Best Games I Played in 2018

Previously: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017

It’s probably obvious but still worth mentioning that this entire list is based on an extremely incomplete sampling. I had very little free time in 2018, so I had to be ruthless with the games I played. For example, I slowly made my way through 2017’s Assassin’s Creed: Origins somewhere around the middle of the year. And I loved it so much. It probably would have been in my list of favourite games of 2017. But am I in a hurry to drop another 60 hours on Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey now? Am I fuck.

Anyway, here we go.

Minit

Minit

My son – my second child – was born in March, which meant that my free time in 2018 was more precious than ever before. Thank fuck, then, for a game like Minit, which respects the player’s time. I was able to dip in and play this in tiny drops.

Florence

Florence

It’s pretty rare to see a video game even try to tackle the subject of interpersonal relationships, and it’s even rarer to see one incorporate the subject into the mechanics of the game.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker

Is this a bit of a cheat because it’s a remaster of an old game? I don’t care. I played through this all over again on the Switch and I loved it all over again.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2

This is everything I wanted from a sequel to one of my favourite games of all time: a giant cowboy sandbox, with sliiiightly wonky controls that make everything just that little bit more interesting.

Marvel’s Spider-Man

Marvel’s Spider-Man

For a while there towards the end of the year, this game was very much my happy place. It still is. When I want to relax and shut out the world for a while, I’ll fire up Spider-Man and just swing around the city. Maybe not coincidentally, this is the first game on the PS4 that I’ve platinumed.

Gorogoa

Gorogoa

I still don’t understand how a human mind could have created something like this.

Return of the Obra Dinn

Return of the Obra Dinn

When I was 12 or 13, I got a Panasonic 3DO for Christmas along with a copy of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel. And while the 3DO isn’t the best console in the world and this Sherlock Holmes game is definitely not the best game in the world, they both have a really special place in my heart. When I think back to my time spent playing that game and the way it had my dumb little 12-year old brain cracking its mysteries, I’m reminded of all the things around the game. Like I remember that Christmas being the last one where everyone I knew and loved was happy. Like, genuinely, sincerely happy. And so it’s a very warm game for me.

It’s a strange comparison, I know, but Return of the Obra Dinn gave me those same feelings and the whole time I was playing it, I was brought right back to that Christmas, on that couch in my Ma’s front room. Which is pretty spectacular when you consider it’s basically just a giant logic puzzle

Tetris Effect

Tetris Effect

Every year, it feels like there’s one game that stands out for me because of the way it helps me tackle whatever anxiety or depression or other emotional issues I might be going through at the time. This year, it’s Tetris Effect. A real joy of a game that will be unfairly overlooked because it’s “just Tetris”.

Subnautica

Subnautica

With games like Minecraft, the most entertaining and the most magical part of the game is the first few minutes, when you’re first getting set up and exploring and struggling to survive. Subnautica somehow managed to sustain this feeling for hours.

Recent Films - June 2018

(I try to post reviews of all the films I watch over on letterboxd. Here are the most recent reviews I’ve written)

A Quiet Place - 2018 - ★★★★

Since my daughter was born, certain films hit me way harder than they otherwise should. Anything involving a child in peril is danger territory for me. Throw in a father trying to protect the child-in-peril and I’m completely screwed. I’ll be a wreck. For example, War for the Planet of the Apes had me absolutely sobbing in the cinema.

A Quiet Place is exactly the kind of film that hits me harder than it probably should, what with John Krasinski’s kind-faced father bringing the pathos like a doe-eyed hammer. Throw in a nihilistic pre-credits sequence to establish the stakes and, yeah, I hadn’t a fuckin hope.

Some late-game rule-changing to score a cheap emotional hit kinda ruins it a little, but it’s still a tight, tight film.

Super Troopers 2 - 2018 - ★★½

The only thing really missing from this film was a Rodney Dangerfield cameo where he comes out and tells the cops and the mounties to lighten up before turning on really cheesy hair rock music and starting an impromptu dance party.

As light and nutritionally void as the first film, but slightly shorter on charm.

