[00:00:00]
R.S.: Welcome to this month’s bonus episode of Rite Gud, the podcast that helps you write good. I’m R. S. Benedict. In honor of Super Bowl Sunday, we’re taking a look at John Bois’ unique online speculative, multimedia project, story, experience thing, 17,776. I don’t [00:01:00]know a thing about sports, so today I have with me Football Understanders Langdon of Death Sentence and poem criminal Ashely Adams. Thank you both for coming on to talk about football. As part of my, uh, I guess, feminine duties,
I will make you both Totino’s Pizza rolls while you talk about the game.
Langdon: I am scared of Totinos. Thank you.
R.S.: Good.
Ashely: John Madden au.
Langdon: Uh, touchdown. Touchdown. There should be an A S M R, football broadcast. I’m like, and he’s passing to number 11,
Ashely: Oh, I don’t like ASMR, but I I might get me into that.
R.S.: Alright,
Ashely: We’re already
R.S.: I brought you two on cuz I figured somebody involved in this should know something about football cuz I, I don’t know very much about it all at all. And that’s not an impediment to enjoying and, and, and to enjoying this story or whatever you wanna call it. It’s fantastic. We’ve got people who [00:02:00]are not American and are used to the kind of football that you play with your feet.
Like a total basic bitch, I guess. And they’re still enjoying it, So you do not have to be a
Ashely: CTE is minimal. They’re minimal CTE. That’s not a sport to me.
Langdon: right?
R.S.: Right.
Langdon: You’re not sacrificing bodies on the altar of football in that dumb scrub ass game. What? You got a bunch of fucking circles. Dumb. We got oval
R.S.: Yeah. Hello? Harley. Harley is also here. He’s
Ashely: Hell yes. Ask Carly what his favorite football team is,
R.S.: Harley, who’s your favorite team? He refuses to answer.
Ashely: or how does he feel about the, the, Eagles versus the Chiefs. Who’s he, who’s he betting on?
R.S.: Who are you betting on? Cat? He’s not a gambler. He’s not a gambling man. just looking up at me with cat eyes. Okay.
Langdon: Risk averse cat,
R.S.: risk averse cat. That’s right. Cat. Watch, my cat turns out to be a total fedora bro. And is like, “oh, the sporps [00:03:00] ball? You’re interested in the sporps ball?”
Ashely: Is
R.S.: “Good .”
Ashely: I dunno if this is silly, but because we do have people that are not in the football or slash or aren’t American, should we briefly just explain the core concept of a football for everybody? Is that silly?
I
Langdon: I can definitely handle. So you gotta get the, the ball into the point scoring region. And when you do that more times, you’re the winner, baby. And that’s a football.
R.S.: Yeah.
Ashely: And it’s more, it ends up being much more complicated, but just know that is the idea is that you want to… offense tries to get the ball into their end zone, the defense tries to stop them. There’s some kicking sometimes and there’s lots of tackling and
R.S.: Lots of passing,
Ashely: yeah. Oh yeah. Well, good games have lots of passing, you know,
R.S.: lots of things where somehow, despite there being 15 minutes on the clock, the game will last an additional three hours. I’m not really sure how that works.
Langdon: power. True power. [00:04:00] Radiant power.
R.S.: It’s pretty
Langdon: This is, this is a miracle of sports
Ashely: And by the miracle we mean, uh, designated commercial breaks mostly.
R.S.: There’s
Langdon: it’s, um, that, that nature of football of like the, the point, the half joking thing I said about the point scoring region is more that like, that is the fundamental underpinning of 99% of sports. Even something like combat sports, you can phrase almost as though your hands and feet are the ball and the point scoring region is the regions of the body you’re allowed to contact in order to get points in like a, a sparring situation.
But that general fundament. Get ball to point zone. Do that most. You win.
Excepting golf, which isn’t a sport
because points are bad.
Ashely: Yeah. Also, again, as we, I, I think Raquel, you said you, you really don’t need a super great understanding of football too. Like basically if you understand the core concept of Get Ball to point area, you’ll [00:05:00]enjoy a 1,707, is it 1700, 776 specifically? Cause that actually never, we’ll get into it, but that like never happens.
And that’s not even necessarily the goal of most of the games in.
R.S.: Yeah. I don’t think anyone scores a point over the entire thing. I don’t think anybody wins a game. I don’t think anybody scores a point
Ashely: and some of the game structures have nothing to do with getting a, a, b. Some of them are, do you have an end zone? A very ridiculous end zone goal, but some of ’em are just like, collect an object or be there to catch the thing. It’s very silly
Langdon: I can’t wait till we get, I can’t wait till I get to bring up one of my favorite books that I never get to bring up in most contexts, by James Carse. Because I’m god damn certain that either, Bois or his, uh, or his parents read Finite and Infinite Games,
R.S.: Hmm.
Langdon: fucking stoked.
R.S.: Yeah.
Langdon: Let’s get on with it.
R.S.: So let’s get on with it. So this, this story, if you wanna call it a story, it’s hard to call it a story. It came out in, I think [00:06:00]2017, and it got really big on social media. It was really, really popular, and I saw a ton of people from all walks of life getting super into it. It was unsurprisingly ignored by the Hugos.
I think it made the long list at number 11, but was ignored and didn’t make the finalist. And if you’re wondering why, what I will say is that every story but one in the, in its category, the best novella category on the Hugos that year were published by tor.com. The only one that wasn’t published by tor.com was on Uncanny.
So that’s why. Because it wasn’t put out by the inner clique . I’m gonna sound really paranoid when I say that, but I think that’s really the case cuz it absolutely deserved to win it. This story does something fascinating in that it really uses the medium, it uses the platform of the internet in a way that’s incredibly effective.
Most internet fiction is just a story that’s put online. Sometimes you get some hypertext stuff, sometimes you get a little text art. [00:07:00] But this one is, it’s almost an a multimedia project, as corny as that sounds it. The bulk of it is taking the form of chat logs between our three main characters, nine, 10, and Juice, who are all three satellites.
But it also incorporates little YouTube videos, Google Maps, Google Earth, images, animated gifs, sound text art. There’s a lot of really interesting formatting going on, and there’s a real shunning of traditional narrative structure. There’s– this really doesn’t follow, like inciting incident, climax, resolution very much.
It’s, “let’s just look around at some weird fucking shit. What’s what? What’s football gonna look like in the future?” And it’s such a unique and interesting experience and such a unique and wonderfully strange vibe.
Langdon: It structurally is formatted a hell of a lot like if Jennifer Egan made, um, internet fiction. Jennifer Egan is the woman who her huge claim to [00:08:00] fame was A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer and a bunch of other prizes. And famously that one was, um, more of a mosaic novel, which is sort of a formal structure where, you can think of it as halfway between a short story collection and a novel where it’s all these elements linked together.
But there isn’t necessarily an overarching narrative. It’s more images of life. But I mentioned her because structurally a thing that she did in A Visit from the Goon Squad and picked up again in its semi sequel The Candy House was like one chapter in Visit from the Goon Squad is written in the form of printouts of a PowerPoint presentation, as in Jennifer Egan herself, made a PowerPoint presentation and then had screen caps of each of the
Ashely: Oh, that is so fucking cool.
Langdon: And it’s it, it’s done that way because it’s the daughter of a record executive whose brother, who is the son of, of obviously of the record executive as well, has [00:09:00] just committed suicide because of feeling abandoned by their dad. And one daughter has gone off the rails as well. And it’s the one daughter trying to go, like, “you won’t listen to us talking to you as people.
So I’m going to create a business pitch to you about how you’ve been an absentee father that drove our family into ruin.”
R.S.: God damn.
Langdon: Yeah. And so it’s presented as this PowerPoint presentation. Incredible fucking novelist. But it’s, it’s that same kind of thing where it’s like, I think this is ragged or sat in the back of everyone’s head after you read someone like Borges where, who’s writing very much…
there’s been a lot written about how Borges wrote basically hypertext fiction before we had that as a technology, like Library of Babel and The Aleph and all that talking about basically the conditions of the internet age, a post digital panopticon version of cognition. And then, we get the internet and everyone’s like, “oh God, it’s gonna happen.”
And then we get, I don’t know, [00:10:00]David Cage. We get I don’t know, the Last of Us, which is like a pretty dope TV show. But that was not a great game. Mostly cuz you had to chug Vicodin to level up and that was funny as hell. Um, You’re like, I can only get stronger if I have 17 more Vicodin
Ashely: Oh, funnily enough, that’s also how it works in football, I think.
Langdon: That is true. Yeah. Say we all come full
Ashely: that might be the only way to Chiefs win the Super Bowl is to gimo give Mahomes like, uh, here you go. Like, have some,
Langdon: if Mahomes wins the Super Bowl through the God-given talents of the pharmaceutical industry and a lot of, looking the other way in the medical wing, then he will join a wide and esteemed group of quarterbacks who have done exactly the same.
But yeah, the, the formal conceit of 17,776 feels a hell of a lot more, like if someone read Borge and actually went, what if I did that?
Ashely: yeah, and I wanted to
R.S.: for football,
Ashely: Yeah. I just wanna
R.S.: is great.
Ashely: [00:11:00] too for, uh, John Bois. that’s, uh, I think we talked about too, like you read his stuff and you’re like, “how the hell can this exist?” I, I don’t wanna like take away that he is a fantastic writer and craftsperson and doing some really cool stuff.
But I think that example, is a great, like they bringing up examples of author doing similar of things shows that he’s not like uniquely brilliant, but how important it is to find a space that actually can let you do those things and foster that. And
R.S.: it’s incredibly cool that SB Nation
Ashely: Yeah,
R.S.: this is, which is a sport website. It’s a sport journalism website. A sport reporting website says, “yes. We will put your fucking weird ass story up here. We are game. Let’s do”
Ashely: this isn’t the on– this is different, but he’s always doing kind of weird– he’s really interested in the storytelling aspect. and bringing in statistics is a big thing. Definitely go on YouTube and check out, he does videos, I think chart parties is one word.
