Also how do you guys access them because google podcasts is about to shut down and im really not sure I wanna switch to youtube music for it
As for what I listen to it’s mostly Friends at the Table at this point but I will sometimes listen to My Brother, My Brother and Me if I just need background noise
I haven’t listened to them super often, but my mainstays are…
- Behind the Basterds
- God Awful Movies
- Chapo Trap House
- Knowledge Fight
- Cheesy Controller Podcast (video game podcast a few IRL friends produce)
I had a similar issue with where to get my podcasts when Google music shut down. Main reason i didnt move to google podcasts was cuz i knew they would do the same thing.
I eventually got an RSS feed app that handles all my podcasts.
I really like On the Shoulders of Giants, Shelved by Genre, Well There’s Your Problem, Castle SuperBeast, The Great Gundam Project, Blowback, A More Civilized Age, Origin Story, and a handful of others.
I use Podcast addict on Android as my podcatcher of choice.
Actual play
- The Adventure Zone
- Friends at the Table
Comedy
- My Brother, My Brother, and Me.
- The Dollop - an American History comedy podcast which is a good way to learn some stuff and not have it be miserable.
- The Worst Idea of All Time, why watch a bad movie once when you could watch it once a week for a year.
- Til Death do us Blart, an annual podcast review of Paul Blart Mall Cop 2
Media review/critique
- Citations Needed
- No Cartridge
- West Wing Thing - railing about how much Aaron Sorkin sucks and how his shitty politics have infested America by way of watching episodes of The West Wing
NBA Podcasts
- Zach Lowe (national coverage)
- Kenny Beechem Podcast (national)
- Numbers on the Board (national)
- Real GM Radio (national)
- Dunk’d on (national, analytics driven)
- Dane Moore NBA Podcast (Timberwolves focused)
- Locked on Wolves (timberwolves)
General Sports
- The Right Time with Bomani Jones
Oh shit I forgot about deathblart I should see if they’ve released a new one.
I used to listen to TAZ a lot, was my first exposure to ttrpgs-as-storytelling and I think Amnesty is still really good. But honestly I’m kinda getting over the McElboys because Griffin’s review of Xenoblade 3 on the Besties podcast still pisses me off whenever I remember it Steeplechase just wasn’t very good imho
I use AntennaPod on Android, and Spotify (with BlockTheSpot) on my PC
Currently the english-speaking podcasts I dip on are
- Expounded Universe
From the System Mastery folks, they read and talk about Star Wars novels, which are often not great, but they do highlight the good moments that there are. Once in a while they also punish each other with non SW books, there was a Star Trek Vs. X-men book, a Supernatural one, and they’re currently finishing a World of Warcraft book.
- CEREBRO
“A podcast where a homo talks about the homo superior”, a lengthy podcast detailing the backstory, neat details and stories from X-men characters, usually dedicating at least one full hour+ episode for a single character, occasionally dipping into multiple hours/multiple episodes sequences. I haven’t listened to a lot because I find it draining, even if entertaining.
- Dead Pilots Society
A podcast where they invite the writers of a TV show that got approved for a pilot but never had the opportunity to air it, interview the people responsible for creating it, and then do a live reenactment with guest actors.
Still occasionally dip into MBMBAM.
More or less in the same boat (technically Rude Tales of Magic was my first Actual Play but I never got far into it) though in my case it was Ethersea that really killed my interest, those were some horrible characters.
Lmfao I straight up forgot ethersea existed, blocked it from my memory, what a fucking season
for me re: TAZ I really loved Balance (before I was tablefriend-pilled) and it’s still important to me, but I think I’m done w/ the show. Graduation was a slog, Ethersea was not much better and Steeplechase was disappointing. tbh I barely even listen to MBMBAM any more, I feel like it’s lost something. I still watch Monster Factory tho and probably will as long as they keep releasing it because that shit is a direct line to my funny bone hehe
I’m sure everyone here has heard of it but I do recommend The Magnus Archives. starts out as episodic horror (à la r/nosleep) but quickly develops interesting characters and a meta-narrative. largely very good voice performances too. just mind the content warnings :S
I’m way behind on my podcasts cause I don’t have a ton of time that’s great for listening to podcasts, but Big Gay Nerds and Legend Lark are my favorites for Actual Play. Dungeons and Daddies is really funny, but not unlike TAZ, the first season is such a stand out that it’s hard to beat.
