Now Hear This

A new audio feature for the next season of Everything Is Amazing.

If you saw the truly spectacular display of aurora a few days ago and it was your very first sighting of them - as was the case for astronomer Phil Plait - I'd just like to remind you that it’s proof that:

(a) it could happen again, and

(b) something else equally amazing could happen at ANY TIME.

This is inspired by / stolen from a mug by

Brendan Leonard

which I definitely do not regret purchasing a while back. Get yours here.

Image description: different angles of a mug that says “Hope, According To My Dog - One Day, Something Good Happened - Therefore, Any Day, It Could Happen Again.”

(And if like me you missed the aurora light-show because of inclement weather, please join me outside where I’m shrieking foul curses at the sky.)

A day after the new aurora dropped, the company behind Instagram launched an absolute clanger in the form of a new tool to artificially add Northern/Southern Lights to your photos. The public reaction was … unimpressed, to say the least, but this was my favourite take:

Image description: repost of Meta’s announcement of AI tool for adding auroras to photos, with commentary saying “This is a really great example of my insistence that the biggest crime of AI is that it skips the process in favour of the product. The photo of the Aurora isn’t the experience; it’s the receipt of the experience.”

“The receipt of the experience” is wonderfully said.

Okay! Today’s Everything Is Amazing is a quick audio (with transcript below) to talk about a few new things I’m launching in the next season.

Take it away, cakehole:

Image description: hand clenched around cassette tape with the tape unspooled and wrapped around it.

Transcript:

For me, one of the strangest things about being over fifty years old in the year Two Thousand And Twenty-Four is the knowledge that some people today don’t know what a Compact Cassette is. 

Maybe a few of you are wrinkling your brows right now - “a what?” - and I think that’s remarkable, because, how fast the world moves these days. Maybe 50 years from now a few of you currently in your full flush of youth (damn your eyes) will be old-timers, and you’ll mention your favourite smartphone, and you’ll get the same reaction. 

But right now, I bet most of you remember cassettes, and that’s great because I don’t have to explain how fun they were - especially, in my family’s case, the way you could record stuff off the radio. 

As I said way back in season 1 of Everything Is Amazing, my late dad was an aircraft technician for the British Royal Air Force, and that’s why I grew up in Cyprus, in married quarters on a military base. This was when I was first starting to read entire books - my first properly grown-up book being Lord Of The Rings, which took me nearly a year to finish - but my earliest way to consume stories was to listen to them, first from my parents, and then from C90 cassettes of recordings of serials from the BBC World Service. 

I’d sit with my legs curled under me on the row of airline seating on our back porch that my dad had acquired from a scrapped passenger plane, I’d find somewhere to plug in my cassette player, which weighed the best part of a ton, and then I’d be swept away. Thrillers, murder mysteries, natural history, anything I could get my dad to record - including an amazing narration of The Hobbit by the actor Nichol Williamson, best known for his mesmerizing performance as Merlin in the film Excaliber.

I remember I listened to those tapes so much that the tape got stretched and they started getting snarled up - which was really traumatic - first the recorded voice would slow down and distort nightmarishly like a scene in a horror movie, and then you’d have to get a toothpick, fish the tape out of the innards of your cassette player and hope it would work when you rewound it back on. Bloody awful experience.

Anyway. That was nearly half a century ago (dear god), and now audio is easy. I mean, even ten years ago sending audio over the internet was still a bit Star Trek - it was only in late 2013 that WhatsApp started doing voice notes, and before that it was texting, or - and I know this is hard to believe, kids - you actually used your phone to ring people and speak to them in real-time using your face. It was almost as awkward as hanging out in person.

But now, and in particular with this Substack newsletter, I can grab a microphone and record my own vastly inferior version of something on the BBC World Service, like this newsletter and the dozen or so others I’ve recorded for Everything Is Amazing since 2021. It’s easy, and it’s fun for me to do, and amazingly to me, you don’t seem to hate it. When I do an audio accompaniment, that newsletter does better than average and as far as I can tell, hundreds of you prefer listening to it rather than reading the transcript.

So - from the start of season 7, I’m still going to audio-record the occasional piece here and there for those of you signed up for free, but if you’re a paid subscriber, every newsletter will have an audio version, and when I get caught up with things, I’ll go back and record audios for the best-performing newsletters over the last 6 seasons. If you prefer reading me rather than suffering this gravelly House Stark accent (“Winter is coming”), not to worry - I’ll still be writing as normal, but there will just be audio as well.

And speaking of audio: an update on my non-fiction storytelling course. This is the one that some of you went through in 2022 in its earlier incarnation, and I’ve been overhauling it ever since. Part of the reason I haven’t launched yet is because I really wanted to use Substack for it because of all its shiny audio features, but because of a few critical limitations in other areas, I can’t. 

But! I have finally worked out how I’m doing it - and at long last, I’m launching its first five-week run starting November 15th, so it ends just before Christmas. If you’re a new or existing paid subscriber, or were one since July 2022 even if you aren’t any longer, you’ll get free access to it - it’ll be emails with downloadable audios, so you can go through it at your own pace.

Another thing I’m introducing this season for paid subscribers is the rough equivalent of an Everything Is Amazing newsletter, but live! This is via Substack’s new live video feature that they’ve just rolled out. My intention is that you tune in and I teach you something that will hopefully make you go wow, except this happens live and maybe even on location, somewhere in the world that’s worthy of that wow. 

(This is actually something I’ve wanted to do from the beginning of this newsletter in 2021, but the tech just wasn’t there - so I’m eager to play around and see what’s possible here.)

To access the live version of these events, you’d need to install the Substack app on your phone - but I’ll also publish replays of them straight to your email, if you’re happy to wait for the catch-up version. More details to come as I experiment my way into all of this!

All that is currently what I’ve got lined up - and since it’ll be a shorter season, I’m trying to not overload myself here, which is always a danger when you’re a combination of enthusiastic and semi-clueless.

I’m really excited to see how this all goes. Thanks for listening.

- M