13 Days of Halloween

Aaron’s Mahnke’s Grim & Mild is either a true cottage industry or one of the biggest names in independent podcasting, depending on who you ask – maybe they’re both! I listen to a bunch of their shows, and have tried a few others; they’re not all for me, but some of them one.

One of their projects since 2020 has been 13 Days of Halloween, which starts each year on October 19 and releases an episode a day through Halloween. I started listening in 2021 and went back to listen to the 2020 series after last year’s. This year’s series was the most ambitious – and longest – yet.

The basic framework is that the main character is thrust into an unusual environment, often with a guide of some sort, and they listen to the spookystories of the people they encounter along the way. The first season, “Hawthorne Manor”, in which the listener is guided by a caretaker (played by Keegan-Michael Key) who is searching for something in the manor, is a pure distillation of this form, in which the ongoing narrative is little more than a simple framing sequence.

The second season, “The Sea”, is about a woman who wakes up on the beach of a mysterious town and is guided by another woman through the town in a journey of discovery. (The credits on the web site do a poor job of explaining who plays who, but the two main characters are played by Kathy Najimy and Bethany Anne Lind.)

The third season, “Devil’s Night”, concerns a boy, Max (Carter Rockwood), who gets lost on Halloween night in his rural town (it’s implied this takes place in the first half of the 20th century) and is aided by a mysterious figure (Clancy Brown) as he tries to get back home through the surreal landscape.

This season, “Penance”, is about Sayuri (Natalie Morales), a young woman who is abducted and locked up in the Pendleton Rehabilitation Center without being told why. She makes friends, adjusts to life in the combination prison/institution, and over the course of many months tries to figure out how to escape.

This season breaks with the strict format of the first three seasons: Some episodes have more than one story from other characters, some have none, and some Sayuri is directly involved in. She has both higher stakes personally, and more agency, than protagonists in the previous seasons. Her personality reminded me a lot of Mallory in Greater Boston, if Mallory were placed in a scenario where she had little control over her day-to-day life. The season does have more implied violence and gore than past seasons, as far as I can recall.

Overall it was a really successful season, though I imagine the ending might be a bit divisive. I’m still not sure how I feel about it, it almost feels like it it wasn’t quite finished, but for a spooky Halloween tale maybe that was the point. It did leave me a little confused about the title of the season, though, as it’s not clear to me who was doing penance for what.

I’m not sure how they’ll top this one next year. Though I hope this is about where the length of the episodes peak; this was a lot to keep up with on a daily basis. (I’m still playing catch-up with my other regular podcasts that release episodes over the past two weeks!)

Anyway, if you are looking for some creepy, haunting tales around this time of year, keep this one in mind in the future.

Some Favorite Current Audio Dramas

A few years ago I wrote about a number of audio drama podcasts I was listening to, as I’d just gotten into the medium as a vehicle for fiction. Today I listen to even more audio dramas than I did then – and I wanted to write about several I’m really enjoying. All of these are currently releasing episodes or will resume doing so soon, so this is a good time to jump in and catch up on any that sound appealing to you.

Badlands Cola

You’ll find that I enjoy a lot of weird mystery stories, and Badlands Cola might be the weirdest mysteriest of all of them (including its name!). Private detective Sunny is hired to go out to the Canadian badlands where cult leader Jasper Moon grew up. Moon was arrested just recently following the deaths of several of his followers. The town is known mainly for its dinosaur fossils, and its large dinosaur replicas around town. Sunny meets local radio host Strathcona (what a name! Apparently named for several places around Canada) who has some connection to Moon and his sister Melinda, as well as the closed paleontology center. Sunny pokes around trying to find out what Moon was up to, but there’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye.

Renee Taylor Klint’s show is built around Liz Morey’s performance as Sunny – who seems increasingly out of her depth as a not-so-hard-boiled but determined detective – and the ubiquitous Briggon Snow as Strathcona – a traumatized yet strong-willed man caught between his past and the present. The show has an atmosphere of bleakness, of Sunny being stuck out there on her own with only this one weird guy who doesn’t even like her to have her back. It’s nearing the end of its first season and looks like it’s building to something big and ominous, and the fact that it’s building to anything at all – as opposed to Sunny just getting the perpetual runaround from the locals – is only revealed a bit at a time.

Boston Harbor Horror

This is flat-out Lovecraftian horror based in and around New England. It focuses mainly on Coast Guard Petty Officer Alex Devereaux, who finds a mysterious artifact and gets caught up in the machinations of a cult. While he finds allies in Professor Matthew Alvarez and Special Agent Kerri Stone, Alex doesn’t quite make it through the first season unscathed – but he does make it through. In season two he investigates a particularly brutal murder, while season three (in progress) has been split between Agent Stone investigating strange events in Antarctica, and a group of sailors trying to rescue a drifting ship in the Atlantic.

Creator Mike Gagne voices Alex – one of three shows here where the creator also voices the lad character. I have very little insight into what goes into making audio dramas, but it’s pretty impressive that all three creators do fine jobs in both roles.

Fans of The White Vault ought to enjoy Boston Harbor Horror, though it’s more overtly horrific than TWV but it has some of that slow-burn feel at times. It steadily improves season-over-season, and I’m looking forward to the rest of this season playing out, although it’s been slowed down a bit because of Gagne’s work situation (internet at his current posting is not great). If cults and ancient artifacts crossed with the realistic (as far as I can tell, anyway!) modern maritime procedures are your jam, then this one is for you.

How I Died

Dr. Jon Spacer is a forensic pathologist with a unique talent: He can see and talk to the dead. This is pretty useful in his job – working for the police department of the town of Springfield – except that his boss, Sheriff Fran Crowley wants him to stick to examining the bodies and not solving cases, and of course no one knows what Jon can do. On top of this, the now-defunct Springfield Corp research lab experienced a weird event back in 1989 whose effects are still being felt – but only Jon perceives them. And on top of that there’s a serial killer.

Creator Vince Dajani voices Jon and does a lot to carry the show, as Jon is often caught between doing the right thing, keeping his secret, and investigating the deeper mysteries of the town. Shaina Waring is an effective counterweight as Crowley, who goes from finding Jon annoying, to suspicious, to… well, any more would be spoilers.

Now in its third season, How I Died reminds me of Babylon 5 in structure, in that each season has a significant change to the status quo (and a new arrangement of the theme music, too!). Overall it works really well as both a mystery and a character drama. I might quibble that sometimes Jon’s actions seem a little too reckless, and sometimes other characters are too conveniently willing to overlook his weird behavior, but it’s easier to just go with the flow of what the show is doing than try to poke holes. It has some things to say about death and being a good person. It can be a very intense show at times, and doesn’t shy away from some gruesome crime scenes, so be aware.

90 Degrees South

Part police procedural, part eccentric character drama, with dashes of weird fantasy mixed in, 90 Degrees South had me looking forward to it every week of its first season. After a scientist is murdered at Amundsen Research Station in Antarctica over the winter, U.S. Deputy Marshal Bass Marlowe is sent to investigate. Under immense political pressure, Marlowe finds allies and friends on the station to balance out the suspicion and wariness he inspires in others. He also finds a smattering of supernatural occurrences which might be relevant – or maybe not.

