The tape begins with a voicemail — a jumble of static, mumbling, and the distinct sound of someone explaining how to “fix” a cassette with a pencil and a wiggle. From there, the conversation slides straight into Bootstuck logic: juice made from pinecones, acorns, and possibly corn itself.

Soon the townsfolk are preoccupied with a new community effort — putting up lost cat posters around town. The posters, placed two feet high so the missing feline might “see them,” are an act of optimism more than strategy. From there, talk turns to the township’s new “no passing” rule — not for vehicles, but for joints — and the alleged health benefits of mushroom gravy breakfasts.

The episode closes on a high-minded note as Bootstuck’s residents describe their scientific testing methods: paper, pencils, and a race down a hill to see whose “results” travel farthest. The conclusion? Science, like most things in Bootstuck, is mostly guesswork.

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Bootstuck receives another baffling shipment — one that somehow contains blank coins with holes, six violins (or possibly chair parts), an unidentified handled object, and an alarming number of beans. Between coughing up a real frog mid-conversation and debating how to “screw violins together,” the townsfolk attempt to make sense of their new supplies. They even claim to have a refrigerator — though it doesn’t run and functions mostly as a bookshelf.

Somewhere between food safety and symphony, the group plans to teach the township how to identify edible mushrooms, a noble idea given how often everyone seems to be poisoned. The call ends with their usual abrupt sign-off ritual, and the faint sense that Bootstuck might just survive another day — on beans alone.

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A confused caller accidentally goes live on the air and immediately loses his composure, setting the tone for another chaotic dispatch from Bootstuck. Between jam jars, smoke-filled air, and impromptu fire dances, the locals’ musical ambitions get derailed by missing spoons, homemade concerts, and a mysterious old man who may—or may not—have threatened someone’s life. When the tape recorder clicks on, we hear the chilling voice of a stranger offering a pocket rummage before the narrator bolts in panic and joy at once.

It’s unclear whether Bootstuck has been visited by danger, absurdity, or both—but one thing’s certain: someone’s got a pocket full of something, and it’s probably not candy.

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A torrential downpour hits Bootstuck, and the townsfolk treat it like an Olympic event. Our narrator excitedly describes his tactical methods for “dodging raindrops” and “putting out buckets,” before proudly announcing the formation of a brand-new body of water—Bootstuck Lake—created (apparently) by the rain itself. In between weather reports, Hat Guy makes a slippery return after tumbling down the stairs on a pile of sports magazines no one can read. These glossy imports inspire a new community initiative: recreating cricket and other foreign sports using cut-out pictures and Bristol board enthusiasm.

By the time a conversation about picnics (“Pick Nick!”) devolves into existential confusion about lakes, Savannah, and the proper number of sticks one man can hold, Bootstuck feels less like a town and more like a surreal weather report broadcast from the edge of reason.

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In this installment, the documenteur’s patience continues to erode as Bootstuck introduces yet another baffling innovation: the Personal Walking Association (or “PWA”). According to the locals, it’s an organized fitness initiative led by a man named Uber who walks people around “places.” Membership numbers stretch into the millions, and no one seems entirely sure what it’s for — except that it involves walking, sometimes sideways, and occasionally into trees.

From there, the topic of physical fitness meanders into Bootstuck’s unique exercise regimen: jumping over ropes that don’t move, kettlebells that don’t ring, and Halloween celebrations that occur the night before the night before Halloween. The documenteur, valiantly trying to keep up, finds himself listening to debates about dinner bells that no longer “ding” and movie productions that exist only in poster form.

By the time the conversation veers into a hopeful plan to film an “action-packed romance mystery” in a town that no one can actually find, silence briefly descends—only for the Bootstuck air itself to begin cracking and popping, blamed alternately on weather, ice, or Dave Braun’s backside. The documenteur ends the tape no closer to understanding anything, except perhaps that silence in Bootstuck is never truly silent.

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The documenteur, once again hanging by a thread of patience, tries to have a reasonable conversation while the residents of Bootstuck crawl around town “looking for scraps” and debating the difference between beets and beats. What begins as small talk about sore knees quickly dissolves into confusion about dance parties, water suppliers named River, and the discovery of Bootstuck’s newest local celebrity — Waving Tony, a man whose entire existence revolves around the art of waving.

Tony waves at everyone and everything, sometimes so fast it’s unclear whether he has one arm or four. The documenteur’s attempts to understand him — or anything — are met with Bootstuck’s signature logic: “Even when he’s not waving, he’s still Waving Tony.”

The conversation somehow spins further into news of a new “travel show,” which involves blindfolding participants, spinning them around, and abandoning them somewhere in the woods — Bootstuck’s idea of tourism. Amidst the chaos, a revelation emerges at last: the Bootstuck crew let slip that they’re actually in Ontario, a fact that sends the weary documenteur into near disbelief. After twelve weeks of uncertainty, he finally gets a concrete answer… only for the phone cord to cut out immediately afterward.

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The documenteur once again attempts to establish a thread of logic in Bootstuck, only to be derailed immediately by talk of sleep aids — ranging from chamomile tea to the rather more concerning chloroform and carbon monoxide. Dave, it seems, has been missing for six weeks, but nobody’s alarmed; apparently, he was just “sleeping under a tree."

When pressed about education in Bootstuck, the locals reveal their belief that everyone simply “comes with the knowledge,” meaning there are no schools, just an ever-growing pool of collective half-knowledge. The documenteur, visibly exasperated, tries to pivot toward nighttime — only to be informed that Bootstuck “gets night at nighttime, when it’s most popular.”

As if things weren’t disorienting enough, the tape ends with an abrupt advertisement for “Fizz” — a fizzy drink available in flavors like “black and white” and “bird’s eye” — leaving both the documenteur and the listener wondering whether they’ve stumbled into Bootstuck’s commercial break or its collective hallucination.

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The recording begins with confusion over who’s actually speaking—Dave has stepped away to rescue yet another burned pot of porridge, leaving the conversation in the hands of Hat Guy. What follows is an increasingly unhelpful brainstorming session about Post-it notes. Dave has been scattering them across fields, hoping the mysterious “Dropbox guy” might deliver peanuts. Suggestions arise that maybe, instead of begging for legumes, they could use the notes to ask where they actually are. Caleb is promptly assigned to line up the stickies into a giant field-wide message.

From there, matters only worsen. The townsfolk proudly explain their method of bottling water in the well itself, forcing anyone thirsty to rappel forty feet down. A basket-and-rope system is dismissed outright as too complicated. The sheds of Bootstuck also come under discussion: there’s the “two by four” shed (literally two feet by four feet), the massive hangar-like shed, and, of course, the “shed shed”—a shed specifically designed to store other sheds, mostly to keep the squirrels out.

By the end of the tape, the documenteur audibly falters, questioning the point of it all. The patience that once carried him through tales of waving systems and porridge disasters is beginning to fray. Bootstuck, it seems, is not just an archive of absurdity—it’s a test of endurance.

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