Clapcast 24: Goodbye Hieron! (August 2019)
Transcribed by Meko
KEITH: Uh, I need to turn myself down.
[Sylvia laughs in the background]
AUSTIN: You good?
KEITH: Can I do a [rising intonation] teeeeestttttt? Oooohhhh, come on—Okay, there we go, that’s better.
AUSTIN: Classic Fero. Just classic.
KEITH: Yeah. Wait, let me be outraged for a second [Janine laughs]. [yelling] I can’t believe this! Aaahh!! [normal voice] Okay, yeah. Everything should be in order now. I can be even keel and I can be really angry and everything will go fine.
[musical interlude, 0:28]
KEITH: Um, I did all my weekend plans yesterday on the Fourth of July.
AUSTIN: What’d you do?
KEITH: Lots of family yard games.
AUSTIN: Nice.
KEITH: Part of—a section of my family is incredibly competitive over stupid yard games [Austin laughs]. Like croquet and horseshoes.
JACK: Hey.
AUSTIN: Hello.
KEITH: Hey, Jack.
ART: The two of you are so New England. This is just aggressively—
AUSTIN: I know. It’s so funny.
[Sylvia chuckles]
JACK: In what way—
KEITH: We played corn—I played cornhole for the first time.
AUSTIN: For the first time?!
JACK: Oh, yeah!
KEITH: I had never played cornhole.
JACK: I have no fucking idea what cornhole is.
SYLVIA: I’ve never played it.
AUSTIN: Did you play—did you play conkers, my favorite yard game?
KEITH: No, we played boules, my favorite yard game.
AUSTIN: Boules?
SYLVIA: Boules?
KEITH: Pétanque?
AUSTIN: Bétanque?! Boules Bétanque!
KEITH: Pétanque!
AUSTIN: [laughing] The protagonist of Season Six, Boules Bétanque.
KEITH: Boules—
JACK: Pétanque. Sorry, Austin.
AUSTIN: Nope!
KEITH: Boules is both the name of the ball and also a genre of yard games that includes games like pétanque and bocce.
AUSTIN: Okay.
SYLVIA: Yeah, bocce. I was—yeah.
KEITH: Bocce—I don’t like bocce, I like pétanque.
JACK: I’ve never played bocce.
ART: Keith, you’re just a touch echoey.
KEITH: Yeah?
AUSTIN: You are—Yeah, you are a touch echoey. That’s right.
ART: You’re a little roomy.
KEITH: Hmm.
ART: Hey, how regional is whip a shitty?
DRE: What?
JANINE: What?!
AUSTIN: [disbelievingly] Okay! Uhhh. This regional.
KEITH: Sound like very.
JANINE: It sounds like a summer camp in something racist.
AUSTIN: Does anyone here know how to spell the word that Art just said?
JANINE: I’m gonna guess. Can I guess?
KEITH: W-H-I-P—
ART: It’s three words.
JANINE: Oh.
KEITH: A—
AUSTIN: What?!
JANINE: Whip a shitty?
KEITH: S-H-I-T-T-Y.
ART: Yup.
JACK: Yeah, Art, it really truly—Art, it truly can’t be this, right? Can it? I’m typing it into the Discord chat.
ART: Yeah, that’s it.
JACK: [disbelievingly] No, it’s not [laughing].
ART: It’s a traffic maneuver.
AUSTIN: Is this from the Bay? Where is this from?
ART: It might be from the Midwest, because I spent most of my twenties hanging out with Midwesterners inexplicably after I moved to California.
AUSTIN: Yeah, weird.
ART: Uh [laughs], It’s like making a bad U-turn. Like a U-turn in which you have no legal right to do it.
AUSTIN: Right.
JACK: And it’s a game?
ART: It’s not a game, it’s just a phrase.
AUSTIN: No [laughs]. Just driving.
SYLVIA: Yeah, it’s just a bunch of people on like, ice, trying to do donuts, but not really doing donuts.
[laughter from the table]
AUSTIN: That’s not a whip a shitty.
DRE: This uh—
KEITH: Art, are you confessing to whipping shitties?
ART: No!
AUSTIN: Keith, your echoey-ness has gotten worse somehow.
KEITH: Worse, really? Let me—
AUSTIN: Are you on the right mic?
KEITH: Yeah, I only have one mic.
ART: [cross] Keith is slowly walking into a giant concert hall.
KEITH: Here, let me, uh—let me listen to my recording.
DRE: The fuck? What is this video recorded on?
[Art laughs]
KEITH: Yeah, I—
AUSTIN: The past.
JANINE: Keith’s microphone.
[Austin and Jack laugh]
DRE: But, yeah, this looks like about what half the people I went to college with would do.
AUSTIN: This is a donut.
DRE: I guess I should clarify, I went to college in Minnesota.
AUSTIN: Right, right.
JACK: I gotta say, in a certain light, this looks kinda enjoyable [laughs].
SYLVIA: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Yeah, donuts are great! Of course!
DRE: No this is—this looks like, you know, going mud, but just with snow instead of mud.
KEITH: It’s definitely cleaner.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JACK: Snow is the better mud, honestly.
DRE: Well...I don’t know.
KEITH: Well, the mud gets into the snow and makes the snow dirty snow.
JANINE: No it’s not.
AUSTIN: Nmm. I don’t know about—
KEITH: Snow on its own is cleaner than mud on its own.
JANINE: Really depends on where you’re getting your snow.
JACK: That’s where the expression—
JANINE: Snow isn’t—That’s not how city snow works. Like, city snow up here’s gonna eat through your car. It’s worse than mud, and in a long-term way.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JACK: I would rather fall into a snow drift than fall into a mud bank.
DRE: That’s...fair, but again I think if we were like—if it was a snowbank of the shitty city snow that Janine is talking about, you might feel differently.
AUSTIN: Yeah, it’d be bad.
JACK: Oh yeah, no.
JANINE: There’s like a—
JACK: I do not want to whip a shitty into the snow.
[Austin and Dre laugh]
JANINE: I think people are suing the city of Edmonton because of the snow chemicals they started—They started using—I don’t know that it’s calcium chloride, that might be a Poirot poison that I’m getting confused with.
[Austin, Jack, and Dre laugh]
JACK: [laughing] The city of Edmonton has brought in Inspector Hercule Poirot—
JANINE: —To poison their snow.
AUSTIN: [laughing] Wow.
JANINE: [chuckles] It’s some sort of something chloride or chlorate. Or bromate or bromide that—I don’t know chemistry. That they are using there and people are like, “Hey, this is completely destroying my car.”
KEITH: Yeah.
JANINE: And the city’s just like, “It’s your responsibility to take care of your car.” Which is like a shitty—
DRE: Oh gosh.
JACK: That’s not good.
JANINE: Their—their thing is like, “Well, our city vehicles are doing fine,” and it’s like, “Yeah, ‘cause you wash them every two days, and most people can’t do that in the winter.”
KEITH: Yeah.
JANINE: Um, cities are bad.
KEITH: Damn.
JACK: Cities are bad.
KEITH: Never bad.
JACK: Some of them are good.
JANINE: Name one.
JACK: Name one good city?
KEITH: But have you ever driven in their snow?
JACK: Berlin.
AUSTIN: I’ve heard good things about Berlin.
JACK: Berlin fuckin’ rules [laughs].
AUSTIN: That’s what I’ve heard!
JACK: I have not driven in their snow. But, you know how it turns out that like basically every city is like, “We hate artists and young creative people”?
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JACK: Berlin is like the city if they were like, “Actually, maybe artists and young creative people are cool as shit, what if we support them?”
AUSTIN: Why aren’t we there? What—Why aren’t we there??
JACK: Tell me about it. Every British game studio that I know has been trying to get Berlin.
JANINE: Ugh.
DRE: Does my license transfer to Berlin?
AUSTIN: It’s just in Germany.
DRE: ‘Cause if it does…
AUSTIN: Your driver’s license, you mean?
DRE: No, like my practicing license.
AUSTIN: Ohhh.
JACK: Oh, well, I don’t—who fucking knows even if I could work in Berlin come next year.
DRE: Oh God. Yeah.
AUSTIN: Mm.
DRE: Apparently it wouldn’t be that hard for me to, like, move to Ireland and do my work, ‘cause apparently an Irish person was telling me that there is a dearth of mental health providers in Ireland.
AUSTIN: Huh.
JACK: Yeah. I wouldn’t recommend coming to the United Kingdom.
KEITH: Only a little of Ireland is in the United Kingdom.
JACK: I say, in the process of immigrating to the United States. But I’m doing that for love!
AUSTIN: The United States—yeah.
DRE: Yeah. Well, like, yeah, I was about to say, if I’m in the south part of Ireland, right?
JACK: The problem is—the problem is that you would then be directly interacting with the British government as a neighbor.
DRE: Mm.
AUSTIN: Fair.
JACK: [laughing] And they fucking suck.
DRE: [cackling] Have you met my government lately, Jack?
JACK: Yeah. Mm-hm.
AUSTIN: It’s bad out here. Ali, how’re you doing?
ALI: I’m okay. Is this better?
AUSTIN: Can you talk a little bit more? Can you talk—what’d you eat for breakfast?
ALI: Hi—I had some Honey-nut Cheerios.
AUSTIN: Yum!
ALI: Yeah, it was great.
AUSTIN: With coffee or water or juice?
ALI: Mm, just some water, I think.
AUSTIN: Some water, some water.
ALI: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Sounds good.
KEITH: I think it’s fixed, and here’s how I know. Now you’re way too loud. And the thing that happens when your mic does the jump thing is actually it stays way too quiet and then goes back to normal, so we spend weeks telling you to turn yourself up and up and up, and now that it’s fixed you’re way too loud.
ALI: Well, what it is is—so it happens when I adjust my levels while recording.
AUSTIN: Mm-hm.
