The Magnus Archives - MAG Retrospective - Crew's Qs with Jonny & Alex

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Jonny and Alex are put in the hot-seat as the cast and crew of The Magnus Archives ask all the burning questions they've held back for years.Featuring: Martyn Pratt, Nico Vettese, Helen Gould, Annie Fitch, Fay Roberts, Karim Kronfli, Elizabeth Moffatt, Jonathan Sims & Alexander J. NewallContent warnings:Spoilers for all of The Magnus ArchivesDiscussion of: smoking, physical violence, nuclear accidents, death, vertigoMentions of: unreality, panic, war, mould & rot, COVID-19 pandemic, alcoholTranscriptsPDF - https://cutt.ly/6vJZrXuDOC - https://cutt.ly/IvJZc3lThank you to all our Patrons for your continued supportIf you'd like to join them, visit www.patreon.com/rustyquill.Edited this week by Nico Vettese & Jeffrey Nils GardnerProduced by Lowri Ann DaviesCheck out our merchandise available at https://www.redbubble.com/people/RustyQuill/shop & https://www.teepublic.com/stores/rusty-quill.You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast software of choice, or by visiting www.rustyquill.com/subscribePlease rate and review on your software of choice, it really helps us to spread the podcast to new listeners, so share the fear.Join our community:WEBSITE: rustyquill.comFACEBOOK: facebook.com/therustyquillTWITTER: @therustyquillREDDIT: reddit.com/r/RustyQuillEMAIL: [e-mail] Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill Ltd. and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International Licence Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull-Apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. hey everyone welcome back we missed you it's been a little while well we're here today and we are here with myself alexander janual and with yourself johnny simmers hello i overslept it's fine don't worry about it you take the project pressures away and immediately it all falls apart it's been a big week for clarity we are recording this a couple of days after the

finale dropped this is close to morning after as we can really manage. I mean, a bit, yeah. So what we are doing today is we are being held accountable. To be specific, we have our cast and crew are going to be putting questions to us that we've managed to dodge for half a decade. And this was their one chance to hold us to account. So I hope you're strapped in. I haven't pre-read these questions, so I'm assuming they're all going to be vicious,

targeted character assassinations. Elizabeth has been trying to ask me these questions for years, but I just point over her shoulder. I'm like, what's that? And then she falls for it every time. Well, tough. Today's the day where we're going to do our best to give a couple of real answers. Right. On that, then I'm going to hand over to our first question asker and we'll go from there hello it's mine pratt cto of rusty quill and i've got a few questions for you alex and johnny what did you do in my flat that you never told me about the actual honest answer is smoked on the balcony area outside where there were quite a lot of very vigorous looking no smoking signs and i threw my cigarette butt off the side johnny jonathan onto the

greenery what is wrong with 13 stories below what is wrong with you not often i didn't do it every time but there were one or two mornings where i'd dragged myself out of bed at like six in the morning and sat on a bus for three hours to get there johnny i was having a bad time and i'm sorry martin i hope that the building managers never punched you in the gut once and were're like... Oh, Johnny. Ugh. All I did is permanent property damage. Littering's far worse. I'm legitimately a little bit ashamed of that, but also not. Okay, things that I did.

There's two. There's one that I believe I did tell Martin about, which is that I accidentally tore the entire handle of his bathroom door off. It just came off in my hands the whole lot just crunch oh thank god i thought i did that no so i can't for the life of me remember but i think it was slightly broken and i just finished the job so then i think i did have to tell martin eventually like this is broken i think it was already broken but i know i finished it off but there is one that i also did so when we were recording in the corridors we used to have to tape up the sleeping bags and

stuff in order to record and let's just say that at some point one of the tapes was particularly strong a brand i'll say as gorilla tape there you go very good strong stuff that when removing tore out a chunk of plaster and i don't think i ever told martin that but what i did is i then took a strip of gorilla tape because if it caused a problem it can solve it doubled it over stuck it on the underneath of the plaster and then just reinserted that plaster that poor corridor by the end looked there was nothing left started out relatively nice painted i mean you know like it's that sort of cheap paint you get in a lot of rented properties in london that like does sort of come off if you