Pitbull. New Order - 2016 - ★½

My continuing education in the less-“worthy” Polish film canon continues with this, a sub-Love/Hate gangster film set in Warsaw. The writer-director, Patryk Vega, is described as the Polish Guy Ritchie. And from what I’ve seen of his films so far, maybe people mean Revolver-era Guy Ritchie? I dunno.

The film itself is a regressive, homophobic and insecure piece of filmmaking. The main character, “Miami”, is a quote-unquote “tough” quote-unquote “sexy” quote-unquote “cop”. No woman can look at him without wanting to fuck him. No man can look at him without wanting to fuck him. “That was the best sex I’ve ever had” says one of his lays. “Coffee?” a detective offers him. “I bet you take it black.” Yes, he’s a hard-fuckin, hard-drinkin cop. Oh, and when the suits in internal affairs take away his badge, he tells them to give it back or he’ll kick the shit out of them. And they do.

It’s that kind of film. The kind we haven’t really seen since Joel Silver cut down on his cocaine intake.

I’ve read a lot of reviews saying that based on this film, it won’t be long before Hollywood comes knocking at Patryk Vega’s door. And I don’t doubt that’s true, but only because they just need any new blood. But the real person who should be tapped for better things is the cinematographer. This film is total garbage, but at least it’s handsome garbage.

Supersonic - 2016 - ★★★½

I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of Oasis. Their music does nothing for me and their personalities are so ugh (although I love reading interviews with Noel Gallagher). So why am I giving three-and-a-half stars to an Oasis documentary? Well, because it’s not a documentary about Oasis. I mean, not really. It’s really a documentary about a period in time. It’s a documentary about success. It’s a documentary about regret.

The music is just helpful context.

Blockers - 2018 - ★½

Why does everyone keep saying what a great comedian John Cena is? Or even Leslie Mann, for that matter? All these huge comedy stars playing the parents and they got DEMOLISHED by the kids in this film. Very weak.

Sneakers - 1992 - ★★★★★

I fucking LOVE this film. It’s my ultimate comfort film.

BUT.

There’s a bit, a plot point, where Mary McDonnell was pretending to be hooked up with Stephen Tobolowsky on a computer date to get his office access card and his voice print and stuff and she gets stung. Except they make it look like she’s not stung. And then, being a pro grifter, she goes “This is the last computer date I go on” and Ben Kingsley mafia-hacker goes “A computer would never match her with him, I SMELL A RAT”.

BRUH IT’S 2018 AND NETFLIX STILL KEEPS RECOMMENDING I WATCH THE BIG BANG THEORY I THINK YOUR SHITTY 1993 COBOL DATING PROGRAM IS PROBABLY NOT AS FUCKIN SOPHISTICATED AS YOU THINK IT IS.

Gotowi na wszystko. Exterminator 2018 - ★★½

My first legit Polish-language film I’m watching for language homework rather than because of ‘merit’ or whatever and it’s about a middle-aged man-child who spends too much on old videogames and gets berated by his partner. Oops!

The film started to lose me in the middle when they suddenly turned the “plot” dial up a thousand notches. But it really lost me when a guy tried to convince his girlfriend to leave the mental hospital she was checked into. “But I need my meds! If I don’t have them, I don’t know what will happen!” “It’s okay because we’ll be together”.

Nope.

Paper Towns

I knew very little about Poland before moving here. Almost nothing about Warsaw. “I hear they have good pacts”, I used to dad-joke1.

Since then, we’ve been trying to get better. We recently went to the National Museum in Warsaw, where they have a new “Gallery of Polish Design” exhibit which is aimed squarely at dipshits like me who have a weird thing for mid-century design and electronics housed in discolouring plastic. Here’s a video of what you can expect in the exhibit:

Although not exactly vintage, they also had a vintage-inspired “paper town” toy that reminded me so much of Nintendo’s Labo. It’s basically a box filled with sheets of cardboard that you punch out and bend and fold into various parts of a ’town'.

As we were leaving, I noticed they were selling a couple of these in the gift shop. So, of course, I bought them.

