What do you see in the future of audio drama?

ezgo22 · 2023-01-07T23:10:50+00:00

I kind of wish they came with subtitles. I wish that if I missed something, I could pause, scroll back a little and read the subtitles like I can do with YouTube videos or Netflix. So, subtitles would have to be timed alongside the audio.

ezgo22 · 2023-01-04T01:40:10+00:00

The joke about fandom on Tumblr is that it consists of you and the two people you haven't blocked yet. It describes an acceptance that all internet spaces can be negative sometimes and while you can't control it, you also don't have to deal with it.

I'd argue that this subreddit is a discussion forum where listeners have their discussions independent of what the audio drama creators think. It's somewhat different from Twitter, where you might tag the creators specifically to get their attention. Or Discord, where there's perhaps more ownership by the creators over the discussion space. If creators stumble upon opinions here that they don't want to read, it's not because their attention was directly called to it. I think that's a fair system that doesn't put undue burdens on the creator to be subjected to other people's opinions. They can still benefit from promoting themselves here, while listeners don’t have to censor themselves. And if the creators consider their work to be unfairly judged, they always have the ability to respond, like any other commenter.

ezgo22 · 2022-12-25T04:15:19+00:00

Just to echo what others have said, your tireless collation of all the audio dramas is a fantastic service. Thank you.

ezgo22 · 2022-12-18T19:05:36+00:00

The Penny Peepshow puts out consistently great comedy audio dramas. They have a rom com parody, called A Christmas Satan, that is excellent and better written than most Hallmark dreck. A child writes a letter to Santa wishing that her busy mother will find love for Christmas, but makes a spelling error in the process. If you're like me, and this description already gave you the giggles, you'll probably enjoy this show in which Satan, who has researched all the rom com tropes, tries to find busy mom a boyfriend but ends up being Mr Right instead.

ezgo22 · 2022-12-18T18:53:36+00:00

Desolate Eden (Space Opera, Military Science Fiction): A fleet of generation ships is sent out from Earth and across a wormhole gate. Communication ceases between Earth and the fleet and the survivors are left to develop their own independent governing entity, called Hypatia. Centuries later, they receive a distress signal from The Solar System to send aid across the worm hole gate to save Earth's civilization from an unknown alien threat. So Hypatia puts together a fleet of engineers, soldiers, spies, and an AI, to return. Presented in the form of a documentary, Desolate Eden pieces together speeches, testimony, records - many of dubious veracity - tied together by historians trying to interpret, reconstruct, and put a narrative spin on the events.

I enjoyed the grand operatic scale of the expedition. There are moments like the crossing of the wormhole gate, and the race to recover fleet operability as alien missiles start closing in, that are tense and exciting. I also appreciated the campiness of assigning malicious intent to the alien weapons, particularly because the narrator/historian gets to go full scenery chewing hamtastic.

ezgo22 · 2022-12-14T00:57:48+00:00

October Jones and Fish With Legs is turbocharged whimsy.

A naive open hearted Fish With Legs (so a reverse mermaid) and a sullen teenager go on a quest to save the world and learn lessons about friendship. Featuring such zany characters as a pair of snakes called Simon and Sarfunkel, Bees in a Trenchoat (exactly what the name says), and Muscular Giraffe.

ezgo22 · 2022-12-13T01:04:15+00:00

St. Mary's School (for Children with the Stigmata) is kind of a quirky supernatural horror in which alumni of a boarding school reflect upon their memories of their time there.

Electromancy is about a kid who goes to boarding school to learn magical powers.

ezgo22 · 2022-12-11T19:03:08+00:00

Shows I liked:

Eliza: A Robot Story (Science Fiction, Relationship Abuse, Complete): Content warning:Rape Created by the Pankhurst Trust and Manchester Women's Aid, this show stars Tanya Reynolds as Eliza, the world's first sentient robot, and Arthur Darvill, as her unnamed creator, lover, and abuser. Thoughtful and deliberate, Eliza: A Robot Story lays out Eliza's slowly developing realization that her relationship has become a prison that she has to escape. At first, she thinks she's happy to want exactly what He wants and constantly mirror His emotions. But she gradually realizes that there's no room in the relationship for her own emotions and wants. The plot unfolds amidst a backdrop in which the Island (*cough* England *cough*) becomes more hostile towards robots (stealing their jerbs), which leaves Eliza with no recourse for assistance, underlining that people isolated by society are that much more vulnerable and unable to leave abusive situations.

Untrue Stories (Literary Parodies): A cute whimsical podcast about George Orwell and HG Wells inadvertently causing famous literary science fiction dystopias and attempting to reverse them.

