A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A peculiar entry in the field of apocalypse prepper books, written by a risk management and game theory specialist whose narrative voice sounds like a bizarre cross between a tech bro, a leftist, and a character from Sex and the City.

The book is pretty scattershot, but its general thesis is that humanity has been through many apocalypses before, we should consider the idea of apocalypse as a disaster like many other disasters rather than the One Thing That Ends Everything, it is better to prepare in a low-key manner than to either move into a bunker or not prepare at all, and building community is not only a better survival method than planning to shoot your neighbors but is the single best prep you can do.

There are two parts of this book that I've never seen anywhere else, and I think both of them could be extremely useful to certain select groups.

One is an explanation of game theory - something which tech bros, right-wing preppers, libertarians, and other anti-social types love, as it says that stabbing people in the back is the ideal strategy - which goes on to explain that most human interactions don't work that way, and it's not a useful model for human interaction or prepping. She instead proposes a different but equally abstracted model that shows how two hunters who cooperate will do better together than if they either don't cooperate or actively sabotage each other. I liked this very much and think it might be very useful to anyone who would otherwise fall prey to the deceptive logic of game theory.

The other thing she does, which again I have never seen in a survival book, is lay out step by step instructions for how to build a community that will work during a disaster. She gets into issues like who to approach, why, and how. She points out that asking for help with some small matter is a great way to start community-building, and also to find out who is interested in being helpful. This part is great and while it's only a chapter, it's a chapter I've never seen before.

My big issue with the book is her tone, which is pretty annoying. And a lot of the book is stuff you've seen before. But those two chapters are useful and unique, and well worth the whole book for people to whom they'd be useful.

A really interesting, gripping nonfiction book about two deadly volcanic eruptions in Colombia, how many of the same people were involved with both, and how what happened with the first one influenced social reactions to the second. Unexpectedly, there is also volcanologist drama.

Bruce begins with an account of Colombia's depressing colonial history, which was very intertwined with its geology - in addition to being tectonically active, it has lots of gold and gemstones, or at least it did when the Spanish invaded. Then she proceeds to the story of a young geology student, Marta Calvache, who briefly studied volcanoes in New Zealand before returning to Colombia. In 1985 the volcano Nevado del Ruiz began showing signs of unusual activity. This is when Calvache discovered that she was literally Colombia's leading volcano expert by default.

She and other Colombian geologists tried to get help from actual volcanologists internationally, but due to political violence in Colombia and mass incompetence/uselessness of various countries' governments, this was inadequate. Nevertheless, they did manage to get some experts in who warned them that Nevado del Ruiz was liable to erupt soon, and that this could cause massive mudslides in nearby towns. Unfortunately, government uselessness/corruption struck again, not helped by international experts contradicting themselves in public, and the towns in danger were basically jerked around and given conflicting information, while Marta and other geologists desperately tried to gather information and warn people.

The volcano erupted in November, causing a massive mudslide which killed 23,000 people. This was followed by a completely botched relief effort. You may have heard of it because of Omayra Sanchez, a 13-year-old girl who was trapped in a pool of water for days and could not be rescued, despite many people trying, as they didn't have the necessary equipment; she was the subject of a haunting photograph. Bruce doesn't even mention her, but instead recounts the story of two young geology students who were the sole survivors of their class, and got to see the lack of useful help firsthand.

Marta Calvache, horrified, threw herself into the study of volcanoes and ended up in charge of a research station by Galeras, another active volcano. She corresponded with international volcanologists, one of whom discovered that a particular signal seemed to correspond with an imminent eruption. So the science was progressing. But "imminent" can mean anything from "in five minutes" to "in five years." Because of this, a village was evacuated, then stayed evacuated for ages, causing major economic damage from a volcano that never did erupt - because the scientist who said it would had not actually looked at any data. Unsurprisingly, this caused a lot of public bitterness.

In 1993, a number of volcanologists, geologists, chemists, etc held a volcano conference at the Galeras research station. Despite indications that Galeras might erupt very soon, a number of them decided to tour the crater to do various scientific tasks.