sneeze on it but by the end oof you don't have to say we that was me that was all me what was robin lennox doing during season five was he just constantly scared he'd be late for dinner okay oh hey martin yeah so for anyone who may have forgotten martin did play robin lennox all the way back in episode 100 as potentially the most annoying character in the entire series so what was robin up to johnny the trouble is i can think of quite a lot of potentially honest and comparatively upsetting answers but i'm reluctant because it's a nice fun question from a nice fun man go horrible go horrible do it like i'll set your tone my first instinct was to put him out on the moors searching for a dog that never actually existed in the first place and never finding it yeah that's actually kind of where my thoughts

were sort of lending as well i think he's out on the moors, Jackie's gone, he's running, he's looking, he can't find his dog. And yes, he is late for dinner, but also he doesn't know where his mother is. Like, everything that is very important to him feels like it's almost close, but he can't find it. And there's just that gradually building sense of panic forever. Yeah, I think that would work. Was there a field of bad cows during the eye's rain? Yeah, probably. There must have been. Like, there must be someone out there who could not imagine anything worse than a field of bad cows. Therefore, to my eye, pun intended, there must be a field of bad cows, right? Someone pun intended there must be a field of bad cows right

someone's gonna have cows as a phobia also there's probably a field of good cows that are imagining bad cows as they're like a lot of the people trapped in human domains created sort of human or human adjacent things to torment them well they didn't exactly create themselves they were created in response to their deepest fears so if there were some domains where there were cows and the cows were like oh no i really hope i don't get bullied by other cows oh what's that over there some bad cows oh yeah there you go so it's less bad cows than like social exclusion cows, potentially. Potentially. Hello, I'm Helen Gould and I play Melanie's therapist Laverne on TMA, as well as being lead sensitivity editor.

Here are my questions for Johnny and Alex. Number one, who wins in a fight? Martin K. Blackwood or alexander j newell i think it would start going to alex but about halfway would switch over because martin is i've always mentioned like a much bigger guy yeah i'm the same but he's got that thing where bigger people are often a lot gentler because they're aware of their own size and sometimes their own power. And so I think it would be a lot harder to actually get him to invest in the fight. Whereas Alex, I think, would just go from nought to just like violence.

Immediate. Yeah, okay. Yeah, absolutely. Just like a switch snaps and you're wailing on him so i think that would really go in your favor early on but if you weren't able to finish the job pretty quickly i think martin would reach a breaking point and i think he would be able to overwhelm you see i agree i think what it comes down to is is martin starting this process ready to fight because if so i'm i've got my clock cleaned very very quickly but if he's like oh hey we can work

around this and I can really you know get in early with some horrific sucker punch or something I might stand a chance actually thinking about it given that this fight might be instigated by him being told you are the one who has created the universe in which he has suffered, he might be raring to go quite quickly. No, that's a good point, actually. I'm the one who's been gunning for the most suffering for Martin throughout. So actually, I think it might just have to be that I lose. I don't see a win state here.

Do you have any horrible story ideas that you didn't get to include in this series for plot reasons? Like, did you ever want to write about a man whose hands slowly turn into hammers or something i mean yes not this series specifically in fact a lot of the ideas that i say had these are generally things that other people said to me in conversation or like weird little historical or like in some cases physics facts that fascinate me i'm like oh i could do a story on that but the reason most of these didn't end up being used is because i couldn't easily convert them into a season five style horrorscape or statement see i can't list as long as my arm i'm genuinely gutted we never got to do one that was fully based in a submarine i really wanted to do a submarine one you were so pumped

for a submarine episode i really really wanted a submarine episode i'm gutted we didn't get to do one of those i've actually still got a bunch of notes on my phone about potential ones i feel like these notes are gonna be what if lamp but scary well one of them is drained canal full of spooky drain canals are properly a little bit disturbing yeah because it was like about a year and a half ago they drained a bunch of canals in amsterdam and were finding all these i mean like they were finding like thousands of bikes oh yeah but also just like a lot of weird stuff that had fallen into the canals over the course of like a hundred odd years and so the idea of like oh well what else could it have dredged up was quite compelling to me also things like how in chernobyl nothing rots or chernobyl in general is really grips me in the most horrific and visceral

way i feel like by that time i'd learned my lesson about being like oh this is a real world thing that's kind of horrible i'll just use it it isn't one you just dive into i'm not sure it would have been a good idea to do an episode on that sort of thing but yeah there's all sorts of stuff about the chernobyl fallout and how it's affected the surrounding countryside that is like really disquieting in quite interesting ways i often say to people that horror's never really got me the best horror series i've ever seen wasn't a horror series and it was that chernobyl series that grabs me in a way that more fantastical horror never will oh yeah there's the broken or broken spectre. It's a phenomenon where generally when you're like on a mountain or something like that

and the sun is sort of behind you and there's like mist or something in front of you and your own shadow appears as a figure in the distance. Apparently quite unsettling and I think that would have been quite an interesting one. Also the red Zone in France. That one's new to me. It's basically an area where there's still just enough unexploded munitions from one of the world wars that you can't go there. And it's just got all these signs everywhere.

