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audiofictionuk · 5 months

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New Fiction Podcasts - 29th November

Twigs and Hearts Audio Drama A book that ties many together. Who picks up a copy? What powers do they serve? Between missing people and people missing, who will you trust? Twigs and Hearts. Open at your own risk. https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231002-10 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/aedf777c/podcast/rss

Frankenstein Audio Drama En expédition vers le pôle Nord, le capitaine Robert Walton et son équipage recueillent à bord de leur navire un homme et son traîneau, à la dérive sur la banquise. Cet homme entreprend alors de raconter son histoire au capitaine : il s’agit de Victor Frankenstein, un savant suisse. Originaire de Genève et adepte de la philosophie naturelle, celui-ci part étudier à Ingolstadt avec l’objectif de découvrir le moyen de donner la vie. Il se consacre alors corps et âme à son projet et finalement réussit à créer un être vivant assemblé des parties de chairs mortes. Horrifié par l'aspect hideux de l'être auquel il a donné la vie, Victor Frankenstein abandonne sa création. Mais cette dernière le poursuit, et décide finalement de se venger d'avoir été rejeté par son créateur et persécuté par la société. Ce podcast est une adaptation en 5 épisodes du roman "Frankenstein ou le Prométhée moderne" de Mary Shelley, paru en 1818. Adapté par Mehdi Bayad et réalisé par Christophe Loerke. https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231120-02 RSS: https://feeds.audiomeans.fr/feed/0c321f5e-9f33-4544-a240-bcb7930a113b.xml

Seventh Street Murders Audio Drama There’s a murderer on the streets. Not any killer, one who tracks down his victims, punishing them as part of his sick game. With the old police commissioner retired, and his incompetent son in charge of the task force, it’s up to Detectives Lorenna Mimms and Raine Osborne to solve this mystery before it’s too late. https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20230916-02 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/e7650044/podcast/rss

Starfinder Audio RPG An actual play podcast version of the Starfinder Twitch show hosted by Dragonborn Industries. https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231121-03 RSS: https://feeds.redcircle.com/be70dc76-f285-41c0-9e7f-cce474d2c930

1 of 1 Podcast Audio Book Presented by 101 Pieces Publishing. https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231122-01 RSS: https://media.rss.com/1of1podcast/feed.xml

Au pays des rêves Audio Book Des contes pour enfants où se mêlent aventures et apprentissages de la vie. Les héros vont à la rencontres d'animaux et de mondes merveilleux. https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231120-03 RSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/au-pays-des-reves

Les Rôlistes Associés Audio RPG Bienvenue, prenez place! Venez écouter les péripéties de nos valeureux aventuriers. Ils se sont rencontrés par hasard dans une auberge de la petite cité de Guet aux Dagues et se retrouvent emportés dans une mystérieuse enquête dont les enjeux sont peut-être bien plus importants qu'au premiers abords. "Aventures et forts intérieurs", l'histoire de héros pas comme les autres... https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231120-04 RSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/655b2c66a08cd90012e62208

Shortwave Kitsch Radio Show Audio Drama New Stories; Vintage Vibes! Take an exciting leap back in time to celebrate the tradition of radio drama! Shortwave Kitsch is a comedic peek into a slice of history that’ll keep you wanting more! Each show is a new work written, performed, and recorded by local Charlestonians in front of a live audience. Every episode will be available here on the modern-day interwebs so you never have to miss out on any of our stories as we travel back in time, through space, out into the great Wild West, and all around the world. Come with us on your next adventure and hold on tight for this thrilling ride! https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231121-04 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/ed2847c0/podcast/rss

Marshalltown after Midnight Audio Drama Welcome to "Marshalltown after Midnight," a mesmerizing podcast series of short eerie tales and unsolved mysteries broadcast from the fictional WKLR Radio in Morris County's Marshalltown, Indiana. In the quiet hours of the night, our host, Alex Riddle, takes you on a journey through the uncanny and supernatural events that occur in the shadows of this seemingly ordinary town. Each episode unfolds a new story, revealing the hidden, sometimes chilling, aspects of Marshalltown and its inhabitants. From inexplicable phenomena to ghostly encounters, and from time anomalies to unsolved mysteries, "Marshalltown after Midnight" brings to life the tales that are whispered about but rarely spoken of in the light of day. Alex Riddle, with his soothing yet captivating voice, becomes your guide into the unknown, blending the charm of old-school radio storytelling with the intrigue of modern narrative. This podcast is not just for the lovers of the paranormal and the aficionados of suspense. It's for anyone who relishes a good story and the thrill of a mystery left on the edge of revelation. Every episode promises a unique blend of folklore, mystery, and the supernatural, making you question what's real and what lurks in the corners of your imagination. Join us at WKLR as we explore the peculiar happenings of Marshalltown. Remember, in this town, nothing is as it seems, and every shadow could tell a story. Are you ready to delve into the mysteries of Marshalltown after Midnight? https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231119-02 RSS: https://www.spreaker.com/show/6014714/episodes/feed

Dis juste quelques mots, pour décrire notre amour Audio Book Voilà mon premier podcast, Voici le contexte de l'histoire: Une jeune femme perdu trouve enfin l'amour , mais après plusieurs mois de couples . Elle était loin d'imaginer ce qu'il ce passait derrière son dos. Il était avocat . Assistante . Meilleure amie. Un véritable encu***. Elle décide de partir aussi loin qu'elle peut mais l'amour n'est pas si loin qu'elle le pense... et certains démons vont refaire surface. https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231122-02 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/edb64174/podcast/rss

Neon Inkwell Audio Drama This innovative compilation series features short form podcasts from a variety of creators. This project looks to highlight new and underrepresented creators, as well as showcasing a few from recognized Rusty Quill favourites. Whether it’s a post-apocalyptic space thriller or a quirky monster road trip, Neon Inkwell listeners will always have something new to discover. https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231124-01 RSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/neon-inkwell

Gone Bush Audio Drama Gone Bush- Blue Mountains is a 7 part brand-crafted comedy from Dweezl Productions. Written by Brett Danalake and Iain Triffitt, based on their play. Directed by Malcolm Frawley. Produced by Beth Champion https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231123-01 RSS: https://www.gonebush-bluemtns.com.au/feed.xml

Forgive Me Father Audio Drama Forgive Me Father is a techo-surreal horror that takes place both in the virtual reality world of Bright City as well as the real world. https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231123-02 RSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/forgive-me-father

Build a Prince: A Royal Christmas Love Story Audio Drama When fiercely independent Princess Adelaide of Alpinoa discovers she must be married by Christmas in order to be crowned queen, she decides to secretly create the perfect prince out of handsome American commoner, Hayden. What’s intended as a formal arrangement turns into something more when Hayden’s kindness and unconventional charm begin breaking down her walls. But little do they know, not everyone wants her to be queen, forcing Adelaide to fight for her country, open herself up to love, and come to terms with who she’s meant to be - all in time for Christmas. https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231124-02 RSS: https://feed.podbean.com/buildaprince/feed.xml

Voices from the Ledge Audio Book Have you ever felt so desperate or so depressed that you felt like giving up? Be honest, now, did you ever say to yourself, ”I’m probably worth more dead than alive?” Julie suffered from Empty Nest Syndrome. She had been forced into early retirement while her husband had hit the pinnacle of his career. She was lost. What she didn’t know was that her depression was normal. But Julie had a plan. She was going to end her misery, however, in the execution of it, a remarkable thing happened. She meets four women who were at the same hotel on a girl’s get-away weekend. They have a very strange impact on her. Find out what happens when you’re about to give up on life, but that gets interrupted by strangers who really have lived life~! https://audiofiction.co.uk/show.php?id=20231117-05 RSS: https://feed.podbean.com/voicesfromtheledge/feed.xml

#audio fiction #fiction podcast

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ear-worthy · 1 year

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Bass Reeves Mini-Series Podcast: The Man Who Inspired The Lone Ranger

One of the most persistent and attractive myths concerns The Wild West of post-Civil War America. "Patriots" view it nostalgically as a time and place when "men were real men," frontier justice was meted out fairly to all, and guns were routinely used to settle all disputes.

