in Scotland or more than one person.

Hi, Eric. Scott Bennett here in Edinburgh, Scotland. I haven't listened to Imaginary Worlds in a place that evokes imaginary worlds, but I'm about to because I'll probably listen to your 200th episode while I'm at Phantasialand in Cologne in Germany, I'll probably listen to your 200th episode while I'm at Fantasia Land in Cologne in Germany, which is a place full of the most insanely themed, fantastically imagined worlds that there are in theme parks. My name's Gavin and I come from Scotland. In my spare time, I'm restoring a Cold War era nuclear bunker. I often listen to imaginary worlds while I'm working on things underground.

When I heard the episode on LARPing, I thought, oh, I've really got to run a Cold War theme LARP down here, but I've got no idea how. Thanks for all the hard work that you put into the show. Bye. When I got back in touch with people who had been on the show before,

every one of them had a story about how the pandemic had affected their careers but Jason Saran's story is one of the most unique in 2019 I did an episode called talking to the dead I went to one of Jason's theatrical recreations of an old-time seance which was really cool five months after that episode aired, COVID hit, and all the theaters in New York were shut down. During the pandemic, I read that Jason was now doing virtual shows as a mentalist, which is different than a seance. But still, I was curious, how does that work on Zoom? I mean, part of what made his live show so good was just seeing him perform these tricks right in front of your eyes. I think you had to lean into the medium, right? So I looked around at the time at sort of what

other people were doing in the virtual space. And a lot of it was trying to simulate the highest quality aesthetic they could find, right? So there was a lot of, you know, getting a lot of high quality studio lights and, you know, three, four camera setups and people trying to sort of recreate almost like a talk show format or a big stage show. And that was very uncompelling to me personally. That's just not what I was interested in doing. And I think that instinct served me well

because I think what's great about Zoom, about the virtual space, is that it is intimate, right? It's not like a stage show. You're in people's houses. They're in yours. Everybody can see each other. And if you don't take advantage of that, then I think you're missing out on what it can do. And I don't know that it really loses much through a camera if you do it well, right? Because if I tell you the name of your first, you know, crush in middle school, it doesn't matter if I do that for you over the phone or six inches from your face in person, it's equally impressive. Do you know what I mean? It, it, I think it, it translates well to a virtual format in that way. Do you do, are you able to you able to to um guess the name of people's junior high crushes yes i mean it's a part of the show so you know i had to figure out a way to i had to figure out a way to do it but it is doable like anything else right like if you if you think down you go okay what are my what are my resources here what can i do what do i have

access to well okay i've got access to a camera less than a foot from their eyeballs. That's useful, right? I've got a window into their living room. That's useful. Wow. So did you learn, um, any new skill? Like now that you're back to doing, uh, well, you're doing a hybrid of some in person, some online, have you picked up anything, uh, from the, from the virtual shows that you've now incorporated into the live shows? Yeah. So there was a particular piece in my virtual show that I'd never done before. The whole virtual show, by the way, if you end up seeing it, it's called Reconnected. It's very meta. It's probably the most meta thing I've ever done. And there's this

piece, everybody's seen it before. It's the East Indian needle mystery as it's sort of colloquially known because it was culturally appropriated from 19th century Indian street performers by Western magicians. But it's the thing where, you know, you swallow the needles and you swallow the thread and then you regurgitate the thread with all the needles tied on in little knots. When I started writing the virtual show, my first thought was what will work better in this environment, in this world, than it would on stage. Because the last thing I wanted to do was try to shoehorn material into the virtual show just because it was stuff I was used to doing, right? Like I wanted to do things that were

served by the medium. And one of the first things I thought of was the needles. That's a much scarier trick when it's right up in front of your face. And I think when you're watching something on a webcam, there's almost a sense that more could go wrong. Do you know what I mean? When you're in a theater, a place that has a fire marshal and emergency exits and, know city permits and things like that there's sort of this implicit understanding that nothing truly dangerous can happen in this space whereas on a webcam you're almost like i don't know this guy's just in his house like swallowing needles this there's almost something scarier about that it's like oh my god are we all witnessing what

is saying this guy about to kill himself kind of for a trick though right like think about all the horror movies that kind of play off that about how scary the internet can be in that way but i am genuinely genuinely horrified of needles i get terrible terrible trypanophobia every time i get my my blood drawn right even when i get the vet got the vaccine, I like curse like a sailor. I start and stop the process like three times. I just, ever since I was a kid, but I figured when am I ever going to get more time to work on this? You know, because I didn't, nobody was demanding a virtual show from me. It's not like anybody cared if I did this or not.

