Podcasta la Vista, Baby! Episode 28 – Terminator: Dark Fate

Choose Your Fate.

This month, we’re joined by Carol Brouillette of the Hands Free Football podcast, and returning (one last time?) to the franchise that made Arnold Schwarzenegger the king of Hollywood in the legacy sequel, Terminator: Dark Fate!

Twenty years after the events of Terminator 2, a young woman living in Mexico City finds herself targeted by two time travelers from an entirely new post-apocalyptic future. One is Grace, a cybernetically-enhanced soldier from the human resistance with orders to protect her, and the other is a new model of Terminator programmed to… you know. But help is soon found in the form of an older Sarah Connor, who saw her son John murdered soon after she prevented SkyNet’s creation, and from the very familiar-looking T-800 Terminator who killed John and spent the last two decades developing a conscience.

Episode 56 – Vengeance (2022)

Find the story before it finds you.

This month, we’re joined by Chelsea Rustad chair of the Puget Sound Socialist Party and the author of Inherited Secrets: Memoir of America’s Groundbreaking Genetic Witness to  draw thematic connections between seemingly disparate elements and using that to get to the bottom of B.J. Novak’s directorial debut, Vengeance!

New Yorker writer Ben Manalowitz finds himself in West Texas after a late night phone call from Ty Shaw, the brother of a girl he used to hook up with. Ty’s sister Abilene has died of a drug overdose, but he is convinced she was murdered. And mistakenly believing that Ben and Abilene had a serious relationship, he wants Ben to help him avenge her death. Seeing this as a huge opportunity to build his career with a big true crime public radio podcast, Ben agrees to investigate. Ben smugly imagines a story about how tragedy and regret propel people in believing conspiracy theories to avoid accepting hard truths. But as he starts to dig, he begins to question: what if Abilene really was murdered?

Fun Size Episode 73 – But, She Has a New Hat! [CLIP]

We’re back with another new Fun Size episode, exclusive for our Patreon supporters!

This month, we’re continuing our chat with Kayleigh Casterline, and digging into the intersection of sports, video games and capitalist rent-seeking.

The new wrestling game, AEW: Fight Forever, is claiming that it won’t ask you to buy an entirely new game every year, the way that their rival the WWE does (not to mention the NFL, the NBA or MLB). They say they’re going to sell you a game once, and then update it.

What is the promise of this approach? What are the potential pitfalls? What happens to your video game roster when another wrestler does something unspeakable?

Plus, more media has entered the public domain! And we’re one year out from the most famous rodent of them all joining the army of the publicly-owned!

To unlock this episode in its entirety — and many episodes more! — just support us on Patreon with at least one measly dollar a month!

Join us!

Fun Size Episode 64 – A Real Lesson in Imagined Power

We’re back in the studio with Patrick Johnson for one of our weirdest conversations yet. First, what are the consequences of having a perfect memory? On our emotions, our morality, or our sanity? What does it mean to forget, is it for the best that our memories are imperfect?

And when Star Trek‘s Data finally achieves a range of emotional responses, would he suddenly be bombarded with a tidal wave of backlogged emotional responses to old memories? Is a perfect memory a curse? Is it possible to forgive when the wrongs done to you will be forever remembered with perfect recall?

Then, we talk about cops. Both the people and the reality show. And how our deeply ingrained perceptions of policing are shaped far more by fictional media depictions than even our own often tense and uncomfortable encounters with real life law enforcement. And what about shows like Dog the Bounty Hunter, and other situations where people simply assume an air of authority with the implied threat of violence?

We recommend: Running from COPS podcast.

Episode 48 – Sin City

“I grab myself one last lungful of night air. Then I trade it in for a smoky soup spiced with sweat and vomit and booze and blood. I know the flavor well.”

After more than two years, we’re back with another panel episode! And this month, we’re tossing back some cheap booze at Kadie’s Saloon and making some bad decisions with Joe Preti, and Kit Laika, and get our filthy mitts on Frank Miller’s hyper-stylized, two-fisted neo-noir comics franchise that defined all things grim and gritty in the 1990s: Sin City!

After a rise to comics superstardom with Daredevil and Batman, Frank Miller turned his trademarked hard-boiled style up to eleven with a series of interconnected hyperbolic crime stories, set in the fun house mirror world of Basin City, a desert town populated entirely by lowlifes, mobsters, prostitutes, corrupt businessmen, assassins, creeps, killers, crooked cops, dirty politicians, and one hulking unkillable brute named Marv.