ALI: And right now I have, like, I don’t know, I feel like my mixer is lying to me ‘cause it’s like, “You’re really loud,” but it shouldn’t be that way.
AUSTIN: Yeah…
JANINE: You ever think about how coffee is both water and juice?
ALI: Mm, no.
SYLVIA: [breathily] Woah.
JACK: And it isn’t.
[Janine and Jack laugh]
AUSTIN: Isn’t most juice water and juice?
JANINE: I mean, maybe, but like—
KEITH: Orange juice is just juice.
AUSTIN: No, isn’t that water content from the orange?
ALI: The orange has water in it already.
AUSTIN: That’s what I’m—
JACK: Yeah, from nature.
JANINE: But are we gonna say that—is it water if it’s water in your hands or water if it’s just water—
AUSTIN: Yeah, I getcha.
JANINE: ‘Cause then milk is water.
JACK: Milk is water. Milk is cow-water.
AUSTIN: It’s cow-water.
KEITH: Milk is water.
ALI: Um, we’re—
KEITH: Skim milk is super—it’s extra water.
DRE: Hey, before we do this for real—
AUSTIN: Yeah?
DRE: Are we gonna do a recap of all the stuff that has gone down? Since those episodes haven’t come out yet.
AUSTIN: Oh yeah. Yeah, uh-huh.
DRE: Cool.
AUSTIN: Here’s what I’m gonna say. I’m gonna say hi everyone, how’s it going?
ALI: Hey, hi.
KEITH: Hey, what’s up? Good.
AUSTIN: So...we’re about to finish Hieron, which we started about five years ago.
DRE: Jesus.
AUSTIN: Not exactly, but it was August, it was next month five years ago. Which is a long [laughs] time. And I think the first thing I want to say is that I’ve been super proud of telling this story with all of y’all, and I think we’ve told a good one. It is messy in a way different than Twilight Mirage. It’s messy in the sense of we’ve told this story on and off for five years and have not necessarily had a production team that is the size of a television show to make sure we don’t have continuity errors. We’ve told it in ways where like sometimes years go out of whack in our counting; we’ve done it where sometimes we get stuck in long fight sequences that are more boring than we might want. But also, none of that matters because our characters rule, our world is incredible, and people have really enjoyed—including me—the story that we’ve told all along.
I am normally really anxious going into finale recordings, and I have zero of that right now. And you might say that that’s hubris [laughs]. I actually think the answer to why I don’t have any nervousness about this is: we’ve already recorded the finale. We recorded the finale over the last year. We started with really experimental stuff this season, with multiple split-party stuff, we hit character beats full steam ahead out of the gate, and we had again and again and again big climatic personal moments over the last six to eight weeks.
And so, for me, this is less a finale and more an epilogue. This is a place where we can tell stories about who the characters are in a new, changed world. It’s a way for us to kind of peek into what the future of this space that was once Hieron actually has become. And it’s a way for us to say goodbye to characters, both our own and NPCs. And I think that that is the thing I want to focus on here. More than anything, the vibe I want to capture here is a mix between the great Marielda worldbuilding session and Hieron—what was at the time [laughs] Seasons of Hieron Episode Zero.
If you’re logged in, you’ll see that if I bring you over to the map page, it’s completely blank. We’ll talk about why that is in a moment. But, outside of the resources note in the top left and then like some clocks that you can grab for project clocks in the top right, I’m going in with no expectations here. There is an outro to the last home game that I’m about to read to everyone, to help set the stage, there is an intro I’ll read, but I’m not—there is very little that I feel like, “Oh, if we don’t talk about this one thing, we have fucked up.” Because I think we have given people an incredible season. And, more than anything, I want to leave them with a feeling that’s sort of like the Twilight Mirage outro, but for a couple of episodes instead of a couple of minutes. And the best way to achieve that is to just play this game that we all like already, and see how it goes. And, you know what, maybe I’m wrong about this and we record this today and we record a followup in a couple days and we’re like, “Man, actually I hate this,” in which case, this goes in the vault somewhere and I figure out over the next week or two an alternate ending and we record that and it’s not the end of the world because we still have a little bit of lead time on this.
So again, for me, the big thing is we should have a lot of fun, and that, as always, the thing I’m most interested in is finding new story stuff that none of us could have prepared. You know, ideas that kind of are lingering in the back of our minds, that a series of mechanics or prompts leads us to—or conversations leads us to—and to lean into that stuff, um, if that makes sense. Dre, to your point—in terms of the big-picture stuff that has happened. And this is part of the reason why I’m also not too concerned, is because of the great blank slate we’re going to be coming into. You want me just to read the thing that I would have read at the end of—that I’m going to be reading at the end of the final Samot game—or do you want me to kind of speak in broader terms, Dre?
DRE: Ooh.
AUSTIN: I’ll do both. Let’s do both.
DRE: Yeah, both.
AUSTIN: Let’s—I mean—
JACK: Should we clap first, as well?
AUSTIN: Sure, let’s do a clap, since this—also, I should record my backup. Also, we should—can someone get Craig in here?
JACK: [calling] Craig!
ALI: Oh yeah.
DRE: [calling] Craiigggg!
AUSTIN: That’s how it works [chuckles].
JACK: God, imagine if it did.
KEITH: If it’s not, it should be. Yeah.
AUSTIN: That felt like a different amount of beeps than normal to me.
ALI: It’s the same.
AUSTIN: Greta Thunberg says, “Act now, or face disaster.”
SYLVIA: Fuck.
KEITH: Grim.
ART: Yeah.
AUSTIN: This is the—I don’t know who Greta is, but this is a—I think this like a new thing, who is this? Greta Thunberg...is a climate change—
JANINE: I think if you just click her name, it should—
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JACK: She’s the kid!
DRE: Oh!
JANINE: She’s like a Twitter hashtag.
AUSTIN: She’s a kid. Yeah.
DRE: Oh.
JACK: She’s the extremely good child who’s like, “No more. Let’s stop.”
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JANINE: Ohhh.
AUSTIN: Yep. Well, speaking of climate change and potential crisis [Art and Dre laugh], the world has changed. We should clap, we should clap. Want to do 10?
ART: Sure.
ALI: Mm-hm.
DRE: Sure.
[pause, followed by claps]
AUSTIN: Eight individual claps.
[Table laughs]
AUSTIN: Let’s do another one.
JANINE: Waited too long.
AUSTIN: We did, we waited too long.
ALI: Uh-huh.
AUSTIN: Let’s do at 23 seconds.
[pause, followed by claps.
ALI: Hmm?
AUSTIN: That sounded alright to me.
KEITH: That sounded better.
AUSTIN: That sounded better. Um.
[musical interlude, 14:26]
AUSTIN: Alright, I am back. Almost. There we go. Hello. How is it going?
SYLVIA: Eh.
AUSTIN: Are people still out?
SYLVIA: Um—
ART: I think some people are.
DRE: I’m back.
JANINE: Here.
DRE: Was hoping to take the dog out, and of course people are shooting off fireworks still.
AUSTIN: Awww.
ALI: Aww. God.
AUSTIN: That sucks.
KEITH: Hello!
AUSTIN: Hi. Um—
KEITH: What sucks? What are we sucking?
DRE: Fireworks.
AUSTIN: [laughs] Okay.
SYLVIA: Don’t—well.
AUSTIN: We shouldn’t do that, that’s dangerous.
DRE: No, yeah, that’s bad.
KEITH: Sorry, what was it though? Like, for real?
DRE: Fireworks.
KEITH: Oh, fireworks. Okay.
DRE: People were shooting off fireworks and my dog will not go outside.
KEITH: Oh, that’s a bummer.
DRE: Yeah. I had to clean up three puddles last night [laughs].
ALI: Aww.
KEITH: That sucks. I feel like it’s totally random, like some dogs are just totally fine with it and some dogs are terrified.
DRE: Yeah.
KEITH: And, you know, totally understandably so.
DRE: I mean, she has always been an anxious dog since I got her, so. I mean, even bad thunderstorms get her pretty not happy.
ALI: Aww.
AUSTIN: [sympathetically] Bud.
DRE: Yeah, like the only time in the four years that she’s ever got up in a bed with me was when I woke up one morning and it was thunderstorming.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
KEITH: They don’t get it, they don’t understand.
DRE: Yeah.
KEITH: “What is happening? What is that bad noise?”
DRE: [laughs] I mean, you know, I learned it at one point, in like science class in middle school but I don’t remember now, so. I couldn’t even really explain it to her.
AUSTIN: Um—
KEITH: Pressure? Something about pressure?
AUSTIN: Probably.
DRE: Yup.
[typing sounds]
AUSTIN: Uhh—
DRE: I’ll just have her listen to that episode where Austin explains how lightning actually touches the ground and goes up first.
AUSTIN: That’s all.
ALI: Ohh.
AUSTIN: Are we just waiting on Jack still? I think so. It seems like it.
ART: Can I take a moment to complain about the Richter scale?
AUSTIN: Yeah.
DRE: Please.
KEITH: Oh yeah.
ART: Just because I want to find out how many seismologists listen to the Clapcast.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JACK: I’m back!
ART: Oh. Well.
[Austin laughs]
DRE: You ruined it, Jack.
AUSTIN: Wait, what—
JACK: What did I ruin?
AUSTIN: Give me the problem, give me your problem.
ART: Okay, so we had a big earthquake here yesterday, right?
AUSTIN: Yeah.
DRE: Ooh.
ART: I mean, it was away from here. Everything’s fine.
JACK: But it was like, six. It was a big one.
ART: This is my problem. It was a 6.6.
AUSTIN: Wow, the Devil’s number.
ALI: Ohh.
ART: And the Northridge quake was a 6.8
AUSTIN: Yeah.
ART: And it sounds like those two numbers are really close.
DRE: Sure.
AUSTIN: But it’s exponential or something, right?
