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I can't get enough of this show. Please, if you can, tell Cecil Baldwin that when I am feeling panicky, his voice is one of the few things that helps me calm down. You'd think that a show about hooded figures and angels etc. would be creepy and panic-inducing, but something about it is charming - maybe the fact that almost all of the characters on the show adjust to whatever comes their way. Also, this quote is one of the most reassuring things I've read: "The past is gone, and cannot harm you any more. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first, and settles in as the gentle present." So thanks for making something beautiful, and I hope you continue for a long time.
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Sep 4, 2013 07:36
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newwavepony posted:I can't get enough of this show. Please, if you can, tell Cecil Baldwin that when I am feeling panicky, his voice is one of the few things that helps me calm down. You'd think that a show about hooded figures and angels etc. would be creepy and panic-inducing, but something about it is charming - maybe the fact that almost all of the characters on the show adjust to whatever comes their way. Also, this quote is one of the most reassuring things I've read: "The past is gone, and cannot harm you any more. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first, and settles in as the gentle present." So thanks for making something beautiful, and I hope you continue for a long time.
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Sep 4, 2013 20:35
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Action Yak Police posted:I'm getting to sleep much easier now that I listen to WtNV before bed. Same here. Some days, I just can't bring myself to wake up!
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Sep 4, 2013 20:42
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Yeah I'm a terrible sleeper, and WTNV is great at helping me drift off when I need it, too. I've found Poetry Week to be especially great for relaxing. A lot of people dressed up like WTNV characters this weekend it looks like. Also I saw this today, ever instance of Cecil saying Carlos' name.
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Sep 5, 2013 02:21
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Good lord http://nazi-nurse.tumblr.com/post/60246598196/written-by-teripops-secret-police-design-by
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Sep 5, 2013 04:02
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It's...it's so beautiful.
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Sep 5, 2013 04:29
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Forgive all the  , but watching the popularity surge on tumblr and the rest of the media the last month and a half or so since I got into the show has been half as much fun as listening to it. I kind of cobbled together some theories about the why's behind what has been happening based on a couple of years of watching tumblr/fandom culture. First of all, in general why its exploding 1) The number one thing is just that it's good. (I'm not trying to sound like I'm sucking up here, it just is... really, really good.) The writing, the voice acting, the Disparition music that sets the mood, it's all fun to listen to and just as entertaining as any TV show or movie people love. Though opinions on some of the Weather might vary greatly, most people can identify at least a couple of Weather songs they love. There's not a part of the show I would call "weak" unless you count some of the early post-show credit segments where the sound was bad/too far from the mic etc. But people even stick around to listen to the credits because everyone knows the proverbs at the end are awesome, and how else are you going to find out who did the Weather this week? 2) It's unique. There is just not anything else in the market out there like it that most people are aware of, at least. You can make comparisons to the X-files, the Twilight Zone, Supernatural or a dozen other shows/books/movies but there are elements to WTNV that make it a thing all of its own and no two people will describe it the same way unless they're deliberately parroting something they read and memorized. And specifically why it exploded on tumblr: 3) It has an actual gay romance. If there's one thing about a huge number of tumblr kids, they really love gay male romances. If two men even glance at each other on a show or in a movie, a large segment of the tumblr population decides that those two men are secretly gay and in love and nothing will convince them otherwise. They tend to also latch on to the few actual canon gay romances that are out there, but since there's not many, this huge segment of the tumblr population is hungry for more. The Carlos/Cecil relationship in the show is a huge selling point for a lot of the fans. Any quick glance through the #Welcome to Night Vale tag on tumblr will prove that. Also, note that the show really took off on tumblr right around the time One Year Later was released. 4) A really in-depth world to discover, since 25 - 30 episodes have been out since the explosion, around 12 hours worth of material to listen to. The lore is deep enough for people to really dive into and get a handle on how it works, has a pretty good sized cast of characters, and a bunch of locations, but still small enough for there to feel like there's a lot more that they're able to imagine/contribute. It's not played out, it's new and shiny and different. 4) The audio-only medium with exactly one visual image (the logo) ever presented to the audience. Each fan can decide for him or herself what things look like, the style, the direction. There's little visual canon that restricts what things have to look like, which makes people feel like they have a lot of control when they want to create things. And, creating things about whatever fandom someone is a part of - whether it's drawing, graphic design, putting together photosets of things taken from hundreds of other sources, fanvids, or writing - fanfiction or meta - is what tumblr does best. WTNV is both a deep universe of over 12 hours of canon to explore yet also is enough of a blank slate that the creative types on tumblr get to draw all over it however they wish and there's very little that someone can make that can be pointed out as actually being WRONG. 5) Night Vale is weird. Thus, when they go to create works based off of it however they choose, they can be as weird as they want. There are rules as to how things work in Night Vale, sure, but enough is open that a hell of a lot is permitted in that weirdness. More than in the universes of almost any other media they've ever been exposed to. There's some aspects to this that they've latched onto in uh, cringe-worthy ways, though. Giving tumblr kids a canon gay romance, PLUS the innate weirdness of Night Vale, PLUS handing them 12+ hours of good material to explore right away (to those that discovered it in June or beyond), PLUS a virtual blank slate for creativity was like handing them the perfect storm of the thing they've been waiting for for a long time. Honestly, someone couldn't have crafted a better piece of media for tumblr to latch onto if you had been trying to do just that.
