Audio Bonus Content #18 - Zach Valenti on Listening to Audience Feedback

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The Once And Future Nerd

Season: 2

Published on Aug 20th at 2:30pm

Today's bonus content is an interview with the one and only Zach Valenti, star and co-producer of Wolf 359 (among many other things), who took on a cameo role as Merril in our last few episodes. This conversation was originally broadcast in May as part of Zach's ongoing "Self Care Sunday" livestream project. You can watch video of the interview here (Christian starts at right around hour 2), and subscribe to the channel at zach.live. Release of Chapter 3 is delayed slightly, for reasons explained at the head of the episode. We will announce release dates as soon as we can, and we're sorry for the delay! Hit the break for a full transcript of Christian's statement. Statement transcript: Hey everyone, Christian here. Got some more bonus content for you this week, and the reason for that is we're still waiting to see when we can release Chapter 3. You have our apologies for that. I'm sure this has been a really rough week for a lot of us what with the events in Charlottesville. Speaking personally - though I'm definitely angered and saddened and frightened - as a straight white guy living in New York City, these things tend not to hit me as viscerally as they might hit some of you. So I try to use that position of relative safety to hunker down and do what I can to help. That includes but is by no means limited to hopefully getting this show out in time for anyone who counts on it as a little spot of fun in their week. Unfortunately, in addition to everything else, Jess and I had a pet pass away this week, and being perfectly honest I wasn't really able to focus much on work. So in the interest of transparency, that's meant that editing is delayed on Chapter 3 and writing is delayed on Chapter 4. And I want to take just a moment to say for posterity that our rabbit Bebe was a sweet little spot of light and good in a world that too often lately feels dark and shitty. She was loved and will be very dearly missed. I know it’s a small thing in light of what everyone else is certainly feeling this week, dearly beloved though Bebe was. So I'll just add this, because I've been thinking about it a lot: The first words spoken in The Once And Future Nerd are "Imagine, if you can, what life is like for a rabbit." At the risk of saying the subtext out loud, that was us trying to p rime our audience to think about what it would be like to be much more vulnerable than they are. That's always been a core principle of the show. A lot of people are very vulnerable right now. Do what you can for them. Be excellent to each other. I hope that our fandom is a fairly wide tent. I'm glad we have writers who don't always agree with me. I hope we have fans who don't always agree with us. I want our show to affirm but I also want it to teach, and you can’t teach if everyone agrees. And right now with tensions running so high, I think those of us who are relatively safe could do better at having patient, good faith conversations with people whose views frustrate us. Having said that, if your stated belief is that some people are inherently inferior to you at birth, you have thereby forfeited your claim on patience and good faith. The Once And Future Nerd, as a project and an organization, is Black and Brown and Jewish and female and queer and disabled. Nazis and white supremacists and their ilk can fuck off, now and forever. And to be clear, because I don’t want it to seem like I’m just calling anyone I disagree with a Nazi, if you walk around next a Nazi flag saying Nazi shit like we should have a white ethnostate, you’re a fucking Nazi, and you can fuck off. End transcript.

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