Considering how much we watch, read, listen to and play in any given month, it’s almost a bit sad that we only write about a fraction of these. So, starting this month, we’re trying a new monthly format: on the last Wednesday of each month, we will release a few shortcuts: quick impressions of films, series, books, albums, games, or any other damn fine cups of culture that we’ve enjoyed this month, whether they are new or we only just got around to them now.
So, with no further ado, here are our first Shortcuts. Enjoy!
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
There was a point in my mid-40s where I realised: I have so many games purchased on Steam, I will not live to play all of them, at least not unless I start going through them one by one… and not unless I stop buying a single additional game.
And, looking at my collection of films on physical media? The same may be true. I have a bit more of a fighting chance: my library of games on Steam is in part so large because once a game I’m even just mildly interested in is on sale for US$10 or less, I tend to buy it. Films still cost more, especially those highly addictive Criterion releases I can’t seem to do without. Still: I buy films at a higher rate than I watch the films I’ve bought. The same is definitely true for books.
And, frankly: when I realised the extent to which my backlog would survive me? I felt an unsettling sense of vertigo. (And, embarrassingly, I briefly hoped that by the time I’m old, there’d be a way to upload my consciousness into the cloud, where I would then spend eternity working off my backlog.)
Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
I didn’t like Oppenheimer. That’s largely because I didn’t understand the second half of the movie, wherein, somehow, Oppenheimer gets the upper hand over Strauss. I didn’t understand what was there for the getting, nor did I understand what the bone of contention was. To the very small extent that I got the situation between them, I didn’t much care. As I understood it, it took a smallish statement by the Rami Malek character during the hearing to push Strauss off his pedestal. And that was it. What had just happened?
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
In our main podcast for the month, we celebrated our one-hundredth episode with Matt, Julie and original co-podcaster Mege, talking about the beginnings of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture. For this month’s espresso episode, we’re continuing the story: Matt, Alan and Sam met up in real life to record their first ever live podcast episode together. Join the three of them in their conversation about 2020, the year they joined A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, and their experiences since. How have they changed as podcasters? How do they keep things fresh and interesting, even after five years of podcasting? What are the episodes they remember best? And what are the topics they hope to do an episode about in the next five years?
P.S.: A big shout-out to the wonderful REX cinema in Bern, Switzerland for letting us meet up at their bar in early January (you can hear the gentle noise of other cinemagoers, glasses and espresso cups in the background) to record our conversation!
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Alan writes about 2024’s witchy Agatha All Along– and what it may say about the different roads the Marvel Cinematic Universe could go down in the future.
One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.
In 2017, a small Australian studio called Team Cherry released Hollow Knight. The game, an action adventure set in a world of insects, was well received by gamers and critics, and its reputation grew over the following years, as much for its challenging gameplay as for its melancholy world and atmosphere. Over time, Team Cherry aded to the game in various ways game – but the main expansion they originally promised, which was to feature Hornet, one of the game’s characters that starts off as an antagonist only to become an ally of the player character, proved too ambitious. As a result, Team Cherry announced in 2019 that Hornet’s adventures could not be contained in an add-on of the original Hollow Knight but instead required their own game: Hollow Knight: Silksong.
It would take another six years until Silksong came out.
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
And suddenly, to our surprise, we find that we have reason to celebrate: not just the beginning of a new year, but our one-hundredth episode! After our small-scale beginnings back in 2017, a little over eight years later, we have arrived at this nice, round number (and that’s without even counting our monthly espresso episodes, which we started in April 2022). And for this occasion, we’re got something very special: Julie and Matt are joined by co-founder and Damn Fine O.G. Mege, who graced the podcast from its first episode until January 2020, though he has been back on an annual basis to contribute to our Christmas Specials. Join the three of them as they wax nostalgic and talk about the early days of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture: what was it like to jump into the podcasting pond? What were the challenges we had to overcome? What made Mege hang up his headset back in 2020? And what are some of our favourite episodes of those first couple of years?
