Transcribed by Meko
AUSTIN: Uh, I would like to keep this tight, like I don’t—I just don’t have—there’s no adventures, no one’s going on adventures today [laughs]. So. So. It should be—We’ll see. You know, I say that now, jumpcut four hours from now and I’m like, “Wow, I can’t believe we wrapped up the season.”
[Ali laughs, multiple laughs in background]
AUSTIN: Wild.
ART: We would really need to fill a lot. We would need to—
SYLVIA: Who knew that we just needed to ask nicely? [Ali laughs] Why didn’t we just—Fero wanted to try that!
AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah.
KEITH: When we go long, it’s always in service of ending things sooner in the long run—
AUSTIN: Oh, definitely.
KEITH: It’s just extra stuff we never thought we’d end up getting to.
AUSTIN: Definitely, all the time. Alright.
ART: The trick would be like, all the episodes from here on out would be like fifteen minutes long, that’s how we would end the season today—
AUSTIN: Yeah.
ART: It’d just be like—
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
ART: This has got to last until 2019 [laughs].
AUSTIN: God.
ART: And here it is!
AUSTIN: And we’re also going once every other week from now on. Uh, alright, let’s clap.
ART: In the middle, you can hear Keith’s hilarious cheese comedy.
[Austin, Jack, and Keith laugh]
AUSTIN: I can’t believe we’re releasing fifteen-second Clapcasts now. Out of order, it’s a puzzle.
JACK: Tune in.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JANINE: Also, it’s Keith’s hilarious cheese fact.
[Keith laughs]
JACK: Oh, right.
AUSTIN: Not a bit. Not a bit.
ART: Clapcast is for cheese facts—
AUSTIN: [skeptically] Mmm.
ART: —And the main show is for a cheese bit.
AUSTIN: Gotcha. Alright. Clap at fifty?
ART: Oh.
DRE: Sure.
[long pause]
ART: Nope! I don’t got it.
AUSTIN: Mmkay. Clap at the top of the minute?
ART: I still don’t got it. Okay, got it, alright.
AUSTIN: Okay.
[pause, followed by claps]
KEITH: Um, I skipped a few seconds so I think I’m on—I think I got it, but. It skipped 58 through 01.
AUSTIN: That’s all—okay. You wanna do one more, just to be safe?
KEITH: Yeah, let’s do one more.
AUSTIN: Twenty?
[pause, followed by claps]
KEITH: Cool.
AUSTIN: I may have been a little late there, but it’s okay. Alright.
ART: I hiccupped immediately after cough—after clapping—which I don’t think affects anything but I feel bad about.
AUSTIN: Ooh. You don’t get the resolution, that clap resolution.
ART: Yeah, I don’t get the—yeah, I don’t like—I don’t get to get that glow moment.
[musical interlude, 2:15]
ALI: [through yawn] Are these emoji?
KEITH: What?
ALI: These are very emoji-esque.
AUSTIN: Excuse? Oh yeah, these are very emoji-esque, you’re not wrong. Those are the three things that were—go-out-places-things that they’ve identified.
JACK: Gloria Lake has ransacked one-and-a-half chess sets.
[Multiple laughs]
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
KEITH: We’re the Golden Lance and here are our cartoon game pieces.
[Austin and Jack laugh]
JACK: Oh, for the listener, these are like little knights, chess knights.
AUSTIN: Chess knight, yeah.
JACK: Yellow chess knights.
AUSTIN: Um—
SYLVIA: And let me just say, they’d make good emoji.
AUSTIN: Mm-hm. Yeah.
DRE: You would know.
JACK: You’d know.
KEITH: Yeah, Sylvia[1] would know.
SYLVIA: Just weighing in.
AUSTIN: I want to see if there’s more of this set, or is this the only thing.
KEITH: Roll20-icon-drome. An offshoot podcast.
AUSTIN: Oh, this is not from that, I wish this was from that. I had to go look this up somewhere else, unfortunately.
KEITH: Oh.
AUSTIN: And I want one from the same creator that’s a different piece, but I’m not seeing it and that fucking sucks.
SYLVIA: Wasn’t it that game icons site?
AUSTIN: I always forget, but it’s really good, and I wish we still had it. I’m sure we could find it again, but.
SYLVIA: I think I have it, somewhere. Yeah, I have it.
AUSTIN: Here’s a really good bad bishop, one second. I was looking for a bishop but I got this bad bishop instead. You said that one was emoji-like, check this one out. It’s loading...there it goes [laughs]
[laughter and groans from the table]
KEITH: Oh my God.
JACK: So this is a chess bishop, with just emoji eyes.
AUSTIN: Wow, this is a whole series!
KEITH: And a big open mouth.
ART: Really disturbed by his own hat [Keith laughs].
KEITH: Oh yeah, this is a bishop who’s just been bishop’d.
AUSTIN: Right.
KEITH: And five minutes ago was just some guy [laughter in the background]. “You’re a bishop now.” “My name is Carl.”
[Keith and Austin laugh]
AUSTIN: Yeah, that’s right—
JANINE: That pawn has an armpit.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
[Dre makes disgusted noise in background]
AUSTIN: It’s gross.
