Zooier Than Thou
- Author TogglesHappyZoo
- Creation date
- Featured
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Thoughts About the Episode
It’s been a heck of a week! I had a great time at MFF, getting to see my good friends and meeting people at the zoo room parties, but I got the con crud from Hell. Thanks to some careful pre-planning, we got the episode out on time, despite me being knocked on my ass for two days during production week.
We knew that MFF and holiday travel were going to get in the way, so we planned light and got stuff done earlier than normal. Mike and I originally had a completely different topic planned, but our planning document has completely disappeared, and we couldn’t remember what it was in detail. Mike had the idea of having Ask Zooey letters for the holidays, and separately, Eggshell had the idea of holiday letters as well. Ask Zooey is a bit more involved, but I ran with the idea of holiday letters and asked a few people from different parts of the globe to write a holiday letter to a friend — could be any winter holiday, and any type of zooey relationship. Not everyone was able to get something in, but we got letters from England, Germany, and Australia, in addition to two we’d already had pre-written. I’d wanted to get more perspectives — other holidays, different non-euro, non-white perspectives, etc. — but I was pleased not everyone went with dog relationships — we got pigs and cats in the mix, too, which we never hear a lot about! And frankly, all the letters were just lovely, with reading performances to match. Even though this episode is really low-key, I think it’s just good audio and good storytelling. It should be nice. Way to go everyone who contributed <3
As a joke with her friends, Eggshell asked ChatGPT to write a Zooier Than Thou holiday episode. I thought it was silly enough to include in the episode. So yes, that’s a real ChatGPT response. Mike added the bit about two festive meals, though. The dog knows how to celebrate the holidays!
There’s not a lot to say this time! Things came together relatively smoothly. Here’s hoping we can close out the season with more of the same!
Happy Howlidays, friends! See you next year!
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What’s Christmas like where you’re from? Do you celebrate a different holiday? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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Thoughts About the Episode
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(written by Aqua)
It's only been two weeks since the last episode but for reasons we think should be obvious, it felt like two days. The rest was a blur while each of us processed events, took care of ourselves, and our nearest and dearest, and helped them do the same. We hope you have too in your own way. For now, there's no need to say anything more about that.
October is always a high effort production, so this month was a perfect chance to take another look at human-animal relationships in our traditional discussion format, and try to keep things simpler and lighter. This time we wanted to focus on society's awareness of working animals, the kinds of jobs we task them with, and the ways we honor them or ignore them. Working animals can fall anywhere on the continuum from irreplaceable partner to invisible and disposable, which is fraught with ethical and moral challenges.
By the end we had only just scratched the surface and were scrambling to look for a hopeful way to wrap up, and found a bit of a silver lining in the way humans honor (belatedly) a few animals with extremely difficult jobs who performed far beyond what was expected from them. From one perspective those honors are performative and phony, and just another example of anthropocentric thinking applied where it doesn't belong. But from another perspective, that recognition brings overdue and badly needed visibility to animals' lives with us. And you all know how we feel about visibility.
One area we did not discuss was animals in entertainment. This is well covered by Peter Singer in his book Animal Liberation, but there is another story happening right now that we invite you to listen to: The Good Whale, a 6-episode podcast looking back on Keiko's life as a captive orca, star of Free Willy, and what he meant to all the people lucky enough to be part of his life. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. -aqua
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Any animal jobs you think we missed? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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Thoughts About the Episode
Man, this month has kicked my ass. Between closing on a house and having to move in the middle of a production cycle, to my mom ending up in the hospital during production week, we’re lucky that this month we can just say, “Oh, we decided to put it out on Halloween since it’s the Halloween episode!”
So yeah, this was production hell for me, and I’m so glad to be finished, like you wouldn’t believe. It was hard to keep my head in the game, and I really just want to not do this again for a few months. Alas, December has to be finished before MFF, and everything sucks.
But I think this came out pretty well. Shout out to Brass Bulldog for giving a very nice performance, and for redoing lines over and over for meAnd also my friend who did Crispy did so friggin’ good I had to laugh while I was working on it. Also, Shiv released an album and let me use a track! Finally, check the show notes for a really great link about animal activism that I was thinking about while helping write the end of the episode. The rest is coming from the writer, Argus. Ciao!
(From the Eigen Ground Writer)
Hi. Writer for The Eigen Ground here.
Let me begin by saying I'm in a bit of an awkward position. I'm not part of the usual writer's space for Zooier Than Thou - I'm an outside contributor. So. I hope Toggle covers the stuff on that side of things so I can cover my side of things.
If that wasn't weird enough, I have to write this without having heard the episode yet. Which should be interesting enough.
This episode really starts with last year's Howloween, which in turn starts with the events of last year. Last year I couldn't write an episode because I was too depressed due to events in my personal life. Right as I was giving up on Eigen Ground making it in for Howloween, a script came in written by someone else that tried to put together The Eigen Ground concept with Welcome to Nightvale. The draft was sent to me, I sent feedback, and they decided that the direction and intent I have in mind for Eigen Ground isn't the direction and intent they had for the episode. And that's okay! The community got 2023's Howloween episode instead with its framing, and honestly, having seen the original draft, I think it worked better as a Welcome to Nightvale sort of thing.
The notes from that exchange left some material on the cutting room floor. Toggle and I had, to some extent, come up with a framing story where a convention goer would get stuck in the Eigen Ground and we'd track them through this zany experience in a Nightvale inspired space. I decided this year to pick that concept up, dust it off, and rework it.
You've not heard from me in two years on the podcast. I know that people seemed to appreciate "Eigen Ground: Come Out and Play,” which I'm grateful got to exist in an already stellar Howloween episode, back in 2022. It's hard to follow that one up. (It was inspired by a meme, of all things, at the last minute that year.) Oftentimes I feel bad because I don't do horny and I don't do humor - the two things that I think Zooier Than Thou skits often cover. But - then again - this is why I'm sort of relegated to writing a horror story as an ongoing commitment annually to the podcast.