The show has a surprisingly small cast despite a large number of characters: Marlowe and most of the male roles are played by Trent Shumway, which I had no idea about until I saw the cast list on the show’s web site, because many of them are extremely different from one another. While the few – the two IT geeks and the janitor, for instance – are obviously played as very broad caricatures, others are straight dramatic figures. It’s an impressive set of performances.

90 Degrees South revels in its eccentric characters, even as Marlowe is engaged in a very serious and potentially deadly hunt. But there are also some very touching moments as characters learn or confess things about themselves. And then there are the moments of outright weird, starting with the man who claims to be a demon lawyer.

The first season brings its main story to a close, but also ends on a cliffhanger, and leaves several threads unresolved. I’m hoping that some of the smaller weirdnesses will be explored and/or explained and not just be transitory color. In any event I’m very much looking forward to season two.

Palimpsest

Palimpsest has two characteristics that I’m not usually into: It’s an anthology series – each season is a new story – and it’s a single-narrator fiction series – Hayley Heninger narrates Jamieson Ridenhour’s stories. But in fact it all comes together nicely: Full-season stories get into enough depth to satisfy me, and Heninger gets into each of the main roles convincingly, while adding some color when other characters speak up. The stories are all written as diaries or reminiscences of the main characters, which further sells the approach.

The show’s tag line is “embrace what haunts you”, and “haunt” is the right word: There’s some horror here, but the stories are more creepy and haunting, rich with atmosphere and setting. I think my favorite season is the third, about a woman who worked for the British code breakers during World War II, but all four are excellent. The show is currently running a set of single-episode vignettes between the fourth and fifth seasons.

Spectre

This one reminds me of Becky Chambers’ novel A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet: Both are found-family stories that take place on starships with small but diverse crews. A key difference is that while the main character in the novel joins the ship voluntarily, in Spectre the lead character of Rho (voiced by creator Stef Howerton) has escaped from a facility and ended up on the ship because it was one she was able to get on. Fortunately, the Spectre is a crew of good people – even if they do take jobs as mercenaries, albeit ones trying to work for the right people.

Rho has also lost her memory and has no idea why she was in the facility, though it turns out she had been augmented with fantastic abilities – which might be great if she could just control them (just what you want when you’re on a tin can in space). Not that the crew of the Spectre doesn’t have secrets of its own, starting with its mysterious captain.

Nearing the end of its first season, Spectre has been focusing mainly on Rho, so the large cast of characters feel a bit thin, as does the backdrop. Hopefully these details will be filled out in future seasons.

Unwell

Lily Harper moves to the small town of Mount Absalom, Ohio to help take care of her mother Dot, who runs a historic boarding house, is recovering from an injury, and has the early stages of dementia. Which all sounds like a bummer of a show, except that Unwell actually has some of the liveliest and funniest dialogue of any audio drama, with off-the-wall characters and secrets and mysteries galore. Lily befriends the long-term lodgers in Fenwood House as well as some of the locals, and starts to peel back the curtains hiding what’s been going on in Mount Absalom for centuries.

Unwell feels to me like it takes place in perpetual autumn. It’s not horror per se, but is genuinely creepy at times, and the creepiness is sometimes played for comedic effect and sometimes not. You never really know what direction an element of the show is going to go in. All the characters have their flaws and their own motivations, making them all – even the more sinister ones – pretty complex.

The show just wrapped up its fourth season, and it sounds like the fifth will finish the story. Much like How I Died, it feels like Unwell has changed so much since the first few episodes, but in its case it’s been a gradual evolution, where characters end up in places that make perfect sense, and it’s only on reflection that you realize that a couple of seasons ago they wouldn’t have been in those places at all.

Within the Wires

My favorite audio drama from the Night Vale Presents network, Within the Wires features a different story each season in its alternate universe where things went in a very different direction in the early 20th century, where the First World War didn’t end until the Great Reckoning in the 1930s, resulting in the formation of the New Society, a global government with radically different approaches to families and raising children, and many apparently hallmarks of autocratic states.

But the series is told obliquely, through found footage audio relics dating from the 1950s to the 2000s, with a different narrator for each one. The first season started slowly – to be honest I didn’t warm to it at first, only going back to finish it when I got into the second season – as a series of relaxation tapes, which we eventually learn are being used in a center run by the New Society. The second season are a series of museum audio tapes from the 60s through 80s about an artist named Claudia Atieno. But I think the series really hits its stride in seasons 3 (dictaphone notes from a doctor involved in setting up the New Society in the 1950s), 4 (audiocassettes by a woman involved in resisting the family planning of the New Society in the 1990s), and 5 (a series of voice mails told backwards from 2008 to 1997 by an artist at the fringes of the New Society in England). The sixth season is about a young nurse who arrives to care for an elderly woman in rural Ireland in the 1970s and is a sort of ghost story, which I felt didn’t entirely deliver on the promise of the strange things it chronicled. Season 7 is coming out shortly, and there’s also a novel, You Feel It Just Below The Ribs, which is a quite good chronicle of the Great Reckoning and early days of the New Society by a woman with a unique insight into those events.

The series often feels claustrophobic and dark, its characters trapped by their circumstances even if they’re not physically confined. You’ll find a little bit of multiple genres as you progress through the series, and the nature of the New Society is gradually revealed. But as I said we see most of this only obliquely, as few of these people are involved in shaping or running the New Society, and some of them stand in opposition to it. You can take it as a commentary on how ordinary people try to live their lives within such a framework, or a commentary on our own society – or just take it for what it is, a series of stories about people. However you take it, it’s very good.

Bonus Recommendation: An Episode of Archive 81

Archive 81 was a horror podcast that ran for three seasons from 2o16 to 2019, and whose first season was adapted into a single season of television on Netflix. Each season was radically different from the previous one – and it goes steadily better, as well.

While not a “current” series like the ones above – although apparently they hope to produce another season sometime – I only caught up on it earlier this year, and I was blown away by one episode in the third season. The third season features a pair of half-siblings, Nick (Peter Musante) and Christine (Kristen DiMercurio), trying to complete a mystical ritual left to them by their late father. The season plays around with various tropes of the genre – for example, Nick is initially portrayed as weak and somewhat subservient, while Christine is outspoken and strong, but both have more depth than that.

In episode 28, “Exist in the Place You Are Currently Occupying”, Christine goes on a dream-quest to acquire an ingredient to complete the ritual, and ends up falling in with a crew on a sailing ship who help her pursue her quest. The episode shows Christine living an alternate life as an adventurer, as told in a series of smart, self-aware vignettes as she and the crew make their way across their world and become friends and trusted companions. It’s a tour-de-force piece of drama, and I think would stand well on its own even outside the context of the larger story. (It’s also an adventure story and not a horror one – which the rest of the season very much is, so be warned if you decide to listen beyond this episode.)

Wikis

Fandom.com hosts wikis for many different interests, including many audio dramas. The better ones can be useful for refreshing your memory of previous episodes, clarifying plot points, or connecting pieces that you might not have connected while listening to episodes across many weeks. Here are a few wikis for audio dramas above:

Audio Dramas by A.R. Olivieri

Last week I did a binge-listen of all of A.R. Olivieri’s audio drama podcasts. I recently started listening to the one that started last spring, Great & Terrible (because I’m about 8 months behind on podcasts these days), and something clicked and made me think I should go listen to them all. This isn’t as big a project as it sounds, because individual episodes top out at about 8 minutes, less credits. I started listening on Sunday and finished up on Thursday.