JANINE: Ew!
KEITH: Oh wow, that is bad.
ALI: No, we’re out of here, we’re not doing this.
KEITH: That’s like the—that is the Pickle Rick of pawns, I hate it.
[Austin laughs]
DRE: I don’t like any of this—oh, that one’s alright.
ALI: No, we’re out of here. Wrap us up.
AUSTIN: No it’s not, it’s terrible!
JANINE: —ten minutes ago [laughs]
JACK: Let’s clap at, uh—
AUSTIN and ART, in unison: Fifty?
JACK: Fifty.
KEITH: Let’s—
AUSTIN: Yeah—
JACK: Oh God, the queen is real bad.
AUSTIN: [laughs] She’s terrible.
DRE: Are we actually?
JACK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Fifty.
[claps]
AUSTIN: Okay.
ALI: Yes.
ART: Alright.
JACK: Okay.
SYLVIA: Oh, I hate that queen! Sorry, I just saw it. Okay.
[musical interlude, 5:02]
JACK: —Janine, which I think about basically every day, which is, like, not every line needs to be the line.
JANINE: Yeah.
JACK: Spiderman has such a bad case of this. And it also has a bad case of the writers are believing or being told that they need custom dialogue for everything.
JANINE: The biggest thing that bothered me—that has bothered when I’m watching that game is that I can deal with him being like a pithy, tryhard teen type of character, ‘cause that’s him.
JACK: Mm.
JANINE: That’s Peter Parker, he is kind of a smartass tryhard, whatever. The problem I think—I think the real problem there is the frequency that the lines are triggering. Like—
JACK: It’s so often.
JANINE: He just—It is just beat beat beat beat beat [snaps fingers].
KEITH: And there’s—
JANINE: There is very little room to breathe unless you just physically stop him for a moment, and even then sometimes there’s just—there are lines that trigger over lines.
[Jack laughs]
JANINE: Like to me, I think the big problem there—maybe this is also because this is exactly my intersection of—what I’m doing in I/O right now is the intersection of what the AI are saying and what they’re doing.
JACK: Mm.
JANINE: So to me, I look at this and it’s like, okay, his lines are irritating but they’re character-particular, they’re kind of as they’re supposed to be, but they’re triggering way, way, way too often. They’re triggering to a degree that pushes him past sort of his annoying character-true state into of like, oh, he’s an annoying video game character now. Like it—
JACK: Mm.
JANINE: It pushes him into that realm of, like, even if you don’t consciously realize, it’s like, oh, this is a video game problem.
ART: I think Peter Parker’s too old?
JACK: Yeah, I agree.
JANINE: Is he?
ART: I think—‘cause he’s like twenty-four, twenty-five in this; he mentions being Spiderman for eight years early in the game, and he’s like, living in his own apartment, and he and Mary-Jane have had a relationship and broken up, and he’s graduated from school, and I think he has a Masters or something. And, like, I think I could be cooler with the Spider-cop character if he was sixteen.
AUSTIN: Mm.
JACK: Yeah.
JANINE: Yeah.
ART: If this was sixteen-year old Peter Parker, like, okay, yeah, Spider-cop is a fine thing for a sixteen-year old to say, it’s not as okay for a twenty-four, twenty-five year old, like it just—
JANINE: Or like, if the game just becomes about him hitting that phase of, “Oh, I had shitty teen opinions and now I have to have some adult opinions.” But from all I’ve heard, that’s not what this game necessarily does.
ART: Well Spiderman can’t ever—
JANINE: Like him growing out of trusting cops consistently, for instance.
ART: I don’t know that Spider—like, especially ever since Marvel decided that Spiderman couldn’t ever be an adult when they decided he couldn’t be married anymore, where like, they had to have the Devil take his marriage from him.
JACK: Hmm.
KEITH: [laughs] Okay.
JANINE: Was it the Devil? I thought his semen killed her, or something. Wasn’t that the thing?
JACK: Wait, what?
ART: No, that’s something different.
AUSTIN: That’s a different thing.
ART: That didn’t really happen.That was a fake future story.
JANINE: Oh, okay.
ART: What really happened was his elderly aunt got hurt and she was gonna die and so he traded the life—he traded his marriage for the life of his ninety-year-old maternal figure, which I don’t think is a decision any married person would actually make.
JANINE: That’s—no.
AUSTIN: No.
ART: But like, the out of universe explanation was that they thought having Spiderman who was married and stable wasn’t good enough for that character, it made the character like, unrelatable, which is telling you something about what Marvel thinks their audience is.
[Janine laughs]
AUSTIN: Yeah, but do you think that’s changing with like, the Spiderverse thing, in which Peter Parker’s whole bit is that he’s twenty-eight or whatever?
ART: Maybe?
JANINE: I mean, that’s the thing—
AUSTIN: And this.
JANINE: I think that’s why he’s twenty-four and out of school and, like, between relationships and shit. I think this is them saying, Spiderman needs to be relatable, this is who we want him to be relatable to.
AUSTIN: Is the twenty-six year olds buying this game.
