Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind listener mail. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Monday, the day each week we read back some messages from the mail bag. If you have never gotten in touch with the show before and you would like to, why not give it a try. You can email us anytime at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. We get a lot of emails, so we don't get a chance to read all of it on the show here or respond to all of it, but we do read it all and we really appreciate all the messages we get, so thank you to all the people who have written in, who keep writing in, and if you've never done it before, give it a shot.
All right, let's kick things off with a pretty cool monster fact listener mail that came in, and this was in response to one of the four episodes that I did on the Chaos Gods of Warhammer forty thousand. These are fictional gods, but there's a lot of neat little ins and outs to them, and this one is a response to the episode on Zinch which is the chaos god of change. Jay writes in and says, my name
is Jay, and I'm a costume maker. I was just listening to your episode about the chaos demons of Zinch and thought maybe you'd appreciate a few pictures of my graduation piece from the twenty fifteen costume construction course at toy Wakari in Wellington, New Zealand. The task for this piece was to find a drawing or painting and recreate it as a wearable garment. I loved this rendering of a disciple of Zinch and Jay includes a photo and I think they incorporate a lot of the elements described
in your episode. I tried finding the illustrator back when I made this piece and had a few leads and emails sent out, but didn't seem to find the right person. I would love for them to see their design come to life, so if you have some reach there, maybe
they can see it. Since graduating, my job has given me the opportunity to work on great projects like the new Avatar movies and the TV productions of the Lord of the Rings and Sweet Tooth, and it has most definitely been full of change and chaos, so I feel choosing this piece was a good omen for me. Have a great day, Jay.
Oh this is awesome. So Jay includes a lot of photos here of is I can't quite tell from the photos. Is this costume life size, like would fit on a person, not on a like a model or a figure.
I'm assuming this is a full costume. If you'll look carefully at the picture, you can see that it's like a rolled white background. Yeah, and I only my wife is a photographer, so I see this kind of thing a lot, so maybe a little bitter identifying it, but yeah, this looks like a full, full body outfit. Just really brilliant, I mean to describe it. It's like, God, it's like what has a cowl kind of a thing going on,
big shoulder extensions, there are these feather elements. It's blue and white and gold and multiple blues and purples there, with blue kind of being one of the primary colors of zench What is.
It called in a garment where you take the concept of a collar, but you make it gigantic, like you turn it into basically a colosseum.
Yeah, yeah, this big. You see this a lot of times, especially in fantastic art, and I guess maybe like high fashion, you know where it's beyond what is perhaps realistic for a person to wear. But if you're a supermodel or a wizard representing a chaos god's interest in the mortal realm and real space, then yeah, go for it. Go out there. It pays to be fashionable.
So you're the one of us that knows about Warhammer, I know nothing about zench. Here what is the deal with these creatures? To me, this looks like a skexis, except whereas the skexes have sort of connotations of decay and slime and filth and decadence, this looks like a sort of glorious, clean, well manicured Skexis.
Yeah, Zinch is all about appealing to like, well, there are various interests that can lead you down the path of heresy to Zinch. But essentially, if you're the type of wizard or heretic who wants to acquire a great deal of knowledge and wisdom, and also you want to maybe you're very ambitious and you want a lot of change, well, Zinch is all about forming a pact with you and giving you just more wisdom and more change than you
can possibly imagine. And some of the major avatars of Zench often have bird like features, which is interesting, like a lot of things in Warhammer and Warhammer forty thousand, Like, there are a lot of influences that clearly have gone into these designs and these factions over the years, and you can often pinpoint some of the major ones, like you wouldn't have Warhammer forty thousand without Dune, for example, And the same can be said of a lot of
sci fi franchises. But it's also been its own thing long enough that it's hard to track down all of the influences, and everything kind of takes on this novel feeling of being its own thing.
Yeah. Again, I don't know much about Warhammer, but when I look at it, it seems to me to have absorbed a lot of influences from other sci fi and fantasy, Like it just straight up has orcs in it.
I think, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, do you have the The orcs of Warhammer forty thousand are like, you know, they're green skins, and they're there. They're a lot of fun, They're they're very punk, I guess to a large extent, like you know, like old school British punk. But then they also reproduce via spores, and yeah, there's a there's a there are a lot of elements to it that are like really grim and dark and other stuff that's a little more whimsical. Anyway, though, this costume is incredible.