Sadly, none of those myths are true. Frontier justice was still hobbled by racism, gunfights were actually a rare occurrence, and most emigrants to the West were families struggling to make ends meet. That's why Parcast's latest mini-series Bass Reeves: No Master But Duty, from the Solved Murders: True Crime Mysteries podcast, is such a must-listen.

It's drama wrapped in a history lesson.

Bass Reeves: No Master But Duty follows Bass’ evolution from an enslaved man, to his escape becoming a fugitive in America’s most dangerous, lawless territory just before the Civil War. Bass became a warrior, and as a U.S. Deputy Marshal protecting and providing for his family, he faced countless risks and criminals on a daily basis.

Bass Reeves was one of the first Black Deputy U.S. Marshals west of the Mississippi, who went from beginning his life in bondage to apprehending over 3,000 outlaws in America’s most deadly frontier. All four episodes are now available for Parcast, a Spotify Studio’s, investigating the life and legacy of the man widely believed to have inspired the Lone Ranger. Throughout the four-part mini-series, available exclusively for free on Spotify, host and arts-activist Darnell Ishmel takes listeners on a journey deep into the Old West, combining historical records, exclusive expert interviews including actor James Pickens Jr. and historian Art T. Burton, and a haunting original score to tell the story of one of the most prolific lawmen in American history. Eventually, Bass himself was put on trial as he stands up for his own innocence. In the final episode, as Oklahoma hurdled toward statehood, Bass faced unprecedented challenges, a firestorm of racial violence, personal tragedies, and a murder case where his commitment to duty is tested like never before involving his own son. Over the four-episode mini-series, Darnell Ishmel acts as our guide and guest host, exploring the exploits of a legendary figure of the Wild West. The man widely believed to have inspired the Lone Ranger… Who was born into slavery and became one of America’s most revered lawmen.

His name was Bass Reeves.

Episode Title: Episode 1: Bass in the Wild Episode Description: As an enslaved man, Bass Reeves fights hand-to-hand with his enslaver. Victorious, Bass escapes, becoming a fugitive in America’s most dangerous, lawless territory just before the Civil War.

Episode Title: Episode 2: U.S. Marshal Episode Description: Eager to protect his growing family, Bass becomes one of the first Black Deputy U.S. Marshals West of the Mississippi. The face of the law in a lawless land, Bass outwits and outshoots countless criminals.

Episode Title: Episode 3: Lawman vs. The Law Episode Description: Accused of murdering his cook in cold blood, Bass stands up for his own innocence - breaking himself financially. Not long after he frees himself, the Marshals become embroiled in a bloody war with a legendary Cherokee leader.

Episode Title: Episode 4: Oklahoma Burning Episode Description: As a firestorm of racial violence rages through the territory, Bass Reeves learns of his next arrest: his own son. Soon after, statehood and Jim Crow laws force Bass into retirement, while whitewashing covers up his accomplishments as Oklahoma's Lone Ranger. In search of justice, we consider his complex legacy.

Check out Bass Reeves: No Master But Duty. You may never think of The Wild West the same way again.

As Bass might say if he lived in modern society, "Do you feel lucky? Well, doing ya, punk."

#podcast #history #social justice

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magnusmysteries · 3 years

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Part 12: The Truth Monster

The Magnus Archives was a horror podcast. It is now completed. Many of the show’s mysteries were never explained on the show. I intend to explain them. Spoilers for the show, but also spoilers if you wanna solve these mysteries yourself.

In Creature Feature Martin and Basira discuss Elias’ ability to put information in people’s heads. Martin wonders if the information has to be true. Or if Elias can magically lie. I think the information does have to be true. Truths are on-brand for the Eye. If it was lies, it would be the Spiral. I also think Elias is specifically a monster representing horrible truths. He puts horrible truths in people’s heads. And in the Eyewitnesses he torments Daisy with the truth.

Furthermore I think Elias is unable to lie at all. This is a consequence of being a truth monster. This does not mean he can’t say things that are misleading, he does that often.

In Human remains he says “On the 15th of March last year, I had a query about a statement one of our researchers was after and went down to the Archives. Gertrude wasn’t there, but her desk was covered in blood (...) The police tested the blood and confirmed the DNA matched to Gertrude (...) They judged there to be almost a gallon of blood spilled, far more than the human body can lose and survive, so I assumed she was dead.”

I think all this is true. But Elias is being misleading, he now knows that’s not when Gertrude died, as he shot her on the 20th march. I think Gertrude faked her death on the 15th. Maybe she had stored some of her own blood in a freezer, for just such an occasion. Gertrude fakes her own death and goes into hiding because of the warning from Oliver Banks the day before.

In Observer Effect John asks “And you think this gives everyone an alibi?”, referring to surveillance footage. Elias does not say yes. That would have been a lie, he knows Gertrude was alive days after he found the blood. He says “The police certainly think so.”

When Daisy interrogates Elias in the Eyewitnesses, Elias is remarkably honest. He says he doesn't think that John is the murderer and that he knows exactly where John is.

In Body Builder when Tim asks Elias about if he knows about the weirdness of the Magnus Institute Elias is vague without lying: “Tim, this place is very old. It has all sorts of… idiosyncrasies and not all of them are good for the people who work here.”

In Remains to Be Seen when Basira asks Elias if he knows what the tapes are, he does not lie and say “No.” He says “What a question.”

Elias tells Basira there is a way to get Daisy back and then sends her on a wild goose chase. He’s not technically lying, as he points out he needed Basira’s absence for John to go in the coffin.

There is one time it seems like Elias lies: in Dark Matter he says “I have been observing a recent increase in people and supplies being moved to the small town of Ny-Ålesund, in Svalbard. An increase which I believe may be linked to a rather desperate attempt by the People’s Church of the Divine Host to perform a crude ritual of their own.”

Elias knows the ritual of the dark has already failed. Wouldn’t that mean they can’t perform another one so soon?

In the same episode in Manuela’s statement she challenges Gertrude to try to stop the ritual. She’s hoping the dark sun will destroy Gertrude. I think the destruction of an Archivist by the sun was supposed to be part of the ritual.

Elias believes that the cult might be planning to use the sun to kill John. That they hope this will be enough for a successful ritual. It seems unlikely this would be enough, but as Simon Fairchild explained in Big Picture, nobody really knows how the rituals work. And Elias did call the attempt desperate and crude.

It is possible Elias was right, and someone from the cult really was planning this. In Civilian Casualties John says “In the last week I’ve seen two different people wearing symbols for the People’s Church of the Divine Host”. They might have been spying on John, trying to figure out a way to get him to see the dark sun.

