Ululu’s Top 8 Podcasts: A Magical Continent Strip-Mines Itself for Content

Ululu, a hidden land that reveals itself to travelers in the Faraway card game, has now become an ecotourism paradise. The residents have changed as the place comes to grips with an influx of wiry fintech people in Mercedes-Benz sprinter vans, bringing with them what might be the modern analog to blankets infected with smallpox: podcasts.

Dornackl now makes jerky out of endangered animals, but he’s doing numbers

My last visit there, I saw my first boutique store run by a transplant and everybody had started a damn Ululu podcast. I had to listen to a lot of them because it would have been rude not to, so for better or worse, here are my reviews of Ululu’s Top 8 Podcasts:

1) That Uddu That You Do, hosted by Dornackl of the Desert 
Listen, I have no shaman-level knowledge of the folk medicine of Ululu, but I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to carve pieces off an Uddu stone and use them in a proprietary burger sauce recipe. My last stop was 24+ hours in the desert, 6 of which I spent watching Dusteen carve off pieces of it, mash them up with Okiko fat, and rant about how his clan was the worthiest of all the desert folk. His mic wasn’t even on. I think the worst part was when the light went out of the stone and it stopped hovering and crashed to the floor, that was the most demoralizing thing I think I’ve ever seen.

2) Daily Mushroom Forest Thoughts
My host played me an episode and the podcast started out with an ad for Red Robin because they’re hosting it on LibSyn. I don’t even know how that’s possible. And I’m not good at hiding my reaction to stuff, that was a long fuckin’ 1 hour 37 minutes, I can tell you that.

3) I Still Don’t Know How to Pronounce This Podcast’s Name and I’m Not Going to Try
I did a pit stop in a town where I saw my old two-headed pals, Klasaatz and Klaaseesin — or is it “pal”? I never quite grasped their conception of singular vs. plural. Anyhow, Klasaatz remembers details with eidetic clarity and Klaaseesin has a gift for interpretation and context. They’re like the play-by-play and color commentary team on an NFL broadcast, except they’re talking about all the people who move through their stacked pueblo of houses during the summer. At one point I appeared in one of the recollections and they reminded me about why I first came here. The live episode I saw them record was 8 eight hours long. Absolutely hypnotic. Five stars.

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4) Breath of the Okiko
I think the general problem with becoming a solo version of a media network is that your broadcast time and release schedule far outstrip your ability to meaningfully populate it. Turn on your local news during a flood or fire, they will have a couple poor schmucks at major intersections bouncing back and forth between graphics and the studio team for hours with no new information. The urgency is the information. “As you can see, there are some emergency vehicles moving around in back of me…” That’s what Breath of the Okiko tries to do, except it’s about a self-absorbed former tourist who settled here and now they’re trying to one-up everybody else for authenticity and turning every damn thing they see into some tarted up tale of transformation. Even back home, I get very nervous about people who advertise how centered and virtuous and empathetic they are right up front. People who do this are usually hopelessly lost or they’re hoping you are so you’ll buy their three-tier Ululu Self-Actualization Coaching Package. Fuuuuuck that.

5) The Stave and the Garland
From the banks of a pristine river, this host talks over the ambient sound of moving water on the banks near where they practice martial arts. I tried to sit in for a bit of it and I have to say, I think I cracked a rib, but it still felt somehow playful. There’s one episode and so far it’s 136 hours, 28 minutes and climbing. They’ve definitely got the ASMR listener segment dialed in.

6) The Shifting Lands
I’d never considered double-decker teasers with the intro music. The first cold-open teaser made me feel a bit pandered to, but if you’re podcasting, it’s a very hard tactic to resist: “A missing donation box. A quiet town torn apart. Find out what happens when you don’t stay out of Riverdale.” But what I liked here is how the host flips the setup right into the first tale, which centered on Ululu’s forest taxonomy, which I never get tired of hearing about. It’s pretty slick.

7) Journeyed
Another dickhead for whom the most fascinating thing about Ululu is…them. The intro was so laden with tautological statements, I actually whimpered a bit around the 2:48 mark, which got me a nasty stare. The show description has typos in it. Horseshit like this is one of the reasons nobody believes anything anymore.

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8) Crappshawn’s House of Bars
You know that look when you’re talking with somebody at a party who works at a dab store and hangs out with dab people who live the dab life but it’s still a fairly cool conversation until you realize they’re about to rap? It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Colorado or Ululu, the few seconds of body language and the way they look into your eyes is universal and you think, “Oh God, please don’t rap,” and then they rap and you put your hands in your pockets and stare at your shoes and bob your head once in a while because they’re looking at you the whole time and gesticulating in your face? All I’m saying is please don’t rap, especially to a guest who’s trapped in your yurt for the night. You don’t have any bars and it’s not cool. Please don’t rap.