It's finals week. Well, ok, finals are over, so that means it's finals GRADING week, the worst week of the academic semester for anyone who teaches for a living. It can really burn you out. So, for this week we decided to do something of a pallet cleanser episode. Longtime listeners might know that VoxPopcast was originally patterned after being something of an academic happy hour... so we decided that it might be fun to play a common drinking game but with a pop culture twist. So on today's episode, Mav and Monica are joined by returning guest Blake Collins to play Pop Culture Fuck-Marry-Kill! It's a quite simple game... the rules are pretty much right there in the name and if you don't get it... well, we expect you'll...
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e153. Seeking a Game for the End of the World
Do you remember the before times? The long, long ago. Do you remember a time where you used to have real live friends that you used to be able to do stuff with? Maybe you held a weekly game night where you got together and… well, you mostly probably hung out and drank beer and…
Excalibur #3: “Moving Day”
Excalibur #3 “Moving Day” Writer: Chris Claremont Penciler: Alan Davis Inker: Paul Neary Colourist: Glynis Oliver Letterer: Lois Buhalis Editor: Terry Kavanagh Publication date: December 1988 In this episode, Anna, Mav, Andrew, and special guest Brad Mendenhall of the Cosmic Geppetto Podcast discuss Excalibur #3, “Moving Day,” and fight about the Juggernaut (just kidding—everyone loves him).…
Call For Comments: Can We Cancel Cancel Culture Culture or Can’t We?
From Mav: So this is a weird one. We had this idea a few weeks ago that we would do a show on “cancel culture” after Gina Carano was publicly fired from The Mandalorian. But we didn’t get to it. For one thing, everyone else in the world was dumping think pieces left and right on her. For…
e152. Obviously it’s the WandaVision Show
Somethings are inevitable and predictable. Water is wet, gravity pulls us down, and this show was going to have to talk about WandaVision. That was clear even before the series premiered. However, we didn’t know just how big a cultural phenomenon it would become. Who could have expected while reading the 1982 Bill Mantlo comic…
Excalibur #2: “A Warwolf Possessed”
Excalibur #2 “A Warwolf Possessed” Writer: Chris Claremont Penciler: Alan Davis Inker: Paul Neary Colourist: Glynis Oliver Letterer: Tom Orzechowski Editor: Terry Kavanagh Publication date: November 1988 In this episode, Anna, Mav, and Andrew discuss Excalibur #2, “A Warwolf Possessed.” Topics include how comics communicate agency within sexualization, the politics of retributive justice within fantasy…
Call for Comments: Gaming in the time of COVID
From Hannah: Fairly early into the pandemic last year, it felt like almost everyone was playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. (We actually did an entire episode on the relationship between cozy games and what was going on it the world.) In fact, the Nintendo Switch felt impossible to find for most of 2020. And the…
Call for Comments: Just WTF is Ergodic Literature?
From Wayne: So there’s this idea I’ve been trying to wrap my head around, both as a writer and a scholar. A while back a friend of my posted about his reactions to the Netflix series The OA, and referred to it as an example of ‟ergodic storytelling.” If you’re like me, your reaction right…
e151. Yet More Bridgerton! and other good things
A few weeks ago when we did our Bridgerton recap show we found ourselves with way more to talk about than we could possibly fit in a single episode. That happens a lot, really. And as we often do, we said back then that we’d have to do another episode and discuss more Bridgerton. Well,…
Bad (?) Things We Love (or at least find interesting): Part II
March 18, 2021
From Hannah: Almost a year ago, the Voxpopcast team attempted to get you to see the inherent value of our …. questionable … entertainment choices in the episode we titled Bad Things We Love. We were perhaps a little Kantian in our notions of taste — at least at first. But the range of material…