Elias does call himself Elias. In the Eye Opens he says “statement of Elias Bouchard”. And in the Eyewitnesses he says “correct” when Daisy asks if he is Elias. Is this not a lie if he’s really Jonah Magnus?

Maybe in a way he is both Elias and Magnus. Jonah has the ability to put information in other people’s heads. Maybe that is how he took over Elias. By putting all the information from his head into Elias’ head. (and also put his eyes in Elias' head). When Jonah is threatening to put the image of Melanie’s father dying in her head he says “I will drive that image so deep into your psyche (...) it will be there every time you close your eyes.” So Jonah has the ability to make some information more prominent in someone’s mind. Maybe he did that with Elias, made Jonah’s memories and personality much more prominent that Elias’ memories and personality. That way Jonah is in control.

#the magnus archives #tma #magnuspod #elias bouchard #jonah magnus

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theradioghost · 4 years

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hey, can i pester you for some podcast recs? something with a good dose of humour and not too many episodes to catch up on. a sprinkle of queer romance would be a nice bonus. my fave so far is tsco starship iris, and i also loved greater boston, wooden overcoats, the bright sessions and caravan. and thanks always for all your great recs! you’ve brought many hours of joy into my life :)

We Fix Space Junk -- Two intergalactic repairpeople -- a knowledgeable cyborg veteran and a former socialite on the run -- travel the universe meeting people and fixing things at the behest of the terrifying intergalactic corporation they’re trying to work off their debts to. Hilarious British sci-fi sitcom featuring Evil Space Capitalism, many many wonderful AI characters, and an absolutely delightful teenage space wasp-human-cow hybrid princess who is probably off accomplishing her grandiose special destiny somewhere offscreen while the main characters deal with things like their bosses possibly trying to kill them (again).

Death by Dying -- People have a tendency to die in odd ways in the small town of Crestfall, Idaho. Luckily the town also has an Obituary Writer, an eccentric and nameless but impeccably stylish fellow whose closest friend is the Angel of Death, and who has a knack for solving murders even though that’s definitely not his job description. Throw in walrus haikus, extremely rude ravens, Something Mysterious And Malevolent Lurking In The Dark Woods Outside Of Town, disappearing childhood homes, silent nuns, ghost bicycles, and three man-eating cats, and you get something like a delightful cross between Wooden Overcoats and Lemony Snicket. (Also, OW is peak Canonically Bisexual Dumbass.)

Less is Morgue -- Riley is a paranoid, reclusive teenager with a fondness for conspiracy theories who lives in their parents’ basement. They’re also a predatory ghoul who feeds on human flesh. Evelyn is a cheerful, outgoing young woman with questionable tastes in media. She’s also a ghost, ever since she was killed by a falling stage light at a Nickelback concert 16 years ago. And since Riley dug up and ate Evelyn’s corpse, they’re roommates! Will they ever manage to record a coherent episode of their podcast without something going ridiculously wrong and/or Riley eating one of the guests? Probably not!

Victoriocity -- The steampunk buddy-cop comedy-mystery thriller you never knew you needed but definitely do! Featuring Inspector Fleet, a grouchy, extremely driven policeman looking for the murderer of the Empire’s greatest inventor, and Clara Entwhistle, an even more driven and unfailingly upbeat rookie journalist who has just arrived in the island-spanning, bizarre cityscape of alt-history Even Greater London. Come for some of my favorite sarcastic British narration since Adams and Pratchett, stay for characters-are-begrudgingly-forced-to-work-together-until-they-come-to-genuinely-and-deeply-care-about-one-another-as-friends trope. (Also for Tom “Eric Chapman” Crowley as the aforementioned grumpy detective.)

Quid Pro Euro -- From one of the other leads of Wooden Overcoats, this doesn’t have a typical plot as such but has made me laugh so hard I pulled a muscle despite the fact that I know nothing about the EU. Which is what this near-surreal, Look Around You-style comedy is about: Felix Trench’s vision of a simultaneously hilarious and terrifying alternate European Union, seen from the perspective of a serious of educational tapes from the ‘90s predicting what the EU would look like in the 21st century. It’s hard to describe this show in any way that does it justice, but it’s incredibly funny.

Time:Bombs -- A miniseries by the exalted creators of Wolf 359, which (because they are madmen) was written, recorded, and produced in the space of one week. Also, a comedy about an NYC bomb retrieval squad on New Year’s Eve, most of whom are just trying to get through the night while their leader attempts to break a record for most bombs cleared before the calendar ticks over. Chaos and hilarity ensure.

Superstition -- Wisecracking, bi, Jewish, definitely-a-private-eye-just-don’t-check-her-qualifications Jacqueline St. James receives a message from her father, which is weird, because her parents disappeared years ago. Following the trail leads Jack to Superstition, Arizona, a town in the middle of the desert where everyone’s got secrets, assorted ghosts/monsters/cryptids harrass the locals, and the missing persons rate is the highest in the nation. As a protagonist Jack is Looking For Trouble And If She Cannot Find It She Will Create It, so while Superstition isn’t a comedy per se, it’s got a fair share of laughs and is also just so, so excellent in general.

Standard Docking Procedure -- A self-declared hopepunk scifi workplace comedy about the somewhat dysfunctional staff of Pseudopolis Station, effectively a high-tech interstellar truck stop. It’s funny and heartwarming, nothing truly bad happens, and Julia Schifini is there.

Solutions to Problems -- A morally-questionable human named Janet who has defintely never done any illegal time travel and an easygoing, physically indescribably alien who likes to go by Loaf host an intergalactic advice podcast. Are you tired of your species’ insistence on solving everything via ritual combat? Not sure how to talk to your partner about whether body-swapping has a place in your sex life? Dealing with being a superpowered teenager summoned into being by the collective will of an apocalyptic groupthink cult? Janet and Loaf have you covered! Provided that Janet’s on-and-off girlfriend, the AI who supplies the air they breathe, doesn’t kill them all first. Oddly heartfelt comedy in the form of a relationship advice radio show from the Space Future.

Middle:Below -- This show’s tagline is “Remember: bad things WILL happen,” and that is basically a lie. This is actually a short, incredibly heartwarming and frequently funny show about Taylor Quinn, the only human with the ability to pass between the land of the living (aka the Middle) and the land of ghosts (the Below). Meaning, of course, that the dead call on him to fix all their problems, with the help of a girl named Heather, a ghost named Gil, and a cat named Sans. (Also, some of the most comparatively wild live shows I’ve ever heard.)

Inn Between -- Ever wonder what fantasy characters get up to between adventures, during all that time they seem to spend at inns? This show skips all the adventuring, question, and action, instead focusing on the quiet moments between where what is Definitely Not A D&D Party meet and progress from bickering strangers brought together by circumstance to close-knit found family -- all at the inn, of course. (Lots of queer folks in here also, although there’s no romance at least in the first couple seasons.)

The Godshead Incidental -- A relatively new but very exciting and so far really enjoyable show!! Following a young woman who writes an advice column through her life in a familiar, and yet strange city where anyone might be a minor god -- your editor, your landlord, that weird guy on the street who was shouting about how he’s the God of Memory and you got into a fight with him and now you keep forgetting everything? Also, your apartment is full of pigeons now because you found out the aforementioned landlord is secretly the god of doorknobs and he’s panicking. Good luck! (Starring Ishani Kanetkar, aka Arkady from Starship Iris!)