The topics that I feel needed a sharp prod and surfacing are the last two years of events. I've been depressed and lost, sure - but there are also a lot of other people in the community that I've talked to along the way who have been feeling very lost, too. Events have taken strange turns several times, and it's often hard to know what or who to trust. Those conversations and the things that people who sit with me frequently and just talk greatly influenced this episode - to the extent that some of those conversations made it almost verbatim into the interrogation scene.
This episode won't be for everyone. I recognize that. It's not very funny, but it is sincere and heartfelt in what it tries to address. There were at least five sets of hands involved in writing it (I suspect more) as drafts were passed around, cleaned up, completely rewritten (almost an entire script on the cutting room floor this time! Not just a concept!), segments were cut, and other things abounding. The writing team worked hard on this. I worked hard on this. Many of my friends worked hard on this.
Hopefully it helps some of the hopeless feeling zoos out there, if they're still listening. And hopefully you enjoy the story.
I'll give just some brief notes about each segment and some questions I've already been passed here, for those interested.
"What is an Unspun Record? Why is that the title?" - In the first draft of this episode, Todd would have been in charge of the radio and spinning the dial for us. A radio station's DJ spins records; an unspun record must then be one that wasn't played by the DJ. (A very opaque play on words.) The title stuck, but oddly works better in this version of the script.
Disclaimer - I believe Toggle rescued this entire segment by rewriting it. Originally it was a reference to We're Back! (a movie about dinosaurs) While I'm sad to bid adieu to the nightmare fuel that is the Brain Drain, it is true that Monster House released roughly 18 years ago and that it is a horror movie.
Cold Open - How do you take over an entire episode and still play the Zooier Than Thou theme? This stumped me for a while, and the notation in the script is a mess here. ... Betty's Bestiality Brothel is a crowd favorite, and I'm no exception. Somewhere deep inside of a parallel universe there's a script based on that instead, I suppose. ... Dave's name wasn't originally "Dave.” Toggle approached me with a "We've got a problem" kind of message that required his name to be changed. I had been writing and making jokes about the robotic interaction between Todd and Dave before then. It fit together naturally through the magic of committing to an idea for lack of a better one being proposed and rolling with it to see where it goes. Although I do love Arthur C. Clarke, it was someone else who ultimately wrote the Dave/Hal jokes here. ... 950 - Dave's parking bay - is also the decimal value for lowercase zeta (the symbol generally used for zoophiles) in several text encodings.
A Troubled Bridge Over Water - This is inspired by a real world location, and a wall that I've actually walked in early Autumn after the seasonal droughts. It's also inspired by a Dungeons & Dragons session where the players had to cross a body of water and one of them (the "barbarian") crossed the water first with a rope to tie off to give the other players and advantage trying to cross the water. This "now it's not so secret" homage to those two things I think works well. ... Crispy is not based on anyone, I just liked the concept of calling someone "Crispy.” You're stuck with it now, the same way Toggle stuck me with the name Todd for The Eigen Ground's narrator in 2022's episode. ... The name, if anyone isn't familiar with classic rock or folk music, comes from "Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a song by Simon and Garfunkel. (A non-opaque play on words.)
Garage Mirage - Toggle wrote almost the entirety of this, I think. Originally I had written it with a crow falling out of the sky, but later discussions showed that neither of us was sure about crows despite a mutual love of corvids, so it had to be scrapped for something Toggle knew. By this time, I was in the midst of "yet another tragedy" in my life and pretty much read over it, said "it works as well as anything falling out of the sky", and told him to run with it. I think he did better than I did at writing the concept of this segment, but a later joke about "attempted murder in the desert" and a smooth segue to a raven joke for fans of 2000s animation gets lost.
Interrogation Seat - Originally, I wrote the script with no real conflict for Dave. He would just walk down this road, as Todd told him, and not encounter anything from the hayfield to the woods where he'd encounter the Samhain Ritual. This means that at some point, Dave would do his "everything feels hopeless" rant and it sort of came out of left field. That version of the script was left on the cutting room floor (almost an entire episode worth!) and recut into the episode you hear. ... Dave's two sort of longwinded things here - the "confession" and the "everything feels hopeless" bits - come from actual conversations I've had over the last two years and were both in the original script draft. (Much love to Mike the Dog for tolerating me well into 3 AM phone calls for things like this.) ... I don't feel like there's too much else to say about the script version here. It's largely recovered from the later scenes in the original script, and carries their intention well, I think. ... Oh, yes. Some explanation here. The dates are: December 1950, date on the first House of Mystery (modern home of John Constantine, originally a horror and suspense anthology series); October 1959, debut of The Twilight Zone (which greatly inspired Todd's character and is another anthology series); September 1963, debut of The Outer Limits (another anthology series); April 1977, debut of Heavy Metal Magazine (an anthology magazine generally best known for the movie and Taarna's stories); October 1981, the release of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (a book full of nightmare fuel for countless schoolchildren, I'm sure); August 1992, debut of Are You Afraid of the Dark? (Nickelodeon's horror anthology series for children and an influence on I believe 2022's Howloween episode); June 2003, debut of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy (a very weird, horror-esque cartoon series full of bad ends). A reference to Sir Raven, the recurring storyteller from Billy and Mandy, immediately follows the last date.
Into the Nexus - We needed a small bridge piece between the emails and the Samhain Ritual. I forget what I originally wrote here (other than Dave sneaking up on a gathering in the woods in the original script), but the version here was almost blow for blow lifted from 2023's Howloween segment for entering the Nexus at Toggle's direction. It was apparently so well done it saw no major edits, so I'm sort of proud of that.
