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Episode 15 - Year One Retrospective
294 Plays1 year ago
Queer Lodgings is one year old! Help Grace, Leah, and Alicia mark the occasion with a bit of reflection of the first year of the podcast as Tim asks a few questions about their experience thus far. We also share some teasers of what listeners can expect in our second year and beyond, and share some laughs over failed attempts of auto-transcription at Tolkienian names. Plus, learn how listeners can convince the co-hosts to do readings from Demetrious Polychron's terrible knock-off Lord of the Rings sequel!
Thanks for joining us on this journey over the past year, and we hope you'll continue on this path with us for many more!
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Transcript
One-Year Anniversary Reflections
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to Queer Logics, the queer-led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Grace, and I'm here with my usual co-hosts, Alicia. Hello, hello. And Leah. Hi, y'all. Friends, take a swig from your canteen or traveling waterskin, because we've now been on this journey for approximately a year, which means that sometimes next month, we may all return home from an adventure with dragons to find our silver spoons and furnishings auctioned off to the highest bidder. I suspect the Sackville Bagginses.
00:00:43
Speaker
Because we're celebrating our one-year anniversary of the podcast, we wanted to mark the occasion with a few different ways of celebrating. We'll have Tim pop in to interview all three hosts about our reflections from the past year. We'll talk a little bit about what you can expect from us in the coming year. And we'll also poke a bit of fun at some of the auto-transcripting program's most hilarious fails in regards to Tolkienian names.
Conception and Contribution
00:01:06
Speaker
Before we get started with episode proper, I just want to thank Grace and Leah for coming on this crazy fucking journey with me. When I first walked up to Grace at MythCon and Albuquerque and kind of really obliquely floated the idea of this podcast, I had no idea that it would go the way that it has, but I love it so much.
00:01:30
Speaker
And I really wanna give a special shout out to Tim because although he is not a regular co-host, he does so much work for us. He keeps the trolls at bay on social media. He makes sure that we're not eating our microphones.
00:01:47
Speaker
edits the podcast and makes us sound so intelligent and honestly part of the reason why it even popped into my head to potentially do this podcast was because I knew he had the skills to do it and without knowing someone who could run a podcast already I don't know if it ever would have popped into my head to actually do
Challenges of Podcasting: Research and Criticism
00:02:11
Speaker
this.
00:02:11
Speaker
Thank you all for making this so lovely. Well, thanks, Alicia. Yeah, I'm so glad that we all kind of came together to do this, especially because, yeah, like we've talked about a little bit before on the podcast, but like how we were just kind of fed up with
00:02:29
Speaker
what was kind of out there and what was missing and really just wanted to bring something new into Tolkien, you know, the Tolkien, I don't know, media sphere and talk about the things that we wanted to hear more about. And I guess it's that trite saying of, you know, write the thing that you're looking for so much or do the thing that you're looking for and aren't seeing in the world. And
00:02:52
Speaker
Yeah, I'm kind of stunned that we've been doing this for a year and it's been so much fun and so enlightening and rewarding in a lot of ways. So thank you guys for all the work that you do and for being awesome co-hosts.
00:03:07
Speaker
I think we all do really really good together and it's been so much fun. I want to say thank you to Alicia for bringing us all together and and like floating this idea and then you know making it actually go from the idea stage to the like executable stage. Totally totally. And it seems bizarre to me that it's actually only been a year sometimes and sometimes it's like wow we have a whole year of episodes and other times it's like wait I've
00:03:33
Speaker
I've only been sending you guys these ridiculous memes for a year? Like, what? Yeah,
Favorite Episodes and Community Insights
00:03:40
Speaker
exactly. It's very weird to me that I'm like, oh yeah, I feel like I've been doing this forever. And yeah, it's been a year and many, many more to come, I hope.
00:03:51
Speaker
We certainly have enough content to fill out at least another year. Yeah, we have so many goals. My gosh. Yeah. I've had multiple conversations with people where they're like, well, how long is this podcast going to go? And I'm like, I don't know until we run out of gay shit to talk about. So probably never.
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, there's always more gay shit around the corner. Always. Around the corner there may wait some gay shit and you won't have to wait. Okay, I'll keep working on that. An effort was made.
00:04:24
Speaker
I tried. I went off on my own mental tension on that too. Don't worry. I just, I didn't say it into the microphone because I wasn't being rude and talking over you, but I was, I was off somewhere with my like five-year-old self or whatever.
00:04:41
Speaker
I know. Do we need to summon Tim? We do need to summon Tim because it is now the point in time for us to go ahead and reflect on everything that has come thus far and throughout the preceding year. And so Tim is actually going to pop in and take the a little bit of like the host and interviewer role for a second.
Tolkien's Influences and Guest Contributions
00:05:03
Speaker
And we get to be the interviewees.
00:05:06
Speaker
Hi folks, nice to talk to you all again. Wait, so you need me to do my angry nerd voice? Is that what I'm here for? That is always your role. You got it. You actually get to be a real boy.
00:05:21
Speaker
Are you guys still making this gay Tolkien podcast? There's no gay stuff in Tolkien. How are you still doing this? I mean, you can just pick up that guy's comments in our Facebook group and read them verbatim for real. Yeah. So like Grace said, I'm just going to sort of fire some questions off at our co-hosts just about sort of the experience of making the podcast over the last year.
00:05:48
Speaker
a little bit of a retrospective. So first off, what's the most surprising thing that you've learned while making the podcast so far? It's honestly the sheer amount of work to put together a research-heavy episode because
00:06:04
Speaker
I thought, oh, there's three of us. That's going to one third all of the work. And that's not at all what ends up happening, because we're each coming at these topics from our own perspective. So it multiplies the work. Yeah. So I've said to people before, it's like writing a conference paper once a month.
