Happy #AudioDramaSunday Pals!

I’m gonna start right off with a Baldur’s Gate 3 update, because frankly, that’s what ate up a majority of my entire week this week: I’m 90 hours deep and I still haven’t defeated the Elder Brain. In fact, I stayed up until 3:30 in the morning Friday night, grinding away at the final battle, only to realize I hadn’t appropriately kitted out my party enough to survive the punishing ordeal. I’m the kind of video gamer who will put this much time into an RPG, only to let my PS5 gather dust for months afterwards in a kind of detox, but good god has nothing made me revert this hard into my childhood behaviors in years. I was mad at myself all day yesterday, my body all out of sorts because I wasted hours in the pursuit of a goal I’d have done a much better job achieving if I’d just went to sleep and tried again first thing in the morning. Instead, I had to spend the entire day recovering from that one decision and pointedly not playing the game anymore. Oh well, so it goes.

There’s some part of me that wants to be down on myself for this kind of regressive behavior, but then I’m reminded of one of my all time favorite Kurt Vonnegut quotes: “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.” There is so much out there happening that deserves our attention, our action, hell: even just to bear witness. But there’s also a lot of ways in which we can each pursue individual and communal joy in spite of everything. Rather than beating myself up for being a teenager again, here in my mid-thirties, I’m going to remind myself that growing older doesn’t necessarily need to mean leaving behind the things that once brought me the most joy. In fact, it’s never too late to choose to just fart around, rather than force ourselves to be an adult who cares about things like bills and insurance and taxes and the inevitable heat death of the entire universe.

Speaking of chasing joy: my band Ghost Tour has our first live show together at Arlene’s Grocery in just three weeks. This is obviously only relevant to any of you who are based in New York City or the surrounding area, but I’d love to see any of y’all out in the crowd! the fact that it’s on a Sunday is certainly not ideal, so I totally understand if that gives you a hard out, but we’re new so there’s no way a promoter’s gonna give us a desirable Friday/Saturday slot just yet. That said, we’ll be playing alongside some of my best friends in the band Cautious Funday, as well as NYC locals Smooth Brain, and Guardrail who are coming in from Chicago. I’m incredibly excited, since this’ll be my first gig in a decade, and I may or may not have impulse bought myself a Wildfang jumpsuit for that exact purpose.

With that, let’s get to the meat and potatoes:

Midst

This is one of those shows whose name I saw floating around for years before I finally dipped my toe in the pool, but gosh, am I glad that I did. Midst is one of the most inventive, propulsive, and entertaining fiction podcasts I’ve ever heard, so I wasn’t at all surprised when it was announced they were partnering with the Critical Role family and doing a re-release of the series before finally launching their third and final season this year. I didn’t remember that it was dropping on Valentine’s day, so I’m a few weeks late to the launch, but having two episodes to catch up to on Monday was certainly nothing to complain about. Things picked back up immediately where they left off, with our heroes and villains still reeling from the recent Moonfall incident, and scattering amongst themselves to figure out their next move.

Note: I just realized when linking this show that there’s already a third episode of the season released as of Wednesday, so they’ll be the first thing I talk about next week too! Please, if you haven’t given this show a chance, I’m begging you to try it out. It rules so hard.

Victoriocity

This was another late-to-the-party-listen for me last year, since I never jumped on the bandwagon properly until I saw the news about their upcoming novel, so I was incredibly stoked to see Victoriocity announce a brand new third season in conjunction with its release. And while I haven’t had to wait years for this return to Even Greater London as many of you other fans, gosh, what a perfect reintroduction it was. From the harrowing cold open, to checking in with our intrepid PI’s Archibald Fleet and Clara Entwhistle finishing up a case just before they get sent on the new one, to singing pirates, and fraudulent spiritualists, I was immediately stoked to be back in this world. Chris and Jen Sugden have created such a playful and inventive wonderland for us to get lost in, and I can’t wait for my copy of High Vaultage to show up at my doorstep sometime sooner than later.

Breaker Whiskey

We’re back on the road again, but everything is still not all right in the world of Breaker Whiskey. The experience at Leanne’s house is still weighing heavy on our protaganist’s mind as she wonders more about whoever it is that sent her there. We also got some more curious hints at what (or who) else might be out living solitary among the wastes. And while it was lighter on some of the bigger or more contemplative developments that we’ve seen in past weeks, Shippen continues to keep us coming back for more day in and day out. And not that long from now? We’ll be at 200 episodes and counting!

Camlann

We got not one but two episodes of Camlann this week (although one of those was really more like a half), and I couldn’t have been more stoked for that news. The world that Ella Watts, Amber Devereaux, and the rest of their intrepid team are building is lush, with a rich history and nefarious obstacles lurking around every corner. There’s a power in names here, and finding out that the first “Knights of the Round” our crew crossed paths with is a bunch of rugby assholes from a local university was fantastic. The idea of some Game of Thrones obsessed bro taking up the mantle of King Arthur is perfect, which makes the reason our crew questions their new Guinevere’s intentions make all the more sense.

Ask Your Father

This week on Ask Your Father we go back to earth and let Mikey (i.e. Kevin R. Free) take a backseat as Lem catches up with Rebecca (Rebecca Comtois). It’s a shock to the system for Lem to be back on earth as Rebecca exhaustedly answers all of the questions he’s been presumably asking for days: where am I? How did I get back here? Are the kids okay? Have I seen my husband Jay yet? And while the answers to those questions prove to be satisfactory, at first, the end of the episode forces us to question reality all over again. We’ve only got a few episodes left in season one, so now’s the perfect time to get started if you haven’t yet!

Welcome to Night Vale

Taking a break from their recent tendency to remix the hits, Welcome to Night Vale brings us a new segment this week with the first ever Community Lost & Found section. And honestly? This episode still reminded me of the magic of experiencing the show for the very first time, because while they weren’t going back to old archetypes, they went back to basics in an extremely satisfying way. Because sure, some of those thing either lost or found were weird and wonderful bits of ephemera from our favorite otherworldly desert town, there was also some truly beautiful bits of stream-of-conscious style ruminations on growing up and leaving past versions of ourselves behind. The fact that my first ever ficiton podcast listen is still going strong all these years later is an enormous boon to me right now, and I’ll never not appreciate Jeffrey Cranor, Joseph Fink, Cecil Baldwin, and team for what joy they’ve brought me over the last 10+ years of my life.

BONUS SNACK

Sheer Mag

Speaking of things that have brought me joy for over a decade, shout out to my friends Tina Halliday, Hart & Kyle Seeley, and Matt Palmer on the release of their first album as Sheer Mag in 5 years, and their first ever for Jack White’s Third Man Records, Playing Favorites. Watching this band grind away for the last ten years, from playing in dingy apartment venues, to being able to headline classic venues in NYC like Bowery Ballroom is something I’ll never not be inordinately proud of them for. Their new record refines the sound they’ve perfected over their run with the Thin Lizzy-style riffs, ripping bass lines, and screeched glam rock stylings that we know and love, injecting it with even more pop and disco sensibility, and turning it all up way past eleven. There’s nothing quite like seeing people I’ve known for 15+ years get the recognition they’ve long deserved, and I can’t wait to see where the world takes them next. There truly is #nostoppingthemag.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Maybe next week I’ll actually listen to more Old Gods of Appalachia like I keep promising myself, or maybe I won’t and I’ll just mention them in this little end section again. Who knows? We’ll just have to find out!