All of these podcasts are good enough to simply sit and listen to, but in all honesty the ideal time to consume audio is when your body’s busy doing something else — just like any talk radio. I even put clips of each show in the doodads after each entry to boot. (The numbered links point to each podcast’s subscription page in iTunes.)

1. This American Life

Though the show is native to radio, not the internet, This American Life regularly dominates the top spot on the iTunes podcast charts when their new episodes drop on Mondays. In its life as a radio show, TAL has won Peabody awards for its journalism, though the show’s focus is less on straight journalism and instead simple storytelling — and following the threads of narrative wherever they lead. Starting last year, they made their first forays into video through a TV program on Showtime, which is equally compelling.

2. The Sound of Young America

Jesse Thorn started his now interview-based show as a random, low-key college radio affair, only for it to grow in quality and popularity until Public Radio International (the same company that distributes This American Life) picked up The Sound of Young America to air nationwide. Thorn interviews a host of authors, internet personalities and comedians of every stripe for the most part, meaning that just about everyone he talks to is someone I’m interested in listening to. Past guests have included Ira Glass, Michael Cera, Zach Galifianakis, Patton Oswalt, They Might Be Giants, as well as a brilliant dual-interview with real-life friends John Hodgman & Jonathan Coulton.

3. You Look Nice Today

Subtitled “A Journal of Emotional Hygiene,” You Look Nice Today incorporates a handful of my favorite internet people to great effect. Ringleader Merlin Mann (who’s already proved his comedy chops with his 30 Seconds with That Phone Guy videos) and his friends Adam Lisagor and Scott Simpson record their pointless, meandering conversations about topics real and imaginary — the four episodes released so far have covered premium nuts, loofahs, merkins, comptrollers, snare-drum-based fitness plans, and possible ad campaigns for fictional women’s deodorant brands. Mix in just a dash of John Hodgman (he provides the non-sequitur act breaks), and you’ve got an excellent recipe. And don’t let the numbering fool you — episode 2 is the first one. [Note: the free-range conversation includes smatterings of swearing throughout.]

4. Downloadable Content

The only bad thing about this podcast, made from the recordings of brainstorm sessions between the creators of Penny Arcade as they write a strip, is that it doesn’t update nearly enough. Though the podcast is essentially a straight fly-on-the-wall recording, which occasionally makes divining the topic at hand difficult — we aren’t privy to whatever it is on their computer screens that one or the other is pointing to. Nevertheless, Gabe & Tycho (or, as they’re known in real life, Mike Krahulik & Jerry Holkins) frequently have unique perspectives on video game issues, colored all the way through with their unique style of baroque vulgarisms. [Note: Take that to mean, they swear a whooole lot, but poetically.]

5. The Bugle: Audio Newspaper for a Visual World

The Daily Show’s John Oliver comments on weekly news of the world with fellow Englishman Andy Zaltzmann, as sponsored by The Times Online of London. Half-serious, half-mocking, all British accents, all the time. This is a fairly recent add to my regular rotation, and I’ve yet to cycle through the entire back catalog, but I don’t need to do that to be able to recommend it. That delicious flavor of crusty, dry British humor of understatement smashed up against Daily Show-style comedy news commentary is like peanut butter & chocolate all over again.

HONORABLE MENTIONS
The Mortified Shoebox Show — Mortified is a long-running stage show that puts adults on the spot reading from their childhood diaries and journals, to decidedly humorous effect. The Mortified Shoebox Show is a video podcast made from their archive of recordings, including gems like 500 Miles to Hollywood and I Hate Drake.

Have Games, Will Travel — Paul Tevis is a game reviewer of a different sort: shunning electronic games altogether, Have Games, Will Travel instead focuses on board, card, and tabletop role-playing games exclusively. The program itself is, admittedly, somewhat dry when Tevis is reviewing and not interviewing people in the tabletop gaming industry, but that doesn’t detract from the quality of his insight. Most of the games he reviews are somewhat indie affairs, but learning about a little-known gem that sounds like a blast to play is one of the show’s prime attractions.

Jonathan Coulton’s Thing A Week — The project now over, Thing A Week was the force that propelled Jonathan Coulton into the geek mainstream and onward into the geek stratosphere as nerd-dom’s go-to troubadour. For an entire year, Coulton released a new, free song every week as a personal creative exercise. One of the fruits of this labor was the song “Code Monkey”, instantly beloved by socially-awkward programming nerds the world over.

