Sickening Sounds, Childhood Traumas, and Bodycounts | Doomsday Mailbag 5

Hello, and welcome to Doomsday. History's most Dangerous Mailbag minisowed number five. Hello, dear listeners. Together, we've seen an awful lot of shop across time and space, and it's only natural that you would have questions. So here's you're a chance to hear them answered and maybe learn something a little gross, maybe a little interesting. This is my chance to publicly address some of the friendly, odd and occasionally gross questions that come in through our various social media channels. On today's episode, we're going to find out why the show sounds as disgusting as it does. I am going to reveal finally the childhood experience or memory that led us all down this road. And at long last, we are announcing our body count contest winners. And you get a bone, and you get a bone, and you get a bone and everybody gets a bone. So get a comfy pretend you're at my place, and get ready for all why the what the how? The Mailbag episode unlike any other. So to begin ian today's random mailbag. First up, Steve from the Unknown Orbits podcast wrote to ask about the show sound and if I was some kind of professional engineer or something. Well, Steve listen to me. I don't know if you can tell, but I'm sitting in a car in a park under a blanket right now, so no, I don't. My background is in marketing and graphic design, and I have zero professional experience with sound recording or editing. I just always love the craft of storytelling, and I did this to find my voice. Yeah, everybody hates their voice growing up, but I just really needed something creative to do after years of sitting behind a desk. I must have recorded the first episode at least a dozen times before I even got it to sound something reasonable, and the rest just came with trial and error. I taught myself editing from YouTube, and I think I took some courses on you, Demi. But the real story is I just bought myself a microphone and I went to town until I was happy enough to put something out into the world. But what he specifically wanted to know was about the sounds and the scoring. I don't have bottomless pockets to pay for will anything, so I have to find workarounds. I don't use any of those paid sites. I find all their stuff kind of sounds the same. So what I do instead is I painstakingly scour YouTube for royalty free or non copyright stuff, which is why the show takes so goddamn long to put out. And the other half of that, most of what you hear comes from yours, truly. Every broken bone, every sheared chin, every gurgling victim of lava or bugs or molasses, that all comes from yours, truly. Owls, crocodiles, even that Cajun guy talking in that one episode talked about me all the hell. Every lightning strike, can, rockslide, and tornado cow all homegrown. Early on, I decided I really wanted to make some behind the scenes Dolby work videos so you could just see how much effort and work goes in. What I didn't know was whether people were going to sit and want to watch me crush salary with my thighs while making fire noises with my armpits into a microphone. And do you have any fucking idea how hard it is on the larynx to make that bleeping sound just there now? Obviously, sometimes the effects can happen organically, and I just capture a few. In fact, here I'm gonna open the door and oh, there we go. Yeah, so you can see for yourself. My neighborhood is a cornucopia of Dolby effects, all the free, all the time. Get there. So long story short, anyone with my particular interests and a willingness to learn and what three and a half cups of humility could have done this. But they didn't. And here I am. I'll still mind telling you if anyone's listening, who would love to do what I do? I wrote this thing for four years before I recorded word one, and then I just put that first episode out in the world and hope for the best. And today it's become really an earnest attempt to entertain and teach and maybe even extend a life or two. So if you're sitting on the fence about doing something creative for yourself, just grab a microphone, put a bunch of blankets over your head, and off you go. Now the second one, Yes, the second one. A few people had already written in and since starting this wild ride together, they wondered how this even began. There is a theory that everybody who loves disaster as much as yourself or I must have been influenced subconsciously by some early exposure formative memory and so I spent the time sat down and kind of figured it out. So thank you, Joanne HELLX, and I apologize, I know there was a third Just raise your hand. My formative experience took place back in nineteen eighty five, and it really solidified by nineteen eighty six. I was only eleven when the great United States Canada tornado outbreak dropped twisters all over the Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ontario made thirty first nineteen eighty five. Forty four twisters formed in that one day, from fourteen of them right here in Ontario, and one of them landed in a town fell burying. And I know I've talked about this at least once before, but this was an f for tornado, which you will instably recognize as the most powerful and deadly force on earth, next to the finger of God. And I spend my time there in I am bus full of joyful, oblivious idiots beneath a highway overpass, watching the world turn black and screamingly loud. When it was all over, made it home alive. No one said boo, and not one single person in my school ever acknowledged that anything had ever happened. Ninety died and over a thousand were injured. And what this taught me at such a young age was that bad things happen, and that people were willing to pretend, or ignore or just overlook the whole thing. And by eleven, I was already well aware