So great job, Jay, and congratulations, I'm getting to work on these pretty awesome product I've seen at least some of all of these, and yeah, the production designs are amazing.
Now, Jay, as to your thing about helping you maybe get in touch with the artists, I don't know exactly the best way to do that since this is an audio medium, but hey, if you are listening and you are an illustrator who has I don't know, done illustrations of these Sorcerers of Zinch and you are wondering if this is your illustration, you can contact us and we'll we'll, you know, try and help you figure it out.
Yeah. I always happy to hear from artists either way.
All right, This next message is about our episodes on the Telephone Game. This comes from Sky Sky says Hi, Joe and Robert. I just finished the first episode and had a few follow up thoughts. First of all, the alternating picture slash text version of The telephone game is, as you suspect, a fantastic game. I've never heard of it by the name mentioned on the podcast, but have seen it go by many others telephone pictionary, illustrations, draw seption,
and drawful. It's one of our standards for board game nights. When a where a few too many people are invited, just find a pencil for everyone, rip up some paper, and hilarity ensues. Second point, I appreciated the reference to the Chinese Room thought experiment, and particularly its relation to
recent large language models like chat GPT. When self driving cars were getting a lot of attention, it seemed to me like the trolley problem got enough attention such that most people have now probably heard of it and somewhat
understand why it's a tricky problem for that technology. I'm somewhat frustrated seeing the ill informed debates about whether or not large language models are conscious and hope dearly that the Chinese Room can also enter the zeitgeist and get more people involved in the interesting parts of the idea. You've focused on consciousness and many of the relevant thought experiments in previous episodes, but I wonder if a timely discussion of language models in relation to those topics could help.
I'd certainly listen three. Robert's voice of the mind when talking about alterations to the boy hides from his father's story are hilarious. I love modeling part of your subconscious as a bunch of study lit critics. Cheers Sky. Well, yeah, thanks for the thoughts guy. You know, I've thought recently about whether we should do something about like chat, GPT and all of this new these recent explosions of AI.
I feel like my inclination is it's exactly when there are a lot of takes exploding on a subject, is when I feel disinclined to talk about it, you know, because I feel kind of like, is my take here going to be just a kind of transient, ill informed thought that will blend in with all these others and then fade away. I always kind of feel like I want to give it some time and then look back on it and then figure out what I think and say that Yeah.
I mean, We've had a couple of guests on the show, including David Eagleman, and we've we've we've chatted with these
experts and about the topic. But I'm of the same mind a lot of this seems to be still developing, and I've I've waffled a lot just with my own experience with say, like some some of the image generators and the chatbots, you know, Like I found that I initially find them really exciting and get into using them a little bit, but then, like two things occur at once generally, or they have occurred at once, I'll sort of the more I use it, I'll sort of discover
the soullessness of the experience and find that it's not creatively satisfying me, and in fact, it feels like it's causing a void to grow in me creatively, and then again I sort of push it away.
That's interesting. I've had a similar experience recently. So Okay, well, I just said I'm not going to give a take. Maybe this is not a take. I'm just explaining an emotion more than a strong opinion. And it's hard to put my reaction into words, but it's just kind of a revulsion at the idea of a kind of explosion of convincing insincerity in all of the content domains of human life. And I don't know, there's something I've I've found kind of disturbing about that.
Yeah, now, now I do want to drive home that you know, this is what I've just said was based on my experience toying around with it. It's it's likely these tools are just not for me. I don't want to steer anyone else away from enjoying them. But and it's you know, it's also possible that I just I am not technically proficient enough to make the most out of them. I don't know. There are various ways to cut it. I'm not saying I'm right on the matter,
it's just my opinion. The other side of it, though, is that, you know, I've seen plenty of artists that I either know personally or I follow on Instagram or something speak out against like AI art specifically, and you know, I feel like I need to listen to them. I need to you know, support them and here them out. And so I've tried to do that as well.
Yeah, I agree with that. I feel like I'm feeling the poll. I'm feeling the poll to like keep blabbering on and just get into get into the takes. I said I wasn't going to give, So I'm not going to give them. We'll just let's move on to something else.
