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Jan. 24th, 2025 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI have a podcast problem, which is that I need a steady podcast diet of fifty minutes a day for my walks to/from work, and my favorite kind of podcast is a (good!) media discussion podcast, but I can't listen to most media discussion podcasts even if they are good because I often will want to make sure I experience the media first and I simply don't have time. Anyway, here's some podcasts that I listened to this past year.
A More Civilized Age: As someone who only got really into Star Wars as an adult via the medium of watching The Clone Wars at the same time as I was involved in a tragic clone-centric Star Wars-themed RPG campaign, I am exactly the target audience for this Star Wars critical discussion/analysis podcast, which started with Clone Wars and has now moved onto Rebels with occasional detours to Andor, KOTOR, and the Thrawn trilogy. It is currently the reliable mainstay of my podcast diet and I'm very excited for them to eventually get to The Bad Batch, which appears to have become my favorite piece of Star Wars media after Rogue One and the approximately three Clone Wars arcs I really care about.
Re:Adapted: Usually I have a bit of a hard time with podcasts in which One Person Reads Out a Scripted Lecture (I prefer more freeform conversation) but I make an exception for things as directly relevant to my interests as this show, which traces the various ways that Phantom of the Opera has been readapted since the original Gaston Leroux novel came out and which pieces of each adaptation then got carried on, picked up, put down, pushed back against, etc. in subsequent adaptations after that. This is the kind of thing I find most interesting and I think Phantom is an incredible starting point. I think the Phantom season is complete at this point, but the creator has suggested that she might do subsequent seasons with other frequently adapted narratives and I hope that she does!
Jim Gordon Must Die: this is a podcast about the TV show Gotham, done by friends of mine who drop an update at complete random when the muse strikes them. As a result, every episode is always an exciting surprise! A rare and precious exception to my usual podcast problem, because I do not and will never want to see the TV show Gotham but I am curious about adaptations generally and so having all the most absurd parts of the show explained to me by my very funny friends is frankly an ideal way to experience it.
The Big Dig podcast: I wrote this up already, but in short, just a great piece of audio documentary storytelling about Our Beloved Local Nightmare Infrastructure Project. The producers have a follow-up coming about the lottery called Scratch and Win and I will be listening to it!
Shelved by Genre: This is a book discussion podcast ft. Austin Walker of Friends at the Table and A More Civilized Age plus some other guys who are new to me; I am not an archive completionist with this one and I'm not trying to read along with it, butkate_nepveu alerted me to the vital and important fact that they were reading the Vanyel trilogy and it has been both funny and fascinating to listen to people who have never experienced Mercedes Lackey seriously analyze The Vanyel Experience as a standalone piece of media. (I've also listened to a couple of their Earthsea episodes, but only for the books I recently reread.)
Friends at the Table: Currently airing FatT has become a show that I listen to socially withgenarti rather than a show that I listen to solo on my walk from work, which is delightful but is also part of the reason that I have been looking for more podcasts to fill up the daily fifty minutes ... anyway, as has been the case from the beginning, I'm into FatT less because I think it is always one hundred percent satisfying storytelling and more because I am fascinated by the ways that the actual play format lets the listener see how cool ideas and personalities and impulse and chance come together to structure the narrative, and as such I find the show's successes and failures equally interesting. The most recent season, Palisade, I think, is an incredible object lesson and illustration in this; unfortunately it's also a terrible place to pick up the show as it's more of a sequel to all of their previous stuff than they've ever done before.
I am really fascinated by the way that the narrative and the dice and the play style have all fallen out such as to make Brnine kind of a uniquely compelling character in the history of the podcast (or at least, uniquely compelling to me). They're a character on their second season, meaning they've had more time to develop out a long arc than many of the single-season characters. They are a marine alien who is designed, from the get-go, to be awkward, low charimsa, and bad at communication, who is nevertheless in a leadership role as captain of a spaceship. They had an intense relationship with another player character in that first season who died tragically, and Ali-as-player made a deliberate choice to incorporate Brnine's grief about that character into the narrative drives on their character sheet but never ever talk about them onscreen, which provides a constant level of fascinating tension as the the GM constantly builds things into the world and the narrative that might encourage Brnine to open up about this central grief and depression while Ali ducks and weaves in order to avoid doing so. And then, in the middle of the plot, the dice and the mechanics line up to give this swagless fish an absurdly impressive, overwhelming victory in an interaction where Ali was clearly cheerfully prepared to let this be Brnine's final battle -- followed by an arc in which in-character Brnine has a deathwish and out-of-character Ali is fully ready to let them die because she's afraid that continuing Brnine's story too long after the spectacular thing that just happened could only be a narrative letdown, while the other players actively sabotage Ali's efforts to give Brnine a spectacular sendoff because they want Brnine to stick around. Forced to live by the narrative in every possible way! It's the kind of storytelling that can only happen in actual play, and that's made more effective and not less by the fact that you can see all the factors that went into it and the way that the players are trying to shape the narrative as they go and sometimes being shaped by events instead.