00:06:25
Speaker
But it's a little bit more than that, honestly, because you're having to, you know, do all your research to write your conference paper, but you're also collaborating and making sure that it all kind of fits together into at least kind of a cohesive whole or two.
00:06:41
Speaker
or six as it might end up being episodes in many parts yeah it's like all three of us it's sort of like what can you talk for 30 minutes straight about no preparation needed and it's like oh yeah Tolkien
00:06:57
Speaker
And then you realize, oh, I actually have I have a lot more reading that I can do. And there's actually a lot of stuff that I haven't read before or I've never learned before. And there's always so much more to kind of dig into.
00:07:13
Speaker
Yeah, I would say that's the most surprising thing for me too. Not just like how in-depth the preparation is, but also how much I constantly feel like, oh, well, I want to revisit this topic or another aspect of this topic because there's like this approach to it too that we should give it's due to.
00:07:33
Speaker
And also the things that are like, oh, this is such a great tidbit or whatever, but it's a tangent, and it sort of has to get left on the proverbial cutting room floor, and maybe it will become its own episode later on. But we all end up down our little research warrens and burrowing through all these different aspects of any particular topic. And sometimes we keep building on all of that, and sometimes we just keep building out more episode ideas.
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think the most surprising thing that I have learned so far is that no matter how many cis white men come onto our Facebook page to yell at us about how there's no queer people in Middle Earth or in Tolkien and how dare you, it's still funny every single time. It still brings me so much joy. It still brings me so much delight to see
00:08:27
Speaker
how mad they get. It's yeah. Oh, wow. How committed they are to being so wrong. My gosh. Yeah, it's like over a year now. And I'm like, still funny every single time. Still great. That is always a good reminder to like, you know, because we're we're all
00:08:46
Speaker
queer, women, non-binary. And we always just need to remember, just treat the world as though you have the confidence of a mediocre, straight, white man, and you will go far. And it's honestly a good reminder of any time that I'm worried about, wow, have we supported this point enough? Have we documented enough research for this? Have we put that point together or whatever?
00:09:11
Speaker
And then I see these folks coming on to, you know, social media and the internet and whatever, and they haven't bothered to put together a cohesive sentence, let alone any research for it. So it's a good reminder to me that we are enough. Yeah, we've done more than scan one David Day book and then yeah, proclaimed ourselves experts.
Personal Journeys and Queer Exploration
00:09:32
Speaker
Yes.
00:09:33
Speaker
We've done 30 pages of research and that's a light episode. My God. The flip side of that is like imposter syndrome is real and it is when people are that shitty about it that I remember like, Oh, actually I've done the work. I've done the research. I've done it for years. I can come back at you with receipts, but you're not even bothering to enter this conversation on that level. So why would I waste my time?
00:10:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of affirming in a lot of ways. It makes me feel more centered in myself. And I'm like, oh, yes. Is this what confidence feels like? Wow, it's just amazing. I never really felt this way before. And also, like, don't give me too much credit. I still do that. Like, someone is wrong on the internet and I must help them realize it. You know, like I'm recovering from that, but I'm not recovered. Hence this podcast.
00:10:33
Speaker
Also, none of the cashew white men, if you don't know that reference, it's a really good meme, who come on our Facebook telling us that we're desecrating Tolkien. None of them have actually gone through the trouble to email us. So, I mean, they're mad, but they're not big mad yet.
00:10:52
Speaker
But we do actually get a fair number of emails from people who have been so sweet and given us episode ideas and just told us that what we're doing resonates with them. And that is so great. We just had an email come through who
00:11:09
Speaker
The person was like I feel like you guys need to hear this because you've been talking a lot about hate you get on the Internet and I we do get a fair amount of hate on the Internet Tim absorbs a lot of it I'm assuming because I don't log on to Twitter and check our Twitter notifications because I'm not that much of a masochist
00:11:30
Speaker
I only see what happens on Facebook and hate comments on Facebook are relatively few and far between, shockingly so, given how other spaces I'm in. It comes in fits and spurts. That's what she said.
00:11:48
Speaker
you know, there'll be weeks where there'll be nothing. And then, for instance, when we did like the Talking Tuesday takeover, you know, we got amplified a lot by a lot of people, which was great. And it was, you know, generally really good experience, but it also put us in front of some assholes that decided to tell us that what we were doing was wrong. But for now, at least, Twitter still has a block function, so. For now. For now.
00:12:15
Speaker
So I want to do a little bit of a follow
Tolkien's Context and Beliefs
00:12:18
Speaker
-up to that. Thinking specifically of Tolkien the man and his writings, what's the most interesting or surprising thing that you have uncovered that you didn't know prior to doing the book?
00:12:31
Speaker
Oh, that's a good question. Had he dressed up in drag at least once? That's a good one. That was a good one. Yeah, that he stayed up all night reading W.H. Alden's poetry and she loved it. I think for me, it's his recommendation of Mary Reynolds novels and how incredibly just like matter of factly queer there are portrayals of characters in them.
00:13:01
Speaker
and that he recommended these books going like, well, yes, this is historically valid and everything, and not like, oh, heavens, I must clutch my pearls because how dare the classical world have any sort of queerness in it. I had been given to believe that that's like who Tolkien must be because he's a Catholic, right? And that didn't resonate with my understanding of his writing. And so like finding some of these things going like, yeah,
00:13:30
Speaker
actually like the people who want to take him out of his context and say that he must be like among the worst of the worst today just that's not historically grounded. Yeah. So that might have spoiled my next question for some of you but for each of you looking back at the episodes that you've done over the past year is there one in particular that stands out as a favorite?
