Podcast

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

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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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Not Another D&D Podcast Is Worth Your Time

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Of all the people I’ve ever talked to who got into the various tabletop gaming shows and podcasts created by ex-College Humor people (Such as Dimension 20 and Not Another D&D Podcast), I’m the only one who has followed my particular path. I’m sure there’s other people who have followed the same route given that there’s billions of other humans and millions of other people who fit into the same broad media categories that I do, but I’ve yet to find any despite keeping my eyes peeled. After all, most probably followed the various comedians or College Humor itself as it began to fracture in the collapse of the online advertising marketing (fomented, of course, by Facebook’s outright lies about video views), which makes sense! A lot of the modern Actual Play shows that quickly rose to prominence did so as a result of bringing an existing audience with them (one need not look further than Worlds Beyond Number for recent proof of this). I wasn’t really into the type of humor that College Humor relied on, though, and wasn’t really into internet comedians in general (and I’m still not, to be honest). They’re just not my thing. So I only discovered NADDPod (and through them the rest of the now DropoutTV network) three years ago, when they were about halfway through their second full campaign and I happened to stumble across a song from the finale of their first campaign on my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist.

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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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Digging Deeply Into A More Civilized Age

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While I might have started listening to Media Club Plus first thanks to what felt like a premise made specifically for me and my podcast listening time opening up right as it started posting, the podcast that actually got me to stop avoiding media discussion podcasts as a category was A More Civilized Age. I might not seem like it, but I’m a pretty ardent fan of Star Wars. I mostly avoid it because the online fandom is, perhaps, the most toxic and miserable fandom I’ve ever seen and not only do I want to avoid being associated with it in any way, shape, or form, I don’t want to ever catch its attention. The worst of them have way too much time on their hands and these miserable fucks have driven numerous people off the internet already, so I want to avoid them at all costs. Still, I love a good bit of Star Wars and while I might have some mixed feelings about the modern media landscape of the franchise (especially after all the books I’d read as a child and teen got launched into the uncaring and non-canonical oblivion that is “Star Wars Legends”), I figured that listening to some media-savvy folks discuss it might be a great way to push myself to finally sit down and watch some of the TV shows. I’d already tried and failed, after all, since I let myself get caught up in a bunch of online message boards that listed each episode in what was supposedly the “correct” timeline. I bounced off it pretty hard when I tried that method since none of it made any sense and it was a pain in the butt to cycle through seasons for the next episode I was supposed to watch. This podcast, though, declared that they were watching it in release order and, this January, when I ran out of other things to do, I resubscribed to Disney+ and started working my way through the show and the podcast in tandem.

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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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Getting Back Into New Stuff (Podcast Edition)

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I’ve been listening to mostly the same podcasts for the past two years. To be entirely fair, there’s been a lot for me to catch up on, since I got into podcasts late in general and very late in regards to some of these longer-running podcasts, specifically. That said, I hit a point last summer where I was entirely caught up and had listened to or watched all of the Patreon bonus content I cared for, but I wound up starting a string of full-series re-listens that I’m still working through now instead of trying something new. I needed something familiar and comfortable, so I just listened to stuff all over again. Some of it was nice, since I missed things here or there the first time and a second listen-through cemented the stories and characters I loved so much more firmly in my mind. Most of it, though, was just something I enjoyed to fill the silence of my evenings, combat the tinnitus I’m developing, and drown out the constant thumping, bumping, and creaking of my upstairs neighbors. Over the past few weeks, as I’ve pushed myself to start trying new things again, I’ve finally started making progress on my “to-listen” pile.

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Swept Away Again

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Due to my attention/anxiety issues, I almost always have music going in the background. It makes it easier to ignore errant or intrusive thoughts if I have music playing. As I’ve gotten into podcasts, I’ve found myself doing the opposite, finding something to play in the foreground so I can pay attention to my podcast since I’d almost always wind up browsing twitter or something on my phone if I don’t have something to do with my eyes and hands when I’m listening to a podcast. As a result of this habit, I’ve discovered a special moment I treasure whenever it happens.