You will sit there and end up watching a 50 minute video about him justifying what’s the, [00:12:00] the most pathetic punt in N F L history and it’s so good.
Langdon: He makes multi-part mega documentaries about sports teams as well. He made one for the Mariners. It was six hours long. And one for the Falcons. It was about seven hours long. Fucking incredible. It’s the same kind of storytelling, but with all real world details. I mean, there’s, there’s a reason why Best American, which has best American short stories, best American poetry, all that kind of stuff.
They’ve had a best American sports writing volume that comes out every year just the same as all of the others, because I think that that’s mostly for people who live outside of the world of sports. We can understand the notion of really great creative nonfiction about a person’s relationship to quilting, to, to catfish, and to everglade biological preservation and to mountaineering and all these things [00:13:00]that you may not give a shit about, but you’re like, I know “someone can tell me a great compelling human story about their connection to it.” But for whatever– well, we kind of all know the reason.
There’s a whole wing of people that when they hear sports, their brain goes, ” there are no good human stories in that entire world.” Even though sporting is one of the few categories of human play and human interaction that is quite literally pan cultural. The sport may be different, but sporting is universal.
Ashely: I mean, that’s what drives us back to it is always the narrative. That’s what we always look for. Every Super Bowl is the, the good story. You know, the underdog comes up. Yeah. Sports ball can be good writing
Langdon: It’s funny because learning to love something like the N B A or the N F L or something like that is touching on a raw nerve here, a hell of a lot, like learning to love science fiction or fantasy. It doesn’t mean that you ignore all the weird fucked up structural [00:14:00] problems.
Good lord, no. The more you love it, the more painfully apparent all of those are.
R.S.: should talk about a little bit later in, in terms of the wickedness of football. But yeah, sports nerds are a kind of nerd. They’re absolutely a
kind of nerd.
Ashely: Oh, the hugest nerd.
R.S.: You talk to sport guys, they’re all memorizing statistics going on and on and on, about the minutiae and the lore.
Talking to sport, listening to sports guys talk about sports is not that different from listening to a bunch of nerds talk about, don’t know, the Silmarillion or something. It’s just, oh, their thing is in the real world, at least
Langdon: I felt at home when I, it clicked in my head. I’m like, oh, every single person who loves sports is autistic as fuck. Okay. Yeah. No, I actually do belong here. This is, these are my people. It’s just memorizing numbers and doing math. Oh my God. Why didn’t you tell me
Ashely: That’s why girls can’t be in sports. Girls don’t like math. They like to, they like to cook. Totino’s pizza rolls.
R.S.: girls don’t have autism ever, according to [00:15:00]psychologists,
I guess.
Ashely: I was gonna, I was gonna,
Langdon: that’s,
Ashely: When I, when I read something like John Bois’ stuff, it is so permeated with his, and I say this in a very complimentary way as someone that does non-fiction, his weirdness and obsession. And that’s like, I remember, it was the Hugos and Nebulas had one story that was based around solving a math equation.
And I wanted to read something John Bois wrote, which is so weird, so obsessive, so entrenched in the Lang— like everything’s told with that language of statistics and a love for that language. It’s really brilliant. Like I said, if you want, if you wanna learn how to write really compelling hard sci-fi, go listen to John Bois or read 1700,
R.S.: Yeah. It really does have the same tone as hard sci-fi.
Langdon: yeah, I mean that’s sort of the thing that we get to when it comes to… this touches on previous discussions that we’ve had, that you’ve had all over this and that, like I’ve even been part of, of questions about world building, about [00:16:00] talking about how to build the spaceship or how the spaceship works or things like that, which are typical craft problems.
And this is like a sterling example of… This is more a condemnation of a hell of a lot of writers, more than a compliment to anyone else. This kind of proves that you really can get as much into the nitty gritty as you would like. You just have to make me give a fuck.
R.S.: Yeah.
Langdon: And there’s a level of passion and there’s a level of, I’m not telling you this for its own sake.
I also want to make– and this comes from if you do good journalism writing, it naturally overlaps with good creative non-fiction writing, where it’s like, I need to make legible to someone outside of a field why inside baseball matters.
R.S.: Yeah. Here’s why this story’s important. Here’s why you should care about this.
Langdon: Yeah. It’s one of the number one things you learn in a journalism story is, or a, or a school. It’s like, why should I care? That is a fundamental structural component.
R.S.: Why is this [00:17:00] news? Why are we devoting space to this and not to some other story?
Langdon: and it turns out that’s just good writing advice. If you include a detail, I should care about that detail.
R.S.: I think that’s how Kurt Vonnegut learned writing. I think a little bit of how George Orwell learned, I know he’s, he’s canceled for various reasons. But they were journalists. These were people who trained in communicating to broad audiences in really straightforward ways. So it also really affected their prose.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s case, he used a lot of very simple language. He didn’t use a lot of $10 words, but could still get across these really thoughtful, nuanced, complex ideas using incredibly basic vocabulary of, “so it goes.”
Langdon: A classic thing classic thing with Hemingway as well. His best period of fiction writing, that before he went into hyper-masculine as psychosis and killed himself, , um, came right after he was a war [00:18:00]correspondent. That’s where you have his really rich writing about World War, the conditions of World War I and the mindset of people after World War I is, he was still very much in journalism mode and not “my balls don’t work” mode, which would, would kill him later, which is really funny to me.
Ashely: maybe his balls don’t work cuz of World War I. They were gassing up people a lot. Did
Langdon: it, it actually was he, he got hit with grenade. He got hit with grenade shrapnel and it fucked up his dick. That’s why that detail’s in The Sun Also Rises. That’s a semi autobiographical pit.
Ashely: Oh, Well, I was gonna say, I mean, me, me and Langdon have had this conversation, I think multiple times about how getting good at non-fiction, like creative, non-fiction, even, even if you’re like, I will never write it for a career or really make it my central point, it will make you better at everything else.
Because non-fiction really forces you, I think it is the, it lays bare the most, the constructedness of writing. And non-fiction is like, okay, you have a real event, but you have to make it a [00:19:00]compelling story. So it’s the most, like, I have to be aware of fiction constructs and putting stuff together.
Um, and I say that as my thesis was in creative non-fiction, specifically hybrid stuff. So you brought me in as a football understander, but honestly, I’m, I’m also more of this the multimedia stuff and stuff I am really into. And I really appreciated being asked on it because I started this and a while ago and I, I liked it, but it just kind of, it is long, for an online piece.
So it’s really easy to be like, oh, this is so great. Let me come to it later. And then you can forget because you’re like, oh, I gotta open up another tab. It’s
R.S.: yeah. Where am I? Where am I in this? What the hell is going on?
Ashely: It’s 2017, so, uh, Trump is probably tweeting something I gotta go look at, you know, whatever.
R.S.: Yeah. So maybe we should talk a little bit about what this story, if you wanna call it that is.
So the story is 17,776. It is the year 17,776, and people stopped dying in the [00:20:00] year 2026. And a good bit of America’s underwater, of the United States is underwater.
Other countries apparently built sea walls, but we didn’t. We didn’t bother. And no one has died in thousands of years. No one has been born in thousands of years. People don’t get sick anymore. People don’t get hurt anymore, thanks to a bunch of nanobots that take care of us. And I love the detail that you can see them like pollen in the wind.
They’re just ambiently there. So what the fuck do we do with our time now that we’re gonna live forever? We just play football. We just play really big crazy games of football and I, I, I think it’s kind of sharp to have an outsider character being our viewpoint character. In this case, the satellite Pioneer Nine, which was built by NASA in the 1960s awakens because machines all achieve sentience eventually, and it just wakes up and starts watching football cuz there’s nothing else to do.
Langdon: And what’s beautiful is all of that’s sort of presented in the [00:21:00]opening and in terms of narrative forward motion, basically nothing else happens. There are chapter length vignettes that sort of will follow a character as they go about things. There’s eventually a super big tornado that whips a minor character all the way across the United States, and then they have a long trek back.
And you get really cool vignettes from there, but there isn’t really much in the way of, an overarching narrative. It very much feels more like a, a combination of photo montage and travel logue of this fictional future society,
Ashely: It’s basically a story, its structure also replicates, its kind of content, is that what do you do in a post scarcity, post mortality world? And also kind of stymied by the reality of like, they do talk at some point cuz they’re, they’re probes in space.
So it comes up, well why don’t the humans leave? Well, you see how big space is. Even if they left, it’s gonna be a long time before they [00:22:00] see it that they, they ever see anything. So it’s kinda like, I don’t know, why not play football?
R.S.: Yeah.
Langdon: He, he winds up doing a really smart thing that, much worse sci-fi writers tend to miss out, which is– fantasy writers as well. It’s like, why do we write fantasy? Why do we write science fiction? And it’s ultimately because we are not writing about fictional people or the future. We’re writing about our own thoughts and anxieties and concerns and lives and things like that.
But through this kind of valence, it requires a level of self-awareness that that’s what you’re doing. Even when you’re scare, quote, just writing escapism, there’s the invisible object of what you’re escaping from that’s sort of captured in what you’re escaping to. It requires you to actually think about what the fuck you’re doing in order to know that and which a lot of people don’t for some reason.
Um, but he very clearly did. He very clearly. This is sort of the benefit of, it’s fascinating to talk to someone who doesn’t really know about [00:23:00] football with this, because it felt very much to me like football was more the palette and he was more writing about the thought of… so he’s grappling with a general existential thing.
Unless you’re dumb, you have a level of death anxiety. The big spooky one, the thing no one likes thinking about too much, but then it, in the wake of that, in the wake of any kind of awareness of death, anxiety, it becomes like, why do I have the life that I have? Like, why
R.S.: Sorry, I have to ask, I have to interrupt. Is, is somebody’s dog jangling
Langdon: That’s mine. In our
stop in our, she just got a haircut so now she looks like a little bear, um,
R.S.: Oh, is that your tiny cat size dog?
Langdon: That’s right. That’s right. She’s even tinier now.
R.S.: She’s so small.
Langdon: That’s right. Lay down like a little lamb chop.