I casually follow what might be called the “audio drama community”, but mostly I’m a listener. From what I can tell, Olivieri projects an aura of obscurity, doing projects that are notably different from many other audio dramas, and also being personally something of a mysterious figure. His web site is pretty sparse, and the only info about him his this interview podcast, which I listened to after finishing (or catching up on) his series. I have no idea if all of this is intentional on his part, but it’s an interesting image. Many other podcasters are pretty transparent about their personas, at least in broad strokes.

His podcasts, too, are kinda quirky, with a distinctive – though evolving – structure which makes them stand out. For example:

  • Each podcast title & episode title is in ALL CAPS.
  • Every episode is almost exactly a round number of minutes, for example 3:00, 4:00, 6:00, 8:00. Sometimes they’re a second longer, but that might be a rounding error in my podcast app. While he sometimes pads an episode with music to get to this point, it seems likely that he plans or edits many episodes to fit into a specific amount of time. Does any other audio drama do this?
  • Only his first series, 2298, has introductory music, which comes in almost exactly 1 minute in. All the others have a cold open.
  • Every series except for Limbo has closing credits which are 30, 60 or 90 seconds in length. Most of the credits have a memorable turn of phrase where he says, “<this podcast> is written, directed and produced by… me! A.R. Olivieri.”, followed by some info about his Patreon.
  • His podcasts have music by a variety of performers (none of whom I’m otherwise familiar with), but they all feel somewhat similar – like they’re in a particular style which I infer Olivieri likes.
  • Structurally several of the stories are grouped into “chapters” of 2-to-4 episodes, although except for 2298 there’s no clear indicator in the audio itself of this; you need to look at the show notes.

It’s quirky, but I think a lot of it is cool, appealing to the structure work in me. It’s just… very different compared to other audio drama podcasts.

It took me a while to realize that many – maybe all – of his shows take place in the same world, and that he’s slowly revealing the nature of that world. There’s connective tissue, but where everything fits together is not entirely clear. I find this deeply neat, and it definitely elevated my interest in his shows to another level. I believe in one of his “thank you” shows he alluded to it being a single world.

Olivieri is clearly very respected in the audio drama community, and he gets several top-notch voice actors from other podcasts to appear in them. Some actors appear more than once, and it’s not always clear whether they’re appearing in different roles, in the same role but we don’t know that they’re the same role, or if there’s something else going on. (“There’s something else going on” is a recurring theme in his shows.) For example, Sarah Rhea Werner, who does the great Girl in Space audio drama and who recorded the interview above, shows up several times. She has a really distinctive voice, which which made me wonder, “Wait, is this character also this other character… or not?”

Olivieri also does voice acting, appearing in a few of his own podcasts as well as others. I first heard him as one of the two main characters in the SF horror drama Janus Descending, which is maybe the best performance I’ve heard by him. In his own dramas he plays an everyman sort of character, observing, commenting on and questioning the world around him, while in Janus he’s a scientist who gets thrown in way over his head and is by turns frustrated, panicked, annoyed, terrified, and angry. It’s quite a range.

At time of writing, Olivieri has 5 audio dramas of his own, 4 complete and one still ongoing. Here are some of my thoughts about them. Also, while I didn’t listen to them in this order, I think this is the best order to listen to them in, as least as of the time of writing:

2298: A dystopian story taking place in the titular year. Number 24 is a “profile” in the remnant of humanity, somewhere on Earth in an enclosed environment after civilization’s collapse led to an invasion and a new society being set up run by a computer system called the Network. 24 – voiced by Olivieri – is a happy young cog in the machine until a bird and some strange dreams lead him down a path outside the one the Network has assigned him. The story contrasts a totalitarian society to a free one through the eyes of someone who’s happy with the system he lives in. The ending hints at where some of the other shows are going, although I imagine that wasn’t very clear when it first aired in 2018.

Magic King Dom: This was the first show I listened to; it grabbed my interest because of its conceit of a girl who grows up in Walt Disney World after the end of the world destroys everyone else. Dom (voiced by Lysette Alvarez of Kalila Stormfire’s Economical Magick Services, whose performance is great) survives for 6 years by herself before she encounters other survivors in the park, who need her to escape. There have been two seasons so far, with the third and final one coming soon. The writing is pretty strong as far as it goes, but there’s an awkward discontinuity between the first two seasons and there are several bits I found hard-to-follow, so I’m glad I re-listened to it. I think the story takes place about a century from now. The second season is where the hint of the tie-in to 2298 appears, but it’s still not clear how it fits together.

Limbo: David (Olivieri) is a thirtysomething (?) man who dies and finds himself in a house her grew up in, alone, except that he receives one visitor each month. Only 6 episodes, but to be continued in the future. It’s the lightest on plot of all the stories, and if you prefer stories which focus on the background, foibles and anxieties of the main character, then this is the one for you. It’s not quite my thing, though, as I am more plot-oriented, and I felt this was basically a collection of settings and moods without a sense of moving forward. I’m also not sure what more there is to do with what’s here if it does continue as the final episode seems, well, pretty final.

Great and Terrible: This one is the story of a woman who was gifted and cursed with immortality (and maybe other powers?), but who has to kill someone every new moon or her life is forfeit. (No spoilers – it’s right there in the podcast description!) This is the slowest of slow burns: While it’s self-narrated from – it seems – centuries in the future, the whole story so far takes place in 1988, when the main character of Jane (Leslie Gideon) is in high school and acquires the curse. It’s weekly 4-minute (less credits) episodes, and after 8 months we’ve just gotten to the curse, but it is nonetheless quite good and at times arresting, and it’s the sort of story that could go on for many years at this pace, so I wonder if that’s what Olivieri plans for it – I hope so. The high school dialogue is perhaps just a bit too precious (TBF I wouldn’t want to write high school dialogue from that era, and Jane is only 3 years younger than I am!), but Gideon’s performance sells just about everything else. This is in my opinion Olivieri’s best series to date.

The Easiest of All the Hard Things: Kelsey (Lucille Valentine, who gave perhaps the most memorable performance in the first season of The Six Disappearances of Ella McCray) is stranded on an island with only a turtle for company when they find a cell phone, and work to charge it to hopefully get off the island. How did they get there? How do they expect to get a cell signal? Who left the phone? I found the last episode of the season pretty baffling, and the story overall felt slight compared to the others, although with more of a plot than Limbo. But overall I wasn’t sure what I should have taken away from it.

I definitely enjoyed the binge-listen, and found myself much better able to engage with the stories than I was when I’d just listened to Magic King Dom and Limbo, which are at the more surreal end of the spectrum. It looks like he has at least a couple more series planned, and I’m definitely curious whether the pieces across the stories will start to knit together more closely as time goes on. I hope so!

Wolf 359: The First Half

I’ve listened to a lot of audio drama podcasts, but none of them has impressed me as much as Wolf 359. Created, co-written and co-produced by Gabriel Urbina, the science fiction adventure-comedy ran for 61 episodes (plus a number of mostly-shorter bonus episodes) between 2014 and 2017 and is – as far as I can tell – one of the most acclaimed audio dramas around. I’m not sure I’ve listened to any other audio dramas as old as this, but it feels as fresh and new and polished as any of the new releases in 2018 and 2019.