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TAZ and The Words I Needed to Hear

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“See, there’s magic in a bard song. They call it inspiration and it tells the listener what they need to hear right when they need to hear it.”

Those were the words I needed to hear right when I needed to hear them. I was sitting on my couch the night following my grandfather’s funeral, a year and twenty-seven days ago. I’d just gotten back from Chicago, unloaded the car, and then sat down on the couch to finish the podcast I’d started on my first of many drives down to Chicago in 2019 to visit my grandpa and help out my mom. I was alone–my roommates could tell I didn’t want to talk–and I put on the last two episodes of the Balance arc of The Adventure Zone.

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The Anthropocene Reviewed: Reviewed

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I’m a relatively recent fan of the Vlogbrothers. I’ve been working my way through all of their videos during my workouts because they’re a lot easier to muddle through if I’ve got something else to focus on, and I have to say that I’ve become a huge fan of John Green’s voice. In a lot of his recordings, he sounds so calm and soothing that I find myself feeling more relaxed, no matter what I’m doing while listening to him. I love Hank Green’s videos as much as I love John Green’s, but I don’t enjoy his voice the same way I do John’s. If I want to feel excited about something or to get psyched up about something I’m passionate about, then I’d listen to Hank Green.

As a result, I was very intrigued when John announced that he was starting a solo podcast in which he would review “different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale.” He has called it “The Anthropocene Reviewed” and his first episode was a review of Canadian Geese and Diet Dr Pepper. I’m not going to spoil the review by telling you how many stars he gave each of those things, but I am going to insist that the parts leading up to the numerical rating are the absolute best.

As a huge fan of John Green’s Vlogbrothers videos that were themed as “Thoughts from ________,” I enjoyed these podcasts because they sound just like an extended version of one of the videos. In the first episode, he talks about the history of Canadian Geese, shares some interesting facts, discusses how they’ve participated in the Anthropocene era of the world, and how we Humans have affected them. I learned a lot and I got to do it all while listening to the soothing tones of a wonderful writer. As if that wasn’t enough, he then went on to discuss the soda flavor known as Dr Pepper, which is incredibly interesting to think about. It is a flavor made up of other flavors and there is no naturally occurring equivalent that we can compare it to, so Dr Pepper would not exist without Humans.

The second episode, he discusses Halley’s Comet and Cholera, which are both interesting topics. Halley’s comet appears once every Human lifetime. Some people get to see it twice, if they’re lucky, but never more than that (at least by current life expectancies. Who knows what’ll happen in the next hundred years in terms of Human lifespans…). As a result, its participation in the Anthropocene era is more as a spectator, witnessing the drastic change of the world and Humanity at larger. Cholera, on the other hand, is what happens when people gather large numbers and don’t have access to clean water. Cholera is a side-effect of human expansion and continuously pops up because the people with the resources to end it don’t care about it. John does a much better job addressing the issues that have resulted in an ongoing Cholera epidemic, but I feel like my summary is accurate if a little angrier than John’s analysis. Sorry, but preventable stuff like that pisses me off.

While I haven’t found any kind of regular updating schedule for the podcast yet, I think that it will start to gather steam as more and more people start listening. John and Hank are incredibly busy people who somehow find the time to keep doing incredible new things, so I really can’t fault John for not having a specific schedule right now. He has a lot going on these days, by anyone’s standards. I say I’m a fan of the Green Brothers, but I haven’t even started to plumb the depths of their content outside of their YouTube videos. There’s just so much and I’ve already got so much going on!

Anyway, I suggest checking out John Green’s new podcast. There’s plenty to laugh about, plenty to think about, and you get to listen to Mellifluous tones of the elder Green brother’s voice for almost twenty minutes at a stretch. That’s a win all around.