It's the holiday season and that means that it's time to begin the tried and true and for some people massively neurotic holiday tradition: Present Shopping! In this episode, Mav and Hannah Rogers engage in a lively discussion about the anxiety and joy associated with buying gifts, the consumerist nature of the holidays. How do you buy the perfect present? Is there a perfect present? Is there a to "do Christmas ethically" or is the whole process simply dooming us to capitalist holiday hellscape of conspicuous consumerism from which none of us will ever emerge before the world descends into inescapable dread and chaos as we await the eventual heat death of the universe? But you know... with friends and family and presents under a tree! Listen as we work...
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e348. The True Meaning of Gifting: Connection over Consumerism
It’s the holiday season and that means that it’s time to begin the tried and true and for some people massively neurotic holiday tradition: Present Shopping! In this episode, Mav and Hannah Rogers engage in a lively discussion about the anxiety and joy associated with buying gifts, the consumerist nature of the holidays. How do…
CFC: How Do You Holiday Shop?
From Mav: As we reach the Christmas (Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, etc) season and devolve into our annual socially mandated display of affection through conspicuous consumption, we started having this little conversation amongst the cohosts about gift giving. Not for each other… just in general. How do you shop? Are you trying to be as capitalist as…
e347. Jack vs. Jack: The Jack Off
Yes, we know the world is on fire, but that’s just going to be our status quo for the next several months. And it’s Thanksgiving week and we wanted to do something fun. So we decided this week we’d play a fun little game that we borrowed from our friends over at the Protagonist Podcast.…
e346: Over the Rainbow: Examining Wicked, Oz, and their Cultural Impact
Did you know there was a movie adaptation of the film Wicked released this week? If not then we assume you must not see any commercials or advertisements in your life ever, because the marketing is PERSISTENT. And by all accounts it’s doing fairly well at the box office. That’s to be expected; the play…
Call for Comments: Wicked and the Wonderful (?) World of OZ
From Hannah: In our next show, we’re tackling populism, propaganda, and resistance — through Wicked (the film, the musical, the book series) and its source material the Oz series by L. Frank Baum. The world of Oz has always been political (especially in terms of American politics) since The Wonderful Wizard of Oz first appeared…
e345. Superpowers, Sex, and Science with Diana McCallum
For a show that was originally created in a comic book shop, we do surprisingly few episodes about comic books. Today is an opportunity to fix that. A few weeks ago, Mav was contacted by a publishing agent and asked if we could interview the author of a book that was all about comic book…
e344. Creepy Kids & Horror: Exploring Unsettling Youth in Film
Well, the US presidential election happened. And you’ve probably heard a ton about it. But we’re living in denial here at VoxPopcast so we’ve decided to pretend it’s still Halloween! Actually, before the election occurred, we recorded an episode dealing with the concept of creepy kids in horror. You might recall we talked about creepy…
e343. 2024 US Election Special
Well, here we are. There’s only one day from the time this episode drops until the US Election. It’s not really a secret how we fall on presidential politics on this show, so obviously we’re going to endorse Kamala Harris. However, we wanted to take a chance to just really talk about the state of…
e342. Creepy Dolls and the Freudian Uncanny
Happy Halloween! As has been our tradition, we wanted to make sure we marked the season with a special episode or two highlighting the concepts of horror. On today’s episode, Mav, Wayne and Monica are joined by friend of the show and Director of University of California at Santa Cruz’s Center for Monster Studies, Michael…