R.S.: Okay, cool. That’s, that’s just, I thought, are someone’s keys jingling
or is that a dog?
Langdon: No, I just have a very good microphone [00:24:00] and a very beautiful dog
R.S.: Very good.
Langdon: Um, but you start asking the question and after you have that kind of moment of death awareness of like, why am I living the life that I do? Why don’t I just walk out of my job or walk out of these social circles that give me so much anxiety?
Why do I let myself get tied down into, and eventually you get kind of, you get answers to it, but it felt very much like that was what he was looking at. It’s like given our finite time, an interesting way to examine why we do the things we do and why we find meaning from them might be the invert.
What if someone had infinite time, do they do something different, or do they just learn to really dial into why we do the things with finite time that we do. And that’s the kind of thing that literary writers write about all the time, but they don’t have nanobot clouds and infinite football, so they’re worse.
Ashely: Yeah, I was gonna say , this is, this does explore I think some heavy existential things, but also it’s very charming and [00:25:00]humorous. Don’t get so bummed out. I mean, I love Juice so much, which is the, uh, what is it? Jupiter, Icy moon Explorer, which a lot of those names, I, I don’t know why they call it Juice.
Cause I’m like, well Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer has a lot of letters in there that aren’t, wouldn’t equal Juice, but whatever. So his dialogue’s great. The games are very funny. Like I said, even if you don’t really get football, it start, it starts off again. The other playing– all– they have default games, but all of the default games will be like, well, one end zone is in another, across the country.
Another one’s over here. There’s one where they’ve been playing in a, a gorge for like 10,000 years, which I think is super funny.
Langdon: That’s my, that’s my favorite or second favorite one that
they
Ashely: the, they play in a regular stadium, but other people own parts of the stadium, so they have to try to play around this weird… like capitalism doesn’t really exist, but people still kind of play at it because they feel like it. So they’re like, yeah, well we’re gonna do a weird monopoly on this stadium and you have
Langdon: well it’s funny cuz [00:26:00] the, they live in like a post scarcity society. So the threat of , what if we play around with certain, business forms or stuff like that, there isn’t one anymore cuz you’re not actually going to put anyone at risk of unemployment or hunger. So as a result, they have a semi feudalism that’s occurring inside of the stadium.
So you have to go around a chicken restaurant that is fully operational in the middle of the stadium, and talking about how
R.S.: Yeah, and there are condos rented out to tenants or something like that.
Langdon: There’s a house that’s in the middle that wasn’t part of the stadium and due to expanse, there just is a house that is in the middle of a football game.
Ashely: there’s, there’s one game where, there’s a rule that basically if someone holds onto the ball for, in their ed zone for was it like thir like 15,000 years or something like that, they automatically wins. So you find one character who’s basically been in a cave for like 10,000 years. Funny enough is being door to door evangelized, which is very [00:27:00] funny.
And then it kind of falls apart because it’s like, what does God mean when you don’t die?
R.S.: Yeah, no one’s going to Heaven. It doesn’t matter.
Langdon: There’s a beautiful bit where a ball gets whisked away. I, I think the whole, if I remember correctly, the tornado thing was it’s a current player who’s holding the ball, gets hit with the tornado, and that’s why they have to make, the journey, because technically they’re still in play,
Ashely: Yeah.
Langdon: but no one knows where they are or where the
R.S.: just hanging out. She’s just having a beer, taking it easy.
Ashely: And that’s the thing too, is that in this, everybody gets to play football because John Bois was like, I think that, not to get too in the weeds, but I thought the way he handled quote unquote diversity was good. Cuz it’s a, well it’s less that I’m doing a thing cuz I think it’s good.
Which I think he does care about that, but also because duh, that’s this good craft and good world building. Cuz yeah if there was a future where nobody died, why wouldn’t women be playing football? What the fuck else are they? Like why wouldn’t 60? Well, [00:28:00]When they stopped aging, why wouldn’t 60 year old equivalent women be playing football?
Why
R.S.: Yeah, one, one of the star players is this little old lady named Nancy, who just hurls herself, she hurls herself deliberately into the tornado. She’s not just picked up. She like fucking makes a break for it cuz there’s no, she’s surrounded by the opposing team. She’s got nowhere to go except chaos.
Langdon: Yeah, you have players that embrace the whole like, well, I’m small and because football fields will be like thousands of miles long and include whole passages of real just functioning towns and stuff. People will attempt to sneak by by acting completely normal and hiding the football on their person.
R.S.: But, but local people, if they spot you, if you’re sort of in the opposing team’s city or something, people will catch you, try and rat on you or something while you’re trying to be sneaky. It, it’s really great. It’s just this really [00:29:00] detailed, well thought out everything world that’s really funny and strange and, and offbeat. And the way they give us the viewpoint character of Pioneer Nine who has been asleep for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years, I think is well handled because,
well, who would be the viewpoint character? You’d need a viewpoint character who’s not familiar with any of this. Can’t be an alien because we’ve established, at least in this, that we’re not able to make contact. We have not been able to make contact. The universe is just too big, so it’s just satellites who become sentient for no reason and they like football for no reason, and that’s
Ashely: Yeah. makes great sense with the themes cuz a lot of it is exploring , what does it mean to exist and stuff like that. So why not have some things that were not, why not have robots , or at least probes come to life. It fits so well. It doesn’t feel like– it is a device, but it doesn’t feel like– what it feels so naturally ingrained into the [00:30:00] structure of this weird story.
R.S.: and that they’re floating over and sort of looking at the whole world while it’s doing this.
Langdon: yeah, he, he does a very classic science fiction, 1940s, 1950s structural conceit from sci-fi, which is you have the non-human witness, the human in order to see what it is to be human. I’m not gonna say trope. It’s an archetypal form. There we go. I can use my big boy words. I did go into so much debt to learn these words.
um, uh, it’s an archetypal form that’s sort of as old as the genre. And then he pairs it against this very Faulknerian folk narrative. And then this kubrickian bit of, or I like how it goes back and forth with the satellites of, sometimes it feels kubrickian and other times it feels almost like a frat novel.
R.S.: Yeah, it does
Langdon: the boys chilling in space,
R.S.: It absolutely is like Boys Chat, where they’re just dunking on each other. The bulk of this storytelling is done through a chat with these three space [00:31:00] probes that are just dunking on each other and pestering each other and making fun of each other. And then all of a sudden you’ll get a reminder, oh this, this one is millions of miles away and just getting further away, and it’s just floating in the void and it’s just gonna keep floating in the void for another million
Ashely: The structure of how it’s set up on the page, I think does such a good job to give you that feeling. The introduction is like you start you– it’s really brilliant. It’s what I think one of my
R.S.: Yes. It’s so, it just throws you in there
Ashely: Yeah. You start reading something that’s looks like a normal SB article and as soon as you scroll down, all of a sudden it black from the te– it, the text blows up and takes over the screen and it’s like “something is wrong.
Something is wrong,” and you scroll and you finally get to a calendar and it’s just like, uh, Pioneer Nine. Just being like some, what the fuck’s
R.S.: Well, it’s a calendar in ’43, but it doesn’t tell us what century. It’s ’43, so we’re thinking 1943. Okay. And somebody’s talking and some somebody else is talking to them. We don’t know who [00:32:00] it is. We don’t know why. All we know is that they don’t get a message very often.
Ashely: right.
R.S.: And
then many, many decades go by. It’s the seventies.
We don’t know which
Ashely: you’re scrolling. You’re scrolling. So even the text gives you this really empty, lonely kind of creepy feeling. And then when it finally kicks into what most of the thing that’s structured around is like this texty dialogue sort of thing, I feel relieved cuz it’s like, oh people, people quote unquote are here.
They’re talking and it’s not alone anymore. And then, but then you get moments too where they like are reminded , Hey, we’re floating in the dead of space. And you’re like, it Oh, oh, you’re never gonna see anything ever again. Oh my god.
R.S.: Yeah, and, and moments of that with the humans too. People are kind of doing okay. And then occasionally someone will see a picture of a baby and just have a, a difficult time because no one has seen a baby in 15,000 years approximately.
Langdon: I,
R.S.: been no babies.
Langdon: I really love the, how this, so this functions as a [00:33:00]kind of structural sequel to an earlier piece that he made called, ” What in the Hell Is a Catch in the N F L anyway?” That article got written in the midst of, Ashley will remember. There was, a period in which, for non-sports fans, I’m going to describe it in your language.
A man throws a ball. A second man catches the ball and falls down and they declare it an incomplete pass because he didn’t catch the ball. And you watch the footage and you go, “yep, he caught that ball.” And they go, “as you can see, he didn’t catch the ball.” And you’re like, “are the refs gaslighting me?” And this became this huge fervor because it was one of those things where you’re like, “I’ve seen this footage.”
If they had gotten that touchdown, they would’ve won. It becomes this big thing cuz , hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people are watching it going, ” isn’t that what a catch is? It’s in his hands, he tucks it to his body and he falls down. That’s a catch, right?”[00:34:00]
And then this gets into the reality of, the rules of the N F L. So, sports bodies have different approaches to the legalist, philosophical approach of rules. God, I love sports . Um, and certain ones are a bit more loosey-goosey, like the, a bit more human interpretive, but football, the N F L, for whatever reason, has really dialed in to strict, almost supreme court level legalist interpretations of the rules of what does the language say, not what does the interpretation say.
And this leads to all the same kinds of legal and linguistic nihilism in football as it does in American politics. Where you go, all it takes is someone to adequately argue, oh, that word that we all know what it means, or that phrase that we all know what it means was never legally defined in the rules.
So a catch. [00:35:00] Isn’t necessarily when your hands go around a ball and you have it. Now we have like
Ashely: it’s about the feet and control and stuff like that,
Langdon: and you’re like, what? No, that’s a catch. I’m looking at it and
Ashely: Uh, well, you all were complaining that it didn’t have enough feet in football. So here you go. Here’s
your feet.
Langdon: And so all of a sudden all these articles are getting written trying to explain to a layperson why that wasn’t technically a catch in football. And John Bois responds to these by doing the only rational thing, writing an existential piece of creative non-fiction, called, “What the Hell is the Catch in the N F L Anyway?”