P6260060

P6260061

Here’s the finished product from a different set that we made earlier, so you can see what they look like finally constructed:

P6260057

My daughter (who’s two and a half), was too young to ‘get’ the Labo2 but she absolutely loves these. She loved punching out the little buildings and vehicles and handing them to me to construct. The first night, she took the restaurant (the two-tiered building in the back-left of that bottom picture) to bed with her. My wife even said that if she was in need of a present for a similarly-aged toddler, she would get them one of these packs. They’re cheap, extremely cute, very tactile and recyclable.

If you can’t make it to the National Museum in Warsaw to buy them, you can also order them from ringoringo.pl.


  1. One of the good things about being a dad is that you can dad-joke unironically. ↩︎

  2. Too much waiting around for not enough payoff at the end for her ↩︎

Housekeeping

You may have noticed some changes on this blog (or maybe you didn’t - there’s too much going on in the world for you to be concerned with my bullshit website).

The short version is that I’d been thinking a lot about what I wanted this blog to be. It’s probably the primary face of my internet presence, and I wasn’t really pleased with how it was representing me. Part of the problem, I realised, is that I was using a static website generator to power the website.

Don’t get me wrong, static site generators are wonderful pieces of software. You didn’t have to worry about backups or databases or where your content lives or extracting it from some SQL file later on. But they also mean that writing a blog post is a non-trivial task. To write a post, I had to create a file on my hard drive, open that in my editor, write the blog post, generate the site, preview it locally, then upload it to this server. I was using a fucking Makefile to streamline this process. Makefiles tickle my nerdy side deeply, but the process was so cumbersome it meant that I’d only write a blog post about something that really mattered, instead of just firing off a few posts every day. And I’m many things, but I’m not a ‘once in a while, here are my thoughts on a capital-I Important capital-T Topic’ kind of guy. I don’t work well like that and I didn’t feel like it best represented me.

(An anecdotal aside: during my migration back to Wordpress, I came across a prominent Wordpress developer who had actually left the project, citing fundamental problems with PHP as a language and the Wordpress codebase in general. He also moved to a static site generator and, just like me, his output fell off a cliff after the move. You could argue that this is probably a reflection on the general state of blogging in 2018, but like I said, this is just an anecdotal aside.)

So that was the short version of what’s been happening behind the scenes. Now let’s see what happens next.

Yes

Apologies for the interruption to my (ir)regularly scheduled posts about random bullshit no-one actually cares about, but I thought this was worth bringing up. Even though I have no idea how many people are actually reading this, this is my platform for my thoughts and this is something I feel strongly about. So here we go.


The 8th amendment of the Irish constitution recognises the equal right to life of the mother and an unborn child. This has always been a controversial amendment and people have argued that such wording has no place in the constitution. So, tomorrow, May 25th, Ireland is holding a referendum to repeal the 8th amendment.

I want to encourage any Irish people reading this website to vote yes to repeal the 8th amendment on May 25th.

We all have our reasons for voting yes or no. We all have our stories. Let me tell you a little bit of my story.

We spent a long time trying to conceive. It took forever. Long enough that we experienced that pain when our friends got pregnant. Why could they get pregnant so easily, without appearing to even try? Each month, we’d realise we once again weren’t successful and we’d be desolate, completely unable to comfort each other. If you haven’t gone through this, you don’t know the pain involved. When I look back on it, I remember it as being one of the hardest points in my life.

But eventually we did it. My wife got pregnant.

The pregnancy was fun, but the labour wasn’t. My daughter was posterior, which basically means that instead of being face-down, the baby was face-up, so the baby’s head and spine was pushing against my wife’s spine so that every push was intensely painful. Also, with every push, the baby’s heart rate would drop precipitously. Eventually, it was decided to bring my wife in for an emergency c-section, where they discovered the chord was wrapped around the baby’s neck (just before I heard my daughter cry for the first time, I heard a surgeon say “look at this messer!”)1.

Obviously, this whole experience was extremely traumatic, both emotionally and physically. And that was just the beginning. Then there’s the issue of being a brand new mother, trying to breastfeed having had major surgery on your abdominal core. I can’t begin to explain the pride and admiration I have for my wife and how she handled the whole thing.