It's just an otherwise completely beautiful bit of the French countryside that is still, a hundred odd years later, unusable because of the war and like i don't know what i'd do with that but that when i read about it it seemed like a relatively potent seed but again real world stuff learning to be a little bit more careful about that you also forgot though the most important horror story that never got told which i can't believe you never raised what you no no the best pitch i ever heard. I think it was you. What if teeth only got hard when you were about to eat? Oh, no, that's not me.

It was a deeply upsetting tweet I found. That's the true horror that I regret not being able to fit into Magnus Archives. The idea of your teeth becoming tumescent. God. Who is your favourite fear avatar? You are... I don't know. Helen's your favourite fear avatar? You are... I don't know. Helen's not a fear avatar. Well, I quite liked the character Helen,

but I always did. I always wanted a character that's like, oh, you know, they're a bit disreputable, but they'll be a good friend in the end. No, they won't. You'll just feel that way for a while, but they'll just burn you in the end. Yeah, I mean mean like all my

children are dear to me oh i know who your favorite is even if you won't admit it straight out the gate monster pig oh monster pig monster pig you love monster pig monster pigs you're like absolute favorite monster pig's great oh monster pig i think i also like never really dived into it much beyond the one episode but the piper i've got a lot of affection for that because that is a story that was very much with me a long time before magnus came about it was one that i sort of like when we started doing magnus i was like all this would go really well here so uh like ol? Oh yeah. Maybe it's just because he's very tired all the time, so right now I consider him relatable. Fair enough.

Hey Alex and Johnny, it's Nico, your humble servant of an editor through Magnus Season 5. Question 1. Alex, you said in a previous Q&A that there was an episode in an earlier season

where, because the deadlines were so tight, you couldn't get Johnny to come back in to record a John line, so you did it yourself. Would you be able to reveal to us what episode slash line that actually was? I feel like I should put this one to bed at this point now the series has been done. Do I have your consent, Jonathan Sims? I mean, what you have to remember is I'm not actually here. This is Alex doing an impression of Johnny.

Ha, wah, wah. Yes, Alex. I, Johnny, very much consent to you revealing this. The sad news I have for people is I don't remember the specific episode off my head, but there's a reason for that, which I've done it a few times throughout the season. It's not like once or twice. The one that everyone has been hunting for, the reason they haven't found it, is the largest substitution was the title read of an episode. Johnny read the wrong title for an episode, so I recorded myself as Jonathan Sims reading the episode title. I don't even think it was the whole title.

I think it was like a three word title and he got two words wrong or something. So the major one that people will be able to find if they hunt, and I don't mind sharing it because it won't ruin the episode, is I have read as Jonathan Sims the title for an episode, I think in season three, but I have done that more than once because there's been a couple of gaffs there yeah it's like i think people are like oh what is the one thing and it's like no this is just something that alex discovered in like season two it's a fix that i've had to use a couple of times i don't think you've needed to do it much at all in season five because i've generally been

almost not at all it's because weirdlyemic has made that bit a lot easier because if you're like, I need this line again, you can just be like, hey, Johnny, can you just record this line again and send it over? The unfortunate truth for people is there is an episode,

and I would have to dig around, and I don't know off the top of my head, that I did basically the title for, and that's not Johnny, and I think it's around season three. There's another one where I did a couple of words from a title. And there's been a few points in the series where I have subbed in like a word. But very often what I'll do to throw people is,

let's say that the word was like... Watermelon. Yeah, watermelon is actually a good example. Is I would take Johnny saying what, and then I would take me saying a melon, and then blend them so that it's you're never ever gonna find it maybe a spectrographic analysis but that's a lot of effort to go through on 200 episodes and it's not worth it there isn't anything particularly exciting the one that

