Creative people are very good at turning joy into homework. We find something we love, immediately ask how it could become a career, worry that we're not doing it correctly, read seven books about it, and six months later we're staring at the thing we used to love and feeling nothing. It is a remarkable talent and we should probably stop.

This week — inspired by The Tick, of all things — the Craft and Chaos crew attempts to remember what it felt like before all that. The assignment: something you made or did or consumed recently whose only job is to make you unreasonably happy. No portfolio value. No lofty artistic ambition. Just the pure, embarrassing, uncomplicated thing.

The results are, genuinely, a lot. Pete spent months learning to use a lathe in his neighbor's garage and emerged with a camphor burl bowl so thick-walled it could survive a home invasion, and he is vibrating at a frequency that can only be described as "third-grader at a craft fair." Ryan wrote his first murder — in a genre he's never written, with a live stream, an off-camera death, and a moral ambiguity that refuses to let you off the hook — and somehow made it work without a drop of blood. Kyle has finally launched a plays page on his website (WadeIntoTheWeird.com, which is a name that earns its keep), attended four overlapping high school theater productions, and was reduced to helpless laughter by a single line delivered with absolutely no inflection whatsoever. And Mandy directed a commercial, hired her own dog, and dissolved a piece of paper in eclipse water at a crossroads to banish obstacles from her life. We are not here to judge. It worked, probably.

The episode closes with a dramatic reading of Terry Bisson's 1991 short story "They're Made Out of Meat" — two aliens assessing humanity and arriving at the only logical conclusion, which is to erase us from the records and pretend no one's home — and if you don't come away from it slightly horrified by the fact that you are a pile of thinking, dreaming, singing meat, you weren't paying attention. Pure joy, folks. This is what it looks like.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos
• (02:24) - Things that are Creatively Satisfying
• (19:25) - "Sponsor" Brevity
• (20:26) - Something you Do for Joy
• (51:17) - "Sponsor" Brevity

Here's a question that has haunted every creative person who ever watched a reboot and thought, "I could do that better": should you play in someone else's sandbox, or build your own from scratch and accept that no one will show up? This week on Craft and Chaos, we dig into the Original Character vs. Existing IP debate — and end up somewhere that involves Batman and the Joker as co-parenting dads.

We also talk about firsts: first book signings, first school visits, first film festival screenings with four people in the audience — all your people — and at least one legendary audition for Saturday Night Live that began with a witch-manifestation and ended with Amy Poehler's dressing room and a nervous breakdown.

Plus: the Drawer of Shame. What's still in yours? What's waiting for you to level up?

• (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos
• (01:32) - EC v OC?
• (11:45) - A Haunted Interrogation
• (32:14) - The Project Graveyard