Announcement

Hello, dear listeners,

First and foremost, we want to apologize for the absolute radio silence since our hiatus statement in June 2021. A number of pandemic-related and personal factors have overwhelmed our creative and administrative team since the announcement of the hiatus, and have prevented us from making a final statement about the status of the podcast. 

Simply put, Pitch Library will no longer be able to continue making and producing The Underwood Collection. 

The reasons for this are numerous, and because of the nature of some of those reasons, we cannot provide an exhaustive list of the factors that have ceased production of TUC. Regardless, we regret to inform you that in addition to halting the production of TUC, we may in the future remove TUC from podcast catalogues entirely. We ask for your compassion and understanding in these decisions. 

We thank everyone who has listened to the show, posted on social media about it, and sent kind questions and comments to the team. 

Pitch Library itself will be dissolved and undergo some major changes, and we will return as a cohesive creative unit in the future. Thank you again for all your support.

Love, Pitch Library

by 𝐕𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐒𝐈𝐀 𝐎𝐁𝐒𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐀

PSA: throw some cash at your favorite indie fiction podcasts today

TMA2 but they just set The Underwood Collection team loose with fancy mics and a full budget.

So what is Eskew? What does it want?

I’ve been reading some fantastic analysis on this topic which is far more thoughtful and sensible than anything I intended, and it got me trying to write out my thoughts about what, if anything, I actually *did* intend.

To me, Eskew (the city) was always a few different things at once, and it was those in a piecemeal kind of way that became a struggle to make cohesive by the time the finale came around. 

I thought I’d share what I wrote in case it’s interesting to anyone - but obviously if it doesn’t mesh with your own ideas on that subject, feel free to ignore:

1) Primarily, I wrote Eskew as an amplified, literalised expression of a particular kind of fear that I’ve experienced in isolation and during past periods of difficult mental health challenges - when you find yourself second-guessing not just the random cruelties and kindnesses and reactions of the people around you, but the chaos of the living environment itself. 

Did that car splash me because I’m a bad person? Are those people on the street corner laughing as I pass because they recognise something terrible and mockable innately in me? Why did I spill my dinner on the floor? Is all of this really arbitrary and random or is there a punitive sense to it? And if there’s sense to it, can I out-manoeuvre it?

Sometimes the world’s response to us - as individual entities passing through it - seems to make sense. Sometimes it doesn’t. 

Sometimes you seem to be getting adverse results from a certain course of action…so you change your behaviours, but then the adverse results happen anyway.

2) I wrote Eskew as a literalised expression of the isolated person’s inability to just give up - the way that life and human connection keep on happening to us in spite of our best efforts, and we keep on dragging ourselves back to them.

That, to me, is a source of weary, absurd hope. But it’s also a source of terror and despair, because it’s systemic as well as psychological. ‘The real monster is capitalism’ is funny as hell in commentary across contemporary horror fiction, but, well…

I will wake up each morning, and go into the city, back to a job that corrupts me morally, walking past suffering people who are reaching out for my help and will not receive it, and I will pay money to get what I want from vast companies whose horrors will outlive me, and I will return. And the next day, I’ll do it again, and the best hope I have of living well is to stop thinking too hard about it and stop questioning the process.

In other words, I have to find a way of dwelling within the belly of this *thing*, because it won’t let me stop. I have to find a way of not minding that I’m being eaten away even as I carry on - but if I succeed, I’ll be shutting down my ability to understand what’s happening to me.

I think the traditional preoccupations of cosmic horror are ultimately charming and quaint in comparison to that endless atrophy - wouldn’t it be a relief to gaze into the maw of an eldritch god once, confirm the truth of existence, and lose your mind entirely? 

At least that’d have a sense of resolution to it. At least then you could stop pretending that everything was fine.

3) Beyond that, insofar as Eskew had motives as I wrote them, they were purely cancerous. This is a harmful, inchoate thing that ‘s dreaming of being a city. 

It wants to grow, like a city, and be dwelt in, like a city, and because cities are named, demarcated human territories, it wants to be recognised as a city. 

But on some level it doesn’t understand how to be those things; on some level it can only ever wreak havoc upon the things it shapes, and it becomes spiteful when the objects that it’s trying to push around the gameboard don’t react in the right way.

That’s where the connection between the character and his nemesis comes in, for me - while the city of Eskew is not meant to be a literal manifestation of David’s state of mind, it is absolutely an expression of him, or at least a kindred spirit.

Both David and Eskew are struggling with a reality that will not respond logically, or favourably, to their efforts to control it - and they’re struggling with a reality that will never remain still or consistent for enough to become something certain.

My youngest niece plays with that building block game where you have square blocks, circular blocks, and triangular blocks - and correspondingly, you have this base with all the holes where the different shapes slot in.

When you slot the square block successfully into the hole, that’s one of the earliest empowering, orderly experiences that you have.

When the opposite happens, when you take your block and try and fit it into the hole, but it just smacks crudely into the sides and refuses to fit and you start crying your head off because there’s no sense or resolution to your own actions and you don’t know how to interpret this or fix the issue? That’s how I feel a lot of the time, and to me it’s as funny as it is horrible as it is worth writing about.

