One man's adventure in life!

Podcasts I've known and loved

I read a blog post elsewhere on Write.as mentioning podcasts the other day and realised I had got out of the habit of listening to them. I started while I lived in the US. My commute to work was one and a quarter hours each way, a mix of walking, train (the BART – Bay Area Rapid Transit) and shuttle bus. This left me plenty of time to delve headlong into an immersive world of podcasts spanning serious to comedy, daily to weekly to bingeing on serials. It was a great way to transition to and from the working day.

Fast forward to my current job. It has a 20 min or so walk to work, not something I'd normally complain about but this has squeezed out most of my podcasts, leaving behind only Nature once a week. In lockdown I've dropped even that, partly because the walk to work (a.k.a. my living room) is less time than it takes to start a podcast, partly because in the early days of the pandemic the virus dominated took the content and I needed a refuge away from it.

Reading the blog post got me thinking though and soon I found myself subscribing to Brian Posehn's Nerd Poker on AntennaPod, my podcast app. I'd listened to an earlier version of this podcast before they took a break for a bit. Since lockdown started, I've been mainly taking my walks with my wife but this time myself and the Nerd Poker gang went for a longer evening wander alone. It was like returning to old friends. They sit around playing D&D, going on adventures, using their imagination and enjoying each other's company. I could count the number of times I've played D&D in real life on one hand but listening to this podcast is escapist fun.

I'm not sure how I'll fit podcasts into my new life with baby but I'm gonna try! For the record, below are some I've enjoyed down the years and recommend – check them out wherever you go for podcasts if they sound like your kind of thing!


Entry 16 of my participation in the “100 days to offload” challenge. Find out more and join in!

2020-06-25 #100DaysToOffload #Podcasts #BayArea #beer #homebrew #running