Yeah. Yeah, but you know, discussion continues if you have thoughts about this rite in. We'd love to hear from everyone out there if you agree with us, disagree with us, or have more information.
Yeah, all right, We've still got plenty more messages about childhood amnesia. We're going to do a couple here. This one comes from Jay. Jay says, Dear Robert and Joe, I recently listened to the Before You could Remember episodes, and I have a memory to share. I have a somewhat fuzzy childhood memory that doesn't feel like a memory of an event, but more like a feeling or a dream.
I remember laying on my back and above me is a pale brown surface, and on that surface is a bird, and there is a voice without a body that again and again says the words tweety bird or rather a peepifogo in Swedish. As I grew up, the memory popped into my mind every now and then, but I never thought much about it. But when I was in my late teens, I asked my mom what she thought about the dream, or what she thought the dream meant. She looked amused and told me that when I was a toddler.
We used to live in an old house and the bathroom had an inner, rough cut natural wood roof, and every time she needed to change my diapers, she took me to the bathroom, laid me on my back on the bathroom mat, and distracted me by pointing at the roof and said, look at the tweety bird. The bird she pointed at was a sawed off branch on the wood roof that looked like the outline of a flying bird.
I've always wondered if this was a real memory or if it was something I picked up as a child when I after bedtime listened to the adults talking in the living room to my bedroom. If it's a real memory, it probably stuck because of hundreds of times I must have seen and heard the tweety bird. Anyhow, thank you for a great podcast and keep up the good work.
Kind regards, j oh And to be clear, this is this is a different Jay than the other j who just wrote in That was j Y. This is just the letter J. But thank you J.
Yeah, and I like this term peepe fogo's that's very nice. But yeah, this this whole topic of early childhood memories. I think has stirred at a lot of discussion. I know that I ended up talking about my like vague childhood memory of my pediatrician being Gene Shallatte. I talked about this with my mom and she of course confirmed that Gene Shallott was not my pediatrician. But and at first she was like, there was you know, your doctor
looked different. It didn't look anything like Gene Shallett. And then I'm like, well, no, maybe it was, you know, further back, and she was, And then she did confirm that I did have a doctor pretty early on at a mustache though I'm not sure exactly what age I was at that point. So I think this mustachio doctor was the Gene Shallatte of my memory.
Oh that's very interesting.
All right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Josh, Rob, Joe, JJ and letter writer Scott. We've got listener mail folks talking to other listener mail folks, which is great. While listening to the podcast regarding childhood amnesia, I wondered over my earliest memory with no satisfaction. However, during Rob's reading of a letter replying to the episode about a sort of first moment of consciousness from Scott.
My mind was absolutely blown. A memory came back to me that I haven't thought of in what must be like thirty five years. I remember waking up in the morning and having a memory of the previous day, of which I doubted the trustworthiness. I remember believing that I began existence upon waking and stepped into oblivion when I went to sleep. Remember devising a test wherein I resolved to send myself a message and decided that if I would remember this specific message from myself, I would lay
the question to rest and believe in yesterday. I figured that through repeating the message many times as I fell asleep, I created the greatest likelihood of remembering it, and that I should keep it simple, I told myself, remember thinking this, I did in fact remember the message, although there is no way to know if it was the first time I tried this experiment, and if my experiment is to be trusted, every day since I have believed in Yesterday. Thanks for the memories, cheers, Josh.
That's interesting, Josh. This sounds like the kinds of thoughts that I think I had when I was a little kid. Weird psychedelic childhood thoughts.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I engaged in a bit of that, a lot of closing the eyes and looking at the starscape and so forth.