that people made zero sense. My parents taught me about common sense, but my exposure to the outside world worked overtime to show me that there was nothing common about sense. Then fast forward a few months, and seven astronauts died before my unblinking eyes as the Space Shuttle Challenger fell from the sky. And when I yelled at my mom to let her know what had happened, she came and she told me that at least they would have died instantly, and that was something again to find gratitude in. Fast forward just two more months, and news items started leaking out of Europe about Soviet radiation warnings. And as a kid of the eighties, I was born into gen X and everything they say was true. We were feral street children. We didn't respect authority, We ate what we killed, and as children we were forced to learn to make our own fire and alcohol. We made the most out of every day because we lived under the constant threat of never ending nuclear nihilation. So some of us got sad and spray painted vaginas on cars about it. Others became mentally ill. Others kind of shaped patterns into their hair and became nihilists. Chernobyl taught me that the end of the world was something that could very literally happen by accident or just be kept secret. I did find some level of comfort knowing that everything is arbitrary and nothing I did could affect any of it. And believe me, for a kid who already felt like a stranger on a strange planet, that was pretty much it for me. My early exposure to disaster and tragedy showed me the very best and worst that life could offer, and the lessons just stuck. It's probably why I fear disaster as much as anyone listening. But I try to find the lesson or the humor or the bright side. And no, at no point in my life did I think I was going to grow up and host a show where I make purp jokes about people dying by the thousands. But in lighter news, now here we are without further ado. It is time to announce the winners of our great twenty twenty three dead body Count contests. Guesses flew in from everywhere, and they were all over the place, like I don't know if we're all listening to the same show, kind of all over the place. But that is okay, In fact, it's great. So before I tell you how many people have died, I'm going to start with the runner ups. In fourth place, standing beside the podium but not actually on the podium, with a guess of twenty seven thousand, six hundred and eleven. Totally not The FBI from Patreon came so close, but not close enough. You just stand off to the side and yeah. In third place, coming in with a guess of thirty four thousand, one hundred. Oh, yes, it's Andre Ray from Facebook. Great guess, Andre, very very good, but not that good. You're only in third place. Oh, bronze, bronze, bronze. Let's keep going. We're getting closer. In second place, coming in with a guess of thirty eight thousand, five hundred and seventy four. Oh that's good and close. Oh, but not close enough. Oh it's carry Ann from Twitter. Oh Carrie Ann. Good. Yes, Holy cow, when I came in. I was pretty sure you were going to win, and you almost did. But let's not try to take the glow and the shine off our first place winner. Our closest guests submitted by a man through Patreon who used the full computational power of his mind to generate a number of corpses and then type them into his television typewriter to take the gold medallion, but not actually a gold medallion, because this isn't the Palm Door Film Festival. Here coming in with a guess of forty one thousand, three hundred and two. Oh boy, mister Jason Piper from Patreon. Congratulation Jason. This is a huge win and a victory to be handed down throughout the ages. Please do enjoy your bragging rights and we'll discuss prizes eventually, Yes, eventually. What was the actual number of people who visited the Afterlife on this show as of the beginning of this contest. I know a lot of people say this can't be true. Fifty two thousand, and five hundred and thirty nine. Oh man. I am not going to break it all down now, but I sat and did the math. Fifty two thousand, five hundred and thirty nine that is a hell of a lot of people for the limited time that we have been doing this show. And like I said, I still haven't figured out a good prize. Oh did I say prize? I met prizes. I've got some strange ideas and I really want to send something to all of you, and specifically for Jason, I will be engraving your name on a very special trophy I am working on as the first ever winner. And for all our listeners and for everyone who's submitted a guess, even the terrible ones, thank you, Thank you so much. I'm just glad you liked this show. I love you all, as I've tried to tell you every week, and although this was a short one, this week you did get more than your money's worth in personal information and behind the scenes whatnot. All our older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends, and if you care to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo or buy Meacoffee dot com slash Doomsday. And I specifically want to shout out all those people who just joined Patreon, good Lord five in the last two weeks. Thank you so so much. If you are curious to hear my take on things rattling around in your head, you can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as doomsday Podcast, or just fire an email to doomsday pod at gmail dot com on the next mail bag. I have no idea, I haven't had time to go through anything. I'm literally just dropping a ball and kicking it along as I do this week to week. So I'm gonna leave you by saying thank you again. Watch out for next week. We have a new episode and this one is guaranteed to teach you a brand new way to be afraid of subways that you'd never even considered. And we'll talk soon. Safetygagles off, and thanks for listening.