Where same thing as, as you’re scrolling down, he’s talking about, here’s the history of rule making in the N F L and their philosophical approach to the rules. And you get to a point, and literally he’s coded it so that the H T M L frame for the website breaks and blows off the page.
And then it becomes a picture of the crab nebula, like [00:36:00] literally. And as you keep scrolling, you’re like, what the fuck is happening? It starts popping up words in Courier New and talking about existentialism in the history of games and game making and. Just this really wild piece, a much shorter one.
It’s only the one page, but it basically gets at, there is no reason for something to be or not to be a catch, because football is a game that we play and one of the many meta games wrapped up within the game is the game of rule making about the game. This is one that, again, to touch on, a favorite topic of us shows up also a lot in the world of science fiction and fantasy.
What constitutes a good story craft wise or politically wise? What constitutes an award worthy story? And that’s as much a game of rule making, li literally a game. It’s not objective. It is quite literally a game. And when someone goes, well, that’s why this one beat out that one, you go, [00:37:00] that’s entirely phraseological .
There’s nothing inherent about that. And they, if they’re self-aware, they go, yeah. They never do, but if they were, they would do that. But it’s sort of, it felt like he looked at that and went, “I have two notes for myself. One, it should be way longer. It should be long as fuck. It should be long as fuck.
Two. I should have dudes broing out in it. That’s what I was missing. And Nancy, I need Nancy”
Ashely: I think he does say that there’s a really good interview about his process, which I was so glad Raquel sent us. Cuz I was like, that’s what I want to know. And
Langdon: ha I didn’t know that article was a thing at all yet.
Thank you a lot for sending that Raquel.
Ashely: Because it’s something I, I was like, I need to find, I need the director’s commentary for this. But yeah, he was tooling around with this idea, but he really needed characters to be the narrators and protagonists and that’s what what it finally clicked was when he said he figured out, cuz he was al also upset.
Again, chase your obsessions, chase your weirdness. Cause he is like, I thought space probes were really [00:38:00]cool. So I was like, I’m gonna put that in my story. Just to fucking do it. Be weird for God’s sakes. That’s the thing that, one of the things nonfiction really teaches you is be fucking weird.
Cause that’s what makes it interesting.
Langdon: It also gave him on the craft end all these different vantage points to, for any given. So one of the other creative non-fiction things and journalism things as well that creative writers would be, would behoove themselves to learn is asking yourself what is the story? And then the secondary question that follows up, what is the most interesting or illuminating way to pursue that story.
And when you ask yourself what is the story, you can start finding it anywhere. It’s like, why do I have mismatched China? and you can now all of a sudden explain your weird history with, poverty and conflicting family legacies and inheritance from friends that you can, you can start dialing into this really wild thing about what it is to be human.
Cuz you looked at your China cabinet and went, oh, none of my shit [00:39:00] matches. You just have to know how to look for that story. But then he gave himself on the craft end, the tools of all these different styles and voices that he could tap into and perspectives he could tap into. So it became like, who would be the most interesting person to tell this set of events . And then I’m sitting there thinking, damn, this was so smartly crafted.
And then that gets blown out of my mind when again he starts talking about “yeah, this game got derailed cuz their chicken restaurant became so popular. Even the players were eating there and they forgot that they were playing football. And this went on for hundreds of years. Delicious, delicious chicken.”
And I’m like, oh yeah, I love chicken too, man.
Ashely: There’s a part later on where you get the one real death in this is the… though they’re playing one game, and the idea is like, it’s based on this game where you throw the ball up in the air as high as you go, and whoever catches it, gets the point and eventually can take over.
[00:40:00] And
R.S.: This one’s shot out of a cannon in Alaska.
Ashely: like on fucking Mount McKinley or, uh, sorry, Denali. That’s actually in the story as they mention it being renamed Denali. So,
R.S.: Yeah, cuz being president isn’t a big deal anymore cuz there’s been so many of them. Cuz it’s thousands of years
Ashely: and also McKinley never even fucking visited that mountain. It’s stupid. But they’re on, they’re on Denali and uh, the ball comes down. The ball’s a huge, massive thing, right? Like, it’s not a regular ball,
R.S.: It’s enormous.
Ashely: Right. And so it ends up landing. It’s actually this really, it’s really beautiful bittersweet sort of thing where it’s this person that’s never gotten a point, in the whole history of the game and finally is gonna get it.
And it’s kind of that like, oh, it’s been so long. And the news is coming and it lands on this one building which has the longest running light bulb, and ends up killing the bulb. But it’s the one death we experience and the satellites are crushed cuz they consider it kind of their ancestor.
I don’t know where I was going with this, but I think it’s this, I think [00:41:00] it’s uh, well yeah, cuz John Bois– People were like, well, what’s with the light bulb? And he was like, oh, I read about it and I thought it was cool.
R.S.: Yeah, I mean, it is real.
That is
a real thing. This light bulb that’s been burning since I think 1904 or something ridiculous. Oddly long time like.
Langdon: It’s especially because people have taken it down and looked at it and gone , “I don’t even know why it still works.” They’re like someone, there’s gotta be something. But it looks like it’s a normal ass light bulb that just, it won’t burn out. It just, it keeps working.
R.S.: And it was made by this company that at the time made light bulbs to last, which is probably why they went outta business. Because people would just buy one light bulb from them and then would not have to buy another light bulb ever again.
Langdon: you’re like, fuck, we built a communist, business model on the land of capitalism. We’re stupid. Fuck.
R.S.: Which is so weird to think that. I mean, as a kid, I, growing up with old timey light bulbs, oh yeah. They burn out really soon. It, it didn’t occur to me that that wasn’t necessary, that that’s a deliberate choice by manufacturers. That if [00:42:00] they, if you want to, we know how to make a light bulb that lasts a hundred years.
We just don’t.
Langdon: Yeah. One of the weird things of political awakening for me that eventually turned my brother kind of libertarian and turned me commie. Funny how that happens. um, was finding out, that light bulb lobbies are weirdly big in terms of pushing different regulations through as pork onto bills that basically affect, the viability of different technologies regarded to lighting technology.
That’s one of the reasons why L E D lights got sort of– we’d had the technology for L E D or home halogen lights for a while, but we just didn’t roll them out. Due to basically, market end fear that if you put out a really good light bulb, then every light bulb manufacturer will go out of business.
R.S.: Yeah.
Langdon: There’s a level that he taps into here that feels like it had to have come from, this book, that short version. My dad had the [00:43:00]weirdest scholarly history in the world. He came back from the Vietnam War. He was mad as fuck about having been duped into going to the Vietnam War.
Normal reaction, I think shitty war, bad. You convince a bunch of 18 year olds to go, live through a hellish war game in a jungle for no fucking reason. No. They’re gonna come back mad. Pretty classic. Bounces around college, gets a whole bunch of different classes, never gets a degree.
As a result, had a whole bunch of different books in the house, including a bunch of religious texts from like religious studies. I mentioned that because there was a really big book in religious studies in the eighties that came out that had a weird pop culture or window for like four years and then just disappeared, called Finite and Infinite Games.
And I feel like he must have read this book. The whole thesis of it is basically that there’s two kinds of games, finite and infinite games. A finite game is a game that has rules and the goal is to win the game. And an infinite game of which there’s [00:44:00] only one and that’s being alive, is to play the game.
There isn’t winning. There’s just playing. You lose when you are removed from the game by dying or through social ostracization or things like that. But the goal is just to play. And looking at life as basically a series of, you can use that notion of a finite game as social interactions where there’s rules of acceptable decorum and unacceptable decorum.
And if you violate the rules, you scare, quote, lose by being excluded from the game. And that people think you’re weird and they don’t wanna talk to you. But you can also have games that are wrapped up inside of games or games that intersect with other games where it’s like the game of politics intersects all other games within its society.
The game of rule making for a game is a meta game that wraps up the nominal game that you’re playing. And it’s just seeing a lot of how he literally talked about how these football games overlay [00:45:00] each other. He had to have read that book. He fucking had to . Especially when it’s like the whole thrust is when you think of
life as a game like that, like as an infinite game. The whole thought from the religious studies end is removing the sense of tension from day-to-day life. That it’s like if you’re still alive, if there is a viable future, you are on some level okay. And maybe not the best okay. But you don’t need to fall into dread and despair, which are different from struggle obviously.
And him reframing, Bois reframing , what if everything was the infinite game? What if the infinite game went on forever and now there isn’t even winning or losing in these games? So that you can look at more like the point of play.
Ashely: I was gonna sum it up in the short version. I was suddenly thinking of that meme where it’s the two astronauts in space except replace, it’s Pioneer Nine and Pioneer 10 and it’s Pioneer Nine looking at the earth and being like, “it’s all a game.” And then Pioneer 10 [00:46:00]behind maybe with a gun if you want
to be like, “always has been”
R.S.: Always has been.
Langdon: The beauty of science fiction to me, this is why it’s the best genre in the world. As much as I love literary stuff, and that’s most of what I write now and all that stuff, sci-fi has my heart forever cuz it’s “what if you talked about smart brain stuff like an idiot?”
Ashely: That’s such a good way. Yeah.
Langdon: It’s so beautiful. It’s professional wrestling about philosophy. It’s perfect.
Ashely: you’re fucking right. I was just thinking how wonderfully this pairs with the last book as an examination of the future. And it’s I think one of the most interesting depictions of future cuz it’s not dystopia. Cuz most people are pretty happy, but it’s not
R.S.: are doing okay. Yeah. Not utopia. Cuz people are kind of weird about not
dying or having babies for
Ashely: And not really having a, coming from capitalism, but that drive to some, that forever drive to keep moving into something bigger and [00:47:00]better. But they finally kinda like, “well we don’t have anything bigger and better to move on to at this point.
So, Hmm.”
Langdon: what’s funny is that taps into the negative or inverted Americana
R.S.: Yes. Let us talk about America. Let us
talk about America and football
now because
this is super, super interesting in that this is a version of America with no frontier. No expansion, no manifest destiny, no imperialism. Just fucking kicking it, just hanging out. And it’s hard to imagine that because that’s such a big part of the American character is expansion.