everyone's been hunting for and the one that i alluded to was yeah it was an episode title only i'm afraid and i know that's a grossly underwhelming secret but don't assume that all secrets are interesting because they're not what's the biggest idea one of you has had for any point in the Magnus archives that you were really fond of doing that the other one has vetoed that's a really good question

it's a hard one though because like that is the process of planning basically every season has been just a long back and forth with like us throwing out ideas the other vetoing or being like yeah but twist it this way i think you initially wanted to be a lot harder on john and martin with the ending I wanted the ending to be harder across the board and one of the things that I know like we discussed and I do for what it's worth I do believe that we've pretty much consistently come to always the answer of what it should have been. I pushed initially the idea that Georgie didn't make it. I think we were both initially talking

about the idea of a sole survivor at the end and it was like partway through season five because that was when we really started like okay so who is going to be the survivor and we came down on the the idea that actually there was no dramatic reason to kill them off other than just to be a bit sadder cruel yeah certainly in the ending i was on the harsher side of that table than you were. It's one of those things, I don't remember the exact details. I remember both of us throwing out a lot of things.

I remember quite a few of yours. I was like, I think that's a bit too much. I'm probably going to veto. You don't want to read something that's ever been written by me solely. It's always just vicious. There is one disagreement we had and i remember this conversation and this is early season one where it was the first time we ever

discussed the feasibility of a martin john romance and i distinctly remember your initial reaction being i don't know if there's much space for romance in this as a property i very much went into season one being like oh no this is horror there's no like i think there's space for romance i don't think it was actually john and martin though i think we were talking much more abstractly because i remember there was a distinct moment end of season two early season three where we both had the moment of like john and martin actually the dynamic do we lean into this and we were both like yeah actually that is that's the move you're right it was it was a blanket discussion of should we put some romance in the ensemble bits it wasn't specific technical issues aside because of the pandemic which we all are very very much aware of how

much of an emotional impact has it had on you to record the magus archives how much harder has it been to get into character i am going to give a controversial answer which is i think remote recording is technically more difficult, but I find it significantly easier to perform in because I find it really difficult to squeeze eight people in a room inches away from one another's faces, accounting for all of that, and then trying to perform and being like, you have to keep your hands by your side. Why? Because if you gesticulateulate you're going to hit everyone else in the studio whereas remote recording kind of frees that obviously yeah because for you alex like doing non-remote recordings means that you are performing the functions of both actor and actual sound technician which means that you're only ever going to be able to put what 70 of yourself into a performance because

part of your brain's always going to be on the actual recording remote recording because it kind of distributes that so everyone's brain is like 10 sound technician 90 actor that's exactly how it feels to me yeah for me i found that it hasn't had any effect on the quieter scenes. It's entirely volume-based, and it's just because I live in a shared house with relatively thin walls, which means that louder scenes I have to actively fight against getting quite self-conscious and quite worried about disturbing other people.

Hey, I'm Annie. I am a vocal editor for the Magnus Archives. Johnny, Alex, settle a debate for me and one of my closest friends. Insofar as any of the avatars or monsters were a part of just one of the entities, were Breakin' and Hope a part of the Stranger, or were they free agents working for the overall entity of fear from the beginning? For me, Breakin' and Hope were one of the first sort of examples of how a lot of the fears interact, because they are pure stranger. In terms of what their alignment is and what entity they

are a part of, they are 100% the stranger, they are a manifestation of the unknown figures arriving in town bearing something bad. But because of the way the fears sort of blend into each other, and because of the specific role that those figures have within stories of all sorts of different horrible things, they had this function of being able to interact with and facilitate all sorts of different fears. So in many ways, it was an early example of the quite weirdly intricate ways that the fears can blend and merge and interact with each other based on, in many ways, what their actual narrative roles were within the world, rather than just within the story.

