To each his own. I'm pretty close to dropping the Political Gabfest from my weekly podcast diet.

Thumbs up to the Bible thing. I highly recommend finding the Harper Collins study Bible. The NSRV is the gold standard of Bible translations among academics and Harper Collins version has incredibly extensive footnotes and intros to each book that offer a lot of context. It's a little pricey (about $50), but it's well…

You're making us all look bad by doing things you intend to do.

"Writing Down the Bones" is a book that's hippie as hell, but it has a lot of good suggestions about and meditations on the craft of writing. It helped keep me going during one of my more productive writing periods.

Yeah, no YA shame. Doesn't mean the books can't be well-written and even when they're trash, I far prefer them to any trash written or meant for adults.

Disagree. The Brothers K was way easier for me to get through than Crime and Punishment. Much better book, too.

When I played 4, we retconned in a bunch of stuff that was basically, "This worked better in 3.5, so let's do it."

-Write more. When I force myself to write everyday, good stuff eventually comes out.
-Go to soccer/hockey games. 
-Experience more of Russian pop culture since I live here now, dammit.
-Read more. I still need to go through Tolstoy's back catalog and start on Akunin and Pelevin.

But…D&D is awesome. And I got into it kinda late, too.

Yeah, one of my resolutions is to immerse myself in Russia culture while I'm here.

More Libby needed, indeed!

Jonny McGovern has a podcast?! Thank you for this update.

I do like the ones where Klosterman seems annoyed by Simmons, like he's the stupid friend he has to hang out with.

Never heard of it, but I'm trying to get into English football, so I'll check this out!

Planet Money is a lot of fun. Way better than Radiolab or Stuff You Should Know at explaining complicated things to the layman.

Hang Up cannot be overpraised. It's funny, interesting, and insightful, even when I don't care about the sport in question. And as  @avclub-75639ebffd530f09cf29eb0efb05a3d0:disqus  mentioned, it's pretty much the only good thing about Slate.

@avclub-9ff7c9eb9d37f434db778f59178012da:disqus Look, I like ol' Misha, but he didn't end the USSR so much as feel the way the wind was blowing. Brezhnev deserves the prize for fucking things up past the point of no return.

@avclub-f3df38bea0571d15e376bda9c1245e59:disqus Except Reagan actually governed rather from the center. He raised taxes and supported immigration reform.

@avclub-d80126524c1e9641333502c664fc6ca1:disqus No one really put forward a coherent vision for how proportional voting would work.

This is the best thing I've read all day.