All in Culture

Worst Episode Ever is a podcast “for people who love The Simpsons, by people who love The Simpsons, about how much [the hosts] hate The Simpsons.” The idea behind the podcast is to watch a “post-classic” episode and then have an in-depth discussion about it before running it through their HIPPO grading system to place it in their list, the list being the ultimate goal of the podcast: to find the worst episode of The Simpsons ever.

I’m unsure whether anime still stands at an equal rank to Western television for most people, but I think it definitely should – there are countless of anime that avoid the most common tropes of the medium and are great works in their own right. The foremost example for me is Legend of the Galactic Heroes, often hailed by its fans as ‘the endgame of anime’.

An album creates a whole; a collection of songs that together tell a story much wider and complex than they would alone. It feels like nowadays I just tend to listen to individual songs and kind of miss the big picture that an artist or a band is creating with the whole of an album. But every now and then I’m lucky enough to stop, take a moment, and listen to the whole story instead of just hearing the beginning.

For Barán, the biggest cultural difference has been how much people care about others. She feels that the people in Benin are so much more interested in each other, and so much kinder than what she is used to in Finland, where, she admits, it often feels like people simply don’t care about others’ daily concerns such as flus, stressful life situations of funny everyday occurrences.