See, I think we think of him ever so slightly differently, which is, I also see him as pure stranger, but I just... So a lot of what I do directing is I have to find shortcuts for people, where it's like, instead of learning, here's four seasons of lore, just like, think of it like this thing. I use a lot of shortcuts. For me, I always just saw Breakin' and Hope as pure stranger, but they're ambassadors who are granted diplomatic immunity. thing i use a lot of shortcuts for me i always just saw breakin and hope as pure stranger but

they're ambassadors who are granted diplomatic immunity so they're bouncing around other powers and then just they flash their diplomatic immunity badge and then they get to have a natter with other powers and everyone just leaves them alone that's how i always just kind of skipped to in my head there are certain seemingly mundane locations that provide good cover for places of power for the various entities. For example, the archives for the Eye, a theme park would do well for the vast things like this. What seemingly normal business establishments would provide good fronts, good cover for other entities? I think that every tax office ever would be a fantastic place for a buried statement or five yeah absolutely i think public swimming baths for the vast also works oh actually i was

gonna go with corruption oh no johnny why that oh that's so viscerally horrendous oh sometimes you go to a swimming pool and you're like this has not been cleaned long enough yeah and there's mold all up the sides of the thing and you don't want to touch the side so you just hover in the middle and regret your decisions yeah okay the horrible floating plaster sorry content warning for horrible stuff oh god oh here's one for you that's an odd one a tanning salon for the spiral because i happen to have been in one or two and they always tend to be very long backroom corridors where like it has a nice shop front but you're always inevitably just wandering around in the back and it's full of all of these figures just lay waiting in bright bright light and the fact that it never has a

normal layout because it's always some kind of retro fitted domestic space and no i don't do tanning as a thing but i have been in tanning salons before yeah no i keep thinking of them and then we're like you did that in season five because that's what season five was a little bit yeah we have narrowed the field a lot i think there's a reason that you have so many just coming out and I'm like, uh, meat shop? Because I feel like I've used up most of my, like, what locations would be good for what powers? These 40.

Last one is simple, evil pubs. You know, you have like the Harry Potter one where it leads to another world. That, but evil. Oh. So what power is evil pubs? Oh, evil pubs. I mean, all of them.

You pick a power, mate, and I will find you a pub that's evil and fits that bill go any any power the clown one the clown spiral stranger yeah the clown one the pub that you go to and it's your regular but you never ever see a same person behind the bar more than once and you've been going there for a year and you go there three four times a week sometimes, even if it's just to sit and play games in a corner or whatever, but the staff is never the same one after another. I mean, it's a damning indictment of the current gig economy, but pubs are universal.

They're a nexus point for all powers. My name is Faye Roberts, and I played Daisy Turner on the Magnus Archives. To both of you. Probably enough of us have asked, did you ever expect the Magnus Archives to become as phenomenally popular as they have turned out to be? So instead, I'm going to ask, how has that changed other aspects of your life?

For better or worse? There's the obvious answers and the big-ticket answers, which are like, hey, I got a book deal. Professionally speaking, I've had a lot of success based on it. For me, it's quite an easy one to answer, actually. No-one wants to hire a young director. No-one wants to hire a director who's certainly younger than 40. It's a genuine issue because people assume a level of experience is required and it does take a lot of

experience. Having this means I don't need to any longer convince people to take a punt. I can point to it and be like, look, I've done this, just you either want to hire me or you don't. And that's quite useful because it was very difficult, especially in my 20s, to get directing work because everyone's like, come back to me in 20 years, which isn't a particularly helpful answer. So that's been a big help. The next question is for Johnny. I know that some details of the final season have changed way beyond your original or even relatively recent plans. Though some, the archivist accidentally starts the apocalypse, which you mentioned in passing about exactly four years ago, have abided. Could you talk us through a little of that process of change and how that feels or felt?

It's tricky, because in many ways to talk about it in terms of change often implies a level of set that things weren't. It was in many ways a lot less a process of change and much more a process of discovery. So the idea of the archivist making his way across this hellish transformed wasteland was very central right from a very early point. Then around season three ish martin was added to the journey we were like okay so it's martin and the archivist making their way across season four when we cemented the panopticon as this thing we were like okay so it's martin and john making their way across this blasted hellscape towards this tower and so that is much more how it went, rather than me coming in with a strong

idea of exactly how season five was going to look, and then revising it and changing it. I think the biggest change that happened probably was the last 10 episodes were a little bit reordered early in the season. My first draft didn't actually have them meeting elias till right at the end till the finale and had hilltop road happening a couple of episodes earlier but as i was writing as we arrived at the tunnels beneath the institute i realized it felt super artificial for them not to go up and see elias basically immediately well it's a pet peeve of mine in fantasy fiction and stuff like that where it's like we have arrived at the tower you know what we should do anything else for a while no it drives me up the wall i hate it and that was

kind of how it read in the original episode plan it was basically a reorder where it was like okay no we're going to have them go up and see elias and use that to establish the stakes that can then be used to launch into the sort of longer finale run involving hilltop road and all that sort of thing question for alex what advice would you give someone who wanted to set up their own audio entertainment production company? I am getting asked this increasingly. Run! I will make sure that my advice is not UK specific. If you want to set up a company, actually set up a company.