Gal Pals Present: Overkill -- Madison, a middle schooler at a Girl Scout camp, agrees to play a game with a somewhat tastelessly bright-pink Ouija board. However, Madison doesn’t know that she’s a natural medium, and now sarcastic mid-2000s 19-year-old Aya Velasquez has joined the many ghosts who are for some reason haunting scenic Harding Park. Aya, however, will not rest until she can solve her own murder (and possibly get to know that other ghost girl a bit better, who says romance has to stop when you’re dead?). Absolutely hilarious writing of a narrator who is almost definitely wearing spectral Uggs during the entire show.

Dark Ages -- The Rivercliffe Museum of Mostly Natural History is one of the finest museums anywhere! Or it would be, if anyone ever actually visited it. Or maybe if the staff weren’t a disastrous and dysfunctional collection of criminals, weirdos, wannabe immortals, idiot bisexuals who can’t just admit they like each other, and one extremely uptight elf with no people skills. Also, it would probably help if the legendary and fearsome Dark Lord, finally returned from his millennia of dormancy to complete his prophesied conquest of the world, wasn’t hanging around watching the chaos unfold because they’ve got his crown on display. (Fantasy workplace comedy with a theme song that did not need to go that hard?)

Brimstone Valley Mall -- It’s mid-December 1999, and at one mall in South Central Pennsylvania, a group of demons are going about their evil work -- namely, working at various dinky kiosks and restaurants, hoping of achieving every demon’s dream of getting to work at Hot Topic, trying not to do too much evil because Earth is way more fun than Hell and no one wants to get promoted back home, and preparing for their band's triumphant opening performance at the upcoming Y2K party. Just one problem: their lead singer is missing. Another absolute masterwork from The Whisperforge.

Arden -- 10 years ago, Hollywood starlet Julie Capsom vanished into the woods of northern California, leaving behind a car containing a human torso that may or may not have belonged to one Ralph Montgomery. Now, private eye Brenda Bentley and reporter Bea Casely, both of whom were among the first at the scene and both of whom have their own very strong opinions on the case, are setting out to solve the mystery on their true crime podcast, Arden. Providing, of course, they can stop arguing with each other long enough to solve it. (Or, a not-really-parody-but-definitely-comedy “true crime” podcast where the crime is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet -- and even knowing that, it’s still a genuine mystery with twists and a surprise ending! -- and the hosts are wlw Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing. In other words, it’s perfect. Season 2 is upcoming soon and is adapting Hamlet!!)

Alba Salix/The Axe and Crown -- Another high fantasy workplace sitcom, this one a medical comedy about the titular not-very-personable witch who runs the kingdom’s House of Healing and the various shenanigans she gets into, between her somewhat scatterbrained sister and brother-in-law the king and queen and her assistants, an overly-whimsical fairy and a wannabe monk forced to do community service. The same feed contains The Axe and Crown, a spinoff set in the same world that manages to simultaneously be a sitcom about the staff of a local pub trying to stave off foreclosure and come up with schemes to beat their business rivals, and a heartfelt story about gentrification and recovery starring a gay veteran with PTSD? Which is possibly one of my favorite podcasts? (Also contains one of the most unbelievable crossover cameos possible: Leon Stamatis.)

The Adventures of Sir Rodney the Root -- Also a high fantasy comedy! When a witch transforms heroic Sir Rodney into a small piece of wood, his closest companion Sir Gilbert must set out to cure him by collecting several highly powerful and dangerous relics, accompanied by a snarky dwarfen thief, an imperious princess, a slightly creepy human child raised by fairies, a picky elf sorcerer, a dead unicorn possessed by the ghost of a stoner, and a bard who breaks the fourth wall too much for his own good. So far as I can tell, nobody is straight.

The Amelia Project -- A dark comedy about a secret organization that helps people fake their deaths. Which is honestly a pretty full summary, barring the two important points that 1. this show contains possibly the most continuity-warping crossover event of all time (it’s the center point of this absolutely chaotic diagram), and 2. in one episode Felix Trench plays a character named Bartholomew Fuckface Chucklepants Knucklecracker.

#podcast recs #bobbie recommends things #yujacha #asks #my posts

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Alice Bolin, The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime, Vulture (August 1, 2018)

The “true-crime boom” of the mid- to late 2010s is a strange pop-culture phenomenon, given that it is not so much a new type of programming as an acknowledgement of a centuries-long obsession: People love true stories about murder and other brands of brutality and grift, and they have gorged on them particularly since the beginning of modern journalism. The serial fiction of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins was influenced by the British public’s obsessive tracking of sensational true-crime cases in daily papers, and since then, we have hoarded gory details in tabloids and pulp paperbacks and nightly news shows and Wikipedia articles and Reddit threads.

I don’t deny these stories have proliferated in the past five years. Since the secret is out — “Oh you love murder? Me too!” — entire TV networks, podcast genres, and countless limited-run docuseries have arisen to satisfy this rumbling hunger. It is tempting to call this true-crime boom new because of the prestige sheen of many of its artifacts — Serial and Dirty John and The Jinx and Wild, Wild Country are all conspicuously well made, with lovely visuals and strong reporting. They have subtle senses of theme and character, and they often feel professional, pensive, quiet — so far from vulgar or sensational.

But well-told stories about crime are not really new, and neither is their popularity. In Cold Blood is a classic of American literature and The Executioner’s Song won the Pulitzer; Errol Morris has used crime again and again in his documentaries to probe ideas like fame, desire, corruption, and justice. The new true-crime boom is more simply a matter of volume and shamelessness: the wide array of crime stories we can now openly indulge in, with conventions of the true-crime genre more emphatically repeated and codified, more creatively expanded and trespassed against. In 2016, after two critically acclaimed series about the O.J. Simpson trial, there was talk that the 1996 murder of Colorado 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey would be the next case to get the same treatment. It was odd, hearing O.J.: Made in America, the epic and depressing account of race and celebrity that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, discussed in the same breath with the half-dozen unnecessary TV specials dredging up the Ramsey case. Despite my avowed love of Dateline, I would not have watched these JonBenét specials had a magazine not paid me to, and suffice it to say they did very little either to solve the 20-year-old crime (ha!) or examine our collective obsession with it.

Clearly, the insight, production values, or cultural capital of its shiniest products are not what drives this new wave of crime stories. O.J.: Made in America happened to be great and the JonBenét specials happened to be terrible, but producers saw them as part of the same trend because they knew they would appeal to at least part of the same audience. I’ve been thinking a lot about these gaps between high and low, since there are people who consume all murder content indiscriminately, and another subset who only allow themselves to enjoy the “smart” kind. The difference between highbrow and lowbrow in the new true crime is often purely aesthetic. It is easier than ever for producers to create stories that look good and seem serious, especially because there are templates now for a style and voice that make horrifying stories go down easy and leave the viewer wanting more. But for these so-called prestige true-crime offerings, the question of ethics — of the potential to interfere in real criminal cases and real people’s lives — is even more important, precisely because they are taken seriously.