Conversely, this is notoriously a season with an endless finale, because the first system that they tried to use simply did not work in its mechanics and also because external circumstances caused various people to be depressed during the making of it, and they pushed on anyway. As the first round of finale goes on, you can hear the way that the players are attempting to push at or work around the mechanics to make a story that's satisfying for them and for the listener, and it is just audibly like shoving a boulder uphill, and they get all the way through it and are like right! Okay! Well, I guess the only way to fix this is to make another, post-finale finale! Which is very silly, but also, they were absolutely right, that was the way to do it, and I'm glad they left all of the difficult finale in and worked with it instead of just putting it aside and starting over from scratch, because this too is the work of storytelling and is the stuff I find interesting.
I am as always open to podcast recs! though as you may have gathered I'm quite picky about what specifically works for me and so I reserve all rights to ignore them.
A More Civilized Age: As someone who only got really into Star Wars as an adult via the medium of watching The Clone Wars at the same time as I was involved in a tragic clone-centric Star Wars-themed RPG campaign, I am exactly the target audience for this Star Wars critical discussion/analysis podcast, which started with Clone Wars and has now moved onto Rebels with occasional detours to Andor, KOTOR, and the Thrawn trilogy. It is currently the reliable mainstay of my podcast diet and I'm very excited for them to eventually get to The Bad Batch, which appears to have become my favorite piece of Star Wars media after Rogue One and the approximately three Clone Wars arcs I really care about.
Re:Adapted: Usually I have a bit of a hard time with podcasts in which One Person Reads Out a Scripted Lecture (I prefer more freeform conversation) but I make an exception for things as directly relevant to my interests as this show, which traces the various ways that Phantom of the Opera has been readapted since the original Gaston Leroux novel came out and which pieces of each adaptation then got carried on, picked up, put down, pushed back against, etc. in subsequent adaptations after that. This is the kind of thing I find most interesting and I think Phantom is an incredible starting point. I think the Phantom season is complete at this point, but the creator has suggested that she might do subsequent seasons with other frequently adapted narratives and I hope that she does!
Jim Gordon Must Die: this is a podcast about the TV show Gotham, done by friends of mine who drop an update at complete random when the muse strikes them. As a result, every episode is always an exciting surprise! A rare and precious exception to my usual podcast problem, because I do not and will never want to see the TV show Gotham but I am curious about adaptations generally and so having all the most absurd parts of the show explained to me by my very funny friends is frankly an ideal way to experience it.
The Big Dig podcast: I wrote this up already, but in short, just a great piece of audio documentary storytelling about Our Beloved Local Nightmare Infrastructure Project. The producers have a follow-up coming about the lottery called Scratch and Win and I will be listening to it!