In a phenomenon which has also been a factor in a number of fatal aviation accidents, the people who giving the warnings were lower-ranking and less respected than the people who wanted to go ahead, and so were ignored or brushed aside. Calvache's warnings were disregarded by the more famous American chemist Stanley Williams, who wanted to lead a crater trip. She did at least manage to limit the number of people going to the crater, and told them to get in and out as fast as possible. They did not do this. Also, despite repeated warnings, the government had refused to close the volcano to tourists, and so a local man and two teenagers took advantage of the handy ropes left by the scientists and followed them into the crater.

KA-BOOM!

Six scientists and the three tourists were killed, including Calvache's friend and co-worker who had worked on Nevado del Ruiz with her, and six scientists were seriously injured. Calvache and another woman scientist climbed into the crater despite not knowing if it would erupt again, and carried out the leader of the crater expedition, Stanley Williams - a task which took two hours due to the extreme difficulty of the terrain.

By this point a lot of Colombians were so furious with the government and volcanologists that the general reaction to this was basically "Fuck around, find out."

And now we get into the absolutely bizarre surprise twist! Stanley Williams gave a number of interviews where he claimed to be the sole survivor of the eruption. People who knew him first thought he was mistaken, then worried that he had brain damage from his head injury. As time went by and he continued to make that claim, they largely decided he was just an asshole.

Victoria Bruce, the author of this book who at that time didn't know about this controversy, heard that Williams was looking for a ghostwriter. Excited at the idea of working with him, she met with him to suggest herself, but he already had someone. A volcanologist heard of this meeting and contacted her to basically say, "Everyone hates this guy, he's at least partly responsible for multiple people getting killed, and he keeps spouting blatant lies about the incident. And also, he's a research thief! He stole the research of the guy who actually did predict the Galeras eruption! Lemme introduce you to literally everyone else involved."

Bruce then talked to several other people, got interested in working with them, and based on this book seems to have gotten interviews with nearly everyone involved except Stanley Williams. Their books came out at the same time and they both got sent on tour, presumably not to the same places at the same time or I assume there would be an afterword about a book tour brawl. I'm now curious to read Williams' book and get his side of the story.

Content notes: Some pretty gruesome descriptions of death by volcano.

Sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow, in which a remote Anishinaabe community survives an apocalypse.

Twelve years after the first book, the community realizes that the place they've settled in is too small to sustain them. The lake is getting overfished, and the game is getting wary. They decide to send an expedition to look into whether they can resettle in their original home, in the Great Lakes area. The last expedition they sent never came back, but Evan Whitesky, his now teenage daughter Nangohns, and several others decide to take the chance...

I liked this even more than the first book, and I liked the first book a lot. It's one of my absolute favorite genres, "cozy apocalypse but with stakes." A lot of the book is about life and how it's lived now, with tons of details about how to preserve a plastic fishing net and how to dress a deer, how to name a baby and how to create a consensus, how to fight and how to live. The various communities feel very real, and the relationship of Evan and Nangohns is lovely.

It has a very satisfying ending but I really hope Rice writes more books in this setting and creates a whole saga.

Content notes: violence, one instance of rape threats, racist slurs, all in the context of the group encountering some white supremacists.

A novel by an... I'll just copy Wikipedia here, because I can't improve on it... American adventurer, dogsled racer, musher, advice columnist and nonfiction writer. She raced and completed the 2019 Iditarod, the 1,000 mi (1,600 km) dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. Publishers Weekly called Braverman a "21st century feminist reincarnation of Jack London."

Relevantly for this book, she appeared on the survival reality show Naked and Afraid.

Small Game is about the four contestants of a reality survivor show, Civilization, who get stranded when the crew disappears without explanation.

(Spoiler for whether or not we learn why - I got accidentally spoiled for this, and I think it's better to know up-front: ( Read more... ))

Mara, the main character, was raised by paranoid survivalists and got a job teaching survival to techbros and other bros, as it's the only thing she knows. In addition to having extremely limited social experience, she's probably autistic, or at least I read her that way. She applies for the show because she's in a bad relationship and needs money to escape. Her voice and way of seeing things is very striking; while her emotional and personal horizons expand a lot during the novel, she stays her essential self.