Returning Home - If the community loves this story enough, I am open to writing longer form ones in the future, but not for at least a few years. I have often complained that I have taken over the show or nearly done so incidentally, and I never submit a eulogy alongside my segments because I want other people to have their time. I am perfectly content trying to come up with one half-hour-at-most story I believe in and writing that for each Howloween. Maybe we'll revisit the "Bright Future" timeline at some point and show that world? I've been itching at it some. ... The "vegan fast food" was changed somewhere along the way to avoid mentioning a specific restaurant chain with a specific mostly-vegan burger on the menu that I'm quite fond of. ... As I recall, Toggle wanted to shout out efforts fighting against cockfighting rings, and I suspect he wrote that line. You should thank him; the original script section there mentioned something far, far worse that I've heard along the way in the last two years, with far less hope involved for people to do something themselves about it. ... The "lesson line" for The Eigen Ground was at least initially written by Toggle. Geez, I think he's written every single one so far, or at least edited them to be better. ... My notes have things he's supposed to do in the episode credits, so hopefully he does that. ... We are not trying to tell you to adopt late life shelter pets (although they do need it and you could!) and we aren't trying to tell you to fight against cockfighting rings (although it is something you could do). It's literally just two things you could maybe do to help animals. The real intended takeaway here is: if you are lost in the zoo community's happenings, ignore the human aspects and just do something for animals. The politics and everything are a waste of time if we don't just do things for animals along the way. "Do good recklessly" and all that.
BUT WAIT, THERE's MORE!
Brush Ratpaw - I used to listen to Alex Jones, in passing, from time to time, on Fox News. This was in the mid-aughts, when he wasn't considered a total lunatic yet, before Sandy Hook and all the things that followed for him. Brush is greatly influenced by Jones somewhere between there and the InfoWars era of his career, and is named loosely after Rush Limbaugh, who sort of precedes Jones in that general space. ... This segment was written in collaboration with Chocobo13, who agreed both to be directly mentioned and made it his darling when asked for help. If cat lovers appreciate this, you should mostly appreciate Chocobo13, as I'm not a cat lover - I just took his scattered notes and arranged them into a Jones-esque rant.
The Glory of Dog - Charles Coughlin was before my time, and this isn't at all about him, but it felt like a strong play on words to change his name to "Charles Doglin" for the sake of the bit. ... This segment I wrote pretty much entirely alone, with a proofreading by Chocobo13 to fix pronouns from object to person in addressing non-humans, and that still had one slip to the eleventh hour when I was patching up the script for final copy. ... Hug your dogs for me, okay? Or your cats, or whatever.
War of the Wools - The famous broadcast production of War of the Worlds, featuring Orson Welles, changed the landscape of radio after it incited a mass panic. This joke entirely relies on that and the following question: "What did the alien sheep say?" ... They can't all be winners. Hopefully it's at least a good presentation of the joke. (And, yes, this one is entirely my writing and by extension my fault.)
Zoovale - This concept is actually Toggle's. I think he almost completely rewrote the original version of this. Ah, well. Any time I write a line for Toggle the Rat as a character, I go to pains to admit it's just a suggestion, so I'm glad he wrote something he was comfortable saying. ... "Who is Argus?", I hear you shouting furiously at the radio, "and what's the cut segment?" ... Perhaps that will get off the ground in a later year ... Just kidding! ... For several years now I've had a second series concept that would be my stab at comedy, called Ratman. Ratman would tell a fictionalized version of the events from just before the Zoosadist Leaks to today. Featuring Toggle the Rat as Ratman (played up as an airheaded superhero) and his faithful house servant Argus. ... I will eventually get it off the ground, but the research load is heavy to do something like that in parts equally funny and correct, and I've been bogged down in our history and how convoluted it really gets in that span, trying hard to filter the noise and get at what really happened and when. ... Anyway, the cut segment was just a Ratman Movie Commercial. I've been wanting to do some sort of soft pilot for the concept just to gauge if it elicits any strong reaction from anyone not in the rogue's gallery for our intrepid hero. Things have gotten a little weird in recent history, and Toggle was somewhere between "I don't want to poke current events with a stick" and "I don't think this concept works without a chance to actually get the joke first in a full length skit.” So it was scrapped at his request before it was even past the pitch stage. ... Argus's character is meant to be the dry, "you have to know this is kind of messed up, right?" ongoing voice of reason in the series, so of course he'd be the narrator when one is needed there. ... I could talk on and on about snippets that are already written but I think I'll cut chattering about that concept here and hope I make it see the light of day before too long.
Gill's Human Diet - Did this one get cut? [Toggle’s note: Yes.] This concept was great, I think, and I'll die on that hill: human food designed by fish, sold like we sell pet food. The execution, however, is so finicky and it's so hard to write, and I'm not proud of it. At the last draft exchange, Toggle expressed a simple "not getting it,” I expressed "yeah, it requires oddly specific knowledge and isn't working,” and I'm not sure if it made the cut because I'm writing this without hearing the episode. ... Look up a Hill's Science Diet commercial. ... Not my best. Probably my worst. ... Entirely my fault.
Numbers [Secret Decoder Ring] - "Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine!" ... Okay, now that someone said it, this is actually solvable. You'll probably need a sheet of paper. But full warning - it was greatly inspired by the scene in A Christmas Story, and it's not much of a payoff. I just wanted one that actually could be decoded, and went for the shortest reasonable message I could think of. ... It's hard to remember now but old radio shows did have kids clubs and the like, and they'd have little bonuses like this in them. This was thrown in here both as a love letter to radio's golden era and for "one more distinct segment" for the episode. ... "The numbers Mason - what do they mean?!?" (You're welcome.) [Toggle’s Note: I laughed at the Christmas Story reference, but I decided to change it to something different at the very last minute. Get out your decoder rings!]
Temple Grandin - I have a copy of her autobiography on my "favorites shelf,” picked up one day secondhand from a library's pull pile because she was autistic and I was curious. She's certainly a bit out there, but she does generally mean well in that pragmatic sense. Anyway, this is written based on memory of what she said and wrote. I'm pretty sure this one is entirely my fault, and I'm shocked it passed the approvals process for Zooier Than Thou skits. ... The punchline felt mandatory with how people would be going "but isn't this a podcast..?" while the DJ's waiting on calls. ... I won't lecture you on the merits of doing what we can and still working towards veganism, I just felt Temple Grandin was a person worth knowing the existence of for zoos and autistic people alike.
Emails - I did provide the premise pitch, but Toggle wrote that because I was too afraid to touch it. I don't know anything about it. [Toggle’s Note: This is Tabby Talks. These were real emails!]