ART: Yeah, a 6.8 is one-and-a-half times stronger than a 6.6
AUSTIN: Right.
ART: And you have made a scale that doesn’t mean anything.
KEITH: So, there’s a scale called the Mercalli scale that is a different—it is based on, like, how earthquakes actually feel and not on a weird science graph.
AUSTIN: Mm.
KEITH: And—but because everybody knows what the Richter scale is, news outlets still just use the Richter scale.
JANINE: This is Celsius v. Fahrenheit but for earthquakes.
KEITH: Yes, yeah. Mercalli is the Fahrenheit of [laughs] earthquake measurements.
AUSTIN: No, that seems like it makes more sense to me.
KEITH: The comparison chart here, it says that, “The calculation of the Richter scale is based off a base-ten logarithmic scale obtained by calculating the logarithm of the amplitude of waves,” but the Mercalli scale says “Quantified from observation of the effects on the Earth’s surface, humans, objects, and manmade structures.”
AUSTIN: Right, right. Whereas, the thing with Richter is that, like, a six is ten times more than a five, is that right?
KEITH: This thing here says a 3.0 is ten times stronger than a 2.0.
AUSTIN: I believe that that’s true, and I think that continues indefinitely, right?
KEITH: Yeah. Yeah.
AUSTIN: Anyway.
KEITH: The scale for the Mercalli is it goes from one to twelve; a one is “not felt” and a twelve is “total destruction”.
AUSTIN: Right.
KEITH: And presumably, you know, there’s something you can look at and be like, “Oh well, things got broken but no buildings fell down so it’s like a five,” or something.
AUSTIN: Yo, that makes sense.
KEITH: I don’t know, but yeah.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
KEITH: Yeah.
ART: I mean, I have to presume that a—
JANINE: I’m assuming the thing you look at is a ball on a string on top of a ruler.
DRE: Mm-hm?
JANINE: The ball, like, flops around and you’re like, “Oh, three inches. That’s a five.”
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
ART: I have to presume that a Richter is literally the end of the world. The Earth shakes itself apart and everyone dies.
JACK: I’m looking at it up now, let’s see.
JANINE: And there’s trees inside.
JACK: So, Richter goes up to—
AUSTIN: It goes up to ten, right?
JACK: —“nine or greater”.
AUSTIN: Oh, okay. I gotcha.
JACK: And you’re pretty much right, Art. He says, “At or near total destruction. Severe damage or collapse to all buildings. Heavy damage or shaking extends to distance locations. Permanent changes in ground topography.”
AUSTIN: The Second Spring.
KEITH: It’s like Hieron shit.
AUSTIN: Yeah, uh-huh. Yeah, exactly.
JANINE: Some of that feels like stuff you can’t measure until afterwards.
JACK: Oh, so this is the—
JANINE: Like, you wouldn’t be able to say that something’s a ten if it’s in progress because, like, there are still buildings up so it must be a nine.
AUSTIN: Well, no, because the Richter is the one that is jus—
JACK: This is the whole thing, right? Is that the big problem with the Ma—Macall—How do you say it, Keith?
KEITH: Mercalli.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JACK: The Mercalli scale, is that it requires subjective experiential—experience of the thing. Which Richter, whose background was in building earthquake-safe buildings, he was like, “Hey, this is fucked up—”
AUSTIN: Mmmm.
JACK: Because if an earthquake strikes old Florence, it’s gonna destroy it completely but if a similar earthquake struck, you know, a modern-built thing, it’d be fine but they’d have the same result on the Mercalli scale. So he—
JANINE: Mm.
AUSTIN: Or they wouldn’t, they would have different results on the Mercalli scale.
JACK: Oh, yes, exactly!
AUSTIN: Right?
JACK: The same earthquake would have different results.
AUSTIN: Right. Yes.
JACK: And so he tried to build a system that was based on, like, seismological—where he’s like, “Does the machine say it’s a 6? Machine says it’s a 6.” [laughs]
AUSTIN: But this leads to the Art problem. Which is, a 6.6 and a 6.8 are wildly different in experience.
JACK: Mm-hm.
AUSTIN: Um. Alright. We’re back.
ART: It was also much further, if that helps.
AUSTIN: Right, yeah.
[musical interlude, 21:35]
JACK: I have never been a person to Google symptoms, but I’ve always been a person to have to resist the temptation to Google symptoms.
DRE: Aw.
JANINE: I—
JACK: For the exact reason that I know that if I do, I will—I’ll just put in my symptoms and then the computer will say, “You’ll—You’ve died.”
[Janine laughs]
JACK: “Bad news, Jack.” [chuckles]
JANINE: It’s what I was gonna say is, I will only ever let myself Google combinations of symptoms, specific combinations of symptoms.
JACK: Like four symptoms minimum.
JANINE: It’s usually like three that are happening concurrently or near concurrently.
JACK: Right. Otherwise you just get death.
JANINE: Yeah.
DRE: Yeah.
JANINE: It’s like, “Okay ,well this thing hurts and also this part hurts, and also I have a headache? What do these three specific things—what is the recipe—what is the disease recipe with these three things [Jack chuckles] that I have in my cupboard right now?”
JACK: Oh, God. Back to Google. God, we’re gonna have to do a quick recap of this map before we start, because I thought I had it all in my head before I sat down. And now, I’m like—
JANINE: We’re in a completely different turn order now, huh?
AUSTIN: It’s up top at least, the original one.
JANINE: Oh, right, that’s true. That’s true. That’s smart.
AUSTIN: So we’re good. We’re good.
JANINE: We’re good then.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Uh-huh. Not intentionally.
JANINE: That was a good—[Jack laughs] yeah.
JACK: We just do it by who has the most to the least contempt.
AUSTIN: [laughs] Uh-huh.
[Dre laughs]
JACK: So: Austin, Janine, Art, and me take our turns simultaneously [Janine laughs]. Keith is gonna be here via text today.
ALI: Oh, that is fine.
JACK: Yeah—
[Jack and Dre laugh]
DRE: Craig will be playing the role of Keith.
AUSTIN: Oh, we should get Craig in here.
JACK: Craig delivers one line amazingly, and it’s now recording. Listen to that.
AUSTIN: Incredible. Incredible.
ART: Nailed it.
JACK: He’s a professional.
AUSTIN: Oh, Ali, I should send you the last Craig, huh?
ALI: Didn’t I get it?
AUSTIN: Did you? Maybe you did. Yes.
DRE: [dramatically] The last Craig.
AUSTIN: The last Craig [dramatic noises].
ALI: Last Friday at 2:51.
AUSTIN: Yeah, it was you. It was you.
ALI: I should make sure I download it.
JACK: Does Craig expire? Is there an expiry date for Craigs?
ALI: Yeah. You have to download it within a week.
JACK: Oh, okay. Otherwise he just goes, “I don’t need this anymore!”
DRE: Oh.
ALI: Yeah, it doesn’t have the—
AUSTIN: Yeah.
ALI: Oh.
AUSTIN: That’s a long time.
JACK: Ohh, I see.
AUSTIN: Yeah, mm-hm.
ART: Alright, that’s enough time for me to tell you guys about the two DJs playing at the Home State Margarita Festival.
AUSTIN: Oh, there’s so much happening here already [Jack chuckles]. And I’m happy about all of it. Home State.
ART: Home State is a, uh—the “Home State” is Texas. Home State is a Los Angeles restaurant making Texas-style, um— mostly like breakfast tacos.
JACK: Okay.
ART: They do good work.
JACK: Mm.
[Dre laughs]
JACK: So we should be going into this with some measure of fondness towards Home state.
ART: Yeah, uh-huh.
JACK: Okay.
ART: And in two weeks, they’re doing a Margarita Festival.
JACK: Hell yeah.
DRE: Yeah.
AUSTIN: That’s— I wish I had the time to get there, honestly.
ART: Uh-huh.
JACK: I wish it was tonight and we were there.
AUSTIN: Yeah, that’d be the best.
ART: Yeah. We’d just bounce from this—
AUSTIN: Mm-hm [Jack chuckles].
ART: —and go get some margaritas and some tacos. I think there’s going to be pizza and barbeque. It’s on point.
AUSTIN: All this sounds great.
ART: Well, there are two DJs who are going to be playing at this. And these are the names that are just on the website. One is Fred Armisen.
ALI: Hmm.
AUSTIN: Okay.
DRE: Alright.
[Jack laughs]
AUSTIN: Like the comedian?
ART: Yeah. Actor, comedian.
AUSTIN: Mm-hm.
ART: Used to married to, um, whatshername.
AUSTIN: Oh, did they get divorced?
ART: I think so, yeah.
AUSTIN: Okay.
ART: And the other one is a DJ, DJ Peanut Butter Wolf.
DRE: Hm.
[Jack sighs]
JANINE: What?
JACK: So a classic combination.
ART: Yeah.
JANINE: Two words or three? Or one?
ART: I think it’s two words.
JANINE: Okay. Peanut Butter Wolf.
AUSTIN: I got a photo here for record. Here it is, this is Peanut Butter Wolf [laughs]
SYLVIA: Peanut Butter Wolf’s actually, like, not bad.
AUSTIN: Are you familiar with Peanut Butter Wolf?
ART: That’s Fred Armisen, isn’t it? That’s not Fred Armisen?
AUSTIN: It’s not.
SYLVIA: He did a song with Charizma that I like.
AUSTIN: Gotcha. That is not Fred Armisen.
JACK: Is it maybe John Oliver?
AUSTIN: It’s not John Oliver.
[Dre laughs]
JANINE: If it was John Oliver, it would be, like, some—it would be more British. It would be more character British.
JACK: He’d be saying, [John Oliver impression] “Right!”
AUSTIN: Uh-huh [laughs], that’s him.
[Janine laughs]
DRE: That’s really good, Jack.
JACK: Thanks, we’re from the same country!