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Sep 5, 2013 04:46
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Annakie posted:Giving tumblr kids a canon gay romance, PLUS the innate weirdness of Night Vale, PLUS handing them 12+ hours of good material to explore right away (to those that discovered it in June or beyond), PLUS a virtual blank slate for creativity was like handing them the perfect storm of the thing they've been waiting for for a long time. Honestly, someone couldn't have crafted a better piece of media for tumblr to latch onto if you had been trying to do just that. Homestuck has all of these.
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Sep 5, 2013 05:07
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Maybe someday soon Homestuck will receive the internet attention Annakie is alluding to. 
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Sep 5, 2013 05:15
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Brownview posted:Maybe someday soon Homestuck will receive the internet attention Annakie is alluding to. Oh, I was interpreting his statement as "Tumblr has been waiting for something like Nightvale to latch on to" and not "Nightvale has all the qualities they already use to latch on to something."
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Sep 5, 2013 05:18
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Lady Naga posted:Homestuck has all of these. I don't really know what Homestuck is beyond that it's also pretty big in some circles of tumblr (I know it's a webcomic only because I went and looked at the wikipedia article for five seconds at some point), so it has got the visual aspect to it that WTNV doesn't have. (Though I suppose you could trade that out for the audio aspect Homestuck probably doesn't have.) And I'm just speaking from personal experience here, but I've never seen as much Homestuck on tumblr in my two-ish years of having a blog there as I have in the last two months of WTNV. I think it's pretty hard to avoid WTNV on tumblr unless you only follow blogs that don't talk about popular media / fandom things or hardly any other blogs at all. *edit* Lady Naga posted:Oh, I was interpreting his statement as "Tumblr has been waiting for something like Nightvale to latch on to" and not "Nightvale has all the qualities they already use to latch on to something." Tumblr is pretty latched onto a lot of things, I think I was more saying the second thing, yeah. 
Annakie fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 05:21
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Annakie posted:I don't really know what Homestuck is beyond that it's also pretty big in some circles of tumblr (I know it's a webcomic only because I went and looked at the wikipedia article for five seconds at some point), so it has got the visual aspect to it that WTNV doesn't have. (Though I suppose you could trade that out for the audio aspect Homestuck probably doesn't have.) I think the "social circles" thing is colouring your perception, yeah. Even after I stopped liking Homestuck my dashboard was nothing but, meanwhile I've only heard vague references to Nightvale through it in the entire time I've been listening. Anyway as far as I can tell those are the only two things that really hit all their sweetspots.
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Sep 5, 2013 05:42
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Can we keep tumblr out of this? The fanart that gets cross posted is really cool, but I couldn't care less about why tumblr kids in particular may or may not like the show. I just feel like they add a whole new dimension of drama to everything they collectively touch.maxnmona posted:Good lord MIDWIFE CRISIS fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 11:28
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maxnmona posted:Good lord I don't know where/when the 'Third-Eye Cecil' came into play, but I now cannot view it any other way.
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Sep 5, 2013 11:43
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I'm gonna draw fan art of Cecil with only one eye. Maybe as a pirate. My little sister just got into wtnv a few weeks ago and I get constant emails about it. She is 13. Middle school is tough, and she seems to have found a little home in night vale, away from real mental chaos, much like I did. It's amazing to me how this show gets people through stuff. For something so consistently creepy, it is also consistently comforting.
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Sep 5, 2013 12:42
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Why is Cecil depicted frequently with a third eye?
