Monday, March 15, 2010

Picking a Peck of Podcasts



I know I haven't written in awhile. I've been putting in some long hours an the True Grind that I call work. What can I say? I like getting paid.

I've also been a little slack in keeping up with the goings on in the WoW community. I have to deal with poor internet connection when I'm working out of town, and limited internet time when I do manage to squeeze in a few hours at the homestead. Trying to catch up via blogs is quite time-consuming (I like reading many blogs) and I generally try to avoid things like the World of Warcraft official forums because I value my time (and I don't speak "paint-sniffing hamster").

However, one of the perks of my job is that I have long commutes to and from work. Yes, for me that's a perk. No, I'm not well in the head. Moving on. This commute gives me the opportunity to listen to as many podcasts as I can. In fact, I often don't have enough time to listen to them all during my three-plus hours of travel time a day. What I'll end up doing is slapping the iPod buds in my hears while I'm killing time in the evening (shopping, cleaning, etc).

I admit that podcasts might not keep me on the cutting edge of gaming news. I might be a few days to a week behind, depending on when I download them from ITunes, but 99% of that news either doesn't affect me or doesn't concern me to the point where I feel the need to immediately address the issue.

Plus, there's times when I just want to be entertained. Just like WoW itself, with all its theorycrafting and min/maxing, the bottom line is having fun (and not Deeprun Tram fun like that one time with that drunk lady gnome with the sweet, cottn candy hair and full red li-)

*cough*

Allow me to share with you a couple of my preferred listening podcasts:

- The Instance: About a year and a half ago, the evening before I was to go in for LASIK eye surgery, I searched iTunes for a World of Warcraft podcast. LASIK laser eye surgery would allow me to live without my glasses for the first time in decades. It meant I had to make the small sacrifice of spending twenty four hours in darkness to help the eyes recover from the procedure. I knew I wasn't going to be able to read, and playing WoW would be out of the question (twitch twitch). The next best thing would be to listen to people talk about WoW. Hence, my search for a podcast.

During my search, I came across The Instance. I listened to part of one of them, and immediately downloaded about the previous fifteen episodes. The next day, after lasers burned my eyes, I joined the gamer stereotype for one day only and crawled into the basement to get my (audio) WoW on.

About a hundred episodes later, I'm still a fan.

I joined their guild.

I'm still entertained by Scott and Randy. They give me the news, tips, and are a pleasure to listen to. They support the fans that support them with a guild, giveaways, and let's not forget the yearly Nerdtacular event.

- CASTaclysm: A recent addition to my playlist, CASTaclysm is a podcast hosted by Thunderer, Jhaman, and Markco With two arena competitors and a PVE dynamo, CASTaclysm covers a wide variety of topics including making gold via Markco's two copper, so to speak.

Two podcast from my playlist. Put them on yours.

1 comments:

Markco said...

I'm glad you like the podcast! Thanks :D