I couldn't make head or tail of this dialogue, although I understand the Chinese. What has the introduction to do with the content of the dialogue? It's not very helpful to the Chinese learner to have such obscure texts. Sometimes you seem to me to go too far in your attempts to be "original". A bit more down to earth please!

I don't know what's so confusing; it's a movie trailer. You hear the narrator announcing that the movie is coming, interspersed with fairly cornball dialogue between characters.

尼古拉斯桑,

I wouldn't say Uncle Tom. I think the misperception is that we're trying to be edgy just for the sake of being edgy. Which isn't the case -- we produce stuff we find entertaining. And if we ever hit the point we can't do that there won't be much reason to continue.

When it comes down to pedagogical debates, I personally think these sorts of materials ARE much easier to remember because the mind wraps around them in strange ways. But that's another discussion.

Perhaps the take-home from this one is that we should be more careful writing the introductions to make it clearer when the format changes unexpectedly. Since this podcast is archived by now and isn't the sort of thing a first-time listener will run into, I don't mind us being a bit random. This sort of thing keeps us on our feet as much as anyone else.

Also... I think this is really useful language (盛夏，古老, 灭亡) and fairly straightforward... so Brendan is crazy!

--dave