I enjoyed the first 25 episodes so much that I stopped there, and went back and started listening again with my wife, who has also been enjoying them. Conveniently, episodes 31 is the halfway point in the show and is also a great point to pause and reflect on the series up to that point, and speculate on where it’s going. And maybe this will encourage a few more people to listen, and perhaps amuse people who have already listened to the whole thing and can chuckle at some of my observations.

I’m going to talk in general terms about the series and its story, and will have a few spoilers from the first season which I think are useful to know since the first season is regarded by some as “something you have to get through to get to the good stuff”. Then I’ll have some more spoilery discussion later a cut.

Wolf 359 takes place aboard the U.S.S. Hephaestus research station, which orbits the red dwarf star of the same name. Said star is 7.9 light-years from Earth, and might be best known on pop culture for being the site of an off-screen space battle in one of the most disappointing stories in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The show’s protagonist is Communications Officer Doug Eiffel (voiced by Zach Valente, who also co-produces), a lazy, ne’er-do-well who nominally is checking for unusual transmissions from deep space, but who spends a lot of his time trying to smoke cigerettes and avoid work. The station’s commander is Renée Minkowski (Emma Sherr-Ziarko), a by-the-book military officer who is constantly locked in battle trying to get Eiffel to do his job. The station’s science and medical officer is Dr. Alexander Hilbert (also Valente), a Russion mad scientist whose bumbling experiments also threaten everyone’s lives on a regular basis. The station is overseen by an artificial intelligence, Hera (Michaela Swee), who is a little sensitive whenever anything goes wrong around the place.

The show opens about a year and a half into the crew’s 2-year mission, and the first ten episodes are a collection of mostly-humorous vignettes about the crew’s mishaps: Eiffel getting cigarettes from Hilbert, Eiffel staging a revolt to hoard the last tube of toothpaste on the station, the terrifying annual physical exam, and so forth. But there is also real danger, as the station gets rocked by solar radiation, the power goes out and Hera goes down, and a mysterious extra room is found bolted onto the side of the station.

I feel like Wolf 359 has a lot in common with Babylon 5. While it’s common (and sometimes frustrating) for audio dramas to have a slow burn, Wolf 359‘s arc is a lot like B5’s: The first season provides background into how things on the station work (or, often, don’t work), raises several interesting questions and suggests several others, and lets the listener get the lay of the land before things get rolling. While the characters are not without depth, they start out as caricatures, with just a few glimpses of what’s beneath the surface. And that’s the point, because it makes what comes later that much more powerful.

And again like B5, the end of the first season shakes up the status quo and raises a whole bunch of new questions. More crucially, it takes the story from a light comedy to a serious drama with a heavy dollop of suspense and significant character development. Eiffel and Hilbert both turn out to be much more capable than you would have guessed, while Minkowski and Hera are both a lot more fallible than they’d appeared. And the story becomes a series of crises and developments, each time bringing us back to a slightly different status quo than we had before.

Most importantly, the show becomes one of understanding motivations and teasing out background. Eiffel is the perfect character for this, because he’s a big loudmouth and not a very deep thinker by nature, but he also has a sharp sarcastic streak which makes him seem profound when he does figure out what’s going on. As the second season progresses, a number of key questions are suggested:

  • What exactly is the Hephaestus’ mission? It’s pretty clearly more than “sit around and see if anything happens”.
  • Why was the station staffed with this collection of buffoons?
  • Why does the station seem so unreliable?
  • What else are their superiors hiding?

There’s one other point, which might turn out to be nothing, or it might not. Let me get into it this way:

It’s been said that restrictions breed creativity, and the audio medium has its own peculiar set of restrictions. First, there are no images, so the story has to be conveyed through audio. Unlike prose, however, there are sounds as well as words. But there’s a lot less space for words than in prose, so economy of words is valuable. (Consequently, I tend to find most audio dramas which substantial narration to be tedious.) Wolf 359 is outstanding at conveying the action without having long bits of exposition, and even when it does have exposition it feels meaningful and dramatic. But the show also has a terrific array of sound effects, with a very distinct style: They’re generally overly dramatic, and very retro: Mechanical keyboards, bells and whistles, a communications system that signals with a loud buzz, and so forth. It’s wacky.

Or, I thought it was wacky, but there’s something missing from the setting: When exactly does this show take place? The station is 7.9 light years from Earth, but they are able to travel between the two in a few months. And there are loads os pop culture references, but they’re all… contemporary. Entirely from the 20th and early 21st century. Lastly, while I couldn’t easily find the quote, there’s a suggestion at some point that some of the music they listen to is from within the past century by the crew’s time.

Does Wolf 359 take place… in the 2010s? Is this a parallel universe to ours? And does that matter?

Maybe it’s just part of the show’s wacky background, but so much of the story seems carefully assembled, with many deliberate set-ups and payoffs, that it feels like this could be something.

I hope it is.

Anyway, if you enjoy audio dramas, science fiction, comedy, character development, suspense, surprises, or people showing they’re capable of more than you thought they were, I highly recommend Wolf 359. If the second half is as good as the first half, then it’s gonna be fantastic.

A few more comments spoiling season 2 and the beginning of season 3 after the cut:

Continue reading “Wolf 359: The First Half”

Yet More Audio Dramas

Today I’m concluding my survey of podcasts I’ve been listening to. Here are the audio dramas which don’t easily fit into any of the categories from the last few entries.

Reminder: I’m a bit over 2 months behind listening to audio dramas which are still ongoing (longer for a few I’m catching up on), so some of my comments might seem dated to people who are all caught up.