Small Game is notable partly for what doesn't happen: it's not Lord of the Flies. The survivors don't turn on each other, and there's no rape. (In fact, the sexual danger vanishes when the crew leaves, as that removes the power dynamics based on financial control and exploitation.) There's social awkwardness, and interpersonal blowups, and emotional breakdowns, and tragedy. But there's also kindness and community and mutual support.

It's an unusually realistic take on wilderness survival, in that even supposed experts are going to really struggle to get enough calories, and weakness from hunger quickly makes even small tasks incredibly difficult. There's a lot of interesting thoughts on what survival means.

The ending is very abrupt and I'd have been pissed off if I hadn't been spoiled for the thing I spoiler-tagged, but I did like the last paragraph.

I enjoyed this a lot and recommend it, especially if you're interested in survival. Also it has a central F/F relationship that runs the gamut from sweet to unsettling to unhealthy to heartbreaking to heartwarming, with everything in between.

Content notes: Creepy sexual power dynamics involving the crew and producers; off-page power-related dubcon; an upsetting, kind of unintentional animal harm incident; lots of nature red in tooth and claw; gruesome injuries; spoiler ( Read more... )

You can tell from this that this is a book that really goes for complication, fucked-up characters, and not making anything black-and-white. That's another thing I liked about it.

A journalist's account of people who go missing in the American wilderness, often in national parks. Billman interweaves accounts of assorted missing people with an extended story about one, Jacob Gray, a young man who disappeared in Olympic National Park, leaving behind his bicycle and camping equipment - most spookily, a bow, a quiver of arrows, and four arrows stuck in the ground in a line. Billman befriended Gray's father Randy, and half the book is about Randy's search for his son, which involves getting to know psychics, Bigfoot believers, and other odd folk.

Billman has a quirky style, which is sometimes put to good use and sometimes annoying. The search for Jacob Gray was the less interesting part of the book for me; it has an aimless feeling despite its urgent purpose. It also quickly became clear to me, though not to Randy, why Jacob had vanished. He had begun to show textbook signs of schizophrenia, accompanied by depression, and by far the most likely explanation was that he had either gone off to die or had been driven by delusions or hallucinations.

The rest of the book, a rather scattershot set of accounts of other wilderness disappearances, was more interesting, though mostly as a basis for a late-night internet hunt as a number of them had either been found since the book was published, or they'd been found years before the book was was published and Billman just didn't bother to mention the outcome.

A lot of people vanish in the wilderness and are never found, and there isn't a national database tracking them. There are often jurisdictional issues for that, and some people get searched for a lot more than others. Indigenous women, women of color, people of color, homeless people, etc, often don't get searched for at all. White people, rich people, white women, and particularly rich white people may get massive search efforts.

There's a small cottage industry of woo and grifting centering around missing people, in which a key figure is the "Missing 411" guy, David Paulides, who is also a Bigfoot enthusiast. If you want to continue holding out hope for the existence of Bigfoot, don't click on this link.

Billman is skeptical of Paulides, but doesn't get into any depth as to why. This is the basic problem with Billman: no depth on the details. For instance, he says that a missing man's camera was found and the last pictures on it indicated that he was succumbing to hypothermia, but doesn't say what the pictures were!

I will give a little detail on my own skepticism about Paulides, and about woo-woo missing persons theories in general. Paulides says that the national park service is involved in a vast conspiracy to cover up disappearances (maybe partially true; there might be efforts to cover up incompetence or racism), and strongly implies that missing people were taken by UFOs, dimensional portals, and/or Bigfoot. He presents misleading statistics about missing people to make it seem like something spooooooky is going on, such as that they're often found near boulder fields (a very common feature of wilderness) or granite (the world's commonest rock) or water (can't imagine why a lost person would seek out water) or berries (ditto), and were seen by someone shortly before they vanished but then vanished the instant they were no longer within view (DUH), are often found naked or with missing clothing (paradoxical undressing), are found in an already-searched area (people are surprisingly hard to find in dense wilderness) etc.