Shelved by Genre: This is a book discussion podcast ft. Austin Walker of Friends at the Table and A More Civilized Age plus some other guys who are new to me; I am not an archive completionist with this one and I'm not trying to read along with it, but
kate_nepveu alerted me to the vital and important fact that they were reading the Vanyel trilogy and it has been both funny and fascinating to listen to people who have never experienced Mercedes Lackey seriously analyze The Vanyel Experience as a standalone piece of media. (I've also listened to a couple of their Earthsea episodes, but only for the books I recently reread.) Friends at the Table: Currently airing FatT has become a show that I listen to socially with
genarti rather than a show that I listen to solo on my walk from work, which is delightful but is also part of the reason that I have been looking for more podcasts to fill up the daily fifty minutes ... anyway, as has been the case from the beginning, I'm into FatT less because I think it is always one hundred percent satisfying storytelling and more because I am fascinated by the ways that the actual play format lets the listener see how cool ideas and personalities and impulse and chance come together to structure the narrative, and as such I find the show's successes and failures equally interesting. The most recent season, Palisade, I think, is an incredible object lesson and illustration in this; unfortunately it's also a terrible place to pick up the show as it's more of a sequel to all of their previous stuff than they've ever done before. I am really fascinated by the way that the narrative and the dice and the play style have all fallen out such as to make Brnine kind of a uniquely compelling character in the history of the podcast (or at least, uniquely compelling to me). They're a character on their second season, meaning they've had more time to develop out a long arc than many of the single-season characters. They are a marine alien who is designed, from the get-go, to be awkward, low charimsa, and bad at communication, who is nevertheless in a leadership role as captain of a spaceship. They had an intense relationship with another player character in that first season who died tragically, and Ali-as-player made a deliberate choice to incorporate Brnine's grief about that character into the narrative drives on their character sheet but never ever talk about them onscreen, which provides a constant level of fascinating tension as the the GM constantly builds things into the world and the narrative that might encourage Brnine to open up about this central grief and depression while Ali ducks and weaves in order to avoid doing so. And then, in the middle of the plot, the dice and the mechanics line up to give this swagless fish an absurdly impressive, overwhelming victory in an interaction where Ali was clearly cheerfully prepared to let this be Brnine's final battle -- followed by an arc in which in-character Brnine has a deathwish and out-of-character Ali is fully ready to let them die because she's afraid that continuing Brnine's story too long after the spectacular thing that just happened could only be a narrative letdown, while the other players actively sabotage Ali's efforts to give Brnine a spectacular sendoff because they want Brnine to stick around. Forced to live by the narrative in every possible way! It's the kind of storytelling that can only happen in actual play, and that's made more effective and not less by the fact that you can see all the factors that went into it and the way that the players are trying to shape the narrative as they go and sometimes being shaped by events instead.
Conversely, this is notoriously a season with an endless finale, because the first system that they tried to use simply did not work in its mechanics and also because external circumstances caused various people to be depressed during the making of it, and they pushed on anyway. As the first round of finale goes on, you can hear the way that the players are attempting to push at or work around the mechanics to make a story that's satisfying for them and for the listener, and it is just audibly like shoving a boulder uphill, and they get all the way through it and are like right! Okay! Well, I guess the only way to fix this is to make another, post-finale finale! Which is very silly, but also, they were absolutely right, that was the way to do it, and I'm glad they left all of the difficult finale in and worked with it instead of just putting it aside and starting over from scratch, because this too is the work of storytelling and is the stuff I find interesting.
I am as always open to podcast recs! though as you may have gathered I'm quite picky about what specifically works for me and so I reserve all rights to ignore them.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-25 02:53 am (UTC)I think you might like Dragons made me do it, which is a Pern podcast:
https://dmmdipodcast.neocities.org/
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Date: 2025-01-25 03:01 am (UTC)Anyway, I'm also very particular about podcasts, in my case because I am usually terrible at paying attention to audio, but if you want to try out some media analysis/craft talk for a wholly different genre/medium, then I do, in fact, have two recommendations: VS is a poetry podcast where "poets confront the ideas that move them". Basically a loose interview that is more of a conversation where the hosts (who have changed over time, but who are always poets) interview a specific poet. It's gone through some iterations & one host change which has had various periods of downtime, but it does look like they've been posting new episodes in the past few months. My other rec is a podcast that is now defunct, but is a similar idea with a more more casual & relaxed vibe: Poetry Gods. Audio isn't always great on Poetry Gods, but I enjoyed listening to the conversations. Also, good thing about poetry podcasts: usually the poet will read some of their poetry during the podcast, which is kind of like a mini catch-up session, so you that get a sense of their work even if you did not read anything ahead of time. On the other hand: I understand that poetry is not like, a universal thing people are into, so.
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Date: 2025-01-25 03:10 am (UTC)(I tried A More Civilized Age's Rebels podcast and ran into the problem that they...don't really seem to like Rebels very much? Which is fine, they're entitled to, but it doesn't make for great fan listening and also I feel their dislike means they frequently misunderstand characterization and other details.)
ETA: Also I see the Phantom podcast covered the 1943 Phantom, which is my favorite after the Synetic version, and if you've watched it I'd be interested in your thoughts!
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Date: 2025-01-25 06:01 am (UTC)Then there's The Poetry Exchange, a UK podcast where two hosts invite a guest on each week to discuss a "poem that has been a friend to them." That guest is sometimes mildly famous or themselves a poet, but usually they're a complete random, so there's a wonderful mix of educated criticism and simple love. The selection is thus often a little more pedestrian -- I think we've had multiple gos with The Lake Isle of Innisfree? -- but the tack is always so different it never feels repetitive. Tragically, one of the long-time hosts passed away last autumn after a sudden illness, but the podcast continues. There was a lovely episode in her honor.