The Ricky Gervais Show — Another now-dead podcast, this one features co-creators of the BBC version of The Office, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, along with Karl Pilkington, an associate from their earlier days in satellite radio. Primarily, the show revolved around teasing Pilkington’s ignorance and plethora of surreal opinions with varying degrees of meanness, to the enjoyment of all. Pilkington’s behavior is so perfect as a comic foil that some have suspected him of being a plant; regardless of the truth, The Ricky Gervais show was a beacon of the inane while it lasted.

For starters, an admission: I’d definitely classify myself as a fan of Harry Potter. I’ve read the books, seen the movies, attended midnight releases for the books and movies alike. I’d even heard of wizard rock through friends — but I had no idea it was anything like this.

Profiling a geeky subculture is nothing new for a documentary. I remember watching Trekkies in high school, and feeling conflicted afterward due to the way the film treated its subjects like freakshows on parade. The Wizard Rockumentary doesn’t have that problem, though, and makes the members of bands with names like Draco and the Malfoys and The Hermione Crookshanks Experience seem as normal as any mainstream band.

In fact, most of the subjects profiled have truly infectious charm — to the Harry Potter fan, the gut reaction is to go home and get started on a wizard rock band of one’s very own, just to join in on the fun these folks are obviously having. The film spends a lot of time with the members of two giant bands in the wizard rock scene — Paul & Joe DeGeorge, of Harry and the Potters, and Alex Christopher, who fronts The Remus Lupins — who come off as especially likable and engaging.

Then again, maybe that’s not surprising, considering that most of the bands profiled in The Wizard Rockumentary helped create the wizard rock genre almost without meaning to. One established band wrote a one-off song about Ginny Weasley that became unexpectedly popular, and subsequently turned to wizard rock full-time. The DeGeorge brothers created their Harry Potter-themed act as a lark when the bands booked for their backyard concert canceled. And Alex Christopher wrote his first song about Snape as a joke at a party, put it on MySpace to share with a few friends, only to have it explode in popularity.

“Explode in popularity” pretty much sums up what happened to the wizard rock genre as the film progresses. There’s a moment about 20 minutes in, after interviews with a handful of musicians, where a montage introduces band after bands after band, each claiming a different bit of the Harry Potter lexicon for themselves. Solo acts, like The Whomping Willows; duos like the Parselmouths and The Moaning Myrtles — even a band composed of a 7- and 4-year-old who call themselves The Hungarian Horntails. It’s a revelatory moment; you just want it to go on and on.

And it does go on. The film’s perspective gets wider & wider, following the bands as they move from bedrooms to libraries, to concerts featuring multiple wizard rock bands, to playing Las Vegas conventions and being covered on television by MTV News. As the movement surges, the film’s focus changes from simply exploring the genre, to the issue of managing the community facing the major players.

Band members grapple with defending themselves from friends who see their music as kind of a joke. (Joe DeGeorge, on predictions for the final Harry Potter book: “It would be cool to see Harry start his band… that would legitimize a lot of stuff for me.”) Adults have to deal with the issues of playing music to an audience comprised largely of very small children. There’s the newcomers to nurture. And when things reach the MTV tipping point, a label comes forward and tries to capitalize on wizard rock’s popularity in time for the last book’s release. It’s a lot more interesting than a movie about Harry Potter bands has any right to be.

As interesting as it is, though, The Wizard Rockumentary still has flaws. Directors Megan and Mallory Schuyler, 22-year old twins, produced the film independently and on a low budget, which occasionally creeps into the production values — low-fi video here, editing and audio leveling problems there. There’s maybe a bit too much concert footage in the 92-minute movie, and, sadly, the often-witty lyrics in that footage are frequently drowned out by crowd noise and loud instruments. And for a film subtitled “A Movie About Rocking and Rowling”, it would have been helpful (though understandably difficult) to get some comments from J.K. herself — even if it was archival footage.

The film’s biggest problem, though, is the absence of a strong narrative. Interviews are framed more or less chronologically, starting in the summer of 2006 and continuing until August 2007, after the final Harry Potter book’s release. The interview material is highly entertaining on its own, but could benefit from a stronger sense of the deeper issues at hand about wizard rock — the “Why should we care about this?” aspect of documentary film. The reasons are there, but the viewer has to do a little too much reading between the lines to find them.

