Skyjazz

Companion Episode: Wendy, Watch the Stars

Jeff Emtman is a good son to his father, and like all good sons, he desires to take the gifts he finds in the world and bring them back to his dad, fashioned into a slightly different shape. In the winter of 2021, Jeff had been building on his not-insignificant technical skill base to learn python coding for Neutrinowatch, and perhaps coincidentally (we may never know), decided to create a computer program as a birthday gift for his dad. The code did a few different things, but perhaps most notably, it used an astronomy library to calculate the current position of the planet Uranus and tell his dad where to look for it, if it was visible at the time Jeff’s dad ran the code, at his home somewhere in the western part of North America. He called this gift “Where’s Uranus?”.

Martin is a less good son to his father. He once recorded a version of his dad’s favourite Gilbert and Sullivan song*, and another time he wrote a song about his dad’s recurring nightmares of being trapped in a fire at sea that turned out (after the fact) to be based on a real and highly traumatic event. He’s not good at gifts. But he’s ok at cut and paste coding, so he took Jeff’s code and decided to make it into a podcast episode.

“Where’s Uranus?” is a bit of a basic joke, but then Martin is a bit of a basic person, so he wrote a theme song and created a whole headcanon whereby Wendy, the West Antarctic AI zapped by some sort of cosmic event at the end of episode one but keen to keep producing Relatable Content and get John up the iTunes Chart, was generating a load of ideas based on the sort of ways she thought human beings chose to entertain themselves. A daily, live show, broadcast from a different city of the world every night, answering the question “Where’s Uranus?”. Sure, that’s the sort of shit human beings like! It’s a radio-friendly unit shifter!

It took some time to realise that the show worked better as a format if Wendy wasn’t in on the joke – if she’s a serious (AI) astronomer (which, in the fiction of the show, she is) that is constantly plagued by dickheads like Michael Hunt or IP Freely trying to get her to say “Uranus is beautiful” or something, and instead of falling into their traps, treats it as a serious astronomical question. Says something about why talking about Uranus constantly is using a kind of humour to cover the fear of change. Maybe hinting that the weird cosmic burst came from within the solar system? It was important that she never fall into the trap – never said “Mike Hunt” or whatever, so I spent a significant amount of time finding comedy names that were both very puerile, and would not be at all funny or offensive if you didn’t use the shortened version (“Mike”).

And then I wrote a load of facts about planets, some of which are not total bullshit! Every day some of those surface, some are ignored, and some never come up because the randomly selected city we’re in can only see a few planets. And if you’re wondering – yes, there are different versions depending on whether Uranus is visible from that location at 9pm. I have no way of knowing, because although the time (and date – today) is fixed, the city is random, and the code chooses from a list of thousands of possible cities. So I cannot tell you in advance whether Uranus is visible.

-Martin
*The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze