Actually, Odyssey’s not in Ohio

NOT OHIO- Interviews with Focus on the Family revealed that Odyssey is not anywhere close to Ohio and that fans please stop associating them with that state. According to Odyssey mayor Hicks,

“We no longer want our beautiful town to be connected with Ohioans any longer. While we are honored that outsiders would believe this way, we are respectfully distancing ourselves from any Ohio-related incidents.”

Apparently Odyssey has been stateless for the longest time, and that clip from Family Portraits was just a blunder.

In other news, Danville and Springfield’s mayors have also distanced themselves from any states with whom they have been associated.

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Connie Excited For Yet Another Valentine’s Day Spent Single

Odyssey, USA – Today resident ice cream shop employee Connie Kendall expressed her total joy over yet another Valentine’s Day spent single. On her show Candid Conversation with Connie on KYDS radio, she delved deep into her dating history.

During this radio segment, she talked about her relationships with both Jeff Lewis and Robert Mitchell. She discussed how she is very happy with her single life and does not need anyone else to complete her.

Witnesses however, noticed that a dark figure who looked uncannily like Phil Lollar passing Connie cue cards during the live recording session.

U.S. Military Shoots Down Mystery “Object” Flying Over The Midwest

Today, the Department of Defense released a statement about a recent incident miles above the earth that had many civilians scared and bewildered. Spokesman Karl Stanley told a crowd of reporters “Although many details of this case are classified, I can tell you that our satellites picked up an unknown object flying above the earth. We perceived it to be a threat to national security and it was eliminated.”
Many critics have spoken out against this use of force by the government as “unnecessary” and “excessive.” They wonder what was so dangerous about this object that necessitated such a reaction.
Karl Stanley reassured his listeners that “the government is always looking out for the safety of the American people and you can always trust us because we are never unwise and we would never abuse power.

Dave Ramsey Revealed To Have Sponsored The Episode “A Little Credit, Please”

NASHVILLE, TN – Today on The Ramsey Show, host Dave Ramsey revealed a partnership he had with Christian ministry Focus on the Family. Back in 1995, Ramsey joined hands with writer and director Paul McCusker to craft an episode that would teach children about the dangers of credit cards while they were young.

Ramsey said “I have the ear of many adults for financial advice, but I wanted to reach some children with my important message. Thanks to this episode, millions of children learned about this very important topic. I hope Connie’s example sufficiently scared them away from the idea of ever using credit cards.”

A recent study conducted by the Campbell County Community College revealed that children who grew up listening to Adventures in Odyssey were 74% less likely to own credit cards than their non-listening counterparts. Dave Ramsey is proud of his accomplishment and hopes to roll out new content for children that will scare them away from credit cards in the near future.

Op-Ed: My thoughts on an animated AIO.

I wanted to keep the news part of this strictly news, so there weren’t really analytics or feedback from me. By now, each and every person reading this article has seen the news I broke not two days ago. Since I’ve been so consumed by the hype, and the aforementioned reason, I haven’t yet said a single word about my own thoughts on the news. I also started drafting this the night I posted the news, so if you read anything outdated, don’t be too rough. That’s all to say; here’s all I think about everything.

Personally, the first thing I thought about was, likely like most of you, to check the legitimacy of what I’d found. But the second thing I thought was that it would be so interesting to see developed along with a myriad of questions. I was shocked, of course, and I was excited by the concept and distracted by everything around me to take a good look at the actual story. While walking about, I began to realize that AIO had likely been leading up to something like this all along. After warming up to the fan community in the last year and releasing posts on Facebook and Instagram to expand the Odyssey universe (such as Elsewhere in Odyssey Comics and Fine Art Fridays) to warm people up to this idea. The podcast with Evan David also serves this purpose. The main point is Odyssey is planning this, but they want to reveal it less disastrously than Windows 11 (which I probably aided by purveying this news).

Speaking of Windows 11, while it’s too early to tell, it seems the lessons learned from their mistakes in releasing the Club are being applied. They seemed to (at least for as long as they could) really want to keep this under the radar for as long as possible. I’m sure it has to do with marketing psychology somehow, but I’m not entirely sure.

Character design is another major thing I want to talk about. Lucy looks like she came out of a Magic School Bus episode or another show I can’t quite put my mind to. The design of Whit looks way younger than I imagined, and that brings up another problem with animating Odyssey in any era: it’ll never truly fit the imagination of any Odyssey fan. While I would never conceive of Whit with brown hair, certainly someone in the design stage did. Odyssey, throughout all its technological changes and voice actor shifts, will always be an audio drama. It’s in a world of its own. Everything about both this new show and the 1990s version will receive some kind of backlash because of this fact. Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic. But while Adventures in Odyssey is exploring new fanbases, they can never forget the ones whose opinions carry the most weight.

Lucy’s appearance likely means she’ll be a returning character, but that raises even more questions, such as whether she’ll return as an adult or with Jack. It also raised the inevitable voice actor question. I certainly believe both Lucy and Jack’s actors are well and able to perform as adults, but, at least for Jack, definitely not as kids. There are so many unanswered questions, likely because, as both Phil Lollar and Nathan Hoobler have said, the team is just too early in development. I have lots of other thoughts (thoughts I’ll release if more info comes out), and also, to avoid this point being too long, I’ll cap it off here. I just want to say even with all this, I’m still very excited about what is in the future, whether it takes a few months to a year. I also hope I haven’t put a damper on AIO’s big release, which is more apology than a Windows 11 leaker will give you. For now, you know who it is, signing off.

*AIO Animation Article Reference pages

Read below to see the full article containing the news, and to see the cover page for context.

Focus Times Page 3.pdfDownload

Focus Times Cover.pdfDownload

EXCLUSIVE: Adventures in Odyssey releasing new animated series

It’s finally time for a solid post! And not satire, but a perfect scoop of news. “What is this news” you, the imagined reader, may be asking. Well, let’s break it down.

Adventures in Odyssey, according to the Focus Times (a newspaper published by FotF and found in their bookstore, is currently producing a brand new 3D animated series. According to Focus themselves, the original animated series seemed not to their liking, almost as much as with most fans. While the original series is animated in classic-Disney style, this new series is intended to be “2D graphics rendered to look like 3D similar to the lighting and shading found on Netflix’s original film KLAUS”. The first three episodes are set to cost 1.8 million.

The imagery for the new series on page three is interesting at best and reminds me of the original art for Paul McCusker’s books. A sneak peek on page three shows Lucy as one of the upcoming characters. I believe it is either a re-dramatization of past episodes or a revival of previous ones. I’ll cover Lucy’s appearance another time.

As for Focus’ thoughts, they seem to be excited about this. Nathan Hoobler and the rest of the team want to expand their reach. “All kids need to learn about honesty, integrity, responsibility, respect of authority, and other life lessons-but how they learn those lessons changes.” This may explain the constant transition of media over the years, including the recent changes to the Adventures in Odyssey Club.

Since this print edition is labeled 2021-2022, I expect this series to come out this year or the next. It will be exciting to see what Adventures in Odyssey comes up with, but strange at the same time. In the meantime, I’ll hopefully share my thoughts in another post and will update as more information provides itself.

Another anniversary, I guess?

I’m almost entirely sure that one of my New Year Resolutions for 2022 was to ‘post more,’ and boy, what a joke that was. This goes on record as our most underperforming year in content and content viewership, but it didn’t go without a few noticeable successes. Today marks the second anniversary of AIO Writer’s Block, which as the most dedicated readers of this website should know, started out as “The New AIO Blog” in late 202o. So grab your hot chocolate as I go over the biggest accomplishments of 2022.

The exceeding 10k views in May of this year

Thanks to all our readers, we superseded 10,000 views on the webpage this year and are now passing 12,000. I know we can make 15,000 in the coming year, and thank you so much for this. Unfortunately, due to a lack of posts, we barely scraped the number of views achieved last year, but I believe this is still an accomplishment.

The acquisition of two websites

Though I’ve kept this quite quiet over the past several months, two websites (Adventures Happening in Odyssey and Odyssey Fiction) have now joined what is dubbed the AIO Writer’s Block family. Hopefully, we can expand and develop this over the coming year, and I’m very excited to see what I envisioned for this site coming to fruition.

Now for the stats:

Obviously, 2022 was worse in terms of viewership, which strangely seemed the case around the board for AIO fan content. It may also have been the prime opportunity for creators (myself included); it appeared as though a sharp decline occurred, even though lives were resuming and content was being produced at a normal rate. In 2022, our most popular post was:

Mr. Whittaker In Trouble After Details Of His Life Before Moving To Odyssey Emerge

…garnishing a spectacular 131 views before the close of 2022. It also pulled in 1,008 views for April 2022, making it our most successful month this year and our second most successful month in history, just missing December 2021’s 1,457. The site also received

75 Likes

20 Comments

And now has a total of

32 Followers

Congratulations and thank you to our readers and John, without whom none of this would have been possible, and who gets full credit for that post. We now turn to social media, whose stats are significantly more impressive. We broke 100 followers early on in the year on both pages. Let’s take a look at the main page, which has a whopping

118 Followers

A number that will certainly increase in the coming year and will hopefully break 150 and possibly even 200. We’ll see. The SONN page now has

116 Followers

a surprising figure as it previously superseded the number on the head page, and hopefully will again, with all the goals previously mentioned.

It’s almost 2023, and also time to stop looking back on the year and begin looking forward. I’m sure I had a clever way I was going to wrap up this post. But for now, thank God for another year, drink some sparkling cider, and get ready for the best content ever!

For AWB, you know who I am; good morning.

Kanye West Joins The Bones of Rath After Learning They Are Enemies With The Israelites

ODYSSEY, USA – Today, popular rapper Kanye West announced his support of and involvement in the local gang “the Bones of Rath.” According to Kanye, “I found out the Bones are fightin’ some rival gang called the Israelites. I just gotta help them out.”

The Bones of Rath is a gang run by Rodney Rathbone, the son of Odyssey businessman Bart Rathbone. According to our sources, Rodney’s gang has been responsible for much havoc that has been created around Odyssey in recent days. This shocking new development means that this mayhem is quite possibly being funded by a millionaire.

Despite the wrongdoing of those like the Bones of Rath, and Kanye West, Jason Whittaker assured us that “the battle of good versus evil will go on no matter the opponent.”

Company with app that doesn’t work mad when people share content outside of it*

COLORADO- A corporation came under fire last week after users were banned from social media platforms when they disclosed they had bootlegged episodes off the broken application. Fans’ defense was that the app was broken and they could not use it. PR team’s had this to say in response:

I can’t believe fans would subvert our authority like this. This is exactly what our episodes try and teach them not to do. This is entirely their fault. The app works completely fine! This “everything is broken” stuff is hogwash and balderdash.

The team who’d worked on advertising the features of the app no one asked for were equally flabbergasted, declaring the public needed to be thankful for all the hard work put into the app and not complain.

In unrelated news, Focus on the Family has another protest going on outside their doors, likely because of some political reasons.

*This publication nor its parent or owners endorse ripping from the Club. It’s illegal, so y’know, don’t do it.