JANINE: Yeah.
ART: And in the main comics, he’s like, he’s a little more paternal with Miles Morales—
AUSTIN: Miles.
ART: And he’s trying to be paternal with him in this game too—
AUSTIN: Yeah, I was gonna say, that’s—yeah.
ART: It feels weird in this one.
AUSTIN: There’s that great scene, there’s that great scene where Miles is like, “Don’t fucking be paternal with me, you don’t know me.” So.
ART: Yeah.
JANINE: I wish also that this was like—I forget what the name of that Spiderman movie, that animated thing that’s coming out is, but I wish this was also more like Peter Parker—
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JANINE: —As an idealistic, kind of washed-up dirtbag [laughs].
AUSTIN: Mm-hm. A bit schlubbier.
JANINE: Yeah. Like, I want his jokes spaced out but I also want some flopsweat.
JACK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Um, okay. Superheroes.
ART: But yeah, comic books spent a lot of the eighties and nineties trying to be like, “Our characters can grow up and have real lives!” then spent a lot of the two thousands and twenty-tens being like, “No, they can’t!”
AUSTIN: Mm.
JANINE: “Nevermind!”
AUSTIN: Right, right.
ART: “Stable relationships are boring!”
KEITH: It’s probably really, really hard to grow up when you have superpowers, actually.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JACK: Well, we can explore this!
[Janine laughs]
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: That’s the game we’re playing.
JANINE: This and more!
KEITH: Oh yeah, that is the game we’re playing! [laughs uproariously] I forgot, I literally forgot.
[Jack laughs]
JANINE: This is all—that’s all just your character.
KEITH: Turns out this is very apropos.
JANINE: This whole conversation is your character.
AUSTIN: Mm-hm.
JACK: I accidentally went to time.com instead of time.is [laughs], and now I’m reading headlines.
JANINE: Nope.
JACK: They’re all bad.
ART: Turns out the world sucks. Yeah.
JACK: Time.com is just like,—my God, is it all—is it all upsetting?
KEITH: I saw someone today—
JACK: Yeah, everything on the front page is upsetting.
KEITH: Yeah. Um, this is—I saw—’cause someone’s—‘cause some some rich people are buying time, just like, two rich people are just buying it—
AUSTIN: Aren’t they always?
[Janine laughs]
KEITH: Yeah. But it’s not a company, it’s just two rich people, like a married couple, is buying the magazine.
AUSTIN: Cool.
KEITH: And I saw someone in the comments—I don’t know why, I was just looking at them—but they were like, “I hope the excellent covers stay the same!” and it’s like, oh my God.
[Austin laughs]
KEITH: The thing—”Here’s what I’m worried about about the news, I hope Time magazine still has those good covers.”
JACK: Oh God.
AUSTIN: Okay. Everyone ready to time.is?
JACK: Yeah.
JANINE: Mm-hm.
ART: What’re we—
AUSTIN: Wanna do ten after?
ART: Okay [laughs].
KEITH: Oh, hold on, I might not be ready, sorry.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: Alright. Twenty?
AUSTIN: Twenty, yeah.
[claps]
AUSTIN: Okay!
[musical interlude, 11:43]
JACK: Um—
AUSTIN: Um—yes?
JACK: Can I just run and get a tissue really quickly—
AUSTIN: You still—
JACK: —‘cause my arm’s bleeding in a small but not severe way.
AUSTIN: Oh my God. Okay.
JACK: In a small but not severe way.
AUSTIN: Okay, you go do that right now. And we’re back when we’re over Franklin’s drives.
ART: Did Jack say fishy? Get a fishy?
JANINE: Tissue.
AUSTIN: A tissue.
ART: Ohh.
AUSTIN: I think.
ART: Like, do they— is that what they call it over there?
AUSTIN: A fishy.
JANINE: They call it a fishy.
ART: A fishy.
AUSTIN: They call it a little fishy.
[musical interlude, 12:14]
KEITH: I’ve got, um—hmm. Alright, so here’s the thing: it’s not showing it on OBS but on the Youtube it’s definitely showing a little sliver of back on the side there. How bad do we feel like I should just fix that right now? It’s not a problem.
ALI: Um, we can.
KEITH: Yeah, I’ll just fix it.
ALI: We have a little bit of just chill time. Also, can you change that to September [laughs]?
KEITH: Is it—Oh my—
ALI: Technically—[dissolves into laughter]
KEITH: Oh, oh, we wanna be—we wanna pretend like—we’re not just gonna do November 2? [Ali still laughing in the background] Is this a bit you wanna do? Like, do you want me to pretend that it’s September? ‘Cause I’ll do it.
ALI: [laughing] Yeah, Keith, how’s your back-to-school shopping going?
KEITH: It’s been—it’s real—yeah, my back-to-school shopping was really—yeah, La Bean, yeah.
[Sylvia and Ali laugh]
KEITH: Is it not La Bean?
SYLVIA: No!
ALI: I don’t think it’s La Bean.
KEITH: Is it not La Bean?
SYLVIA: No, it’s like Cool J.
KEITH: Okay, I’m just gonna—
SYLVIA: Yeah.