And so I took like all the time I needed. I took like two months to just work on that one piece. And it segued into one of my favorite parts of the show, which was asking everybody what they worked on during the pandemic, like what project they took on, what way they tried to sort of better themselves before Tiger King came out and we all got distracted, right? Like, you know, something they just baked or something they crocheted. That was really, really cool to me. Like that was my favorite part of the whole show. Yeah. Hi, my name is Mark Dreskov. Um, I started, uh, listening on episode 38, but, uh, it all began, uh, back in September 2014. That was the month my wife went into hospice.

And by early October, I became a single dad of seven. I wasn't listening to any podcasts then. But I discovered Episode 38. And I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. And my kids didn't know what that was, but they knew Marvel. So I was able to allow them to listen to that. And it was an amazing opportunity to meet them where they were at and to describe parts of my childhood. And I actually had met my wife on the steps of the Shire.

We both went to UC Irvine in California, where there's a whole dorm complex called Middle Earth. I chose it only for that reason, and I was living in the Shire when I met her, first week of college in 1990. And we are married until October 2014. So thank you. I appreciate it. It's a great podcast, and I still listen to it today. It's a great podcast and still listen to it today. By the way, episode 38 that he referenced was called Why They Fight.

And it was about how you can apply D&D character alignments to Marvel and a lot of other fantasy universes. We'll hear more from listeners and previous guests after the break. Pick from over 190 assets and start with the $10 in your pocket. Easy. Go to Kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash CA dash PRU dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. Introducing Tim's new Infuser Energy Beverages, made with natural caffeine. They come in two refreshing flavors, Blackberry Yuzu and Mango Starfruit.

Try them today, only at Tim's. At participating Tim's restaurants in Canada for a limited time. It's time for Tim's. In 2017, I did an episode called Atari versus the imagination gap. In that episode, I interviewed Tim Lapitino, who wrote a book about the artwork on Atari boxes and how it compensated for the limited graphics of the games. Since then, he's come out with a new book about Pac-Man, and I really wanted to talk with him about it. When he got on Zoom, I saw right away behind him was a full-sized cabinet arcade game of Pac-Man from the 80s.

You know, part of the goal of this was during this is I was going to play Pac-Man more and get a sense of, OK, I've played this game, but what does it take to be good at it? What does it take? What are some of the secrets? And I've established that I'm still a terrible Pac-Man player. Can you, were you able to use it as a tax write-off? Oh, of course. It's a business expense. Excellent. Yeah, it was one of the things I did during the pandemic, a little, not really little,

but a little project I did. I did something called 365 Days of Pac-Man. And every day of 2020, I experienced something Pac-Man-like. So I played all of the Pac-Man video games, pretty much all of them. I ate old Pac-Man cereal, 40-year-old box of cereal, did all this stuff. And I documented it on Twitter. How did you get a 40-year-old box of Pac-Man cereal? eBay.

It wasn't as bad as you might think. The whole thing was just sort of a little dried out. Although I think it's kind of disturbing that it's still, that it's not, that it hadn't gotten stale. It was still sealed. So it was still sealed and I opened it up and made my kids eat it too. Although that was fine compared to the gum that I ate in the Pac-Man trading cards. That did not go as well. The funny thing is I feel like even as kids, that cereal was probably,

you knew that cereal would last for 40 years and at the same time, you know, you knew that gum was stale the minute you opened it. 100%, 100%. Yeah, so yeah. So tell me about the Pac-Man book. What did you discover in researching it? I was really interested in writing a book about it.

One, because I feel like the origins of the game were not well understood or well known. But also, Pac-Man's got an unusual history in that it came from Japan, but it didn't do particularly well in Japan. But when it was licensed and brought over to the United States, that's when it sort of became the cultural behemoth. And that was really interesting to me. It's like, why did that happen? That happened in Chicago. It came from a company called Midway that operated right outside of Chicago. And they sort of took the license, but then they kind of made Pac-Man a little bit their own. And I was really curious, this bit of video game pop culture history had sort of happened in my backyard. So I really wanted to investigate that. So why did it not take off in Japan? You know, I think some of the