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Sep 5, 2013 13:24
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SalTheBard posted:Why is Cecil depicted frequently with a third eye? No reason as far as the actual show is concerned. As far as fan-art, it's a follow-the-leader thing. Someone drew him with a third eye as a kind of "wouldn't it be funny if..." situation. From what I understand, the line of thinking is that Cecil isn't actually getting the news from reports or whatever normal methods reporters get their news from, he's actually psychic or something similar. Thus the third eye. So, of course, people saw that and said "hey, that's cool" and did their own art based on that. Nowadays new fans to the show will check out stuff on Tumblr, see all these 3rd-eye Cecil's and just assume that's actually what he looks like. Since they're not familiar with the show, they might assume it's canon, explained in some episode they haven't listed to yet. Fandom latches onto odd things. Like the frequent depictions of Cecil having his arms sleeved in tattoos and whatnot. Shnakepup fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 13:42
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Shnakepup posted:Fandom latches onto odd things. Like the frequent depictions of Cecil having his arms sleeved in tattoos and whatnot. I kinda liked that the mayor also had a full body tattoo barely peaking out from her suit in that particular fan art. I can see it becoming a meme where people of import in night vale just end up with these odd full body tattoos that could be easily covered but always just peek out a little bit.
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Sep 5, 2013 14:12
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Lady Naga posted:I think the "social circles" thing is colouring your perception, yeah. Even after I stopped liking Homestuck my dashboard was nothing but, meanwhile I've only heard vague references to Nightvale through it in the entire time I've been listening. Anyway as far as I can tell those are the only two things that really hit all their sweetspots. From what I can tell the people that are really into Night Vale and Homestuck are also really into Sherlock, Hannibal, Pacific Rim, and to a lesser extent the new Star Trek movies. And also some things I just don't recognize because I'm old.
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Sep 5, 2013 14:30
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Look Under The Rock posted:I'm gonna draw fan art of Cecil with only one eye. Maybe as a pirate. It's canon that he has at least two eyes  Kevin described his eyes in 19A. Other than that I'm all for Pirate Cecil. Now he just needs his own ship at the Night Vale Harbor and Waterfront Recreation Area. Even though it was just a mass hallucination.
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Sep 5, 2013 14:54
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Pirate Cecil in a Halloween themed episode! I wonder if and how they celebrate Halloween in Night Vale.
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Sep 5, 2013 14:59
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Kazy posted:It's canon that he has at least two eyes Whoa now buddy he says something is wrong with his eyes so maybe Cecil wears an eye patch and Kevin is just assuming it's some degenerative thing.
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Sep 5, 2013 15:00
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Look Under The Rock posted:My little sister just got into wtnv a few weeks ago and I get constant emails about it. She is 13. Middle school is tough, and she seems to have found a little home in night vale, away from real mental chaos, much like I did. It's amazing to me how this show gets people through stuff. For something so consistently creepy, it is also consistently comforting. Because it's a form of comfort that exposes how much pretense goes into constructing the idea that things are actually alright.
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Sep 5, 2013 15:32
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Admiral Goodenough posted:
Episode 12, The Candidate. She's a homeless woman who lives in the Earth Sciences building at the community college. I think she's mentioned in a few other episodes too.
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Sep 5, 2013 16:17
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Shnakepup posted:No reason as far as the actual show is concerned. As far as fan-art, it's a follow-the-leader thing. Someone drew him with a third eye as a kind of "wouldn't it be funny if..." situation. From what I understand, the line of thinking is that Cecil isn't actually getting the news from reports or whatever normal methods reporters get their news from, he's actually psychic or something similar. Thus the third eye. I thought that was a weird line of thinking until I started relistening to episodes recently. I think the things they're talking about aren't the bits where Cecil talks about normal town events that have explicitly or implicitly been reported to him through normal channels but the bits where he just starts telling a creepy story about things happening to people. Those are things he'd have no way of knowing about unless he's making poo poo up, psychic, or being influenced by some other outside force, so I can understand going down the third eye/psychic train of thought.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:27
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MariusLecter posted:Pirate Cecil in a Halloween themed episode! I wonder if and how they celebrate Halloween in Night Vale.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:38
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Organza Quiz posted:I thought that was a weird line of thinking until I started relistening to episodes recently. I think the things they're talking about aren't the bits where Cecil talks about normal town events that have explicitly or implicitly been reported to him through normal channels but the bits where he just starts telling a creepy story about things happening to people. Those are things he'd have no way of knowing about unless he's making poo poo up, psychic, or being influenced by some other outside force, so I can understand going down the third eye/psychic train of thought. His booth faces the street and he has a little window to see out onto the busy streets. A good reporter is always aware of his surroundings
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Sep 5, 2013 19:25
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Lady Naga posted:His booth faces the street and he has a little window to see out onto the busy streets. A good reporter is always aware of his surroundings So Cecil is Samuel L. Jackson from Do The Right Thing.