The worst thing that you can do that I keep seeing people do is they set up their Facebook page as like the glorious rabbit and they start getting all of their branding for the glorious rabbit, but they're not a company. they're still just themselves dressing themselves up as a company and that is a gross error i'm not going to dive into how to direct audio because that's not the question if you want to do the company stuff actually set up a company thankfully in most countries but not all countries of the world it's surprisingly easy to set up a company because they want you to do that because, you know, it has economic benefits for the country at large if everyone's doing it. Setting yourself up as a company, again, in most countries, affords you a large number of protections because it means what happens if you make a show and then you get sued because the glorious bunny or whatever I said the company was already exists. If you're not a company you're just sued if you are a company the company is sued and the worst thing that can happen

is that the company goes bankrupt not you and i know that sounds like an unsexy answer but is the mistake i see most often is people saying oh i'm a company but they haven't actually set themselves up as a company and you're leaving yourself open to just enormous problems the other one is it requires three things to make a successful company time money and lack of asbestos that is the secret fourth ingredient yes it takes let's call it talent i'm not a huge fan of that as a word whatever basically it doesn't matter what the proportion is but you're gonna need to hit a certain amount and it's like if you've got no money you'd better be quite good at what you do and have a lot of time i basically maxed out the time aspect is how i decided to game the system i was like i can take a job that gives me a lot of time and i can just burn a lot of midnight oil if you've got a lot of money shocker

it's quite easy you can skip steps if you're just brilliant if you're just absolutely amazing turns out you don't necessarily need much money or time however i think a lot of people including anyone who thinks that of us tends to overestimate that and underestimate the time element so the other one is really balance those three and figure out what your win of those three is and work to it, I guess. But again, I'm not an expert. Hello, everyone. This is Kareem Crompley, voice of Simon Fairchild in the Magnus Archives.

Question for Johnny. After having written this massive opus of a creation, do you think you need to lie down in a dark room for a period of time or find yourself some nice wide open spaces? Yes, but I have deadlines. Deadlines are your friends. Deadlines mean you'll always have work. Just load yourself on deadlines, and you'll never be tired again.

And to be fair, actually, my part in the writing actually finished a month and a half, two months, before the final episode actually dropped so i should have had plenty of time to rest post magnus i haven't but that's entirely my own fault there's always an extra project you can take johnny would you like three more have three more projects johnny yeah okay to alex how do you feel about roller coasters fun fact for people i actually have a perfectly manageable fear of mostly man-made heights so as a result i adore roller coasters and take every opportunity i can to go rock climbing i know that might sound counterintuitive but you get more thrills from something you're afraid of than something you're not so i love theme parks love roller coasters

love rock climbing and anything that feels like that what i don't like is going up something like i don't know tokyo tower or the shard and just standing in a big skyscraper very still because i'm not grabbing anything and if i'm not holding it together myself clearly it's all going to fall apart which says a lot more about me i think roller coasters are a little bit of a tragedy in my life because for the first 20, 21 years of my life, I was absolutely terrified of them. I've got a bit of vertigo and I could never bring myself

to actually go on a roller coaster. It legitimately terrified me. And then around 20, 21 maybe, I was like, you know what? Screw this. I'm going to do it. And I did. And I was like, know what screw this i'm gonna do it and i did and i was like wow roller coasters are fun i really like roller coasters and so i had five six years of like really loving roller coasters and whenever we went to theme parks let's go on the roller coasters

but a few years ago i was diagnosed with high blood pressure. And that has meant that I can still go on roller coasters. I'm not going to burst like a balloon. But it means that I tend to get headaches. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I can't just be like, yes, let's go on all the roller coasters. I'm like, OK, I've been on a roller coaster and I probably need to sit down and just, you know. So that's a bit sad that I can't do roller coasters as much as I'd like anymore.

