JCC Where's the Subscribe Button? A Podcast Discussion Thread!

I also first heard Aisha thanks to Archer, and I like her in things I've seen since, so I'll give this a listen, perhaps only the ones where the guest interest me.

In other podcast stuff, Im seeing The Dollop live in April, so looking forward to that.

 

Marc Maron interviewed Bill Paxton last week, and I enjoyed that. Otherwise, I'm only listening to Fareed Zakaria GPS and IGN's GameScoop on a weekly basis. I like the 20 questions segment they have on GameScoop.

 

I only check out Fresh Air sporadically and totally missed this one. Thanks for linking to i! Listening now.

 

Recently got turned on to two podcasts w/an interesting hook; Star Wars Minute and Indiana Jones Minute (not officially connected, though the hosts have gusted on each others shows), each looking at the films of those franchises one minute at a time. That is to say, each episode covers one minute from the film. The episodes tend to be short, snack-sized audio bites of about 10-20 minutes each depending on how deep they dig into that minute's minutia. A nice little sorbet in between the longer podcasts I listen to @ work, and on subjects close to my heart.

 

I heard about Star Wars Minute on Doug Loves Movies and I thought it was a really inspired idea. Never actually went and listened to it for some reason. I'll have to check it out.

EDIT: Oh! Hardcore History has a new one out: The Destroyer of Worlds. It's a "Blitz" version of the show; you know, the "blitz" editions are the shorter ones that are only . . . SIX HOURS LONG!?!?! I think the "blitz" editions are just no longer worthy of the name, you know? But it's about the atomic/nuclear bomb programs and it feels really of the moment; Carlin never says what's got him thinking about nukes, but I think we all know.

 

Star Wars Minute is okay. Hit or miss IMO depending on the guest many times. I have listened to all their episodes (I subscribed when they were on ROTJ). Some are better than others; forget which ones now but in ROTJ they discussed fun stuff about story ideas that got discarded.

But as a prequels fan, listening to them (even more so their guests) express disappointment about them & talk about all the things GL should've done instead that would've made them great was really irritating. TPM wasn't too bad IMO, but I haven't listened in a few weeks to the AOTC ones cause it was getting to me.

As for others, I've been hooked on Last Podcast on the Left since y'all mentioned it a while back. Listened to the whole catalog months ago, but now going back & re-listening to episodes too. I liked My Favorite Murder for a while, but they got on my nerves talking a lot at the start when I wanted them to get to the true crime stuff that I haven't listened lately.

 

RT podcast for me.

 

Does anyone else listen to Up and Vanished?

If so...wow.

 

GOLF SMARTER
Studio: Fred Greene
Category: Amateur

What It Is
Another one of those podcasts that will reignite the debate about the worthiness of this project.

Technical Details
It’s a weekly show, mostly audio, but it does drop occasional videos. It puts out a lot of premium episodes and sometimes even breaks up an interview with a guest into a regular episode and a premium one. The iTunes archive has twenty-six episodes and they aren’t all the most recent. Episodes 521 – 558 are missing, for instance; the iTunes page jumps from 520 to 559 without explanation. For the entire archive hit up the website. It’s behind a paywall, so accessing the entire archive also gives you access to the premium episodes.

What About It
Well, look, the first time I went golfing, I literally crashed my golf cart into another player’s golf cart. In fairness, why would you go over a hill and then just stop? And it was a muddy day; I hit the brake in time, but it fishtailed on me. I will never in my life forget the way the guy’s head snapped forward as I rammed the back of his cart or the way my rider screamed, “GET OUT I’M DRIVING.” But at least I wasn’t the idiot doing donuts on the fairway. You can’t take some people anywhere. Though the manager was maybe a bit out of line to start screaming profanities at him like that. And I was actually raising my golf club to signal to another member of my party there that once; I was not, as the manager of the course accused me in yet another profanity laced tirade, about to start angrily beating the golf cart with it. That guy needed to chill, I’m serious. None of this is made up, by the way.