  • Within the Wires: A Night Vale Presents offering, I wasn’t thrilled with the first episode of this when I listened to it, as the first season is presented as a series of relaxation tapes for a resident at a clinic. I went back to listen later and it turns out there’s a lot more going on here, starting with it taking place in an alternate history which diverged sometime before World War II. The second season is presented as a series of tape narrations of a renowned painter’s artwork by her friend, from throughout the 70s and 80s. WtW doesn’t have a “story” as such, but is heavy on atmosphere. Although not the sort of thing I’m naturally attracted to, it’s one I look forward to. Season 3 started a few weeks ago.
  • The Bright Sessions: One of several highly-regarded podcasts I’m catching up on, this one finished its run recently. It’s is about a psychologist who counsels people with superpowers. It’s skillfully written and it certainly fits in with the many comic books which have worked in the “normal people with superpowers” territory. At six episodes in, I expect that the story will start developing its themes further soon, as I think the current characters and structure will soon lose its novelty.
  • WHEN in Rhapsody: I’ve only listened to the first two episodes of this so far, but I’m intrigued: Most of it surrounds production of a radio show in a small town in the 1930s, featuring concern about the coming war and a science fiction audio drama. But there’s also a brief injection of the same radio station from the 1960s, so there’s the promise of something crunchier going on here.
  • Victoriocity: A whimsical crime drama taking place in Even Greater London of the 19th century, it’s full of steampunk and silliness, and is much funnier than Welcome to Night Vale while having a similar sense of humor. The first episode didn’t grab me very strongly, but it’s gotten steadily better. Season 1 is complete and season 2 is forthcoming.
  • It Makes a Sound: Another Night Vale Presents show, this one about a woman who discovers an audiotape from an early 90s local concert by a musician of whom she has fond memories. As a journey of self-discovery for the woman and those around her it’s quite moving, but you have to suspend your disbelief about a lot of the plot (for example, her inability to get hold of a cassette player, or to do any research about the musician). There’s nothing fantastical in the story, it’s all down-to-earth. I wish the ending had had some more surprise to it – there were a couple places I thought it might be going which were just not relevant, and it didn’t really go somewhere else instead. Not sure if there will be a second season, but I’d listen if there is.
  • The Amelia Project: A very stylish series about a secret group which specializes in staging peoples’ deaths at their request and setting them up with a new life. The basic format is an interview with the client working through how they’re going to accomplish the feat, so it’s largely about the audacity of the nonsense they come up with. But as the first season goes on it emerges that there’s a little more going on, which presumably will drive the second season. I found it somewhat repetitive at first, but it grew on me.
  • The Far Meridian: A podcast from The Whisperforge, which produced ars Paradoxica. Peri is a young woman who lives in a lighthouse, and one day when the lighthouse starts moving to a new location each day. The narrative leaves a lot of the basic plot to be filled in by the listener; for example, it seems Peri is supposed to be agoraphobic, and she’s searching for her missing brother in a haphazard way. She makes connections to other people, but mostly off-screen. It seems like some of the narrative takes place in the past, but it’s difficult to tell. It’s strangely interesting in a dreamlike way, but the ongoing story is too fragmented for my tastes, and the sometimes-lengthy digressions about life and existence don’t interest me. I’m hoping there’s a big payoff at the end of the first season. The second season started recently.
  • Fireside: Alex takes over a radio station in the town of Hamilton, and is later joined by Angie. Alex is fully bought-in to the narrative of the town council and basically shills for them, while Angie is much more critical of the shady goings-on, which involve kow-towing to a couple of large corporations. I’m not sure where this is going as it’s mostly the two of them arguing and reporting on the ongoing events in town, but there doesn’t seem to be much real progress. I feel like the narrative is a little too oblique to the actual events going on in the town. It’s been on hiatus for a while.
  • What’s the Frequency: A 1940s story of a private investigator/thief, his ward, some gruesome murders, and a bizarre radio drama. You’d think I’d have included it in my entry on suspense podcasts, but there’s not a lot of suspense; instead it’s more of a surrealist – maybe postmodern – style (the web site describes it as “psychedelic noir”), with a lot of odd sounds and transitions and storytelling choices. Very little of it works for me, other than the two main characters who are amusingly quirky, but otherwise it seems like more flash than substance. The first season recently wrapped up, but at 3 episodes in I’m not sure I’ll make it to the end. Presumably the title comes from the famous attack on Dan Rather.
  • The Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air): One more Night Vale Presents production, this one about an entertainment troupe which broadcasts a popular radio show from the top of the Eiffel Tower (!), and the tower’s janitor (played by creator Julian Koster) who is enamored with them and keeps getting in their way. The stories are an endearing sort of nonsense, and one feels for the poor janitor. Reminds me a bit of the comic book Terminal City.

And that’s the lot – quite a bit more writing than I’d expected when I started this project. But it’s been fun diving into all these podcasts, and discovering more and more as I keep listening.

Did I say “the lot”? Well, unless you count podcasts of which I’ve only listened to a couple of episodes, like Kalila Stormfire’s Economical Magical Services, Greater BostonSuperstition, Magic King Dom, or Midnight Radio. Or podcasts I haven’t even heard the first episode of yet, like Hit the Bricks, The 200 Year OldMythosMirrorsZooPalimpsestProject NovaThe Magnus ArchivesProject OzmaWho Killed Julie?, or Arden.

Uh… I may have a problem.

Suspense Audio Dramas

I’m not naturally attracted to suspense stories, though I appreciate some forms of horror (the world-building and inventive dread of Lovecraft and his ilk), and the craft that goes into top-flight suspense yarns (e.g., Alfred Hitchcock). But by-and-large I don’t get a huge rise out of being kept on the edge of my seat, and the longer it goes on, the larger the payoff has to be to work for me. Since I think this puts me at odds with what writers of suspense stories are trying to do, that means this genre is not generally for me.

That said, I’ve accumulated a number of suspense and horror podcasts that I listen to regularly, each with a rather different flavor. Not all of them are suspense in the sense I describe above, but I think they’re adjacent, at least.

Reminder: I’m a bit over 2 months behind listening to audio dramas which are still ongoing (longer for a few I’m catching up on), so some of my comments might seem dated to people who are all caught up.

  • I Am In Eskew: A horror series (with occasional Lovecraftian overtones) about a man who lives in the city of Eskew, location undetermined. Strange things happen to him and other people in the city, and there’s a dreamlike – often nightmarish – quality to the story, with the constant sound of rain in the background. Genuinely creepy. I’m several episodes behind, but the story is starting to branch out to the world beyond Eskew, and I’m very curious to see where it goes.
  • Six Minutes: An adventure serial about a girl who isn’t what she seems. Holiday is found in floating the water during a boating trip, and, amnesiac, is adopted by the family who found her. But her new parents seem to know things about her, and her new brother and sister help her try to find answers. As the title says, each episode is about six minutes long, and typically ends on a cliffhanger. The production values are very high, though I find the teenage hijinks of Holiday and her siblings to get a bit tiresome and I wish they’d get on with the story. I infer that Six Minutes is aimed at an all-ages audience which is why some parts of it drag for me. But overall I’m curious where it’s going – I just with it would go there faster.
  • Moya: A one-man podcast about an inspector in the fictional nation of Moya who is sent to an outer district during the winter to investigate a homicide. Moya feels like a sort of alternate England, perhaps set around the 1950s, with undertones of 1984. The narrator has a strong – but not thick – English accent, which gives the story an unusual feel. Fundamentally the story is a police procedural set in a remote and uncaring land. I found the ending of the first season a little abrupt, but I’m curious to see what happens next.
  • Blackwater Falls: A young man goes to the town of Blackwater Falls, Vermont to look for his missing sister, and finds that there are a number of strange disappearances in town, as well as other problems. I’m not very far in, but it’s intriguing. There’s not very much about it online that I can find, so the audio must speak for itself.
  • Welcome to Night Vale: This is seemingly the most successful audio drama out there, and it spawned the Night Vale Presents network. I jumped in without catching up shortly before episode #100, and I found it… okay. The town of Night Vale is a place where all sorts of fantastic things happen, as told (mostly) by the local radio host voiced by Cecil Baldwin (who is great). The stories are dark and often nonsensical, and it’s heavy on humor and wordplay, but frankly I don’t find that a lot of those elements work – it’s not nearly as smart or clever as it thinks it is. Certainly I’ve never felt the urge to catch up on earlier episodes.
  • Alice Isn’t Dead: I’m partway through its third and final season, and I think this is the best of the Night Vale Presents offerings. Keisha becomes a trucker to take her away from memories of her wife, Alice, who disappeared, but who Keisha suspects is still alive. Keisha uncovers a broad conspiracy involving manlike monsters and sinister organizations, but at its heart the story is a travelogue of the eerie bywaters of the United States. Jasika Nicole is great as Keisha. Might appeal to fans of Tim Powers, or Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
  • Station Blue: A young man is hired by a company to staff a station in Antarctica for 6 weeks. I had expected this was going to end up being some sort of cosmic horror story, but it’s mostly been about the anxieties of this guy living alone in the middlest of the middle of nowhere. I’ve been waiting for more information about the company he works for, what’s happened in the past at the station, and so on, but that doesn’t seem to be what the podcast is doing. So it seems the podcast is not a great match for me.
  • The Archivist: A story about the end of the world, told through audiocassette recordings made by a young man named Cash during the event, and played by an artificial intelligence sometime in the future. It’s fundamentally a suspense/survivalist story, and though the precipitating events are fantastic, the story by and large is pretty straightforward. I recently finished the first season and despite a little bit of timey-wimey stuff, I’m not sure there’s enough going on to bring me back for a second season.