And this is when I realised that this only made me more pro-choice. Having seen first-hand the reality of pregnancy and labour and the reality of raising a child and the lasting (permanent?) scars, both literal and metaphorical, involved in the whole process, I firmly believe there is no way a woman should be forced to go through all this if they couldn’t manage it. And this is to say nothing of extreme cases involving, say, assault or a fatal foetal abnormality. Forcing a woman to go through all that would be barbaric.


Jump forward a couple of years and we’ve been extremely lucky and managed to conceive our second child without really trying very hard at all.

But halfway through the pregnancy, we found out there were complications. Well, no, wait, that’s not quite accurate. There were possible complications. And not insignificant ones, possibly. Which meant a lot of sleepless nights, worrying about how our child would be affected by all this. And there were a lot of tests. So many tests. During one particular test just after Christmas, a doctor (an Irish doctor) asked us “have you considered termination?”

We hadn’t, and we wouldn’t, because we knew the risks, and we knew how strong we were and we knew that we could manage it, no matter how bad it turned out to be2 and I wouldn’t judge anyone for making a different choice in the same circumstances.

And that’s kind of the point of all this: the choice already exists. When the doctor asked us if we’d considered termination, he meant “have you considered (traveling to England for) termination?” The 8th amendment doesn’t stop Irish women from having abortions, it just stops them from having abortions in Ireland3, where they can be surrounded by their loved ones when they really need it.

It’s a horrible, uncaring section of our constitution and should be taken out. And that’s what this referendum is about. Recognising that something is wrong with the current situation and trying to do something about it.

Please, vote yes.


  1. My daughter came out perfectly fine. As I write this, she’s a strong and sturdy two and a half years old. And she’s bilingual, did I mention that? She speaks English and Polish. Smartest kid I know. ↩︎

  2. It’s fine, by the way. My ten-week old son is healthy and thriving although he will need to be continuously monitored until he’s about a year old. ↩︎

  3. The 14th amendment added some extra provisions to the language introduced by the 8th amendment, saying “This subsection shall not limit freedom to travel between the State and another state”. ↩︎

Twitter Threads

A couple of weeks ago, Max Krieger wrote a really interesting twitter thread about the design of San Francisco’s Metreon building. It got a lot of traffic and was retweeted into my timeline a few times. I always find it interesting when multiple people point to a specific Twitter thread because Twitter’s awful design makes threaded discussions a nightmare to read. Like reading a novel by turning pages with a pliers - sure, you can do it, but it’s an awful experience.

I didn’t think much more of it until a few days later, when John Gruber also linked to the thread and, more importantly, linked to some of Max Krieger’s older twitter threads through threadreaderapp.com.

And, dear readers, this has changed everything for me.

Laid out in this more thoughtful way – flat and with no separations between tweets, with actually readable typography and with no cropping of images forcing you to break flow to see the full context – you can see how the twitter thread is a wonderful art form in itself. When it’s done right, of course (for example, you’ll see Krieger isn’t numbering his tweets).

Unlike blog posts like this one, tweets are conversational by design. You get a much better sense that of the author’s actual voice because they’re speaking to you rather than speaking at you. Combine this with a long-form discussion of a topic that the author is really genuinely passionate about and you’ve got something I could sit and read for days.


I recently read Cory O’Brien’s Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes, which is a jokey, lighthearted summary of the major world myths. But what makes it interesting is the way it’s written. This is not a dry, didactic lecture. The entire book written like an IM conversation with a friend or – to bring this back on-topic – like a well-done Twitter thread. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

And as I predicted, I devoured this book. Loved it. Not just because it was easy to read (which definitely helps when you’ve got a weeks-old baby), but because it felt like I was casually talking to someone I knew about something they were super knowledgeable and passionate about.

I’m not saying I want all books to be written in this way (but wow, can you imagine how great it would be if, say, Ulysses was written like this?), but instead I’d like for anyone thinking of starting a Twitter thread to keep these things in mind: keep your voice and remember that Twitter dot com is not designed for long-form threaded monologues, so imagine your words being presented with a designer’s eye.