00:13:56
Speaker
I mean, I really want to say Tolkien would hate this podcast part one because I have a tendency to get a little trolly when I'm making papers for conferences. And we've been accused of that in particular being a kind of a trolly episode title. But honestly, the one that stands out for me was our first collateral episode because it was the first time we really
00:14:21
Speaker
joined together and did what we set out to do with the podcast in terms of doing the research, doing like a good grounded queer reading of a character. And I just also personally really enjoy reading Galadriel as some sort of gender queer icon.
00:14:42
Speaker
That's the one I was thinking of too. I'm really proud of all the work that we did on that one. And it just had a really nice tone for what we wanted to kind of keep doing in the podcast and for episodes to come. I also really enjoyed talking with our first guest, Taylor Driggers. I think that we had a really great conversation.
00:15:03
Speaker
kind of getting into the weeds about some of the troubling sort of these questions of Tolkien's religion and sort of like how much bearing that might have on what we read into him and how much we should be crediting him with our assumptions, I guess. How much we should be thinking about it in a very particular and very sort of rigid way. I think he's doing some really great work in sort of troubling the waters of fantasy and and Tolkien in general and
00:15:32
Speaker
Through talking to him, I think we also started thinking more about some other scholars who we really want to speak to who are kind of doing similar challenging and divergent sort of work in making Tolkien scholarship in general a lot more, a lot more queer and a lot more challenging to sort of cisheteronormativity and the Christian hegemony in Tolkien scholarship.
00:15:59
Speaker
I also love how having Taylor on as a guest like brought me to more of his scholarship. And it tickles me every single time that there's a conference and Taylor is presenting or running a panel or whatever. And I like look in the online attendees or whatever. It's like, oh, every single queer lodgings podcast host who is here at this conference is in fact here at this panel. Excellent. Yep. Showing up. Good to see you. Showing up. Yep.
00:16:26
Speaker
brief shout out to Myth Lore for making us aware of Taylor Triggers. It was a review of his book in Myth Lore that made us reach out to him. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I tend to think of our episodes as like we have two types of episodes that we do a lot of that are the bulk of our content. And one is like our
00:16:48
Speaker
really research-heavy episodes where we're putting together all the research and the others where we're getting to interview other researchers and scholars and experts in their own fields and lived experience, right?
Building Community through Scholarship
00:17:00
Speaker
So I am going to be stereotypically bisexual and not choose just one.
00:17:05
Speaker
So I'm going to sort of talk about my favorites in either of those. I was going to say like Taylor has a special place in my heart for that episode because he was our first guest and like was very gracious in us like figuring out how to work through the process of having a guest and scheduling a guest and you know interviewing a guest and all of that so it was a wonderful guinea pig.
00:17:28
Speaker
But our second set of guests was also just particularly special to me. We had Megan Abramson and Maria K. Alberto on to talk about depictions of Fingan in fan art and depictions of Fingan as a Black character.
00:17:46
Speaker
And that was a fantastic episode. And then I knew Megan. I'd already met Megan through PX Society and other places and all that. But I hadn't met Maria before. And then shortly after we recorded and possibly even before we released that episode, I was at a conference.
00:18:06
Speaker
and was in the hospitality suite. It was, you know, was still like all kinds of COVID precautions, so everyone was masked. And a masked person from across the room said, hey, are you Grace from the Queer Lodgings podcast? And I was like, yes! And it turned out it was Maria and we were at the same conference and it was just this wonderful moment of like, oh my god, I got to meet you in real life, but also like getting recognized as
00:18:31
Speaker
like this podcast host role at that point was just really, really gratifying. And so seeing the ways that it all ties in and sort of the community that we're building through doing this is really, really special to me.
00:18:47
Speaker
But then in terms of the research episodes, the one that's my favorite is probably the second Tolkien would hate this podcast episode where we talk about the historical and queer contexts for Tolkien's life and writing and all of that.
00:19:02
Speaker
And it's one of my favorites just because it is my proverbial soapbox and your history kind of always is in my wheelhouse, in my area of interest. And so getting to do all of that research was really, really lovely and really, really special. And I also had a lot of health issues that started right around the time that we were going to record that episode. And so being able to make it through those in order to do that recording was also really meaningful to me.
Owning Queer Identities
00:19:32
Speaker
Yeah, your work on that particular episode was really good and obviously really well received. We did a thread on Twitter about that for our takeover. And so many academics I really respect came in and were like, this is great scholarship. And it was all great.
00:19:55
Speaker
Totally. Did we ever share the photo of like just the books that I had like the physical copies of books because that wasn't everything because there were papers and everything to you but just like my research when I had come home from the hospital and I had everything spread out on my bed and just trying to like reach for all of the books at different times to cite my sources and everything I had taken a picture of everything all spread out I don't know if we ever shared that if we didn't we'll put it in the show notes.
00:20:20
Speaker
From our listener's standpoint, the favorite episode is Queer Reading's Galadriel Part 1. That episode has almost 500 listeners.
00:20:29
Speaker
Okay, but caveat to that. That was the featured episode on the homepage of our website from the time before it even launched up until we recorded the second episode of Tolkien would hate this podcast. So it is a little weighted because of it may be a little. Okay, it's okay. Should we have what our favorite episodes are from our resource perspective, though? Yeah.
00:20:56
Speaker
Like, don't knock on the leash, it's fine. Just push, push. So going a little, I mean, we've already been talking a little personal, but has there been anything that you've learned about your own relationship to queerness through the process of making the podcast?
00:21:15
Speaker
Well, getting back to that episode about collateral and her genderqueer sort of icon status, like it was kind of a process of kind of chasing that hypothesis, I guess, and going through that sort of research that kind of put me on a journey to kind of my own.
