Happy 2014, everyone. My music list is taking longer than usual, and will be up in a couple of months I assume. In the meantime, here are my ( favourite podcasts of 2013. )

I basically live and breathe TV, so whenever I think about larger questions of art and culture, they tend to be coloured by that medium. And now that my long-term hobby these days seems to be feeling my way through the basic tenets of media criticism, I thought I should pull back a bit and consider TV's place in the art world. I think it's a ( Read more... )

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I haven't been keeping up with improv4humans as much since it started putting out occasional best-of episodes with much higher hit rates than the regular ones. Not that I don't enjoy the show, but as a series of standalone sketches, it makes for slightly less compulsive listening than most other podcasts. I did hear a lot of praise for last week's ( Read more... )

I last talked about Harmontown just before it took off on its three-week "Harmoncountry" tour, and it's been quite a trip since then. Even the last episode before the tour began, "Turtle Panties," offered the show's funniest-ever moment, a long-in-the-making guest spot from Eric Idle featuring him singing a song written by hosts Dan Harmon and Jeff ( Read more... )

The Todd Glass Show tends to live or die by its guests, so I knew that this latest episode, with Paul F. Tompkins and Jen (F.) Kirkman, would be a winner. For one thing, the two are great friends, and clearly love each other's (sometimes divergent) senses of humour. For another, both are always wonderful on the show, but for different reasons. ( Read more... )

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As much as I love Comedy Bang Bang and my other beloved podcasts, nothing's making me as excited right now as Harmontown. The show is going on tour in just a couple of days, and over the weekend it released its backlog of three episodes in order for the podcast to be current with the live shows. Those three episodes, "Flesh Knife," "Adventurtunity ( Read more... )

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My top album list is looking a little more difficult than usual this year, but since 2012 was the Year I Got Into Podcasts, I thought I'd write up what I hoped would be a quick list of my five favourites of the year to tide myself over. I also included some brief clips, as well as links to two episodes for each entry (I do like these a lot). Look ( Read more... )