Monday, June 01, 2020

Podcast Roundup May 2020

Last month, I whined about the lack of good podcasting content because so much of it had been taken over by Covid-19-related news and things have not gotten better. I have very little to to add to my list of things I dearly loved listening to this month.



Finding Drago is a podcast from ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).  I don't want to give too much away about this podcast because it's sort of fascinating how I thought the podcast was going to be about one thing, but it turned out to be about another. Two dudes, Alexei and Cameron, are your run-of-the-mill podcasters who used to have a podcast together talking about movies. They watched Rocky IV (Drago is Rocky's opponent in the film) and got some strange comments about it, but didn't really follow-up. Years later, Alexei starts to go down a rabbit hole that involves Wikipedia and an a Google search. Before you know it, these two fools are interviewing sports journalists and historians and hijinks ensue. It was just the type of light-hearted entertainment I needed right now.  


Harry Potter Unspoiled! is part of the Unspoiled! network, which covers television, movies, and books with one person who has already consumed the media and another person who is completely unspoiled.  Natasha claims to be a Harry Potter superfan (but has obviously not read the books as many times as I have because the number of times she says "I forgot that happened" makes me want to scream) and RoShawn has little information about the series.  They go through the books, chapter by chapter, getting RoShawn's reactions and predictions as Natasha walks a fine line between reading lines that she likes or are important without spoiling RoShawn.

I don't always love this show because Natasha is not my kind of person. But I listen because RoShawn's the absolute best.  She is SUCH A GOOD READER. She picks up on foreshadowing so quickly and efficiently and she has throwaway lines that are completely spot on predictions.  She's empathetic but tough and I love hearing her take on how characters behave and how situations play out. I also LOVED that RoShawn was a Harry Potter skeptic. She started reading this books under a certain amount of duress and you can see her falling in love with the whole wizarding world and the plot and she starts to CARE so much for the characters until it's the last book and RoShawn is basically talking about she doesn't want to read it because all she feels is dread.

RoShawn is my kind of person.

I've been listening to this podcast because it's comforting to go back to Harry Potter with fresh eyes. It's comforting and yet RoShawn does make me see things that I've never seen before. I want to hear her enjoying media for the first time all the time.

The biggest issue with the show is that the episodes are OLD, so it's all Obama-era sweetness and light and Trump rarely gets mentioned.  That's actually not a bad thing to me, but sometimes their tangents are much too topical and not relevant in 2020, so be aware. There are a lot of tangents and sometimes I don't really care (Natasha's stories are almost never interesting or important), but the HP talk is for real, yo.

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