AUSTIN: This is from—ah.
[Janine laughs]
AUSTIN: So wait, Peanut Butter Wolf has been in this game for twenty years?
SYLVIA: Like literally longer than I’ve been alive.
AUSTIN: Longer. 1989. DJ Peanut Butter Wolf has been at it.
ART: And he’s getting second billing to Fred Armisen?
AUSTIN: Fred Armisen the—yeah.
SYLVIA: Yeah, Fred Armisen has been on SNL.
ART: But not as a DJ!
JANINE: Literally one of us knew who Peanut Wolf was. All of us knew who Fred Armisen was.
AUSTIN: [overlapping] We all knew who Fred Armisen was.
JACK: Sadly.
AUSTIN: Don’t look this up, how many albums has Fred Armisen released?
JACK: Seven.
JANINE: Six.
ART: Two.
DRE: I’m gonna—yeah, I’m gonna go nine.
AUSTIN: Eleven.
[Art laughs]
JANINE: Huh.
DRE: Alright.
AUSTIN: Eleven. As a member of the rock band Trenchmouth—I guess I said albums, that includes EPs.
SYLVIA: Of course.
JANINE: I think I know who Trenchmouth is.
AUSTIN: [incredulously] Yeah?
JANINE: I didn’t know he was affiliated.
AUSTIN: He’s the drummer.
JANINE: Okay.
DRE: Tell me of Trenchmouth.
AUSTIN: Ohhh. Interesting.
DRE: Hmm.
ART: You can get on SNL by doing that?
AUSTIN: [reading Wikipedia] “In 1998, he posed as a music journalist for the short film Fred Armisen’s Guide to Music and South by Southwest. It was filmed by then-girlfriend Sally Timms and featured Armisen ‘pranking musicians and industry types’ during the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.” Uh—
DRE: Wholesome.
AUSTIN: Yeah, that’s how he did it. Interesting. He directed some music festivals.
[Jack laughs]
AUSTIN: Did they really have him do Barack Obama for two years?
ART: I believe that’s correct, yes.
AUSTIN: For two years?
ART: They don’t have the—the policy at the time was that Kenan could be the only black person.
AUSTIN: Oh right, of course. As opposed to Meadows, right, so.
JANINE: Ugh.
JACK: Christ. [typing] Fred Armisen...Didn’t he, like—Isn’t he supposed to have made a good Amazon show recently or something? I don’t like Portlandia, and—I’ve never gotten a good vibe from Armisen but everyone says his new N—Amazon show was good.
AUSTIN: Portlandia—
JANINE: I think the ideal way for me to consume Portlandia is: every now and then when I watch enough crafting videos, Youtube will recommend me a clip from Portlandia and I’ll watch it.
[Austin laughs]
JACK: Mmm.
AUSTIN: I feel like Portlandia is exactly the sort of show that would be made by someone who got their start in comedy by pranking musicians at South by.
JACK: This motherfucker was in Red Dead Redemption 2! And Red Dead Redemption! And Grand Theft Auto!
AUSTIN: Who—who? Who was he?
JACK: He’s been Grand Theft Auto IV and V and Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2, so he fucking knows someone at Rockstar—
AUSTIN: Ohh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
JACK: And I bet it’s one of the Houser brothers.
AUSTIN: Almost certainly.
JACK: He played—
JANINE: If you hang out at South by Southwest, that’s gonna happen.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JACK: Oh yeah, no, absolutely. So here are—
AUSTIN: He wasn’t pranking them though.
JACK: No. These are the roles he played in GTA IV: Pervert—
AUSTIN: Great.
JACK: Hotdog Vendor, and Internet Nerd.
DRE: And Pervert Hotdog Vendor.
AUSTIN: Oh, okay.
JACK: And in 2010, two years after that, he played Pharmacist in Red Dead Redemption. Then, in 2013—
JANINE: Hotdog Vendor.
JACK: [laughs] He played Hugh Harrison in Grand Theft Auto V.
AUSTIN: Uh, Hugh Harrison, I just looked up. The—just gonna post this image here. Jack, I have bad—I have a bad feeling about where this bit goes.
JACK: Oh no.
AUSTIN: “Hugh Harrison, British music expert.”
JANINE: Ughh.
ART: Oh nooo. Nice of him to come in and do the face modeling though.
AUSTIN: Yeah, that’s him.
DRE: Uh-huh.
JACK: Yeah. And then in Red Dead Redemption 2, he plays a character called Aldridge T. Abbington, which is a really bad first name, worst name situation.
AUSTIN: Do they think that he’s British?
JACK: British. Does he play a Brit in—? He plays a theater guy in—
AUSTIN: Ohhh. The character—the GTA character is Simon Cowell.
JACK: Oh yeah?
AUSTIN: That’s the bit he’s doing.
ALI: Oh, yeah.
JACK: Ohhhh, sure.
SYLVIA: That’s really funny.
DRE: Uh-huh.
ALI: Look at that shirt and that haircut.
DRE: Oh, actually yeah.
JACK: Oh, that’s so fucking funny.
SYLVIA: That’s really funny.
ALI: Mm-hm.
SYLVIA: Remember when Simon Cowell was in Shrek?
ALI: No, wait—
AUSTIN: In my life?
DRE: Not recently, I gotta say.
AUSTIN: He’s on—I’ve seen him be in viral clips of people doing good things on a stage and he’s like, “Well, I gotta give it to ‘em.
ALI: Yeah. He’s on—
AUSTIN: But he doesn’t say that, he just—he’s there doing that. Giving it to them. You know, it’s like, [approvingly] “Mmm.”
DRE: Mm.
JACK: What’s he on?
AUSTIN: I dunno.
ART: He’s like on America’s Got Talent or something.
ALI: Oh, yeah. Can we rewind to the Shrek thing though?
SYLVIA: Yeah—
JACK: Simon Cowell was in Shrek?
SYLVIA: Oh, did you guys never see that?
ALI: [laughing] No!
JACK: [in the background] I’ve never seen Shrek.
SYLVIA: It was one of the special features on Shrek 2, I think.
AUSTIN: [groaning] Oh.
SYLVIA: Where they did an American Idol parody and Simon Cowell was just one of the judges there.
DRE: Oh! Yeah. So if we just look at the Shrek wiki…
ALI: Oooh.
SYLVIA: No, I’ve seen that skit a bunch of times. I’m a big fan.
JACK: No! No! [Sylvia laughs] I don’t feel good about this.
SYLVIA: It’s really bad.
ALI: Oh wow!
JANINE: Ehhh.
AUSTIN: That’s him raising his eyebrow. Like [Ali shriek-laughs], that’s Simon Cowell from Shrek.
[Art laughs]
SYLVIA: It’s so bad!
JACK: You know one of my favorite things about Simon Cowell? [laughing] Is how he doesn't look like his character model is completely fucked up.
[Jack and Austin sigh]
SYLVIA: He and Joan Rivers are the only real people who have ever appeared in a Shrek movie. Sorry.
JANINE: I watched the—I watched the trailer for that movie that Benedict Cumberbatch is playing Edison in.
JACK: Uh-huh?
AUSTIN: Nnnnnn, I didn’t know about this but I hate it.
JANINE: He’s just doing a very—he’s just doing a whiny American kinda voice.
AUSTIN: Ughhh.
JANINE: And I don’t care for it [laughs].
JACK: Why is Benedict Cumberbatch playing Thomas Edison?!
JANINE: Good question. I don’t—nothing about—I mean, he’s certainly—when I watched it, I kept thinking, like, “Did they cast him because he plays Edison well?” and I couldn’t tell because he’s definitely playing a character, I just [laughs] don’t know what character.
JACK: Mhm. [laughing] If that’s Thomas Edison. God.
JANINE: I don’t know if I’m not familiar enough with Edison or if I—if it’s—I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening. Uhh—
AUSTIN: Is it The Currant War? Sorry, the Current War.
JANINE: Yes, it is the Current War.
AUSTIN: Not the Currant War—
JANINE: No, it’s not a war over small fruit.
AUSTIN: Not the—yeah. Yeah, uh-huh.
JACK: If you told me Benedict Cumberbatch’s parents—Benedict Cumberbatch’s grandparents or something—were the London land-owning family that invented horseradish sauce or something [Austin snorts] and have been in the money for centuries following...I would believe you one hundred percent. Benedict Cumberbatch’s grandad invented mustard in Norwich [Austin laughs] and his family’s been wealthy for decades.
DRE: Fuck that guy.
KEITH: Oh, imagine inventing mustard?
AUSTIN: Do you want me to—do you actually want to know this history?
JACK: Yeah, he’s a fucking posh boy isn’t he?
AUSTIN: So...he was born at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in the White City district of London’s Hammersmith and Fulham borough.
JACK: Okay, lots of people are born there.
AUSTIN: To actors Timothy Carlton, born Timothy Carlton Condon Cumberbatch, and Wanda Ventham. Or Ventom. He grew up in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. He has a half-sister. His grandfather was a submarine officer of both World Wars—
JACK: Mm-hm.
AUSTIN: —and a prominent figure of London high society.
JACK: Mm-hm.
AUSTIN: His great-grandfather, Henry Arnold Cumberbatch, was a diplomat who served as counsel in Turkey and Lebanon. His great-great-grandfather, Robert William Cumberbatch, was also British counsel in Turkey and the Russian Empire. Cumberbatch’s third cousin six times removed of Richard III, whom he portrayed in the Hollow Crown.
JACK: Fuckin’.
KEITH: So he’s got colonialism money.
SYLVIA: Oh yeah, his family’s literally built on slavery.
AUSTIN: Oh yeah.
JANINE: Every member of his family not only could be but has been in episodes of Poirot.
[laughter]
SYLVIA: There was like, I remember, back on Tumblr, there was a big thing when people first found out that his family straight-up owned people. And there was a lot—
AUSTIN: Oh, right, right, right!