Next time I’ll wrap up with a few more audio dramas which don’t really fit into any of these categories.

Science Fiction Audio Dramas

These science fiction audio dramas include some of (what I imagine are) the most complicated podcasts in their writing, acting, and production. This genre also includes what are my two (maybe three) favorite audio dramas, so I, at least, appreciate all the hard work.

One of the pitfalls of such production is that the warts can be more evident and more disruptive than in simpler podcasts. Audio quality is really important, especially in maintaining a comparable audio volume and clarity among all the actors. I suspect this is a lot easier to say than to do, as there are some clearly-very-high-production podcasts which don’t quite get this right. I try to cut them some slack, but it does take me out of the experience. One actor being noticeably quieter than the others, or a slight hiss in the audio for one voice, can be very distracting unless there’s an in-story explanation for it. And when it’s two people who are supposed to be in the same room having a conversation, it jars. While this isn’t likely to make me drop a podcast I’m otherwise enjoying, it might keep me from sticking with a new one I’m having trouble getting into.

Reminder: I’m a bit over 2 months behind listening to audio dramas which are still ongoing (longer for a few I’m catching up on), so some of my comments might seem dated to people who are all caught up.

  • Girl in Space: If you asked me to pick the single best audio drama in production now, it might just be this one. (And if it’s not, then it’s the next one.) The main character, X, is a young woman raised by her scientist parents on a decaying research ship orbiting a peculiar star. Her parents disappeared years ago, but she continued their work. Then a corporate fleet shows up to claim her ship and work for their own. The first-person-present narration works brilliantly, and X’s musings on existence and her peculiar situation – as well as the jerktastic behavior of many other humans she meets – is human and insightful. There’s an ongoing mystery which gets revealed in little bits over several episodes, and it all adds up to the most engaging audio drama out there. If it has a flaw it’s that the supporting characters are a little too stereotypical, but I suspect that’s actually the effect they’re going for (you can hear the sneer of the lead heavy whenever he speaks, for example); it’s just a bit odd next to the humanity of X.
  • The Strange Case of Starship Iris: After the war against the aliens, a revolution leaves humanity governed by an oppressive Republic. Violet Liu is the last survivor of the research ship Iris when she’s rescued by a group of smugglers. Their adventures take them around the edges of human civilization, as well as encounters with some interesting aliens, as they try to figure out what was going on aboard the Iris and to what extent Violet was (knowingly or not) involved. The cast and dialog is first-rate, and there’s clearly something going on behind it all. I feel like the newer episodes have lost focus a bit (perhaps the long hiatus after the first five episodes had an impact on the creator’s plans or approach), but I still look forward to each one.
  • ars Paradoxica: A 21st century scientist’s project goes wrong and throws her back to the Philadelphia Experiment in 1943. She starts a new life as part of a secret war project, trying to replicate her discovery and figure out how it works, and maybe get back home. I’m only a few episodes in – up to the end of World War II – and each episode has been clever and engaging, with a strong period feel and fun cast of characters. And of course time travel and other high-tech hijinks. I believe the show recently concluded, to rave reviews, so I’m really looking forward to making my way through it. I’m enjoying it at least as much as the two above.
  • Wolf 359: Another heralded series which recently ended, about the hijinks aboard a space station orbiting the star of the series’ name, presumably no relation to the Star Trek battle around the star. Communications officer Doug Eiffel narrates the events; he’s a hedonistic slacker who butts heads with the commander and the chief scientist, and the stories so far slot right in alongside other comical SF series. But there’s a hint that the first contact with aliens is coming, and I imagine that will concern much of the series once it happens. Each episode so far is basically a set-piece for the quirks of one of the three characters on the station, which makes it lightly amusing but not (yet) remarkable.
  • Startripper!!: The web site’s summary reads, “Follow Feston Pyxis, a former file clerk who left it all behind in search of the best times the galaxy has to offer, on a road trip through the cosmos!” And that just about covers it: The exuberant Feston flies from place to place to sample the many experiences the universe has to offer. Three episodes in, it’s difficult to figure out if Feston is naïve and lucky, or secretly up to something. The high-energy tone of the series – which feels like a more optimistic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – suggests the former. Lightweight but fun.
  • All’s Fair: A 6-episode series about a Victorian woman who invents a time machine and travels to humanity’s future, where she repeatedly encounters a man in increasing positions of importance in government. Things don’t go well. Smart and to-the-point.
  • Tides: One of the most-lauded audio dramas currently running, about a scientist who gets stranded on a planet with an unusual and massive tidal cycle, exploring the local ecology and trying to stay alive until her crewmates on the ship orbiting the planet can rescue her. Julia Schifini as Dr. Winifred Eurus might be the single best acting talent I’ve yet heard in the audio drama universe, with a tremendous range of emotion and amazingly clear enunciation. And the podcast needs her because the story is very uneven. The suspense of her trying to stay alive is engaging and suspenseful, but the long asides of her describing the local fauna does not hold my interest at all. Maybe it’s a matter of what kind of science-fictional nuts-and-bolts interests you, as the brief description of the local cosmology around the planet was way more interesting to me than all of the biology bits put together. Your mileage may vary. I presume the status quo will get shaken up sometime soon since I can’t see Dr. Eurus remaining alone and wandering around like this for much longer, as the set-up is getting repetitive.
  • Marsfall: Another current audio drama which has gotten rave reviews, but which I’ve struggled to embrace. Certainly it shows a tremendous amount of technical ability in its production, and the acting is generally strong, but I’ve found the story to be pretty shaky. It’s about one of several commercial missions to colonize Mars later this century, with a commander who has an art background (that’s an early plot point), and an AI supporting the colony which is less frightening than HAL, but more suspicious than Data. Things go wrong as soon as the colony arrives on Mars, with several waves of mayhem over the first seven episodes. But I’ve been frustrated with the frequently-unprofessional behavior of these supposedly professional colonists. I also guessed one of the big surprises in the first season very early on, which made me wonder why none of the characters figured it out, since the evidence seemed to be screaming it at them. It feels like it’s aimed at casual fans of SF television shows as opposed to serious readers of SF (basically the opposite audience from Tides). Hopefully the second season will have a tighter story with characters acting less erratically.
  • Athena: An “audio journal” about a young woman growing up on a starship who decided to steal a shuttle and head to Earth. Episodes are short, so with me being 5 episodes in there’s not much backstory so far (for example, how can Athena and her people be human given their background?). Athena’s voice – which I assume is the podcast’s creator – has unusual vocal mannerisms which gives Athena an unusual feel. I’m hoping this will be more than a coming-of-age story, as it sounds like it will be a fairly short story when it’s finished, it might not be.

Next time I’ll run through some suspense and horror audio dramas.