Anything else - I did encourage any send-ins to be randomly flipped to, as well as any songs and such. So. I don't know if they exist, but if they do, that has nothing to do with me, and I can't tell you anything about their production or history, sorry.
FINAL THOUGHTS
"Radio, someone still loves you." ~ Queen, "Radio Ga Ga"
I hope you enjoy this journey through snatches of the golden age of radio and this journey through the doubts and fears we're often not talking about that I felt needed a moment in the light.
Please - hug your companions.
Every day.
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Is there someone you were thinking about during the Samhain ritual who’s special to you? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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Thoughts About the Episode
(From Mike the Dog)
I could have been on vacation! I guess, in a way, I take a thousand little vacations that allow me to reflect on things and plan all this stuff out. In a real way, good work can be its own reward, enough to keep us going for a few years. But I also think that it's unavoidable that we'll eventually take on enough responsibilities to fill our free time, and that we'll have a harder and harder time to manage those same responsibilities as we burn out.
There's a bit of an art to a proper vacation. It's easy to lose yourself in some online dopamine loop while trying to convince yourself that you're doing something else you wanted to do. As a rule, I try to avoid movies or any "catching up" if I'm taking a real break. You get the hang of it after a while, recognising what activities feel refreshing and which feel like they're distracting you.
When you get good at it, you can work for a while in "steady state", where you are meeting your needs in the moment as they arise, almost like long-distance marathon running. It's not the same as a flat-out sprint, but still has some challenges, some things to plan around. Did you know your heart never stops beating until you're dead? And yet, it actually spends most of your life resting. There's a careful balance to that sort of work, a kind of poetry that describes how two halves can make a whole.
I was lucky enough to get both Sigma as cohost and Akitoe as a guest. Both have been around for a very long time and have managed to keep their toes in even if they've stepped away for a while. As someone who jumped in full-force and started running half the community's infrastructure, it's neat to hear from people who reduced their workload in response to stressors. I think there's a recognition there about what's really important. Akitoe is still recording Zoo & Me, and Sigma has remained in both the Telegram group and the Mastadon server she created. We keep some responsibilities close to our hearts, and then we rest up a little so we can come back to other things. I myself haven't hosted a Zooier Than Thou episode for a while, and I appreciate the time I could take away from recording because there are also others to do it.
We ended up pretty lucky around the recording timeline. I'd written most of the notes for this topic a couple years ago, and so once I got Sigma and Akitoe it was simply a matter of booking a couple recording sessions. Easy peasy! We usually take the week after each full moon as a bit of time off, and I've been mindful about how much I appreciated that time, and the extra time I took during the writing and recording weeks.
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Are you on vacation right now? Have you been active in reading studies and engaging in debates for several years now without burning out? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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Thoughts About the Episode
Man, this was kind of a weird production cycle, but in a good way. I guess I’ll try to go chronologically sort of? We’ll see how this ends up.
I had the idea for the chorus for the Kiss Me Kabar song back in October of last year or so, and I’d jotted down a few notes for some lyrics, but I never really had time to touch it again in earnest until July. I’d done some guitar sketches, and I knew I wanted to go for a Father of All Motherfuckers sort of vibe, and I finally started recording a week before production actually started.
One of my favorite things about this song is that I went to like 15 different people and asked, “Do you wanna participate in a chorus chant about how we wanna fuck the bear from Baldur’s Gate 3?” And the response from basically everyone was, “FUCK YES!” Not even just zoos — some regular furries, too! So there’s a ton of people’s voice melding together during the chorus. In the end, it sounds very unified, but it doesn’t actually sound like any one of the individuals who contributed, so that’s neat! Konny let me know Cookie was getting onto him for belting out the lyrics in their apartment x3 Sorry Cookie!
I brought my original lyrics to Kynophile to get his input. He gave me a rewrite of the lyrics, but they didn’t quite fit the melody I was working with. However, I had to admit a number of his suggestions just made more sense, so I revamped the lyrics with his ideas in mind. One line I really liked, about teeth clicking together as they shove their tongue down your throat, got cut in favor of a more digestible line about their heavy weight making it hard to breathe — it’s kind of an intense song x3 Unfortunately, Kyno couldn’t provide vocals this time around, and I’d written the falsetto stuff with him in mind. I think I managed to pull it off OK for now, but I’d love to get a version with him singing when we release it on Spotify.
As I was starting to jump into production, Steeeve messaged me and was like, “Can you please use real drums in this song?” And to me, I was like, that is an impossible request, delivered as if I could just easily and casually meet that request. Drummers are hard to find as it is, let alone drummers who have a recording set up and are also cool with participating in zoo music. So I said, “If you find someone who can play drums and has all the equipment to record them, let me know,” expecting that to be the end of it. Eventually Steeeve came back with some musicians on Fiverr, and I was like… I don’t think this will work — asking a professional musician to play music for our song about fucking a bear seems like a bad idea. But there was one option that specified we’d have all commercial rights to the recording, so I said, “OK, why not?” The next problem is that I don’t know how to MIX actual, live drums, so I had to figure that out really quickly. I kind of hacked and slashed my way through getting them to sound good, but I think I managed to make it happen!
As for the episode concept, we knew we wanted to do late night radio for the next radio session, but what I had in mind originally was very different, and had The Stallion featuring extensively. Sometime a few months back, Eggshell pitched an entire script for this episode to me, but it was during an off-month, and I didn’t really have time to go over it, but I was skeptical about what had been described — something with Will and Akito doing the hosting, and Amoronauts taking over the Dear Non-Zoos segment. I kept tryin’ to go back and read the script, but I just didn’t have the time for it until it was time to do the thing.
So I got Eggy and Aqua in a room and we discussed the episode, even though me and Aqua were blind going into it. My first glance over the script, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but Eggshell had provided some reference material — Some Adult Swim bumps, a radio show from the 80’s with They Might Be Giants, and most notably, an archive of the esoteric, 90’s, late night BBC1 radio show Blue Jam.