[Ali laughs]
SYLVIA: By the way, there’s no ‘I’ in my last name, while we’re giving tips on the first slide [laughs]
[Ali laughs]
KEITH: Wait, what’re we doing?
SYLVIA: You mis—There’s no ‘I’ in my last name.
KEITH: Oh, is there not?
SYLVIA: No. It’s okay, literally everyone does that, ‘cause that’s how the name should be spelled.
KEITH: I swear that I’ve seen it with an ‘I’; it might have been just someone else getting it wrong, and I was like, well, that’s obviously how to do that.
SYLVIA: Yeah, I mean, that’s how you spell the human first name. So, you know.
KEITH: Yeah.
[Sylvia sighs]
KEITH: Anything else that you guys wanna fucking nitpick on? Huh?
DRE: Oh, I should hit record.
[Sylvia and Ali laugh]
DRE: Keith, I think you’re doing a great job.
KEITH: [mockingly] Oh my name’s spelled wrong, it’s actually September!
[Ali laughs harder]
KEITH: Give me a break.
[pause]
KEITH: Okay, so I’m actually just—for whatever reason it’s like, it was like, no, we’re never gonna fix this black sliver—
ALI: Oh wow.
KEITH: Like I—it’s definitely not in the OBS, so I think there’s something wrong with the way it was being captured, so I’m gonna try to capture it just a different way....Um, can I fullscreen the slideshow? Is that something I can do?
DRE: Mm-hm, I think so.
ALI: I think so?
KEITH: How do I do that?
[Ali laughs]
DRE: It’s been a while since I’ve used the Google Slides.
KEITH: Yo, anybody know how to fullscreen in the chat?
[Ali and Dre laugh]
KEITH: Anybody know how to fullscreen a Google slideshow?
DRE: Hold on, I’m gonna see if I can—
KEITH: What?
ALI: [laughing] Can you just send us the slideshow in the Patreon chat? Can you like, pop a link?
KEITH: Do you want it?
DRE: Yeah!
ALI: [laughs] Yeah I do, I would like to see if we can help [laughs harder].
KEITH: Whatever.
[Ali and Dre laugh]
KEITH: Listen, this is Runbutton host style, I don’t give a shit.
SYLVIA: Oh boy.
KEITH: I was gonna be all professional but I—
DRE: Apparently, I need to ask for access to this.
KEITH: Oh, is that not—I can do...okay, get shareable link, that’s fine. Just ignore that, get shareable link [clicks], here we go. I’m just gonna...here, new link is there, it works now.
ALI: Okay.
DRE: Bazinga.
KEITH: Bazinga.
ALI: Do you still need to know how to fullscreen?
KEITH: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ALI: Okay [laughs].
KEITH: It is not clear, how to do it.
DRE: I think it’s ‘view’ and ‘present’.
KEITH: View...present.
DRE: Oh, there’s also ‘fullscreen’ under ‘view’ as well.
ALI: Oh yeah. See, look at that.
SYLVIA: But it—it keeps the grid on the side though.
KEITH: Yeah, view and present looks like the thing that I want. And then now it’s fullscreen so I should be able to just window capture and then not do anything. [speaking to himself] Add...er yeah, window capture…
ALI: Free wrapping paper from Coheed and Cambria today [laughs]
SYLVIA: Ooh.
DRE: Excuse me?
KEITH: Free wr—Only today?!
ALI: [laughing] Only today.
DRE: Is it Coheed and Cambria wrapping paper?
ALI: I’m checking.
SYLVIA: It’s covered in dead wives.
ALI: Aw [laughs]. It is. It is.
SYLVIA: I calls it like I sees it, you know.
ALI: Sorry, I was looking through my spam email [laughs].
KEITH: Okay. I want everybody to know that we are streaming.
ALI: Uh-huh.
KEITH: I’m capturing it fullscreen, and it’s still got that little black sliver.
ALI: Wow.
KEITH: So I think it’s not me. I’m pretty sure.
ALI: It’s time to move on.
KEITH: Yeah.
DRE: Yeah.
ALI: It’s not—
KEITH: I’m gonna try real quick ‘stretch to screen’. But that didn’t do anything, so.
ALI: I cannot find a picture of this wrapping paper, what’s the point?
DRE: I‘m gonna look on their website. Oh, well, the tweet from their official Twitter goes to a dead URL, so that's nothing.
[Ali laughs]
KEITH: Are they okay?
ALI: [through laughter] They’re fine.
KEITH: Are you sure?
DRE: No.
ALI: [through laughter] Totally—
KEITH: Can I tell you something? I know Ali—Ali, you love this band, I don’t know who else loves this band—
ALI: I love them.
KEITH: Can I tell you something for real?
DRE: I like this band okay.
KEITH: Can I tell you something about this band?
ALI: Yeah, please.
KEITH: I—The way that some people hate the word ‘moist’, I hate the words ‘coheed’ and ‘cambria’ together.
[Dre laughs loudly]
SYLVIA: Okay.
KEITH: There’s something just orally repulsive about it, I just hate it [laughs].