That ravenous expansionism. There’s nowhere to expand to. It’s just, it’s done. Let’s just hang. Let’s just play football.
Langdon: so there’s this, there’s this book by a guy named Steve Erickson called Shadow Bond, which is a, semi experimental novel about Jesse Presley, who is the real identical twin [00:48:00] of Elvis who died in the womb. bunch of your really crazy, weird messianic writing about Elvis will always deal with the shadow of Jesse cuz Elvis talked about being haunted by the thought of his twin brother who died at birth and
nine 11.
And, the town that Elvis was born in was hit by the most deadly tornado in American history, like right when he was born, which
R.S.: Oh
wow.
Langdon: yeah, there’s a reason why there’s a lot of weird dark American messianism tied up with Elvis. Cuz you get these weird things of like the king’s brother dead at birth and the most deadly tornado ripping through town.
And then he creates rock and roll through accidental theft. Because he was always adamant in life to try to credit his band mates, but his managers were like, no, you’re the white face, shut the fuck up pretty boy and play on tv. And then he did, he also, he also married a [00:49:00] 14 year old. He is a bad person, so I’m not saying he’s a good person.
um, not defending Elvis to be clear. But, it’s a book that deals with that and it, it felt very resonant in the same vibe of like, when you look at this is especially apparent to anyone from, speaking kind of Raquel’s language here. Anyone from Puerto Rico can spot pretty quickly how America is an empty shell, a very pretty shell with nothing inside. It would be great if there was evil inside, if there was some actual true negative desire. But it feels like there isn’t. There’s not even enough coherence for that. There’s not even like, if you wanna conquer the world, you’d think you do a better job. You look at colossal obvious fuckups and it’s that weird kind of dread.
We want a super villain because that’s more comforting than idiotic hyper strength just wins. It doesn’t matter how smart or good you are. Just some stupid– and [00:50:00] this inverted version of– why did we– the story feels haunted by this violence. This one feels haunted by like, why did we kill all the Native Americans in order to do this?
R.S.: There’s an echo of that. Yeah, it, they go into it. He goes into it a lot more in the sequel, but he actually overtly draws the comparison that a long time ago, the Cherokees played a sort of stickball game as a substitute for war. It was kinda like lacrosse. It was called anetsa, and it would be played by two teams and men would play it.
But there was a time when women would play it. Old people would play it. And it was kind of a rough game, but they would use it to settle differences without war. It was like a milder version of war, a less violent version of war. Although you’d still get kind of fucked up. People would come home from it
pretty banged up. But it was this really important kind of sacred game that was just played all over the country.
Langdon: We have that kind of the [00:51:00] evil image of the nihilism of all these wars, and it’s sort of the dark version that comes out when you look at this existential viewpoint. On one hand, I think some people read existentialism as being meant to validate people and assuage a kind of anxiety of being. But if you are a bit more sharply self-critical, it takes on this very corrosive aspect really quick.
Cuz it looks at certain very horrible things that we might go, oh, that was a necessary evil. And going like, no, no it wasn’t. And that was just a choice you made. And what’s worse is even a notion of justice doesn’t really, the universe doesn’t care. You just did something horrible for no reason and nothing’s ever gonna happen because of it.
You get to just sit with that. And it’s this weird shadow of an Amer– you can, you can see that in the way that certain people are haunted in their world about the idea that there’s no death anymore. It feels so weird to say out loud that you’ll [00:52:00] just get a character, go, “man, I’m really fucked up about this.”
And they’re like, “shut up, take the ball.” And they’re like, “yeah, yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Gimme the ball. Yeah.” But that kind of thing of you’re, you’re put in this bathysphere where the weird inverted face of the America you made stares back at you and it’s going to be this forever. There’s not gonna be restitution.
It’s just this and the profound but unanswerable discomfort in that.
R.S.: Yeah, I mean by the fact that he calls this 17,776, obviously a riff on 1776. And it’s interesting that the particular probes that he’s using are called The Pioneers. They’re not like Voyager probes, they’re pioneers specifically. They’re Pioneer Nine and Pioneer 10. He could have picked a different one, but he’s very clearly going for something here. And that he picked American style football, which I don’t know if that’s a game played anywhere [00:53:00]else in the world.
Ashely: Uh, in
R.S.: know if anyone plays it the way
we
Ashely: a par, there’s Canada, there’s European one, but they’re, I think the Canda one is the only one that’s the, it’s not comparable to America, but that’s the only place I would say, people theoretically care. That’s where all the losers end up going to as a C F L. So,
Langdon: so I’m going to tell you two. So one of my favorite, autistic fixations ever since I got into sports was getting really into looking at ancillary sports leagues. Cuz in baseball, they do a really good job of saying that there’s a million in one different minor leagues. Outside of the MLB there’s the Costa Rican League, AAA, AA, single A, the Korean League, there’s a Japanese league, there’s all these different places.
And you’re like, okay, that kind of makes sense. And you look at other sports and you go, I don’t think there’s a football one. You find out there is a summer league and you go, that’s interesting. You find out there’s arena football, two different arena football leagues actually, oh, there’s actually been for over a decade a women’s arena football [00:54:00] league
that is really good. They’re really fascinating and the games are really exciting. There’s a Canadian football league, but I’m not here to talk to you about that. I’m here to talk to you about the Polish American football league
Ashely: Yeah, let’s go.
Langdon: Poland, just Poland, they are called the P L F A had the biggest American football league in the world. 2013, they had 74 teams.
R.S.: What.
Ashely: What the fuck?
Do they even have 74 cities in Poland. What the
Langdon: There are 32 teams in American football.
Ashely: Holy shit.
That
Langdon: were, there were more than double that in Poland. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s a whole beautiful history that you can look up regarding that. But yeah, for whatever reason in Poland, American style football took off. Also, Australia has a weird hybrid game called Australian football that isn’t rugby, but isn’t American football.
It sits in between.[00:55:00]
Ashely: That’s deeply Australian. I bet all the rules and positions have names that sound like vaguely like slurs or something like that. You call it like the quarterback, the the kibaki or something like that.
Langdon: So inexplicably, and I mentioned this because I imagine John Bois would know this being a huge sports nerd as well, inexplicably, there are other American football leagues elsewhere in the world. They’re typically incredibly short-lived because, duh. It’s a game that will kill you. Very few other sports will kill you in the way that American football will.
Ashely: Yeah. I, I can’t think of a sport that’s equivalently so regularly, deadly. Even stuff like race cars, that’s the, probably the closest I can think. That doesn’t, the way cars are designed, those don’t kill you a lot. And,
Langdon: but like to to, to your point, there are definitely, there are two American sports. And that’s baseball and football, and they both are quintessentially American in different ways. Kind of what you were hinting [00:56:00]at Raquel. They, they, they point at different aspects of America. Baseball hits it kind of the weird way that beauty gets wrapped up and caged by the nihilistic bureaucracies of America that mitigate it to eternity.
But every now and again, you get a beautiful home run and you go, “oh.” meanwhile football is the endless waves of brutality.
R.S.: Yeah, so there’s this really great quote from an interview with John Bois where he’s explaining why he did this story the way he did, and here, here it is. “I see a really clear parallel between America and football. Both are beautiful. And both destroy people. This is a recent development in neither case. They are designed to create misery.
They are both institutions that I want to love unconditionally but can’t possibly. I can only appreciate either if I retreat into [00:57:00] fantasy, filter out what I hate about them and present a distillation of what I love about them. If you distill American into the land itself, and if you distill football into the game itself and you populate them with the people who make them both beautiful, you end up with a world I find pretty amazing.”
So it’s almost like the premise of this story is, how could I unconditionally love football and America? Under what conditions would it be possible for me to love these things without feeling kind of gross about it? And this is the condition: we would have to live in the post scarcity society where no one dies.
Ashely: I think too, in an interview, it’s something that’s interesting I think about a lot is, like I said, not to read up Orange Man bad, but this piece was written kind of as a response to election, uh, Trump’s election. I think a lot about how the response of like art and what art can do and how do we respond and how this is probably, it is one of the, the better kind of, it’s not [00:58:00] direct Trump response, but it’s clearly like grappling I think with that what the feeling of the non CHUDs were dealing with. I think it starts the question of that quote you read, it’s like, why football?
And it’s kinda, why not football? It’s the most American thing. It reminds me of, since we’re referencing other works, Angels in America. People ask, why Mormonism? Well cuz it’s the most American religion I could think of. So why not use as a metaphor for exploring America?
And it’s the same thing with football. What’s more American than football? All these people on a field super specialized, they have all these fucking weird rules and this goal that they’re trying to work towards and it’s difficult. And there’s kind of this arbitrary sort of rule structure slapped on to try to keep them from mostly killing each other, not killing each other, in the worst way ever.
It’s like, yeah, that’s very American, isn’t it?
Langdon: He does a smart thing in response to Trump, which is that good art in response to a nihilistically shitty president, has existed since time immemorial. That’s sort of the thing that [00:59:00] any leftist worth their salt will have said, which is that Trump is absolutely not unique in being a wild shit bag of a president and an open fascist of a president.
It was more galling to certain liberal types. Where they had convinced themselves that certain things being scare quote, necessary evils weren’t out and out displays of fascism. But you get information like the wild levels of torture we were doing at Abu Ghraib. And it’s hard not to look at that as , oh yeah, no, no, we’re evil.
You get stuff that came out about Reagan, you get stuff that came out about, the Clinton missile strikes on civilian centers in Sarajevo. Any number of things. If you’re reading stuff, this is not the first bad or evil president in history. He was bad, he was evil. Caveat to the people at home, not a defense of the, the orange man.
Bad man, bad man. But not thought of
Ashely: He didn’t invent racism in [01:00:00] 2017,
is the thing
Langdon: He galvanized it in a certain way, but he’s also not the first one to have galvanized racism in America. And this kind of thing that’s reckoning with what is it about this thing that I love that’s given me the life that I have. Cuz that’s the other thing that you can get from certain kinds of leftists who are still in the, if I’m, if I’m doing a good faith thing, they’re still in the necessary performative aspect of learning about their politics because they need to learn about the perspective outside of themselves.