All Right, maybe we should do some weird house cinema email. Are you ready for that? Rob, Let's have it? Okay, I'm going to do this one from Emily Hi, Robin Joe, Whether you're finished experiencing the smorgasbord of late twentieth century three D cinema, here's a suggestion for a non three D but still deeply weird film. My husband and I just watched Sunshine two thousand and seven, starring Killian Murphy
and Chris Evans. The tagline on IMDb is a team of international astronauts is sent on a dangerous mission to reignite the dying Sun with a nuclear fission bomb in twenty fifty seven, which is already compelling, But I would further describe the experience of watching this film as like trying to watch two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey, Alien, and Solaris at the same time by flipping back and forth between TV channels. Indeed, the director names specifically those
three films as direct influences, and it shows. I think the film is plenty weird enough to be featured on Weird House. But it also, I think prompts a broader discussion of science fiction as a genre. Does it become more or less difficult to write hard sci fi as we as a global society learn more and more about
the world we inhabit and how it works? Will general public scientific literacy ever reach a point at which the average person will struggle to enjoy or engage with stories like this because of all the scientific liberties taken for the sake of the plot. Keep up the great work, Emily, Okay, I'll respond to both points. On the second point, If you know, increasing scientific literacy, I guess it's debatable whether that is really going on overall. I want to see
some information, some stats on that. But to the extent that is true, I don't know. I don't really see that causing much of a problem because I don't feel like, as in my life my personal scientific literacy increased, that made me less able to enjoy unrealistic science fiction. In fact, it's almost been exactly the opposite, Like the more kind of scientific literacy I've had throughout my life, kind of the more I've enjoyedid absurd nonsense and as you know,
the pseudoscience and sci fi plots. I don't know, it's you know, you can suspend disbelief, it's just fun.
Yeah, absolutely, I mean they're always going to have to suspend disbelief to some level with a science fiction motion picture, I think. I mean, I think even the more the hardest examples of sci fi you could point to, you're still you know, you still have to immerse yourself in the movie viewing experience and certain elements of the plot and and you know, certain conveniences of storytelling. So yeah,
I tend to not think that's the problem. I mean, there's probably a larger, more complex discussion to be had about the role science fiction could play in both increasing scientific literacy and also dulling it perhaps in some cases. And that's that's probably more you know, the danger as opposed to people, you know, losing out on appreciation for films that get it a little bit or a whole lot wrong. You know what.
There is though, an area where I can see this maybe being a problem, which is like a film that is trying to be hard sci fi, like it is going strongly for realism and fails at that, Like that can kind of be a problem. But as long as a film is just you know, committing to some kind of pseudoscientific absurdity, you know, Yeah, I don't care, that's fine. I think the problem is when it's insisting, no, this is real, this is really how the world is, and it's still getting it wrong.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean generally, I think a lot of sci fi are going to take those real things that are happening and just and use those as as a springboard to get into other fantastic ideas.
Yeah. Now, the other thing about Sunshine, I haven't seen this movie in a long time, but I remember liking it when it came out. Though. It's funny about the influences, so it's like two thousand and one Alien Solaris. I can see all of those influences in it, but in my memory definitely more in the first half because spoiler alert if you haven't seen this, doesn't it sort of turn into Friday the thirteenth in space in the second half, like it becomes a slasher movie.
Yeah, it goes a little bit of then Horizon Eate, which I remember. I think I saw this in the theater and I remember everyone was pretty excited for it because I mean, it's Danny Boyle and you know, he was riding really high at that point, could do no wrong. Alex Garland, you know, could do no wrong. A great cast, even outside of the people we've already mentioned here. Underworld worked on part of the music along with John Murphy.
So all these things were lining up, and then the movie itself is kind of a mess, kind of and you know, kind of just you know it is. The idea of switching channels definitely was part of the experience. So I remember being a little underwhelmed by it but finding it interesting. So in a way that makes it the perfect kind of film to discuss on weird House cinema.
Orbit of Mercury, Chainsaw Massacre.
Yeah. Yeah, Like there's a guy who goes nuts because he's like, I love staring at the sun.
Well, I liked that element, actually, I thought that was cool. So one of the themes of the movie is that, like as the ship gets closer to the sun, there's like a viewing deck I guess where you can see you can look at it with reduced intensity, and some people just get like hypnotized by it. It's almost like it's a you know, it's an ancient god and they become worshipers of it, and some become so obsessed with the sun god in front of them that they lose
their minds. I thought that was cool, but yeah, the slasher element, I thought, I don't know, Yeah, I'd watch it again. I mean it's been a long time, you know, most movies I watched like fifteen years ago. My opinion could be very different now.