SYLVIA: Yeah, no, like if you look up ‘Cumberbatch family slaves’, there’s a ton of articles about it.
AUSTIN: It’s a whole thing, yeah.
SYLVIA: Yeah. And seeing the way people bent over backwards to justify that was pretty interesting.
DRE: Oh sure.
JANINE: Ughh.
AUSTIN: He had some bad quotes around it, right?
SYLVIA: Yeah, I think so?
ART: I said I thought he looked weird on Twitter once and got shit for a whole day.
DRE: Yeah.
SYLVIA: Yeah.
JANINE: I’m surprised it was just a day.
DRE: Yeah.
KEITH: This is the most I’ve heard about Cumberbatch since there were allegations that he maybe was domestically abusing his girlfriend.
AUSTIN: Love to hear it.
SYLVIA: Hm.
JANINE: Ughh.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh. Great.
KEITH: Fuck that guy.
AUSTIN: Ughhh.
KEITH: And fuck Thomas Edison.
JANINE: Spiderman’s also in that movie.
JACK: Wait, the new Spiderman?
KEITH: Spiderman is gonna be in Edison?
AUSTIN: Yeah. This movie’s also old.
DRE: You know how old Tom Holland is?
JANINE: Is it?
AUSTIN: There’s a trailer from two years ago, it just never came out.
JANINE: Oh.
SYLVIA: I think it—yeah, it played at TIFF here a couple years ago. And it’s got very bad reviews, ooh!
AUSTIN: I’m trying to find a real quote here. Because—
JANINE: I’m trying to find a picture of something I mentioned earli—I mentioned this before, Benedict Cumberbatch playing Van Gogh, and I just want to link a picture while it’s relevant to this conversation. [laughing] ‘Cause it’s gross!
DRE: Ugh.
KEITH: I’m, um—my thing is all set, by the way, whenever we’re ready.
AUSTIN: Great. Um, so—
ART: Ha!
AUSTIN: Oh, that’s bad.
DRE: Oh I hate this.
SYLVIA: Oh!
[Mixed noises of shock and dismay]
AUSTIN: That’s not good.
JACK: Wait, wait, wait. Everybody cool it. I’m gonna post a picture of Willem Defoe playing Van Gogh, as a palette cleanser.
[Dre and Janine laugh]
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JACK: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Everybody don’t panic.
[Sylvia laughs]
AUSTIN: I’m panicked. I’m looking—
KEITH: Yeah, Jack, I don’t know what to do.
AUSTIN: That’s better.
DRE: Oh, that’s much better.
AUSTIN: That’s, that’s—that’s better.
JANINE: Yeah.
KEITH: No, see, I feel like he’s trying to kill Spiderman.
AUSTIN: Good!
JACK: That’s a Van Gogh—yeah!
AUSTIN: That’s what Van Gogh did.
DRE: Yeah.
SYLVIA: Yeah?
DRE: How do you think he lost that ear?
JACK: I look at him and I say, “That’s a Van Gogh!” Yeah.
DRE: He lost his ear to Spiderman.
AUSTIN: Benedict Cumberbatch once played William Pitt the younger in a film called Amazing Grace about an abolitionist, William Wilberforce—
JACK: Oh Jeez.
AUSTIN: And once remarked that, because of his family’s dark past, playing this role was, “sort of an apology.”
JACK: Oh no!
[Dre laughs]
AUSTIN: [laughs] Uh-huh.
JACK: I pretended to be a man who did some okay things for slaves [laughs] to get away from the fact that I am related to a man...who didn’t.
AUSTIN: Who did not.
DRE: Who did some not okay stuff.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
SYLVIA: How does he feel about his role in Twelve Years a Slave, then?
AUSTIN: Yeah. Um, I think—
KEITH: Do they cancel each other out? Is he looking, on the hunt for an abolitionist role?
SYLVIA: Yeah.
JANINE: Acting only counts when—it only counts in one direction, not the other direction.
KEITH: Oh, you can only make yourself look better, you can’t make yourself look worse?
JANINE: If you act—if you play a bad character [cat meows in the background], you’re just playing a character and it’s informative, and it’s fine, don’t worry about it.
[Sylvia chuckles]
AUSTIN: Uh-huh. Um, this is—a lot of this came out in 2014 when there was a new—Bill de Blasio, the current mayor of New York City, had appointed a woman named Stacy Cumberbatch to be a commissioner. I don’t know her full title, but it came out that she was related, let’s say, to Benedict Cumberbatch because her family was owned by Benedict Cumberbatch’s family. That is one of those things that came out.
[people suck in a breath]
KEITH: I was gonna say, “what do you mean, ‘related, let’s say’,” and then you said.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
KEITH: And it’s way worse than I ever could have imagined.
AUSTIN: It’s way worse. It’s really bad. So that was around when Twelve Years a Slave was—anyway! Slave trade!
KEITH: I didn’t know any of this! I really didn’t know anything about this guy—
AUSTIN: No, no.
KEITH: —except for, like, a general sense that he sucked.
DRE: Hm.
AUSTIN: You know, don’t judge a book by its cover, but also [laughs]. But also.
JACK: His cover literally has the words “Tory Boy” emblazoned on it.
[Austin and Keith guffaw]
DRE: You should check out this time.is quote today.
AUSTIN: Oh no.
JANINE: For Benedict Cumberbatch?
ART: Oh, if it’s Benedict Cumberbatch, I’m gonna scream.
AUSTIN: It’s not.
KEITH: “Time erases all wounds.”
AUSTIN: No, why—okay.
KEITH: From Benedict Cumberbatch.
AUSTIN: That’s what it s—[breaks into laughter]. Especially yours, other people. “Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness” —Nobokov.
JACK: Thanks, Vlad.
AUSTIN: Nabokov, yeah. We should clap.
DRE: Alright.
JACK: Let’s do it.
AUSTIN: Are we all ready to clap?
DRE: Yeah.
JANINE: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Alright, let’s hit twenty. Let’s do it!
[pause, followed by claps]
AUSTIN: Okay.
[musical interlude, 39:16]
KEITH: I—and my super tower is driving me up the wall. Which, honestly, if I could be—
JANINE: I know! You know, I tried to get a monster tower and they laughed me out of the store, and if you go for a super cube, they’ll arrest you.
KEITH: I honestly do have a super tower.
JANINE: Uh-huh. I have a mid-tower.
KEITH: I got mine for a very specific reason, which is that it wasn’t any cheaper than getting a smaller tower and my computer for years has had a problem with both overheating and—my last tower, my video card literally didn’t fit in it so I had to—I had to disform the metal inside to allow my video card to fit in it properly.
JANINE: Ohh.
KEITH: And it was a full—it’s a full—it was a full—or a mid-size tower. Maybe it was a—yeah, it was a mid-size tower. It was pretty big. And the card was, like, just really big. It was cheaper—it was slightly more powerful and it was cheaper than the other card of the same specs. But it was like, “Warning: this thing is really big, measure it before you buy it.”
JANINE: Yeah.
KEITH: And I measured it and it looked like it was gonna fit, and it was, like, maybe half a centimeter too big, or maybe a third of a centimeter too big. And so I had to, like, use pliers and peel back some metal.
JANINE: They always have those bits of metal anyway though.
KEITH: Yeah. So I was just like, fuck it, I’m just gonna get a giant PC. And if I have problems with overheating, now I have this huge space on the bottom where I can fit like seven fans, if I wanted.
JANINE: Mhm.
KEITH: But it seems totally fine, for now. So. But maybe I’ll [laughing] look into this “Infinitum Altar”.
JANINE: “Infinate Altar”. This guy—
KEITH: Infinate Altar. Not “infinite”, “infinate”?
JANINE: No, this guy—I—here’s a question. Um, okay, so here’s a quote from Bentley. Bentley says, “If you want a different spec, or even just a different color scheme, we can do it”.
KEITH: Nice.
JANINE: “Laser-etched logo? No problem. Spray-painted chassis, wooden panels, totally custom case? Sure, why not!” What’s the difference between a chassis and a case in this situation?
KEITH: [exhales] Is the chassis the metal inside that allows for certain hookups?
JANINE: That it’s like mounted on?
KEITH: Yeah, the chassis I believe is—or the case is put around the chassis.
JANINE: Why would you spray-paint that, though?
[pause]
KEITH: Gamers are bad [Janine chuckles]. Gamers want bad things.
JANINE: Wow, they decided to craft not just one but three separate custom acrylic pass-through plates to mediate the flow of the liquid across the system.
KEITH: So a chassis is a base frame.
JANINE: Oh, okay. My computer doesn’t have a base frame, I don’t think.
KEITH: This is—I mean, that’s just the definition of a chassis, so I’m...what is a PC [typing]—
JANINE: It has, like, slots...I think.
KEITH: It must be offering to, like, change the amount of slots inside. Like, how many—
JANINE: No, they say specifically spray-painting it. So whatever it is, it’s something you can color and then it matters.
KEITH: Well, I can see computer chassis. Let’s see...yeah the—everybody’s just saying it’s just the tower.
JANINE: I’m sure it’s like a thing you mount—I mean, I guess I have slots that I put the hard drive in but they’re built in...Maybe this is the problem that you have when you have an inferior super cube or monster tower case.
KEITH: Yeah, yeah. If our super cubes were better, more advanced, we’d know exactly the difference between a chassis and a case.
JANINE: Yeah. This is really on us.
KEITH: This computer case, “also known as a computer chassis, tower, system unit, or cabinet—”
JANINE: Damn.
KEITH: “Is the enclosure that contains most of the—” Yeah, so, Wikipedia says they’re the same. This Bennet guy I think is—
JANINE: Bentley.
KEITH: ...Bentley guy is I think padding his resume.
JANINE: [chuckles] Or his menu, technically.
KEITH: Sure, his menu.
