Things! Now, with Podcasts!

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Podcasts:

My Brother, My Brother, and Me: A humourous advice show with the three McElroy brothers. Quite funny, not SUPER progressive (eg there was a very unfortunate joke about chronic fatigue syndrome awareness month) but good natured. I listened to a couple and enjoyed them then got bored at the sameyness.

Adventure Zone: a humourous, fourth wall breaking Dungeons and Dragons fantasy campaign with the McElroy brothers and their Dad. I keep hearing about these roleplaying podcasts but being put off by my improv drama squick, but thought I might enjoy a more humourous one and I am! I'm up to episode 8 and apparently it gets better from here, with a pretty good plot underneath the silliness. I skipped episode one because it was too much D&D finangling, that aspect hasn't been too bad from Episode 2 on.

Computer games:

Rose of Winter: A high fantasy dating sim about being a heavy set but sweet natured female warrior escorting princes from different magical species across the mountains. Cute and lightly funny, short and not very deep and more heteronormative than I would have liked, but still obviously trying to subvert the more sexist romance tropes. One path has a BITTERSWEET BEST ENDING which is NOT what I want from a dating sim, but the others are nice. And, well. Interspecies romance >.>

Charming Keep: a fantasy themed tapping mobile game, where resources build up over time and you spend them to make more resources. The premise is you are building towers full of shops in order to fund rescuing princes. You choose the shop type (magical items, clothes etc) and shopkeepers, they're cute and nicely diverse. Requires a bunch of tapping every time you start a new tower but not afterwards. Not the deepest or most intensely fun game but cute and not too frustrating to play without spending money.

Spirits of Mystery: the Fifth Kingdom: a hidden object game that started out ok but the back story turned out to be gross: The villain is the usual hook nosed greasy dark haired guy etc, which i could sort of deal with, but then it turns out his country was destroyed and his people scattered for the actions of one bad king and this is seen as totally ok. His anger about it is bad and unjustified because they should just...accept being oppressed forever, I guess.

Live Action TV:

The Good Place: A douchey woman, played by Kristen Bell, ends up in heaven due to a clerical error and has to pretend to be the person everyone thinks she is to avoid hell. She has the help of her nerdy ethics professor "soulmate", cue lots of cute odd couple/fake dating moments. I knew a REALLY BIG SPOILER going in that actually made the show way more fun for me, will probably make a spoilery post for anyone else who's interested, but will just say here that I thought it would run out of steam but instead it stayed interesting and the full season makes for a good story. It's made by the same people as Brooklyn 99 and Parks and Recreation, and has that mix of humour and drama, plus some exploration of the nature of good and evil, the possibility of redemption etc. AND instead of having a fat guy everyone is mean to, there's no fat people at all!

Animated TV:

Mob Psycho 100: perfectly good for what it is but not my thing. Humourous action from the maker of One Punch man about a young boy with psychic powers dealing with every day life and his "mentor", a fake psychic who is riding on his coattails.

Interviews with Monster Girls: One of those moe shows that is mostly fine and cute but every now and then crosses the line into SUPER SQUICKY. A good natured and scientifically curious biology teacher finds himself at a school with a number of monster students, and one teacher (a succubus). He tries to help them out and also learn about their lives and biology. A little bit too harem-y for me, he thankfully seems to only be interested in the other adult (and mostly in a "don't make the succubus feel uncomfortable by showing that you think she is hot" way) but one of the girls has a crush on him and there's just WAY too many hugs and questions about their dating etc, plus the camera is clearly into them all. But it also plays out like this "disability accessibility is important" metaphor that I find WEIRDLY ENJOYABLE, plus the teacher ship is cutely interspecies stop judging me.

Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: I can explain.

Voltron Season 2: I am finding this a slog, I am stuck on the second last episode with limited motivation. It's not even that different to season one, they just flanderised Hunk into The Fat Idiot Who Likes Food and overall made me feel like they don't value character and relationship arcs long term which makes it hard to get invested.