interest in the game at first in Japan, it was that it was a moderate success. It did well and it did what they wanted it to do. The programming team really wanted to create a game that appealed to not just men, but also women, where men were very much the staple of arcades in 1977, 78, 79, and into 1980 when the game came out. Toru Iwatani, who sort of headed up the design and really was kind of his brainchild, really wanted a game that would appeal to women. It would be something different from what he would call at the time violent, aggressive games, which is kind of funny to think about things like Space Invaders and Galaga, Galaxian,

those being violent, aggressive games. But they are sort of this high-twitch, fast-moving game where it's sort of stressful and it's kill or be killed. Whereas Pac-Man, there's a little bit more exploration. There's a little more puzzle solving and it's cute and really approachable. So he wanted to focus on making sure that women would feel included on that. And that happened.

It was just one of those things where it didn't quite catch on. Yeah, well, then why did it catch on in the United States if it didn't catch on in Japan? Some of it I think was timing, it catch on in the United States if it didn't catch on in Japan? Some of it, I think, was timing. But I also think the other part of it is that it felt like a fresh game. It felt different. And then Midway did some things that were pretty standard practice in the time,

is they took a Japanese-feeling game, a Japanese-looking game, and they Americanized the marketing. They sort of drew from old animation, things like Hanna-Barbera or Popeye in terms of character design. And they started putting it on t-shirts and those t-shirts sold well. And then they put it on cereal bowls and boxer shorts and sleeping bags. And suddenly it became a phenomenon and Pac-Man sort of became a stand-in a little bit for video games in general in a culture that's still sort of discovering it.

I had a Pac-Man doll. I think it's still in my parents' house somewhere. I used to watch that Hanna-Barbera Pac-Man cartoon, which was awful, and I still watched it. And I actually just got, for Christmas this year, I got Pac-Man socks. And I still watched it. And I actually just got for Christmas this year, I got Pac-Man socks. Pac-Man persists. And but then each sort of iteration of the licensing sort of furthered the story. And I think that was really important for the sort of the longevity. Whereas, you know, you didn't have a huge storyline, but you did have Miss Pac-Man. And

then suddenly there's a relationship between two characters and there's a baby and then you have baby Pac-Man and Junior Pac-Man and a pack of dog that shows up in the cartoon. Yeah, these little bits of story for things that are not the case for Space Invaders, like there was no narrative through line between Space Invaders and Space Invaders Deluxe. Yeah, Pong was really missing a storyline, too. It's an epic quest of a circle and a rectangle.

Hi, Eric and team. This is Moritz from Germany. And I just wanted to congratulate you to 200 epic episodes. I have a public policy master's degree and I've been working in NGOs for a while. But thanks to your podcast, I was inspired to develop a course

for my old home university on pop culture and politics and utopia. And yeah, I'm now an external lecturer at my university, at my old university. And I'm preparing to teach the course actually tomorrow. Thank you so much. Congratulations and all the very, very best. Hi there.

My name is Joana. I'm a listener from Portugal and I've been listening to your podcast for a really long time now. I've got to say that Imaginary Worlds is a door, a portal to a world of magic and fantasy that has brought me several moments of joy over the course of the last few years. I remember especially an episode about the fairies that came in a time in my life where magic was lacking.

a time in my life where magic was lacking and I could feel how much it filled my dreary morning with joy while I was commuting to a work I didn't like. So yes, imaginary worlds has been very important to me in my life and I want to thank Eric and everyone involved with the podcast. to thank Eric and everyone involved with the podcast. One of the best developments with the podcast over the years was bringing on Stephanie Billman as my assistant producer. And for this episode, Stephanie wanted to check in with Shari Spiros. In 2018, we did an episode called Board Games Go Indie about how new technology was allowing people to create their own board games and get them distributed. Shari Spiros is a big player in that industry. Her company, AdMagic, publishes indie games

like Cards Against Humanity, and she's made a lot of game designers' dreams come true. But she told Stephanie that the pandemic has created some nightmare scenarios for her company. I really feel like I deserve and my team deserves an award that is the size of a six-story building out of solid gold, preferably shaped like a giant meatball. Because we are living in extraordinarily difficult times to run a company. There have been days where, you know, the covid levels were so high that we just, you know, shut down the warehouse

at the end of the week. And that part has been difficult. You know, the price of boat transport went up 10 times what it used to be. So we had to deal with that. They are coming back down. But now there are rolling COVID shutdowns in China again, because people are getting sick in China again. You know, boats have been delayed. Walmart shipments have been delayed. I mean, like, you know, just crazy, crazy stuff. The other thing is we, we literally signed a lease on a hundred thousand square foot warehouse because I don't know what you know but i took over black box in the beginning of 2020 right so black box was

originally owned by cards against humanity and um and they they were they were done with it we signed the lease for march 2020 and just as we were moving into the warehouse covid hit yeah so we had no people. We had to be very, very careful. We didn't want people to get sick. And yet we had to set up a hundred thousand square foot warehouse with racking. So that was the worst timing. And yet it was something that had to be done.