All in all, the wider world may dismiss the genre as slight, but the truth is that wizard rock does for music what the Harry Potter books do for reading & writing: inspire people, and kids especially, to be creative. As Paul DeGeorge says in the movie: “When we would autograph, like, 7- and 8-year-olds’ CDs, we would write: ‘Start your own bands about books!’ And to see a 7-year-old actually do it… I mean, I could quit now. I feel that my job is done, having seen that.”

As a film, The Wizard Rockumentary stands as a great portrait of an internet grassroots subculture — one unique for being primarily driven by young people and run by volunteer effort — but one that doesn’t look quite as deeply into its subject as it could.

Score:

For more about wizard rock, check out the Wizrocklopedia, the Wizard Rock Club, Real Wizard Rock (a lyrics site), and Wizard Rock Dot Org. For the film, visit the official Wizard Rockumentary site. You can also go to the Wizard Rock page at Buzzfeed — a topic I tipped them off to, yet got no credit for suggesting. Dis!

All it needed was a little crop rotation. Or it might be more like a screen door…

I think that area — the invented ecology — best captures my fondness for the kind of source material that fill the pages of Dungeons & Dragons books. It’s not so much the content itself, which is diverting in its way, but the picture all the books attempt paint together of a coherent world. How else do you explain the sourcebooks on my shelf I may never actually put to use, but that I don’t regret owning for a second?

A well-developed invented ecology is the only reason I can bring myself to stick with most fantasy novels. Most sport average-to-bad prose, but their evocation of a total world is what makes me a fan when it’s done well. Sabriel is young-adult fiction, written below even the Harry Potter level style-wise. Its plot is decent, but its world is original and compelling. And for those few fantasy authors able to turn a phrase, there are cases like the fictional New Crobuzon of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, or Armada in The Scar feel as permanent, historied and tangible as the London of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Maps are like a real-world version of this. They describe real places that grew organically, but still have an element of invention to them. Obviously, maps of imaginary places are even better. Maybe the ultimate are imaginary maps of real places — an idea I can’t quite describe other than as something like remembered geography, or to link to sites like strange maps, or someone’s geographical map of internet communities, or a hand-drawn map of a videogame world. Basically, mixing up the objective and subjective on paper the same way they get mixed up in the brain.

World-creation may be my favorite art.

Typical answer when object is found (unspoken):
Yes, you are.

I’ve had a reviews tab going since last August around this same time, which is shocking. I’ve been far more consistent and thorough about maintaining my movie scores than I have been about anything else of mine on the internets, probably because of the simplicity of typing a name and picking some stars.

Looking at the numbers associated with each entry in the admin panel, I can tell I’ve seen over 150 titles this year — not just movies on DVD and at the theater, but a smattering of TV shows on DVD as well.

Even assuming a nice round figure of two hours for each entry — which has to be low, given single entries for entire television seasons — I figure I’ve spent almost a solid fortnight (two weeks, two weeks) just watching stuff. I’d probably be horrified, if I was somebody else. But I’m me! And besides, I think whatever total would come out for “boredom naps” would be far scarier.

My other time-consuming hobby continues to be WarMachine, as well as its sister game now, Hordes. I ordered some models on the cheap over the internets back in July, their cheapness stemming from the fact that the retailer couldn’t ship any orders for about a month. They finally came last weekend, and I’ve been picking away at assembling the ones that arrived — a pair of smaller ones are still on back order.

Here’s everybody I have assembled so far: one WarMachine ‘jack, and a couple beasts and a warlock from Hordes. The Hordes faction has a very druid-esque theme going on.

A woldwarden in-progess. Given the nature theme, the faction has some nature-powered constructs: this one is made of animated wood and stone (which you can see better here).

I was in Troutdale for the last week or so of July, to get my car’s engine replaced (long story) and, by happy circumstance, to attend Powell’s Books midnight Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows release party (pictures forthcoming on Flickr). While I was home, I met up with Josh Porter and Sean Cowan, who both moved to Portland recently. They’re both getting into WarMachine, too.

Sean inherited some of Androo’s models to start a Cryx faction army, and Josh was just about to get some Menoth stuff of his own. But how to get in some test runs before committing to buying this or that unit?

With Z-Bots mounted on cardboard cut-out bases with double-sided tape, of course. Ah, the sublime joys of post-college poverty — both Josh & Sean are fairly recent graduates. The fuzzy black things in the background are legit models primed black; everything else is plastic standing in for pewter.