Like the sensational tone, disturbing, clinical detail, and authoritarian subtext that have long defined schlocky true crime as “trash,” the prestige true-crime subgenre has developed its own shorthand, a language to tell its audience they’re consuming something thoughtful, college-educated, public-radio influenced. In addition to slick and creative production, highbrow true crime focuses on character sketches instead of police procedure. “We’re public radio producers who are curious about why people do what they do,” Phoebe Judge, the host of the podcast Criminal, said. Judge has interviewed criminals (a bank robber, a marijuana brownie dealer), victims, and investigators, using crime as a very simple window into some of the most interesting and complicated lives on the planet.

Highbrow true crime is often explicitly about the piece’s creator, a meta-commentary about the process of researching and reporting such consequential stories. Serial’s Sarah Koenig and The Jinx’s Andrew Jarecki wrestle with their boundaries with the subjects (Adnan Syed and Robert Durst, respectively, both of whom have been tried for murder) and whether they believe them. They sift through evidence and reconstruct timelines as they try to create a coherent narrative from fragments.

I remember saying years ago that people who liked Serial should try watching Dateline, and my friend joked in reply, “Yeah, but Dateline isn’t hosted by my friend Sarah.” One reason for the first season of Serial’s insane success — it is still the most-downloaded podcast of all time — is the intimacy audiences felt with Koenig as she documented her investigation of a Baltimore teenager’s murder in real time, keeping us up to date on every vagary of evidence, every interview, every experiment. Like the figure of the detective in many mystery novels, the reporter stands in for the audience, mirroring and orchestrating our shifts in perspective, our cynicism and credulity, our theories, prejudices, frustrations, and breakthroughs.

This is what makes this style of true crime addictive, which is the adjective its makers most crave. The stance of the voyeur, the dispassionate observer, is thrilling without being emotionally taxing for the viewer, who watches from a safe remove. (This fact is subtly skewered in Gay Talese’s creepy 2017 Netflix documentary, Voyeur.) I’m not sure how much of my eye-rolling at the popularity of highbrow true crime has to do with my general distrust of prestige TV and Oscar-bait movies, which are usually designed to be enjoyed in the exact same way and for the exact same reasons as any other entertainment, but also to make the viewer feel good about themselves for watching. When I wrote earlier that there are viewers who consume all true crime, and those who only consume “smart” true crime, I thought, “And there must be some people who only like dumb true crime.” Then I realized that I am sort of one of them.

There are specimens of highbrow true crime that I love, Criminal and O.J.: Made in America among them, but I truly enjoy Dateline much more than I do Serial, which in my mind is tedious to the edge of pointlessness. I find myself perversely complaining that good true crime is no fun — as self-conscious as it may be, it will never be as entertaining as the Investigation Discovery network’s output, most of which is painfully serious. (The list of ID shows is one of the most amusing artifacts on the internet, including shows called Bride Killas, Momsters: Moms Who Murder, and Sex Sent Me to the Slammer.) Susan Sontag famously defined camp as “seriousness that fails,” and camp is obviously part of the appeal of a show called Sinister Ministers or Southern Fried Homicide. Network news magazine shows like Dateline and 48 Hours are somber and melodramatic, often literally starting voice-overs on their true-crime episodes with variations of “it was a dark and stormy night.” They trade in archetypes — the perfect father, the sweet girl with big dreams, the divorcee looking for a second chance — and stick to a predetermined narrative of the case they’re focusing on, unconcerned about accusations of bias. They are sentimental and yet utterly graphic, clinical in their depiction of brutal crimes.

It’s always talked around in discussions of why people like true crime: It is … funny? The comedy in horror movies seems like a given, but it is hardly permitted to say that you are amused by true disturbing stories, out of respect for victims. But in reducing victims and their families to stock characters, in exaggerating murderers to superhuman monsters, in valorizing police and forensic scientists as heroic Everymen, there is dark humor in how cheesy and misguided these pulpy shows are, how bad we are at talking about crime and drawing conclusions from it, how many ways we find to distance ourselves from the pain of victims and survivors, even when we think we are honoring them. (The jokey titles and tongue-in-cheek tone of some ID shows seem to indicate more awareness of the inherent humor, but in general, the channel’s programming is almost all derivative of network TV specials.) I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but in its obvious failures, I enjoy this brand of true crime more straightforwardly than its voyeuristic, documentary counterpart, which, in its dignified guise, has maybe only perfected a method of making us feel less gross about consuming real people’s pain for fun.

Crime stories also might be less risky when they are more stilted, more clinical. To be blunt, what makes a crime story less satisfying are often the ethical guidelines that help reporters avoid ruining people’s lives. With the popularity of the podcasts S-Town and Missing Richard Simmons, there were conversations about the ethics of appropriating another person’s story, particularly when they won’t (or can’t) participate in your version of it. The questions of ethics and appropriation are even heavier when stories intersect with their subjects’ criminal cases, because journalism has always had a reciprocal relationship with the justice system. Part of the exhilarating intimacy of the first season of Serial was Koenig’s speculation about people who never agreed to be part of the show, the theories and rabbit holes she went through, the risks she took to get answers. But there is a reason most reporters do all their research, then write their story. It is inappropriate, and potentially libelous, to let your readers in on every unverified theory about your subject that occurs to you, particularly when wondering about a private citizen’s innocence or guilt in a horrific crime.

Koenig’s off-the-cuff tone had other consequences, too, in the form of amateur sleuths on Reddit who tracked down people involved with the case, pored over court transcripts, and reviewed cellular tower evidence, forming a shadow army of investigators taking up what they saw as the gauntlet thrown down by the show. The journalist often takes on the stance of the professional amateur, a citizen providing information in the public interest and using the resources at hand to get answers. At times during the first season of Serial, Koenig’s methods are laughably amateurish, like when she drives from the victim’s high school to the scene of the crime, a Best Buy, to see if it was possible to do it in the stated timeline. She is able to do it, which means very little, since the crime occurred 15 years earlier. Because so many of her investigative tools were also ones available to listeners at home, some took that as an invitation to play along.

This blurred line between professional and amateur, reporter and private investigator, has plagued journalists since the dawn of modern crime reporting. In 1897, amid a frenzied rivalry between newspaper barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, true crime coverage was so popular that Hearst formed a group of reporters to investigate criminal cases called the “Murder Squad.” They wore badges and carried guns, forming essentially an extralegal police force who both assisted and muddled official investigations. Seeking to get a better story and sell more papers, it was common for reporters to trample crime scenes, plant evidence, and produce dubious witnesses whose accounts fit their preferred version of the case. And they were trying to get audiences hooked in very similar ways, by crowdsourcing information and encouraging readers to send in tips.

Of course the producers of Serial never did anything so questionable as the Murder Squad, though there are interesting parallels between the true-crime podcast and crime coverage in early daily newspapers. They were both innovations in the ways information was delivered to the public that sparked unexpectedly personal, participatory, and impassioned responses from their audiences. It’s tempting to say that we’ve come full circle, with a new true-crime boom that is victim to some of the same ethical pitfalls of the first one: Is crime journalism another industry deregulated by the anarchy of the internet? But as Michelle Dean wrote of Serial, “This is exactly the problem with doing journalism at all … You might think you are doing a simple crime podcast … and then you become a sensation, as Serial has, and the story falls to the mercy of the thousands, even millions, of bored and curious people on the internet.”