In spooooooky missing persons cases in general, it is a very disappointing pattern that when you dig into the cases, it often turns out that the spooooookiest details are simply.... wrong.

Spooky detail: A man got on a bus which made no stops, but had DISAPPEARED FROM HIS SEAT by the time it arrived! His belongings were found on his seat! Passengers heard a loud, metallic snap right before he vanished!

Actual facts: He was last seen getting on the bus. That's it, that's the story. The rest of it didn't actually happen.

Spooky detail: A promising young producer suddenly fled a set, looking terrified for no reason whatsoever, and rushed madly down a cliff and into the woods, and was NEVER SEEN AGAIN!

Actual facts: This is true. The part that wasn't mentioned is that he was having serious mental issues preceding this. He probably had a panic attack or psychotic break, and got lost in the woods.

Spooky detail: The last known radio transmission of a vanished plane was "Danger like a dagger! I cannot escape!"

Actual facts: That didn't happen.

Spooky detail: A three-year-old child was found days after his disappearance, and said a bear took care of him. Definitely Sasquatch! Or A MAN IN A BEAR SUIT. Eeek!

Actual facts: This one is true! I think it's probably a case of the Third Man phenomena. A lost child seems likely to be comforted by the idea of a big, warm, friendly animal companion.

A lot of spoooooky stuff involves people not understanding how wilderness and getting lost in it operate. They find it suspicious that children are found alive more often than adults. How can a young child possibly survive??? Must be Bigfoot! This is pretty straightforward, IMO: children will get a huge search effort launched very quickly, as there's no chance of them having just gone to Vegas/a crack house/on a long trip, and their disappearance will be noticed almost immediately. Also, children have less ego involved and are much more likely to stay put once they realize they're lost.

The wilderness is huge and dense and easy to get lost in. Things that disappear in it can be very hard to find. People who are found alive often report that they saw helicopters or planes searching for them and failed to get their attention before one did spot them.

( Read more... )

I don't particularly recommend this book but I would love to read something on the same topic but better. Ideally something that takes a skeptical position on Bigfoot, dimensional portals, and other woo. My absolute ideal would be a book or website or article (etc) that analyzes cases where the initial disappearance seemed very mysterious, then explains what actually happened and the reasons for the mysterious elements.

Two nonfiction books on the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the California town of Paradise and killed 86 people. It was caused by negligence by the power company PG&E, which failed to maintain power lines and poles that were almost 100 years old and overdue for maintenance by about 20 years.

The Camp Fire began when an ancient hook snapped, releasing a power line which set a fire in an extremely remote area in the California mountains. Fire crews were alerted almost immediately, but were unable to get to it due to narrow mountainous roads and high winds; by the time it started spreading, it went out of control almost immediately.

Paradise was one of the few California towns that had an actual evacuation plan. It was divided into evacuation zones so it could be evacuated in an orderly fashion, and had a system for warning residents via their cell phones. Unfortunately, none of this worked. The cell phone system was voluntary and very few residents signed up for it, and when alerts were sent out the system crashed and only about 10% of all residents got them. The evacuation zone system didn't work as no one got the alerts, and the fire was so huge that the entire town needed to be evacuated all at once. There was only one way out, and it got jammed almost immediately. All things considered, it was lucky more people didn't die.

The books are divided between the wider picture and accounts of some specific Paradise residents, including a woman who'd just given birth by Caesarean to a preemie and ended up being driven around and around in circles by a random hospital employee, a retired firefighter who jumps back into action, the town mayor who nearly stays behind, a man and his seven-year-old daughter, a woman whose father runs back into their burning house, and the dispatcher who makes a snap decision to evacuate the entire town without waiting for orders to do so.

I'm always fascinated by different accounts of the same event. My absolute favorite in that vein is the plethora of books on the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, as it was a very time-limited event involving a relatively small number of people of which a disproportionate number of them wrote books about it, and the books are extremely different from each other.