00:21:34
Speaker
gender explorations and gender queerness sort of exploring, which is still very much like a baby sort of unfolding process. But being able to dig really deep into this particular character and taking that experience and sort of applying it to a lot of the rest of Tolkien and how a lot of my queer friends
00:21:58
Speaker
are doing their own queer readings of Tolkien, it really just made me really deepen into my own queer identity, I guess, and sort of see this journey that I'm undertaking as one that's really like playful and fun and also like kind of well supported by a community that is sort of finding themselves in literature. So yeah, so for me, it's been a little piece of further journeying into myself and finding more things about myself that I'm really enjoying.
00:22:27
Speaker
This is the most openly queer I've been in my life because I've historically been pretty stealth. I mean, I'm married to Tim. We look like a normal cishet couple. I've never really like been in the closet, so to speak, but it's not something that I've
00:22:43
Speaker
really talked about because like if you can't tell then I'm a little bit gay that's on you. It's been weird to me to fully incorporate like queerness into my identity as a person when I never really
00:23:01
Speaker
have before. But it's also been rewarding to do that because it's been rewarding to do that and kind of scary to do that given the current political climate. But it also feels important for me to do that, especially since I'm not incredibly visibly queer. I mean, my purple hair aside.
00:23:21
Speaker
Yeah, co-signed being a lot more visibly queer or at least associating myself like as a queer co-host, as a queer person leading a queer podcast. It's sort of like, oh, I actually am owning that a lot more than I used to or ever kind of thought that I wanted to, you know? And yeah.
00:23:45
Speaker
Given the current atmosphere of the planet in general, it feels both very tender and scary.
Future Plans: Queer Readings and Religion
00:23:53
Speaker
It feels really encouraging to me to kind of
00:23:56
Speaker
find that little space, that little niche and owning that, you know? I think for me, so I've done a lot of visible queer activism and I'm on the steering committee for the bisexual identity group, like social group and activism group in my local community and everything.
00:24:19
Speaker
I've been marching in parades, I've been putting myself out as, you know, I don't always appear visibly queer. My hair is only dyed on the underside, even. And I've always had to be balancing how queer I want to appear, how queer I do appear, and then the professional roles that I'm in and everything, as well as my activism roles.
00:24:48
Speaker
been doing that for years. But that's not always a linear process. And I think in particular, this was really important and meaningful to be doing as we're coming out of living through the lockdown piece of a pandemic.
00:25:11
Speaker
a lot of the in-person events that I used to do and host and run weren't meeting during pandemic. It wasn't safe to do that. There were years that we couldn't do even like the Pride Parade and like Pride Fest and all of that. We couldn't do those things. And so the ways in which to be visibly queer felt pretty reduced to me when we were in like lockdown and needing to kind of keep everything
00:25:39
Speaker
physically separated from everybody. So doing this at the same point in time that my activism organization is ramping back up to in-person events and like getting to visibly live queer identity a little bit more again and doing that also like in this context online led to a lot of I think really good reflection about my bisexual identity, queer identity,
00:26:07
Speaker
how I'm actualizing each of those what those each mean in the different contexts. So, it stood out it stands out to me, not so much as like a new realization or development or, but just that.
00:26:23
Speaker
how fluid identity is and how predicated on all of our other contexts, the way that we get to express that is. So that's been really key for me. I think also it's been a really cool experience because the last time that I was like this obnoxiously into Tolkien,
00:26:48
Speaker
where you couldn't get through a conversation with me at dinner without me bringing it up. I was a teenager. I was discovering Tolkien for the first time. I was doing that reading. I was watching the movies and everything, and I could connect all these different aspects of life and culture and everything to aspects of Tolkien's writing or work or adaptations of that or whatever.
00:27:13
Speaker
And I'm absolutely doing that again, just with my 35 year old's vocabulary instead of my 13 year old vocabulary, which is much more pretentious. No, actually it might not be more pretentious than when I was 13. Let me take that back. I was going to say, I think I'm a lot less pretentious. I think I am too. I was a pretty pretentious 13 year old. Yeah.
00:27:35
Speaker
But getting to delve back into that where like when I was a teenager was a really important for everybody. That's a really important time in lifetime development. And so getting to revisit some of those things that were like so precious to me then and having them still be connected to the queer identity that I'm vocal and upfront about now where I was just figuring that out when I was a teenager has been really, really powerful and
00:28:03
Speaker
the staying power that that has. Yeah, it's really important to me. Oh yeah, that's lovely. And finally, what can y'all share with our listeners about what is coming up in the future for queer logics?
00:28:25
Speaker
I am very excited. More of that gay shit. More of that gay shit. The gayest of gay shit. We're having a couple of our favorite Sauron experts to geek out about Sauron, primarily for me. But I'm dragging Grace and Leah along for the ride. Oh, you're not dragging Grace. Grace is right there. And honestly, here's the only thing that you might be doing to Grace. You might end up making Grace right.
Podcast's Academic Impact
00:28:52
Speaker
bang bang fanfic because you did get grace to write silver twisting hand fit you did get grace to write silver gifting fanfic so
00:29:03
Speaker
that one's on you and you may be responsible for more nonsense in the future and I applaud you for it. You're welcome world. Yeah we're gonna be talking to a fair number of our friends who are doing really interesting things and
00:29:25
Speaker
presenting on what they're doing at various conferences and hopefully are still eager to talk about them after they presented them to us so that we can geek out some more. I am really looking forward to our next interview coming up basically with the three editors of an forthcoming book about queer approaches to Middle Earth which I think will be really really exciting for
00:29:52
Speaker
our listeners and for us I love that a lot of our friends are really incredible scholars and I love that they are also reaching out to their friends who are incredible scholars and whom like for me I've been reading these guys for a long time and I'm kind of like oh my god I can't believe I'm actually talking to you and you're you're listening to me and you you think our podcast is cool oh my god it's so cool uh
00:30:19
Speaker
So yeah, that's something I'm really looking forward to is talking to our friends, both old and new, about Tolkien. We get really excited every time another interview with another scholar. It's like getting lined up and everything. We definitely fan flail about that a little bit.