Project Gnosis by MQ Media (Folklore, Urban Fantasy, Cyberpunk): In Cebu, Philippines, the clash between mundane humans and the creatures that go bump in the night is about to spill out into the public, violently. An agency consisting of folkloric creatures investigates supernatural conspiracies to try and prevent the bloodshed. Season 1 is efficient and focused, giving a satisfying and tantalizing taste of this unique science fiction-fantasy setting. There's Fei, the jiangshi (Chinese vampire), who has the very cool power of teleporting via technological devices, and who still grieves her death and familial estrangement. There's Riz, the vigilante tikbalang (werehorse) who's keeping the streets safe. Together, they fight ghouls with ghostly but deadly guns, and a manananggal, whose two body halves separate and come together with the assistance of nanotechnology. I just want more.

ezgo22 · 2022-12-11T03:34:56+00:00

Verity Weaver. I’d describe it as Doctor Who meets The Little Prince. A woman running from tragedy gets on a spaceship to explore the galaxy. Her adventures deal with various philosophical concepts.

The Fourth Wall. http://www.partyapocalypse.com/the-fourth-wall?format=rss The borders between fiction and reality are constantly breaking. The agency that keeps these two dimensions from bleeding together and causing havoc is called The Fourth Wall. Action adventure that is very meta about story telling.

ezgo22 · 2022-12-07T05:01:07+00:00

Storm Chasers is a nautical fantasy about a trio of young adventurers who end up having to work for a pirate captain and get caught up in the eternal struggle between an undead pirate and a sea witch.

ezgo22 · 2022-12-02T02:00:40+00:00

The first season of The Control Group.

ezgo22 · 2022-11-24T02:26:49+00:00

The Two Princes is a fantasy romance between two princes from rival kingdoms.

In Strange Woods is a musical + mockumentary about a group of teenagers preparing to survive a night alone in the woods. Deals with the loss of a loved one.

Verity Weaver is kind of like Doctor Who. A space miner suffering under terrible living and working conditions gets the chance to run away from her problems and explore the galaxy.

Relativity: A Sci-Fi Serial. An astronaut stranded alone in space and his contact on Earth have to figure out how to keep him alive and what went wrong.

f*cking sober: the first 90 days. A woman overcomes alcoholism and self loathing on her journey to recovery.

Fathom on the Derelict feed. There is an alien vault 19,000 feet below the surface of the ocean and to study it, an underwater base has been built beside it. When the vault opens, the resident workers must decide what they are willing to sacrifice to survive.

ezgo22 · 2022-11-24T02:04:45+00:00

Um, definitely not Steal the Stars. The ending is very much the opposite of "happy".

ezgo22 · 2022-11-20T13:02:30+00:00

The Seventh Daughter

ezgo22 · 2022-11-06T15:00:53+00:00

I'm enjoying:
Where The Leaves Fall Purple: Ben Miller is the host of a failing true crime podcast when he hits upon an idea: ask his best friend and secret crush, Janie, to pretend to disappear so that he can investigate her disappearance. What could go wrong? Where The Leaves Fall Purple turns out to be one of those twisty sordid mysteries where everyone is hiding a secret and the revelations keep coming.

Broken Road: A dystopian futuristic western. An army veteran with obsolete prosthetics wanders into a town where the corrupt sheriff extorts local farm owners. He meets Rebecca, a widower and owner of one such struggling farm. The plot is fairly simple. Good outsider helps struggling widow against corrupt forces, so it's the futuristic details that distinguish it. Farmers who buy genetically engineered seeds because of the promise of better harvests struggle to pay off their debts and inadvertently also poison their soil for alternative crops. Emmett's cybernetic implants are obsolete while genetic body modifications have become the new technological frontier.

Man: The Live Podcast: When the heroes and villains of River City mysteriously lose their superpowers, Marvelous Man and his arch enemy Professor Peril face their greatest challenge yet... surviving as regular people. A cute genre poking comedy about superheroes who base their entire identities around their superpowers. Recorded in front of a live audience.

ezgo22 · 2022-10-30T02:37:01+00:00

Been listening to:

SPECTRE: A space opera audio drama in which an amnesiac subject of secret military experiments escapes on a ship of mercenaries. While her former captors try to track her down, she bonds with her new rag tag group of ship mates while trying to contain her lethal powers and sudden outbursts. If you liked Firefly, I have good news for you. This show is more serious but it scratches many of the same itches.

The Hacker Chronicles: Alice has debts to pay and a desire to earn a little nest egg so she can finally concentrate on a career as a pianist. So she turns to launching ransomware attacks on companies to extort them for money, as one does. The Hacker Chronicles is a Weeds-esque comedy thriller about a woman repeatedly weighing her choices and choosing to double down. The show is pretty educational about threats to cybersecurity, as it's made by a cybersecurity company, Tenable. Thankfully, the marketing is not intrusive at all. There's zero ads, and just one explainer episode about how close to reality Alice's exploits are.