Simply by merit of their popularity, highbrow crime stories are often riskier than their lowbrow counterparts. Kathryn Schulz wrote in The New Yorker about the ways the makers of the Netflix series Making a Murderer, in their attempt to advocate for the convicted murderer Steven Avery, omit evidence that incriminates him and put forth an incoherent argument for his innocence. Advocacy and intervention are complicated actions for journalists to undertake, though they are not novel. Schulz points to a scene in Making a Murderer where a Dateline producer who is covering Avery is shown saying, “Right now murder is hot.” In this moment the creators of Making a Murderer are drawing a distinction between themselves and Dateline, as Schulz writes, implying that, “unlike traditional true-crime shows … their work is too intellectually serious to be thoughtless, too morally worthy to be cruel.” But they were not only trying to invalidate Avery’s conviction; they (like Dateline, but more effectively) were also creating an addictive product, a compelling story.

That is maybe what irks me the most about true crime with highbrow pretensions. It appeals to the same vices as traditional true crime, and often trades in the same melodrama and selective storytelling, but its consequences can be more extreme. Adnan Syed was granted a new trial after Serial brought attention to his case; Avery was denied his appeal, but people involved in his case have nevertheless been doxxed and threatened. I’ve come to believe that addictiveness and advocacy are rarely compatible. If they were, why would the creators of Making a Murderer have advocated for one white man, when the story of being victimized by a corrupt police force is common to so many people across the U.S., particularly people of color?

It does feel like a shame that so many resources are going to create slick, smart true crime that asks the wrong questions, focusing our energy on individual stories instead of the systemic problems they represent. But in truth, this is is probably a feature, not a bug. I suspect the new true-crime obsession has something to do with the massive, terrifying problems we face as a society: government corruption, mass violence, corporate greed, income inequality, police brutality, environmental degradation, human-rights violations. These are large-scale crimes whose resolutions, though not mysterious, are also not forthcoming. Focusing on one case, bearing down on its minutia and discovering who is to blame, serves as both an escape and a means of feeling in control, giving us an arena where justice is possible.

Skepticism about whether journalists appropriate their subjects’ stories, about high and low, and about why we enjoy the crime stories we do, all swirl through what I think of as the post–true-crime moment. Post–true crime is explicitly or implicity about the popularity of the new true-crime wave, questioning its place in our culture, and resisting or responding to its conventions. One interesting document of post–true crime is My Favorite Murder and other “comedy murder podcasts,” which, in retelling stories murder buffs have heard on one million Investigation Discovery shows, unpack the ham-fisted clichés of the true-crime genre. They show how these stories appeal to the most gruesome sides of our personalities and address the obvious but unspoken fact that true crime is entertainment, and often the kind that is as mindless as a sitcom. Even more cutting is the Netflix parody American Vandal, which both codifies and spoofs the conventions of the new highbrow true crime, roasting the genre’s earnest tone in its depiction of a Serial-like investigation of some lewd graffiti.

There is also the trend in the post–true-crime era of dramatizing famous crime stories, like in The Bling Ring; I, Tonya; and Ryan Murphy’s anthology series American Crime Story, all of which dwell not only on the stories of infamous crimes but also why they captured the public imagination. There is a camp element in these retellings, particularly when famous actors like John Travolta and Sarah Paulson are hamming it up in ridiculous wigs. But this self-consciousness often works to these projects’ advantage, allowing them to show heightened versions of the cultural moments that led to the most outsize tabloid crime stories. Many of these fictionalized versions take journalistic accounts as their source material, like Nancy Jo Sales’s reporting in Vanity Fair for The Bling Ring and ESPN’s documentary on Tonya Harding, The Price of Gold, for I, Tonya. This seems like a best-case scenario for prestige true crime to me: parsing famous cases from multiple angles and in multiple genres, trying to understand them both on the level of individual choices and cultural forces.

Perhaps the most significant contributions to post–true crime, though, are the recent wave of personal accounts about murder and crime: literary memoirs like Down City by Leah Carroll, Mean by Myriam Gurba, The Hot One by Carolyn Murnick, After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry, and We Are All Shipwrecks by Kelly Grey Carlisle all tell the stories of murder seen from close-up. (It is significant that all of these books are by women. Carroll, Perry, and Carlisle all write about their mothers’ murders, placing them in the tradition of James Ellroy’s great memoir My Dark Places, but without the tortured, fetish-y tone.) This is not a voyeuristic first person, and the reader can’t detach and find joy in procedure; we are finally confronted with the truth of lives upended by violence and grief. There’s also Ear Hustle, the brilliant podcast produced by the inmates of San Quentin State Prison. The makers of Ear Hustle sometimes contemplate the bad luck and bad decisions that led them to be incarcerated, but more often they discuss the concerns of daily life in prison, like food, sex, and how to make mascara from an inky page from a magazine. This is a crime podcast that is the opposite of sensational, addressing the systemic truth of crime and the justice system, in stories that are mundane, profound, and, yes, addictive.

#true crime #adnan syed #media #ethics #The Way We Live Now #culture #andrew jarecki #james ellroy #criminal justice #detective fiction

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trainsinanime · 4 years

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Red Web Mystery Reviews

Red Web is a podcast by Rooster Teeth featuring two guys from that whole Achievement Hunter thing that I can never tell apart (but you don’t need to know anything about this) about unsolved mysteries that often but not always have something to do with the internet. Let’s review the episodes out so far, because… well, no reason, honestly, I just wanted to.

Lake City Quiet Pills

Based on their information presented here, this whole thing and their explanation for it seem plausible enough. You have to assume that this group of apparently assassins is kind of bad at operational security, but there’s actually a lot of cases where big criminals got exposed because they used the same URL or E-mail address or similar.

Satoshi Nakamoto

I already knew about this beforehand, and I would say they did a good job explaining it. Personally, I think they should have gone into a bit more of how much a shit-show the whole Newsweek Dorian Nakamoto thing was; in short, there was no reason to believe this person had anything to do with Bitcoin, he didn’t even speak good english (which is probably what caused some of the misunderstandings), and it was both a huge embarrassment for Newsweek (at least I hope they felt embarrassed) and they needlessly hounded a completely uninvolved person for this.

But then they get into new evidence, and we see a problem that I think is a bit systematic: They don’t really go into how trustworthy the evidence is. Specifically, they say that the one person who can cast light on this might be… John McAfee. Fucking John McAfee. Seriously, that guy?

For context: John McAfee did indeed create the antivirus company that still bears his name. But he sold it in the 1990s, and thanks to money and drugs, he’s just gotten plain crazy ever since. There was the whole thing where he was implicated in a murder in Belize a couple of years ago; he kept blogging from a jail in Guatemala, later returned to the US, and keeps being part of outlandish schemes (including two presidential runs, though he failed to get the nomination for libertarian candidate both 2016 and 2020), controversies, and supposedly super-awesome tech startups that never go anywhere. It makes perfect sense that he’d claim to be involved in the creation of Bitcoin. It makes no sense whatsoever to believe him. If you’re interested and have way too much time, read what El Reg has to say about him.

Mortis

Oh god. This one makes me both want to laugh and cry. Mostly laugh, to be honest, because it is such an obvious nothing burger, but also weep for the internet that was.

The story is that they found a participant in an early internet warez network who wasn’t that great at OpSec. This is only fully revealed at the end, and they don’t even seem to have noticed that this case is clearly and completely solved.

