podcasts

i got burned completely out of serious podcasts, so these are going to mostly have a lighter bent, but they're all either by communists or people who are very happy to associate with communists

first i'll second the shrieking shack and a more civilized age. i went into some detail about the shriekcast below, so i'll just say that amca is for you if you're the type of person who would like to hear people discussing how fucked up the whole droid slavery thing is, but not as a gotcha joke but as a thing to be seriously analyzed. one of the hosts is pretty clearly a better read leftist than the others, citing theory a bunch especially in their episodes on andor (which is a pretty great show you should 100% pirate if you haven't)

the whole abnormal mapping network is good. abnormal mapping is a game club podcast, every episode they play a video game and discuss it. they're good critics with good chemistry, and at a certain point they started reading theory and you can tell. from there the hosts have done a bunch of spinoff podcasts, and i like all the ones i've listened to. your uncle's beach house is about anime, repertory screenings is about movies, there are others about icelandic sagas, ghibli movies, james bond, etc. plus a bunch of adjacent podcasts they host as well, like fate/moon archive which covers the works of type moon

and then there's the real reason i started listening to them to begin with. for 1$ a month on their patreon there's the great gundam project, which lets you pinpoint the exact moment they read theory because there's an episode where they come in like "ok to understand this episode of gundam we both read lenin". they also cover other anime along with it, mostly mecha anime but currently they're doing rose of versailles

i'm gonna add the ranged touch podcasts + fatt later but here's what i've got for now

friends at the table is an actual play podcast. i've only listened to counter/weight which is really good cyberpunk with mechs, but i know later seasons get more explicitly communist. a bunch of the hosts are also doing media club plus, where they're covering the 2011 hunter x hunter anime

finally, ranged touch does super good academic critique of primarily genre works. they have mages and murderdads about the baldur's gate games (and the games inspired by them, like icewind dale, planescape torment, and disco elysium), too much future about the fallout games, homestuck made this world about homestuck (which has the bonus of letting them cover wide swaths of internet culture), shelved by genre where they cover different examples of genre fiction starting with book of the new sun (cohosted by austin walker of a more civilized age and friends at the table above), just king things where they cover the works of stephen king in publication order, and game study study buddies where they cover academic works on gaming and gaming culture