These books about the Paradise fire are pretty similar. Both are by journalists, both take similar approaches to the story, both have similar virtues (interesting and exciting story) and similar flaws (could have been better at explaining exactly how the fire spread; we didn't need to know what everyone's family did for the last three generations). I suspect that in a month or so, I won't be able to remember what was in which book. I liked Lizzie Johnson's better but it's marginal.

I knew PG&E was terrible but I hadn't realized that in addition to multiple fires caused by their extreme negligence followed by attempts at covering it up, they were also responsible for a pipeline explosion that killed eight people in 2010, AND the Erin Brockovich case in which they dumped toxic waste into a town's water supply. They were sued over the Paradise fire, fined a pittance which they passed on to their captive customers in increased costs, and went bankrupt, but still control a lot of California's power and show no signs of changing their ways.

To this day, most California towns have no evacuation plan and many of the ones that do have one refuse to disclose what it is, citing security concerns.

The county also did not provide the evacuation plan for the communities of Lake Arrowhead, Crestline [where I live] and Running Springs — three communities where at least 95% of residents live in very high hazard areas for wildfires.

El Dorado County officials also initially refused to release information about evacuation plans that would cover Pollock Pines, one of the 15 largest communities in the state where more than 95% of residents live in a very high hazard zone for wildfire.

"I confirmed with the [lieutenant] for our [emergency services] division that we do not release our emergency plan, for obvious security reasons," wrote El Dorado County Sheriff's Sgt. Anthony Prencipe, in an email response. He did not elaborate on those reasons.

Then, in response to a Public Records Act request, the county provided one page from its emergency operations plan that refers to evacuations. Three paragraphs on that page were blacked out.

So for supposedly for fear of some random bad actor waiting for a fire to start and then using their knowledge of the evacuation plan to try to sabotage it, the inhabitants of the towns are left with no idea whatsoever of what they're supposed to do in case of wildfire. More likely, the towns either have no plan or their plan is grossly inadequate, and the supposed security concerns are just an excuse.

A well-written, meticulous, and absolutely infuriating account of how a series of greedy, reckless, and criminally negligent decisions by multiple people led to the deaths of 100 people in a nightclub fire.

It was caused by the nightclub owners using a type of foam described by one person as "solid gasoline" as soundproofing and allowing pyrotechnics by a man who had no idea what he was doing, and the fire inspector repeatedly ignoring multiple blatant fire safety issues and issuing a permit allowing them to cram the club with more people than was safe. There were some legal consequences but nowhere near what was deserved; the fire inspector, who in my opinion was the single most culpable person given that ensuring fire safety was his literal job, was never charged. Neither were the two bouncers who physically blocked people from leaving via the stage exit while the nightclub was on fire.

It's a heartbreaking, enraging story that Barylick carefully and clearly lays out. He gets into the human aspect of the story, with many portraits of the people who lived through a horrific trauma or died an awful death when they just wanted to have some fun for a night. He paints an absolutely damning portrait of the corruption within the fire department that allowed the fire inspector to basically take bribes, plus the equally corrupt business practices of the awful nightclub owners who stiffed people as a matter of course.

He also traces the unexpected origin of that fucking foam. A man who lived next to the nightclub kept making noise complaints (understandably!) The nightclub owner visited him to try to pacify him, and they ended up discussing soundproofing. The neighbor said he worked for a company that made packing foam that might be used as soundproofing, and the nightclub owner bought it from him, presumably in the hope that the money would shut him up. The foam was not supposed to be used as soundproofing, which the neighbor probably could have guessed and the company that made it definitely knew.

The man who set off the pyrotechnics was the only one, out of everyone culpable, who showed any genuine remorse. He pled guilty against his lawyer's advice and served four years in prison.

There have been a number of improvements in fire safety in nightclubs and similar venues since then, most importantly sprinklers. But deadly fires still do happen, generally in overcrowded spaces cluttered with flammable material and without sprinklers or clearly marked and accessible exits. The Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, which killed 36 people, not only met all those criteria but occurred in a space not zoned for entertainment or residential use at all.