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Date: 2025-01-25 06:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-25 06:57 am (UTC)You seem pretty well-equipped podcastwise, but I will say that I enjoy Marie Vigouroux and Jeremy Greer discussing Hannibal on Rude Eats.
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Date: 2025-01-25 08:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-25 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-25 02:30 pm (UTC)SbG I make some attempts to keep up with, mostly when I wanted to read the thing anyway and am using the episodes as an excuse to do so, but I don't feel a need to read the book in question to listen to it.
If you like the other guys on SbG enough to listen to them on their own, I genuinely did love Homestuck Made This World, a (re)read and analysis of Homestuck as an art object and cultural touchstone. (Their nonfiction game studies book discussion podcast, Game Studies Study Buddies is also fun for two people talking about an academic subject I find fascinating but have no desire to read up on myself.) (They also have a podcast about reading every Stephen King novel, but I'm not interested in that enough to have heard any of it.)
anyway YEAH PALISADE it sure is a thing! and you are completely right about Brnine's whole Deal being the most fascinating part of it, especially once Ali's desire for them to die hits the wall of every other player going "nah, they're gonna live".
And yeah, as much as I often love the stories FatT creates, I love them because I can see the messiness of how they're created. Actual play is messy! It's cool that way! Love an AP that lets me hear the tabletalk and understand the player mentality and narrative desires of the table as contrasted with the in-character motivations and actual scenes shown. <3
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Date: 2025-01-25 02:34 pm (UTC)Thanks for the rec of Shelved by Genre, I've just started listening to the first Magic's Pawn episode and am enjoying it!
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Date: 2025-01-25 02:49 pm (UTC)somehow I had not added Re:Adapted to my list of things to try! Also adding the Gotham one.
have you tried Lingthusiasm, in which Gretchen McCullough (author of Because Internet) and Lauren Gawne talk about various specific linguistics topics? https://lingthusiasm.com/ has suggested starting episodes towards the bottom.
also I know you know about this, but for people who are reading this who aren't you, Media Club Plus is currently watching Hunter x Hunter (2011 version) and is trying to be accessible to people who haven't watched it, and is fun and thoughtful about shonen and where the show sits within it--HxH has eaten my brain but I don't recommend it, because it is shonen and does not distinguish itself wrt its treatment of women. (but my blorbos!!!)
also also how I did forget to say: Brnine!!!! Thisbe!!!! <3333333
(Friends at the Table is going to be starting a completely new setting and campaign in about a month or so; they're currently starting a game their GM wrote, which is exciting, but it's going to be moving to their Patreon after the first several episodes.)
that is all.
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Date: 2025-01-25 02:51 pm (UTC)adding Poetry Unbound to the try list, thanks!
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Date: 2025-01-25 02:53 pm (UTC)hmmm, interesting!
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Date: 2025-01-25 03:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-25 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-25 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-26 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-26 03:17 am (UTC)HOWEVER I want to recommend Daughters of Ferrix, which is a dense and thoughtful SW podcast hosted by two trans women, and it goes deep into history and politics and and and and. It's really cool but possibly kind of a lot. If you like AMCA you might like DOF.
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Date: 2025-01-26 08:45 am (UTC)And yeah, a lot of the charm of FaTT is seeing how the sausage is made, even though I always skip the world-building episodes. Listening to a player test how far they can push someone they've know for a decade or two for the sake of telling a better story adds some interesting tension on top of the regular kind you can get anywhere.
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Date: 2025-01-26 12:28 pm (UTC)Thanks for this rec
Date: 2025-01-26 10:10 pm (UTC)...it sounds fascinating! Modern and ancient meet.
I loved The Big Dig
Date: 2025-01-26 11:48 pm (UTC)so I added the Scratch & Win to my subscription list.
You may enjoy a similarly-detailed 8-episode series that examines how the standardized shipping container transformed so much of our world. I raved about it at length a while back.
CONTAINERS
https://pod.link/1209559177
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Date: 2025-01-27 01:27 am (UTC)also I know you said you don't usually like podcasts that are one person reading out a pre-written script, but you made an exception for re:adapted and I think you might also be interested in making an exception for Going Rogue, which is all about the complications that arise in creating movies, and the reason that some films are....like that. It starts with a season on Rogue One and Solo, and it's SO fascinating.
Re: I loved The Big Dig
Date: 2025-01-27 01:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-27 01:31 am (UTC)