ALI: Is it in association with the band? Or are you like—
KEITH: No, I don’t know anything about the band!
ALI: —they’re fine, but they should have a different—oh, okay
KEITH: No, no, not in association with the band at all, no. Zero judgment on the band, there is just something about the way that those words sound that I’m just like, “Oh my God, I’m gonna be sick.”
[Ali and Keith laugh]
KEITH: Do we want to do a time.is?
ALI: I would love to. It’s gonna take me a second, I don’t have [laughs] a keyboard—
SYLVIA: Do you want us to link it and you can just click it?
ALI: No, I’m good. Okay. Good time.
DRE: I—you need—I need to mail you this keyboard.
KEITH: I swear that the—okay, there we go, great. Um—
DRE: Uh, fifteen?
ALI: Okay.
[pause, claps]
ALI: Mm.
KEITH: That was a little messy, it was a little sloppy.
DRE: Hm.
[Sylvia and Ali laugh]
KEITH: That’s fine, do you want to do it—nah, it’s whatever, who cares?
ALI: It’s fine. We’re fine.
KEITH: It’s fine. Yeah.
[Ali laughs]
KEITH: Listen, I know how lining up the claps works, that’s fine, doesn’t matter.
ALI: Yeah.
KEITH: Alright, um...are we starting? Are we good?
[musical interlude, 19:05]
JANINE: Hi Keith.
KEITH: Hello, what’s going on?
AUSTIN: We’re talking about being warm in the winter, via pajamas.
KEITH: Being warm is nice, when you know you should be cold.
AUSTIN: Agreed.
JANINE: Mm-hm.
AUSTIN: Not the other way though.
KEITH: Being cold when you know you should be warm? Oh, that’s—yeah, that’s the worst!
AUSTIN: Or being warm when you know you should be warm [laughs]. And it’s like, “ugh, I’m too fucking warm.”
JANINE: Yeah…
KEITH: But warm is nice. I don’t think you can ever be—
AUSTIN: I don’t like being warm. I like being warm in the winter.
KEITH: Oh, but like, hot.
JANINE: I mean, the classic wisdom is it’s easier to warm up than cool down. So it’s better to be cold than hot.
KEITH: But, I’m just thinking like you walk outside into a sunbeam and you immediately are like, “Oh, that’s so warm and good.”
AUSTIN: No.
JANINE: But that’s different, because that presumes you’re at a neutral, or maybe even slightly cool, starting position—
AUSTIN: Right.
JANINE: If the warmth of a sunbeam stands out to you.
KEITH: I don’t know, I guess even on a nice day where it’s like eighty degrees and it’s already warm, just like, you know, the sun is nice, it’s nice to be warm.
AUSTIN: I believe you feel this way.
KEITH: Yeah.
[Janine laughs]
KEITH: I’m s—I feel like that’s, uh—yeah, the sun’s nice. Breath of the Wild, man.
AUSTIN: Yeah, I get you. Sometimes I want to walk outside and be a nice crisp day. That’s just how I feel, you know?
KEITH: I like that too. I like them both.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JANINE: I was about to say I’d rather walk outside and have it be Breath of the Wild, and that’s not actually true, ‘cause that world seems a little harsh.
AUSTIN:That seems rough right now. I have to play that game again.
JANINE: Yeah, I need to go back to it.
AUSTIN: Set some time aside.
KEITH: It is so good and comfortable to go back there.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JANINE: I’ve been playing Dragon Quest Builders again, which is—‘cause I have that on, I got to like, the second level of that on PS4, but then I got it on Switch ‘cause I thought I might want to play it when I was traveling and I was waaay too tired.
AUSTIN: Mm-hm.
JANINE: But I have it. It’s also one step away from just doing Breath of the Wild, and I keeping thinking, what if I was just playing Breath of the Wild?
AUSTIN: Yeah.
KEITH: Hi Art, hi Jack.
JACK: Hi.
ART: Hey.
AUSTIN: Oh, you’re both here.
JACK: I am.
ART: Am I going to be unbelievably loud? Yes, I am.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: Asked and answered.
JACK: You sound fine to us.
AUSTIN: You sound fine.
KEITH: It’s me, Art, I’m going to be unbelievably loud today.
ART: Huh.
JACK: —take my headphones off because I need to take my sweatshirt off, which I should have done before I put my headphones on and joined the call.
AUSTIN: Put the headphones on, yeah. Hm.
JACK: Goodbye!
AUSTIN and KEITH, in unison: Bye!
AUSTIN: Bye bye bye.
JANINE: Bye forever!
ART: It’s just like, exhaling is picking up on the mic, and that usually doesn’t happen and it’s bugging me out.
KEITH: You have a pop screen right? Maybe it needs to be readjusted.
ART: Maybe.
JANINE: Pop screens are a lie and a myth.
[Multiple disapproving noises]
KEITH: That’s not true—no, wait, okay, hold on. Let me breathe into my mic, and then let me breathe in without the pop screen.
[Jack chuckles]
KEITH: Here’s a breath, ready? [soft exhale sound] And now here’s a breath [popping noises, loud exhale].