00:30:42
Speaker
just like all of these people whose work we really respect think it's worth your time to come chat. For real, for real. I'm like, I can't believe you're actually talking to me. This is crazy. I also just love that I then get to like have this conversation with these scholars about their work and everything. And it's like, yes, please tell me all about these amazing things. I would thank you for this like small venue conversation where I get to just listen, chin hands and
00:31:08
Speaker
like be all excited about everything that you're saying, because it's so cool and making such amazing connections. Yeah, just heart eyes the whole time. Yeah. We're going to be continuing some of our various series, so there will be more queer readings of various characters, some for like characters we haven't covered yet, some for that we're going to be delving into, you know, other aspects of queerness for characters that we've already encountered in that series. Like we're not done with Galadriel.
00:31:37
Speaker
We're going to talk about AON, absolutely. I don't know when, no promises on that yet, because we all like her so much and it needs to be like perfect. So, you know. And we are still working on our Tolkien would hate this podcast. Oh, yes. A couple of different, some spicy content on your way that I think will be really fun and also really meaty. And one of the reasons why it might take a minute
00:32:05
Speaker
to get to it is because there's kind of a lot happening. There's a lot in there that we are still kind of talking about and kind of figuring out. And I think it'll be very rewarding.
00:32:19
Speaker
Yeah, if you want to have an idea of why it's taking so long, I believe the next episode of that series is about religion. Yeah. Just a small topic, you know? It'll be an easy one to tackle, no? No biggie. No biggie.
Episode Ideas and Preparation
00:32:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's got to be right.
00:32:43
Speaker
So we're taking a lot of care and effort and research with that. So we're not just going to slip something out that we haven't thought through and all that. So we're taking the time with that one. We're also having some fun workshopping the idea of a Horse Girls of Middle Earth episode that we're going to have a wonderful guest on to talk about there.
00:33:05
Speaker
So we'll have some fun and lighthearted takes on topics and then also some of those like really deep and important and heavy ones. So, you know. Yeah.
00:33:14
Speaker
I will say I'm just looking at the episode idea sheet that we all contribute to and it has almost 50 items on it and only a couple of those have been crossed off so far. So there is no shortage of ideas, including this is not the entire topic of this potential episode, but there is mention of Elrond's Loop Kitchen at one point.
00:33:41
Speaker
So stay tuned for that. What a fun tease. And some of those ideas, we say episode ideas and they may end up being series ideas. Like we're, we're going to have things to say about them. Elrond's Lube Kitchen, parts one through six.
00:34:00
Speaker
Yeah, honestly, that's what happened with Tolkien would hate this podcast. Because when I originally pitched that idea, I was like, let's just make an episode where we refute all of this bullshit that we see on Twitter. And then we don't often get like a pre call before we actually do the recording. But this time we did. And we sat down and we were like,
00:34:21
Speaker
because the document was almost 40 pages long, just of citations. And we were like, oh shit, no, this is more than one episode. It might be unethical to make an episode that long and ask people to listen to it.
00:34:36
Speaker
Unless you're you know, Dan Carlin doing hardcore history and oh, yeah With like the nine-hour episodes. Yeah, yeah Or not, I was gonna say it Tim would editing Tim disagrees
00:34:53
Speaker
Editing Tim would throw himself off a cliff, I think. But we were very nice to Editing Tim that time because we realized it was going to be more than one episode worth of content. So then we decided to pre-break it up, unlike the Galadriel episode where we, or the Rings of Power episode where we just like continued to fucking talk. Yeah. So, you know.
00:35:19
Speaker
That is all the questions that I had, but yeah, thank you for reminiscing and thank you for bringing me along for the ride. I found this a very fulfilling experience so far and look forward to continued adventure.
00:35:32
Speaker
Thank you, Tim. And we do have one more thing that's coming for the podcast that we're going to tease a little bit. And that is something that we've been working on and we've had as a value since the start, but we want to make sure that there are transcripts available of our episodes. And so that's a project that we started honestly with me trying to do the transcripting in between recording sessions.
00:35:54
Speaker
And there are a few reasons why that has not yet resulted in transcripts, one of which is that I mentioned I had some health issues and everything, and so I had to take a lot of pauses on that. And two, also, we get an auto transcript file that gets converted into a readable format from ZenCaster, which is the program that we use to podcast.
Transcription Challenges and Humor
00:36:20
Speaker
That has a lot of wonderful things to it, but it also struggles just a teensy bit with any word ever made up by Tolkien.
00:36:32
Speaker
And we're going to treat you to a few of those particularly amazing auto-transcripting fails. But because of that, it's a pretty involved process to try to do not just transcription, but transcription and correction of the correct spellings of things and citations and all of that.
00:36:51
Speaker
So actually, I am no longer trying to go alone on that and we've actually turned that over to a friend of the pod, McGreen Addis who you've heard us talk about their scholarship and everything a few times before and they're also going to be coming on as a guest too.
00:37:07
Speaker
extra special friend of the pod but because of that and because of Mercury's work we're going to start being able to turn those out on a much faster time scale than Grace was working at which is a low bar because Grace was at like 1.5 episodes a year so yeah um right now
00:37:26
Speaker
On our web page, which is queerlodgings.com, our proto episode, episode 0.5, episode 1, and episode 2 have functioning transcripts.
00:37:37
Speaker
Yay. More to come. So exciting. Yes. Very exciting. More to come. And as promised now, we are going to talk about some of the truly amazing, very confident suggestions that this auto-transcrafting program makes. Some of these are even more excellent when you can see them in print. So we'll try to have a way for you to be able to take a glance at those as well.
