schneefink | Entries tagged with podcasts

( Annoying teeth things )

Unsurprisingly I have done very little today after that, mostly reading and fishing on MCCI. I got another screenshot with Etho today, that was pretty cool, after the first one two days ago (I was so surprised that time I completely forgot how to go into screenshot mode and remove the hotbar etc.) And I saw Scar yesterday, that was also cool. I've now made it to level 33 and the first tropical island, and I finally had some better luck with cosmetics today though I still don't have the ones I want most (the forest witch hat, or any of the rods or wings.) Currently I'm wearing a normal witch hat and carrying a beach bucket, with the new eyeblossom cape, and I think it looks cute.

About a month ago I was asking for podcast recs and

scintilla10 recommended The Two Princes. I enjoyed it a lot! I really enjoyed the romance between the titular two princes, they are very sweet. I also enjoyed most of the supporting cast, like Joan and Cecily and the Chamberlain etc. Seasons one and two have big adventures with just the right amount of humor to keep it (mostly) light-hearted; season three had a bigger villain (and tbh a bit of a predictable deus-ex-machina ending, though I didn't really mind), but more importantly it's also a musical with some very fun songs.

Season one has the least songs and is occasionally a bit heavy-handed in its messaging, but my biggest pet peeve was queen Lavinia. ( vague spoilers )

More random things:

My favorite subreddit for procrastination purposes is currently /r/hobbydrama. It doesn't get full write-ups that often (anymore? I have a vague memory that they used to be more common in the past), but even just reading through the weekly "Hobby Scuffles" threads is entertaining. All kinds of both fun and unfun drama from different communities.

At Worldcon someone recommended me the "Sheep Might Fly!" serialized fiction podcast by Tansy Rayner Roberts, and I decided to check it out because I really enjoyed "Musketeer Space" and her "Creature Court" trilogy.
I listened to all 25 chapters of Season of Dragons, which is basically "AU Pride and Prejudice with dragons from the PoV of Caroline Bingley." It was entertaining enough I kept listening weekly for months, though I found it very predictable (even apart from the P&P elements) and despite the dragons at times somewhat bland. I think it's likely that it's less an issue with the book and more that it's not generally one of my favorite genres. A good light read/listen when one is in the right mood for regency romance with fantasy elements.
I don't think I'll follow along with the next one though.

I stopped listening to The Magnus Protocol because I'm not really in the mood for horror currently. (I do want to try playing Slay the Princess but I haven't yet had sufficient time and mental battery at the same time.)

The other podcast I currently semi-regularly listen to is The Spawn Chunks, a weekly Minecraft podcast by Pixlriffs and Joel Duggan. Also something that doesn't require a lot of brainpower, conveniently. It's nice to stay informed and they have some interesting thoughts about existing mechanics and good ideas about possible future ones.

If anyone has recommendations for serialized fiction podcasts that are not horror and don't require too much brainpower, ideally but not necessarily SFF, that'd be appreciated :) I guess I could just listen to audio books but, idk, it doesn't feel quite the same.

Things I have been consuming:

Taskmaster, a UK comedy panel show. I first heard about it when

sabinelagrande started writing RPF about it, and only later found out that it's actually hilarious. I usually have a big problem with second-hand-embarrassment so I was initially hesitant, but it was never a problem here. The tasks are so random and fun, the casts are hilarious, and it's just overall very cheerful. I started watching random tasks, and now I'm watching from the beginning. I'm in the middle of series 3 and enjoy it a lot.

Dice Disasters, an actual play D&D podcast that DD recommended to me. The premise is that five people from our world - four young adults and a kid - wake up in a fantasy world with magic. It took a while for me to get into: the plot moves quite slowly, though I did always like the game and cast and characters a lot.
And then episode 22 had a few character scenes that I really loved( for example ), and I've just finished episode 23 ( in which exciting things happen ) and I love it a lot. DD promises that it only gets better, so I'm trying to catch up in time for Yuletide sign-ups.
I will also definitely ramble more about my feelings for all of the characters later but I'll stop procrastinating for now. (I also baked things! I've definitely made much worse procrastination choices.)

When I first listened to Skyjacks it was mostly while either running or in transit. When I switched to listening to new episodes on my laptop in my room when they came at first I thought the latest episodes just didn't grab me as much for whatever reason, until I realized how much harder I found it not to be distracted by other things. Then I listened to two episodes again while running last weekend and found out it's definitely not the podcast, it's me. (TMA is different, it's shorter, not actual play but scripted, and I listen to new episodes while following along on Discord.)

So I remembered a post I saw on Tumblr, "i can only be podcasted when i'm being debuffed by a hand activity", and today while listening to the new episode I took out the puzzle (and puzzle mat) I got last Christmas & my birthday and for the first time in a long while started doing a puzzle again :) A puzzle with 1000 pieces, a fact I overlooked at first, so this is going to take me a while. It's going to be a shiny cat when it's done (this one), maybe I'll even hang it in my room. I've been looking for things to hang up anyway, it's just so hard to decide.
The podcast + puzzle combination worked very well, so I'll do that again.

I only took very few notes for the last few episodes originally, and then before posting I went through them again and there were more things I wanted to mention, but have I mentioned how inconvenient the lack of a transcript is?, they're still missing a lot. ~~yay more procrastination but I do not have the time to listen to them all again right now, shit~~

( Notes for #67-71 are a bit sparse )

I'm currently listening to Skyjacks episode #22 and making high-pitched noises over ( spoilers ) :D

I find this stage of new fandoms one of the hardest: already so excited about it but trying to avoid the fandom to avoid spoilers, and being simultaneously excited that there are so many more episodes to listen to and impatient because it'll take so long to catch up.