AUSTIN: Wait a second [laughs].
[Janine laughs]
KEITH: Do you guys not pop when you breathe?
JANINE: I’m saying my pop screen—I’ve never had a pop—I’ve had three pop screens now, and none of them have ever done the thing they’re supposed to. The basic thing they’re supposed to do.
KEITH: You should—I’ll link you to the one I have. The kind that I’m using used to cost—
JANINE: I think that’s the one I bought before.
KEITH: The kind that’s like, it’s a hard screen that you—
JANINE: Yes.
KEITH: —you put a rubber band on. Oh.
JANINE: Yeah.
KEITH: Huh. I love these.
JANINE: That shit didn’t do shit. For a while, I had that plus also one of the round ones on the gooseneck in front of that, and it still didn’t do anything for my pops.
KEITH: Is it—hm. Is it possible you’ve got your mic set to omnidirectional or like, front-and-back, instead of cardioid?
JANINE: I don’t think so?
KEITH: There’s a switch on the back, it should be in the center.
JANINE: Yeah, I believe it is.
JACK: There’s a switch on the back?
AUSTIN: Yeah.
KEITH: Yeah, switch on the back, it should be in the center.
JANINE: I have a switch on the front, but—
JACK: Oh yeah, I see it!
ART: What do the two switches on the front do?
KEITH: One of the switches on the front is like a built-in compression, that should be at zero, not at minus ten.
AUSTIN: Got it, yeah.
KEITH: And there’s another one that I think is like a noise gate? Which we don’t need, because we do that on the other end. So it should just be this straight line.
ART: Oh. I’m not—
AUSTIN: I think I’ve been using the other one but I’m not touching this today right before we record.
KEITH: It’s honestly—
AUSTIN: I’m gonna use the thing that we’ve been using.
JANINE: Sorry Ali, I was just touching my microphone all up in here.
KEITH: Honestly, the two in the front are not a huge deal, because, like, the decibels you self-correct in Audacity anyway.
AUSTIN: Right.
KEITH: And the noise gate, all it—worst-case scenario is like, maybe you sigh on purpose and it doesn't pick it up or something.
[Art laughs]
AUSTIN: Uhh—
JANINE: Yeah, I just checked and all my shit is set and fine, so, I dunno.
KEITH: Maybe you just have a uniquely plosive voice.
AUSTIN: It’s possible.
JANINE: Maybe.
AUSTIN: It’s possible, it’s possible.
JANINE: It’s very possible.
KEITH: Time.is, right?
AUSTIN: That’s what we do.
KEITH: I feel like—you know when you go to work, and then you go to work the next day and it feels like it’s the same day.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
KEITH: Or like, you worked all week and don’t know what day anything happened.
AUSTIN: I sure do.
KEITH: Yeah, it’s bad. But, that never happens at Friends at the Table except, it does feel like we’re on a five-minute break from doing Hieron [laughs].
AUSTIN: Well, yeah, again, yeah, uh-huh. I have some names written down here, and I don’t know who these people are. Not all of them but a couple of them.
KEITH: Who don’t you know?
AUSTIN: There’s somebody who—You know, good question. I know who some of these people are, but. Like I know who Principal Osbone is but it’s very funny to just open up a document, and at the top it just says Principal Osbone.
[Keith laughs]
AUSTIN: Who isn’t gonna come up probably in this episode, but, still. Man, who is this? I don’t—
JANINE: Is it Horace Mann, the person who famously said: “Lost, yesterday somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.” Horace Mann.
KEITH: That’s not the time.is quote, Janine just knows that.
AUSTIN: Oh, wow.
KEITH: Yeah.
JACK: That’s a great quote to just know, honestly.
KEITH: Yeah it is, yeah. It’s super impressive.
AUSTIN: Wait, where is the time.is quote at?
JACK: Where is the time—
JANINE: You like, scroll down.
JACK: Oh, if you scroll all the way down.
AUSTIN: Oh, Horace Mann.
JANINE: If you scroll down well past the point where this page is useful.
[Austin and Jack laugh]
JACK: It’s me, Horace Mann.
KEITH: Then it does something else not useful and gives you a quote from someone that mentions time.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JACK: Is there a new time quote every day?
KEITH: Every day, maybe even every minute, I don’t even know.
AUSTIN: Every time, every time.
KEITH: Every time, yeah [laughs].
JANINE: Time.is has so many features that I—[Jack laughs] I just thought that time.is was like a beautiful, simple, like, this is the time.
AUSTIN: No, no.
KEITH: I didn’t even know it was a website.
JANINE: What’s the difference between ‘exact time now’ and ‘just time’?
AUSTIN: Why is there a sound button?
KEITH: Is it like a—
AUSTIN: Whoa.
JACK: If you press L1 twice, it spins its gun when it puts it back into the holster.
[Janine laughs]
JACK: It’s true.
AUSTIN: There’s a sound button, you can turn on—oop.
[long pause]
AUSTIN: You can turn on—oh, sound?
JANINE: You can turn on every clock in the world?
AUSTIN: You can turn on sound and then like for the last few seconds before the minute changeover it gets higher.