Conspiracy Fiction Audio Dramas

After several years of Magic, poker and science podcasts, I dipped my toes into fiction podcasts – or, as most of their creators prefer to call them, audio dramas – with Welcome to Night Vale and a couple of other podcasts from the Night Vale Presents network (which I’ll talk about in more detail in a future post). But it was just a sideline to the nonfiction podcasts until…

I don’t remember where I heard about The Polybius Conspiracy, a 7-episode documentary about an urban legend surrounding an early-80s video game, which seemed like a great piece of niche investigative journalism. Or at least, I thought it was a documentary, but it turns out it was mostly fiction. Something about it seemed too good to be true, but it was so well done it fooled me. Which left me pretty mad.  But there was a silver lining:

In the form of Wil Williams and her blog. I found her review by searching for information about the Polybius show. Exploring her site and following her Twitter, I found – well, I honestly don’t know which shows I found first through her, but a year(ish) later most of my podcast subscriptions are audio dramas, including several completed ones and some long-running ones I’m catching up on.

So I’m going to survey the ones I’ve listened to in groups, starting with what I think of as “conspiracy fiction” audio dramas: Podcasts which present a conspiracy or urban legend as if it were real. But they’re a lot more enjoyable when you know that they’re fiction.

The biggest risk with podcasts of this genre is that they’ll dance around the edges of the story and not get to a satisfying payoff. That basically happened with Polybius, which kind of petered out at the end. I think of this as “X-Files syndrome”, where an unwillingness or inability to take the story to (or at least towards) a satisfying ending drove me away from that show in its third season. (The fact that The X-Files was running opposite Babylon 5 – while B5 was smoking all the other genre shows with its deliberate storytelling – probably didn’t help.) The journey is enjoyable up to a point, but the payoff is a critical part of stories like this. I don’t think everyone agrees with me on that (evidence: the persistent and baffling popularity of The X-Files), but to me it’s make-or-break: If the writers just want to do weird stuff and don’t have a fairly concrete payoff in mind from the beginning, then I’m probably going to find it more frustrating than enjoyable.

Note that since I’m a bit over 2 months behind listening to audio dramas and catching up on some older ones, some of my comments might seem dated to people who are all caught up.

  • TANIS: It seems it’s just about impossible to get into this genre of podcasts and not eventually end up listening to TANIS, from the Public Radio Alliance. Host Nic Silver (an alias of writer/producer Terry Miles) explores the lost city (?) of Tanis starting from a few hazy clues, but quickly going down the rabbit hole of deaths, disappearances, shadowy figures, and corporate espionage. He’s aided by his new friend, the hacker MeerKatnip (MK). The show is in its fourth season, and I’m nearing the end of the first. I definitely worry about X-Files syndrome with TANIS, but so far the ride is enjoyable. The interactions between the out-of-his-depth Silver and the snarky MK are the highlights of the show so far.
  • Rabbits: Another PRA production, which ran for one season (a Kickstarter for a second season failed), and arguably it’s even better than TANIS. Host Carly Parker is searching for her missing friend, and ends up being dragged into the latest iteration of a centuries-old game called Rabbits, which has mostly avoided appearing on the Internet. While the last episode is a little less than I’d hoped for, it does have a satisfying conclusion, and there are a lot of neat cultural Easter eggs along the way to read about on Wikipedia. If they do somehow do a second season, I hope they delve into the mechanics and outcomes of the game some more (even though I’m sure they haven’t really thought about those, but I think they have to in order to keep interest).
  • The Last Movie: Another PRA creation from Nic Silver, this one dropped all six of its episodes at once earlier this year. Nic and MK investigate the rumored “Last Movie” of the 1970s, which supposedly kills everyone who sees it. A pretty good introduction to the PRA style, but it’s not as good as TANIS or Rabbits.
  • Limetown: The first season (back in 2015) concerned a fictional corporate town in Tennessee, all of whose inhabitants disappeared ten years ago. Reporter Lia Haddock investigates what happened to them. I’m not as high on this story as some people are, as I wasn’t wild about the revelations or the conclusion, find them all a bit pedestrian for fantastic fiction. But I enjoyed it well enough to see if they develop it in a more satisfying manner in the upcoming season two. From what I’ve read that this was one of the first of the modern wave of podcasts, so with several years since the first season ended, simply assimilating what others have done in the form in the meantime might make for a more satisfying story.
  • Mermaids of Merrow’s Cove: A public radio reporter goes home to her town in New England to investigate apparent kidnappings and murders of young women who appear on the beach and which locals suspect are mermaids. I’m 3 episodes into this 6-episode series, and it’s pretty good, though I find it not as polished as PRA’s offerings; in particular I find the story and acting to feel a bit contrived. The high points so far have been the reading of the journal by an early inhabitant of the town.

Next time I’ll cover the science fiction genre, which include some of my very favorite audio dramas I’ve discovered to date.

Nonfiction Podcasts

Last time I ran through the gaming-related podcasts I listen to, so here are the other “nonfiction” podcasts in my feed.

Public radio podcasts

Many shows from public radio outlets are also released as podcasts. Some of these include bonus material, but they also come with reruns which may or may not be of interest. This is a great way to listen to shows that aren’t available in your area, or which are broadcast on a schedule that doesn’t match your own.

  • Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me!: NPR’s weekly news quiz show, which has been running for over 20 years, hosted by Peter Sagal and Bill Kurtis, with a rotating panel and a weekly guest. Always entertaining, often informative, I probably started listening not long after it started and I’ve never stopped. I still hold out hope that Charlie Pierce will come back someday.
  • Ask Me Another: Hosted by Ophira Eisenberg with musician Jonathan Coulton, this is a trivia quiz show with one or more weekly guests. Not the laugh-fest that Wait! Wait! is, but a fun diversion.
  • Says You: A long-running panel game show revolving around language and wordplay, I often forgot to catch it because it airs here Sundays at 4 pm, and for a long time you had to pay to get the podcast feed. Now it’s freely available, and it’s very funny. Sometimes the games are fiendishly clever.
  • Serial: A podcast from This American Life which focuses on a single topic each season. I listened to season 2, on Bowe Bergdahl, which I found a bit overlong for its topic. The season 3 teaser just dropped a week or two ago.
  • S-Town: A spin-off from Serial, about a man in a small Alabama town who invites a reporter down to investigate a suspicious death, and then things take a disturbing turn. This 7-episode podcast is complete, and while there is some extraneous material, there’s also a lot going on, and since it’s reporting on true events, not everything gets tied up in a bow. However, I think the central mystery was given a perfectly satisfying conclusion at the end. Atmospheric, creepy, tragic, I found S-Town very compelling, and superior overall to Serial. (For a different opinion, see Wil Williams’ review.)

Scientific American podcasts

I listen to a couple of podcasts from Scientific American, which – along with Wait! Wait! – might be the ones I’ve been listening to the longest:

  • 60-Second Science: Despite the title, these are 2-to-4 minute reports on recent developments in science. Releases every weekday.
  • Science Talk: A longer-form usually-weekly podcast usually focusing on a single topic – an interview, a book, etc. – with special episodes each year when the science Nobel Prizes are announced. Both of these podcasts cover the full range of science, so unless you’re interested in everything in science there are bound to be some that won’t grab you. Nonetheless both are informative and engaging.