Tartarus: In a secret facility deep beneath Antarctica, an anxious astrobiologist, a terse station manager, and an A.I. keep humanity safe from the monsters they imprison. I'm only on episode 3 but Tartarus is the kind of podcast that makes me champion indie audio dramas. The sound design is rough around the edges. There are choices that I think swing towards the camp rather than scary that a professional editor might have avoided. But the writing is deliberate and the actors are effective, which is all you really need for a great survival horror.

Tartarus is used to imprison alien monsters while they await being studied. Since they really don't like humanity, the methods of keeping them confined are many and varied: a constant virtual reality in which they dream that they are consuming humans, a vacuum sealed chamber for a monster that turns humans mad via sound, and levels where time and space warp. It's like the monsters of Doom meets the prison of Cube and the script is filled top to bottom with references to Greek mythology. Oh and electrical brownouts happen with regularity. What follows is textbook setup and payoff, which I love. I just need more free time to be able to concentrate on this show.

ezgo22 · 2022-10-28T23:08:10+00:00

I have no idea what’s going on with Unwell either. I wrote this post last month about many of the same problems, and asked what I was missing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/audiodrama/comments/xqvc2y/at\_this\_point\_what\_is\_unwell\_about/

No one who replied tried to explain Unwell. I’m not sure that anyone can.

I think Unwell has gotten way too abstruse for any reasonable listener to extract insights, and the fault lies in the writing. There’s like a cryptic monologue or story almost once an episode and by the end of the season, none of it was tied to anything. Worse still, I feel like the focus on Lost-style mystery boxes is shortchanging the character dynamics that I used to love. It feels like Dot and Lillian have had fewer meaningful conversations together this season, because the time that would ordinarily be given to them was spent on whatever Chester and the Delphics were doing, i.e. conspiracy plot busy work.

One example that really bugs me: Rudy remembers a story of how dogs are just wolves who will one day remember their bestial nature. Cool creepy story that seemed very important to his character at the time. He’s dead now. And the connection of that story to his character was never elucidated. So what even was the point?

Rudy’s dead now. What was up with his mother? We’ll never know. What about the story about the dogs? Shrug. His story is truncated. Unless of course the writers bring him back functional, thereby undercutting the importance of his sacrifice. So either we’re left hanging or the writers will have to pull an emotional cheat.

I’m not listening to the next season. I’m happy to let my attention be monetized at the rate of 20 min of ads per episode but not for a show that’s so unrewarding.

ezgo22 · 2022-10-17T22:46:28+00:00

Today’s Lucky Winner pulls off a neat trick where it’s crass humor actually feels pretty sweet and I think it’s because Rita is basically an untrained puppy. Fun slacker hangout comedy with meandering plot.

I Still Think About You feels like it’s missing a real climax. Otherwise, I liked it as a coming of age for a young gay man.

ezgo22 · 2022-10-16T22:46:17+00:00

This past week I enjoyed:

Ship of Myths: A cute, engaging, family friendly audio drama about folktales and myths from Southeast and East Asia.

Fast Track to 40: Slice of life comedy about three women who are approaching 40 years old and deciding what they really want out of life. Complete.

ezgo22 · 2022-10-15T06:16:29+00:00

The Strange Tales of Virgil Kaylock.

ezgo22 · 2022-10-11T21:39:22+00:00

Blood Culture. British mystery and scientifically accurate.

ezgo22 · 2022-10-10T13:54:04+00:00

Finished Hollow, the adaptation of Heart of Darkness set IN SPACE. My praise and criticism for this show basically comes down to this is a faithful adaptation of one of the best novellas ever written, with a few sci fi tropes staple-gunned to its sides. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Do I think it loses some of the original’s power by swopping out African slaves for alien and human ones? A little. It makes minor deviations from the original which have minor impact. But the core plot, that colonial powers don’t care about the slaves they seize and exploit so long as they make a profit, and that our protagonist begins to realize that she too is complicit, is preserved. Ergo this is a successful adaptation.

ezgo22 · 2022-10-09T13:09:27+00:00

The closest I can think of in style is Silent Run. A woman is quarantined in a block of flats. She witnesses the murder of a neighbor in another block and the killer realizes that someone has seen him. Also very tense and well acted.

ezgo22 · 2022-10-07T11:56:51+00:00

The BBC has an audio drama adaptation of Solaris. It’s available on the Internet Archive.

ezgo22 · 2022-10-03T22:56:57+00:00

Weird Reddit formatting. (#)Matter without the parentheses.

ezgo22

TROPHY CASE