Hey, it's Elizabethabeth one of your editors what was the opinion of the eye and the spider of martin's poetry given that from what i understand they both had to suffer through it in my capacity as the web i haven't listened to a lot of it i listened to it to the first few patreon releases to make sure it was good and then i was like brilliant i trust anal to absolutely nail this no specifically you went i listened to it to see if it was good it wasn't and then was told that was the point and like okay cool yeah i was like oh no this is not great perfect in terms of the in-universe iron spider i think you got to remember that they delight in fear being caused so for them to listen to it is fine because all they can see is the potential for people being afraid that martin's going to strong arm them into coming to an open mic night although there's an interesting nuance here which is

okay the eye stuck with martin right the way through to the end right but the web sort of gave up on him to a degree as we established with joma's speech yeah yeah therefore it follows in a sort of like greek philosopher style logic that the eye is more on board with martin's poetry than the web as the web clearly didn't like it as much having bailed early yeah well i mean fundamentally there's less for the web to work with poetry is not i mean i suppose you could talk about like poetry being like all playing on emotions and like manipulating emotions but like fundamentally you're much more likely to have poetry lead to feeling terrified of people watching you you know you got stage fright you got the fact that a lot of poetry is kind of putting your own emotions and soul on blast are you talking about the terrifying ordeal

of being seen johnny seen the mortifying ideal of being known is much more i think part of poetry than anything that the web's got going on so i would say that the eye is probably more on board than the web but also the web is probably almost cognizant enough to understand it in a way that they don't like. Just cognizant enough to not like it. Well, okay, this prompted then one question I've never asked you, actually. Outside of Magnus, do you write poetry, Johnny? No. Have you ever?

I think so-ish. I mean, I was a teen. I got a collection of angsty teenage poetry somewhere. Yeah. These days, like, I really like when other writing allows me to be poetic. Like, I really enjoyed doing 165, for instance. But years back, I was housemates with someone who is now, like, a pretty successful poet. I feel like there was always a sense of,

I'm always someone who's been quite, this is what I do. This is what other people do. I don't want to encroach on their thing. I get it, I get it. So all podcast monologues belong to Johnny, but that means that you stay away from other people's poetry, yeah? Yeah, they're mine.

Any of you who's tried to do it, I'm going to knife you. Why did no one ask who'd win in a fight between Jonathan Sims and Jonathan Sims? This was a fight between Jonathan Sims and everyone else out there doing podcasts on their own logs. You've drawn a line in the sand, and the only person allowed on your side is you. Wow. And I feel like that was quite a thing because I went to a lot of poetry stuff with him and it was very much like, this is your world, you know? It's how I met Faye, actually.

I think Faye's really good at poetry. I really like Faye's stuff. Faye's poetry is great. Yeah. Yeah. Faye's really good at poetry. I really like Faye's stuff. Faye's poetry is great. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like I really enjoy doing it, but at the same time, I've never quite felt like it is my domain, I guess. Oh, wah, wah. Gotta end on that. Best pun of the night. In that case, then, thank you, crew. Those were surprisingly civil. I was ready to really be dragged over the coals, but actually, you know, most of those were reasonable I mean Martin's still a nightmare I think we started very harsh but yeah I think that was alright

in which case then do you have anything you want to say before we disappear for another week before coming back with yet more you? let me rest no no rest for Johnny no rest for Johnny only deadlines

okay bye everyone bye No, no rest for Johnny. No rest for Johnny. Only deadlines. Okay. Bye, everyone. Bye. This episode is distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution non-commercial share alike 4.0 International License. For more information, visit RustyQuill.com, tweet us at TheRustyQuill,

visit us on Facebook, or email us at mail at RustyQuill.com. Thanks for listening. Hello, it's Kareem, the voice of Simon Fairchart from the Magnus Archives, letting you know about our sponsor, Audible. For fans of heart-racing, bone-chilling and mind-bending stories, Audible has everything you need. Audible is the leader in audiobooks,

so you'll always find the best and freshest selection of mysteries and thrillers to choose from. Sometimes you just want to get lost in a classic whodunit, and sometimes you want to get wrapped up in a twisted new mystery where the tension is high and you just can't stop listening until you find out what happens next. Audible can take you places

only you can imagine and whenever you want. On a run, doing errands, commuting or just relaxing at home. And it's not just audiobooks. Audible also gives you binge-worthy podcasts and exclusive originals with thousands of included titles you can listen to all you want,

and more get added every week. So, if you're into secrets and suspense, or you want to explore any other genre, remember, there's more to imagine when you listen on Audible. Your first audiobook is absolutely free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.ca. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th.

Terms and conditions apply.