Mint turned me onto The Read a year or two ago, which is like a black culture podcast, it severely rules. Stuff You Should Know is also good for sort of general knowledge stuff. Couple of goofy dudes talking about different topics.
I gave up on Graduation cause whoof. I liked Amnesty though. It wasn’t quite as powerful as Balance, but you can’t force lightning to strike twice.
I haven’t listened to actual plays since I started actually playing TTRPGs¹, though I don’t think those two points are related. However there were a few I tried and thought worthwhile:
- Rude Tales of Magic
This one is DM’d by Branson Reese and its a absolute laugh riot. I don’t think they dovetailed so much into Serious Plotting like TAZ did, though the characters aren’t exactly paper thin and without drama.
- D20 Dames
I don’t think this one is a standout quality wise (I never finished a season) but I think its somewhat notable for being more family friendly than the usual Actual Play, I think they even avoid cursing.
- Queer Dungeoneers
Good humor, not American or British, and they don’t play D&D (though Dungeon World has since been found out to have an infamous creator as well). Unfortunately some of the episodes are blocked in my region so I never finished it either (there’s a pattern here)
¹ I did watch D20’s Misfits and Magic but that was just outstanding
I have a friend who does a podcast called Video Death Loop. It’s pretty funny. They watch a short piece of cultural detritus like a commercial, music video, or video game attract mode, and use it to, most of the time, spend about a half an hour to 40 minutes or so hallucinating a new cosmology about it. Because they’re out in the Knoxville area, the Bass Pro Shops pyramid is a recurring character.
Available wherever podcasts are sold
Only podcast I listen to is Castle Super Beast, lol. Used to do it during my commutes when they were longer, but now I kinda just listen to it whenever I feel like it, maybe.
My work days are 11 hours long with the commute, and I work manual labor with headphones allowed so I’m always looking for podcasts to keep myself sane… I only listen on my phone, so I use Podcast Addict.
Some selections…
This Podcast Will Kill You - Disease and biology podcast by two epidemiologists where they go through the biology, history, treatments and future outlooks on miscellaneous ailments. Extremely serious, and informationally dense. I haven’t actually been able to listen to it much nowadays, because I’ve been suffering from burnout and my brain is so fried I’ve been struggling with paying attention to dense and serious podcasts. :( But I do still like it. This one Does have network ads preroll and sometimes after the intro which can be grating as hell but I like the podcast enough and have been listening long enough that I bear with them.
Abnormal Mapping and some other shows on their network - Network run by queer commies, I listen to some of their shows on and off. Mainly Abnormal Mapping, their video game crit podcast and Repertory Screenings, their movie crit podcast. They’re all generally pretty serious critics with heavy leftist perspectives who don’t throw out any bigoted language, and I’ll happily take that for media criticism consumption. I’ve listened to some chunks of Great Gundam Project, of seasons I’ve watched and feel like listening to watchalongs of, but it’s not really my type of podcast generally. I’d recommend the seasons that Austin Walker guests on.
A More Civilized Age - The Star Wars podcast by Austin Walker and co. I have very low interest in Star Wars and haven’t even watched all the main numbered movies, but this has been decent longform listening fodder recently. I enjoy Austin, and the other hosts, a lot, so just listening to them talk about something easily digestible works for me.
Random Number Generator Horror Podcast - Horror movie podcast that picks their movies by diceroll so they jump around a lot geographically and chronologically. The hosts are pretty relaxed and I enjoy their presentation. This one I listen to a bit on and off depending on the movie covered, sometimes I’m like “oh I’ve been meaning to watch this I’ll wait before I listen” and then two years pass and I still haven’t watched that movie.
I’m really picky with podcasts. If audio quality, presentation and format, or host vibes are the slightest bit off to me I’ll immediately remove the pod from my feed. One of the first podcasts I listened to faithfully for a while back in the day was the McElroy medical podcast, before they hit big, but as time went on the husband got more and more obnoxious interrupting his doctor wife with Internet Funnyman jokes, and she started to get into it too, and I had to remove myself from it, so I got my McElroy fill pretty early and haven’t looked back. Unfortunately, I have a hard time with actual play and general fiction podcasts, which is a bummer because I know there’s weeks and weeks of Austin Walker tabletop content out there… But I struggle keeping track of plot progression when my brain is still half dedicated to working, it’s like when you’re reading a book and you realize your eyes have just been moving over the words without actually reading them for a page and you need to go back. That’s why more loose discussion-form podcasts work better for me, where it doesn’t matter if you mentally miss a minute here or there.