So many exciting things happened recently, ( spoilers )
I'm also very interested in the consequences of ( spoilers )

Halfway through listening & writing this post the new TMA episode was released for patrons (a few hours late) so I stopped in the middle, and wow that was a change in atmosphere ^^ Felt like it took half an hour for my heartrate to go back to normal.

I just finished listening to "The Adventure Zone" (and by that I mean I literally finished it ten minutes ago, I was typing this up during the last two episodes) and it was amazing and I need to ramble about it. I started it and it didn't really draw me in, I only kept listening because I saw so many people recommending it. Eventually it got better, then around The Eleventh Hour I started to actually enjoy it (finally some character stuff), The Suffering Game wasn't my favorite but that arc's end and the following Lunar Interlude is where the overarching arc got really interesting, and then The Lost Century was really great, and Story and Song was fantastic. It took a long time, but in the end it was worth it. So many feelings. Especially about Taako and [spoiler] *flails*

( Spoilers )

I bet it would be fascinating to listen to the whole story again, see how it all looks different now that I know the background, especially because I listened to most of it at work and definitely missed some details. (Not sure I will, at least not right away, because there's a lot of other stuff I want to listen too (live session and Q&As from TAZ alone), but I'll see.)

I'm procrastinating on cleaning up, so I'm trying to get my notes on "Wolf 359" into something that maybe resembles order.

When I first started this podcast I stopped in the middle of episode 3, because it's no fun listening to people who can't stand each other and make each other's lives unnecessarily difficult by behaving unprofessionally on a fricking space station, I mean, wtf. The sheer number of recs I saw while looking for similar podcasts convinced me to give it another try, however. The second half of season one was okay, and then the season finale was fantastic and it got pretty great from there.

The show is currently in season 4. The plot is great, very tense, with the heroes almost constantly in danger of varying degrees. While there are funny and touching moments, there's not a lot of fluff. The "characters can't stand each other" problem gets a lot better, people grow closer under pressure, and by season 4 I really love several of the characters. (Others I enjoy hating.) I'm very curious where it's going, and how they're going to get out of this.

Do try not to get spoiled, there are some great twists. So if you haven't listened to it yet, stop here.
( Spoilers: barely organized notes I made while listening )

In offline happenings, tomorrow my parents, LB and I are going to a dinosaur park.
Mom: "Unfortunately we found out that the dinosaur park where we went when you two were kids has closed, but we could do something else…"
LB: "There are two other dinosaur parks."
Mom: "I thought it was about the memories?"
Me: "Mom. It's about the dinosaurs."
It's going to be great.

I've been checking out the podcasts you guys recommended and it's been great. Eventually I'll make a longer list of those I liked, but for now I want to talk about "The Bright Sessions," a fiction podcast about a therapist for patients with unusual abilities. I quickly got attached to the characters, and then in season two the plot really took off. Originally I just wanted to make a few notes for a future rec, but by the middle of season 2 I was making notes for almost every episode, so now you get a long list of episode reactions to distract myself from the cliffhanger at the end of season 3.

( Season 1 )

( Season 2 )

( Season 3 )

Season 4 in October! I really look forward to it. And there will be a TV adaption too, I'm very curious.
In the meantime I'm thinking about what fic I want for Yuletide, because it's the season of worrying about Yuletide nominations.

I don't dislike my job, but it's often boring. Fortunately during much of it I can listen to other stuff. During the first few months I listened to many many Critical Role episodes, but now I'm caught up, so I need something new. I've been trying a few different things.

- Political comedy. There are a few I enjoy watching/listening to, like Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, sometimes Trevor Noah. Is there something similar for European politics?, that could be fun.

- I tried other RPG videos or podcasts, but haven't been able to get into any. They all start pretty slow, so without recs from people whose taste I trust I'm unwilling to invest much time into it. (I heard good things about The Adventure Zone, but I'm not in the mood right now to listen to a men-only RPG.)

- Speaking of! Podcasts. I was looking for economics-focused podcasts and the vast majority of what I found was hosted by men. I found an article that said about 2/3rds of podcasts are hosted by men, that about fits what I saw and doesn't even take into account which topics the podcasts are about. DD and I wondered how much of that is because men are more used than women to people listening to whatever they say. I also still sometimes have to consciously train myself out of thinking that a woman's voice on the radio or on TV sounds "shrill" whenever she raises her voice and/or gets angry.
If anyone has recs for podcasts hosted by women, especially about economics and/or history, that would be welcome.

- I thought aboud podfic, but I usually get too frustrated by the fact that I know that I can read faster. Radio plays are different though. I was never that into WtNV, but I remembered that someone on DW (I forgot who) recced The Strange Case of Starship Iris. I liked it a lot, but unfortunately it only has 5 episodes and is currently on hiatus. Recs for radio plays would also be very welcome (but no horror, even though I think it's a genre that lends itself well to radio plays.)

- I also spent two days watching youtube videos about ancient battles. I now understand better why

dhampyresa is so fascinated by Hannibal and Scipio ^^ Unfortunately battle plans need to be watched and I rarely have time for that.

- I had the idea to listen to Russian language learning podcasts, I found out that there are a few. Unfortunately I realized that while podcasts are okay to remember words I already knew once (I used to speak Russian at B1+, but I'm severely out of practice), I can't learn new words from listening. If I don't see how they're spelled I forget them almost immediately, which is frustrating. Russian also takes more concentration to listen to, which I don't always have.

I also sometimes just listen to Disney soundtracks on a loop when I don't have much concentration to spare, or radio. (I never listened to Ö3 before, but 2-3 weeks ago I realized how little attention the constantly repeating pop songs require.) But that sometimes feels close to wasting time – which is ridiculous when I'm at work, but still. I could be learning things or listen to actual stories! Not the whole time though, I'll try to find a balance, and in the meantime I'll try out more stuff.