Solo a Star Wars Story

You probably didn’t notice, but I deliberately avoided talking about The Last Jedi last year. And not because I didn’t have things to say about it (I do), but because there was too much noise around it and people seemed to be taking it all extremely personally, to the point where telling people you thought the film was fine was functionally equivalent to saying “it was the worst film in the world and you are a bad person for liking it”.

Now we’ve all calmed down a bit, let’s talk about The Last Jedi for a moment, shall we? I watched it again in Ireland over Christmas and stood by my assessment of “fine”. It’s got a great start and a great ending, but in between – the entire middle stretch of the film, basically from Finn waking up until the scene in the throne room1 – is extremely poor. It’s boring, it doesn’t do anything to advance the plot. In fact, at points, you can even detect a whiff of the prequels, which is not a favourable comparison.

I saw The Last Jedi twice and twice I came out feeling disappointed. Not because I’d seen a bad film (it was fine, remember?) but because I’d come out of a Star Wars film and wasn’t feeling giddy and excited. It didn’t give me that feeling of having seen something really great. The last time I remember walking out of a film feeling that sense of deflation was probably Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull2 - another film with all the basic ingredients of a thing I love with my whole heart but which just didn’t have that ineffable quality that worked for me.


The teaser trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story was released last week and I guess I should lower my expectations for what a “Star Wars” film means to me. I mean, I’m not saying it’s all bad. There are some amazing images in there – a Star Destroyer coming through a storm cloud, Han under the Millennium Falcon in a smokey haze – and you know what? All those reports about the studio hiring an acting coach for Alden Ehrenreich don’t worry me because that one little nod during the “It’s fine” moment in the trailer is such a perfect touch of Han Solo that I’m convinced the “acting coach” was probably more likely an “acting like Harrison Ford coach”.

But almost everything else about this trailer suggests a film that I could easily, happily skip and miss nothing. The whole “kicked out of flight academy” shit makes me think that there’s a solid chance the entire film might be an attempt to replicate the “Greedo shoots first” scene for providing unnecessary, shitty character motivation and, in doing so, make the character less cool.

I dunno, I’m sure the film will be fine.


  1. You like how spoiler-free I’m being here? ↩︎

  2. There’s probably a deeper comparison to be made between The Last Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull but that’s probably for another post. ↩︎

Best Games I Played in 2017

As is customary with these posts (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016), it’s worth mentioning that this is based on an incomplete sampling. There were so many games released in 2017 that I never even touched. For example, Horizon: Zero Dawn launched the same week as Zelda and there was no fuckin’ way I could handle two of basically the same game without putting a bit of distance between them1. With all that in mind, these are the best games I played in 2017.

Golf Story

To be perfectly honest, I spent a good portion of 2017 in a fairly shitty place. Not exactly a dark place, but it got pretty gloomy at times. Golf Story was exactly what I needed. A golf RPG that doesn’t care too much about either the golf or the RPG parts of its own game, it just wants to be entertaining. At one point in the game, the action pauses so that two groups can throw down in a rap battle. This game does everything it can to be fun and entertaining and that’s no bad thing. Also, let me tell you a little story: around 75% of the way through the game, I made a series of bad decisions and silly mistakes and ended up accidentally deleting my save game. I immediately started up a new game, no question or hesitation.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins

I thought I was done with Assassin’s Creed games, but I guess not. Pretty early on in my game, I saw the pyramids off in the distance and decided that’s where I was going to go. I traveled across the desert, ignored all of the rest of the world and the game just to get to them. You know that bit in Lawrence of Arabia where Omar Sharif’s character makes his entrance? That’s what it felt like - like I was seeing that scene from Omar Sharif’s point of view. Because of this and thousands of other moments like it, Assassin’s Creed:Origins was more special than I ever expected or that it had any right to be.

What Remains of Edith Finch

There are some parts of Edith Finch that work better than others. The part with the scream-queen daughter was cute and I see what they were going for, but it felt a little too dorky for me. Having said that, when this game hits, it hits hard. Narrative and mechanical inventiveness are important qualities when making up lists like this, but more importantly, it’s the little moments that connect, that hit you in places you didn’t expect, in ways you didn’t expect. In Edith Finch, it was the bathtub section. Before it even started, I knew exactly what was going to happen and they handled it so perfectly that I was a mess of emotions after.

