listening to the taskmaster podcast, skipping forward 30 seconds through the adverts:

You guys know me: you think Ed Gamble, you think - "why not?!"

pleasing thing 1: one of the springleaf kickstarter backers gave their "public name" for display on the Wall of Thanks as "TRANSPHOBES CAN SUCK IT FOREVER" XD

pleasing thing 2: the springleaf team specifically said they reserved the right to reject inappropriate "public names" :D

okay, so... since i last posted about james starting gigging again and my immensely fretful efforts to find out about gigs before they sold out... i have in fact managed to nab tickets for FOUR of his upcoming shows. within as many weeks. starting this thursday. XD

(for the record: two of them i found by twitter namesearching; one of them i DID actually get in on time for by virtue of signing up to comedy venue newsletters and getting alerts forwarded to my featurephone; one of them i'd just completed booking after twitter namesearching by the time i got a newsletter alert about it :P)

i should... maybe stop automatically booking in for every gig i hear about him doing that i'm free for now? at least for a bit? XD he is very definitely Back, Babay <3

(i mean, i regret nothing: who knows if i'll even make it to all of them, there's still a goddamn pandemic on; plus, it's a fun mix of venues! one small theatre with allocated seating (FRONT ROW AGAIN, BABAY) and across-the-board Relaxed Performances; one rooftop bar(!) (at least that one will be a little covid-safer); and one of his old haunt comedy clubs that has its own lovely atmosphere/regulars that we attended several livestreams of throughout lockdown times and are genuinely excited to patronise in 3D...)

we watched back one of said early-pando livestreams last night, one from almost exactly two years ago, and it's one where he's going hard on "lockdown is great! i realised all of my stress comes from doing stand-up, and now i can't do it any more! can't wait to come out of lockdown and never do it again!" - and maybe that was the first time we heard him voice sentiments like that, and maybe we thought it was a joke but he certainly doubled down on it in pretty much every livestream/podcast he turned up in after that - and - now here we are, and here he is :D

(i'm not sure how much of the advertised "hecklers welcome" theme will come through in the actual shows, but i STRONGLY suspect that he's trying to do himself some kind of an exposure therapy or something, trying to pre-empt the part he finds stressful - i.e. audiences being dicks - by inviting it, you know, trying to take control of not feeling in control by explicitly "giving up control"... and i am fascinated to see how it plays out... and i also strongly suspect that now that he's invited it, all the audiences will be too polite to do it XD nevertheless i am 100% happy to contribute to his attempts to get himself free - or rather, paid - therapy :P)

(he's also talked on the "oh captain my captain" podcast about not minding audience interruptions when he's doing work-in-progress shows because they're looser, or they're useful feedback, or whatever - it's when he's crafted a tour show to exactly how he wants it and it gets derailed that burns his biscuits - so possibly the whole thing is a red herring for the time being, to be fair)

i've never been to a work-in-progress show before! thursday will be only his... if i've spotted them all/counted right... fifth full WIP hour since his "comeback" began! i get to see how a WIP evolves - if at all - over the course of weeks! my overzealous overanxious efforts eventually paid off! this is going to be a hell of a summer :D

sat 12th feb: tickets for hecklers welcome at machfest go on sale

sun 13th feb: tickets for hecklers welcome at machfest sell out

tue 22nd feb: i find out about hecklers welcome at machfest, and frantically scour all possible avenues i can think of to try to discover whether this might be part of a bigger run of shows, including checking the listings of every comedy club i can remember james having played in the past, checking his dice.fm profile, and googling various combinations of "james acaster" "hecklers welcome" "work in progress"

wed 23rd feb, 10am: tickets for hecklers welcome at angel comedy go on sale (via dice.fm)

wed 23rd feb, 7pm: i google "james acaster" "hecklers welcome" again in order to remind myself of the machfest deets, and am completely thrown for a loop when the angel comedy deets also appear - already marked as sold out

wed 23rd feb: i frantically sign up to every possible comedy club newsletter i can think of, "follow" james' dice.fm profile (whatever that means), and set up various alerts for various channels where there's half a chance of resales turning up

thu 24th feb: i wake up exhausted and take a mental health day

like, to be clear, that's not the only thing that's been A Lot recently - but - haha, that's funny, isn't it - james quit stand-up because it was giving him anxiety - now him coming back to stand-up is giving me anxiety.

the calculus has changed! two swallows make a summer! he is working up a show! i haven't missed my perhaps only opportunity to see him! i've also missed additional opportunities to see him, but there will surely be more! this is HUGE FUCKING NEWS!!! <3 <3 <3

...aaaaaand i cannot rest until i track some tickets the fuck down o.O

...aaaaaand perhaps not even then. -_-

very, very strange to have heard about the two gigs in such a compressed timescale, and with such inauspicious timing. it gave me the impression of FRENETIC ACTIVITY and more news HAPPENING ALL THE TIME and if i could only maintain CONSTANT HYPERVIGILANCE then surely i could get my foot in some door somewhere. in reality, things are happening quite slowly. i'm full of nervous energy and channelling it into likely-fruitless busywork (setting up an app to send dice emails as texts to my featurephone will surely pay off(!)) and shutting doors after horses have bolted (whoops, if only i'd stayed on that patreon i would have heard about that gig, signing back up to it will surely not be a waste of money(!)) and failing to notice tip-offs through sheer panic-induced failures of reading comprehension.

maybe - probably? eventually? law of averages? - i'll score tickets to A Gig. i'm still not sure it'd be enough for me. i want to go to All The Gigs. i want to go to The First Gig. it's about to happen without me and i'll surely be climbing the walls. what will happen?? will it be The Best Gig??? will it somehow abruptly and catastrophically be The Last Gig???? every gig is different, and i'm going to miss so many of them...

i got very into a completionist special-interest groove during the pando. (easy when your person-of-special-interest is only doing an average of 0 gigs per month, and all of them are livestreamed.) that is... very much not going to be sustainable, now.

come on, brain. this is huge news. this is fantastic news. this is news i honestly didn't think i'd ever hear. if i can just manage to wrap my head around it... maybe it'll turn out i'm not anxious, i'm just excited :P

- has been leafblowered in the face on a tv show

the person behind the celebrity is full-on 100% humiliation kink and james did not hesitate to accept the gig: change my mind

(demeaning rules! obedience! disobedience! punishment! talking about someone as though they're not there! putting shameful tweets in their mouth! lingering shots of their awkward discomfort! DID SOMEONE FIND MY AO3 OR)

gotta say, if this is something that some people find humorous and i find titillating, i'm sure not worried that i'm the unreasonable one XD

Stu Mather (producer of Hypothetical) retweeted one of my Hypothetical Twitter shitposts with a positive endorsement! <3

The retweet got absolutely no engagement XD but this is the closest thing I have ever had to a senpai actually noticing me and I can therefore retire from shitposting happy.

(He retweeted it nearly two weeks ago, but I had been stress-avoiding my Twitter notifications ever since attempting to shamefully self-promo it by replying to a Dave post - which is probably how he came to spot it - because I fully expected to get absolutely no engagement and didn't want to face the humiliation. I had genuinely forgotten WHY I'd been stress-avoiding said notifications so when I randomly clicked on them it was a delightful surprise!)

I do not understand Twitter, it scares me, it upsets me, I'm definitely doing it wrong, and I should probably just delete it, BUT. FINALLY. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED. someone involved in the making of a thing that I shitposted about ACTUALLY ENJOYED THE SHITPOST. \o/

predicted the "i've started so i'll finish" joke; feeling incredibly pleased with myself B)

also, and not for the first time, very much in the market for some phillips/acaster ¬‿¬