I agree.
On top of I Don’t Even Own a Television and History Honeys, which have already been mentioned, I’m a fan of Blurry Photos. Hosts David Flora and David Stecco talk about various paranormal phenomena, weird history, pseudoscience, and general weirdness from a perspective of being skeptical but nonetheless (usually) enjoying the material being discussed.
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Nothing will ever replace Jeff Green, Shawn Elliot, Ryan Scott, & Sean Malloy on GFW Radio. I tried giving giantbomb a try, but it never filled that void left from 1up. At least giantbomb let me discover the amazing Austin Walker.
You must listen to Hello from the Magic Tavern. It’s a very serious weekly podcast by Arnie Niekamp about the magical land of Foon. His co-hosts are Usidore the Blue wizard and Chunt the shapeshifter.
Learn about:
- The Six Things in Foon You Should Not Piss Off
- How Shapeshifters Change Shape
- The Optimal Number of Buttholes
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My go tos for light entertainment are We Hate Movies and The Flophouse, the latter of which can get a little tangent heavy. Storycorps does phenomenal oral history work. You Must Remember This I highly recommend to anyone interested in film history.
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For people into all sorts of strategy games I’d recommend taking a look into Three Moves Ahead, the podcast covers tabletop gaming, wargames, turn and real-time based strategy and sometimes even thoughtful FPS like Red Orchestra 2/Rising Storm.
The Idlethumbs network also has another couple of interesting podcasts: Tone Control and Designer Notes. In which game designers are interviewed about how and why they make games, comment on the choices made along the way and the challenges involved in creating games.
I didn’t know Janine was in the new season! I love when her and Austin get together, they have real good chemistry. I’ll have to check it out
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Seconding the rec for System and Movie Mastery. I think Movie Mastery might be my favorite movie podcast on the internet, since they go through the film scene-by-scene and pick apart stuff as it happens, whereas a bunch of others only talk about the bad parts of it out of order. They also have one of my favorite podcast characters, Wowzers, the Dog Who Denies The Holocaust. Check out their reviews for FoodFight and Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, they’re really good at talking about why they’re both bullshit movies in general, rather than just 'oh this part sucked, right!'
I also like Last Podcast On The Left, which is probably the best true crime podcast out there since they don’t just limit themselves to official reports and readily talk about conspiracy theories, aftereffects, and various suspects (all with a grain of salt, of course). Their episodes on 9/11 and Columbine are horrifying and and amazing, and really comprehensive. They can get a bit bro-comedy at times, though for the most part it’s not their main focus and they’re quick to resolve tangents.
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Seconding LPOTL, their politics podcast Abe Lincoln’s Tophat is pretty good too.
The Dollop is a bi-weekly podcast about american history, which is kinda weird.
Recommendations:
Hugh Glass from the Revanant movie fame. His real story is actually a bit different.
http://thedollop.libsyn.com/dollop-x-hugh-glass
Competitive tickling. Or is it? Stay for the twist ending.
http://thedollop.libsyn.com/dollop-viii-competitive-extreme-tickling
Dolphin “researcher” John C Lilly. He really loved them
http://thedollop.libsyn.com/the-dollop-xiii-dolphin
Famous baseball player the Rube. Famous for chasing cars during games.
http://thedollop.libsyn.com/the-rube
Lobotomies are actually funny. Also there was a Lobotomobile
http://thedollop.libsyn.com/lobotomy
If these don’t get you hooked, you’re a lost cause. The quality of the podcast is very consistent.
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I’ve been listening to a lot of Thinking Sideways at work recently. They examine weird and unsolved mysteries, but unlike most unsolved mysteries people, they try to remain sane, reasonable and not distracted by bullshit science and magic thinking.
They do not always succeed at this, and sometimes they have weird knowledge gaps, but it’s a fun time!
One podcast series I’m surprised hasn’t come up yet is Six Feats Under, the RPG conglomerate that’s home to General Ironicus, Medibot, Ikks and quite a few others. Their main campaign, The Rogue Elements, was a 13th Age game that has just recently come to an end, but it’s well worth going through and listening. Also notable for their bonus feats, where they do short sessions (typically just one-shots, though they have re-visited a few) of RPG systems they really like and want to shine some light on. Quite often they have guest stars on those and they’re all a total blast. My personal favourites are their Lasers and Feelings sessions, which are equal measures of hilarious and warm and fuzzy. Well worth checking out if you haven’t already.