Barylick concludes with these brutal paragraphs:

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In honor of the snowpocalypse, I listened to a podcast series, "Trapped on Mount Hood," which was so interesting that I read the book it was based on the same day. That was a mistake. (Because the book was bad, not because Iw as traumatized by snow.)

I had not previously heard of the Mount Hood incidents, which was one of the worst alpine disasters in US history. A group of students were taken hiking up Mount Hood students from a private high school is part of a mandatory wilderness program, got caught in a storm, and seven of them died. Two adults also died. I find this particularly awful because it was mandatory for the students, but the disaster happened because the teacher leading them made a series of absolutely terrible decisions.

There was a storm coming, which he knew about, but did not factor into his decision-making. They started too late to avoid at, continued hiking under poor weather conditions, were poorly equipped for getting caught in a storm, ends didn't turn back until long after it would have been prudent to do so. They had to dig into a cave, which wasn't big enough for all of them so they kept having to rotate who was inside and who was outside. Conditions got so bad that a hired guide finally decided to leave and go for help in a blizzard, and took the only student who was willing or strong enough to go with them. They made it out, but got so lost in the blizzard that they had a hard time figuring out where the cave was. Meanwhile the cave got completely buried in snow. By the time the cave was found, several days later only two of the people inside survived.

The behavior of the teacher leading them is a bit mysterious. The author of the book says that he made such bad decisions that he must have been hypothermic. However, the decision to start the hike late when he knew there was a storm coming happened before the hike began, so he couldn't have been hypothermic then. There's also the matter of not taking equipment that should have been taken under the circumstances – also a decision made long before the hike began. However, he previously did not have a pattern of doing reckless things, so it's not really clear why this particular height was different. In previous hikes, they turned back without reaching the summit two out of every three times.

Code 1244 is an incredibly frustrating book. The author interviewed literally everyone who would agree to talk to him who was involved in the incident, and he did get to speak to most of the people who were and who are willing to talk at all. (One of the main people involved, the girl who survived the case she hiked out, has never publicly spoken about it at all.) He had an incredible amount of access so you would think he could have used that to write an interesting book. He did not. It's emblematic that I still don't know what a code 1244 is.

I wishvhe had done an oral history of the event, because I bet that would have been fascinating. What he instead did, as far as I can tell, was to write down every single factual detail that everybody told him, but put in his own words rather than theirs. His own style is extremely dry. He occasionally mentions what people felt or thought, but not all that much. So it's a recital of incredibly minute details. This book has more citations than I think anything I have ever read. About every third sentence is footnoted. I applaud his integrity but it also means that about one third of the book consists of citations.

There are so many details that the overall story often gets lost. It was much harder to follow what was going on in his book then it was in the podcast. I got the book because I was curious to learn more details then the podcasts gave, but when I finished his book, I felt that I knew less, not more. In particular, it was very hard to tell what was going on with the rescue operation and whether or not it was mismanaged, and whether that made a difference. The author obviously felt that one person in particular was to blame for the cave not getting found sooner, but I'm not sure if that was correct.

Based on the podcast, it sounds like he thought that guy was responsible for the guide who hiked out not having been taken up in a helicopter soon enough to search. But in his book, I couldn't tell whether that was a problem or not, or who had made that decision. One thing I really wondered about was why no one ever asked the girl who had hiked out with the guide to go up in a helicopter and see if she could recognize something. It seems to me that two people following the same route might notice or remember different things, so why not ask her if they were going to ask him? This never comes up in either the podcast or the when they finally did let the guide search, it's possibly important because he led the helicopter to the wrong spot five times before he did finally get locate the right spot on his sixth a try. So there was a lot of time wasted searching in the wrong areas, even after he got involved.

It's a very sad story, and also a very interesting one if you're interested in survival and wilderness rescue. If you are, listen to the podcast.

Against the Odds podcast.

I am so obsessed with this show. It continues to have great and very likable characters, a compelling story, and tons of wilderness survival and heroism and creeping dread.