JANINE: That was fun. I was gonna hop on in here and talk about this revelation I just had about how Animaniacs was amazing.
KEITH: Animaniacs was amazing!
JANINE: Not really a revelation but like a new appreciation of, like—imagine—[pause] I—it’s one of those things that’s so hard to imagine now in the very reboot/refresh-centric media ecosystem we live in, the idea that Warner Brothers would be like, “We want to make new kids’ cartoons.”
KEITH: Mm-hm.
JANINE: “That are very Warner Brothers-centric, very Warner Brothers-focused, but we’re not going to use any of our existing characters. We’re not going to lean on them at all.”
KEITH: Right.
JANINE: “We will maybe vaguely allude to them sometimes but for the most part we want an entirely new cast, and also we’re gonna be meta as hell. Like it’s just going to take place in this production lot.”
KEITH: Oh yeah, they like terrorized the Warner Brothers studios.
JANINE: Yes! And, like, I was also thinking—this specifically came about because while I was laying in bed feeling awful, I started thinking about Good Idea, Bad Idea. Those cartons with the little skeleton guy, who’d be like—and there’d be an announcer like, “Good idea: making a cake for your mom. Bad idea: making your mom into a cake.”
KEITH: Is this [laughs]—Was this part of Animaniacs?
JANINE: Yeah.
KEITH: I don’t—
JANINE: It was one of their mini interstitial things that they’d put between like Chicken Boo or whatever.
KEITH: I sounds like—I think Pinky and the Brain was one of those too, right?
JANINE: Yeah, that’s how Pinky and the Brain started.
KEITH: Yeah.
JANINE: But Good Idea, Bad Idea...I realized that is maybe why I have an appreciation for—
KEITH: For not making people into cakes?
JANINE: That too. But for, like, silent-movie-era slapstick. Like Buster Keaton stuff.
KEITH: Mm-hm.
JANINE: Charlie Chaplain...Like, I don’t know that I would have found that stuff funny if in childhood I wasn’t primed for it by that show. Which is, like, super slapstick but especially stuff like Good Idea, Bad Idea. Which was also always black and white, I think, unless I’m misremembering? And just—I don’t know, it’s just smart.
KEITH: Good Idea, Bad Idea sounds vaguely familiar, but it—
JANINE: It was just very clever for a kids’ show, at the time.
KEITH: Yeah. And I [chuckles] learned about They Might Be Giants from them.
JANINE: [laughs] I learned about They Might Be Giants from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
KEITH: They had—what was another thing? Kablam had another band that I was introduced to because of Kablam. I don’t remember what band it was, though. It could have also been They Might Be Giants.
JANINE: I’ve never heard of Kablam before.
KEITH: Kablam is a—
ALI: Isn’t that like a cleaner?
KEITH: What’s that?
ALI: Isn’t that a cleaner? [laughs]
KEITH: No [laughs]. Hi, Ali.
ALI: [laughing] Hi.
KEITH: Kablam is a cartoon that—it was a Nickelodeon cartoon, I think—that was sort of—
JANINE: Nickelodeon stuff took a while to get up here sometimes.
KEITH: It was like a sketch show but the different sketches were different—they all had different art styles and different characters. And they would recycle the same sets of sketches. But it was really like five short shows crammed into an episode.
JANINE: Hmm.
KEITH: No one else knows Kablam?
JANINE: No.
KEITH: Okay. Yeah, yeah. We were talking about Animaniacs being a very bizarre, semi-reboot.
JANINE: It’s—I mean, it wasn’t even a semi-reboot, it was like—Whereas if Warner Brothers now or if—I’m not gonna say that Warner Brothers were good people. Uh [laughs, clears throat]. Most companies now, if they’re gonna make a new cartoon series and they had all this, like, existing stable of existing shit in their back catalogue, they would just do that. Like, they would just do Tiny Toons again. I guess that was why they couldn’t—I guess that’s why Animaniacs couldn’t be that, because they’d already done Tiny Toons.
ART: Janine, are you working for Warner Brothers right now?
[Janine laughs]
ART: Wow.
JANINE: Indirectly, no comment. Sorry.
KEITH: Yeah, Janine is directing the grimdark Animaniacs movie, where—
JANINE: It’s all Good Idea, Bad Idea, but it’s all bad idea.
KEITH: [laughs] Yeah, well, the three ants are just played by regular humans, they are children, and they’re going on crime sprees. They’re—
ART: Did you say are or aren’t children? It’s a—
KEITH: They are children.
ART: Okay.
KEITH: But it’s human children, but they’re—
ART: Each played by Joaquin Phoenix [laughs].
[Janine laughs]
KEITH: [laughs] Each played by Joaquin Phoenix. CG—
ART: They’ve been working on this for so long.
KEITH: And they’ve got to steal all the money from the Warner Brothers vault. It’s a heist film, really gory.
JANINE: That’s the other thing! I didn’t—I don’t know why I never—[Keith laughs]. I don’t know why I never put together that Yakko, Wakko, and Dot were basically silent characters. Like, they were black and white characters, they were—their names are extremely 1930s, like 1930s slapstick comedy.
KEITH: Mm-hm.
JANINE: So of course, one: the show riffs on that all the time, but two: like, it—that’s just fun. I dunno, that’s a fun concept. Neat.
ART: It was Spielberg though, right? Spielberg had a credit on all of that? Maybe it was like—[Janine makes “I don’t know” noise] Maybe that explains some of it.
JANINE: Did he just have a credit on all of it because of the, um—no, I got nothing. I was [laughing] confusing him with someone else.
KEITH: I mean, when you’re Spielberg, you’ve got a whole team that just gets you credit on things, right?
ART: But this team might have had something to do with this, and that might be responsible for why it’s good. He doesn’t have a credit on anything now, and it’s generally bad.
JANINE: Mhm.
ART: I mean, I guess Warner Animation is not in the business of making half-hours of cartoons anymore, but like—
KEITH: They on the CW? People love the CW right now.
ART: I don’t think Warner Animation is doing anything on the CW.
JANINE: Know what wasn’t a good show? Freakazoid was bad.
KEITH: No, but I just mean Warner Brothers in general. What’s that, Janine?
JANINE: Freakazoid was bad.
KEITH: I liked Freakazoid, but also I was like six, so.
JANINE: Yeah.
KEITH: I don’t really remember it apart from—was that Jason Lee?
ART: No way.
KEITH: I’m thinking of that guy’s voice and he sounds like Jason Lee. Right?
ART: There’s no way.
KEITH: Couldn’t it have been, though? I mean, you’ve got a skateboarder who was in Mallrats and was in My Name Is Earl. Like, couldn’t he have been in a weird superhero cartoon?
ART: My Name Is Earl was so much later though. You’re talking like he did Mallrats and then a children’s cartoon.
KEITH: No, but I’m talking about across his career. Well, he was in—
JANINE: Freakazoid was also Steven Spielberg.
KEITH: He was in the Incredibles. He was the bad guy, right? He was the—
ART: That’s also way after—you don’t—you are not—your timeline is off.
KEITH: No, but I’m not—I’m just talking about, this is a guy that will do skateboarding and live-acting, and also cartoons.
ART: Yes.
JANINE: Also, I have bad news. Freakazoid is voiced by Paul Rugg. Two Gs.
ALI: Rugg?
KEITH: Paul Rugg?
ART: Two Gs, yeah.
JANINE: Paul Rugg.
KEITH: Is that like the Mr. PiBB of Paul Rudd?
[Jack and others laugh]
ART: He’s been in basically every cartoon in that period, though.
JANINE: Okay. That’s before my time.
ART: What are these contracts like that you’re signing, that you just have blanket non-disparagement of voice actors?
JANINE: None, it’s just called...feeling a sense of deep responsibility to a team of very nice people [laughs].
ART: Yeah. And I think we can all agree that Ant #5 in the Ant Bully was the transcendent performance in that movie.
JACK: Also Paul Rugg is just a very funny name.
JANINE: It is.
ART: He also has writing credits on a lot of this shit.
KEITH: I like Diet Rugg.
ART: Paul Rugg might be one of the most influential people in animation history.
JACK: Wow.
JANINE: Yeah, he was in Puppet Up! Uncensored.
JACK: He was in what?
JANINE: [laughs] Puppet Up, exclamation, Uncensored.
JACK: Oh, like puppet? As in, like a—you know, like a puppet? But—
JANINE: Oh my God, it is. It says “Henson Alternatives”, which is [laughs]—
JACK: Oh that’s—
AUSTIN: Ooh.
JANINE: That sounds like a vitamin brand for puppets.
ART: This is a live show. So this is a—
JANINE: Nmm.
ART: This is like puppet—sexy puppet improv, or…?
[Ali laughs]
JACK: Terrible.
JANINE: Uhh [laughs].
ALI: That’s a thing that happens, though. That’s like a genre.
ART: Or maybe just really profane? I don’t want to pigeonhole this.
[Dre sighs]
ALI: Yeah, I mean, after Avenue Q, people were—
JACK: Avenue Q, yeah.
JANINE: Oh, right.
ALI: They were trying to get on that.
KEITH: What the hell is Avenue Q?
JANINE: Also, Crank Yankers? That was puppets.
KEITH: Oh [laughs].
JACK: People realized puppets fucked.
ALI: Hmm.
JACK: That there was a time when people were like, “Oh, puppets fuck!” and then they just made, like—
JANINE: Realized?
JACK: They commercially realized.
JANINE: [laughs] Okay.
KEITH: Yeah, they walked in on some puppets fucking and were like, “I didn’t realize they did this! This opens up so many business doors.”
ART: Hold on, I’d like to read a sentence from the Puppet Up! Wikipedia page.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh?
ART: [reading] “On July 21, 2016, Puppet Up! Uncensored began performing monthly shows at the Venetian Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. It closed on September 17, 2016.” So they did, like, three shows and the Venetian were like, “Sorry, it’s not working out. Get the fuck out.”