Aqua seemed a little relieved not to have to do his typical Dear Non-Zoos segment, but he wanted to make sure it made sense for his character. Eggshell originally pitched it just as Amoronauts taking over the show, but Aqua had the idea of them actually stealing it from him against his will, and it actually sounded pretty entertaining. Through the course of this conversation, Eggshell mentioned that she didn’t really get the Dear Non-Zoos thing, and that actual Non-Zoos she’d had listen to the program objected to a lot of what was said. But I think it’s largely because — just like her script didn’t make a lot of sense without the context of Blue Jam to us — our segment didn’t make a lot of sense to her because she wasn’t familiar with the source material, Dear White People, so the purpose and the meaning was lost on her. Maybe it’s lost on a number of people. And maybe this episode is, too. But that’s always a risk, I guess.
So I was sitting at the car shop listening to the first couple of episodes of Blue Jam, and the whole thing finally started to make sense. If you haven’t heard it, it’s free on Archive.org, and it’s pretty neat. Some of the sketches are a little uncomfortable, and a lot of them push the boundaries of what censors would allow to air, but the dark, abstract prose set to downtempo beats was particularly interesting to me. You’ll even notice there are recurring doctor sketches that are all super bizarre, so I thought the weird Furry Hospital sketch felt apropos.
Once I had that context, I got back together with Eggshell and we hashed out the episode. There was already some bits of prose and some off-the-wall sketches in the original episode, and a lot of it made the final cut, but I wanted to add some introductory prose that would take audio elements from the songs themselves and lead directly into the tracks. We felt that Creatures of a Shared Taste, which was already in the script, would flow nicely into Zipwok’s Paw Pads. I drafted up some stuff for the other songs and we refined them. Otherwise, it really was like we were just finding things we liked or thought were funny and adding them in. Going through the script, I noticed a lot of instances of the ABCs being referenced — in two interstitials AND in Paw Pads — and I remembered that someone had sent in Zooey ABCs as an email and shared it with Egg, and that found it’s way into the episode. Eggshell had recorded herself playing the Fuck the Bear chorus on Guitar to prep for recording her contribution to the track, and it ended up kind of sounding a little like Dead Kennedys, so we threw that in there. The friend I got to do Sprank Lookmangger had this thing at the end where he went, “How’s that motherfucker?” and made a bunch of weird noises into the microphone, and that ONLY got cut because I thought it would be too jarring once I tried to fit it in. Aqua read the couch-humping dog sketch and was like, “It would be such a missed opportunity not to reference JD Vance’s couch fucking meme,” so random things like that got added. That’s a great moment for that sketch imo, that dark break from the happy-go-lucky music makes me laugh every time.
All of OUR writing was done on time, which was a huge boon, and Amoronauts got her writing to us in enough time we were able to get some tweaks to Aqua’s lines and refine a couple of spots. Generally speaking, everything came together about right on time, even the stuff that came in late, and that was super helpful.
Amoronauts didn’t want to perform the Dear Non-Zoos segment, and in fact wrote the character as someone separate from herself. AI came in handy here, cuz I couldn’t find someone to play the part quickly enough. So yeah, Pearl is just me, filtered through an AI voice. I liked that we get some dolphin zoo representation for once, to break up the significant amount of dog-based content we put out. Dogs are great, but every time Eggshell gives me an episode, I’m like, “Man… it’s just all dogs!” X3 Still don’t have anyone to write horse content for us, still open to this!
I had an idea that we should just have Brad talking over some psychedelic music, and it would be like they’d taken a recording of him calling into WZOO and set it to a track, and there’d be someone going, “Uh huh…. MmHmm…” like they were waiting for him to get off the phone. It seemed like the right vibe, so I pitched it to Lovecat, and he came back with this trippy story about coyote, and I thought, “Well, this isn’t random rambling, it’s a whole story,” and I happened to find a track that fit almost exactly the length I needed, with a trippy introductory speech to boot, so I just did the whole thing. Turned out pretty well.
The Stallion was as awesome as ever. He gave me a date he was available, and we were able to get everything to him in time. I gave him a sample of how I’d deliver The Bear, and he was like, “You just want me to fuck you with my voice, don’t you?” And I was like, “Basically.” That was the first audio I completed, and when he heard it back to back with the song, he was like, “This needs to be released somewhere on its own.” And now it has been, on SoFurry and Inkbunny! FurAffinity pending because of the hack.
Shiv actually sent us several tracks to choose from, and all of them were good, but I liked the guitar riff and the general tone of the song as a contrast for other silliness in the episode. I got Shiv to send me stems for their track and grabbed the section with their guitars going back and forth, distorted them, and stretched them out… and I took the organ for their chorus and washed it out in reverb, and set the performance of Voiceless, Invisible over top of it, and that turned out really well. Shout out to the person who performed it, and also all our other performers for coming together and putting on this weird show x3
For Creatures of a Shared Taste, it was a lot longer, so I blended three downtempo songs together, and then got Zip to send me some instrumental versions of Paw Pads that I could loop underneath the ending to lead into his song. I’d noticed during Blue Jam they’d use a loop of the beginning of REM’s Tongue a lot in the first couple of episodes, so I wanted to play with that idea. Also, Paw Pads is such a banger for real. I listened to it on repeat for a while.
I asked Rave Pup if they wanted to contribute to the episode, and they asked for a general vibe they should be going for. I sent them the Puppy Steps prose, and they thought it was very touching and kept that in mind while writing their piece. Gotta say, they work pretty fast and produce some really incredible work. They were like, “I hope this isn’t too weird,” and I was like, “No, this is fucking beautiful, are you kidding me?” They weren’t able to send me stems, so I found an ambient track I thought would fit. When I tried to fit them together, I realized they were jumping a tritone from the end of one track to the beginning of the next, and it was jarring, so I bumped the tuning up a whole step for the stock track, and it fit like a glove. Later, playing it on loop, I realized the segment ends and begins on the exact same chord, which is a neat coincidence!