Season three launches with a new set of characters exploring a different area. This team is also international, but with a quite different character and mission. They're academics plus one guide tasked with exploring a remote area of Patagonia where some strange glyphs have been found, in order to do an archaeological survey and also see if it's suitable for tourism. There's two Spanish-speaking professors and two grad students, Eva and Simon. Eva is fluent in Spanish, Simon is hilariously not. There's also a linguistics professor from China who thinks a recently discovered site in China may be relevant; everyone else seems to think she's a brilliant crackpot.

At this point I realized that her Chinese site is covered in one of the bonus episodes, Imperial, and backtracked to listen to that. Afterwards I understood why everyone who gets her report on the Chinese site thinks it's a hoax.

Similarly to season one, it took me a couple episodes to get into this, though for a different reason. There's a wind effect in I think episodes 2-3 or so that makes it very difficult to understand what people are saying when they're shouting over the wind. Thankfully that goes away soon.

This season has an interesting set of challenges that I thought were handled very well. Unlike seasons 1-2, at this point the listeners know much more than the characters. There's much more of a "No! Don't go in the cave! Don't touch the statues!" vibe, because we already know something about their discoveries based on similar ones made in the earlier seasons by different characters. (The Patagonia characters don't know about the Svalbard characters.)

But what you gain in dramatic irony, you lose in freshness. We already know what the heartbeat means, and that the statues move. This season introduces some new bits of creepiness to preserve the element of surprise and the unknown, most prominently bugs. FUCKING BUGS.

Then episode five has a reveal that literally made me scream aloud. (With glee, not terror). It was all up from there, though all down for the characters.

SO EXCITED for season four. Consulting with the timeline, I will listen to the bonus episode Iluka first.

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The Terra Nova expedition meets House of Leaves meets cosmic horror, but modern day and with women and people of color involved.

An international crew goes to an Arctic research station in Norway to do some quick repairs. They are trapped by a blizzard, and then weird things start happening. Followed by very weird things. Followed by extremely weird and also fucking terrifying things.

This is a fictional podcast made of found footage from the doomed expedition. The doom isn't a spoiler, as you can immediately figure out that if someone is reconstructing what happened from the crew's reports, recordings, etc, complete with notes like "This journal entry was found crumpled under a chair in the common room," it's because no one is around to explain things.

This podcast is spectacularly well-done - exactly what I wanted and didn't get from the terrible The Nox. It combines the best elements of horror, survival/exploration, and found footage/epistolatory fiction into a genuine tour-de-force. (I struggle with found footage movies as shakycam gives me motion sickness, so getting to enjoy this genre with actors was a treat.) It won me over even though I very rarely enjoy fiction podcasts - in fact this is the first I think I've ever enjoyed.

It did take me a couple episodes to get used to everyone's voices and catch up on who was who - I read transcripts for the first few episodes after watching them. But once it gets going, it REALLY gets going. I had to hurriedly turn off one episode because I was listening after dark and that was a mistake.

The multi-lingual cast is using their actual accents and languages. I really loved that aspect. The acting is extremely good, as are the sound effects. But the story is best of all. I ended up really liking the characters, especially Graham Casner and Dr. Rosa de la Torres, and feeling for them. Though the story is horror and everyone is probably doomed from the start, it's not the kind of horror where everyone and everything is terrible. It's the kind of horror - and also the kind of survival/expedition story - where basically decent and competent people try their best, but it doesn't work out because sometimes life is like that. Nature does not forgive, and neither does cosmic horror.

I really enjoyed going into this almost completely cold and I recommend it. Seasons one and two constitute a single arc. It doesn't wrap everything up as there's still a ton of mysteries which presumably continue into the next season, but it does complete the story of that particular expedition.

Content notes: Monster/horror-type violence. Body horror (within my tolerance levels.) Brief, non-graphic mention of sled dogs getting killed by a creature (they're not dogs we know.) No sexual or human-on-human violence. In general, it's more on the suggestive rather than graphic end of things.

( Spoilers! Spoilers! )

recessional, thank you SO MUCH for reccing this. I'd never even heard of it before.

The White Vault. There's lots of places to listen to this. I listened on Audible and also joined the Patreon to get bonus episodes.