Yeah. Yeah, so we'll have to put it on the list of potential films for Weird House for sure. All right, here's another one. This one comes from Anna. Hello, Robert, Joe, and JJ boy. There are a lot of j's and JJ's in this episode. Anna continues in your recent Weird House Cinema episode about the never Ending Story, you talked about a scene in the book where bast is in a bookshop. This brought back a very strong memory of
reading the book Matilda by Roald Dahl. Near the start of the book, she Matilda wants to escape her horrible family, and she finds refuge in the library. She sits for hours in the library reading books. Then one day the librarian tells her she can take books home. She can take as many as she likes. As long as she brings them back. This was a pivotal moment in her life.
This huge, magical world had opened up. I think part of the magic of the scene is also that someone has recognized her own sense of imagination and encouraged it, rather than try to suppress it like the other adults in her life. I remember when the movie came out. This is alluding to what the nineteen nineties adaptation. There's a wonderful new adaptation of the stage musical that my son is super into, and I've seen it twice already. It's great, But I also finally remember what the nineteen
nineties adaptation. Anyway, Anna rites, I remember when the movie came out. It seemed like a different story. There was some controversy because it was depicting supernatural themes. I was so surprised because I had completely forgotten about the parts of the book where she moves things about with her mind. The magic in the story of Matilda was always the
books and imagination, not the telekinesist stuff. The villains were the people who had lost their sense of imagination, people who had forgotten what it was like to be a kid. This was a common theme in the Doll Books. A lot of the books you were given as a kid felt like just some adult contriving a story in order to teach you a moral. But with the Doll Books, it was as if he was sharing a secret with us. Using funny words and using Quinton Blake's simple illustrations was
part of this. It felt like he was one of us. Okay, now a side note about childhood amnesia. One of my strong first memories is of putting on my own shoes. There was a feeling that if you had to put shoes on to do something, that meant it was important. Anyway, I should end this email now before I ramble on too much. Thanks Anna, Thanks Anna. It reminds me of the Simpsons when they go shoe shopping for a good, stiff church shoe. But also it's for doctor's appointments, piano recitals.
I don't remember all the other things, but yeah, you got to put him on for anything important.
But also, Anna, yes, this thing about the never Ending Story, I assume you're picking up on the things we were talking about in that episode where I think my comment was Strangely, what stuck with me most about the never Ending Story was the most fascinating to my imagination was actually not any of the fantasy stuff, but it was the book stuff. It was the scene in the bookshop where Bastion speaks with the guy about, you know, the
other books being safe in this book being dangerous. And then the scenes where he is hiding up in the attic, just hiding all day, where nobody can find him and he doesn't have to do what anybody else's teme telling him. He just gets to be alone and read.
Yeah. Yeah, really connecting with it was something that I think a lot of us can relate to in our childhoods Now, as far as Doll goes, yeah, this whole idea of kids essentially being at war with adults. This is a common theme in his work. You also see it in The Witches, which, by the way, I mean there was a nineteen ninety adaptation of The Witches, which of course was pretty fun, had Jim Henson. It was Jim Henson production, I believe, and Angelica Houston plays the
High Witch. A lot of people did not like the twenty twenty adaptation. This is one that was directed by Robert Zemeckis, and also the screenplay on that was at least partially by Gimmel del Toro and Anne Hathaway plays the High Witch. You know, this is very much a modern take on it with a lot of computer effects. But I thought this was pretty fabulous as well. I enjoyed it. I thought Anne Hathaway was amazing in it. I have room for two high Witches in my life.
Well, I haven't seen either one. Maybe this is one of those gaps. I will, I will, I will close once I'm watching movies with my daughter as she grows up.
Yeah, all right, we're gonna go ahead and close the mail bag there, But we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on anything were discussed in this episode of Listener Mail. Thoughts on recent episodes of anything that we're putting out in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed, let us know we'd love
to hear from you. Stuff to Blow Your Mind Listener Mail airs on Mondays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed, and you know the rest of the schedule Core episodes in Tuesdays and Thursday's Monster Factor Artifact on Wednesday, Weird House Cinema on Friday, and you know What's throwing a little rerun over the weekend.
Huge thanks as always to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com.
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