#gastronaut

[fyeahaudiodrama]

If you like Dungeon Meshi...

Have you heard the good word of audio drama? Come on in, the medium is full of little weirdos with specific obsessions!

Bullet points in text below the cut!

The Dungeon Economic Model

Still all about dungeons!

Focus on the economic impact of dungeons (and why your town wants one!)

Just ignore the cults and old magic, it’s fiiiiiiine

Eeler's Choice

Strong economic ties to the pursuit of monstrous creatures

Emphasis on maintaining balance within this system

Gastronaut

Worldbuilding based around ideas of food, consumption, and being consumed

Makes you want to slow down and enjoy what’s on your plate

Inn Between

Fresh interpretation of classic fantasy RPG settings

Importance on reflection and rest between adventures

Full of adventuring party hijinks

Starfall

Focus on food and its role in healing and growth

Settings as living reflections of their inhabitants

Non-standard cat girl

Unwell

Setting that loves you (and holds onto you, and never lets you go)

Managing the supernatural through study and investigation

[boombox-fuckboy]

Hey!!! You commented on my post about limetown haha which is why I’m here. You offered to give podcast recs! What are your favorites?? I’m looking for some new ones

I completely forgot I had this ask, excuse the delay. Here's a selection of 30 podcasts I enjoyed from a broad range of genres: hopefully at least one appeals.

Let me know if you're after something more specific.

Arden: (Investigative, Comedy) On the 25th of December, 2007, heiress and young actress Julie Capsom crashed her car into a tree and fled into a nearby forest clearing, leaving a trail that seemingly vanished into thin air, and a dismembered torso in the trunk. A decade later, Bea, the first reporter on the scene, and Brenda, a detective on the case, are hosting a true crime podcast about it, and neither is remotely impressed with what the other has to say. Arden is also a retelling of various Shakespeare plays.

Desperado: (Supernatural, Adventure, Horror Elements) In a modern world of gods and magic, three young people, all under the patronage of death dieties, embark on the same adventure for different reasons: for safety, for revenge, and to kill The Old Man in the Sky. Fantastic banter and killer action sequences.

The Far Meridian: (Magical Realism) An agoraphobic young woman wakes one day to discover her lighthouse home has travelled to somewhere entirely unfamilar. As this continues to happen day after day, she uses the opportunity to search for her missing brother. A really unique and charming piece of fiction.

Gastronaut: (Sci-Fi) Interstellar travel audio blog of a former food critic as he travels to an active warzone to get firsthand experience with unfamilar cuisine. ft. Disgruntled martian nobility, sinister businessmen, explosive mushrooms, forbidden snacks, rogue revolutionary artists, and the consequences of your actions.

Girl in Space: (Sci-Fi) The Girl In Space lives alone on a space station, doing science, making cheese, rewatching Jurassic Park, and tending to the plants, animals, and artificial sun entrusted to her. It's a little lonely, but not a bad life. Would be a shame if someone came along to ruin it.

The Goblet Wire: (Microfiction, Weird Fiction) A surreal microfiction with horror elements, taking the form of phone calls to an audio-based game in which the voice of the mysterious Dictator leads each player through fantastic and horrific world and story.

Hello From The Hallowoods: (Horror, Supernatural) A dramatic entity beyond your comprehension visits your nightmares to tell stories of the people (in varying degrees of human and alive) that inhabit the strange, deadly, and beautiful Hallowoods, as they find meaning and sometimes eachother.

Hi Nay: (Supernatural Horror) A year after moving to Toronto, sound designer Mari finds herself drawn into helping people around the city with various horrific supernatural encounters due to her babaylan (shaman) family background. It quickly becomes apparent that there's something much more sinister and complicated happening in the background.

Inco: (Microfiction, Sci-Fi) A perpetually exausted interstellar information trader and her peppy AI find a mysterious (read: bratty) boy floating in space and are inadventently pulled into a world political intrigue.

Inn Between: (Fantasy) Ever curious about what the D&D characters get up to at the tavern between sessions? A generally lighter-hearted (with some exceptions) with richly-written and always-growing characters. A really interesting format, too: a lot of the adventure appears in the "next time" and "last time" segments which makes it all flow really nicely. Not a tabletop podcast.