Most of the humour for me comes from the fact that they’re rediscovering the old pre-social web, and are convinced that it’s all weird and nefarious. Why would one person register websites for their interests, and then never do anything with them? Because that’s what the internet was like back then in the late 1990s and early 2000s! Hey, look, here’s my ugly special-interest website from that era that hasn’t been updated in years and isn’t going to be updated any time soon either. That’s just what was normal back then. Same with a website for every person, or trying to do your own garage sales via your website. That was the thing to do back then. And yes, obviously it sucked and didn’t work very well.

They even realise that this is what „might“ have been going on, and theorise about this hypothetical early web. „Maybe if there was some website that linked all these together and allowed you to search“ - yeah, those existed. Digg and Technorati and Del.icio.us, remember those? All bought by Yahoo and promptly forgotten. And to be fair, they never worked as well as real social networks did.

But back then we had this glorious freedom. No sudden porn bans like here on Tumblr; no need to match any predefined template for what posts are, no user tracking by Facebook, nobody telling you that you’re tagging your posts wrong…

It’s understandable why we lost that web. Linking together is much easier if all content is owned and controlled by like four companies. It also makes it much easier to set up a new account; setting up a new website is just a lot of pain and knowledge you have to have that you don’t necessarily want to have.

But now we live in our monocultures and must live with whatever content decisions our corporate overlords make and then sell us as „community standards“, and the wild and weird web that we used to have is only a memory. And sometimes not even that; sometimes these new young kids treat it as a „weird nefarious mystery“. Actually, I just looked it up, and Alfredo and Trevor are both around 30, just a few years younger than I am. They were alive for at least the tail end if this. These guys could have known this shit!

So, yeah, the story here is not the mystery; it’s a lament for the web we lost.

D.B. Cooper

Again one I already knew, and I think they gave a good overview. Personally I’m in the camp of people who assume that he failed to make a safe landing.

Happy Valley Dream Survey

This seems vaguely interesting. One thing that kind of annoys me about this podcast is that they (well mostly Alfredo) generally assume that everything strange is necessarily nefarious, without any evidence. The whole thing here leads nowhere, after all.

Lead Masks Case

Again, I’m not sure how much weight to put on the other evidence they listed, especially that whole supposed UFO sighting. Yes, that one woman may have been very respected in her community and/or had a high social status, whatever that means. But the thing is that rich people who are super-involved in their church community or whatever can still (through no fault of their own) be unreliable witnesses and invent things that weren’t there, or not the way they were described.

Cicada 3301 (parts 1 and 2)

Personally I find this one less interesting because it’s not a mystery, it’s a riddle, and that’s way less fun. Much of the circumstances are weird enough, I guess.

What confuses me the most about this is how it’s supposed to be a recruitment tool, but it doesn’t seem to be very good at that. A lot of the steps don’t really seem to be that difficult and require just some fairly standard hacker skills. This is similar to the Satashi Nakamoto case, where one hint was „knows C++ programming“. Lots of people know that, and it’s something you can totally teach yourself. And if the people who were recruited through this were really supposed to program software, well… why did no part of this test whether they could do so? That’s a whole different skill. My conclusion is that this Cicada group is either a long con or a group that is nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is.

One thing to note here: They just casually assume that the FBI and NSA and so on are monitoring the whole internet, in real time, all the time. Which is true, we know that thanks to Edward Snowden. Isn’t that much more nefarious than any of the other mysteries here put together? How did we get to a place where Americans both think „this is the country that has all the freedom“ and „if you say or search for the wrong things you’ll get put on a government watchlist that’s just normal“ at the same time? Pervasive monitoring of a population is pretty much the exact opposite of freedom, but apparently we all in the western world just take it in stride anyway. That’s nothing to do with this podcast, though.

Conclusion

Generally okay podcast. The hosts are good storytellers, even if the stories are sometimes a bit shaky. It is at least at no point overly gross or insultingly stupid (unlike the official Rooster Teeth Podcast, which is both). So I think I can recommend it if you need something, anything to fill the quiet, and you’re already out of episodes of Black Box Down.

#red web #rooster teeth

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vmheadquarters · 5 years

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It’s become old hat for a cult TV show to get revived in some capacity now, but rare is the TV show that gets two different revivals across different mediums. Veronica Mars is that rare show. First, it was brought back from the dead because of a passionate crowdfunding campaign that led to a movie released by Warner Bros. Pictures in the spring of 2014. Now, Veronica Mars is back again with an eight-episode fourth season airing on Hulu starting on Friday, July 26. Where the Kickstartered movie felt haphazard and mildly uninspired, this revival is incredibly well-written and conceived, a return to form at least as good as the show’s second season.

For the uninitiated, Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) is a hard-nosed private investigator in the Southern California hamlet of Neptune, where the richest of the rich rub elbows with the lower classes. On the original show, airing on both UPN and the CW, Veronica is a high-school student whose dad Keith (Enrico Colantoni) had once been the city’s sheriff before accusing one of the richest men in town of having murdered a teenage girl (who happened to be Veronica’s best friend). After his fall from grace, Keith became a PI, with Veronica as his aide and a sleuth of her own, trying to solve the case of her best friend’s death and figure out who date-raped her at a wild party. Over the show’s three seasons, Veronica graduated high school, solved various murders and other crimes, went to college, had numerous romantic entanglements, etc. The show, created by Rob Thomas, was always at its best in balancing Veronica’s distinctively witty, charming personality with a neo-noir sensibility.

SPOILER BENEATH CUT

And the fourth season of Veronica Mars (I’ve seen all eight episodes) is a remarkable, bracing reminder of why the show is so rightfully beloved. Veronica and Keith are still at Mars Investigations in Neptune, but a lot around them has changed. After the events of the movie, there’s literally a new sheriff (Dawnn Lewis) in town, who’s clearly a good detective despite still disdaining the presence of PIs like Ketih and Veronica. Our heroine and her paramour Logan (Jason Dohring) live together, but Logan, a Naval Intelligence officer, is often away on classified missions. He returns from his latest, at the same time as Neptune celebrates another hedonistic Spring Break season, with a surprising question for our heroine: a marriage proposal.

Veronica can only distract herself from that shocking offer when a bomb goes off at one of the local motels, leading her down a rabbit-hole conspiracy where she and Keith are tasked with figuring out who set off the bomb and why. And, in Veronica Mars form, the question of who the bomber is involves a lot more figures than would be expected. There’s a Muslim Congressman and his rigid family, a true-crime obsessive (Patton Oswalt), a Neptune entrepreneur and his enigmatic fixer (J.K. Simmons), Mexican hitmen, and more.

The era of streaming has made it so even a revival of a beloved show doesn’t guarantee it will feel the same as the original did. As was the case with the show’s third season, the case here doesn’t span the course of 20-plus episodes. There’s also not a lot of side cases for Veronica to investigate, just the spate of bombings and their unique aftereffects, as detailed in the eight 50-minute installments. And unlike in the original series, there are only three regulars in the opening credits: Bell, Colantoni, and Dohring. (This credit choice is interesting because you could make a very solid case that Oswalt, Simmons, and Clifton Collins, Jr., as one of the aforementioned hitmen, have at least as much to do as Dohring does. Oswalt, too, appears in every episode.) A number of the show’s supporting characters from the old days do show up, but often very briefly and sometimes in ways that make you wonder why they’re there to begin with. (As a longtime fan of the show, I was very happy to see Percy Daggs III as Wallace Fennel again, but the character serves very little purpose in these episodes.)

