e143. Thirty Great Things You Missed In 2020

The year 2020 is over. You’re probably as relieved as we are. Of course the problems with 2020 are largely still with us, but at least getting here feels like SOMETHING has happened. Last year on VoxPopcast, we decided that rather than doing a “best of the year” episode with the greatest movies or books…

Call For Comments: 2021 Box Office Game

From Mav: Well, this ought to be weird. It’s the end of the year, so it’s once again time for us to do our movie picks for the annual fantasy box office episode. If you’re new to our show, every year we play a game where we earn points by how well movies do at…

e142. Deconstructing the Queen’s Gambit

If anything has characterized pop culture in the year 2020, it’s streaming media. From Hamilton to Tiger King, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the essential elimination of out-of-the-home entertainment, we as a people have been absorbing a great deal of content from our couches through the magic of streaming. This is a world made for…

Call for Comments: “The Queen’s Gambit,” or Chess is a Virus now

From Katya: The world, it seems, has lost its collective mind over The Queen’s Gambit. Released in October, it quickly became the most-watched limited scripted series ever and hit number 1 in 63 countries, according to Netflix. I’m not going to lie, I fell into the binge too. Give me an aesthetically pleasing show with…

e137. Think Virtually, Live Locally! Our New Virtual Reality

Ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, people the world over have been forced to spend more time meeting and communicating virtually. As different communities have implemented differing levels of lockdowns, quarantine restrictions, and work from home protocols, and distance learning, life has increasingly taken place over Zoom. Socializing over FaceTime is the…

e136. Describing 14 Films We Haven’t Seen

In a world where four podcasters are exhausted from the never ended horrific news cycle of politics, racial tensions, pestilence and death that has been the year 2020, these weary souls decide to take one week away from serious pseudo academic pop culture analysis with drinking and swearing and do… goofy pseudo academic pop culture…

Call For Comments: Is This The Darkest Timeline?

From Mav: It’s 2020, and the world is on fire. We all know how bad things have been. Some of the things are obvious, longterm, and we’ve done shows on them before. Some of them are new: There’s a deadly pandemic that has killed over 213,000 people in the United States (and over a million…

e127. Dungeons & Diversity

In our contemporary moment pop culture is controlled by two forces. A focus on so-called “geek culture” and a push for more inclusive diversity across media forms. While there is certainly a long way to go, in many cases, leaps and bounds of progress have been made in the last several years, with greater attention…

Call for Comments: Revising Race in Dungeons and Dragons

Dark elves aka drow From Katya: Wizards of the Coast recently announced (by recently I mean mid-June. It’s been a YEAR y’all) ways that they’re attempting to address the game’s racist characterizations of, well, in-game races. In their announcement, they acknowledge the widespread critique of their rules surrounding races, particularly the ways that stereo-typically dark-skinned…

e113. Cartoons vs. Avatars

A couple of weeks ago, in order to placate the masses during a worldwide quanrantine, Facebook released their new “Avatar” system — a tool to allow users to create little cartoon characters of themselves for use in profile pics and stickers. Other technology companies have similar system. Apple has one built into its messaging system…