New Podcasts
Since the Magnus Archives ended, I've been listening to a lot of new ones, looking for something just as good and, to be honest, just as long.
I figured I'd let you know what I've found.
SCP Archives. It's been around since 2019, and is based on the entries located at the SCP Foundation website. The episodes I've listened to are basically half drawn directly from the web site and half stories fleshing out the background of the objects in question or the experiments related to them.
The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity, and Mortality. This one comes out of Australia, and is almost a gentler version of the SCP foundation. The items it deals with are always supernatural in nature, but the stories behind them, as narrated by the audio guide, are not necessarily tragic. Each season has its own story arc, but they all tie together. As a bonus, the titles in each season form an acrostic that forms a word summing up what's happening in each season.
Old Gods of Appalachia. This one is awesome. It's basically cosmic horror set against the backdrop of the poorest parts of West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and down into Tennessee in the early 20th century. It gives you the feeling that you're sitting by a campfire and actually listening to the narrator tell the story, and I think he may actually be from that area. The stories are all connected, but you don't have to have listened to them all to follow what's happening. I found this one through Rusty Quill.
Midnight Burger. This one, I discovered when I was searching something else on Spotify. It's about a woman who lost her job during the pandemic and stumbles into a little diner about an hour and a half outside of Phoenix, AZ. She quickly finds out that it travels in time and across dimensions, and to a different place every night. It's comedy mixed with science, and a bit of philosophy thrown in for color, and well-worth your time. I don't know how much it matters to anyone reading this, but the lead is a Latina woman. It just recently finished up its first season.
Out Of Place. To be honest, I very nearly turned this one off at first because it sounded too much like it was trying to be the Magnus Archives. The main character was a snarky Brit who worked in an archive with a lot of weird shit he really doesn't want to cope with. The nature of the weirdness was what made me keep listening - artifacts that celebrated or were part of events that didn't happen in this timeline. He's given the opportunity to join the organization that's been sending him these artifacts, but refuses because he doesn't want to lose the people he loves.
The second season, which just finished, picks up with his much lonelier counterpart in the organization that had been sending the artifacts. He is still an archivist, but this version of him records the mission reports from reconnaissance teams who have traveled to timelines where the human race is dead and/or dying.
Bridgewater. I literally discovered this one last night. It focuses on a folklore professor who starts trying to solve the mystery of his father's disappearance when his father's badge appears forty years after the man vanished. What initially caught my attention was that it stars Misha Collins (the Angel of Thursday himself) and Nathan Fillion. I've only listened to three episodes out of seven, so I don't know how this one ends yet.
Chickenman. This isn't exactly a podcast, but they were these 2-3 minute comedy shorts that ran on the radio back in the late '60s. Each of the eight albums runs about an hour with roughly 25-30 episodes each. I actually discovered this through my roommate in college, who had a copy of the Best Of Chickenman on tape, and I took a chance and looked to see if it was on Spotify. They deal with a bottom-of-the-barrel superhero (a guy who makes like a chicken on the weekends), the equally bottom-of-the-barrel police commissioner, and the commissioner's secretary who seems to be the one with the brain cell most of the time. As a warning, the weekend segments have an extremely heavy-handed environmental message (again, this was the late '60s and progress hadn't been made on that front yet), but they work as period pieces.
