Here Be Monsters

During a moment of personal turmoil, Rocky Villanueva gets an email from a long-time client.  His client is in his final weeks of life, and is getting his last wishes taken care of.  One of those wishes: to look like himself when he dies.   Rocky says that many hairdressers and barbers have similar experiences: helping their clients through the last stages of life and letting t...

Jeff walks to the edge of Berlin and explains why the Here Be Monsters feed has been quiet for so long.  On the way, Jeff talks about plans for upcoming episodes, looks at the ways that moving to Berlin has changed him, and discusses a pair of films featuring Tilda Swinton: Cycling the Frame (1988), and The Invisible Frame (2009). Both movies feature Swinton riding a bicycle around the entire...

n the midst of a stressful move, HBM producer Jeff Emtman finds comfort in the phasing techniques developed by minimalist composer, Steve Reich .  Note: this episode contains sounds that cannot be accurately represented by speakers.  Please use headphones.   Steve Reich compositions excerpted in this episode:  Clapping Music , performed by Steve Reich and Wolfram Winkel Vi...

Allen H Greenfield is a UFOlogist and occult researcher.  He’s also a father of three.   His first child, Alex was the subject of HBM155: Ghosts Aliens Burritos .  In that episode, Alex tells stories from his childhood of chasing strange phenomena with his father.  In this episode, Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman talks to Allen to get the “fatherly perspective” on UFOs,...

Berlin’s Schwerbelastungskörper is a massive concrete structure that, today, is hidden in plain sight between a railroad and an apartment building.  It’s one of just a dozen remaining pieces of Nazi Architecture in Berlin.  And it’s not much to look at. It was built in 1941 as a test structure for a triumphal arch that Hitler wanted to build in that spot.  The Schwerbelastungskörper...

The Here Be Monsters Art Exchange is back! It’s a really simple and wonderful thing where you, gentle listener, can mail a piece of art to a stranger and get a piece of art in return. It’s open to artists of all experience levels from around the world. The deadline to sign up is November 10th, 2022 . Sign up and more info here: https://www.hbmpodcast.com/art The art exchange is made possible this...

Content Note: pervasive language, brief mentions of bigotry. Alex Greenfield says that there was no such thing as a normal day when he was a kid.  His dad ( Allen H Greenfield ) self describes as a “researcher in the shadow world.” And his mom soon grew tired of her husband’s lifestyle, which included a lot of time on the road: chasing rumors of cryptids, ghosts, and aliens.   But a...

Sally Grainger was originally a chef, but in her 20’s, she was gifted a copy of an ancient Roman cookbook called Apicius .  Apicius is a bit of a fluke.  It shouldn’t have survived the 2000-ish year journey into the modern era, but it did.  And in this episode of Here Be Monsters, Grainger explains how Apicius persisted due to being a favorite text for monks-in-training to practice...

In 2012, a street preacher walking three small dogs tried to convince Jeff Emtman of his way of thinking about gender and the afterlife.  In this Here Be Monsters brief, Jeff shares the short essay he originally wrote about the dinner party where they attempted to make an uneasy friendship.  Jeff re-edited the essay in 2022 and gave pseudonyms to the main characters (“Cliff” and “Sophie”...

The composer Pauline Oliveros thought there was a difference between hearing and listening.  She defined hearing as a passive act, something done with the ears.  But she defined listening as something active saying that listening happens in the brain .   Sam Parker is a recordist who takes inspiration from Oliveros’ words and work.  About six years ago, on an episode of He...

What do you want to happen to your body when you die?  It’s a touchy topic where tradition, religion and death denial all come into play.  But across much of the world, there are just two options: burial and cremation, which both have substantial ecological impacts .  In 2019, Washington State passed SB 5001 , which legalized several new options for deathcare.  In this episode,...

Season 10 of Here Be Monsters starts and host Jeff Emtman hallucinates his adolescence while working long hours.  Scenes from middle school dances, dawn bus rides, the basement, and ( most crucially), a late-night raffle at a hardware store. Do you like Here Be Monsters? Tell your friends, support HBM on Patreon , and have your boss sponsor an episode . Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: Serocell a...