But they haven’t done the work of now reintegrating of , okay, you’ve learned a perspective that isn’t yours, but that isn’t your perspective. You actually do have a life indebted to the blood that was shed. But you now have to ask and reconcile with yourself whose blood. It, it wasn’t foreign enemies. It was other Americans.
It was slaves. It was people of color that built the railroads. It was the invisible [01:01:00] labor of, Latinos building the infrastructure of the American Southwest that then were driven out by the Mexican-American war. All this stuff, it’s the real question of, who am I indebted to for the world that I inherited?
And it feels much more like him sitting with that, of just being honest about the messy thing of in my gut, I have all these fond memories about what these things mean to me on a personal level, and I have to reconcile that against the weight of what history tells me these were made from. And the not doing to use the Marxist term of liberal, not the CHUD version, not doing the sort of American liberal version of throwing up your hands in defeat, but just being very honest with like, I don’t know how to make sense of that on an emotional end.
I don’t know how to square that. I know I’m looking at the legacy of evil, but I remember fond things with my father and [01:02:00] grandfather. I remember bonding with community and neighbors and cheering for a sports team in a sports bar, but knowing that these men are going to end their careers brutalized in their early thirties, I don’t know how to make sense of that. And just being honest about it, like no more bullshit, no more like I’m gonna take a moral grandstand that I don’t actually feel in my bones just going, I’m gonna show you my conflict and not pretend to a resolution that is, that I haven’t actually had.
Ashely: I think that’s the, that non-fiction instinct coming into, cuz I think about people that only write their response to Trump and, it all becomes like, “I would vote the child from Omelas out of jail.” With non-fiction, I think there is an instinct and I guess to get, get accused of being a little navel gazey, which it is, I don’t know, whatever.
It’s fun sometimes to gaze your navel, shut up. This idea of I think John Bois is grappling with this thing. And I don’t think, and it’s not like there’s an easy answer cuz I think there is a sadness. I felt sad, seeing the [01:03:00] characters struggle with the idea of, this is kind of it for the rest of time.
And I may be like, I’m a little America pilled. And I guess in that way, seeing them sad, not to have kids, not to, the probes can never be next to each other. But there’s still beauty and it’s a much better future than maybe what we have now or a dystopia.
Yeah, I think the idea of grappling with a thing rather than an easy answer is really what intrigues me about this and what I think is good about it and maybe not so good about other pieces that try to kind of grapple with a post-Trump America,
Langdon: Well, if I can inappropriately go in on Squee bullshit, cause I haven’t had my turn sharpen my blades, . Um, there’s, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a false version of worldliness that we see people present, which again, in all fairness, they’re not doing it, for the most part they’re not doing it cynically.
I think there’s a cynical urge that can be present in people and can be leaned on, but they’re doing it because they see, okay, no, this thing is actually obviously bad. But I feel ashamed of [01:04:00]saying that I treasure this thing . Squaring, having all these fond memories of the music of the Beatles and what that means on like, oh, my dad showed me Eleanor Rigby– real story.
My dad showed me Eleanor Rigby. And that was the first time that I understood one that I was dealing with a kind of deep kind of sadness that I didn’t have a name for. And two, that music could be art. Not just a fun song . and I was like six. And it was this epiphany moment. Then you find out they all beat the fuck out of their wives and it’s like, how do you square that?
The real emotional connection to something with the painful reality of what these things are in material history. And again, it takes a humility to go, I’m not gonna grandstand and pretend that I’ve solved this dilemma. I’m just going to honestly tell you that I’m experiencing that dilemma. And that’s. That’s a thing that I think is eminently worth, commendable or worth, commending or eminently is commendable and worth [01:05:00] commending. There we go. I can do words. I went into too much debt not to do words. Fuck me. But
Ashely: there
could be a lot of comfort in just saying , “Hey, there’s this grappling, there’s this thing that sucks. We’re all kind of in it together. You’re not a crazy lonely person. You may be crazy, I don’t know, but you’re not the only person that grapples with this.”
And I think there could be, there could be comfort just in that act.
Langdon: It’s definitionally what makes something non didactic or non polemical, but still dealing with those questions is it isn’t about coming in with, “I’ve answered the question, and if you don’t agree, you are wrong and a bad person.” It’s going, “I’m thinking on the page, I, as I am writing, I’m feeling out this question and I’m putting my own thoughts into the voices of other characters because it’s really me analyzing my own thoughts and feelings through this to see what’s there.”
And so like that sense of vitality of, “oh, that’s what people mean when they talk about honest fiction. You [01:06:00]were thinking on the page and feeling on the page. So if you land on an answer, you are not preaching at me.” It’s, it’s like when you hear someone spilling their guts, when they’re drunk out of their mind at 2:00 AM about a thing they sincerely regret.
And you go, “I never really thought of you as capable of remorse for that, but I witnessed a two and a half hour drunken breakdown. You sure as hell don’t feel great about it. Now I see this all in a different light.” that’s what people like us have really just been asking for about fiction or from fiction in general.
I really don’t care if it’s written for a young adult audience. I don’t, that’s, that’s whatever. It’s, I just want that, I want that structural bit that I’m like, I felt like I witnessed the re witnessed and felt a real thing. And I’m grateful that he did that with really sick sports ball.
Ashely: Isn’t that kind of the joke that sports are one of the few things that men can be vulnerable with and have those true, genuine, vulnerable emotions? Again, I think [01:07:00] football, like why football? Football is the perfect, crystallization of so much of what we’re dealing with.
I mean, this piece feels so timely considering, the state of labor and what happened with Damar Hamlin, for you that
Damar Hamlin is a, uh, a Buffalo Bills player. He was doing a tackle, it was a totally fine, typical tackle and he got hit in the chest and sometimes when you get hard enough in a chest at the right time, you can, um, basically have
cardiac arrests. Yeah.
It was a miracle. He survived. Basically the first responders saved his life and then that generated a whole bunch of conversations about… I, I’ve never in my life seen so much conversation about labor rights and the labor of these workers, cuz it’s very easy to dismiss them cuz they, they do make more than the average worker, but, What do, what do they actually make it and what do they pay for that?
And then of course the legacy of racism. It, it is super in tied in as well. So like again, if you’re sitting there being like, why football? Why some piece like this about football? Well cuz it’s just as much [01:08:00] in the struggle as everyone else and it’s probably one of the most accessible ways for a lot of people to do it.
Cuz all of a sudden, I remember when that happened with Damar Hamlin, you saw everybody, from all kind of political spectrums coming together and being like, “this isn’t right. What’s happening to these people? We need to do something about this.” So sports can be a very powerful, because it’s so popular, it can be a very uniting feature.
I mean there’s a reason why, I mean, not so much in America, but you got in Europe, their football clubs are like, some of them are actually political forces a lot of times for fascism, but not always. So,
Langdon: I mean we, we wind up getting as a Marxist, it’s very easy to use sports teams as a really great visualization for what people mean by ownership of the means of production and who is the proletariat versus not. It would be hard, you’d be hard pressed to ask a regular person is an N F L player, a member of the proletariat.
And technically if you get into Orthodox Marxist terms, they’d have a slightly different designation. [01:09:00] I will not bore you with that shit, but the short version, the short version is you go, oh, they make, millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars over the course of their career.
I can’t believe that they, and you go, yeah, but they have a career window that if they’re lucky is 15 years and when they end, they will never be insured again. Well, until one of the few good bits of Obamacare, of, annihilating preexisting conditions prior to that, they literally could not qualify for private insurance.
Ashely: Right, because their body is destroyed. Nobody
would ever insure
Langdon: you’re re you’re retiring in your thirties because your body is destroyed and now all of that money has to pay for all of your medical care for the rest of your life because it will all be
out of pocket.
R.S.: and not to mention the brain damage, the horrible amounts of brain
Langdon: We have, people like to bring up, there actually is a weird, I’ll, I’ll put a flag in that mentally for a second, but there’s also the bit of how owners, owners walk away [01:10:00] making billions,
Ashely: oh, they’re, they make so much.
Langdon: they’re not retiring at 35.
They’re alive and active in their seventies, in their
Ashely: Most owners are like old as balls.
Langdon: and then again, you had the racial component of what’s the color composition of the bodies being destroyed for entertainment for white owners.
Ashely: I think a lot too about the fact that in football, for the most part, there’s some exceptions, but there isn’t the nepotism path. The people that join are some of the most vulnerable peoples in society. And of course they would say yes because oh my God, this is suddenly a way to access so much wealth and power.
They wouldn’t necessarily, but then they don’t necessarily– they, they have a career that maybe lasts for usually less than 10 years and they have usually, they don’t have very many, they don’t have a lot of education. They get through it as fast as they can. No one gives a shit. They don’t necessarily have life skills and they don’t necessarily come from great support networks when they go back.
So
what do you do then?
Langdon: We also have this, treadmill that… The professional sports player, their life does [01:11:00] not begin in college as a professional sports player. It begins at eight or nine, and you’re put on that track. And if something happens and you get knocked off at any point, all of a sudden, bit of the support and community that had built around you literally evaporates.
They’re like, I don’t give a fuck about you. You’re not part of this world anymore. And so you just get left adrift, which hits it that previous bit you brought up of the way that there are, without belaboring the point, there are a lot of elements of what would constitutes men’s rights under patriarchy, which is laughable, fascist, bullshit, laughable on a good day, horrifying and nihilistic destructive on a bad day.
But there are certain obvious bits of , how do things affect, queer men, trans men, men of color. There are certain pockets where you go, okay. There is something though heinously tragic and it makes sense. Does not justify to be clear, but doesn’t make sense [01:12:00] why certain horrible shapes take place when you go, oh, these sort of structures of what constitute positive self-image and a sense of a place within the world in this hyper pa patriarchal, hyper masculinist approach to things is the brutal sacrifice of your body, and that you aren’t allowed access to any kind of real emotional intimacy with even your own male peers, except by breaking your body. It is at the breaking point of your body, literally, that you are allowed to emote and build this sense of, of unity.