Illustrated in a stunning highly contrasted black and white, Sin City was a perfect distillation of everything comics readers loved and hated about the comics of a controversial and often problematic master of the craft.

Music: 
“Cool Vibes” from Film Noire by Kevin MacLeod

Fun Size Episode 56 – “The Customer is Always Right”

We continue to work the registers with Tobiah Panshin, going to places both weirdly metaphysical and painfully mundane.

First, Mike thinks it might actually be preferable to live in a hypothetical computer simulation than a “real” universe. What is real, anyways? Does that make our programmers gods?  Is the act of creation inherently selfish — and if it is, does that even matter?

Then, we look at a recently unearthed-on-YouTube reality show, Airline, about ticket agents and flight attendants weathering often-drunken customer abuse and demands. It triggers all sorts of all-too-familiar customer service flashbacks. Plus, Mike remembers that one time he almost got into a fight at the airport.

Fun Size Episode 51 – Existential Dread and Animal Puns

It’s a Captain Picard Day miracle!

After a five-month hiatus, we’re back….ish. We’re broadcasting remotely with KTQA Radio‘s Sam Mulvey and trying to shake some of the cobwebs out.

Casey meets a wild Keanu and we wonder ponder again the magical unicorn nature of his celebrity namesake. And on the opposite end of the moral spectrum, we predict the inevitable airlock assassination of future space-despot Elon Musk.

We try to unpack media Copaganda, our changing relationship with police-centric media and lament how a lot of the progress made in this year’s uprisings against police violence have slowly rolled back.

Sam fills us in on the radio station he’s been building, and we talk about all the media we’ve been watching and reading from our protective bunkers, trapped in a world we never made.

Also! We have a Discord server now! Join us!

Black Lives Matter

On May 25th, a 46 year-old black man named George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. The cop, Derek Chauvin, choked Floyd against the pavement with his knee for over eight minutes until he died. In full view of cell phone cameras. While other officers looked on and did nothing.

Without that cell phone camera, George Floyd’s story would have ended there. Not only was Chauvin not fired immediately, it was only after nationwide protests in nearly every major city — protests that police have uniformly and predictably escalated into brazen violence — that he and other officers were finally charged with Floyd’s murder.

And through all of this, the police have done everything in their power to deflect blame, avoid accountability, and provoke an already tense situation into a violent one. So far, we have seen police:

We wish it ended there.This is just over the past nine days.

Policing is utterly broken and is entrenched in an oppressive and racist system that has rarely gotten more than a finger-wagging and empty moralizing from politicians in either political party. George Floyd’s murder is part of a pattern of racially targeted abuse and murder that goes back over a century. The cops act with brutal impunity because they know they will not be held accountable. They do it again, and again, and again. And it needs to stop NOW.

Radio vs. the Martians! stands unequivocally with the protestors who are putting their bodies and freedom at risk in the heart of a global pandemic to counter the racist murder of George Floyd, and all of the murders and assaults that preceded it. We reject the police violence that transcends this one killing, and call for the entire institution to be rebuilt. The police unions to be busted down, their leadership fired and prosecuted for their part in the escalating violence and assault on protestors. They need to be made fully accountable to the communities they operate in.

We also have no time for the hand-waving and pearl clutching of those who have more anger for a burned police station or a looted store than they do for the dehumanizing and unrepentant racist violence against human beings. Stuff can be replaced. Human lives cannot. If you want to scold someone about violence, tell it to the cops.

As director James Cameron once said when he explained why he made the villainous T-1000 an L.A. police officer in Terminator 2:

Cops think of all non-cops as less than they are — stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job.

To that end, our show is making a $500.00 donation to the Freedom Fund of Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County. This will be used to bail out those arrested during the protests in Seattle. The cash bail system is an inhumane way for the police to keep people who have not been convicted of a crime locked up if they don’t have the economic privilege to afford their own freedom.

We ask that you make a donation of your own, to this or another organization fighting for racial justice. Take a screenshot of your donation confirmation, post it to social media, and then link to it in the comment below.

Stay safe. Take care of each other. And fuck the police.

Fun Size Episode 42 – Hey, I Know That!

We chat a bit with Tobiah Panshin about that great intangible that gets people’s ire up: Fan Service!

What is it? Why is it used as a pejorative? Is it ever a welcome thing? Why does it both delight and frustrate? Amuse and Annoy? We delve into the wherefores and whyfores and try to figure it all out.

Note: This episode was recorded before our last Fun Size episode in October, and we hadn’t seen Joker yet.