In all of these senses combined, I think the ending of the show is possibly overly optimistic, and even violates the essential nature of Eskew itself as a ‘character’ - but then perhaps I needed it to, to avoid some kind of Beckettian cliffhanger.

It was meant as expressing the hope that perhaps the dark cloud will lift, that perhaps whatever malign thing has its eye on us will move its attention on to somebody else - and we’ll finally be able to change. We’ll become something capable of moving free and unseen and easy through the darkness. The world won’t get better, but somehow we’ll have what it takes to exist at last.

Anyway, just some random thoughts - hope you’re all doing OK, and best wishes to you and yours x

Artist Creates ‘Decaying’ Paintings As Visual Representation Of Neglect

by Valerie Hegarty

[ID: Eight art pieces that consist of a frame and/or oil painting and a 3D element coming out of the flat structure.

The first piece shows a tarnished gold frame divided into four sections like a window. Mold-like green, white, and blue paint drips down from the top of the frame. The right side of the frame, which merges out of the rest, is several tree branches. The branches have a few leaves, but are mostly bare.

The right side of the second piece is a flat painting of a ship at sea. There is a tear down the center of the piece. Protruding from the tear is a crumpled model of the left side of the ship over a dripping-looking section of sculpture painted like the sea. The ground below the painting also shows some pools of ocean-colored paint.

The third piece is a decaying painting of a person standing in an ornately decorated room, gesturing to their right. The tear down the middle renders the person faceless. Parts of the painting around the tear bulge out, as if something had broken out behind it. Paint drips down the tear. In front of the frame, lying on the ground, are two broken halves of a carved wooden table. The crack aligns with the tear in the painting.

The fourth piece shows a landscape with mountains, lakes, and a blue sky with clouds. The lake is brown and the mountains are barren. There are holes in the corner of the painting and the bottom half of the frame has become two intertwining outgrown branches.

The fifth piece shows another decayed gold frame. The left and bottom sides of the frame have become branches that intertwine. There is black tar on the frame and branches.

The base of the sixth piece is an still life of a bowl of fruits. There are 3D holes in the peaches and oranges and color splatters out of them, creating pink and orange spray and smear on the frame and wall. This creates the effect that these fruits have been shot. There are small, gnawing holes in the wood frame around the painting.

The seventh piece is a decayed portrait. The bottom half of the wooden frame is missing, and it appears that the person’s face is dripping, being pulled down by gravity.

The base of the eighth piece is a painting of a large chunk of watermelon on a table. Part of the watermelon protrudes from the painting in a distorted manner, like a fleshy tongue. Paint like watermelon juice drips from the bottom of the frame. One black smear looks like a dropped watermelon seed.

/end ID]

Scratches, Namba 難波

After three months of labor-conducive love, my silkscreen book is complete! 

Based off of the video game ANATOMY, it tells the story of what it really means to live in a haunted house

This game has some of the best writing and one of the most original ideas I’ve seen in a while, so please, take a look!

[ID: a series of scans of a silkscreen book. It uses minimal colors with bold solid areas and minimal cel shading.

1: The cover is white on black, a two story house with billowing smoke up out of the chimney where the title, “Anatomy of a House” resides.

2: a spread, white specked on solid black next to the silhouette of a person in an open doorway, the only light coming from outside of the house.

3: spread, a living room, there is a fire burning in the fireplace and someone laying on one of the couches, next to it is an anatomical heart with veins and arteries branching off of it.

4: spread, a kitchen and dining room next to a stomach and intestines, the stomach is full of acid.

5: spread, a hallway, the floor is covered in two sets of foot prints, one going either direction, next to it is two bodies, one mapped with veins the other with arteries.

6: spread, a staircase next to a spine, each vertebrae is labeled with a number

7: spread, exterior shot of two windows, next to a diagram of eyes and their nerves into the brain that are viewing a large building.

8: spread, a bed in a bedroom, light shining in through the window, next to a brain with brain stem, the brain is red and lively.

9: spread, a foot standing at the top of a staircase that leads down into darkness, next to another brain, this one melting and dripping, bugs fly above it.

10: spread, a person sleeping in a bed, there is a shadow of a figure cast over their blankets, next to a set of teeth on black.

11: spread, a two page image of a house, it has been unnaturally stretched to new dimensions to contain the set of teeth that reside across its second floor. There is blood dripping form the teeth and down the lawn.

12: spread, a closed door with red foot prints leading up to it, there is blood dripping down the handle. Next to it is a black page splattered with white.

13: back cover, black splattered with white and it contains a single tooth in the lower left corner. /end ID]

John Brosio - Closing the deal - 2012

Ant-like crab spider, Amyciaea forticeps, Thomisidae. Found throughout Southeast Asia.

This species mimics weaver ants which is their preferred prey.

Photos 1-2 by roythedivebro, 3 by hari_krishnan_, 4 by wildthings666, 5 by chathuri_jayatissa, 6 by budak, 7-8 by pankaj-kumar, and 9-10 by ivijayanand

so uh. who was going to tell me there are underwood collection tiktoks