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Sep 5, 2013 19:29
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Just started listening. Am really enjoying it. Am currently working my way through the archive. Thanks for the great show!
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Sep 5, 2013 19:42
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Lady Naga posted:His booth faces the street and he has a little window to see out onto the busy streets. A good reporter is always aware of his surroundings I guess it depends on how literally you take everything in the show. When he launches into a poetic soliloquy about someone's innermost existential concerns, I take it more as a neat flourish on the part of the show itself, I'm not thinking "wow Cecil must be reading that guy's mind". Hell, if you wanted to try and take everything literally, you could easily just say Cecil's intentionally adding fictional monologues/poetry/editorials/etc into the broadcast to make things more interesting. Dude certainly has a flair for the dramatic. Kinda like how the New Yorker has actual articles and reviews next to short fiction and poetry, it doesn't focus on just one thing.
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Sep 5, 2013 20:19
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The Unfuck Your Habitat tumblr collected enough donations to get Cecil to record a special recording for them. They posted it here, in case you want to hear Cecil say "gently caress".
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Sep 6, 2013 01:40
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maxnmona posted:Good lord The regretful wheat-eaters though... nazi-nurse on Tumblr does some really excellent Night Vale drawings even if I think her username is in poor taste.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:55
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Annakie posted:The Unfuck Your Habitat tumblr collected enough donations to get Cecil to record a special recording for them. They posted it here, in case you want to hear Cecil say "gently caress". Cecil is a downtown NYC performance artist, so him saying gently caress is not...like...a rare thing in this world. I've heard it a few times.
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Sep 6, 2013 03:01
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Organza Quiz posted:I thought that was a weird line of thinking until I started relistening to episodes recently. I think the things they're talking about aren't the bits where Cecil talks about normal town events that have explicitly or implicitly been reported to him through normal channels but the bits where he just starts telling a creepy story about things happening to people. Those are things he'd have no way of knowing about unless he's making poo poo up, psychic, or being influenced by some other outside force, so I can understand going down the third eye/psychic train of thought. I think Cecil just has the entire town wired and there's a giant gently caress-off wall of monitors showing him everything. He can't not report, after all! The best way to ensure he is always reporting things properly is to always be watching. Good night, Night Vale. Good night.
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Sep 6, 2013 03:11
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Just an FYI (and I just posted this in the Shortwave thread). The PA (power amplifier) in my radio poo poo itself during the last test for some reason. It's out for repairs BUT, rather than use a high-end radio for this, I'm looking for a cheaper, older unit that will take the abuse a little bit better. I'm hoping to have it picked up, tested and ready to go by the end of September because if I CAN have it ready to go by then, an awesome thought struck me. That thought was how awesome it would be to broadcast an episode a night for each night in October up until Halloween night, when I could marathon the last ones (with obvious rest periods between). Curious if anyone's still interested, I'm sorry it didn't work out before but I'm still trying to get it done!
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Sep 6, 2013 04:41
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That would be amazing. Good luck in finding a new amplifier!
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Sep 6, 2013 06:01
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ChibiSoma posted:I think Cecil just has the entire town wired and there's a giant gently caress-off wall of monitors showing him everything. He can't not report, after all! The best way to ensure he is always reporting things properly is to always be watching. He has a contact in the Sheriff's Secret Police, and it is well established that they do indeed monitor and spy on the whole town.
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Sep 7, 2013 05:08
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Yeah, he is the town news source. So he has
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Sep 7, 2013 10:11
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confused posted:Just started listening. Am really enjoying it. Am currently working my way through the archive. Thanks for the great show! It's pretty great and gives me something to listen to while I play games that require me to listen to something other than its soundtrack. I'm only on episode 10, and I'll be sad when I have to wait for new ones.
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Sep 8, 2013 00:49
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iostream.h posted:That thought was how awesome it would be to broadcast an episode a night for each night in October up until Halloween night, when I could marathon the last ones (with obvious rest periods between). that sounds fantastic. I'm looking forward to it if you can get it set up!
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Sep 8, 2013 04:52
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