Giant Bomb got me into Podcasts. I first started in November 2011. I figured with this year being the 10th anniversary, I'd listen to the 2011 podcasts in the same week they were originally released 10 years ago.
This is a thing I keep going back to. I was a music critic for several years in one capacity or another, fueled by having gotten into the OiNK's Pink Palace line of torrent hosts early and pretty much making album listening the only reason I was awake during the day for most of my middle school and definitely high school life. But after a few years of turning a hobby into a job, I realized that I just wasn't getting fulfilled by hard deadlines and required word counts about music I was listening to, whether I liked it or not. I was getting unnecessarily wrapped up in the politics that went into who was going to be lead editor for which album of the year piece, or how my review for this or that album earlier in the year would lead to the EIC surely giving me the big album of the year down the road. I got so competitive about it that I pioneered a counter-take section at one publication that came and went with my tenure - a title I kind of hated because oftentimes I agreed with the original review!
Anyway, I got out of that business and took solace in a job as a dishwasher at an Indian restaurant opening in town. In retrospect it was a terrible job, but all I wanted to do was put my head down and consider what was next in life so it worked for me. The kitchen staff was entirely Hyderabadi and spent most of their time communicating in that language, which left me free to put headphones on and just go about my day. Music was a little too counterproductive, though. Sometimes they needed me to do something very quickly or help prep this or that thing and the constancy of the noise was too much for their foreign language to cut through the static. This was around E3 time, and I'd spent most of the PS3 era playing NBA 2K and little else because it was the game series most conducive to music listening and the sport I loved most. The PS4 announcement was on the horizon, and I decided I wanted to get more invested in gaming after a generation spent ignoring even the biggest of titles like Uncharted or Fallout because I was worried $60 was just too much money.
So I came across the Giant Bomb E3 coverage, and I listened to the podcasts at work. Two or three pods was roughly enough to cover a day, and so I quickly went back in time to the very beginning and binged them over a long, hot, overworked summer in which I basically only went to work, the bar near my apartment and home to sleep. It was lonely, depressing and everything else you can imagine that summer being described as, but one constant was these dudes in my ear for 8-12 hours a day as I scrubbed burned sauce pans and chopped 4 cases of onions.
Eventually I caught up to the present day, and then it was on: a Marc Maron pod here, a Bill Simmons pod there (if I'm being realistic, his podcast was my first, but I only ever listened to it on a desktop via the ESPN Radio plug-in), and whatever else filtered in and out of rotation back in those days (man, I used to listen to a lot of Jay Mohr and Adam Carolla!) to the point that, ten years on from that, I might take one night out of the month to listen to new music, and so rarely is it a full album that the people who knew me as The Kid With the Recommendations and later The Guy Quoted in the Gucci Mane Autobiography are still disappointed when they ask about a new album and I'm blissfully unaware of it. And that shift is, no joke, entirely attributable to Giant Bomb. They revealed how appealing it is to spend commutes and lonely moments with a friendly voice or voices in your ear or over your speakers and almost completely upended the way I spend my free- and commute-time, even ignoring that I played more video games in the PS4 era than the PS2 or PS3 era combined - and that was still less than 10 new games a year most years! And yet there I was, watching every Quick Look, UPF, listening to every podcast...
Bon voyage, boys, and thanks for ruining everything!
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