Waiting: Time to be the miracle
All right, luvvies? Matt here with the Waiting edition of Ready & Waiting, a fortnightly newsletter from Foggy Outline.
The Waiting edition is all about stuff that’s nearly-but-not-quite ready to release to the world yet. But you get the inside track because you’re one of the clear-eyed, far-sighted few.
The Learning Zone @ Skipton Business Expo
4 September, 10:00BST, Skipton Town Hall
If you follow our Linkedin, you’ll have seen us introducing all our Learning Zone speakers over the past couple of weeks. Everyone’s doing 15 minutes, and your Skipton Business Expo ticket lets you into as many of the talks as you want. All the speakers are local to the Expo, and we want guests to leave thinking “Wow! I didn’t know that”.
The full schedule of speakers is up at foggyoutline.com now.
I Need A Miracle
premieres this Thursday, 29 August.
An audio drama where each episode is a prayer, some prayers are granted, and a granted prayer can upend the world.
I can’t quite believe it’s really time for this to make its way off my laptop and out into the world.
In your benevolence, please bend your ear to these 12 impassioned pleas.
Not usually a podcast person? Here’s a quick explainer of how podcasts work and how to listen, and here are all the ways to listen to I Need A Miracle specifically.
Can’t wait 12 weeks to hear all the episodes (or just want to support us)? Become an Apollo+ subscriber for $9.99 and you’ll get access to the whole series on 29 August, not just episode 1. Plus, ad-free episodes and bonus material for dozens of other fiction and drama podcasts (if you do subscribe, ask me for recommendations!).
Environmental literacy
Foggy Outline x Friends of the Dales: Tree guards
You know those plastic tubes they use to protect newly planted trees? Friends of the Dales is doing a campaign raising awareness about these things; mostly they’re not biodegradable, and they tend to just get installed and then forgotten about.
We’re doing an animation to go with the campaign, telling the story of a young girl who notices the countryside studded with tree guards and starts wondering what can be done. The lead voice artist for the animation visited our northern office to lay down the narration earlier this month, and Mum and Dad took advantage of the summer weather last week to head out and take some photos of tree guards out in the wild (battling head-high vegetation to get the shots!).
We’re doing this animation pro bono because we like Friends of the Dales and think the campaign is worthwhile. Why not buy us a cuppa to enjoy while we give it the finishing touches?
Why isn’t solar energy powering everything?
We’re uploading this new course this week, so it should be live on Udemy and open for enrolments by the end of the month!
What do we mean by climate breakdown?
Next on the list after Why isn’t solar energy powering everything? goes live is to remaster this, which is one of our earliest courses. We’ve learned a lot about video and audio production since we first published What do we mean by climate breakdown?, so we’re going to apply some of that new knowledge to improve the experience for new and returning learners.
👽 Alien: Romulus (dir. Fede Alvarez) – kind of a Force Awakens for the Alien movie series, following the formula of the original movie with enough twists to make it fresh again. Reprising the classic “Get away from her” line is an unforgivable howler and should’ve been cut, but there’s lots of excellent stuff here, and it pulls off the impressive feat of folding in some of the very stupid Prometheus worldbuilding in a way that’s actually cool.
🛩 Starbucks new boss under fire for 1,000 mile commute (BBC News) – Dad’s been spending more time on Linkedin than usual to promote the Learning Zone, and getting incensed by things like Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol commuting 1,000 miles a week by private jet while Starbucks continues to claim environmental cred. We can all travel less and turn the heating down all we like, and a single CEO can do enough damage to counteract all that good. Not to mention the emissions from warfare.
🍉 Funds for Gaza – speaking of, here’s a regularly updated, vetted and verified list of fundraisers to help Gazans escape with their lives.
🏃🏿♀️ Tested (CBC+NPR) – the result of a decade of research by Rose Eveleth, released to coincide with the Paris Olympics, Tested investigates the history of sex/gender testing in professional athletics. The current wave of transphobia is putting this stuff more in the spotlight, but it’s been going on much longer than you might think. You know the Foggy Outline position on enforced artificial binaries by now (categories are made-up bullshit! not worth ruining people’s lives or even spoiling their fun over!), so you’ll be unsurprised to know I found this limited series satisfying and enraging in equal measure.
🐎 Song of the Huntress (Lucy Holland) – if my version of the Wild Hunt in Merely Roleplayers: Vigil is too Tory and not fey enough for you, here is the Hunt you crave, tragic and fearsome and cursed and steeped in conflict, guilt and bloody love. Lucy’s an old university pal and an incredible fantasy writer, who’s lately been turning her talents to Britain’s numinous past, before the magic retreated deep into the land. There’s a stunning special edition available from Goldsboro Books, signed and with sprayed edges, if you’re feeling super fancy.
That feels like enough for now! See you in two weeks for the Ready edition: a round-up of Foggy Outline things you can enjoy straight away, no waiting.