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I listen to dozens of podcasts a week and have for many years, so this is a topic near and dear to me. I’ve been trying to get the word out about Our Debut Album, a monthly podcast where the hosts of Stop Podcasting Yourself (also a great show) give themselves one hour to write a hit song (that is, not a joke or a parody, a semi-serious original). After they write the song, they walk you through the entire recording process with audio clips from the studio. I’ve been a music obsessive for decades and I find the insight into how music is actually made fascinating and invaluable, and it helps that the hosts are hilarious comedians and the songs they write have all been great so far.
I also gotta recommend The Dollop from a few posts above, Doughboys (comedians review chain restaurants), and Canceled (episode-by-episode reviews of TV shows that only lasted one season).
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Don’t forget the The Attitude Era Podcast, which includes Kefin and two others; Adam Bibilo, who was on the Kane episode of How2, and the Baddest Man on the Planet Billy Keable. It’s a rundown of all the PPVs from the Attitude Era of WWE along with some more special bobo episodos, like one talking about Steve Austin’s reality gameshow thing The Broken Skull Challenge. They finished the actual Attitude Era stuff a while ago, so I can understand why it was potentially missed, but right now they’re about halfway through some more semi-modern PPVs about The Rock’s return to WWE from Wrestlemania 27 onwards. Last episode dropped a little over a week ago, for Wrestlemania 28 so there’s still a few to go before they probably talk about something more enjoyable to them. There’s usually an episode a month or so, but for sensible reasons it doesn’t quite always shake out.
It also kind of works as a way to learn about the AE without having to be a wrestling fan, since Billy was kind of mostly going into blind in the first place and they each have different perspectives and outlooks on things. This usually makes itself apparent pretty quickly while reviewing aspects of the shows or when running down their own personal Match Of The Night and MVP.
I’m a fan of the Audio Entropy family of podcasts, particularly their main podcast, Teenagers With Attitude, which is an episode-by-episode rewatch of Power Rangers, including such subjects as the trials and tribulations of Bulk and Skull, Zordon’s complete asspulls, Tommy’s LP of Chrono Trigger, and Goldar’s Cave of Fantasy. They have several other rewatch podcasts, from Totally Spies to Digimon and The DC Animated Universe, as well as several other general interest podcasts, and even a podcast about trans experiences. The people within the network are all really cool folks and really funny, so give 'em a try!
At the very least listen to TWA for the theme song.
Flattering to see all my shows mentioned here, thank you all!
And also gratifying to see so many of my favorites like Friends at the Table, Campaign, Blurry Photos and a bunch of others. Here are some shows I love that haven’t come up yet!
Alcohollywood - your source for cinebriation! It’s a film review podcast where Clint and Jared make a custom cocktail and drinking game for a film every week. The films and discussions are both all over the map so you get the perfect mix of cinematography critique and dick jokes for both The Third Man and Big Fat Liar. They also produced a full-cast audio drama of the unproduced (and god-awful) script for Indiana Jones and the Monkey King, finally being released scene by scene
Sunday School Dropouts - Lauren and Nico are current non-believers from very different faith backgrounds who wanted to know what really was in the bible. Every Sunday they talk about a book of the bible, in order, like it was any other book. They’re currently between testaments which means they’re finally done with the repetition of the Minor Prophets and about to meet this Jesus guy everyone’s talking about. My favorite recent episode is the one on Jubilees because apocrypha is fun.
Our Fair City - Our Fair City is a fully-produced audio drama set after an ecological collapse leaves a life insurance company in complete control of society. It’s currently wrapping up its 7th season of a planned 8, so a big backlog to work from. What I love most about OFC is the wide emotional and tonal range because that’s what life is like, even if you’re a mole person or a pulp scientist. It also allows them to use their setting to tell nearly any genre of story. HartLife: It’s all the life you’ll ever need
But you really can’t go wrong by clicking around the Chicago Podcast Co-op; they do great work.
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Stuff You Missed in History Class is a thing that I’ve been listening to a good amount lately. Each episode is about 45-ish minutes long, and details some of the more fun, unusual or Pretty Awful things about history from around the world. Want to know about weird and wacky lawsuits between Butter and Margarine companies? There’s an episode for that. Victorian streets filled with horse poop just as a matter of course and how you’d deal with that? Yeah, there’s an episode for that too. It’s not all wacky fun times though, because you do get episodes on unsolved mysteries like the infamous ship the Mary Celeste and sometimes there are episodes focusing on one person. Sometimes they’re cool and sometimes they’re George Wallace.
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This is my favourite podcast episode ever. The rest of 99% is also great. The epsiodes are quite short, around 15 minutes mostly.
This one is also great:
Who knew structural integrity could be so exciting?
Wow with the exception of AEPodcast this literally all the podcasts I listen to.
Hard second on How2Wrestling it’s my favourite for sure.