So I was curious because when we were, you know, you can only do so much watching TV and eventually, you know, you and whoever you're living with when you're in lockdown, you're like, we need to find something else fun to do. So me and my husband played a lot of games and, you know, I love board games, especially trivia games. So I'm curious, did your sales go up during COVID? Oh, absolutely. So you got like a significant spike thanks to the fact that everyone was like at home and didn't have much else to do. I'm going to be honest. We had a banner year,

a couple of banner years. Sure, because people were buying things they had never even looked at before. Gamers came out of the woodwork and then people who never played games before were driving to the store to buy games, going online to look for games, just like anything, anything to keep themselves occupied.

And we wound up going into, that's how we went into the puzzle business. So on the creative side, can you talk some about some of the games, the newer games since we last spoke that you're really excited about? Probably our biggest project is we licensed the movie Luck. So Luck is coming out on Apple TV August 6th and we are manufacturing the game and it's Luck the game. And the strategy for Luck the

game is based on the game of 49, one of our all-time bestsellers. I've actually not heard anything about the movie itself. Can you explain the plot of that? It's about the land of luck. There is a land that actually generates luck. And the little girl who stars in the movie stars with a cat and it's all animated. She's pegged as the unluckiest girl in the world. And it shows her visit into the land of luck and how she winds up getting there and what winds up happening. And then we also are releasing Mansplaining. Mansplaining is a great game. Can you explain what the game Mansplaining is about? Yeah. Well, you know, everybody has a different definition of what Mansplaining actually is. And like anybody can Mansplain. I'm kind of

Mansplaining to you right now. But basically when you sort of are expert in a category, maybe that other people already know about, right? So it's kind of funny, because it's a it's a it's a really a tongue in cheek type of thing. I think people will be have a lot of fun with it, because it's different. You know, it's different. And it's, it's, it's timely. One of the other games that we're involved with is a game called Doomlings, which is just adorable. And Doomlings, the imagery on the cards is just so adorable. These Doomlings are like little characters, which probably will be stuffed animals one day, right? And they are just so cute. But I think that Doom is a, I hate to say it, I just think it's a big theme because people are like, it's the end of the world as we know it, you know?

I don't believe that. I am an optimist, but I got to tell you, the popularity of this game, Doomlings, it's crazy. And it's so cute. These guys did such a good job. And not for nothing, we did a great job printing it, but the design is just amazing. I'm just calling in. And, you know, I'm listening to the imaginary worlds, but I'm actually living in a pretty concrete world, walking by a dairy farm, listening to birds just in the countryside.

So I love the show and I love thinking about the different things, but I also really like being rooted in my real world. So anyway, thanks and congratulations for 200 episodes. One of the most popular episodes that we've ever done was called Solar Punk the Future. It came out in April, 2020. I think part of what made that episode resonate with so many people was the timing. The pandemic had just hit

and it was refreshing to hear about a creative movement that was built on hope and light. In this case, literal sunlight. In that episode, I talked with Jane and Scott Knoll. They run a marketing agency together, and in their spare time, they publish a solarpunk-themed magazine called Dreamforge. When I interviewed them in early March of 2020, COVID hadn't spread yet to where they live in Pennsylvania. After that, things changed quickly. They had to stop printing the magazine and go digital, although they're slowly coming back to the print edition.

And I wanted to know, where do they see the movement of solarpunk these days? What's changed in the last two years? And they were actually excited to tell me that their magazine, Dreamforge, now has a rival magazine out there called Solarpunk. There's a magazine that titled themselves Solarpunk Magazine. So I think that's pretty cool too, that there's enough interest to get that.