Stories Untold

Why aren’t there more games like this? Collections of short, idiosyncratic games based not around a theme as much as based around a feel. I started playing this thinking I’d give it a few minutes and ended up staying up waaaay too late just to see what it was going to throw at me next.

Everything

Like What Remains of Edith Finch, I think I was just in the right place — psychologically, emotionally, spiritually — to appreciate Everything, a game that tries to show the interconnectedness of, well, everything. Like if Alan Watts made a video game. If this sounds twee to you, I can totally understand giving it a wide berth. For me, it was the most ambitious game I played in 2017. And the one I needed most.

Gnog

Gnog is such a beautiful, hypersaturated, delightful toybox of a game that I played through it in one sitting, and had a great time. And then I immediately played through it again in VR and had another great time.

Super Mario Odyssey

I’d love to be all high-minded and talk about how this is a distillation of everything Nintendo has learned over the last 30-odd years of making Mario games. About how it’s the pinnacle of platform games. About how it reinvigorates Mario as a franchise in a way we haven’t seen since Mario 64.

But really, it was just Mario’s dance in New Donk City that did it for me. The moment I saw that, I knew I was in love with this game.

Doki Doki Literature Club

While I was playing this game, I was terrified someone would come into this room and see what I was playing. I was terrified they’d think I’d spent too much time on Tumblr and developed some new kink for anime waifus with ridiculous tits. But once I’d finished the game, I immediately wanted everyone else to play it too, ridiculous tits and all. It’s shockingly clever and cleverly shocking, pushing its engine (RenPy) to its limits and breaking the fourth wall like I’ve never seen it broken before. And it’s completely free, so give it a go.

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

If I even have to explain to you why this is on my list, then I guess we don’t know each other at all, do we? (Also, remember, Zelda is the name of the boy).


  1. I’m playing it now though, and I can say that, three hours in, it probably wouldn’t have made this list for 2017 ↩︎

David Foster Wallace on Attention

Here’s David Foster Wallace being interviewed on German TV in 2003

This sentence stood out for me:

It’s true that in the US, every year the culture gets more and more hostile — and I don’t mean hostile like angry — it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read or to look at a piece of art for an hour or to listen to a piece of music that’s complicated and that takes work

Remember that DFW died shortly after the first iPhone debuted, before the birth of Twitter and Instagram and all that.

I have basically given up on going to the cinema at anything approaching what could generously be called a reasonable hour. Now I like to go to the cinema as early as possible — most recently, I went to see It at 12pm on a Sunday — not just because I’m a grumpy misanthrope, and not because I’m the father of a two year old and am exhausted in the evenings. I go at these stupid times because I don’t want to be surrounded by crowds when I see a film. Because, on the whole, multiplex cinema crowds are incapable of sitting through a two-hour film without checking their phones multiple times.

And I’m pretty sure it’s only going to get worse.

My Favourite Podcasts

I wanted to make a list of my favourite podcasts, but I realised that’s probably too much of a movable feast. So let’s just say these are my favourite podcasts right now.

And you know what? Fuck it, I’m opening the comments on this in case anyone has any recommendations for things I should be listening to.

Reply All
Podcasts about technology and the internet are a dime a dozen, but what makes Reply All special is that it seems to come from a place of genuine curiosity. They want to cover every corner of a story. Their most recent season-ender was a great example of this: one of the hosts received one of those Indian hoax “we are a Microsoft support partner and your computer has a virus” calls, and rather than just belittling the caller, they went to India to meet them and find out more about their business. This show jumps to the top of my to-play list every time it comes out.
Good place to start: The Cathedral. An episode about the background of the game That Dragon Cancer. It was first broadcast just days before my daughter was born and, not kidding, it almost broke me.

99% Invisible
99% Invisible is mostly about design and architecture, but you don’t have to be a design or architecture nerd to enjoy the podcast. Every single episode teaches me something cool I didn’t know about the world and gives me a dozen or so Wikipedia holes to fall down.
Good place to start: Ten Thousand Years, where they explore the various suggestions people have given for designing a warning sign that will last ten thousand years, not knowing if language or symbols as we understand them will be around.

