e178. Pop History vs. Public History

How do we learn history? The easy answer is to say we learn it from history books, but is that true? How many of us ever read a history book after 10th grade? It’s more likely that we get the majority of our history either from museums or from historic entertainment… things like Hamilton… or,…

e176. What Was Social Networking?

Instagram recently made an announcement that they were going to be shifting their social networking focus away from “photos”. This decision prompted a collective “WTF?” from the users who saw it. You see, Instagram claims that their primary business isn’t photos (despite having a whole motif from their logo to their name based around polaroid…

e175. Game Studies: Ludology vs. Narratology

We don’t talk about games as much as we should on this show, but arguably they’re one of the most enduring mediums of popular culture. They’re certainly one of the most popular. There’s much comparison of modern video games to movies. This makes sense… if we want people to consider games to be a legitimate…

e173. War of the Readings

The Internet has one main purpose: arguing about things that don’t really matter. I’m sure you’ve seen this, people will fight over whether a movie was good or bad, what the significance of a particular scene of a TV show was, what was the hidden theme of a book, or perhaps most notably today… should…

e172. (More Drinking Than Swearing…) The Culture Of Alcohol

We’ve always had a tag on our show of “the weekly pseudo-academic roundtable with drinking and swearing” but honestly, it’s usually more of the latter. We might be drinking while we record the show, but it really has no bearing on the listener Honestly, the alcohol is usually incidental. Not this week! This week we…

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…

e168. Time to Stop Wearing Underwear on the Outside

Have you ever noticed how infrequently superheroes in most superhero TV shows and movies actually wear their superhero costumes? It makes sense when you think about it. Superhero costumes are actually kind of silly: wearing underwear on the outside of spandex bodysuits? They’re based on pop culture tropes from nearly a century ago, which honestly…

e161. Describing 20 Games We Haven’t Played

Do you like to play games? We do. And Hannah really likes to play games. In fact, she’s addicted. So much so that she made a game about games… and forced the rest of us to play. Seriously… there were horrible threats… people’s families were in danger. Someone might have lost a little finger. On…

e160. Remembering Thought & Thinking About Memory

Do you remember the song that was playing when you had your first kiss, lost your virginity, or danced at your wedding? Do you know what movie that you crowded around the TV to watch as a family every holiday as a kid? Do you have fond memories of the vacation you took in the…

e159. Obviously, it’s the Falcon and the Winter Soldier Show

it’s pretty safe to say Disney has a chokehold on popular culture in America, and to a lesser extent the entire world. Once again, the Powers that Be, as it were, has delivered down unto us yet another installment in the modern epic that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But, do we have to talk…