AKAPAD The Film Buff Podcast Update: Long COVID Recovery, Philly–Nashville Travel, and 31 Days of Dread 2026

If you just dropped into the feed of feeds, this is the show-life-health episode—not a movie review. Peter A. DeLuca (AKAPAD The Film Buff) comes out of Philadelphia with a status check after 1,300-plus episodes of long-form film study: how a childhood-to-now viewing life gets built into director profiles, online discourse, and reception after release. Two things sit on the desk. First, the calendar—back-to-back Nashville trips, three work days in Philly in a 10-to-12-day stretch, inventory episodes while traveling. Second, the lungs. Two years of long COVID wrecked throat and voice; 2026 is the rehab year. Cardio, rowing, volleyball, tennis, pickleball, hot water with lemon and ginger, cough drops as daily practice. Recording a ten-minute episode used to take forty minutes of hacking through mucus. That is why the show still exists.

Coming up: 31 Days of Dread—one horror film a day for October, roughly year ten—rebuilt around streaming platforms, one service per week. Also in the pipeline: more Ridley Scott, a Woody Allen director profile, a female-assassin series, Shakespeare films and documentaries, and the rest of the outside study (Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Charlie Rose). Subscribe, like, comment, and send it to the other film freak in your life. Transcript and timestamps below.

Film Buff Podcast Update: Health, Travel, and the 31 Days of Dread

Summary

In this candid and upbeat update, Peter Anthony Duca, AKA the Film Buff, shares personal insights and behind-the-scenes details about the podcast’s journey, his ongoing recovery from long COVID, and exciting upcoming content. Reflecting on over 1300 episodes, Peter reveals his passion for deep, long-form cinematic study, including director profiles, movie series, and thematic explorations. He discusses his busy travel schedule between Philadelphia and Nashville, the challenges of maintaining frequent podcast releases, and the strategies he employs to rehab his long COVID symptoms through cardio and lifestyle adjustments. Looking ahead, Peter announces the highly anticipated “31 Days of Dread” horror movie series for October, celebrating nearly a decade of this annual event with a new approach focusing on streaming platforms. The episode closes with a call to action for listeners to subscribe, engage, and share the podcast community.

Highlights

• 🎬 Peter Anthony Duca reflects on his journey through 1300+ podcast episodes dedicated to film study.
• 🏙️ Shares his busy travel plans, balancing work in Philadelphia and Nashville.
• 💪 Reveals personal battle with long COVID and how cardio, ginger-lemon regimen, and outdoor sports aid his recovery.
• 📅 Announces “31 Days of Dread,” a month-long horror movie marathon with a unique streaming platform theme per week.
• 🎥 Plans new director profiles and movie series, including Ridley Scott, Woody Allen, female assassin films, and Shakespeare adaptations.
• 🚗 Uses varied recording strategies to overcome respiratory challenges during episodes.
• 📢 Encourages fans to support by liking, subscribing, and sharing to grow the podcast community.

Key Insights

• 🎥 Long-form Film Study as a Lifelong Passion: Peter’s approach goes beyond casual movie reviews; he treats cinema as an evolving cultural and artistic journey. This long-form focus enables a deep understanding of film history, directors’ oeuvres, and industry discourse, giving his podcast a rich, thoughtful texture uncommon in many contemporary film podcasts. This method also appeals to a niche audience craving insightful, contextualized cinematic analysis.
• 🌍 Balancing Extensive Travel with Content Creation: Peter’s back-to-back trips to Nashville combined with working days in Philadelphia exemplify the modern creator’s challenge of managing demanding schedules while maintaining high-quality output. This juggling act highlights the often overlooked logistical and physical efforts behind the scenes in podcasting and content creation.
• 🫁 Impact of Health on Creative Work: The lasting effects of long COVID have significantly affected Peter’s voice recording capabilities. His account reveals the tangible struggle artists and creators face with health limitations—especially those reliant on voice—and underscores the importance of adaptive approaches, such as incorporating cardio and home remedies like ginger-lemon tea and cough drops, to sustain productivity.
• 📊 Podcasting Across Multiplatform Analytics Complexity: Peter notes the challenge in aggregating analytic data from multiple platforms, reflecting a common difficulty for podcasters and YouTubers. This points to the fragmented nature of digital audience measurement and the necessity for creators to strategically interpret diverse metrics to understand and grow their communities.
• 📺 Innovative Content Structuring with “31 Days of Dread”: The decade-long horror movie event is evolving with a clever format—highlighting one horror film per streaming platform each week. This strategy not only taps into the growing prominence of streaming platforms as primary content providers but also offers listeners curated exposure to varied horror subgenres and styles, enhancing viewer engagement and discovery.
• ⚔️ Diverse Film Themes and Director Spotlighting: By focusing on directors like Ridley Scott and Woody Allen, alongside thematic explorations such as female assassin movies and Shakespeare adaptations, Peter provides diverse content appealing to multiple segments of film aficionados. This balanced variety sustains interest while showcasing distinct cinematic traditions.
• 🙌 Community Engagement as Key to Growth: Peter’s consistent calls for subscriptions, likes, and shares underscore the vital role of community interaction in independent podcast success. His openness about this appeal exemplifies how creators foster a loyal base and encourage organic, grassroots expansion of their audience.

