Curate Yourself

http://www.nightvalepresents.com/aliceisntdead/

For me, podcasts are everything I want in a medium.
Podcasts are everything I like about books and TV put into one medium. Narrative sequential podcasts are a medium that I've gotten into more recently as I've been in school. It's like an audio book that gets a new chapter each week, forcing me to take my time and enjoy the story. I like how when listening to podcasts I get to fill in the information as I go. Similar to text driven media, the audience gets to imagine what everything looks like. The voice tells me the setting is a diner, and I get to fill in the rest. Suddenly the characters, characters that I also get to design, are in a diner from my hometown. And at once the story becomes more relatable and engaging.
Why is this podcast important as a whole?
What I like about Alice Isn't Dead specifically is its subject matter and pacing. A sentence synopsis's of the story is about a woman who became a trucker to travel the country in search for her wife who disappeared one day. As she travels she comes across supernatural and surreal physical and mental obstacles. The whole podcast is heard from the truckers perspective, it's recorded like she's talking into her radio. Some of it is her describing the landscape she's in, or just random anecdotes, or any other tangent. This makes the whole podcast feel genuine and makes the protagonist more relatable and realistic. Sometimes she goes off on tangents and then pulls herself back and the writing feels natural so it's easy to believe she's a bored trucker on the road.
This podcast in particular would be beneficial to the class because it's unique in that its a podcast but also unique in its subject matter and structure. It's a horror mystery podcast about a lesbian trucker trying to find her wife while piecing together clues and fighting monsters. I'm not really sure what to elaborate on at that point. If that tagline doesn't interest you than I'm not sure what else I can do to grab your attention. horror. lesbian. mystery. podcast. my whole blogpost could have been just those four words.
It's a medium that with the right voice acting and writing is a cheap alternative to telling an engaging story. There's usually not executives or board members to impress, there's more freedom to tell whatever story the creator wants to tell. That's why there tends to be much more diversity in narrative podcasts.  It's a nice alternative to movies and TV which tend to be more dominated with the typical straight white male protagonist I'm getting sick of. The tendency to take risks and have more diverse characters make narrative podcasts worth looking into for the class.