We got this episode out on time, which is a nice change of pace, and I even had enough time to personally go over the transcript and make sure it was 100% correct. In doing so, I realized right at the end we’d messed up a few things. There were audio cues in the Multilingual skit (Lost in Translation in the chapter markers) that I’d completely missed, but I liked them, so I went back and added in animal noises with lots of reverb and panning. I added some other sound effects to other places last minute, too, but things like The Stallion saying “midnight hour” instead of “3AM hour” just had to stay. No way around it. I was really aiming for an hour and a half to an hour 45, but an hour 50 was fine, considering some content got a bit extended like Brad’s skit.
Shout out to Zooey for appearing in our intro, as well as Konny, Cookie, and Brass, and thanks to Akito for helping host. Mike the Dog as Spot makes me laugh a LOT, and Sprank Lookmangger’s yooper accent is hilarious. Thanks to LC for being available to record last minute corrections to his lines. Major shout out to Ryder, who spent like two days on a tight timeline before going on a business trip making my life easier. Production was really a breeze with everything arranged ahead of time. Considering how much went into this episode, the fact that it came together so easily is impressive.
I gotta say, I’m loving the one-month-on, one-month-off thing. I really came into this energized and ready to go, and I’m looking forward to an entire month off next month before Howloween. My husband seems a lot happier, too. Ultimately, I think my goal is to get everyone to a point where they can do this all on their own, even the tough stuff like skits. I don’t think I wanna still be doing this when I’m 40 x3 but I do want it to continue, and to be excellent, and to maintain its compass well after I move on to other projects. A bit of a tall order — everything tends to decline after some point, and not everyone is going to have the same vision as I do for the direction of the podcast. But I think the real key to longevity is going to be continuing to get fresh perspectives. Even if production values slide, good content is good content, and we have so many tools at our disposal now to create good stuff. We all just need to know how to use them! Three things I want to maintain: positive zoo perspectives while being unafraid to look honestly at actual issues the community faces, a focus on animal rights and animal welfare, and important community things like the Samhain ritual that bring us together and give us catharsis. That’s what I’m thinking in this moment, anyway. Hard to imagine letting go and not steering the ship, but I should eventually be able to pass on the title of captain for this vessel and trust that it will stay afloat. Arrrr!
Anyway, my dog is pleading for my attention, so that’s all for now!
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Do you wanna fuck the bear? Do you have a favorite sketch from this really weird episode? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.youtu.be
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Thoughts About the Episode
Eggshell here! With another not-Toggle episode overlapping with that Zoo Pride time of year, it was time for some zoos who are NOT named Toggle to gather around and mostly just chat. Listening to the other zoo pride episodes, they have been largely conversational, along with a produced segment in the middle that has a variety of zoo voices talking about what it means to have pride in being a zoo.
Tarro, Lovecat, Ryder, and myself had a planning meeting for the episode, and figured out who would be hosting, the kinds of conversational topics we might want to cover, and what our produced segment would be. For topics, Tarro wanted to have a theme of discussing how zoosexuality intersects with other forms of being queer. For the segment, I suggested doing a produced, casted version of an article I’d written for ZDP recently, that takes place in a world where zoosexuality is normalized: I thought that the article was well received by readers, and that it might be good, related to pride, to show a world where zoo pride is fully integrated throughout mainstream culture. Plus it would get a variety of voices in there, like previous Zoo Pride episodes.
Production was a mess on this one. Without any explicit person at the helm with this episode to make sure everyone was on the same page and on task, the team was behind the schedule that we try to shoot for. A big part of the problem is we didn’t keep good track of where tasks were at: Has a script for the skit been written or not? Has this voice actor recorded their lines, yes, no, yes but didn’t upload them yet, yes but someone else has them? The day before the episode was set to go up, I was sitting on a couch kitty-corner with Toggle as he was looking at our team’s progress tracking tool. Seeing from his perspective how it’s a mystery how much has been done on the episode if it’s not in that tool, really highlighted to me why it’s a problem to just keep track of things by mentioning them in an ongoing group chat or individual dm’s.
But, we got there! And now Zoo Pride and also Christmas and Halloween and New Year’s Eve are saved forever, I think. Shout out to our special guest Canidae, who has been a sunbeam in the community and an excellent pick out of all the actual hundreds of zoos Tarro could have chosen to invite. Thanks for coming on Canidae!
Zoo Pride Saves Lives! Zoo Pride World Wide!
We’ll see you in the next episode, where we will be returning to the high seas. Arrrrrrf.
Or, uh. Arrrrrrg.
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Is there anything you want to say about zoo pride that we missed? How do you predict that zoos will fit within the picture of LGBTQIA+ going forward? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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S6E4 Media Mastery 2024
Subscribe to the podcast at rss.zoo.wtfSubscribe to bonus content at bonus.zoo.wtfFollow us on twitter:@ZooierThanThou@OneBigGrumpyRat@ACatWhoLovesYou@CanisG...youtu.be
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Thoughts About the Episode
Alrighty, let’s see! So, it’s been an eventful couple of months! Originally we were going to try to reschedule our Aella Girl interview for this episode, but we couldn’t get back in touch, so we decided to put something together based on some stuff that’s been going on for the past couple of months. Some of it we can’t really talk about at the moment, but some of it you probably already know about, like the excellent Taboo Science episode on Zoophilia that we got to participate in. I won’t go into detail here since we basically lay it out in the episode, but I will say that Ashley was empathetic and totally “got it.” Like, I’d struggle to get something out and she’d just be like, “So in other words, (exactly what I wanted to say but more succinct and impactful).” One amazing moment that didn’t make it into the episode: at some point, she said, “It’s interesting to me how much of what you say sounds exactly like my sister,” who happens to be an ALF-style animal rights activist. That was really cool to hear! It made me feel like we’re on the right track with our message and our core beliefs as a podcast.
So I pitched the idea of a “media mastery” redux to Aqua, who agreed that it seemed like a good idea, and we pulled Tarro and Eggshell on board to help with planning. Eggshell wanted to frame it with three acts of skits, but I cut the middle one cuz it didn’t end up fitting with what we talked about. Tarro’s been helping keep things organized for the months that I’m not working, so grateful for their help, for sure. Plus, with the magazine currently informing AI search models about zoophilia, we felt that was a pretty impressive accomplishment, even if AI models are, as Aqua said, recommending that you put glue on your pizza to keep the cheese attached. They may be shoddy, but people do use these tools.