00:00:01
Quiet on the set speed down production stage one action. We haven’t done many of these episodes in our amazing 1300 episode stretch. But if you’re new here, if you’re just stepping into the feed of feeds, I’m the film buff aka P A D, another known as Peter Anthony Duca. I come to you from the great city of Philadelphia, PA. Now, it’s no secret that I absolutely love adore the long form study of film. Uh I view a lot of the film buff podcast as a journey. What are the films of a childhood of a

00:00:52
you know teenage youth 20s 30s? uh what is someone who has spent a lifetime absorbing film what do they think of what’s happening now so a lot of our episodes aka patter film buffers a lot of the episodes uh I build a a story there’s things to discuss what’s happening online drama with the actors drama with the directors what is the exact discourse and then yeah upon release upon reception so much of this changes and and that’s one of the the points I’m most proud of when it comes to aka pad the film buff

00:01:34
podcast. But yeah, yeah, I’m here to do a little bit of a of a update. So, if this is your first episode, this is probably the most boring, worst episode, but hopefully it doesn’t it, you know, hopefully you’re subscribing, you’re leaving a comment, you’re giving me a like, you’re you’re doing all of the things that’s free, by the way, to push this show to the moon. So, coming up, I have backtoback trips to Tennessee, Nashville, Tennessee. Right now, uh I am being picked up from

00:02:08
a uh Uber cuz I love scheduling Ubers. In about 20 minutes, I’ll be organizing releasing uh some of the inventory of this podcast while I’m traveling. Now, here’s the amazing thing. Upcoming next week, we’re already two weeks, we’re talking two weeks down the road, I returned to Nashville, [laughter] uh backtoback trip. So, within a stretch of of about 10 to 12 days, I will be in Philly for about three of them. And yes, those are three work days. I I’m I’m going to fly in uh do what I have to and

00:02:46
basically fly right back out in in less than 72 hours. I love the the world that we live in. So, coming up, we have I I just wanted to review too of what we have coming up. We have the 31 days of dread. Uh, I’m realigning some of our series. We were doing baseball movies every Thursday. I have a female assassin movie series coming. We have uh more to do with Ridley Scott. I’ve been building uh director profiles, one of them being uh Woody Allen. I’ve been uh kneedeep in Shakespeare movies, Shakespeare

00:03:22
documentaries. Uh all of these things we’re going to uh have and discuss. I uh even recently I just been on a deep dive of just listening to everything. Charlie Ross uh lots of Quinton Tarantino uh in in my YouTube feed. Lots of Robert Rodriguez in my YouTube feed. Uh and I’m always like digging around uh for for the ways to bring you guys more of my outside study, the filmmakers I’m reading about, uh the research I’m doing. Uh the difficulty is that uh often uh we’re at two days a week um I mean two releases a

00:04:02
day uh Monday through uh Sunday. So I don’t know how much more we can do rather than uh just bombard you and and some of you enjoy that update number two uh health. So for about two two years uh I suffered from uh the the best we can uh nail it down to long COVID long co COVID uh just wre havoc on my lungs and my my throat. Uh it was hard for me to talk at length without uh just having a mucous buildup and uh having like a wet hollow cough. Uh there’s some side effects of this or effects of this that

00:04:44
uh even to this day your boy over here still suffers from. Uh but 2026 has been a rehab year and I’ve already done a little bit of a YouTube update video uh for any of you out there. Also, I am available for you on on YouTube [snorts] uh where I kind of break some of this down. And I I’ll say my relationship with some of my YouTubers, uh it’s it’s it’s a little bit closer, you know, like people uh I know I have repeat viewers. I know what the demographics are. Uh everything here uh analytically for the

