Listener Mail: Special Order 937

topic we've talked about. Let's see Rob If you don't mind, I'm going to kick things off with this message from Jeff.

all that. But Jeff has an answer. He says, I wanted to answer Joe's question about how you can tell someone is laughing when they're scuba diving. A group of us went on a night dive, and as we got settled on the sandy bottom, waiting for the entire group to make their way down the buoy line, we noticed a loggerhead turtle sleeping on the ocean floor. Of course, everyone did exactly what you are not supposed to do and surrounded it, shining our dive lights directly at it.

Oh no, This quite predictably freaked out the turtle, who charged straight ahead and didn't quite clear my father as it ascended, bonking him in the forehead with its beak. This caused my father's dive buddy to laugh quite audibly for some time. Dad was fine. He had a red mark on his forehead when he came up, but no permanent damage. He later remarked that he was thinking, Wow, this is just like one of those three D movies.

who got attacked by the turtle? Night dives, by the way, are much cooler than you might expect. Many creatures who were hiding during the day are on the move at night. And while it's true that your world becomes limited to the dive light beam without significant visibility, you really focus on the details of what's in front of you. Since you're bringing your own light source, you can actually see the true colors of the organisms on the reef when

you're relying on sunlight during the day. As you go deeper, all of the warm colors on the spectrum are filtered out by the water above, leaving everything blue and gray. If any of your gear has a rainbow design, on it. You can watch the roy of ROYGBIV lose his colors one at a time as you descend. Oh that's interesting. At night, if conditions are right and everyone turns off their lights, you can wave your arm and agitate the bioluminescent plankton. A trail of light will follow your arm

like a trippy acid rock video. Anyway, getting back to your original point, yes, you very much can hear a scuba diver laughing underwater. The sound travels a short distance, and there's no issue with the dive apparatus if you want to laugh or yell or cough or pretty much anything else. In fact, the dive instructor explained to us that regulators are so safe that you can vomit into

them without compromising their effectiveness or endangering your breathing. This opened up a lot of questions and wasn't as reassuring as it was meant to be. Oh, Jeff, yeah, that I mean it sounds reassuring. I would not be tempted to try it out. Jeff finishes by saying, thanks again for triggering lateral thinking and shaking up our neurons on a regular basis.

and I like doing it in the shallow waters. That's just where I am as an ocean going human at this point in my life.

obviously to scuba diving compared to snorkeling. Snorkeling is a lot more casual in many respects, and I respect anybody who can, you know, get in there and really master the whole scuba diving system. It sounds like they get to see some really cool sights, all right. This next one comes to us from Jay. Jay writes Sin and says, Hello, Robert and Joe. I want to start by saying I've been a fan of the show for a long time.

I love to learn new things, and even if I don't think I'll be a fan of a topic, you always manage to make each episode enjoyable and interesting. And while I very much enjoy the flagship episodes, I absolutely love weird House cinema. My recommendation for the show is the nineteen seventy three German sci fi film World on a Wire, directed by Renier Werner Fassbender, currently available to

stream on the Criterion Channel. Ah. I am not a current subscriber to Criterion Channel, but I have dipped in and out of it before for particular pictures, and they do have a great selection.

German filmmaking sensibility. There's kind of an architectualness about it, a lot of featuring of rooms and buildings in a prominent way. Like a lot of times the subject of a shot, the character will be kind of mediated by architectural features like walls and other things, sort of passing in between the camera and the character as the character moves. Stuff like that. But it's a really interesting film, and yeah,

maybe we will come back to it one day. I guess it's an older movie so there's less concern about spoiling it though. Warning this is a spoiler if you know you don't know anything about it and you don't want to know. But it does cover some similar themes as kind of like the Matrix, but with a much different tone.

called Cloud Impress. It bills itself as an ecological science fantasy RPG heavily inspired by the film NAUSICAA of the Valley of the Wind. It is a post apocalyptic RPG which takes place in a dangerous world and drops players in an even more dangerous time. The emergence of a century brewed a once in a hundred years cycle of

you Guessed It, giant psychics cicadas. One of the things players can do in the game is harvest dead cicadas for a substance called chalk, which can be used to power weapons, and wizards can use it to power their magic. It's a rules light system and is quick to pick up in a blast to play, which I highly recommend. You can get free rules and other resources at their website and link is included here, but I think everyone else can just look for it. Cloud Impress, ecological science, fantasy,

role playing. What's the uh, we're the publishers of this. I should mentioned that.