Season 10 is nearly here!  The season starts on March 9th and episodes will be released on a rolling basis until all ten shows are published. Want to advertise on an episode? Fill out the sponsorship request form .  Want to support HBM with a small monthly donation?  Become a patron on Patreon .  Can’t wait to share the season with you.  More soon.  Producer: Jeff Emt...

I’ve decided to remove my work from Spotify.  It’s not just their recent controversies around Joe Rogan, it’s a much bigger problem with the way that Spotify treats the medium .   If you listen on an app other than Spotify, you don’t need to change anything, just stay subscribed, and you’ll get all the new episodes (Season 10 is coming soon!). If you do listen on Spotify though, you...

The origins of Julia Susara’s chronic fatigue are hard to pin down.  She still doesn’t know exactly how it started but suspects that a deeply broken heart had something to do with it.   She spent about three years going through some excruciating physical sensations: immense chills, brain fogs, pregnancy nightmares and the feeling that her blood was about to boil through her skin.&nb...

A short episode from the new show Neutrinowatch: A Daily Generative Podcast .  Each episode of Neutrinowatch changes a lil’ bit every day.   This episode, The Daily Blast , features two computerized voices (Wendy and Ivan), who share the day’s news.  To get new versions of this episode, you’ll need to either stream the audio in your podcast app/web browser, or just delete and r...

Episode 149 is an odd duck for sure.  It changes every day due to some coding trickery that is happening behind the scenes.  That episode is a part of a bigger project, a new podcast project that’s potentially the first of its kind.  It’s called Neutrinowatch , and every day, each episode is regenerated with new content.  But this is a conversation between Jeff Emtman (Here Be...

As a teenager, HBM host Jeff Emtman fell asleep most nights listening to Coast To Coast AM , a long running talk show about the world’s weirdnesses.   One of the guests stuck out though; one who spoke on his experiences with lucid dreaming.  He’d learned how to conjure supernatural entities and converse with his subconscious.   Lucid dreams are dreams where the dreamer knows th...

With much of the world shut down over the last year, HBM host Jeff Emtman started wondering if there were smaller venues where the world still felt open.  In this episode, Jeff interviews Chloé Savard of the Instagram microscopy page @tardibabe about the joy of looking at small things, and whether it’s possible to find beauty in things you don’t understand.   Chloé also gives Jeff...

A brief follow-up to last episode: you can now follow our AI-powered friend Theodora on Twitter! She tweets several times a day, giving bad advice, good advice, and some strange poetry. Her account’s called Hypothetical Inspiration . Give her a follow.

How does a computer learn to speak with emotion and conviction?  Language is hard to express as a set of firm rules.  Every language rule seems to have exceptions and the exceptions have exceptions etcetera.  Typical, “if this then that” approaches to language just don’t work.  There’s too much nuance.  But each generation of algorithms gets closer and closer. Markov chain...

Like so many others, Amanda Petrus got a bit lost after college. She had a chemistry degree and not a lot of direction.  But she was able to find work at a juice factory in the vineyards of western New York.  Her job was quality control, which meant overnight shifts at the factory, tasting endless cups of fruit punch and comparing them to the ever-evolving set of juice standards that the...

HBM Host Jeff Emtman has always been afraid of losing his memories. Places he cares about keep getting torn down. In this episode, Jeff bikes around Seattle recording the sounds of a popping balloon to capture the sound of places he likes: Padelford Hall’s Parking Garage , The Wayne Tunnel in Bothell , his old house in Roosevelt, The Greenlake Aqua Theater , and his front porch on a snowy day...

Animals sometimes make noises that would be impossible to place without context.  In this episode: three types of animal vocalizations—described by the people who recorded them.  Ashley Ahearn : Journalist and producer of Grouse , from Birdnote and Boise State Public Radio Joel Balsam : Journalist and producer of the upcoming podcast Parallel Lives .  Joel co-created a photo essay f...

1,420,405,751* hertz is a very important frequency.  It’s the frequency that hydrogen radiates at , creating radio waves that can be detected far away.  And astronomers can learn a lot about the history and shape of the universe by observing this “hydrogen line” frequency with radio telescopes Extraterrestrial research astronomers also take a lot of interest in the hydrogen line...and it...