You then add the level of C T E and the way that that increases aggressive behavior on violent behavior and you, it, it dawns on you , oh, we’ve built a death cult. It’s not surprising that this ends in horrible violence as often as it does.
Ashely: Yeah, I think going back to your motion, I think, I think about, again, I’m going back to Damar Hamlin, the teammates were clearly upset [01:13:00]as they should be.
This isn’t me saying, but
Langdon: That’s their friend as much as it is their
Ashely: And then I think the next week or the weeks afterwards where you have, um, Stefon Diggs who’s been emotional and he doesn’t necessarily behave the most gracious after they end up losing their, their playoff game, but then people treat him like shit.
And that happens a lot, especially with black players, that they get really, they’re very easily dismissed for showing passion and not being the gracious player or the sore loser or something like that. And it’s not even necessarily that did anything wrong or did violence or hurt anybody, it’s just they didn’t act emotional in the right way.
It’s frustrating, yeah. To see that in,
Langdon: It’s, it’s, it’s obviously no comment on similar but differently accentuated, brutal emotional nihilism that are foisted upon women and non men under patriarchy. It. It’s more that we’ve built a bunch of parallel fucked up engines and then are constantly surprised that only horrible things come out of them.
[01:14:00] Is everyone fucking stupid? I mean, I’m preaching to the choir here, but you know,
Ashely: But I also not, I don’t know if this is quite connected, but I’m thinking then again how brilliant John Bois is. He’s looking at all of this society and how you do it. He’s so focused, just like I’m gonna focus in on football basically as my means of exploring this whole world.
Cuz other times, you see something like a dystopian, a lot of times you’ll read dystopian and be like, why isn’t anything but America mentioned? Is everyone else fine? Or something like that. But in this case, no, this piece is doing something very specific and that’s very smart, that we’re not necessarily dealing with the rest of the world.
Cause it’s not really what the piece is about. It’s about being a fucking American forever.
Langdon: I I mean, it’s the classic thing about good sports movies, which I think if you like movies in general, you’ll be good– like Rocky isn’t about the boxing match. The boxing match is the organizing event about a person, about their circumstance, about why does this mean so much to them about becoming a person.
Remember the [01:15:00] Titans isn’t about the football game. It’s about a sense of community and a sense of unity, especially in a, a deeply racist, and very recently integrated school going up against racists. Cinderella Man also isn’t about boxing. It’s about– so you have the classic in, in, in the world of, novels, the boxing novel is about as much of a trope in certain spaces as the masculine novel about the ocean.
But it’s the same thing. You use this image as a way to talk about the people associated with it and why this matters and what it brings to them. And yeah, it’s not shocking to me that someone who’s written about sports as much as he has, and credit to John Bois. He’s not an untrained writer either. If I remember correctly, I think he went to school for writing.
And he intended to become a novelist for a while. And like he, he has a long history of, of writing, which is painfully apparent. This man is,
Ashely: He, he’s,
Langdon: can’t, emphasize enough. His [01:16:00] prose is so good. It makes me angry.
Ashely: Yeah. Well, also, John Bois is again, a great represent– I guess if we’re talking about labor, like how important it is to give people this nice, safe places to actually explore the art. Because you get, like I said, I don’t think John Bois is the only person making weird stuff, but how many people don’t get to have that?
Langdon: Credit to him, he shirks off levels of praise in a resolutely, classic Kansas boy, Midwestern humble way where it’s like, I write the kind of things that I think are cool based on even cooler shit that I’ve run into in life. So if you’re, complimenting me, I take that as a credit to all the things that I built off of.
And you’re like, you’re, you’re a sweetheart, John, you’re sweetheart. It reminds me of the same kind of thing there, there’s, there is buzz about this, about being groundbreaking, which again, credit to him, he’s sort of hand waved. He’s like, “I’m not breaking ground. I think you guys just hadn’t seen the stuff that did break it.
But if I’m your introduction to it, I’m very proud.” It reminds me of [01:17:00] the same thing with House of Leaves, where in the grad school literature world, people were like, oh, they, he’s ripping off The Tunnel. He just took The Tunnel and rewrote it. Which credit, if you’ve never read the book, The Tunnel, fucking great novel. Plays with similar meta textual stuff.
Really awesome. Mark Danielewski was pretty open about , “no, I don’t think I invented this. I just wrote a book I thought was cool. And then people liked it.”
Ashely: That’s not about, I think there could be an attitude with some people of beating your predecessors and doing it better. We’ve talked about how I think it’s better to engage in a conversation about who’s around you and how you, you, you add to it and, challenge it where you can.
Langdon: And this this doesn’t have, that, the story doesn’t give that sense of presumptuous or narrative ownership over itself. That’s a thing that’s only gonna make sense to a certain kind of weirdo reader like us. So maybe that’s inside baseball commentary. But there’s something about the way that he writes it, it doesn’t feel like if someone else wrote [01:18:00]something in this style that he’d be like, “Hey, you’re ripping me off.”
It would be more like, “oh, cool. I’m glad that I, I’m glad I opened a door for someone that maybe didn’t realize that there even was a door there.” Which is a really fucking refreshing thing in especially a world where people get incre increasingly touchy over, like, “I’m the one who came up with, what if wizards wear hats?
And now you have wizards that wear hats,”
Ashely: Personally as someone that’s working on a novel that’s based around Finnish fantasy, I, I welcome them to please take it up. Read the Kalevala. That’s what I’m always saying. You guys can say that you, you guys know. Um, I always
R.S.: You know what? No, I’m gonna gate keep, I’m gonna say no else in S F F can learn anything about Sumerian culture cuz they wouldn’t do a very good job. And I don’t wanna see these fuckers ruin the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Langdon: That’s fair.
Ashely: Fair enough.
R.S.: I, I I will gate keep, I will gate keep.
Ashely: I don’t have to worry cuz nobody’s gonna fucking do that. So I’m like, go for it. The [01:19:00] motherfuckers. I wanna see you write about Väinämöinen in his quest for a wife. Okay. I’d love to see you write a YA book about that. Go for it.
Langdon: As someone who’s been dealing with, I mean the, I’m gonna. I am gonna say the most classically online thing of all, if someone’s been dealing with a bit of online drama again recently, the fact I have a renewed weariness of the phrase touch grass. Cuz , no, that’s where I go to get away from you people.
Do not touch grass. Stay inside. Stay on the internet. Do not follow me. Like when I’m walking my dog, I don’t wanna see anyone
R.S.: don’t touch my grass. Hands off my grass.
Ashely: go tr go trust, touch some sedges or some rushes. I always say, here’s my thing. There are 14,000 species in the, the family of Poaceae, which in which is the grass family. That’s not enough species for you to touch at this point. You are too online. That’s what I tell people is like
Langdon: That’s good.
R.S.: Mm,
Ashely: That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s me using my, my fisheries and wildlife knowledge. I’m a, I’m [01:20:00] a, I’m really into grasses, so.
R.S.: so
Langdon: I love your nerd
R.S.: football!
Ashely: Thank you. Oh yeah, football. Did I, this has nothing to, well, football play on grass, so it, it’s the ultimate touch grass. Did I tell you guys. I forgot to say at the beginning, but I was gonna tell you, I am wearing my Bills shirt. I’m wearing camo cargo shorts, and I’m wearing knockoff crocs. I could not be more in the spirit of America right now.
And I just want
everyone to
R.S.: pretty cool.
Langdon: I I’m wearing a queer, Canadian super goth, micro press t-shirt, so I’m not really in the football spirit. I am, I’m one of the people, people are confused by when they’re like, you mean the person who listens exclusively to avant jazz and talks about weird obscure literary fiction?
I’m like, yeah, I fucking love sports. Fucking love
R.S.: You’re from the south, you’re required.
Langdon: It’s so tight. You drink beer and watch the game.
God, I
Ashely: love, I do too. Okay, so here’s, here’s our football question. What, what did we, I [01:21:00] know we talked about before, how we feel in Super Bowl. Raquel, go. What’s, what’s your, what’s your super, where’s your Super Bowl take?
R.S.: I have zero opinions. I’m
so
Ashely: to, you so
so, quiet. I didn’t
R.S.: I’m so sorry.
Langdon: you gotta be the
R.S.: That’s why I invited people on. I don’t fucking know. I know nothing.
Langdon: Pick them. Weirdly racist name football team or anything from Philadelphia.
Ashely: It’s gotta be the birds. Go birds.
Langdon: No, I will never support Philadelphia in my life. That’s never going to
Ashely: What’s your problem with Philadelphia?
Langdon: Fuck you. You’re all, you’re, you’re trash people. Trash city. I hope that you were destroyed in the floods.
Anyone?
Ashely: do it themselves and that, that’s why they’re cool.
If you could rat.
No,
R.S.: you know what? I respect a city where whenever there’s a football game, they have to grease the light poles because people will try to climb them and they just lick the grease off and climb them anyway. So I’m gonna go with the [01:22:00] Eagles.
Langdon: as a sports fan, not from Philly. I can’t respect Philly. As a sports fan from DC I super can’t support Philly. My Nats, fuck you Philies. Fuck you. Fuck the Philies and
Ashely: I can’t be
Langdon: Harper. fuck you. Bryce
Ashely: you’re . So, but Langdon, listen, you’re a communist, right? Do you like the idea of a revolution? Right? Do you, what if you, what if you radicalized the Eagles? In a week you would have the revolution.
Langdon: not them. Gulag.
Ashely: well,
Langdon: Gulag.
Ashely: no, we’re gonna use
the link to, we’re gonna use the link to like, because they got a jail underneath.
They’re already underneath the Eagles stadium. We’re gonna use that to put the non-believers. People are not let you better hope nobody, we cannot actually release this episode because the Eagles fans fucking hear you say that they’re gonna come to all our houses and beat us
with bags
Langdon: No, I’m,
R.S.: No. You know what, Goose, you and I, you and I, Ashley and I are pro Eagles, so if you’re gonna fuck anyone up, just get Langdon.
