Hiya, welcome to this thread all about podcasts! Here you can discuss podcasts that you are listening to in your day-to-day lives, as you commute to work, while your working, or generally when you chill out and relax. Recommendations, new favorites, listening habits, wax poetic about olden podcast now long gone, feel free to sing your hearts out! Let me get the ball rolling by talking a bit about some of the various podcasts I listen to.
For general gaming news, I tend to listen to The Podquisition (Jim Sterling, Laura Kate Dale and Gavin “MiracleOfSound” Dunne, featuring general faffing about and some gaming talk), The Let’s Play Video Games Podcast (Laura Kate Dale, Vicki Blake and Joe Parlock, all formerly of Destructoid UK, not actually about Let’s Plays), and Waypoint Radio (Austin Walker, Patrick Klepek and Danielle Riendeau, talks a lot about current gaming culture and the politics around it).
Speaking of Jim Sterling, I’m also fond of two of his other podcasts featuring collaborator Conrad Zimmerman. Fistshark Marketing is a dark comedy improv podcast about advertising and public relations executives Jim and Conrad, who strive to help their rather dysfunctional celebrity clientele to not get into much trouble. Their other podcast The Spin-Off Doctors are Jim and Conrad reviewing classic movies based on video games and game franchises.
For prime goofs I listen to My Brother, My Brother And Me, where the three brothers McElroy (Justin, Travis and Griffin) offers advice to their inquisitive audience (and various Yahoo Answer gems). The advice is rarely sensible, and are more a way for the brothers to goof around and crack wise about various subjects.
Kefin Mahon hosts two podcasts with somewhat similar themes. With his better half Jo Graham they host How2Wrestling, a professional wrestling podcast where Kefin and Jo discuss various wrestling personalities and topics, both current and past. The main hook is that this podcast is meant for people who want to get into pro wrestling, with Jo being a relatively new watcher of the product, in contrast to veteran wrestling fan Kefin. This podcast is pretty good at addressing all the problematic shit and skeezy business that’s happened in pro wrestling over the years. The other podcast is Cinema Swirl, where Kefin’s co-host Sam Chaplin is exposed to all the classic childhood movies that he somehow missed growing up.
For all my history needs, Grant (AKA GeneralIronicus!) and Aleina (did I spell that right?) present History Honeys. Mostly concentrated on American history (often local Chicago history), this podcasts aims to teach about all the wonderful, fascinating and even a bit weird history that has happened over the years.
And then there’s Retsutalk and Chipod Ironicast, who haven’t updated in a while. Boo!
So there you go. Now my question for you is simple: What podcasts do you listen to?
NOTE: Please refrain from using this thread to promote your own podcasts about chinchilla farming or the benefits of eating mostly cheese or whatever. We got a perfectly fine Creative Forum for that kinda jazz, yeah? Just post responsibly and with care.
For history I also like Futility Closet. They tend to cover more esoteric bits of history and include a logic puzzle at the end of each show where the two hosts trade off giving it to each other.
I mean, if you’re going to listen to MBMBAM, you might as well just recommend the rest of the weirdly huge McElroy Podcast empire, such as Cool Games Inc., where two of the brothers talk about fake TOTALLY REAL video games they’ve made up, or The Adventure Zone, where all three brothers and their dad play a game of Dungeons and Dragons.
Too be fair, I’m still only 2/3rds my way through MBMBAM, so I’m keeping those two on the backburner until I’ve finished up that one. The Adventure Zone pilot was pretty good, though.
I’m ride or die for Friends at the Table. It’s an Actual Play podcast where they play mostly Dungeon World, but they had a mini-season where they played Blades in the Dark, and a season between the two halves of their Dungeon World campaign where they played a couple of different systems in one space opera/giant robots setting.
The GM is Austin Walker, who’s also the editor now at VICE Gaming/Waypoint, Keith Carberry from Runbutton is there in like 3 out of 3.5 seasons, Ali Acampora is a player in every campaign so far, and also does the production/editing work. Jack de Quidt is usually a player, and also composes all the music that they use on the show (it is really good!). Janine Hawkins, who sometimes writes about games in various locations, is there this season, too. There’s several other people, but those are the ones I’m psyched about
Anyway, Austin is a great GM and he forces the party to frequently make really tough and emotional decisions. The podcast is very well edited, and everybody has really memorable and endearing characters. They also get a lot of cool fan art that they retweet from https://twitter.com/friends_table
It’s a really fun listen. My recommended starting points are Season 2 (Counter/Weight, the sci-fi campaign) or Season 2.5 (Blades in the Dark/Marielda). That’s not to say that Season 1 is “skippable”, but there is a LOT of it, and they did a really good recap of it at the beginning of the current season, Season 3, which revisits that same setting and group of characters.
