Web Crush Wednesdays: Dungeons, Dice, & Everything Nice

My obsession with Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t seem to be going away. Playing it is so much fun, and there’s so many great D&D stories told in various podcasts and webshows, that I just can’t stop watching and listening and looking for more. I especially try to look for shows featuring female DMs and female players since most popular D&D productions, such as The Adventure Zone and even Critical Role, are male-dominated. And so today, I want to tell you about about a cool and funny all-women D&D actual play podcast: Dungeons, Dice, & Everything Nice.

Some spoilers below.

Web Crush Wednesdays: The Cryptid Keeper

I’ve made no secret here that I love things of a cryptid-friendly nature, so when I stumbled across The Cryptid Keeper podcast — through no one’s recommendation except the iTunes search function — I was intrigued. I immediately downloaded an episode to check out, but worried before I had a chance to listen that the hosts would end up being Dean Winchester types to whom I was never the intended audience. Much to my surprise and joy, I soon discovered that the hosts were two millennial women #justlikeme. But really, just like me, down to their love of Lin-Manuel Miranda and tendency to quote Spongebob. Within an episode, I was hooked.

They Solved His Empathy Puzzle: The Ineffable Joy of The Adventure Zone Finale

It’s been a summer of endings for my favorite series. Always Human wrapped up its wlw slice-of-life cuteness in early June, Orphan Black finished in early August, and finally The Adventure Zone, whose humor got me through much of last year and this one, came to a close this past week. Though The Adventure Zone will continue, this particular adventure about Merle, Magnus, Taako, and a world of delightful NPCs is now over. Fittingly enough for this comedic fantasy-ish podcast, it ended with a finale which would, in other series, be considered extremely cliché. As other people on this blog know very well, I balk at the slightest hint of anything cheesy, but when I finished listening to this finale, I wasn’t rolling my eyes — I was happy. Somehow, through its 69 episodes (yes, 69, the sex number), The Adventure Zone boys had managed to construct a story in which a loving ending wasn’t only enjoyable, it was also practically required by the preceding narrative.

Massive spoilers for the entirety of The Adventure Zone below.

via Maximum Fun

Web Crush Wednesdays: #GoodMuslimBadMuslim

After catching up with They Call Us Bruce last month, I found out that They Call Us Bruce is actually part of the Potluck Podcast Collective, a network of Asian-American-hosted podcasts that discuss both serious and more comedic Asian-American issues. Starved as I was for Asian-American content, I decided to check out the other podcasts and eventually settled on #GoodMuslimBadMuslim, a podcast about American Muslim issues hosted by Bengali-American Tanzila Ahmed and Iranian-American Zahra Noorbakhsh. I found it to be a funny and informative look into both current events and American Muslim concerns about said events.

Web Crush Wednesdays: The Bright Sessions

I’ve been on quite the podcast binge lately; between Revolutions, The Adventure Zone, The Black Tapes, and my ongoing attempt to listen to every episode of Stuff You Should Know. That said, I’m not quite sure how I stumbled onto this week’s web crush—maybe a mention on my Tumblr dash?—but I’m glad I did. The Bright Sessions is a fascinating podcast about a woman—Dr. Bright—who specializes in therapy for atypicals, people with various powers. The show is a great blend of X-Men-like powers, teen drama, conspiracies, secrets, and complex moral issues, alongside a positive portrayal of mental healthcare and therapeutic coping mechanisms.

Minor spoilers for the show below the jump!

Web Crush Wednesdays: They Call Us Bruce

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, so I have the perfect web crush for us today. They Call Us Bruce is a fairly new podcast, but it’s a timely one: hosts Jeff Yang and Phil Yu started it in March of this year to talk about Asian-American issues in pop culture, just in time to catch up with the explosions of wrong that were Death Note, Iron Fist, and Ghost in the Shell. And ever since its inception, the podcast has only gotten better and more insightful in its commentary.

Web Crush Wednesdays: Trash & Treasures

“A bunch of friends who might not be film experts, but sure do have funny opinions, watch bad movies and rag on them” is a podcasting trope by now, if such a thing can exist. How do you wade through the sea of cinematic chit-chat to find one you know will be good? That’s not actually a question I can answer, since I was lucky enough to stumble into Trash & Treasures sideways, but I can help by assuring you that Trash & Treasures is one worth checking out.

Trash & Treasures is where self-described “three weirdos”, Vrai, Dorothy, and Chris, watch movies and sometimes TV series that have been lost down the back of the pop culture couch. Maybe they’re a product of Disney’s awkward and edgy dark era where the company was low on funds and fighting with Don Bluth, maybe they’re an obscure single-release piece of queer action cinema, maybe they’re… just plain bad. Each episode is devoted to a different piece of media, and the trio discuss the plot, context and history of how this movie came to be and how they came to find it, and which parts of it are terrible and which parts are actually, maybe, kind of good.

Fanfiction Fridays: Lunar Interlude: Something New by Wildgoosery

(via Maximum Fun)

Welcome back from our May blog break! I hope you all had a good May the Fourth, despite everything that’s been going on and all the calls to the government that you may or may not be making. It’s hard times in the world lately, and sometimes we just need to relax, you know? That’s why I’m kicking us off this month with this good good The Adventure Zone fanfic.

Spoilers through Episode 50 of The Adventure Zone.

Lady Geek Girl Reviews: Rabbits

Pacific Northwest Stories, which has expanded to become Public Radio Alliance, the same group that creates shows like The Black Tapes and Tanis, has recently come out with a new podcast called Rabbits. The podcast is only four episodes in and it is definitely addictive and interesting, but it also already has several issues that really bug me.

Spoilers for Rabbits below.

(image via theghostinmymachine)

Web Crush Wednesdays: The Adventure Zone

(via Maximum Fun)

In mid-2016, the U.S. presidential election had just kicked into high gear with the announcement of Orange Cheeto Dust as the Republican presidential nominee, and I started looking for a comical podcast to take my mind off things. A friend of mine recommended The Adventure Zone, a podcast by the McElroy brothers, without really telling me what it was about. Mostly what I knew about the McElroys was that they were from my own home state and had some well-known podcasts, so I went in with absolutely no knowledge of the game they were playing, laughed at some jokes, and listened to an episode or so when I had the time. Before I knew it, I had somehow gone from “an ep whenever” to “three or four eps a day” because I was so invested in the story, and it’s definitely one of the few things that keeps me laughing even in this news vortex of despair. Now that The Adventure Zone is hurtling towards a sure-to-be hilarious and heartrending finale, I feel like it’s past time to try to get some of you to jump on this train with me.

Minor spoilers below!