That said, within the first hour, it becomes exceedingly clear that Rob Thomas and his writing staff — including, in a delightfully inexplicable twist, legendary NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — have an exciting, novelistic story to tell that demands to be told in ways that simply weren’t the case with the recent film. The world has changed in the 15 years since the show premiered, but those changes all are logical within the framework of the new season. Oswalt’s character, who convenes a group of fellow “Murder Heads”, is as solid a way to skewer the rise of true-crime shows, podcasts, etc., without actually turning him into a would-be podcaster. And the presence of a politician of color introduces the inescapable element of how the world looks today. (Though the current president’s name doesn’t get mentioned, there are enough references to him that make you smile at how much Veronica must loathe him.)

Somehow, it all largely works, though a few of the subplots and new characters work better than others once you look at it all in hindsight. The new cast — also including Izabela Vidovic as a teenage girl with a connection to the bombing who might as well be Veronica Mars 2.0, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste as a local club owner — all acquits themselves quite well. Simmons, as an ex-con who seems like the obvious bomber from the outset, is the MVP. He and Colantoni have a loose, lived-in chemistry, as Keith and this new guy try to feel each other out and end up with a shared mutual respect despite being on two sides of the law. But Howell-Baptiste, who some will recognize from a recurring role on the third season of The Good Place (making her time onscreen with Bell even more enjoyable), is a lot of fun too. And Oswalt especially, who’s close to the third lead of the season, proves his dramatic chops in a role that could’ve easily been a source of mockery.

Where the season stumbles (and only slightly) is in its finale, both in revealing the truth behind the first bombing and subsequent bombs set around Neptune as a morbid way to punctuate Spring Break parties, and in revealing what will happen next for Veronica. Being a neo-noir show implies that Veronica Mars can’t ever truly be all sunshine and rainbows — our hard-bitten heroine would likely blanche at such a fate. However, the events of the last 30 minutes of the season, despite technically playing fair logically, feel a bit reverse-engineered (and one specific choice is probably going to alienate a lot of fans).

These spoilery quibbles are just that, though: quibbles. Largely, the streamlined focus on having an eight-episode story spread out over the course of 400 or so minutes makes for the kind of season a streaming service like Hulu must be salivating over: this is an exceptionally bingeable revival, with each episode structured both as its own thing and offering enough teasing excitement for the next installment that you just want to keep watching. More to the point, the story mostly feels true to the Veronica Mars world; it’s the truly singular revival that proves its existence almost instantly and is one of the best TV returns to date.

/Film Rating: 8 out of 10

#veronica-mars #veronica mars #vm spoilers #veronica mars S4 #veronica mars S4 reviews

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ucbcomedy · 7 years

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UCB in the Wild

Videos by UCB performers and filmmakers out there in the jungle of comedy.

The Triplets Of Kings County & The Quest For Truth - Second Season Out Now

WATCH SEASON ONE - IN THE CITY OF DOOM

Welcome to the unpredictable alternate reality of The Triplets Of Kings County. It’s a highly visual slapstick adventure where three midwestern triplet transplants are perpetually perturbed by a cavalcade of mildly annoying supernatural beings. Together, Colin, Terry and Wolf, our identical eighteen-year- old triplet heroes, must solve the mystery of their parents murder, prevent the apocalypse and do all the chores.

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The show is a whirlwind of the mundane and spectacular, like the Marx's Brothers and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein smashed on top of Army of Darkness. Each episode brings a new set of problems and plot lines for the Triplets, from helping Landlord Jo (Jo Firestone) evict an invasion of Andy Warhol clones, to beating Death at his own game (Twister™), to reconnecting Terry with his long lost son, vampire Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins.

WATCH SEASON TWO - THE QUEST FOR TRUTH

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And it features some of New York City’s best comedic talent the likes of Julio Torres (SNL) and Jo Firestone (Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon) who both recently got Comedy Central Half Hour Specials as well as Dan Chamberlain (Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon), Jonathan Braylock (Seriously.tv, Black Men Can't Jump In Hollywood Podcast) Lorelei Ramirez, Katie Hartman, Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson and more - all playing an unexpected array of surreal characters.

The series was created, written by and stars Michael Wolf, Colin O’Brien and Terence O’Brien. We’ve been writing and performing comedy in New York for the past five years including work for Comedy Central, MTV, Above Average, Just for Laughs Festival, a long running primetime sketch show at UCB, and more. Triplets combines our love of cinema, rapid fire jokes, and our overwhelming fear of monsters.

"Our favorite part of making this series was being able to combine rapid fire jokes on the page with highly visual storytelling. We loved being able to use everything at our disposal (be it props, FX make up or the angle our director and DP chose for a particular shot) to bring the world of the triplets to life and tell the best and funniest story we could."

ToKC Website | YouTube | Twitter | Facebook

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thatsnotcanonpodcasts · 5 years

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Indiana Jones, Robotic Delivery Boys & AMD Ryzen

WOW!!! We have an amazing episode for you this week, first up, thank you to our 1000 weekly listeners, you are amazing. At last, winter is here, and Professor and Buck are both totally enjoying it. DJ has brought us the controversy of the week, with wild claims of a new Indiana Jones, and the boys pile in on him. Once again we solve the world’s greatest issues with logic and careful consideration. We decide Chris Pratt is not suitable for taking on the role and also convince DJ that Indiana Jones is not a Marvel character yet; give Disney time and they will make it happen eventually I’m sure.

With a fabulous Segway into the next topic we look at Digit. Not the figures, the robot that will help deliver your shopping from the car to your door. Professor decides he wants one to carry the shopping from the door to the kitchen and then cook his food. DJ calls robots slaves, revealing his desire to take over the world. Buck and Professor decide that given the way technology has been moving they wish to become Cyborgs and serve the robot overlords. We align the killer drones, self-replicating robots, driverless cars and robot dogs.

Moving along before we get into too much trouble. We have a new CPU that is pushing the limits and is looks surprised at how amazing it is. AMD is back baby and challenging Intel once again. Buck and Professor fully geek out over what this means for building your own system. If you get confused and lost please let us know; we will get Professor to write up a translation for you. We also figure out how to turn your computer into an oven. We mean literally you will be able to cook your sausages and toast your marsh mellows.

As always we make fun of everything, have a laugh with each other, at each other and life in general. We have the usual shout outs, remembrances, birthdays, and events of interest. As always, take care of yourselves, look out for each other, and stay hydrated. NERDS rule!!!

EPISODE NOTES:

Harrison Ford about Indiana Jones - https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/harrison-ford-idea-succeed-indiana-jones-nobody/

Robotic Delivery Boy - https://techxplore.com/news/2019-05-bipedal-robot-digit-autonomous-delivery.html

AMD Ryzen 3000 - https://www.anandtech.com/show/14407/amd-ryzen-3000-announced-five-cpus-12-cores-for-499-up-to-46-ghz-pcie-40-coming-77

Games currently playing

– Apex Legends - https://www.origin.com/aus/en-us/store/apex/apex

Professor

– Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - https://cataclysmdda.org/

Buck

– Deceit - https://store.steampowered.com/app/466240/Deceit/