e249. The Media Guilt Pile

You know that book everyone tells you is great and you’ve been meaning to read it for literally years and haven’t gotten to it? What about that game that all your friends are playing and you want to as well, but you haven’t had the time to sit down and learn it so it’s just…

e246. a Very Star Wars Andor Holiday Special

And now for something a little different to close out this Christmas season. A couple of weeks ago on Twitter, we had a request from listener Jim Roberts to discuss Andor, the latest Star Wars series on Disney+. Only at the time, we were kind of packed with some other shows that we had been…

e245. Cheesy Christmas Movies IV

It’s that time again. Ever since we started this show, we’ve been in something of a renaissance of Christmas Movies. It all started with films by the likes of the Hallmark Channel, but it has since spread to other networks, perhaps most notably Netflix. In the last few years we’ve made it a habit of…

e170. What is Serialization? Tune in next week!

In today’s pop culture landscape, serialization is everything. TV, movies, novels, comics. Addict people to your ongoing series and hope they keep paying for another installment. Somehow, despite the fact that we are 170 episodes into a podcast SERIES about pop culture media, much of which is SERIALIZED, hosted by people who literally study SERIALIZATION…

Call For Comments: Serialization Technology

From Katya: It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a game scholar, comics scholar, and Victorianist walk into a bar, they must instantly bond over their shared study of serialization. Except… we never recorded it. It’s rather astounding that we haven’t already; serialization cuts across all of our fields from comics to games and…

e141. Ghosts, Spirits, Scrooge and a Merry Marxist Christmas

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is likely the most famous Christmas story ever written. First published 177 years ago, it has been produced as stage plays, adapted into dozens of films and spoofed and parodied countless times on television shows, in comics, and other media. Whether from Disney, The Muppets, Scrooged, the original or somewhere…

e138. Holiday Tradition and Ritual in the Time of COVID

It’s the holiday season. In the United States we just celebrated Thanksgiving, and in the coming weeks that will be followed by Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, Pancha Ganapati, Yule, Festivus, Saturnalia, Slackernalia and probably 1000 other winter holidays that get celebrated somewhere around the world. These holidays are often commemorated by coming together with…

e121. The Improv Story Game

We’ve had such a long string of super serious shows lately with some very heavy topics that we’ve been wanting to try and do some things that were more fun, laid back and… well, silly! This week is Mav’s birthday, and rather than sit around and discuss any of the dozen ways that the world…

e111. STILL Not Over It!

Some things are hard to get over. Your first love. The death of a beloved pet. That time your team lost the Super Bowl. And… apparently that season finale of Game of Thrones last year. We probably can’t help you with those first three, but the last one is kind of our thing here. Why…

Call for Comments: Great Expectations for Disappointing Endings to the Game of Thrones

From Hannah: Game of Thrones ends Sunday and, based solely on audience opinion of the last two-to-three seasons (particularly the penultimate episode ever), it’s going to be bad. Depending on who you ask, it may be the worst finale of a television show ever (except maybe Dexter). There are a lot of reasons people are…