00:38:06
Speaker
Who wants to start? I do want to bring up Celeborn in particular because of something funny that happened to me while I was discussing the fact that the auto-transcriptor cannot handle the word Celeborn. I was speech-to-texting as I was driving at the time that we were discussing this, and I was like, I wonder if Google can handle Celeborn, and it also could not. And then I was like, huh, can it do tele-porno? Tele-porno
00:38:35
Speaker
Fine, Celeborn, absolutely not. Yeah, no problems with Celeborn-o. Yeah. Hmm, maybe Jirt was onto something with that first take. Yeah, well, because we get Celeborn. Also, Kelly-born, that is spelled with a K and an I, so you've got your, like, you know, I guess your Valley Girl, Celeborn.
00:38:59
Speaker
Oh my gosh, Galadriel. I long to speak to him. He's just Ken. I can no longer see him from afar. And then there's like six different K spellings of it, but I do also love Playborn. One of them has three L's. Yes, and three L's.
00:39:23
Speaker
Yep. And like seven different spellings of the Kelly part because it is convinced that the Kelly is how that goes.
00:39:32
Speaker
We also had a few interesting ones for Celebrimbor, which in that particular episode that we were discussing them in, we're talking about Celebrimbor and Elrond in close juxtaposition to each other. So my note in this document just says, ah, yes, transcript, the famous elves.
00:39:54
Speaker
Kelly Burnmore and Elrod. The very next line though is even better. Callie Brimbo.
00:40:06
Speaker
and Elrond, as in Elrond Hubbard. Which is going to be my drag king name. Nobody steal that. We did start assigning drag queen and king names to these Derby names, stripper names, and Ariel Silks names in our group conversation. Kelly Bimbo was my favorite. Kelly Bimbo. Kelly Bimbo is great. And then five words later, we actually got Key Brimbo also.
00:40:35
Speaker
And I do think that the proximity with which it is coming up with all of these different spellings is part of this charm.
00:40:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty inspired. I am really into the idea of Elrod being the first king of Numenor and he had a sick muscle car and you know, all the ladies were just like, oh man, that guy's got the coolest Elrod. Oh my God. So much, so much. So much fun. There was a great moment in
00:41:11
Speaker
think the Galadriel episode where we were talking about like Lorien versus Loth Lorien and Gandalf and the name that he goes by at one point of Lorien and boy oh boy did the did the auto-transcriptor struggle but it gave it sort of the old college try and took a swing in employing the Meisner technique just taking the same words and doing a different inflection on all of them right so we had
00:41:41
Speaker
Lauren, like the real Lorian, not Lot-Lorian, like when Gandalf was still a Lauren. A-Lorian is how that is spelled. It then followed with Law-Lorian and Low-Lorian.
00:41:57
Speaker
Hello, Lorian. Oh, man. I like Florian. Florian's great. Like Florian's good. I think that...Lorian is really more a character in Pat Rothfuss's, like, Wiseman's Fear and Maybe the Wind novels. So, you know, we get all the mythopoeic things in here, too, which honestly does remind me of Alicia was trying to say, with Thranduil,
00:42:26
Speaker
And the autotranscriptor read that as, chill in Merkwood, spelled with an E, with Rand Wheel. And I was like, suddenly we are the Wheel of Time adaptation at Amazon. After all, we're just getting all the Mississippi if works in. We're good. We're good. It's so good.
00:42:44
Speaker
Oh my god. So this is an incredibly niche reference, but the whole Laurie and Lauren thing reminds me I watched this YouTube channel called the Welsh twins and they're hilarious. One of them does skincare and the other one does makeup and they're like two gay twins. I love them. But so one of the their ongoing bits is that they pronounce L'Oreal as Laurel.
00:43:11
Speaker
And I can't help but to think of that during all of the lore and stuff. There are alternate spellings of Gandalf. One has a double L in it, and there's also Gandalf spelled with a pH. So just when he's feeling real fly.
00:43:28
Speaker
God, I know people who legitimately have spelled Gandalf that way. I've seen books where they've spelled Gandalf that way, and I'm like, did you guys read this book? No. I guess one thing to be really grateful for is that the auto-transcriptor does not have the particular quirk of
00:43:49
Speaker
Adding in random apostrophes sprinkled throughout words for just a bit of extra spice and flavor, the way that especially for like a good 20 years there was very common in the fantasy genre, telling which with like three apostrophes and whatever. So there's one small mercy there and I don't want to give the thing ideas.
00:44:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's listening. It is. We'll also get to see it like a real like sort of recursive thing is like what it comes up with the transcript for us talking about it. Transcription errors. Stay tuned.
00:44:27
Speaker
Oh my god, this one where it's A1, but it's A1 as in the steak sauce. That's one of my favorites, I think. Can we get like a graphic edited for that for when we do an A1 episode? Yeah.
00:44:44
Speaker
If you can remind me, I will make one. I think a steak sauce and just going like I am no man or something. It was specifically in the context of stating like the idea of Aowin as being genderqueer. So what it did actually read out like in the the transcript was the suggestion that Aowin's steak sauce is genderqueer.
00:45:07
Speaker
And I'm not sure that that's valid, but let's take it. Let's make that a thing. Hey man, Bud Light tried to be... Oh my god. If you take away their Bud Light and their A1, what are they gonna do?
AI Limitations in Creativity
00:45:23
Speaker
I have said I said this before, like, they can't even have saltines because saltines are I believe a Nabisco brand, which has also put forward like, queer pandering things at time. So it's a very bland life for the the bigots out there.