Janus Descending: (Sci-Fi, Horror, Tragedy) A xenoarcheologist and a xenopaleontologist are sent to a study a dead city on a distant world. Nobody likes what they find there. A unique format, with one set of logs presented first to last, and the other last to first. I'd recommend listening to the supercut for this one.

The Kingmaker Histories: (Steampunk, Weird Fiction, Adventure, Fantasy Elements) In the Valorian Socialist Republic 1911, on her 25th birthday, tailor's apprentice Colette experienced the worst headache of her life. As a result, she fleed from town with a human artificer and a fae chef - both now smugglers - pursued by an utterly furious flesh-crafter. I'm not sure I'm selling how good this podcast is but it's very good.

Life With Althaar: (Sci-Fi, Comedy) A human repairman moves to a space station on the edge of human territory that is perpetually on the edge of self-destruction, and ends up with a less-than-ideal last-minute roomate. Althaar is polite, friendly, deeply interested in human culture, and eager to be friends. Unfortunately he belongs to a species that sends humans into a visceral panic at a glance.

Lost Terminal: (Sci-Fi, Hopepunk) Seth is a very lonely AI living on a satellite. His crew were left stranded aboard with no hope of return, and it's been longer than he can count since then. The Earth below him has changed dramatically, and with only a few other AI down there to talk to, he's very lonely. But! He has a plan to make some new friends.

Love and Luck: (Romance, Slice-of-Life and Urban Fantasy Elements) Voice messages cataloguing two young men falling in love and opening a queer dry bar together.

Midnight Radio: (Light Supernatural, Romance) Sybil McIntyre, host of the ever-popular 1950's nightly radio hour, begins exchanging letters with an old fan who has reluctantly returned to visit Sybil's beloved town.

Midst: (Weird Fiction, Western, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Elements) The old-western planetoid islet of Midst floats, rotating steadily, in a sea of reality-warping darkness. Down in the town of Stationary Hill, things are in movement, and vistors from the light above are about to bring unanticipated change. ft a monocycle-riding monster-hunter, radio-famous airship paladins, deadly mica, the universe's peppiest cultist, good dogs, and a really strange businessman.

The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity, and Mortality: (Weird Fiction, Supernatural, Urban Fantasy and Horror Elements) A friendly AI tour guide leads you on a tour of the Mistholme Museum, explaining the strange and often alternatural story behind each item.

Monstrous Agonies: (Supernatural, Relationship Advice) An interpersonal advice show for supernatural entities and other people living liminally in the modern world.

Night Shift: (Urban Fantasy, Investigative) Set in a modern world with the addition of magic, which manifests in small inherited skills/traits, can warp people in horrific ways, or can be manipulated with the right science (and intense work) to induce superpowers. Sebastian Fenn is a barista at Night Shift Coffee, but since things are slow he's decided to start a podcast to talk about various mysteries, crimes and conspiracies around the city, and of course finds himself deeper in them than he'd intended.

The Pasithea Powder: (Sci-Fi, Thriller Elements? I think?) The last major interplanetary war was full of atrocities, but none more infamous then the creation of Pasithea Powder, a memory altering drug which was used to horrible effect and landed it's entire team of creators in prison. So when decorated war hero Captain Sophie Green sees one of them wandering free, worlds away from his prison, she gets in touch with a very old, estranged friend: one Dr. Jane Gonzalez, who's behind bars for the very same reason.

SCP: Find Us Alive: (Weird Fiction, Supernatural, Horror and Slice-of-Life elements) You don't need to know anything about SCP to enjoy this. A research team gets trapped in an underground research facility when the complex collapses and the building is dragged into a pocket dimension. The tear it was designed to study begins creating tiny copies of itself, generating strange entities the team needs to deal with. And as if that wasn't enough, the entire situation physically resets itself every 30 days. And yet, this is genuinely also an office comedy.

Second Star to the Left: (Sci-Fi) Audio logs of a scout sent to explore and establish early infastructure new world, and the communications with the minder in charge of keeping her alive.

