Divided by Werewolves

I have two podcasts

When I opened the Chromebook to start this today, I was thinking “I miss blogspot, I used to enjoy “writing”, and people have been following me because of Jesse’s podcast so I might as well actually use Substack”. But then I saw that only 8 of you follow me, and I appreciate all 8, but I felt like the number was maybe higher based on notifications. I also never use this, so it tracks that it’s basically crickets on this page. Also let’s be honest, Jesse is the talent, I’m just the Andy to his Conan except I’m significantly less funny than Andy.

Even worse than all of that though is the fact that I don’t feel like I have anyone to talk to. Most of my friends are just usernames in my phone, and I love them dearly, but there is nobody in my day today, or “IRL”, that I talk to about anything I love. People bitch about social media, me included, but the fact is that if it didn’t exist, I’d be even more lonely than I already am. So back to blogger, wayyyyy back in the day, I had gotten married, had a kid, and most of my friends were still young and either single and/or without child and I all of a sudden had a lot of responsibility and couldn’t tell work to fuck off and just head to Ohio for The Gathering. So i started a blog, Tales from the Batcave. I wrote about movies, games, comics, all of the things that are important to me, and through that I met so many new people, including Jesse. I’ve mentioned this before, but that stupid little blog made me feel as included and as cool as I’ve ever felt.

One thing that happened because of it was I got super close to my friend Brandon. Close enough that out of everyone I’ve ever known online, he’s one of only five I’ve ever met in person. We started out DM’ing each other on an invite only Xbox Live website. He was northeast of Atlanta and I was southwest of Atlanta, but back in the good old days of Atlanta having a hockey team I’d find myself in the city way more often. So we planned to meet at his place before a game one Saturday. Obviously we hit it off immediately, even though we come from VERY different sides of the tracks. Eventually that Xbox site went away, but there was a handful of us who stayed in touch, and are still in touch to this day.

Brandon would go on to work for Gameshark for fun outside of his full time job, writing game guides, and eventually being given the task of running the official Gameshark podcast “Jumping the Shark”. We always talked, but he was doing big things and I never wanted to bother him. I listened to JTS, and even met a few new people through it, but Brandon and I weren’t as close as we used to be back in the days of the Xbox site. We always still talked though, and eventually JTS came to an end, but Brandon was still interested in podcasting. So he messaged me one day asking if I’d be interested in maybe doing a show. Me being me, I told him sure but I have no idea how any of that works. He assured me he would handle all of the technical aspects, and all I would have to do is show up and talk. Again, as I don’t really have anyone to talk to in life, I agreed to at least give it a shot as he was one of my favorite people and if this was an idea he was passionate about I was down to help in any way. Years later this would also be exactly how Damage Per Pod would begin.

We started throwing out ideas, my man had BIG plans that neither of us were capable of pulling off as middle aged men. A youtube channel? A live streamed pop culture show while we played a game co-op? I mean I liked the idea, but we had no idea what we were doing, and again, we were also probably 25 years too late at that point, so as of I think episode 15 or so, our show became just a regular podcast. We also went back and forth as to what to call it. Eventually I proposed “Dances with Werewolves” which I thought was pretty clever, but as Brandon is way more intelligent than me, instead of just going with that, he actually did some looking and it turned out that name was already taken by a podcast I’m not sure is even active anymore. But with that off the table, we were back to the drawing board. Thing thing that I couldn’t get away from though was for as much as Brandon and I were separated at birth, the two things that we absolutely did not have in common were 1. money and 2. our opinion as to which werewolf transformation was the best of all time. I rightfully believe it’s David in American Werewolf and Brandon thinks it’s Eddie from The Howling. As “Big Money and Broke Ass” is a great podcast name, it doesn’t really convey the subject matter we’d be talking about, so Divided by Werewolves was born.

So why we are here today. Next year marks our 10 year anniversary of bi-weekly episodes that we have rarely missed an upload. Neither of us are good a promotion, despite the fact that I created a facebook page, twitter, and instagram for the show. I also taught myself garage band to put together our music. I have no idea how to use advanced photo editing programs, so with my extremely limited resources I made just the most hilariously stupid thumbnails for our episodes. Imagine you asked Chat GPT to make an image as if you were a three year old. I have at least gotten a little better, as I made the image you see above. We do occasionally get emailed screener offers, and even once Shudder reached out about working together. Once they realized what our engagement was they immediately stopped responding though. But whether anyone ever listened or not, we have stuck with it. I can’t speak for Brandon, but for me it’s because of my love of film. Specifically genre. For all of my interests, if I had to give them all up it would be movies that I’d have the most trouble with. I’m specifially married to boutique bluray labels like Vinegar Syndrome, Terror Vision, Arrow, Scream Factory, Kino Lorber, and the list goes on. If a company exists and is giving absolute genre garbage the royal treatment? Safe to assume i’m there.

If you’ve read this far, first of all thanks, second of all I’m going to assume that maybe you’re for some reason interested in what the southern idiot from Jesse’s show has to say about stuff. If that sounds like you, I have good news friend! I enjoy “writing” enough and more importantly I want to do my small part to help promote the genre labels I love so dearly to not only talk about them on a podcast that almost nobody listens to, I’ve decied to use this platform as a way to talk more about movies. The plan as of today is to post here every other week when we put out an episode of Divided by Werewolves starting in January. This month’s shows are two of my favorites to record, our “best games’ and “best movies” episodes, but both would be too much to write about.

I’m planning to be more active on our show’s instagram page, and to try and do more to promote the show. If you’re interested at all, just search Divided by Werewolves literally anywhere online and we should pop up. Further, the one social media spot I’m even slightly active on still is instagram, so if you’re for some reason interested in a look at the collection, I’m mister_bones on there. I’d love to chat if any of you are into genre film. If none of this connects at all, I get that, and to the elite 8 just know you guys are goated, and Jesse and I have nothing but content forthcoming. Thank you all for your time.