Serena Ulibarri that you had had on the show with us in the first place, she has a story in, I think it's the second issue get that. Serena Ulibarri that you had had on the show with us in the first place, she has a story in, I think it's the second issue of that. The other thing I'd say is I've seen an awful lot of Kim Stanley Robinson in the news. That has definitely been, I think, maybe getting broader than just the science fiction audience with some of the work that he's done too. the science fiction audience with some of the work that he's done too. Yeah. Well, you know, back in 2017, I did an episode where I interviewed him about his novel, New York 2140, which is a great book. It's about this flooded New York City that's sort of like Venice in the future. And it's funny because I've seen in recent interviews, people have sometimes

described his work as dystopian. And he's like like what are you talking about like i'm doing best case scenarios here so um have you have you two done any like solar punk in your lives lately like have you started putting up solar panels or like have you started growing herbs on your windowsill or anything we haven't gotten into we spend so much of our time on the magazine we haven't gotten into the one of the of our time on the magazine we haven't gotten into the one of the things you can't well no no no one of the things you can't see here and that jane is blind to because it surrounds her if you just turned her camera into the room it would be filled with plants uh big plants little trees that are in her office there if you were to go into our living room it looks like you're walking into a solarium because they're just.

I counted when I brought them all inside from from outside is there's 50 50 houseplants now. The others are still at the office because I didn't have room to bring them home. So have have either of you noticed in the last two years like any other solar punk influences? Like maybe I don't know, maybe you saw like an advertising campaign or a movie and you're like, wait, I totally see the influence of solar punk on that. That vision of the future these people are creating, even if like those people didn't know what they were doing with solar punk. One of the things that I can say to that is when we make our videos and we do things, and even at our day job, we have resources that you call upon for video clips and for images and that sort of thing. But I'm very surprised to look at that and see, oh, I'm seeing pictures of green arcologies, big building projects where they're growing plants on buildings.

And lots of times, if you're looking for science fiction clips, they do the traditional dystopian thing. It's like, well, here's the science fiction clips. There's the destroyed city that looks like something's happening in Ukraine now. And there's the guy in the radiation suit. But now I'm starting to see, oh, you want to see a future city? Well, look, there's a bright, beautiful, shining city with the sun behind it and a blue sky and clouds. And one thing that ties together, this is something we've seen in DreamForge, and it kind of ties together. You were asking earlier about, well, do you guys have plants and do gardening and that sort of thing? And we've published, we've seen, and then we've published two stories in the last year or so that just were interesting to me because they weren't specifically about, oh, well, here's light as power generation, but that idea of plants and humans getting so close together that you kind

of have the two blending. And we did one that was a fantasy called In the Leaves Embraced by Deborah L. Davitt. That story is a wonderful story of a tribe of people who actually a woman basically ends up with a lover that is really a tree. And you have this, you have this romance and you have this understanding of the two different worlds and it's, it's done in a fantasy way. And it sounds absolutely ridiculous when I say it, but it's a wonderful story that is very emotional and very well done. And, and another one that was even stranger than that was eat and be eaten by JL Akagi. And it was literally about someone who is in a future technological world

is making the choice. Well, I'm, I'm done with being a human. I want to be a tree and they have a way to do that. And it's, it's all presented a little bit in that idea of, you know, what is your identity and how are you dealing with some past conflicts? And it's like, well, I want to become a tree and become part of this park. And, and it gets into how that entire nature environment speaks to itself and shares water and resources and how they develop a relationship with the gardener. And, you know, so we're, we're seeing some things like that. So we're, we are seeing some good stories on some different, different levels that relate to, you know, getting past humans as just destroying the climate. Honestly, I could go on forever checking in with previous guests.

I began the show in 2014 talking about my career changes, how I left home in Boston to become an animation storyboard artist in Los Angeles, and then completely changed direction and moved to New York and went into public radio. This podcast began as a side project, and I'm really happy that it's become my full career. When I worked in public radio, we'd often say something like, this show couldn't exist without the support of listeners like you. And those words feel so true right now. This community of listeners means the world to me. Thank you for listening.

All right, I'm going to close this 200th episode with the way the show began. All right, so are you ready? Okay, that's it for this week. Special thanks to Carol Murphy, Jason Saran, Shari Spiros, Tim Lappetino, Scott Knoll, and Jane Knoll, and all the listeners who called in. The show's assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can follow Imaginary Worlds on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts

or mention it on social media. That always helps people discover imaginary worlds. The best way to support the podcast is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you can get either a free Imaginary World sticker, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can also subscribe to the newsletter. Just fill out the form on the show's website, imaginaryworldspodcast.org.