00:05:16
podcast is a little bit more broad and stretched out mostly because uh analytically I’m on like multiple platforms and it’s it’s it’s really tough to aggregate it all and then even make sense of it. But health-wise, uh, 2026, I wanted to rehab and really like fight this thing. And one of my strategies for that was, uh, to get physical, to get into cardio, to get a little bit hardcore in like giving my lungs an opportunity to be more efficient and and to work. You can’t uh improve your lungs uh on that

00:05:53
level. Like for for example uh if you’re suffering from a lung condition doing cardio will only improve your lung function and I successfully did that. I 2026 open I would row every single morning I joined the volleyball league started playing lots of tennis lots of pickle ball uh you know thanks to my fiance I even bought my own pickle ball net. I bought my own uh volleyball net uh so I can like you know pack it up, go around the city and set it up wherever which I successfully did throughout the

00:06:28
summer. That uh some of the rehab was uh hot water, lemon, and ginger life changing. Um I’m on somewhat of a of a regular intake of cough drops. Uh you know that this is all like a part of now like what’s my regular practice. I I’m still keeping up with the cardio. I’m keeping up with the ginger and lemon. Uh, you know, I I suck down a couple cough drops a day just to kind of get my day started. This improves recording. This improves reliability. There were days that it took me uh it

00:07:04
feels like it took me 40 minutes, an hour to record a 10-minute episode, and I would have to develop recording methods all around uh basically me hacking up mucus every couple seconds. Uh some days it it would take me 20 minutes to ramp up to to clear my lungs and clear my throat so I could sit down. Uh looking back uh I think it’s it’s a little bit of a miracle I was able to do anything. But yeah, aka Pers. I’ll be traveling. We’ll be doing inventory episodes for about two weeks. When I

00:07:40
return for the three days, I will be recording the 31 days of Dread. Uh and the 31 days of Dread is one horror movie a day for the entire month of October. It’s it’s the biggest month of the channel, biggest growth. Uh we always look forward to it. I I’ll give you guys a little bit of a teaser. The theme this year and we’ll have an intro episode that uh brings you up to speed on the previous years. I think this might be the 10th year of the 31 days of Dread. Uh it will be the streaming platforms.

00:08:09
I’m going to do one streaming platform a week and we’re going to go through uh you know, we’re going to pick one horror movie from that platform. We’re going to bring it to you that day. Uh just watch one amazing movie. I’m not joking. It’s a fat demon that possesses a girl that forces her to eat. And it is such a wild movie. Uh, that might be day one. That movie just this this this one movie just blew me away. I watched it last night. All right, aka Patters. I got some traveling to do. I love you guys. Rock

00:08:41
and roll. So, let let’s get into it real quick. My aka Patter, can I get a subscription? Can I get a like? Can I get a thumbs up? That is the best free way to support the Film Buff podcast. And if you have anyone in your life that’s a film freak like us, maybe you should forward the show to him and let’s build this army. Okay, that’s a wrap.

That’s the Update: Travel Inventory, Then October

This is the boring episode on purpose. The work is the journey: two releases a day, Monday through Sunday, plus the series that keep the Film Buff from being just another hot-take feed. Health is better because the body got treated like part of the production—cardio for the lungs, ginger and lemon, methods built around a wet cough that used to eat whole recording sessions. Nashville, then three days home to cut 31 Days of Dread. Theme this year is the streamers. One platform a week. One horror movie a day. Year ten, if the count holds. There is already a wild one queued—an eating-possession picture that blew the doors off last night. That might be day one.

If this is your first episode, stay for the films. If you have been here for the 1,300, you already know the ask: subscribe, like, thumbs up. Free support. Forward the show to someone who watches like we do. Let’s build the army.

That’s a wrap. Rock and roll.

PETER A DELUCA AKAPD

AKAPAD is a versatile thinker known across Philadelphia, Europe, and even in the vast Multiverse as The Electic One. By day, he excels as an IT Mastermind, assisting individuals, both big and small, with a wide range of simple and complex solutions. In contrast, he is also a talented illustrator, a passionate comic book enthusiast, a creative content creator, and an active live streamer. Additionally, his podcast, “AKAPAD The Film Buff Podcast,” boasts an impressive catalog of over 500 episodes available on nearly every major platform.