00:45:41
Speaker
Ah, one other that I do want to make sure that we mention is that Numenor, it spells as new manure, which, you know, that could be some fun commentary on how Numenora looks to perhaps native peoples of middle earth. I grew up in upstate New York in farm country, like dairy farm
00:46:06
Speaker
like sweet corn and apples, right? So just that particular decision on the part of the auto transcriptor just comes with an olfactory sense memory for me every time I see it. Oh, fair enough.
00:46:24
Speaker
Also, one piece of commentary that I had here, every time we talk about ships, like shipping two characters together, the program is certain that we mean chips, as in crisps. And my commentary after that was, who's to say that's wrong? Silverfisting is a snack, spelled with two C's. A greed.
00:46:46
Speaker
These auto-transcripting fails all come from the transcripts that are already up on our website. So we're only like three or four episodes in. Sure. I really enjoyed that old story about fiddled photo and Bilbo and their time at developing at the one hour photo store. Walgreens or whatever. At Walgreens. Yeah. At the Rite Aid, you know, that's the stuff that sagas are made of. Oh yeah. Yeah. And just.
00:47:13
Speaker
It butchers Galadriel's name just so badly. There's 12 to 15 different spellings of Galadriel and they all read like you're being choked while you're gargling. It's disgusting.
00:47:35
Speaker
Galagriel. That is three G's, two R's, two L's, and the start of the word Galahad, I think. The Galagriel is in particular. I think Calagriel is particularly inspired. Right, spelled with a C. Yeah, it's Caladriel as well with a C.
00:48:01
Speaker
Yeah. Claggeral sounds like you're something you are like spitting up. Galateral, as in you're moving to the side. Lateral move there. Galadriel, which sounds like a sci-fi planet.
00:48:14
Speaker
Yup. Yup. Or Galatiel. Yeah. I'm like, that's, oh, that's how Star Trek go in. Yeah. There is one also where it turned it into two words, which was Gal Gladwell. Or Gal Gladduel. She's one of my favorite actresses. Gal Gladduel, you know? She was in that Wonder Woman movie. Exactly. And then there's also Gladrio, which reads to me like a Spanish fencing master. And I think that's a fun one. Yeah.
00:48:44
Speaker
Yeah, Gladrio is a in a bull ring, I think. Yeah, that's like a Middle Earth is written by like Arturo Perez Rivera or something. Special honorable mention to Gimli. It only gets his name wrong in one way thus far.
00:49:06
Speaker
But it is always the same misspelling. He is not allowed to have an I at the end of his name. His name is spelled G-I-M-L-E-Y. And it always does that. He's the only character that it thinks it knows.
00:49:20
Speaker
At least that one's an easy find and replace. Unlike 12 different spellings of Galadriel. The Galadriel episode going through the first draft of the transcript for that was so hard.
00:49:36
Speaker
And I also had made a mistake as I was doing it where there was something I was like, oh, I can do a find and replace on this because they're always getting this wrong. I'm going to do that. And I didn't think about the fact that it was something with like elf or elves.
00:49:53
Speaker
And I didn't think about the fact that words like themselves were also going to be affected by this and it was just like a transcripting it midnight dumb mistake. Oh no. I have to correct manually every time I found it again in like a 40 page transcript.
00:50:10
Speaker
Oh lord. Oh gosh. See, why isn't AI like on top of this? Like where are they training them to like reproduce art and like write fucking books? Like when this is the kind of shit that it needs to get on. Like it needs to get out of this. Right.
00:50:28
Speaker
I can't do this. Actually, I was at a brunch as we bisexuals do this weekend, and a friend of mine who's, you know, fairly up on all the AI stuff.
00:50:43
Speaker
After I had of course brought up the podcast in casual conversation as you do, but he was talking about how there's some struggle with the AI training right now because AI is starting to pull things from the internet that it has already produced and that different AI engines are then training.
00:51:08
Speaker
on each other and they're like when you think of like A.I. art like all of the issues of like hands are bad and it is now training on hands are bad art.
00:51:19
Speaker
to teach itself how to do hands-worse. Yeah, it's getting like Lovecraftian, like non-Euclidean language and geometry. I feel like it's like this is going to turn into a horror show. Yeah, I saw a meme going around that there are AI-produced foraging books for plants and mushrooms. I saw ESA do not trust that. Oh my gosh.
00:51:45
Speaker
It's going to die. You will die. Oh my God. Yeah. If you want a foraging book, research the author and make sure they are an actual scientist in that field. My God.
00:52:05
Speaker
Yeah. Fucking terrifying. Anyway. We live in a hellscape. I'm glad Sincaster's transcription bot is terribly bad at this and not, you know, telling people to eat poisonous mushrooms. It's trying its hardest.
00:52:22
Speaker
It's doing its best. And there are some places like this where you know trying to do the auto-transcripting or auto-captions or whatever like there's a good like accessibility argument for trying to make these things available and make sure that there are tools to make them easier but we also need to be careful about what norms we have in community and all that of
00:52:44
Speaker
Like, okay, it's great to have an auto transcript, but you also need someone to read through it and take the time to actually edit it, especially when the mistakes that it can make can be very impactful and very detrimental to anyone who is relying on that for understanding. And so it's not enough to just be like, oh, well, we'll go with it because it's something, it's better than not trying at all.
00:53:09
Speaker
It is, but there's still a lot of care that needs to be put into actual commitment to accessibility. Yeah. Which, stay tuned if we ever talk about Tolkien's hate of the machine, because I'm pretty sure a lot of this stuff that we're talking about right now is exactly what he was talking about when he was saying, the machine is terrible. And you mean Tolkien wouldn't love just producing a bunch of shitty AI artwork of his characters?
00:53:37
Speaker
He'd in fact be very grumpy about that? Yeah, he wouldn't want a thousand page sequel to his work. He already got Demetrius Polikron to do the sequel, I forgot. Is he an AI? Is Demetrius Polikron? No, he's just a... He's a very confident white man is what I think he probably...
