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Anonymous asked:
Any chance we can get more Unsmoke in s2 or something in the same vein?
🎷: Who can say? The whims of the Fold are mysterious indeed. :) Thank you all for your great questions today! We look forward to answering this one (and many others) with revelations still to come in Season 2. More episodes of Unend (and maybe even Unsmoke) coming your way soon. Cheers to you all! We’ll see you out there around the cosmos. <3
So, we found out in Midst S3E19-pisode, guns are Laser guns in Midst. Amazing reveal, especially with the bulbs used being non-fold safe Loxlee brand lightbulbs. I have two questions:
1. Does that mean Lark's shotgun is also a laser shotgun? If so, I wish we could have seen (heard) her fire it at something.
2. Since Loxlee was manufacturing laser weapons, what were they being used against? Were they just for Company related missions or were there other entities out there that the Trust needed to protect themselves from?
🎷: 1. Yep! Laser shotgun. :) 2. Anything any society would use guns for! Personal use, sport, self-defense, hunting, security, military stuff, you name it. The Un is a big place with many different societies, and Loxlee firearms and ammunition are likely a big export that The Highest Light supplies to many islets, civilizations, and organizations around the Un.
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Anonymous asked:
is there a specific type of video game you think our unend protagonists would enjoy or succeed at? what about you, narrators, yourselves?
🔮: Oh god, Cleo would be SUCH a gamer. I think she’d be into visual novels, Infinity Nikki, Stardew Valley, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Elden Ring. (I play all kinds of stuff, too. At the moment, Infinity Nikki is simultaneously healing my inner child and threatening to give me a gambling addiction.)
🎷: Dot would probably be into Spiritfarer, Everett strikes me as an enjoyer of classic Doom (or American Truck Simulator, I can’t decide), and Mother Artifice would be into something batshit like Chuzzle Deluxe. As for me, I like vibey walking simulators and indie experiments like Bernband, 2:22AM, 0N0W (zeronorthzerowest) and Kentucky Route Zero. Classics Myst and Riven are very high on my list, and my favorite game of all time is Thief: The Dark Project. Absolutely incalculable levels of worldbuilding, weird sound, and atmosphere in Thief. Life-changing.
📜: Ooooh, Merlin would THRIVE and be fascinated by Encarta 98 MindMaze.
The Biological Man would absolutely get into Tetris, and all of its weird variations. 👀 And Balatro.
I think Tzila would love Rain World.
Hambing should try Tee K.O. from the Jackbox Party Pack 3 because he would rock at it.
And if any of these characters shared games with each other, I think we could expect a rash of Balatro to break out aboard the Ship whilst on its various voyages. It would be just like 'The Game' episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But with all kinds of crazy cards. Speaking for myself, I've lately been enjoying the care, design, and upkeep of my fussy vampire dollhouse in V Rising (an incredibly thoughtful cooperative game about being creatures of the night). I've also been on a tour of some of the FASCINATING early point and click adventure games like Myst and Riven as 🎷Xen mentioned, but also Phantasmagoria, Blade Runner, and The Journeyman Project series of games. It was SUCH an interesting period of time in videogame history!
You mentioned during the Season 1 Roundtable for Unend that Star Trek was an influence in developing Unend. Where there any media that similarly served as touchstones for the original Midst? Alternatively any other series that influenced the development of Unend?
🎷: If Unend is Star Trek-adjacent, original Midst is largely Star Wars. And Star Wars itself, among its own influence, was heavily inspired by Westerns (“The Searchers,” most significantly). Midst owes a ton of its own DNA to Gunsmoke, (a legendary Western radio drama) and HBO’s Deadwood, both of which are character-driven sagas about the travails of frontier towns navigating times of change and hardship. For nightmarish and surreal lunar disaster influences, Majora’s Mask is a keystone. Purely on the audio side of things, PC games “Thief: The Dark Project” and “Riven” (the sequel to Myst) are gigantic audio inspirations for me, and I credit them with kicking off my fascination with lived-in, tactile audio worldbuilding. The Midst cosmos sounds the way it does because of these two games.
I’d love to hear more about how UNEND developed in relation to Midst. Did you always plan to have a show exploring the extremities of the cosmos? Did you all come up with what was in the highest heights and deepest depths while midst was still being produced, or did that happen after? And finally, did you know that there actually was a sun somewhere out there during Midst? Thanks Third Person!
🎷: Unend came out of wanting to explore our own cosmos! Original Midst hinted at tons of crazy stuff that was always just outside the scope of the actual story, and we wanted to blast out there and see what it was all about. We had lots of ideas about what the cosmos contained that we never had reason (or time) to directly explore in Midst itself, so it was a natural next step to make a show all about exploring the weird universe we were building. :)
Hi Xen!
Do you use any effects pedals when recording Midst music magic? If so, what’s currently on your Midst pedalboard?
🎷: Midst and Unend guitars are pretty clean, honestly, and my only effect for most of the shows’ guitar elements is a stereo delay/reverb. When it's time for mayhem (or Kozma’s theme) I’ve got an Old Blood Haunt fuzz. A lot of OG Midst music was live-looped with a Ditto looper.
Anonymous asked:
Coffee is so important to any scientific undertaking - how do the Ship’s crew take their coffee?
📜: Merlin is absolutely plain as can be, just the coffee, in that classic Midst style of "maybe barely even some water," I imagine it to be like mate. Something about Micky says espresso to me, but I can't define why. And both Rawfield and Hambing seem like mostly tea drinkers, but would definitely be open to trying some new exploratory fusion of flavors and ingredients, maybe in a latte-context.