JACK: It goes like [high beep noise].
KEITH: That might help for claps for some people.
JACK: I hate this.
AUSTIN: Well, we’re not gonna—you’re not gonna hear the thing that I just heard, ‘cause we have to wait a whole other minute and we’re not doing that.
JACK: It does just go “beep” and I hate it going “beep”, honestly.
AUSTIN: It just goes beep.
JANINE: Oh, that’s scary, it does it at the half too?
AUSTIN: No, it does it—it jumps around if you’re switching between time.is modes [Jack laughs]. Oh, you’re saying—did it build again? Did it build—
JACK: It does sound off—
KEITH: Scroll down now and hit ‘exact time now’ again.
JANINE: I hate it.
KEITH: Or ‘just time’, you can hit ‘just time’ if you want.
AUSTIN: What’s ‘just time’ ?
KEITH: ‘Just time’ is just the clock and none of the frills.
AUSTIN: Love it. You know what, I’m here for ‘just time’.
KEITH: Time.is/just, by the way.
AUSTIN: I love that they offer this service; they could have retracted this and used just their fancy thing, but they know that us purists just need the time [Jack laughs]. Just time. Dot is.
KEITH: Yeah.
JACK: Just time please.
JANINE: And maybe a few unnecessary holidays.
AUSTIN: Yea, every now and—a quote Horace Mann tw—quote now and then. A twote. The name that I have written down here, I don’t know who this is, is Georgia Heights, which is a great name [chuckles] but I don’t remember who that is, so, we’ll see.
KEITH: Is this someone that definitely already came up?
AUSTIN: No. No, no, no, no.
KEITH: Or someone that definitely already didn’t?
AUSTIN: Almost certainly did not.
JANINE: Are we sure that it’s a person and not a place?
AUSTIN: It’s definitely a person, it’s in my persons list.
JANINE: Okay.
AUSTIN: I think I know who it’s connected to—
KEITH: You know what would be funny? One day we’ll do a live game and you’ll write a bunch of names and a bunch of places and then you’ll just swap them.
AUSTIN: Yeah, I’ll just swap them out, who knows.
[Janine laughs]
AUSTIN: [Yawns, sighs] Okay. We should clap. Top of the minute?
[Art chuckles]
JANINE: ‘kay.
AUSTIN: For the beeps. I’m not hearing the beeps, but.
[pause, claps]
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: Honestly, I think just as an oralization exercise, just hear the beeps, in your own head, might help.
AUSTIN: In your own head, mm-hm.
ART: I still don’t understand how to turn beeps on.
KEITH: If you scroll all the way down—
AUSTIN: Don’t, don’t worry about it, we’re not doing this.
JANINE: What’s oralization?
AUSTIN: Welcome to Friends at the Table, an actual play podcast focused on—I lost it, ‘cause I was thinking about the beeps.
KEITH: Oralization.
AUSTIN: Thinking about oralization. Focused on oralization.
KEITH: Visualization but with hearing instead of seeing.
ART: This is terrible, it’s just doing it every second. There’s no—
AUSTIN: Yeah, but then it builds when you get to the end, and it raises in pitch. It’s bad.
ART: Oh, I can’t take it—I can’t turn it off.
JACK: Just hit—
AUSTIN: Just hit the button again.
JACK: No, no, no. You have to hit ‘exact time now’.
JANINE: ‘Exact time now’.
AUSTIN: Oh really? You can’t just hit sound again?
JACK: No.
ART: No, you hit sound again, and sound happens.
AUSTIN: Weird.
ART: Oh my God. Thank you.
AUSTIN: Okay.
[Jack laughs]
[musical interlude, 29:09]
JACK: I got my fidget cube back.
AUSTIN: Nice.
ALI: Oh!
JACK: Previously I had been fiddling with a bit of wire.
[Ali laughs]
AUSTIN: Not as good.
JACK: No, not as good. I curled it into the shape of some little glasses—
AUSTIN: Mm.
ALI: Oh.
JACK: —But it’s not as good as the cube design for fiddling with.
ALI: Yeah. Every surface.
JACK: Gotta have a cube on.
AUSTIN: Gotta have a cube on.
JACK: Oh, you mean each surface of the cube, right, yes.
ALI: Right. Yeah.
JACK: [chuckling] Not every surface nearby.
KEITH: Wait, what cube? What’s the cube?
JACK: I have a fidget cube.
KEITH: Ohh.
JACK: I’d go through the sides but we don’t have time.
KEITH: Oh, no, I know about the sides. Someone at my old job gave me one and said, “You seem like you need one of these.”
JACK: Damn.
AUSTIN: Hmm.
JACK: I find that I do when I record.
AUSTIN: Fair.
KEITH: Yeah, I mean, yeah, she wasn’t wrong. I did—I do need something like that.
JACK: It’s a thing to say though, isn’t it? To someone.
AUSTIN: It sure is.
KEITH: Yeah, it is, it’s rude, but it’s fine.
AUSTIN: I’m ready to go, whenever people are. I would love to.
KEITH: Okay.
JACK: Let’s do it.
KEITH: Austin, you seem a little quiet.