can see the Nasca inspiration there. Very very interesting looking. Yeah, I've I've only waited a little bit into the you know, so called rules light games, but I'm very intrigued by them. You know. It's like it seems like there was a trend for a while with a lot of role playing systems just getting more and more advanced and becoming maybe

just a little bit too much work. And I like the idea that some of them are stripping things down a bit and maybe leaning a little bit more into imagination, you know, letting the imagine not only just role playing, but also letting imagination fill in the gaps that are left by the game mechanics and so forth, less erro counting perhaps.

into animals, Batmanions, Submarine Warfare, Shangri La. All courtesy of Ishiro Honda, Keep Them Coming, Dean, Well, Dean, I looked up some stuff about both of these movies. I've never seen either one. So Latitude Zero is a sci fi movie about a group of Bathisphere explorers who by chance get transported to a secret underwater utopia called Latitude Zero, which I understand is located right at the intersection of

the Equator and the International date Line. And in this underwater kingdom, all the people who have ever been lost at sea around the world are gathered to live in peace and harmony and explore scientific frontiers hidden from the world above. But there is also an evil guy who wants to destroy them for some reason, and he creates giant mutant rats, and he loves cross species cross species

brain transplants like Doctor Doom type stuff. So it's a plot that sounds in some ways similar to Atragon, but with these Doctor Doom elements. So I'm or Doctor of Doom maybe was that what it was?

Rises from the Tomb and so forth. Some places you'll see it erroneously stated that Paul Nashy is in this, but he is not. There's just there's a character in it with a big beard in some shots kind of looks like Paul Nashy. But anyway, this one is okay. This has been on a list for a while and we actually talked about this film a little bit with

Christian Back in the day. We did an episode dealing with this pseudoscientific concept of the late eighteen hundreds called retinal optography, which was this idea that you could see the last image that a dead man saw by looking at their retina, and it is utilized to fantastic sci fi degree in this picture. There are a number of just wonky sci fi concepts that they run wild with in this film, so it's a whole lot of fun.

dinosaur or something. So it's got like I said, it's it's wacky and fun and definitely has that gothic horror feel. It's also a train movie, so it's actually been on my list of potential weird House selections for a while.

But I think one of the things that's always helped me back is we've also talked about doing a train related stuff to Blow your Mind episode in October, and I've always kind of thought, well, these two would pair up nicely, but that just means they're like two levers to pull to see it come to fruition.

Dust and it was great. Ha ha ha. I'm blind, lost auction in to my optic nerves about six years ago, and now I can't see squad. I loved weird and quirky movies even when they were bad. You could find the good in them. A lot of movies before say, twenty tenish, and absolutely none of those types of films include descriptive audio for the blind or visually impaired. More films now come with them, but you'd have to get really, really lucky to find something from the seventies or eighties

with a descriptive audio track. So y'all going through some I was able to watch before the lights went out, and others I won't get to physically see any longer. It's nice to have the podcast as a companion piece. If I can't watch or rewatch and really follow, then your summaries, reviews and anecdotes about the movies are a reasonable bronze or silver metal. I absolutely enjoy anyway you asked, so email sent all the best. Thanks for the edutainment, Joe.

releases and you know, digital or otherwise. But yeah, I guess you go back further and you're gonna find less and less of that, unless I guess it's like a pivotal piece of cinema that is getting like a really nice re release and or is held to a large degree to be culturally important or at least commercially important. And obviously a lot of your weirder films are going

to fall through the cracks in that area. Yeah, all right, we're going to go ahead and close the mail bag right there, but we'll be back next week, hopefully with more listener mail. But we have to admit the mail bags starting to get a little bit thin at this point. We need to hear from more folks. So if you have thoughts about, say, our recent series on cicadas, you have other summertime thoughts, summertime episode requests, write in. We would love to hear from you. Summertime movies for Weird

House Cinema so forth. What kind of movies do you get into watching when the weather gets hot? Are you a blockbuster person? Or do your interest go in a different direction. Anything of this nature is perfectly fair game, so let us know the listener mails. Publish on Mondays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We're primarily a science podcast, science and culture podcast with core

episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, we tend to do a short form episode and throughout the month of July we're going to be putting out a bunch of alien themed monster facts. So I'm looking forward to putting those together and let's see. Yeah, on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.