The last episode is from December but any current or former pro wrestling fan should check out The Greatest Podcast In The History Of Our Sport. It’s all about the decline and fall of the once-unstoppable WCW, hosted by the inimitable Doc Destructo and Jetta Rae, and it’s just as hilarious as… well, the reality.
If we’re bringing up Actual Play podcasts, I definitely have to bring up One Shot and Campaign. They’re RPG podcasts where the majority of the players are Chicago-area improv comics. One Shot focuses on showing off various smaller, lesser known systems in a single session. Campaign is a spin-off set in the Star Wars universe as a bunch of bumbling idiots avoid the Empire while trying to be good dads to their force-sensitive son. Both can be found here. They have some other podcasts on their network, but I haven’t had a chance to try them yet.
System Mastery is also good if you’re really into tabletop games. Two friends review, and often make fun of, old and out of print tabletop games. I highly recommend the episode on Haven: City of Violence. They also have a spinoff movie review podcast called Movie Mastery that is also pretty solid.
I mostly listen to Visiting the Village from Mode7 games and Daft Souls from CoolGhosts. Both are gaming podcasts, with the former being more structured and the latter being more freeform chat.
I have to mention the podcasts on the duckfeed.tv network! Great set of podcasts hosted by Gary Butterfield and Kole Ross. In November they hosted Duckstream which raised over 10,000$ for TransActive Gender Center in Portland, with the community hosted stream Duckspring coming in mid march.
Watch Out for Fireballs is a retro game bookclub type podcast. They pick a game and go through it blow by blow discussing what works, what doesn’t, and what holds up now. Probably one of the more accessible shows on the network.
Bonfireside Chat is their Dark Souls podcast, covering the entirety of the SoulsBorne series and media that either inspired or was inspired by the series. Similar to WOFF, they cover an area an episode discussing the content, lore, and experiences from the area. They’re in their season break right now waiting for the next DS3 dlc to come out, and their last episode covered Momodora: Reverie under the Moonlight.
Abject Suffering is their “bad game” podcast, every week looking at a game foisted upon them by listeners. Probably the most in-jokey of their podcasts but probably has some of the funniest moments.
Monster in my Podcast is one of the easier ones to get into. The hosts go through the DnD Monsters Manual entry by entry 3 times a week. Nice and bite sized and not a huge time investment for some funny content.
They have a ton more shows on the network covering all sorts of topics so I would highly recommend checking one out!
Glad to see Austin Walker getting mad love up in here. I’ve a friend of the dude (through mutual pals who went to college w/ him) and the stuff he’s doing over on Vice is quality. He’s missed on Giant Beastcast, which I still listen to because it’s pretty funny.
Aside from those two, it’s Off Panel, Welcome to NightVale, NoSleep, Jay & Miles X-splain the X-men, Cool Games inc/MBMBaM, Lore, Thrilling Adventure, The Nerdist, War Rocket Ajax, We’re Alive and Penny Arcade’s Downloadable Content. The joys of an office gig means hella podcast listening opportunities.
The Duckfeed.tv and VideoGamesHotDog pods come highly recommended. The former is a network of roughly a million podcasts, mostly about video games. Highlights include a huge deep dive into the Souls series and a podcast going through the dnd monstrous manual.
The latter is run by the developers of Kingdom of Loathing and the developer of Frog Fractions. They have a very unique perspective on the industry, and are also totally hilarious.
I absolutely love Sailor Business and its new sister podcast, Xena Warrior Business.
Also, if you’re like me and into actual play RPG podcasts, a new favorite of mine is Pokemon World Tour United. It is absolutely disgusting how cute this podcast is of these dorks playing the Pokemon tabletop game.
Mike Duncan’s Revolutions and his older and finished podcast The History of Rome. Duncan’s stuff is great all around, THoR is kinda hard to get into since early episodes are your usual Early Podcast Jank and it has few points for jumping in later. Revolutions fares way better, you can jump in on any of them, though Haiti does work better if you know some of the important turning points of the French Rev.
