Friends at the Table

The End Of Friends At The Table Season 8: Palisade – Making Good On An Old Threat

Chris 2 Comments

Spoiler Warning for the mid-season peak of Friends at the Table Season 8: Palisade.

After an incredibly long time (not that I’m complaining about the length, of course: I love a long podcast), the eighth season of Friends at the Table, Palisade, has come to an end. Even the post-mortem has finished up. By the time you’re seeing this, the audio version of the post mortem stream should be up on the main podcast feed and you’ll have probably either settled in to listen all the way through it, have already listened to it, or have made plans to listen to its five-star runtime over the weekend (the stream was just over five hours long, so I’m sure the audio will be a similar length). If one of those three things does NOT apply to you, then there will be nothing for you in this post (or there was a in the podcast episode going up which, you know, happens). If you’re uncertain about committing to Friends at the Table but like a good audio story or enjoy a good tabletop gaming podcast, you should absolutely start listening to it (it’s also available in any podcatcher you might use, on Spotify, and, of course, iTunes). It’s got thousands of hours of entertainment, amazing science fiction and fantasy work, and a great general vibe that shifts from relaxed and fun storytelling between friends to tense and emotional storytelling between friends. I have easily listened to more hours of Friends at the Table than any other podcast and I would not be surprised to learn that I’ve listened to more Friends at the Table than all my other podcasts put together. It’s really good stuff, there’s so much of it out there, and now I’m going to need to fill my idle audio hours with something else while they take a break following the monumental undertaking that was this latest season.

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Media Club Plus Is The Best Hunter x Hunter Analysis I’ve Ever Heard

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I’ve mentioned this multiple times now, over the last year or so, but I started putting an effort into expanding my podcast selection from just Actual Play podcasts to include some of my other interests. The ones I mostly settled on, thanks to them being adjacent to my favorite podcast (Friends at the Table) in some way or another, both wound up being media analysis podcasts. I studied English literature and literary criticism in college and found them both incredibly fun, so it makes sense to me that I’d enjoy podcasts that basically do that same thing but with movies or TV shows. Which is how I landed on listening to A More Civilized Age and the subject of today’s post: Media Club Plus. I technically started Media Club Plus first, since I’ve been listening not only since the day the first episode dropped, but from the day they streamed episode 0 as a proof-of-concept in order to get people to drive up their Patreon subscriptions to the tier that would see them spin off the Media Club Patreon episodes into their own podcast. The selling point of the show was that the main cast would feature a few long-time fans of the anime Hunter x Hunter and one person who had not only watched very little anime at all but had never watched Hunter x Hunter and had only expressed an interest in it after listening to their friends talk about it all the time. The stream was an instant hit and while it took a few months to get the show off the ground, it funded in less than a month after the stream, thanks in part to a large number of people increasing their pledges (myself included) to help push the group toward their goal. Since then, not only have they put out twenty episodes of the main podcast (an episode every other week), but they’ve also published three Patreon specials with one more imminently on the horizon [which released between writing this and it getting posted], covering a selection of Dragon Ball and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure episodes. It has been a genuine delight to listen to the podcast go from a rough concept on a Twitch stream to the absolutely stellar analysis and insight that I make sure to never miss when it drops every other week, time allowing.

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Trying To Break Free From Identity Defined In Opposition To The World I Live In

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While I was mulling over my identity and coming to reflect on the decision I’d made years ago (largely out of self-defense, given how absolutely locked-in I was to my parents’ vision of who they wanted me to be), I was listening to a lot of Friends at the Table. A lot of stuff they said there informed the way I think about my place in contemporary society and the way my identity fits into the world I inhabt. Not because I was entirely unfamiliar with those ideas, but because the thinking they explored as a part of their science-fiction themed seasons (especially Twilight Mirage, their fourth season) helped build on what I’d learned in some of the classes I took in college, in the research I’d done on my own, and the helpful things I’d coincidentally read along the way. One the things that stuck with me the most was the GM, Austin Walker, talking about how he wanted to push the boundaries with their fourth season. I don’t remember the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of “we need to imagine the most radical thing we can and then take it one step further.” The idea being, he explained, that all of us are limited by the world we live in, by the society we’re used to, and that a civilization that had progressed to the very edges of what we could conceptualize would be able to imagine modes of being/ways of life/etc that we couldn’t even conceive of because we are so anchored by the world we know, and that the society he wanted the group to attempt to represent in this season should have progressed beyond even that.

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You Should Check Out Friends At The Table. I Just Think They’re Neat.

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I spent most of last night (technically the 13th, not the 22nd, since I write these a week ahead of time and then juggled all of this week’s posts around so I could tell everyone how much I enjoyed the Diablo IV beta) watching the Friends at the Table crew (well, most of them) play King of the Castle on Twitch. I participated a little bit, since you can sign up to become a noble in the kingdom playing out on a stream game if the streamer has it set up correctly (and I can’t think of why you wouldn’t, given the fun I had last night), and it was a very enjoyable experience. Between the amazingly accurate Gilbert Gottfried impression, one of the players using a fun voice changer for her roles, and the overall humor of the group, I recommend checking them out (this link is to the YouTube upload of their stream). It was a very fun time and while there will be some loss of fun because you can’t participate in the voting after the stream has ended, it is still a hilarious few hours of a video game that is absolutely worth your time. There’s even a wonderful, friendly troll and a campaign to legalize a plant that makes everyone feel great when they’re around it all the time.

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