DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: One of the other aspects that I'm so curious about, and I don't have an answer, but: I wonder like how much of our framing of phobias is also social…
HZ: There is some suggestion that certain fears are community-led. Like when John Wayne Gacy's case was big news, a lot more people were claiming coulrophobia, the fear of clowns.
SAM JONES: Yeah. That would make sense.
HZ: Sort of, but it should more be fear of –
SAM JONES: Serial killer clowns?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah.
SAM JONES: Or just serial killers.
Allusionist 224. Cosmic Hairball transcript
The English language took all this linguistic inspiration from space, but it wasn’t an equal exchange, because what we gave back, the language we put onto space, is not really doing the best job at putting the sublime into words.
A lot of it just seems to be looking around the house and thinking, “Oh, this thing looks a bit like that thing in space, let’s give it the same name – good enough!”
Read moreTranquillusionist: Ex-Constellations transcript
Let’s hear it for some of the constellations that we used to have but are now ex-constellations.
Read moreAllusionist 144 Aro Ace transcript
HZ: How did it feel when you found the vocabulary to explain yourself?
LEWIS BROWN: Oh, it was so good. I think it's maybe a bit of a cliche to say, but it was like I'd found a puzzle piece. And I was like, "Oh! That makes sense. Right. Yeah. You know, that checks out." It really helps, I think, to have to have a term for it. Before I had words like aromantic and asexual, I don't know, I just had a bad feeling. When I assumed that I did feel attracted to other people and I was kind of thinking, do I just have some trauma or something? Am I just a selfish person? And these are a cruel things to be thinking about yourself. And then I was like, oh, wait, no, no I don't. I can think of all the ways in which I'm a pretty giving person. I care about the people that I care about quite a lot. Just not necessarily in the way that everyone thinks is the most important way.
Read moreAllusionist 123 Celebrity transcript
GREG JENNER: If we look back at classical sources, where do we get fame from? What does it mean? What's the origin point? The Greeks had a goddess called Pheme, and she is a winged, beautiful goddess, with a trumpet. She parps a trumpet. And that is your name being sung into the heavens through the trumpet. So it's a nice thing. It's good. You get fame and it means people going to hear about you. But when you get to the Romans, and we get one of the most famous Roman writers, Virgil, in his Aeneid, he talks about Fama, where we get our word 'fame' from. That derives from the verb 'fari', meaning to speak or gossip about someone. And Virgil's Fama is not a beautiful goddess with wings and a parping trumpet; she's basically Godzilla. She's a terrifying, massive monster who stalks the land and she's covered with eyes and ears and tongues, and she grows in scale the more people that are gossiping about you. So the more you're being chatted about or gossiped about, the larger this monster becomes until she's vanishing into the clouds and she never sleeps. And she hunts you down. And Virgil's version of fame is predatory. It's terrifying. It's this enormous force of nature that comes for you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Read more