Seen and Not Heard: (Slice-of-Life, Drama) Seen and Not Heard follows Bet, who's still adjusting to life a year after a bout of severe illness, and the resulting hearing loss it caused. It's about the ways we make connection, and food, and art, and different kinds of grief.

The Silt Verses: (Horror) In a modern world where gods are abundant, frequently both commercialised and restricted, two devotees of an outlawed river god go on a pilgrimage.

SINKHOLE: (Sci-Fi, Weird Fiction) Forum posts from a data restoration community in a near future where the human brain is its own computer and one city hosts a massive void.

Starfall: (Fantasy) Seeking to escape her mysterious past and find some purpose, a young swordswoman joins a travelling actor's troupe. This new life is unfamilar and sometimes stressful, but she's taken under the wing of stagehand Fel, who's determined to help her feel welcome as she experiences the figurative and literal magic of the theatre for the first time.

The Tower: (Weird Fiction) A low-key, meditative podcasy about a young woman who decides to climb a seemingly endless tower. Gorgeous sound design.

The Vesta Clinic: (Sci-Fi) New GP Dr. Fae Underwood, with the expert transcription skills of resident AI Sec, writes up patient reports on human and alien patients of The Vesta Clinic, a medical clinic on the edge of human space. Really comfy and creative.

Victoriocity: (Steampunk, Mystery) Set in the steam-powered Victorian city of Even Greater London, an aspiring journalist and a tired detective find themselves working together to solve a strange murder. I say Victorian but as queen Victoria is now an extensive grandiocity of cyborg components following seven only-kind-of-successful assassinations, you may need to adjust expectations a little.

[smallsies]

Audio Drama Sunday — April 28, 2024 ✨

I checked out quite a few shows this week, mostly thanks to the @podcast-bookclub 1 Year Anniversary event yesterday!

Firstly, though, I have to give a shoutout again to episode 1 of Wanderer's Journal that dropped this week. We hosted a last-minute listening party in the server, joined by a few of the lovely cast and crew, & it was a blast! Eagerly awaiting the release of episode 2 on the Patreon feed this week.

As for all of the anniversary shows I mentioned earlier, we asked the members to submit shows for the event & they knocked it out of the park. I was only able to make it for the first half of the marathon, but it was a great time (and has definitely made me add a bunch of new shows to my to-listen list)

Fawx & Stallion was our first listen of the day! I mentioned on the stage that I'm not typically one to venture outside of my colloquial horror shows, but this podcast is incredible, & makes my past 14-year-old obsessed-with-Sherlock-Holmes self very happy. They're currently crowdfunding for their second season, which you can check out here!

We also checked out Night Shift, which I hadn't listened to before but was immediately told was right up my alley. This observation was absolutely correct, and we all liked this show enough there have already been talks in the server about giving it a listen all together! I love shows with framing devices, and podcast-within-a-podcast is always a fun avenue.

I've listened to Gastronaut a handful of times now, and was more than happy to listen to the pilot again for this event! The semi-recent addition of the transcripts was super helpful, & probably gives me an excuse to relisten to the show in its entirety now, but even just the pilot episode gives you such fun insight into the world & their expanse of cool foods that are tragically denied to those of us residing on earth.

The Grotto was the last show I had time to catch, being another one that I already really loved going in to this! After getting further into the show, you're forced to really reframe your understanding of the beginning of the story which has thus far made it really enjoyable to revisit. (I have yet to finish the finale—whoops—so maybe I'll change my tune when I get around to it?)

I didn't get the chance to listen to anything else this week, (still caught between the end of the semester, packing to move, and the upcoming Podcast Jam @podcastjam Jam Weekend,) but I have at least 14 hours worth of drive time ahead of me this week, so recommendations are more than welcome!

Happy listening for the week ahead, friends!

[thesnadger]

Gastronaut is wild because in episode one Oscar reviews a small Vietnamese restaurant and decides to make a career change, then you skip ahead and it's episode seventeen, Oscar is now making chemical weapons for guerrilla fighters.

How did we get from point A to point B? Well the manufacturing and distribution of frozen TV dinners has more to do with it than you might expect.

[podcast-bookclub]

Cooking and culture, intrigue and... Listening Parties!