Anyway, I have zero skills at golfing and I haven’t been in a couple of years now. That said, this one raises some red flags. Is there really enough golfing tips to justify nearly six hundred hours of content? How many different things do people need to learn? Let’s say you actually REMEMBER all six hundred hours’ worth of golfing tips; I question the efficacy of trying to implement all the tips when you’re on the course. It isn’t awful; the host and guests are kind of bland, but they seem to know what they’re talking about.

1 star.

Essential If
You’re the manager of a golf course trying to find some way to unwind.

Avoid Like the Plague If
You’ve ever done donuts on a fairway.

Best Entry Point
I don’t know.

 

Has anyone listened to Missing Richard Simmons?

Is it good? Is it as Mystery Show-ish as it sounds?

 

I posted about this in the feminism thread, but it's worth a mention here. Jamie Kilstein & Allison Kilkenny have been co-hosting Citizen Radio for more than ten years now and it's been a great progressive political show. The chemistry between Jamie & Allison (who married & then divorced during the run of the show) elevated the show to real brilliance; it was always passionate, often hilariously funny and always thought-provoking.

Well, on Friday the show posted Kilstein's last episode. He's been booted amid allegations (very convincing ones) that he, great feminist ally and progressive comedy icon, has been using his status in order to sexually manipulate & abuse women over a period of at least the last three or four years. I'm super-bummed and I really feel angry too. Like I said, the chemistry between Jamie & Allison has always been one of the show's biggest draws, but I'm sticking with the show because Allison doesn't deserve to lose listeners because Jamie was a dick and I'll be interested to see what happens with her rotating batch of co-hosts.

I learned something about the nature of podcasts when Harris Wittels died. The kind of free-wheeling nature of a lot of podcasts creates a strange intimacy where you feel like you really know the people and not just the performances you see from them when they appear on television or in movies or whatever. There's a level of personal connection that makes you feel closer to people you hear on podcasts than to people you see in movies; it's just the nature of the medium. It made Harris Wittels' death particularly devastating to me and now it's made this particularly horrible. I mean, you spend hours a week with a guy, you think you know him; he doesn't know me at all, but it feels almost like a personal betrayal. It's a real positive of podcasts, the intimacy between artist and audience, but sometimes it backfires.

 

Same thing happened with the one podcast I listened to, The Canon. I miss my Devin vs. Amy scraps. Amy's supposedly bringing it back this spring and it'll be nice to hear her angelic voice once again.

 

I've heard mixed things about The Canon; never got around to checking it out myself.




Good Job, Brain!
Studio: GoodJobBrain.com
Category: Hobbies

What It Is
Friends get together to play trivia games and explore obscure facts.

Technical Details
Episodes typically run under an hour. Up until August of last year, the show consistently put out a new episode every week. Since then, they’ve been very sporadic and have only released five new episodes. The entire archive of 194 episodes (they swear they’re going to get to 200) is available on the iTunes page.

What About It
So, I like trivia games and puzzle games and I like this show a lot. It’s fun to play along and see if I can beat the players on the podcast to the right answer. There is nothing as satisfying as saying the correct answer immediately and then listening to the podcasts hosts struggle to come up with the answer and it’s also super-fun when some challenging game is over my head. The people on the show are a lot of fun, particularly live-wire Karen. The energy is high and the chemistry is good. This isn’t the kind of show that’s going to change your life or elevate podcasting to a new level of brilliance, but it’s always an entertaining and fun listen.

3 stars.

Essential If
You’re into weird trivia.

Avoid Like the Plague If
You washed out of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on the second question.

Best Entry Point
I don’t particularly have a favorite out of the ones I’ve heard. Pick one that involves a topic you’re interested in.

More Podcast Reviews!

 

GeekNights with Rym + Scott
Studio: Rym & Scott – The Front Row Crew
Category: Video Games

What It Is
A couple of guys discuss a variety of topics that they place under the “geek” heading.