JACK: Maybe it was so profane.
ART: I guess it must be four, the last show must be the September one. So July, August—no, September—three shows.
AUSTIN: Three shows. I just, really quick for the Clapcast ‘cause I was not recording before, want to just restate, for the record, that Puppet Up! Uncensored came to New York under the title Stuffed and Unstrung. Still funny.
ART: With all new technical effects!
JACK: Oh—
AUSTIN: I don’t know about—
JANINE: These kinds of puppets are also never strung.
JACK: No, they’re, they’re hands, right?
JANINE: Use a hand and then you have pulls for—to operate the arms.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
KEITH: Well, they could be marionettes.
JANINE: No, they don’t use—
JACK: But these guys are not.
JANINE: Jim Henson—I don’t think Jim Henson people have ever used a marionette, or if they have it’s been a gimmick.
AUSTIN: “Ever” is such a—
ART: Well, if you’re really gonna fuck a puppet, you would—
JANINE: Name one Jim Henson marionette.
KEITH: How ‘bout those birds from—the singing birds from the one with the castle with David Bowie.
JACK: Oh, oh, oh, oh. Labyrinth!
KEITH: Labyrinth, right.
JANINE: I don’t think those count. Those are effects puppets, those aren’t mainline, like, character puppets.
ART: Well, technical effects.
JACK: You’ve got your Miss Piggy—
KEITH: Well, you said “ever”.
JANINE: Ehhh.
AUSTIN: You did say “ever.” You did say “ever.”
JANINE: Ehhhhhhh.
AUSTIN: There’s a Jim Henson exhibit. I can see it from here. So...we should just go.
JANINE: Well, tell us: are there any marionettes there?
AUSTIN: I’ll go, I’ll check! This is what I’m saying.
JANINE: You said you can see from where you are now, just tell us now.
[Keith laughs]
AUSTIN: Well, I can’t see through the door—the wall—but it’s there.
KEITH: Don’t you have a drone? It’s 2019, just drone your way over there!
JACK: While you’re there, fucking steal Kermit.
KEITH: Oh yeah, steal Kermit.
AUSTIN: [shocked] No! That’s kidnapping!
JACK: Yeah, that is kidnapping. Don’t steal Kermit.
ART: I have bad news for you guys about Kermit.
JACK: Yeah?
AUSTIN: Is he alright? Is it—wait, don’t—okay. I’ve had a long day, can—just—
JACK: Break it to us gently.
ART: Okay.
AUSTIN: Please.
ART: Um. Okay, you know how sometimes, Kermit will make an expression and you’re like, “That kind of looks like my hand bunched up.”
[Janine and Jack laugh]
ART: Like, his dismayed expression.
KEITH: Yes! I know exactly the expression, when he’s dismayed.
AUSTIN: [overlapping] Yeah, when he’s dismayed. Uh-huh.
JACK: [overlapping] When someone is feeling sad.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
ART: Yeah, sad Kermit—
KEITH: And he scrunches his face up.
ART: —you can make that with your hand right now.
JACK: Yeah, I’m doing it, yeah.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
KEITH: It’s actually really impressive how he’s able to have that sort of facial control.
JANINE: Wait—
AUSTIN: He’s like Keith with voices but with his face. He can make any shape with his face.
JANINE: If we’re all making this hand shape, how is Kermit in all these places at once?
DRE: Oh, shit.
AUSTIN: That’s not Kermit [Keith and Jack laugh], this is my hand.
JANINE: Kermit’s helper. It’s Kermit’s helper.
JACK: No, this is just my hand. It’s clearly not a frog.
AUSTIN: Yours is—
KEITH: Mine is a Hamburger Helper.
AUSTIN: [laughing] You have an oven mitt on right now?
[Jack chuckles]
KEITH: Yeah, why not? It’s not an oven mitt as much as a weird glove.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
JACK: It’s in case Keith’s hands get really warm while [laughs] recording Friends at the Table.
KEITH: Yeah, it’s so if I touch something—just in case it’s hot.
AUSTIN: Yeah, too hot.
ART: So the reason—
AUSTIN: Wait, was there more to the bad news?
ART: —that Kermit’s face can look so much like your hand—
JACK: Uh-huh?
AUSTIN: Is it like a disease? Is he okay?
ART: I mean, he’s as good as he’s ever been.
DRE: Wait wait wait. Wait.
JANINE: I don’t know that that’s true.
DRE: Are you about to tell me to put my hand up to my face because if my hand is the size of my face I have cancer?
AUSTIN: Wow.
ART: No.
AUSTIN: That’s probably not true.
ART: Um.
DRE: Oh, did you—you didn’t do that joke as a kid?
AUSTIN: No.
DRE: No, it’s—
JANINE: It’s not a good joke [laughs]. I do remember it.
DRE: No, you do it and then when they put their hand up to their face, you push their hand so they’re smacking themselves in the face.
JACK: Kids fucking suck.
DRE: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Kids suck.
KEITH: Yeah, I totally remember this one. I definitely had that done.
AUSTIN: But Kermit does not have cancer?
DRE: No.
ART: Kermit does not have cancer.
AUSTIN: [relieved] Okay.
KEITH: Why not?
ART: He is a person’s hand in a puppet.
JACK: No, Art.
DRE: You’re not?
ART: No, I’m not.
DRE: Oh.
ART: I’m a person.
DRE: I gotta go.
KEITH: Aren’t we all just hands controlling our own body puppets?
DRE: Damn.
AUSTIN: Damn.
DRE: I didn’t realize you were also playing Shadowbringers, Keith.
[Austin and Janine laugh]
KEITH: I am not, is that a—[laughs]
JANINE: Spoilers!
KEITH: I don't get it but it seems funny.
AUSTIN: It’s funny, it’s—I don’t care, Shadowbringers: great name for a thing with puppets—with puppeted people in it. That’s the new Jim Henson property, Shadowbringers.
KEITH: [amused] Puppeted people in it.
JACK: Uncensored.
AUSTIN: Uncensored. Alright. We should time.is.
DRE: Ah.
JACK: Let’s do it.
SYLVIA: Uh, Craig?
JANINE: Should we get—yeah.
JACK: Oh, Craig.
AUSTIN: We should get Craig in here.
DRE: Oh boy.
JANINE: The real puppet.
DRE: It’s a real pungent one huh?
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JACK: I, uh, have been missing ginger ale, which we don’t—thanks Craig—which we don’t really have in the UK, and the only substitute that I could find was a single can of tonic water.
AUSTIN: That’s not the same.
JANINE: Nmmm.
KEITH: That’s not the same.
SYLVIA: That’s not even close.
ART: What is it that you’re substituting?
KEITH: Tonic water.
AUSTIN: For ginger ale.
ART: Oh no.
JACK: Here’s the thing. I’m not saying it’s a good substitute, I’m just saying that I have become so used to drinking soda while recording Friends at the Table and now I don’t have any—
AUSTIN: Right.
JACK: All I can have is a can of tonic water.
JANINE: You’re just craving something fizzy and medicinal?
KEITH: Is there something called ginger beer?
JACK: That’s exactly what it is, Janine. What’s that, Keith?
KEITH: Isn’t it ginger beer in the UK? That’s a thing.
ALI: I was gonna ask that, yeah.
JACK: We have ginger beer, yeah, but I don’t have any of that in my house.
KEITH: Oh, okay.
DRE: It’s different.
JACK: And I feel the taste of ginger beer and ginger ale is so different as to be the difference between tonic water and ginger ale.
KEITH: No way.
JANINE: No, I completely agree.
KEITH: At least those two things have ginger in them still.
DRE: Yeah.
JACK: I think ginger ale only tangentially has ginger in it.
DRE: Yeah, hundred percent.
KEITH: I think you could probably make ginger ale from some ginger beer, right? You could probably throw some—
JACK: [horrified] No!
AUSTIN: You cut it, you step on it.
JANINE: Ehhhh.
DRE: This sounds awful.
AUSTIN: It does.
ART: I’m surprised you can’t get Canada Dry there, because of the Commonwealth.
JACK: I think you can from just, like, sp—from like—
AUSTIN: Right.
JACK: I don’t think Canada Dry has anything do to with—does Canada Dry come from Canada?
DRE: Hold on.
JACK: Why is it—
AUSTIN: Jack.
JACK: Mm-hm.
AUSTIN: Does it not?
JANINE: I mean—
ART: Shouldn’t it?
JANINE: Look, Margaritaville-brand margarita mix or whatever the hell [Jack chuckles] comes from Canada, so anything’s possible [Austin chuckles].
KEITH: Yeah, unless you special order it, the only soda you can get in the UK is Fentimans and they actually make you drink it. They make you drink Fentimans.
JACK: Yeah, they make you drink fuckin’ dandelion and burdock shit.
[Keith and Austin laugh]
KEITH: I actually really like that one.
JACK: Fuck off.
KEITH: I’ve had—I do like it. It tastes like a root, it does taste like gr—the ground.
JACK: Yes, it absolutely does taste like I went out into the yard with a small trowel.
KEITH: Yeah, it totally does. But that’s fun here. We don’t get that stuff.
AUSTIN: There was a court case...according to researchers, the drink did not have enough ginger for it to have health benefits and for the company to claim that it’s, “made from real ginger.”
JACK: Oh.
AUSTIN: [reading] Instead of defending their ginger content by going to court—I guess there was not a court case—they decided to settle by no longer making this claim [chuckles]. Dr. Pepper offered—decided to offer payment to those who purchased Canada Dry for personal use in 2013 [Jack chuckles]; after the settlement with the U.S. government, a class action lawsuit has also been requested in Canada. As of January 2019, Canada Dry still advertizes their drinks as “made with real ginger” in Canada.