Eggshell had a couple of other skits she pitched for the episode, but I actually found the Office Gods sketch in our backlog and thought it was hilarious. It apparently came from a conversation with Brass Bulldog where he’d left a conversation and then returned and said “Welcome back.” Thus, “Welcome back to my presence!” Very silly! I got my non-zoo friend to deliver Asmononoth’s lines, and I gotta say, every time I hear him rumble out, “I will peer into the mind of allllll…….. goats,” I die laughing.
Otherwise, man, production week could not have fallen on a worse week this month. I had like 5 different important events and deadlines all falling on the same week, and there was just no way to get the podcast out on time without taking off work, and I couldn’t afford to this past week. So, a little late, but not bad.
Shout out to Ryder for making my life easier, and Tarro for helping keep the ship running, and Aqua for their valuable insight as always.
Oh, one more thing. During the topic, we recounted talking with RT and trying to take the bullets out of what we knew would be a hit piece. I went back after recording the episode to look it up, and it is so much worse than I remembered. Like, I swore they totally changed the title of the piece, but Wayback Machine suggests it’s always been the same, and I don’t know how I wouldn’t remember a title like “Disgusting Perverts or just Misunderstood?” Can’t go back and change the past, but definitely would not have participated in that whole thing if it happened today. Fortunately, it doesn’t appear that the article ever really found legs — at the very least, I never hear about it. Anyway, don’t look it up, it’s garbage, and I totally get why our writer who left was super pissed about it. We did learn a valuable lesson, though, as we said in our episode, and that is: we don’t have to settle for tabloid trash to tell our stories in the media. Maybe we never did. So be choosey if you have the choice — there will always be another opportunity.
Oh, also! I finally started posting in these Zoophilia telegram channels that ZT bequeathed me, but I really, really need content. Take a look at any of these channels — they’re identical. If you have stuff you think would be relevant, give us an email.
@zoophilia
@zoophiles
@bestiality
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Have you ever had an encounter with the media? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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S6E3 Raising the Discourse
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Thoughts About the Episode
Lovecat here! So this episode was Toggle's first hands-off episode, with planning and editing left to the rest of the team, and it was a mixed success. It's easy to overlook certain elements when the most experienced person on the team isn't managing production directly, and we were just about to sit down to record when we realized we hadn't typed up an intro and outro. Oops.
I inadvertently volunteered to head the episode by suggesting the theme after taking a look at zoo twitter for the first time in 7 or 8 months and not much caring for what I saw. A lot of new faces which is nice but also a lot of simplistic and troll baiting content.
The idea behind this episode was to gently encourage the community to think about how to better use our publicly accessible online activities to serve the wellbeing of animals and zoos, and to suggest some ways of doing that. In that goal I can't say we succeeded to the degree I had hoped. Even though I suggested the theme my own ideas on how to treat of it were limited and I couldn't seem to get on the same page with the other contributors. We all thought in very different directions on the subject and it was difficult to wrangle all of our approaches into something coherent. In the end I was happy with the coherency of the discussion though I still wish we'd been able to suggest more concrete actions for folks to consider. If you thought of something in that vein while listening to the episode don't hesitate to email us about it! Learning from within the community is invaluable, and the next time we pause and take stock of how we're doing we'll hopefully have developed a more insightful view and suite of tools to share.
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Got any tips for raising the zoo discourse? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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S6E2 ZooTTin' the Breeze
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Thoughts About the Episode
After the last major effort episode, we knew we needed to take it easy for a month. After all, we’ve done 7 major-effort episodes in a row! A lot of that is because we did 6 hiatus episodes to start off season 5, but back to back to back is a lot of work!
We got together and talked a little bit about how we wanted to format the episode, I gathered up emails, and we recorded it. There’s not a lot to say about the process, this time, because it was super straight-forward.
Lovecat and Eggshell did put together a very cute skit, though! Apparently there were originally more singing parts, but they got cut. Normally for a song section, I’d write the song first and then have someone sing over it, but in this more low-effort episode situation, I just let Kynophile sing and then made a quick music track to go with it. With a bit more time, I probably could have made it better, but it got the point across for the skit, and that’s really what mattered. Lovecat gave us a reference of a song from Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and Kynophile really nailed it, to be honest! Also, lest we fail to mention the return of Zooey as Deyna in the skit! I’m certain she’s a welcome voice for a lot of listeners. Zooey is hoping to get back to being more involved, but to what extent, we’ll have to see!
And I say we’ll have to see because as I announced in the episode, my husband has asked very directly that I cut back how much I’m working on the podcast. Most of the planning time I’ve spent for this episode was in working with the team to come up with a viable plan, and the introduction of someone who can act as project manager made it possible for me to step away every other episode without stopping production. In addition to actually putting things together, one of my biggest roles — and biggest time sinks! — is wrangling people together and making sure things are done more or less on time. Now that there’s someone who can do production and someone who can wrangle, all I’m needed for every month is putting the pieces together and uploading it! Maybe I’ll even get folks to do their own blogs for each episode. That could be cool!
But this also means that higher-effort aspects of each episode, like skits, aren’t really possible yet, as they require our co-producer to purchase and learn new software. If you’re someone who likes to count, the timing of my episodes coincides with the radio episodes for the past couple of years, Howloween, and Christmas, which is apropos given this fact.
So, we’ll see how this plays out! Maybe next month, instead of hearing from Toggle, you’ll hear from Lovecat!
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How about you? Do you like the way animals smell? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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S6E1 Tackling Taboos: A Guide to Zoo Research
Subscribe to the podcast at rss.zoo.wtfSubscribe to bonus content at bonus.zoo.wtfFollow us on twitter:@ZooierThanThou@OneBigGrumpyRatAqua_Zeta00:00:00 - Dis...youtu.be
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Thoughts About the Episode
Oh man, I’m exhausted. After this episode was finally finished, I totally crashed for like 12 hours. But what a fucking exciting episode to be able to work on! We got two researchers to allow us to interview them about their research, and we also got Aella Girl to agree to an interview, though it seems our schedules didn’t really line up. I don’t think we would have been able to handle working another interview into this piece. It came out to be exactly the right length.
