Funfiltered Episode #054 - "Traumatised in Real Time"

Sam “speaking”. Here it is. The typically bloated, typically belated and atypically... tinted 54th episode of the FF podcast. The question I have for Norman E. Rosenthal et al. is... was it decided first that the acronym would be "SAD", the constituent terms retrospectively conceived? Or was the end result a quirk of fate? I'll concede that very little contortion or contrivance would have been required - as labels go, it's quite spot on. But still... I'm reluctant to believe that there wasn't SOME finagling. They knew it would end with "Disorder" and then someone chirped up with "Season" or "Seasonal". Find a cheeky and appropriate "A" and hey, presto, you've got "SAD". Anyway, yeah, these darker days are rotten, aren't they? Once, I loved them. As a child and as a moody teenager. Now I crave the light like a goddamn normie. It WAS Halloweeeeeeen. Now it is not. In fact, it's Bonfire Night on this day of release. But Bonfire Night doesn't lend itself so readily to "theme". But let me bend over backwards to find some parallel. Umm... an essential element of B. Night is the confusion over what we're supposed to be commemorating. We "celebrate" Guy Fawkes, right? Hang on, was trying to blow up Parliament a good thing? Were Parliament the baddies? It's like V for Vendetta in the old days, isn't it? No, wait, it's what the plotters failed to do, right? It's like a big relief party? How British. To honour failure. And in such a meaninglessly loud fashion. So what's the analogy to the podcast..? Confusion over why we're bothering, I suppose. Or that to listen is, in its own way, to honour failure. For the spooky celebration(?) of recent yore, one need only slap on a darker filter and scavenge for anything vaguely horror-adjacent. Midnight Mass was a serendipitous bit of scheduling. M. Night Shyamalan's Old could be hemmed in too, just about, if one was feeling generous. But how often is that? The rest is business as usual. Bit of Doctor Who, bit of bemoaning the state of popular culture, bit of Jordan being loco. Come on. Give us a listen. Terrify yourself as bangs echo around you, the soundtrack to your inner collapse. It is our pleasure.