Original Airdate: October 2, 2026

What happens when you drop 75,000 geeks into a few blocks of downtown Atlanta? DragonCon.

Nick and Jess recap their return to the gloriously chaotic convention—cosplay, celebrities, three-hour lines, Jim Butcher, Firefly, unexpected wins, sensory overload, and the strange magic of being surrounded by thousands of people who completely understand your particular flavor of nerd. Plus: what they’d definitely do differently next time.

NOTE: This was originally a vlog (https://youtu.be/c52r4a0jlqU?si=h-kx2Eh2V1yhFysH), so some audio may need visuals to make sense.

©2026 House Adducci LLC - houseadducci.com - linktr.ee/houseadducci

Original Airdate: September 10, 2026

Is fantasy an escape from reality—or are we just using “escapism” as a fancy word for avoidance?

Nick and Jess dig into Tolkien’s distinction between the “escape of the prisoner” and the “flight of the deserter,” and ask when imagination helps us face reality better—and when we’re just hiding from it with dragons, spaceships, and excellent worldbuilding.

Full text of Tolkien's quote on escapism: "I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter." ― JRR Tolkien,

On Fairy Stories (full text: https://coolcalvary.com/wp-content/up...)

NOTE: This was originally a vlog (https://youtu.be/c52r4a0jlqU?si=h-kx2Eh2V1yhFysH), so some audio may need visuals to make sense.

©2026 House Adducci LLC - houseadducci.com - linktr.ee/houseadducci

Original Airdate: July 17, 2026

Roger Ebert had some thoughts about fandom. Some of them were fair. Some of them were… very Roger Ebert.

Nick and Jess talk Star Wars campouts, movie quotes, socially awkward geeks, theater crowds, and why the stuff surrounding a movie may matter just as much as the movie itself. Somewhere along the way, the conversation turns into a bigger question: are filmmakers spending too much time thinking about stories—and not enough time thinking about the experience audiences are actually having?

At the end of the episode, they take a look behind-the-scenes at a House Adducci project.

NOTE: This was originally a vlog (https://youtu.be/c52r4a0jlqU?si=h-kx2Eh2V1yhFysH), so some audio may need visuals to make sense.

©2026 House Adducci LLC - houseadducci.com - linktr.ee/houseadducci

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Find the original article at: https://houseadducci.substack.com/p/studio-update-06082026

©2026 House Adducci LLC - houseadducci.com - linktr.ee/houseadducci