Unfortunately, as it is every time we do a big episode like this one, we really cut it down to the wire. So much down to the wire it was released about six hours later than I wanted to release it. I cannot stress how helpful my production assistant was for this episode. I would NOT have been able to get this done without them. They were able to take about 8 hours of work off my plate, which was a huge relief, especially with how last minute the final audio came in. Total lifesaver.
So let’s talk about it!
Aqua’s been wanting to do this research episode for some time. I think this was one of the earliest planned episodes, originally slotted for January, but moved because we wanted to do Enshittification and allow some extra time to focus on the content for this episode. FurScience released their 10 year retrospective in January, which allowed us to reframe our critique. An early draft title was The Problem with FurScience, but it was always intended to be more of an exploration of research in general. Even so, diving into the actual literature allowed us to be a lot more nuanced with the critique than just calling them a “problem.” Because they’re not. They’re doing their best. It’s just not hitting the mark when it comes to zoos.
We tried to pull Eggshell into the writing on this episode, and while they did contribute, it was clear this format of episode wasn’t their comfort zone when it came to writing. They did several passes at an introduction as the actual narrative came together, and the last one was influenced by how they felt filling out the most recent zoo survey.
As we planned, we decided we’d try our luck and see if we could get Dr. Zidenberg and someone from the Sigmund Freud University research team, as well as a few other folks. Aim high and see what happens! In the end, we were able to get the input from everyone we asked, even if they didn’t actually get interviewed themselves, which was super encouraging! Tugs from Fur What It’s Worth and Ashley Hamer from Taboo Science both granted us permission to use clips from their podcasts as well. It really feels like we’ve established some sense of legitimacy over the years to have the privilege of all of these people helping us put this episode together! It made making this episode really invigorating!
ZT mentioned to us that doing an interview with him about the research team was coming at a very apropos time. We didn’t know at the time it’s because he was announcing his retirement. Just remembering as I type this that I’ve been entrusted with some potentially important assets that I need to figure out how to put to good use. So much to do, not nearly enough time |3
It’s worth noting that we chose NOT to ask someone from FurScience to join us. I actually invited Nuka to join us on the Furry Fandom episode back in 2020, but he declined. As we mentioned in our episode, we get the sense that they want to keep their distance from this topic, so in leaving them out, we tried to be very fair and give them credit where it was due.
The interviews went great, and I’m planning to release them pretty soon. It’s crazy how many great, quotable lines they gave us without us prompting, like Dr. Stetina’s line about talking to the right people. Lots of moments in those interviews where I was just thinking, “Yes! That’s perfect!”
Writing the episode wasn’t all that hard, but finding the executive function to get it done came very very late, like during production week late. We knew recording wouldn’t take very long, but we definitely didn’t mean to get started on that part so late. Fortunately, both our researchers approved of the script without any changes or revisions on their parts. After my production assistant cleaned up the interviews, I went through each one and highlighted all of the parts I thought I might light to quote and got a sense of how I wanted to organize the script. Our original notes covered a shit-ton of topics, but we decided to streamline the talking points to three primary points: Trust, Motivation, and Credibility. As I wrote, I kept note of all the papers I was referencing so I could put together a bibliography. We wanted to show what kind of barriers there were for researchers in researching zoophiles, address some of the reasons these surveys sometimes sound tone-deaf, and show how these researchers in particular were actively collaborating with the zoo community. We also wanted to explore WHY they were given the access they were given, to show what’s important to us as zoos and to help legitimize the work they were doing. I’m hopeful that other research teams will be able to listen to this and understand how important displaying credibility, earning trust, and having the right motives are for interfacing with our community.
FurScience was Aqua’s section to write. We went over it together over the course of several conversations, and I definitely helped as a sounding board and as someone who could edit his criticisms down to something manageable, but they were the driving force and primary writer. You might actually be able to hear a voice shift between our sections, if you listen hard enough. In putting together the FurScience section, we did our homework to make sure what we wanted to say was backed up in the literature — though we did have to issue a small correction a day after release for something we missed — and we did find that some of our harsher criticisms about their work weren’t quite supported by the text. Sometimes you read something once and come away with one impression, and then when you go back and read again, what you thought was there was actually a little bit different. There was a lot of that as we went through what they actually said while writing. But that was good, because it allowed us to refine our critiques and address their work directly.
I put together the conclusions at the end based on our discussions and crafted an intro with Eggshell and Aqua’s input, and then we scrambled to get everything recorded. Despite our best efforts, we missed our deadline by a few hours. Thankfully, though, because my production assistant was available to put arrange all the interviews and audio clips together, I had time to gather music, which literally takes hours, and putting the whole thing together was a lot smoother than it’s been in the past.
In the end, we’re really proud of this episode, and we’re also completely wiped out. I’m totally dead, and if the interviews weren’t already basically put together, there’s no way I’d have the wherewithal to get them ready for release this week. But that’s tomorrow’s problem. Please take some time to go listen to them by subscribing to bonus.zoo.wtf, or by going to zoo.wtf/episode-list/bonus/ and downloading them directly from our website.
OK, so also, can we talk about this awesome fucking artwork? I’ve been trying to get new podcast art for AGES, and we’ve finally done it, and it’s incredible! Introducing Steeeve the tired old pigeon, Aqua the floating orb, and Eggshell the sheepdog in sheep’s clothing! I still have to figure out how to get the art to fit into the body of the site, and I haven’t had time, but that’ll get updated as soon as I can get it done. Big thanks to our anonymous artist, who was a pleasure to work with from start to finish and did an amazing job! I’m so stoked <3
I guess that’s about it, yo! See you next month for a super chill and relaxed episode!
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Have you had any experience participating in zoo research? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us!
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