Political & legal podcasts

I’m not a big political wonk (my occasional Twitter rant aside), but in the last year I’ve added a couple of new podcasts in this area to my subscriptions:

  • Congress, Two Beers In: From the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. One of the hosts is Matt Glassman, who I discovered through Thinking Poker. What appealed to me about him is that he talks less about politics per se, but about government – how it works, how politics affects it, etc. – which is an angle not often reported on in the mainstream press. This is in this vein, and I find it very informative, especially given the current governmental clusterfuck we’re living with. Approximately bi-weekly.
  • Make No Law: By Ken White of Popehat, who is a popular figure on Twitter. This podcast focuses on developments in first amendment law throughout U.S. history, including Supreme Court rulings and the national scenario and individual actions which led to them. Releases approximately monthly.

Progressive rock podcasts

As you may know, I’m a big fan of progressive rock music. There are several streaming radio stations I’ve listened to, but not many podcasts that I’ve found – or at least not ones that hit my particular style that strongly. But I do listen to two:

  • Progtopia: A bi-weekly podcast that when I discovered it typically had a single interview with an artist or band each episode, including playing a few of their songs. Now it includes one or more shorter interviews, a roundtable with the main host and some other people involved in or covering prog, and an opinion essay. I think I liked the old format better as the newer content doesn’t add much for me.
  • NewEARS Prog Show: This is a radio show by the New England Art Rock Society which airs on WEMF in Boston. Each episode is 2 hours, and it seems to run in seasons, with season 4 having finished earlier this summer. As a radio show it plays a bunch of music and then has two or three interviews. I’ve discovered a few bands through it already, and I only found this show earlier this year. Plus, you can’t beat the Boston accents!

Others

  • The Geekbox: A weekly podcast about geek hobbies. This used to be a roundtable with several people who worked in or around the videogame industry, plus the guy who owns the comic shop I go to. Life developments have recently reduced it to just two hosts, which has not grabbed me as much. Plus, the non-videogame content has been reduced, and since I don’t play many videogames – and no console games – that limits its appeal for me. So after listening to it for almost 8 years, I’ve recently dropped it.
  • Retropod: A short several-times-per-week podcast about historical events, especially ones which have been in the news recently, e.g. because some new information about them has come to light. I just started listening recently.
  • Fiat Lex: All about dictionaries and how they work, by two people who have each worked in the business for years. (Did you know dictionaries are a business? They are!) Approximately bi-weekly.
  • Query: A bi-weekly podcast answering tech questions from listeners, with an emphasis on Apple products. Some useful stuff in here that you might not easily find out about unless you obsessively follow the tech press (and really, who has time for that?). Recently had a co-host switch as one of the original hosts was hired by Apple.
  • Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone: Paula Poundstone and Adam Felber are both hilarious on Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me!, and this is their second stab at a podcast after last year’s Live From the Poundstone Institute. Both shows have struggled a bit to make their conceit feel natural, with the new show being based around interviewing experts in a couple of subjects and then having Paula offer (humorous) advice on what they’ve learned. The first two episodes were really rough, and although it seems they have an audience, it’s not as evident as in the last show. It’s gotten better since then, but it feels like it could use some editing to get down to the best stuff. Releases weekly.

Next time I’ll dive into my latest hobby: Audio dramas.

Gaming Podcasts

I’m breaking up the “nonfiction” podcasts I listen to into two entries: Gaming podcasts, and everything else. As I said in my intro, a few Magic: The Gathering podcasts have been key in keeping me motivated in running. I also listen to a couple of poker podcasts. I’ve listened to several others of each, some of which have ended, some of which I’ve dropped, but the ones included below I’ve been listening to for quite a while.

One common thread in these podcasts is that the hosts clearly put a lot of work into planning out their episodes and staying on topic (presumably through skillful use of editing and post production in some cases), so you know what you’re going to get: A consistent product, and a clear indication when an individual episode is going to be different. I’ve listened to a few podcasts in each category which don’t exhibit this discipline, and they often end up running 90-120 minutes per episode, and/or spend a lot of time in rambling digressions which don’t hold my interest.

So, these really are the cream of the crop that I’ve found for each game, at least as far as what I’m looking for in these podcasts goes. YMMV.

Magic podcasts

  • Limited Resources: Probably the podcast I look forward to the most each week, LR covers the limited (draft & sealed) forms of playing Magic, which are the formats I mostly play these days. Besides being a clinic in playing, LR is also a clinic in producing a professional-grade weekly podcast on its topic, with insight, humor and depth. I discovered LR back in 2012 because I figured there must be a podcast on Magic drafting out there, and this was honestly the only one I could find at the time. It had already been around about 3 years by then, and it was already very solid. Host Marshall Sutcliffe also does commentary on the Magic pro tour. Co-host Luis-Scott Vargas is in the pro tour hall of fame, also does coverage, and brings great analysis and usually-great humor to the show. Both of them show their enthusiasm for and expertise at the game in every episode.
  • Good Luck High Five (formerly Magic the Amateuring): The GLHF hosts have backgrounds in improv comedy and so they’re the rare podcast which is able to dive into off-the-cuff humor and make it work – but I think it’s because they have the discipline to not let it get away from them. They cover all forms of Magic in a friendly and upbeat way, and have both played competitive magic and worked in coverage of competitive events. They’ve recently picked up the proverbial baton of keeping their listeners apprised of developments in the MtG world, which I enjoy even though I’m not strongly plugged in to that side of the scene.
  • Drive to Work: By Mark Rosewater, the head designer of Magic, who records it while – you guessed it – driving to work. He releases 2 episodes each Friday. Rosewater has a great mind for game design and his podcast is worth listening to if you’re interested in Magic design, game design, and to some extent any sort of design.
  • Kitchen Table Magic: An interview podcast about the personalities and histories of the game. Host Sam Tang does a great job bringing out his subjects’ love of the game, and in the cases of long-time players their historical perspectives on the game. For anyone who’s watched the Enter the Battlefield video series, KTM is a more in-depth and regular feature with many similarities. Organized by “seasons”, it comes out weekly with some gaps in the middle and end of each season.
  • Allied Strategies: As a rule I’m not a fan of podcasts in a “friends hanging out” format, but this one makes it work, and I think it’s because they’re very good at knowing when to ad lib and when to rein it in. Two of the friends have been professional Magic players, and all three are entertaining and insightful. Not every episode is deeply interesting to me, as they rotate through a variety of Magic topics, but I listen to most of them. They usually end the episode with an amusing story from a recent event.

Poker podcasts

  • Thinking Poker: Much like Limited Resources, this is a fine example of producing a focused podcast. Co-hosts Andrew Brokos and Nate Meyvis open with a usually-short intro (a bit longer when they themselves have been playing in major tournaments), then launch into a strategy segment analyzing one or more hands. The rest of the episode is usually an interview with someone from the poker world. Some of the most interesting interviews have been with people who are only tangentially part of the poker world, and the hosts are excellent interviewers. Episode 200 is a good sampler of interviews with several of their best guests.
  • Just Hands: This podcast started off as what its name implies, individual episodes analyzing poker hands and that’s it. It’s been extending a bit into interviews, especially as one of the original hosts has recently left and the other is having a different guest each week. It’s a good listen, though I think their strength is in hand analysis.

Next time I’ll cover the rest of the nonfiction podcasts.