S-Town
This was NPR’s semi-followup to Serial, released shortly after they realised that, actually, no-one really cared about the second season of that show. It’s about a rural town – Shittown – in Alabama and it has the most amazing, almost unbelievably eccentric cast of characters you’ll ever hear. Yes, it’s slightly problematic (and gets even more so towards the end), but it’s still a great piece of long-form radio storytelling.
Good place to start: The first episode, obviously.

Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review
There are a lot of film podcasts I could recommend (Filmspotting is good, I guess? The Slashfilmcast is okay?) but none of them have the unique blend of film reviews and hearing two men argue and banter like a couple who have been married for forty years. This is genuine comfort-listening.
Good place to start: Mark’s Sex and the City 2 review, in full flappy-handed glory.

Dan Carlin’s Common Sense/Hardcore History
I’m bunching these together because they’re both pretty essential. Dan Carlin is a really smart ex-newsman with a love of history. And this is what he channels into his Hardcore History shows - meticulously researched multi-hour, multi-part episodes dealing with historical periods or events. They’re as good as any audiobook and history text as you can find. His Common Sense show is about (American) politics, but again coming from a meticulously researched, erudite and insightful starting point.
Good place to start: Blueprint for Armageddon Pt 1. Part 1 of a six-part, twenty-five hour series of podcasts about the first world war. Move fast, because after a while, he pulls the episodes off the RSS feed and charges people for them (if you want to drop a few dollars, his series on Genghis Khan is amazing)

Til Death Do Us Blart
The podcast’s own description: “Once a year, every year at American Thanksgiving the five men will watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 and record their thoughts, feelings and opinions. These personal expressions will be broadcast as a free, annual podcast. Should a member of the quintet pass away, protocol dictates that his baton must be passed to another, thus fulfilling the promise of five people watching and podcasting Paul Blart 2 from now till the end of linear time.” If this concept doesn’t immediately sound amazing to you then, yeah, maybe skip this one.
Good place to start: They started in 2015, so listen to that episode first, so you can really pick up and appreciate the subtle ways their spirits start to break in 2016.

Radiolab Presents: More Perfect
Maybe it’s just me, but the most recent Radiolab episodes have been a little duff (“I prefer their earlier stuff” says the hipster dickhead). But that’s okay, because their recent limited-run series about the U.S. Supreme Court was fascinating. Now I’ll admit, this isn’t a subject I thought I’d ever give a shit about, but they brought along their great Radiolab storytelling ability and I binged the entire thing in a couple of days.
Good place to start: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. This is the story that inspired Radiolab to create More Perfect. And it’s one of the most heartbreaking podcast episodes I’ve heard.

The Daily
This is the New York Times daily news podcast. It’s a short podcast – about 15 minutes each – and it their format is usually to cover a single story in more depth than other news podcasts (e.g. NPR’s Up First, which is also pretty great). For example, while everyone was going on about how there’s some bad shit going down in Burma, The Daily actually went into a decent amount of detail, giving the entire background, laying out who the major players are etc.
Good place to start: It’s a daily news show - grab whatever is most recent?

Junk food cinema
I get it. There’s no shortage of podcasts where a group of friends sit around and watch films and talk about them later. It could be its own category in iTunes. But where most of these (e.g. The Flophouse) come from a place of detached irony, the guys behind Junkfood Cinema genuinely love the films they talk about. They recently did a “Summer of 87” season, covering films from, yep, the summer of 1987, and their enthusiasm for every single film was so strong, it made me want to watch the films too.
Good place to start: Pump Up the Volume is a perfect example of this happening. My wife and I listened to this episode on a drive home from her mother’s house and immediately settled in to watch the film when we got home.

My Brother, My Brother and Me
Lin-Manuel Miranda is a fan. That’s good enough for me.
Good place to start: MBMBaM 369: Bro’s Better, Bro’s Best Ch. 122 - 133 - a collection of the best bits from the 10 most recent episodes.