Galactic misadventures have hit the Bookclub! Join us over in the Discord server as we listen through narrative sci-fi audio drama Gastronaut. December 10th will officially kick off the listen of @gastronaut-pod as the mod team's next Editor's Pick. Happy listening!

[evilittlecrow]

Every now and then I watch a Gastronaut episode and I get intense cultural backlash

[aarlone]

I haven't really examined the direction my podcast genres have started to lean (beyond away from horror), but I just noticed that the 3 shows I'm working my way through have a theme:

Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace

Gastronaut has been fantastic.

Diary of a Space Archivist is interesting and is going in a fun direction.

Wolf 359's anniversary is this year, so how could I not do a relisten.

Clearly my heart is missing the stars. 2024 should be the year of sci-fi shows for me.b

[sylvansleuth]

Murder🤝Be Racist

[whichcouldmeanothing]

finally dropout gave us a cooking show judged by regular people lmao

[gastronauts]

Bad food 🍔 > "Good" food 🥗

Do you agree or disagree?

[giantkillerjack]

I think Gastronauts on Dropout is the cooking show that has made me truly appreciate the skill of professional chefs more than any other cooking show.

Like I don't know if it's because the challenges are so crazy or the fact that the judges don't have any professional input whatsoever (they're all comedians), but the combination of how utterly stoked the judges are to be eating this food and how creative the chefs get to be really works to make you marvel at just how skilled a professional chef has to be.

Other cooking shows always have a level-voiced narrator listing out shit like,

"Rebecca is doing a praline-mint ganache with a Twiffly Street stir-up, combined with a gestelle Santa Maria sponge technique."

And it's fun to pretend like, 'Ah, yes. Of course! A classic of the genre! He'd be a fool not to!' as though I know anything about cooking or baking.

But on Gastronauts, it's a bunch of comedians who would really graciously appreciate some fancy food, watching chefs cook and going, like,

"What is that? What is he doing?? It's like- like a swishy thing! Like a fancy swishy thing!!"

"OH MY GOD YES, HE'S USING ONIONS."

"Ooo! Crunchies!??"

And then the chefs get to come out and formally present their food, which makes them look very smart. And these actors who generally can't afford Michelin star cuisine are just :DDDD!

And it's like, oh yeah. This is about my level, yes. This conveys how normal people who don't eat good food for a living would actually react. And it's super chill. It's good vibes, that show. 👌

[heytherecentaurs]

Brennan’s talked before about how as a poor young adult he lived in New York and struggled with food security. He tells a story of going to frozen yogurt places for free samples and a cheap dumpling spot because it was a lot of food.

His opinions on food and his described behaviours around food make a lot of sense in that context. He may be successful now and can be assured he can eat again when he’s hungry, but it appears he has legitimate trauma around his experiences with poverty because what he’s humorously describing is a trauma response. His mind hasn’t gotten rid of the anxiety of “I’m eating now so I better make it count because I don’t know when I will again.”

Because he’s a comedian he manages to frame it as a joke, but there’s certainly an underlying sadness. It also informs Evan Kelmp’s characterization. Capitalism is the root issue here and poverty is state-sanctioned economic abuse.

Anyway, I hope he’s doing well and taking care of himself.

[boombox-fuckboy]

hit me with that fiction podcast 😎

Your username reminds of the daytrip I impulse bought 5kg of mandarins from a roadside stall and spent the rest of that weekend making delicious jam. An appropriate podcast for that memory is:

Gastronaut

Sci-Fi • Adventure

The interstellar travel blog of Oscar Yasui, former food critic, current independent food journalist. Specifically, of Oscar's travels to an active warzone to get firsthand experience with unfamilar cuisine. Featuring disgruntled martian nobility, sinister businessmen, explosive mushrooms, forbidden snacks, rogue revolutionary artists, the ways people find to do more than just survive, and the many consequences of your own actions. I adore it.

[thesnadger]

"This one struggles to live and is constantly under attack by people and wildlife" is the best possible description, not just of Oscar Yasui, but of any podcast protagonist really.

[podcast-bookclub]

Episode 4 of Coffee Shop Chats with @gastronaut-pod is out now!

[larsnaldo]