I am officially throwing Langdon under the [01:23:00] bus.
Langdon: I’m the Washington fan. We are the only N F C east team that didn’t even make it to the playoffs. Literally all three of the other ones did. So I’m eating shit regardless. You literally can ignore me. like
I’m bitter. I’m so bitter.
Ashely: Lou, do you wanna talk about Bitter? I’m a Bills fan, which is like, boy, I love
losing. Yeah, but we fucking, we could have gone, we could have done it this year. I don’t, how the fuck are we gonna come back next year?
Langdon: Ancillary,
Ancillary,
Ashely: I know, I know. Uh,
Langdon: but yeah, he like to go to, go
briefly back to the story,
Ashely: Okay.
Here’s what I wanna know, and I’m gonna write, this is my fan fiction of seven of uh, of the, of John Bois’ story. Is that I’m gonna write a, a fan fiction where Tom, where we’ve tried to figure out what Tom Brady’s been up to in this future, like as he, does
R.S.: Oh shit.
Yeah.
Ashely: he back and play for every team?
Langdon: removing enough buccal fat that he looks exactly like Skeletor
Ashely: that’s the game they play with on Tom Brady’s buccal fat. [01:24:00]They try to find it buried across America,
Langdon: I did really love how to emphasize sort of the existential commentary on play and what does play tell us about ourselves. He mentions this in the Q and A, the, the confirmation of the thing you said earlier, Raquel, that no one scores a touchdown in the whole story. And he did that deliberately cuz he is like, I want it to be about the game and life, not about, you
know, and it’s just like, oh, oh that’s really smart.
Reading that Q and A really just sort of brought into focus a lot of things. If you learn to be a good reader, you’ll have your list of mental questions and go, oh, I wonder how many of these are me pondering and how much are one seeded by the author? And there’s something really affirming to know that. [01:25:00] The, the classic thing in any creative writing class, they tell you that the kind of thing you want is to have a reader walk away with questions and thoughts that they think are theirs, but that you have subconsciously pointed them to and that you kind of know that you succeeded.
When they tell you their question and it’s your question that you wanted them to have, then that’s a, then it doesn’t matter how they answer it, just the fact that they’re thinking in the right direction. You’re like, I did my thing. And so it was really like, damn, you write good as fuck, you played me motherfucker.
Damn.
Ashely: Not to be as smart as– to follow up, but I wanted to– one of the questions I really loved and just the little thoughts they adored, is somebody asked about the game that’s in the gorge. Like won’t at some point they start wearing down the gorge? And he was like, oh shit, I didn’t think about that.
That rules, I love that. I also love the questions where, he just doesn’t answer. Cause they’re, somebody asks , “what happened to dogs?” And he [01:26:00] is like, “I don’t wanna think about that. So, uh, that’s, I’m not gonna answer that.” And I’m like, yeah.
R.S.: Yeah. And I find it so funny how around the end of the story, he finally goes, okay, yeah, here’s the answer to the annoying questions that you’re probably gonna ask. Yeah, other countries are fine and the Caribbean’s flooded, but everyone’s okay. So don’t worry about it.
Ashely: yeah. I love, I do, I do love, the “I hear you fucking nerds. Okay. Yeah, it’s fine.” Shut up
R.S.: I hear your little Cinema Sins ding sound queuing up. Fuck
Ashely: that’s really how you can, as
somebody that like the whole two and a half hour thing about K P S, which whole– Kaiju Preservation Society, which is the whole thing is answering to nerd, but not in like a shut the fuck up way.
I think that’s what, if you’re gonna do it, that’s what you should do is be like, yeah, whatever. That’s not the point. Asshole. Shut the fuck up. Yeah. Like everyone thinks fine. We’re trying to talk about the fucking, existentialism and
R.S.: I’m, I’m a, I’m a fan of the Gremlins 2 approach where there’s a scene where these two security guards asking, ” well, what if you’re on a plane and you cross into a different time zone when you’re feeding ’em and it suddenly becomes midnight? Or what if you get [01:27:00]something stuck in your teeth and after you’d fed ’em before midnight, but there’s a little something stuck in their teeth and they eat it after midnight?” And in the middle of these questions, just a gremlin pops out and kills them. And it’s like, “we’re not having that. That is what I think of your questions. We are not talking about
this. Fuck you. ”
Ashely: also, what I’ve discovered is every genre, so spec fic would, would become better if it included football. I think. I wanna see, I wanna see a, I would Brandon Sanderson books become better with football? They
Langdon: No. No, no.
No!
He must never be allowed to touch my beautiful game!
Ashely: Fair enough, fair enough. I’m just, I’m just wondering. I’m reading MistBorn right now and I’m like, it might be better if there was some football in it that, I mean, it couldn’t make it worse,
Langdon: I hate Brandon Sanderson so much. Not even talking about the Mormon stuff, not talking politically. I mean books that are so bad that I want to kill myself.
Ashely: Oh my God.
Langdon: Just what I’m, I’m, this is [01:28:00] purely personal. This is just me talking sincerely. I would rather be in a war than read one of your books. Brandon. You, you ending the Wheel of Time series is, like resurrecting Hitler to see out the end of Trump’s presidency.
Ashely: gonna, my God,
R.S.: Oh
Ashely: Jesus Christ. I was gonna, I was gonna say that’s like Langdon’s 9/11. Was
that? Oh my God. The
Langdon: I’m not scared of Brandon Sanderson. What’s he gonna do? Be really Mormon at me? Pray for me after death? You will probably outlive me. I live a very bad life, Brandon
Ashely: So how about them? Uh, how about them chiefs? You know?
Langdon: You know they’re gonna win.
Ashely: No, they’re not.
Langdon: My boy doesn’t even need ankles. One. Most importantly, he’s got a law and that’s the Lord. So, you know, put that down on paper. Two. He’s the king of football.
Ashely: The whole king. Well, it’s America bitch. And we don’t have a king.
Langdon: Uh, apparently [01:29:00] football does.
And it was Tom Brady, which sucked. I hate saying that, but numbers don’t lie. I wish they lied. They don’t lie though.
Ashely: He w we have no king. And they’re playing Philly, which is where there’s no, they don’t believe in God. God does not touch Philadelphia . So
Langdon: true. God does not touch Philadelphia.
Ashely: so they can pray as much as they want.
and thank the Lord as much as they want.
Langdon: we’re gonna see if Mahomes can put down the evil djinn, sent by, Shaitan himself, Philadelphia in the name of Goku. I hope that they’re purified by a spirit
R.S.: Okay, Okay, so we, we’ve been talking for a while and we’re, we’re going off the field. We are, we are out of play. I don’t know what the fuck is going on, so why don’t we,
Ashely: It’s a, it’s a sa, we’re doing a safety or
R.S.: we’re, we’re we’re out of Totino’s Pizza rolls. So I’m gonna wind things down and let either of you plug your work.
Langdon: I am currently, [01:30:00] neck deep in doing stuff for Death Sentence. We recently got Gareth back after a prolonged hiatus from him.
R.S.: Oh
Langdon: me, me, Gareth, and Eden. Been absolutely loving our output Recently. I also have been writing a hell of a lot for, for Treble. We recently, this year started a series called The Treble 100, which was instead of a listicle about like best blah, which, which can be fun.
This one was just what are the records that are most important to us, not the best, and not being worried about like, are they too poppy? Just what is the most emotionally meaningful to us? And then writing basically creative non-fiction, like miniature 33 and a third books. Those records and why we, why they mean so much to us.
Um, and I recently add my one about, Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü, this classic hardcore alternative rock record drop. Just absolutely love working for Treble. I’ll, I’ll work for them until [01:31:00]I die, or until Jeff kills me. And that’s pretty much it. I’ve also been, finishing off a novel and putting together a short story collection, but we’ll see if that all happens this year.
Publication gets wacky.
Ashely: I don’t really have anything to plug. I live, I’m in Florida and in hell. Can I, can we link to my, co Kofi because I’m missing a, a piece of my tooth and I’m probably gonna have to move soon out of this cursed state. So if anyone wants to gimme money, I’d, I’d sure like it.
R.S.: Okay. You know what, just send me a link to your, send me a link and I’ll fucking put it in the episode description. We do not care.
Langdon: Look, they don’t have to like, this touches
R.S.: Yeah. Speaking of America. No dental insurance.
Ashely: I have dental insurance, but it doesn’t cover shit.
Langdon: some people bring up the shit when they’re like, it’s grifting cuz this person had a GoFundMe and I don’t think they need it. Bitch, it’s voluntary. No one’s holding a gun to your head, making you donate money to all these GoFundMe.
What kinda weird America are you talking about? [01:32:00] Just stop giving them money if you don’t want to.
Ashely: Oh my God. I’m just, I, I, I’m just watching the audio, like fucking peg. Um, yeah, so I’ll
Langdon: It makes me so mad. They’re like, this person is an abuser, manipulator,
Ashely: that, this is my plug, shut up
Langdon: You’re right.
Ashely: So I’ll give you the link to that, uh, if you want or not. I don’t care. Everything’s tight at, and then, also if you wanna see my, uh, tweets, I am at weather goose 1 because I guess weather goose without the one was taken. So, you can see my, my bits there.
So that’s it.
Langdon: Your bits as in like comedic bits.
Ashely: I.
Langdon: Got it.
Ashely: I, I,
I’m
Langdon: it’s the internet. We need, we need to clarify if some, if someone says, you can see my bits, just
need, you
know,
Ashely: enough. No, no. My, uh, comedic bits.
Langdon: You know, we’re just, we’re, shoot, we’re straight shooters here.
Ashely: Okay.
R.S.: Yes. Okay. Well,
Ashely: this
R.S.: I I don’t know what [01:33:00] happened. This this episode went off the rails about, as well as football went off the rails in 17,776, which was delightful. But thank you again for coming on to talk about football and thank you all for listening. Uh, until next time, keep reading and keep writing good.
I’m gonna hit stop now.
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