Outro S5 E13 Whirlwind
Hellos my survivor friends. How are you doing?
For those of you unconstrained by temporal heuristics this episode of After the Apocalypse will tickle your ears real-time somewhere around the beginning of March 2025.
That’s right, you need to wait to the next episode for me to make my annual ides of March reference.
Et tu apocalypti ?
Even though the weather is warming, the thick radioactive clouds are dispersing, and green shoots poke free of the crumbling soil like curious earthworms, we are now entering the starving times here in the bunker.
It will be a couple months before the first spring crops are ready to eat. We have exhausted all the canned food and all that is left are the dried hot-peppers, which, while entertaining and useful are hardly sustenance.
So, I’m afraid, for the good of the community, we’ll need some of you to leave. You’ll be fine. Just go find another survivor community to raid…eat…
Just kidding, all are welcome. Especially the tasty looking among you…
What has Chris been reading?
Well, thanks for asking.
I’m almost through ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’, but I have to be honest with you, I don’t know why this book was so popular. I made it this far, I have less than 100 pages left, so I’m going to push through, but I’m pretty sure I know how it’s going to end.
We’ll save additional opinions for when I’m done with it.
I also listened to a book about the pre-Cambrian animals in the Burgess shale formation. Well, I listened to most of it. It’s called ‘Wonderful Life’, by Stephen Jay Gould. It is from 1989.
The Burgess Shale is a formation in Canada where, somehow, a slew of organisms from 500 million years ago got preserved as fossils. Which is a stroke of luck, because these animals were not particularly easy to preserve.
If you’re close to a computer go search for Burgess Shale images, and you’ll get an idea of what this fantastical menagerie looked like.
But, the book doesn’t’ really focus on these wonders. It focuses on how when they were first discovered they were shoe-horned into known classifications because of our biases.
The first of these biases is the ‘tree of life’ which shows evolution as starting out skinny at the bottom ‘trunk’ and then diversifying into the ‘branches’. Whereas, on closer inspection, many of these animals are unrelated to known families of life today.
The conclusion being that before the skinny trunk of the tree of life there was a broad experimentation and a rare few of these lines survived to become the ‘trunk’ of the tree of life.
The other bias is that evolution is linear. Which, of course it is not, it is clearly experimental and fractal.
Listening to this as an audio book with having the illustrations as a reference was a poor choice. Some of the descriptions are like ‘Here we have XYZ which has 3 feeding claws and 5 eyes and an anus on the side of their head…’ after awhile it all starts to blend together into a mish-mash of arcane scientific terms.
Interesting, but not super compelling for someone outside paleontology.
I have also been watching my way through of the modern Star Trek series. Discovery and Picard.
I’ll have more to say about these when I get through, but it seems to be a part of a trend. We have made a full transition from commercial television series, that maybe got made into a movie(s) to the streaming subscription model.
Each of these franchises with a loyal, or as a marketing person might phrase it, “an irrationally passionate audience” creates a stream of content designed to keep you hooked and paying a monthly subscription.
How does that influence the content? I think it has good and bad. It allows for more experimentation in all aspects of the universe and its presentation. For example, like in Discovery, they can create an entirely new story with unique characters, or in Picard, a nostalgic projection of existing coda and characters.
They can also play with format and tone. Make things dark or introspective.
I think that’s the positive. When the quality is maintained, it expands and enriches the existing story.
On the cautionary side, this business model rewards wringing every ounce of fan devotion out of the series by carpet bombing iterations of the same stuff. And, as you replicate each of the clones is a slightly degraded version of the original.
I think we see this across the board. I mean the Marvel stuff doesn’t even bother to have a cohesive storyline anymore. Just people flying around in rubber suits and lots of CGI explosions.
Anyhow – I’m enjoying these series so far – I can see the screenwriters are at least making an effort.
So my friends, 7ish more episodes to wrap up the After the Apocalypse series.
This has been a great ride for me. I have learned a ton and made some new friends. By the way, feel free to reach out to me directly at cyktrussell at Gmail dot com or on the Facebook group. I may or may not have the answer you’re looking for but I’ll always have something to say!
Don’t forget to go out and buy a copy of the season one book!
I signed the contract for the second book and have added it to my goals list to be submitted by the middle of May.
Go out and leave a review for the podcast and also the book so we can drive the recommendation engines.
Now go forth, out of the bunker, into the gathering springtime to find your fortune, or a mate, or maybe a bite to eat.
And Keep Surviving!
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