Technical Details
Episodes typically run an hour or a bit less. Used to be a twice-weekly show; currently they move things around with abandon, but typically get out five shows a month. The iTunes page has episodes going back to 2015. To check out older ones, try the website.

What About It
I like the breadth of topics this show goes after. They talk about video games in general, but there’s a ton of other things, even some pretty niche stuff, like spending a lot of time on specific animes or on the culture surrounding table-top games. Sometimes, it’s an episode will focus on “technology,” ie. software, hardware, services, etc. And then they also have guests on for interviews. The show casts a very wide net which is admirable, but this also means that certain episodes just won’t speak to you as a listener at all. The anime discussion is meaningless to me, for instance, while I found their tech focused episodes quite a bit more interesting. This isn’t a great show; the only thing that really elevates it is the sheer breadth of subject matter – other than that, it’s a fairly typical “geek/nerd/tech/gaming” podcast. The hosts are affable enough without being particularly charming or engaging. It’s pretty much just an average podcast.

2 stars.

Essential If
You’ve always thought the + sign was underrepresented in podcasts.

Avoid Like the Plague If
You want a narrow focus.

Best Entry Point
Episodes can be quite different from one another. Check out the summaries and pick one.

 

On today's episode of WTFpod, Marc Maron interviews Paul Shaffer. And the last episode was an interesting conversation with Reza Aslan, who has recently launched his new documentary show Believer on CNN, where he chats with cult leaders and followers of obscure religions.

 

Anyone listening to S-Town? I'm three episodes in and thoroughly enjoying it so far.

If you've not heard of it, it's a a seven part series from the makers of TAL and Serial. All the episodes were released yesterday, so you can listen as you please.

From the website the description is:

S-Town is a new podcast from Serial and This American Life, hosted by Brian Reed, about a man named John who despises his Alabama town and decides to do something about it. He asks Brian to investigate the son of a wealthy family who’s allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. But then someone else ends up dead, and the search for the truth leads to a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and an unearthing of the mysteries of one man’s life.
Brian, a longtime This American Life producer, started reporting this story more than three years ago, when he got an email from John with the subject line “John B McLemore lives in ****town Alabama.”
S-Town is part of Serial Productions, a production company from Serial and This American Life.

 

Huge text is huge. I'm three episodes into S-town and I'm not loving it as much as I was hoping to.

Spoiler

I wasn't expecting the twist at the end of episode 2, and I'm not sure I'm finding John's life and funeral arrangements quite as compelling as the rest of the podsphere seems to find it. It just feels like, okay the murder mystery wasn't any story, John was an interesting character, but now he's dead, so why are we still listening to this? What's the point of this story?

Also Brian Reed is lacking for me. So much of my enjoyment of a podcast relies on the host's charisma and affect, and Reed for me alternates between being dimensionless and insincere. He can't carry the show the way Koenig carried Serial.

Believer sounds like an interesting show! I'll definitely download the Reza Aslan episode of Maron. I've been backlistening to a bunch of the cult episodes of Oh No Ross and Carrie after going through their whole Scientology series.

 

******' A. I've heard every episode of that show, which is unfortunately a rarity with me. It helps that they only do an episode a month (typically); even those weekly podcasts are hard to keep up with. Their episodes on the OTO, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Aleister Crowley, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" froup are fantastic.

 

The OTO and Mormons were the first two series I listened to after I finished with Scientology. The OTO is so fascinating and just... silly. I guess objectively it's not any sillier than most religions, but the fact that it's such a recent religion highlights how nonsensical and absurd it all is. The irony of the podcast is that although their tagline is "we show up so you don't have to," some of these make me want to go myself. I really want to experience the OTO mass now, just because it seems so bizarre.

 

I have seriously considered doing a similar project to their show with every religion I can find in my general area. Like not podcasting it, but just going to places and even like reading some scriptures and stuff. They do really make that kind of exploration feel fascinating which, much as they do make fun of a lot of things, I think is actually really cool. There is a group of people who like worship the Norse Gods or something around here (in Oklahoma!) and I've seriously considered going.