AUSTIN: Nope.
KEITH: Okay.
[Jack and Ali laugh]
AUSTIN: I’m at the fives, so.
ALI: Clap at forty-five?
AUSTIN: Sure.
[pause, followed by claps]
KEITH: Tight.
AUSTIN: Okay, yeah, that was good. [clears throat] Okay, so.
[musical interlude, 30:43]
KEITH: I have—God, it’s the worst, breaking stuff. I’ve—I have like these—I have what I consider to be really nice drinking glasses. Just like, small—they’re smallish, like thirteen ounces, but they’re really nice and thin and they’re great to drink out of, but sometimes I’ll just—one will be in the sink and it will just be cracked, and it sucks.
JANINE: Yeah.
KEITH: And I’m like, there’s now—so they came with six or eight—I think they came with six each of two different shapes and I’ve broken three of one. And now I have not enough to fill my cabinet—
JANINE: Ohh.
KEITH: ‘cause I had four in the cabinet and two backups. And so I broke three, the two backups and the last one that fits.
JANINE: Aw, that sucks.
KEITH: Yeah. But they were relatively inexpensive, so I’m thinking I can just be reckless with them [chuckling] and then buy a new set.
JANINE: Yeah.
KEITH: Just like, “These are the ones that I don’t care about anymore, guess I’ll have to buy a new one soon.” Glasses are pretty cheap.
JANINE: Mm-hm.
KEITH: It sucks, needing stuff.
ART: Yeah. We’re primarily a big plastic cup household—
KEITH: Yeah.
ART: So we’ve got a lot of water, and you often get these just for free at places, like, we have two from a barbeque joint in Colorado.
KEITH: Mm-hm.
ART: And we have some souvenir ones from wrestling shows or the state fair.
KEITH: Yeah. I like those.
ART: Or some amusement park I’ve never been to.
[Janine laughs]
KEITH: [laughs] I like those, I don’t like—all my cabinets now are—or all, I have like—you know the upper cabinets and the lower cabinets—all the upper cabinets have glass window panel doors.
JANINE: Mm.
KEITH: And so you can see into them. And it sucks to have a bunch of glass and a bunch of porcelain and then [laughs] just a big stack of big plastic cups. So I have—I do have some plastic cups but I keep them next to where I keep my potatoes.
[Janine laughs]
KEITH: Because I—
JANINE: Your shame cups, right.
KEITH: They’re my shame cups. They also—they just, like, kind of don’t even fit in the cabinets, ‘cause they’re so tall.
JANINE: Yeah, they can be too tall sometimes. That’s tricky.
KEITH: Mm-hm. Yeah. What I really like though, I really like a huge cereal mug. Like a mug that’s so big that you could never think to drink coffee out of it and you can just use it for soup or cereal or something. That’s the best.
JANINE: Mm.
ART: I’ll drink coffee out of that mug, I don’t give a fuck.
KEITH: Oh, it’ll—it would kill me. I have to be so careful with caffeine or I’ll get really jittery and anxious and bad. Specifically coffee.
JANINE: My dad got one of these mugs, that’s like, the body is really, really big but the opening is very, very small. Like, it’s sort of—it’s very orb-like and then kind of closes at the top instead of being a big, wide soup kind of cappuccino mug. And it’s got a cat face on it and these little cat ears and it’s impossible to drink out of it cleanly.
[Keith laughs]
JANINE: Because the cat ears are right there and also the lip of it is very thick.
KEITH: Can you go around the ear?
JANINE: Well, I mean there’s a side that doesn’t have ears, but the lip on the mug is still really thick and also is curved inward so you have to tip it really far.
KEITH: No, I mean like, can you put your mouth around the ear and use the ear to funnel into your mouth.
JANINE: No, the ears are really, like, rounded and—
KEITH: Oh.
JANINE: Yeah. And also small, so I think that would make it messier.
KEITH: Yeah.
JANINE: But it’s like trying to drink coffee out of a miniature goldfish bowl.
[Keith laughs]
JANINE: And it’s just like—it’s just really difficult. It’s a very cute mug, I certainly appreciate the gift—.
KEITH: Do you have a coffee straw?
JANINE: But like, it’s impossible.
KEITH: It sounds—that’s a—yeah. There are some mugs that are—I was at a diner this morning, and the coffee mug, the rim was just so thick that even though it was just a regular-shaped mug, even that I was like, oh this is really shitty to drink from.
JANINE: And there’s drips all on the side and it’s just a fucking disaster.
KEITH: Yeah, it’s like—yeah, it was a like a full quarter-inch thick where the—where my mouth goes.
JANINE: Yeah.
KEITH: It was very weird.
[pause, Keith sighs]
KEITH: That’s my biggest problem right now, is cups!
JANINE: [laughs] So you’re doing okay then.
KEITH: Yeah, I am. Doing pretty good.
JANINE: How’re you doing, Art?
ART: I guess I don’t have any cup problems, so I guess, slightly better?
[Janine laughs]
[Outro music plays to end]
[1] The name in the audio recording is no longer in use, hence the audio/transcript discrepancy.