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History is pretty decent if you can get past the ridiculous chapter art, his radio host mannerism, love for analogies and irregularly releasing multi-hour long episodes. Most of the backlog is only available for purchase, but Episode 48 Prophets of Doom covers the Münster Rebellion and it’s a pretty good ep once Dan stops apologizing for not having enough primary sources. The most recent episode, The Destroyer of Worlds, came out in January so we’re probably not getting a new one until July at the earliest. Perfect time to catch up!
Talking Simpsons - Some Laser Time folks (notably Bob Mackey) revisit and discuss an episode of The Simpsons, in chronological order. They capture memorable quotes, behind-the-scenes production, cultural influences and other trivia, while embracing the obsessiveness & humor of Groening fanaticism. If you enjoy their personalities, check out VGMpire, on the same network, if you enjoy listening to video game music with discussion between tracks (Robin&Bob really need to bring game music into All Songs Considered)
Court Appointed - A lawyer and a lawman talk about legal stuff, usually over a few beers. Just like Sawbones, it’s Informative and comedic & tangentially related to the McElroy brothers.
I’ll second History Honeys, I’ve been enjoying that quite a bit while I’m cooking or something. Still hoping they’ll eventually do an episode on Chicago Blues, that’d be nice.
The other thing I’ve fairly regularly listened to is Henry & Heidi, which is basically just Henry Rollins being Henry Rollins, i.e. it’s Henry Rollins telling anecdotes about music or whatever. Sounds kinda stupid if I phrase it that way
I did not know this existed, and I know at least five people who will be all over that
I’m still looking for decent podcasts on popular music history if anyone has any suggestions
I’d recommend the whole of the Laser Time network of shows as well. The only one I don’t really listen to is Cheep Popcast, but that’s only because I don’t give even the smallest modicum of a shit about wrestling. My personal favorite at the moment is ThirtyTwentyTen, which is sort of a pop culture history podcast, wherein the crew looks at major events during that week 30, 20, and 10 years in the past. They cover everything from movies and music to political events, but it’s mostly focused on entertainment.
It’s a hilarious, sometimes , sometimes podcast about the internet. Every episode they take a deep dive into another weird corner of the internet and bring back the funny bits for you to enjoy and laugh about. Sometimes it’s a woman waxing on the multidimensional powers of dolphins and bigfoot, or a sing-along episode on a site where people poorly attempt to write lyrics, or people who think they’re married to Loki (yes, the Norse god), or a fucking watch fetish? Their subjects are as varied as they are occasionally horrifying. (I’d hold off on the plushie lovers, bug fetish, and adult baby episodes until you’re sure you’re ready)
Every episode is pretty self contained, so I’d recommend getting started by looking at the most recent episode and going back until you find something piques your interest. Each episode’s description should give you a pretty good idea of what you’re in for. Also keep in mind that their few stinkers are helpfully tagged with “in hindsight this episode isn’t very good”, so feel free to skip those.
If you’re still stumped just listen to all the Wikihow episodes because they are all extremely excellent and a great way to ease into what the podcast is all about.
I’d also recommend their spin-off podcasts:
Adjudicated Guess, which is a show where listeners send in fun fact quiz questions (what happens when you send a text message to a landline? Why is it called a ten gallon hat?) and try to stump the hosts. Extra Credit, which is basically The F-Plus but run by some fans of the podcast.
For real though, if you like the concept here I’d recommend a couple of pods from regular guests of thefplus.
The first is Lou Reads the Internet for You, which is similar except that it’s just one guy reading instead of a group. and for this one, but times 1000, the stuff he tends to be much, much grosser than the fplus. Both in terms of disgusting content and abhorrent people with terrible opinions.
The second is I Don’t Even Own a Television, hosted by J. W. Friedman (Satellite High) and Chris Collision. In this, they read a shitty book and then marvel for roughly an hour at the strange and terrible things they’ve forced themselves to consume. Much less of a for this one, although Jay is really good about putting those warnings in when the content of the book demands it.
I found him because he guested on The F Plus a few times. His style is much more dry and I find a few of his opinions a bit more disagreeable (especially re: trans people) but he will probably appeal to most people who like to hear bad bad things read into their ears. Definitely also and .
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