Yeah, Sawbones ran out of interesting medical history to talk about after a while and as they’ve been scraping the barrel the quality has dropped.
honestly I feel you re: picky, I am also intensely picky about very minor things when it comes to podcasts. the reason I recommended MagPod was partly bc it’s one of the only narrative podcasts I’ve come across where the voice performances didn’t make me want to remove my ears from my body. :S
coming to say i use podbean because im not a huge podcast person anymore (i used to listen to wtnv and i thiiiink adventure hour? when i was public transporting during therapy) but i wanna say girl, that’s scary! is a favorite and i just wanna tell people about it lol
I technically have PocketCasts, and I’m sure it works well, but I’m still mostly on Spotify for my pods. Of the shows I listen to regularly:
Friends at the Table, which was already covered
Lateral, with Tom Scott - a comedy trivia podcast hosted by Tom Scott, with questions themed around lateral thinking. One of my favorite questions, as an example, starts with, “A man looks up at the night sky and sees two stars. As a result, dozens of people die. Why?” To which the answer is: It’s an ancient Roman eye test. There’s one star in the Big Dipper that’s actually two stars, and anyone who can see both had good enough eyesight to become a military archer. Most of the guests are just other youtubers and internet creators, but I like both the creativity of the questions and how often answering turns into a deeply silly yes-and fest until they stumble onto the right train of thought.
Oathsworn - an actual play podcast for the trpg Band of Blades. A doomed army fleeing from the unspeakable undead evil they failed to defeat. It’s made by a bunch of FATT fans, so they’re really hitting the “critical worldbuilding, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends.” But with a lot more of a casual atmosphere - I know some ex-FATT listeners who find the later seasons a bit too polished/professional, so I wanted to shout out that quality as well.
The Dildorks - my popcorn podcast, two nerds talking about kink and sex ed. They’re very online millennial, but also end up digging into best practices and interpersonal shit in a way that I really enjoy. Ever since Danny Lavery’s advice pod went off the air, this is where I get my equivalent fix of queer and poly-informed interpersonal wrangling.
Gender Reveal - an interview podcast where trans folks interview other trans folks about their lives, their work, and their gender. I think this is my favorite gender pod out there, both because of the breadth of people interviewed (and therefore the breadth of expertise) but I also find that more often than not everyone who shows up on this pod has something really concrete and informative to say. Whereas sometimes on other pods, you get folks who are notable but don’t have a lot to say (I did recently listen to an interview with Charlotte McDonnell which while neat, both she and the cohosts proceeded to lose me entirely by flopping through a convo about “queer videogames”. So it goes.)
There are other fictional podcasts I have a great fondness for, but are completed and therefore no longer updating. TMAG is one of them but here are the two I’m really fond of.
Ars Paradoxica - 201X physicist accidentally invents time travel and is pulled back to WWII America. It starts off as a fish-out-of-water time travel story and then very quickly mutates into a kind of existentially terrifying Cold War spy thriller as the military proceeds to do Terrible Things with this new technology. One of the greatest things about this podcast is just how ready it is to completely overwrite the status quo and take big narrative swings with characters and events.
Monstrous Agonies - UK-based show, basic premise is “supernatural agony aunt”. The fictional framing is a 2am advice show slot on the Nightfolk Network, the UK’s main radio channel for the supernatural community. I like urban fantasy and I like turning the supernatural mundane and I am an advice column/gossip hound so this was basically lab-engineered to Get Me. Letters range from comedic to heartwarming to tragic. One of the notable ones from Season 1 is an ordinary human woman who writes in about her neighbor, and over the course of the letter you slowly realize the neighbor is a banshee and the letter writer is not long for this world. And then in the next episode you get a letter writer trying to re-enter the job market after being banished to Faerie for 7 years and struggling to craft their resume while under a geass forbidding them from speaking about their time Away. I love it a lot, I love how often the fantasy metaphor swung around into saying something meaningful and useful to actual life, and even if I thought the ending got a bit fanservicey, it crafted its 3 seasons well and did not overstay its welcome.