And there was a Satanic mass in Oklahoma City a couple years back in conjunction with the attempt to get a statue of Baphomet put on the grounds of the State Capital Building. (Seriously, guys, Oklahoma is much weirder than you think and in all kinds of ways no one would expect; I mean, you expect like rednecks and weird racists and such, but who would come to Oklahoma expecting Satanists to have organized around the erection of a statue of Baphomet or see a blood ritual to honor Odin?). I didn't hear about it until it was over or I totes would have gone. People came from other states to go to it! I think the Baphomet statue is also pretty dead right now. If they get it put up, I'll go see it. I'll sit on its lap and take a picture. Seriously, it was going to be fixed so you could sit on its lap.

 

I didn't feel like changing the text size, so sue me!

Spoiler

After John's depression was mentioned so much during the first episode and Reed said someone was going to die, I assumed the suicide, although now that early in the series.

Even though he's dead, he's what the show is becoming about. The first two episodes were probably needed to set the scene. Arguably, it could have been done in one episode, but if it had been a short intro and then he died that probably wouldn't have worked as well. The point of the story appears to be John.

I'd say Reed is somewhere between Koenig in Serial season one and two. In one she was excellent, forced by circumstance into a format she wasn't comfortable with, and we got to hear genuine emotions at each twist and uncertainty. Season two was dull as dishwater, as she didn't help that at all.

 

Grammar Girl Quick & Dirty Tips for Better Writing
Studio: QuickAndDirtyTips.com
Category: Language Courses

What It Is
Writer-blogger gives tips on writing.

Technical Details
Episodes run ten to twenty typically and come out weekly. The iTunes page has the most recent twenty-five episodes. For episodes older than that, check out the website.

What About It
It’s another show from the Quick & Dirty Tips crew. I previously reviewed the fitness show, the Get Fit Guy’s Quick & Dirty Tips to Slimming . . . or Working Out . . . or something. Anyway. The Quick & Dirty Tips model is a good one; on this show, you get a weekly episode of host Mignon Fogerty filling you in one something about grammar. You’ll get helpful ways to remember rules of grammar, strange details about words/rules, etc. This one’s closer to my bailiwick than the Get Fit Guy’s show, but it has some of the same problems. Sometimes, there’s not a lot to the episodes once you subtract ads and introductions and such. If you listen to a few episodes at once (which is what I usually do with the shorter shows I listen to), you end up feeling like you’ve heard more ads/contact info than you have content. There’s little in the way of personality here; there just isn’t the time. But it’s helpful for sure.

2 ½ stars.

Essential If
You’ve always hoped they’re would be a fun way to learn grammar!

Avoid Like the Plague If
“Mignon Fogerty” is already a character in your Star Wars fanfic.

Best Entry Point
Check out the newest one.

 

Holy S.

This is, without a doubt, the most surreal podcast experience of my life. The first episode, John mentions places I've been. Places I know. In the first 10 minutes of the show he mentions the high school, West Blocton, where my dad graduated. And then I realized that this dude's hedge maze is less than 8 miles from the farmhouse where my dad grew up. My grandparents are buried near his house.

I am, almost literally, one generation away from being the subject matter of this podcast.

My father is, very literally, the guy John wishes he had been, the one who escaped Bibb County in his teens and Alabama entirely in his 20s.

I spent my childhood summers in Bibb County. And John's my generation. He's a stand in for a bunch of my first cousins. S-Town is the alternate universe where I have bipolar disorder and live within 10 miles of where my great grandparents were born.

 

Rogue1-and-a-half Grammar Girl was one of the first podcasts I ever listened to! Way back in the day when people were like "what is a podcast" and this format of bite-sized, discrete episodes was basically all there was in podcasting, and no one was ad supported. I haven't kept up with it, but I do often default to her blog when I'm having trouble distinguishing subject and object again or have some other obscure grammar question she's addressed.

 

This is the S-Town podcast setting. I spent 2 months of every summer through childhood in that triangle between Montevallo, Centreville and Woodstock (where John's house is).