00:54:01
Speaker
I'm assuming, you know what? I have wasted no time in my life looking up anything about Demetrius Polychron, the actual man. So I am making assumptions. I am not stating facts to be known because I'm not giving that much time.
00:54:17
Speaker
I'll do it for you, Grace. What precious life. Oh, he looks exactly how you would expect him to look. He looks. Yeah. Okay. I'll humbleness and hubris aside. Called it.
00:54:33
Speaker
So a salty side note for anyone who is doing that sort of thing where they're defending Tolkien and being all grumpy about who gets to have readings of Tolkien and everything and then turning around and illustrating those with AI art and then claiming that they know so much about Tolkien, it's probably time to go do a reread of letters, dear friends.
00:54:58
Speaker
because Tolkien has some things to say about art, art styles, his preferences, and what he thinks is important and all of that. And at least to my recollection, nowhere in there does he indicate that, yeah, machines making up the art would be fine. That sounds great. Yeah, he would be less than chill about it, I think.
00:55:23
Speaker
I do wonder what he would think about the absolute cojones of Demetrius Polychron though. Yeah, that was a hard one because obviously he would be quite upset about dude's mischaracterization of his beloved characters. And adding himself as a co-author of One of the Rings. Wow, misspelling Tolkien's name.
00:55:46
Speaker
So I think there would be a fair amount of disrespect there. But also, he just seems like someone who would be impressed by the sheer brass balls it takes to do something like that. I'm sure there would be a very long letter, probably in line with his feelings about was it the Swedish translation?
Fan Creativity and Future Directions
00:56:07
Speaker
Yes. Of Lord of the Rings? Yes. I think he would devote several pages of ink to that.
00:56:13
Speaker
Yeah. He'd go like Zimmerman script on Demetrius. He would read it. Yeah. He would read it. He would read it. And slice it apart with surgical precision. Oh yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Which listeners, if you want to hear us do some readings from the King Demetrius. Shut up. I'm going to make this happen. I'm going to make this happen.
00:56:43
Speaker
I read the first chapter of it and I don't know if I physically can. It is so poorly written and like I have read some shit fanfic. I've read real good fanfic too but I have read some shit fanfic and it is on par. It's almost my immortal bad.
00:57:04
Speaker
Oh my god. Oh my god. Yeah. Listeners, please write in to convince Alicia to let me do this. We're just gonna end up with an episode of like, Leah giving us summarizations and little quotes and Alicia and I just dying. Just souls leaving our bodies. Oh my god. Yeah. It'd be so good. So amazing.
00:57:28
Speaker
Maybe when we set up this patreon that that's a backing level where we just shit book club with Leah That's that's where I can put my comparing and contrasting shitty Christian readings of token that are basically just
00:57:52
Speaker
people trying to evangelize via token, shitty token books with Leah. All of our listeners who are just have like the little touch of sadism in them and want to pay for our pain. Maybe it'll be possible. Anything else that we wanted to chat about before we wrap up?
00:58:16
Speaker
I think that was everything that we had on our little schedule here, but in the spirit of, you know, other announcements for the future of the podcast and everything, give a quick listen to our little outro that it has a little update as well. I say that. I'm still not going to read the outro. I'm still going to ask Alicia to do it because she does it so much better.
00:58:39
Speaker
But do listen. Oh, before I read the outro, I want to give an update. If you are in and around Atlanta on Labor Day weekend, I am going to be, I being Alicia, I'm going to be speaking at DragonCon for like a fair number of panels in the high fantasy track. I'm on the wit and wisdom of Samwise DMG.
00:59:04
Speaker
Oxford School of High Fantasy and I'm also perplexingly on the Rings of Power Season 1 Review and Recap and the Hobbit's Carfoots and More panels. Who did that to you? Who did you hurt?
00:59:20
Speaker
I have told everyone involved where I am in this. You're on someone's shit list, man. Let me find out. So I'm on most of those panels with people I know. I'm
Upcoming Events and Engagement
00:59:35
Speaker
actually pretty excited about the Rings of Power panel because I'm going to be on that with some of my good friends from Torn, but also Ebony Warrior from Ebony Warrior Studios is going to be on that panel as well, which I am
00:59:48
Speaker
fascinated to hear his take because of the amount of shit that he has been going through on Twitter. And I definitely made it abundantly clear that that panel has got to be moderated well. So I'm hoping that it will go okay.
01:00:09
Speaker
But yeah, you can see me there. And if you're not in and around the Atlanta area and are potentially curious about a virtual membership, they offer that too. I am also on a panel on their virtual track. It is about feminism and Tolkien. And I talk about gay Aowan a whole lot. Yay. Not not gay Aowan, but queer Aowan and trans readings of her. And it's basically a little preview for whenever we get around to doing that episode.
01:00:37
Speaker
Yeah, awesome. Thank you everyone for joining us today. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or you can stream episodes directly on Zencaster, which is zencaster.com slash queerlodgings, a Tolkien podcast with hyphens in between all of those words. Please leave us a rating and like, share, and subscribe. You can find us on Facebook at queerlodgings,
01:01:02
Speaker
Twitter for right now at queer underscore lodgings and we have now joined blue sky at the behest of our listeners over on the good old Twitters. You can also go to our website queer lodgings.com where we have resources for all of our episodes transcripts for some of them and other various things such as our bios.
01:01:23
Speaker
And if you have any feedback or episode ideas, please shoot us an email at queeralogingspodcast at gmail.com. Obviously we read them. Awesome. Thanks guys. Bye.
01:01:58
Speaker
Anything else? Yeah, my computer's not plugged in. Well, that would be exciting, Grace. Just disappear. You guys all just got very, very, very dim. And I was like, what the fuck? Now you're back to your usual vibrant selves. There we go.