The more we've been able to delve into the philosophy of the Mothers Merciful, the more fascinating (and occasionally very resonant!) it gets. Have there been any particular theological/epistemological/spiritual, etc. etc. concepts from our world—or, hell, from other fictional worlds—that informed or helped inspire your development of their ways and their axioms?
🎷: The concept of the Mothers originally materialized after I spent several weekends guesting at a training retreat for new therapists. Dipping my toes into the world of therapy and mental health counseling was pretty life-changing, and I came back to Sara and Matt with an idea for otherworldly Fold therapists. I’ve also been on my own journey to practice and understand meditation for several years, and my own learnings (and misunderstandings!) about meditation have informed several foundational things about how the Mothers operate.
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Anonymous asked:
is there a specific type of video game you think our unend protagonists would enjoy or succeed at? what about you, narrators, yourselves?
🔮: Oh god, Cleo would be SUCH a gamer. I think she’d be into visual novels, Infinity Nikki, Stardew Valley, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Elden Ring. (I play all kinds of stuff, too. At the moment, Infinity Nikki is simultaneously healing my inner child and threatening to give me a gambling addiction.)
🎷: Dot would probably be into Spiritfarer, Everett strikes me as an enjoyer of classic Doom (or American Truck Simulator, I can’t decide), and Mother Artifice would be into something batshit like Chuzzle Deluxe. As for me, I like vibey walking simulators and indie experiments like Bernband, 2:22AM, 0N0W (zeronorthzerowest) and Kentucky Route Zero. Classics Myst and Riven are very high on my list, and my favorite game of all time is Thief: The Dark Project. Absolutely incalculable levels of worldbuilding, weird sound, and atmosphere in Thief. Life-changing.
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Anonymous asked:
What were your biggest inspirations (real city or fictional) when transforming stationary hill into a city?
🔮: I know we’ve mentioned this before, but Perdido Street Station by China Miéville was a HUGE inspiration. The book opens with this incredible description of the city of New Crobuzon that makes it feel like a living breathing (oozing sweating pulsating) animal. Stationary Hill is a much more welcoming sort of a place than New Crobuzon, but those descriptions have a vitality that I always strive to emulate when I’m introducing a city location.
📜: YES New Crobuzon 100%. Something I love about traveling, is getting to see how the values of a society reflect in the spaces they create. Part of what makes Stationary Hill so fundamentally TRUE for me is: it is a city that centers the humans who live there. Yes, it betrays the same kind of uneven rampant growth of an untended plant box for different reasons, but they make it work: for themselves, and for each other. They have weathered many trials, and have learned more about themselves and their neighbors all along the way. Because that is at Stationary Hill's cultural core, everything else just falls into place.
Anonymous asked:
is there a specific type of video game you think our unend protagonists would enjoy or succeed at? what about you, narrators, yourselves?
🔮: Oh god, Cleo would be SUCH a gamer. I think she’d be into visual novels, Infinity Nikki, Stardew Valley, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Elden Ring. (I play all kinds of stuff, too. At the moment, Infinity Nikki is simultaneously healing my inner child and threatening to give me a gambling addiction.)
I'm really hoping the teaser for the Midst: Ripples comic mentioning Daggle as a boy means we get to read about how Daggle in Unend came to be. Can you say? My intrigue has been increased!
📜: Yes! So sorry to keep you hanging - by now you know your intrigue is well-tuned! Daggle in Midst: Ripples and Daggle from Unend S1E04 are one in the same, roughly 30 years apart! Kendra Wells created such an INCREDIBLE character, that we knew he had to see him again.
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Anonymous asked:
Xen: Where would you fly your helicopter? Sara and Matt: Would you go with them?
🎷: If you’re referring to the story I shared in our recent Unend S1 Roundtable (about how I learned to fly the historic “Hind” helicopter in a flight simulator while researching the stagecoach), I like to fly it around the rocky red deserts of Southwest USA! It kinda feels like flying around the deserts of Midst, as does helicoptering around the interior of Australia's Simpson Desert, which has some of Earth's most otherworldly crimson dunes.
📜: I would want to do a full flight ride-along in the simulator first, I think, and we can take it from there! 😅 Honestly, flight is a terrifyingly complex art, and I have yet to even BE aboard an in-flight helicopter IRL, let alone a rather old and sort of notorious one that my actual real life friend somehow acquired, got credentialed to fly, and is flying in this hypothetical scenario. It's not so much the heights I'm afraid of, as the whole falling from them, thing.
So uh, what’s up with Zoron. The episode I mean. Did Matt and Sara KNOW who this guy was or… what… how did you capture that energy.
🎷: Oh yeah, we all knew who he was and what was about to happen during recording, but Zoron does his own thing and has a way of throwing everyone around him off balance. No one can ever be truly prepared to experience Zoron. Not even us.
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For Matt: How is your adventure in playing drumset going?
For Sara: How are Fiona and Jacob doing? Loved seeing a glimpse of them in episode 1!
For Xen: Were there any new instruments you incorporated into Unend's soundscape?
🎷: Quite a few new instruments have been used in Moonward, yes! I use a synth controller called the Glide (also featured in Moonward), handbells and woodblock marimba (for music representing Merlin and the Bocular Man, respectively), kalimba (for various things, but most often aboard-ship atmospheres), and clavichord (for Brocheroug music), and a whole bunch of new software synths for many and various different cosmos locations and new characters. Unend overall is more often scored with acoustic instruments and weird synths, whereas OG Midst was more spaghetti western and guitar-driven.
📜: Thank you for asking! It progresses! Drums and rhythm are exercising a very different part of my brain, and I hope to (one day soon) be able to hold two different beats at the same time. 😵💫 Right now, I'm trying to follow-along with music I already enjoy listening to!