Why did the turkey cross the road?
To get away from the crazy lady with the camera.
If you have ANY interest in musicals, you have to listen to Wait Wait Don’t Kill Me, a musical comedy about Serial. You all listened to season one of Serial, right? Of course you did. It’s on the Secrets, Crimes & Audiotapes podcast. Go. Listen. Enjoy.
I’ve had voice actors on the brain and in my ears with all the fiction podcasts I listen to, and I noticed the other day that some of these voice actors SUCK at laughing. On Wolf 359, which I love, only ONE of the actors is any good at making his character’s laughter sound real. Thankfully, he plays two characters. When the others laugh, it’s painfully obvious that it’s fake, and one of them is so bad I almost can’t listen. It’s just as well that that guy plays a minor character AND he’s an uber-bad guy, so I only feel a little bad for not liking him.
I’m judging them for their bad fake laughter, but it’s not like I could do any better. I don’t think I could be a voice actor. I feel strange just reading things out loud. I don’t do voices or accents, although I’d like to, not that either of those are requirements for voice actors. I suppose I’d get better if I practiced.
I could never be an actor at all, I think. I mean, the biggest obstacle is that I can’t act. I can’t say I’ve tried much, but I pretty much suck at it. And I get weird when someone points a video camera at me. (Weird in still photos, sure, but WEIRDER on video.) Not on purpose – I just can’t help it. Again, though, I imagine practice would help.
New things I like (and one thing I didn’t like):
Lately (and by lately, I mean all summer long), my workouts have been much more enjoyable because I’ve been listening to podcasts. I caught up on Welcome to Night Vale in mid-July, right before the live show, and then they went on hiatus, so I had to find something else. I like the Thrilling Adventure Hour very much (that’s their website, but I download them from here), but I’m not always in the mood for it, and John and I listen to Hello from the Magic Tavern together in the car, so I couldn’t use that. Someone I follow on Twitter was raving about The Bright Sessions, and it looked interesting, so I gave it a try. SO GOOD. The Bright Sessions is about a psychiatrist who only treats “unusual” patients. Her definition of “unusual” is right up my alley. I raced through both seasons, and I’m eagerly awaiting the beginning of the next season. Once I finished The Bright Sessions, to avoid withdrawal before the next season starts, I started another podcast called Ars Paradoxica, about a scientist who accidentally time travels to 1943 while she’s conducting an experiment to do something else. That one is ALSO great, and the only reason I’m not caught up is that I’m having trouble downloading episodes 12 through 16. Not everyone streams all the time, podcasters. So while I figure THAT out, I started a new one called The Black Tapes. It’s also a fictional podcast (all of my favorite podcasts are fiction ones), but it sounds the most like a real radio show. A journalist from a fictional NPR-type station starts a series about people with interesting jobs and gets pulled into investigating supernatural events. The person she works with debunks those events. It’s a little eerie, but it was the fourth one that really creeped me out (just yesterday), so I might limit myself to listening to those outside on sunny days only. I’ve heard those will be in short supply in another month.
There’s good stuff out there!