JACK: God, that’s wonderful that they were just like, “Yeah, you’ve got us.” [Keith and Janine laugh] “Yeah...no ginger…”
KEITH: I mean, you can fuckin’ tell that it doesn’t have ginger in it when you taste it.
AUSTIN: Yeah, ginger’s different. By a lot.
JACK: It does not taste—what does it taste like?
KEITH: It tastes like ginger beer. Ginger beer’s what ginger tastes like.
AUSTIN: No, Jack is saying ginger ale.
JACK: [overlapping] No, I mean—no, no, what does ginger ale taste like? How would you describe that taste.
KEITH: Oh. It tastes—
AUSTIN: Good.
JACK: Good.
JANINE: Spice-water.
KEITH: Yeah. Um. Tan. Bubble.
AUSTIN: So, I just—Real quick, a year and a half ago at Vice offices, in the kitchens—there were kitchens on every floor—there was just a treasure trove of snacks and drinks.
JACK: Mm-hm.
AUSTIN: Uh, what do you—what’s a snack you might want?
KEITH: Um, kettle-popped sour-cream-and-onion chips.
ALI: Wow.
AUSTIN: Kettle-popped—kettle-popped popcorn and kettle-popped—and kettle-baked chips available.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: No sour-cream-and-onion, unfortunately.
DRE: Aww.
AUSTIN: But available. What’s a soda you might want?
DRE: Uhhh.
JANINE: Faygo.
AUSTIN: Okay, not F—okay, one: no, you don’t [Janine laughs]. Don’t lie to the people.
[Jack laughs]
DRE: Uhh, hm. I’m trying to think—what’s the weirdest—
AUSTIN: But a spread.
DRE: Oh hey, okay. Let me ask you this.
AUSTIN: Okay.
DRE: There’s a regional delicacy down here in Kentucky called “Diet Mountain Dew.”
AUSTIN: No. But we did have Mountain Dew briefly.
DRE: Okay.
AUSTIN: We didn’t always have Mountain Dew, but there was—we did for a summer.
JANINE: RC Cola.
ART: I’m calling Mountain Dew Briefly as a character name for the show.
KEITH: Fruta Grape.
AUSTIN: We had colas, we had clear drinks—we had, you know, the Sprites, we had cherry soda—
JACK: Mr. Rugg.
KEITH: God, this is such a long brag about snacks.
AUSTIN: —Mr. Rugg, we had—Wait, no! No, Wait. Our snack situation was great.
DRE: Mr. Pibb.
AUSTIN: We didn’t have Mr. Pibb, we did have Dr. Pepper.
DRE: Okay.
AUSTIN: And we in fact had—we briefly had the cherry Dr. Pepper, which was also good.
DRE: Ooh.
ALI: Mm.
AUSTIN: We had peanuts, we had cashews, we had M&Ms—
KEITH: Peanut brittle.
AUSTIN: We didn’t have peanut brittle; we did have peanut M&Ms and peanut butter M&Ms, which was honestly—
DRE: Did you have pistachios?
KEITH: The best.
AUSTIN: We did not have pistachios, but I did break my tooth on a pistachio once in that office.
DRE: Ooh.
KEITH: You know what you gotta get? You gotta get a bowl of peanut M&M—peanut butter.
AUSTIN: Yep, yep.
KEITH: A bowl of peanut butter M&Ms and a bowl of pretzel M&Ms, and those together—
DRE: Ohh.
AUSTIN: That sounds good. The salt and the sweet.
KEITH: Those are really—Yeah.
AUSTIN: So, over the course of the last year and a half they’ve slowly been, like, biting away at what is available. Mozza—you know, string cheese, still available. Yogurt, still available. Pretzels, still available. I’m not complaining—
KEITH: Rods or twists?
AUSTIN: Twists. Twists. Little twists, not rods. At this point, they’ve eliminated all sodas from every floor...except for ginger ale. And so there are huge soda-only refrigerators filled with ginger ale. Like, twelve rows of it!
KEITH: So they’ve eliminated the other sodas, but they haven’t eliminated the quantity of sodas that they’re buying?
AUSTIN: Right! That’s correct!
[Ali snickers]
KEITH: That’s bizarre.
AUSTIN: I don’t understand! They also got rid of the good M&Ms.
DRE: Somebody—
KEITH: They got rid of the good M&Ms but now there’s, like, three times as much string cheese?
JANINE: Do you know, what I bet what it is with the soda? [clears throat] Sorry, um. I bet the ginger ale gets drunk slower—
AUSTIN: Oh, definitely!
JANINE: So they get to look like they’re buying the same amount of soda—
AUSTIN: Yes!
JANINE: —but it gets consumed slower, so they’re not actually buying the same amount of soda.
AUSTIN: But here’s the thing, I like ginger ale!
KEITH: Yeah.
[Janine laughs]
AUSTIN: But! But! But! I don’t want it all the time! I like it a lot!
KEITH: Mm-hm.
AUSTIN: I like it more than most people! It was—If you gave me the option, I was gonna default to default to ginger ale. I used to drink a ginger ale maybe once a day, once every other day, I was there. Now it’s all they offer, I don’t even want it. I don’t even get to have it!
KEITH: Yeah.
DRE: Here’s the important question: around Christmas are they going to switch it to cranberry ginger ale?
AUSTIN: Probably not. You know what? Probably not.
DRE: That sucks. That sucks.
AUSTIN: Also! Just give us seltzer! Just give us some other options! Just mix it up!
KEITH: Can I give a quick suggestion? I have—here’s the thing with the cranberry ginger ale. You gotta add your own cranberry.
AUSTIN: Where do you get it?
KEITH: You gotta do it yourself. You gotta—I mean cranberry juice.
DRE: You gotta DIY.
AUSTIN: Oh, I thought you meant, like, get yourself some cranberries.
KEITH: No, no. Well, I mean—
DRE: Go down to the bog.
KEITH: My family was always mixing cranberry juice and ginger ale before they had it as a premade thing.
AUSTIN: Mmm. They took it from you.
KEITH: And the premade one is just substantially worse. It’s just not nearly as good.
DRE: Sure.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Mm-hm.
KEITH: Soda tip.
DRE: It doesn’t change the excitement I feel when it’s like a week before Thanksgiving and I walk into Kroger and I’m like, “Oh fuck, that red ginger ale!”
KEITH: And it’s—They’ve got the cranberry ginger ale, right.
JANINE: I think you can get that around—year-round here.
KEITH: Yeah, here too.
JANINE: There’s always—there’s a lot of flavored ginger ale-ing around here.
DRE: [sighs] Man.
AUSTIN: Different world, man.
DRE: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Up there.
JANINE: They do a green tea one, that’s not good, it’s not good.
AUSTIN: Mmm. We should clap.
KEITH: Yeah. that sounds bad.
JANINE: Yeah.
DRE: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Matcha ginger ale.
KEITH: [laughs] Gross! Oh my God.
DRE: Should we clap and just pull up the Wikipedia random article thing, or is that—?
AUSTIN: Yeah, we just did one, that’s just a bonus. This is a Pusher update, actually. Uh, forty seconds?
SYLVIA: Sure.
[pause, followed by claps]
[laughter from the table]
DRE: Oh man.
KEITH: Oh my God.
AUSTIN: Oh boy.
ART: That last one!
DRE: That was me, but I clapped on forty for me. What the fuck happened?
AUSTIN: Refresh that page.
DRE: Yeah.
AUSTIN: We gotta do another one.
DRE: I just did and it jumped ahead in time four seconds, so.
AUSTIN: [laughs] Okay. Let’s do five after, does that work for people?
DRE: Yeah.
JACK: Mm-hm.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Oh, there’s all this time now.
[pause, followed by claps]
AUSTIN: Okay.
DRE: Much better.
KEITH: That was great.
AUSTIN: I’ll let you say it.
KEITH: Just good job everyone.
[Austin chuckles]
ART: No better clap could possibly be had.
AUSTIN: No.
DRE: Good hustle.
ART: I will never be owned.
[Austin and Keith laugh]
[musical interlude, 1:05:41]
AUSTIN: Um.
ART: Oh, I think we’re celebrating end of Hieron by having my mic stand break.
[Janine makes sad noise]
AUSTIN: I missed half of that, because of whatever you said about your mic was happening while you said it.
ART: Uh, the stand is breaking so it’s hard to keep it up to my face.
AUSTIN: Oh no!
ART: Well this is a problem.
AUSTIN: That’s a real problem.
ART: It’s not meant for this
AUSTIN: Wow, the timing.
ART: I can, like, hold it but—but it sucks. This sucks [laughs].
AUSTIN: Mhm.
KEITH: Can you prop it up on something? Can you get, like, a stack of books?
ART: The books aren’t in this room.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
ART: I’ll figure it out, it’ll be fine.
JANINE: You have no books in your room? What about an iPad box or something? Those are sturdy.
ART: Hold on. [off mic] Hello paper towel roll.
AUSTIN: Should I be waiting? Are you, are you—?
ART: I mean, I don’t have anything to say.
AUSTIN: Okay.
[Keith guffaws]
AUSTIN: Fair.
[musical interlude, 1:06:29]
JACK: Could we take five minutes just to run to the bathroom or something?
AUSTIN: Absolutely!
JACK: Okay. I’ll be right back.
ART: Check, check. This sounds okay, you can hear me?
ALI: Mm-hm.
AUSTIN: Yeah!
ART: Alright, it’s a little weird but this is fine for this.
ALI: Yo, it’s hot out.
AUSTIN: It’s way too hot out. I’m not feeling it right now TBH.
ALI: [softly] I hate it.
KEITH: I got this little, um—Janine called it something. Janine called it a swamp—
JANINE: Swamp-cooler.
KEITH: Swamp-cooler. It’s a little—
AUSTIN: That’s like a Hi-C, right?
KEITH: [laughs] No, that’s Ecto Cooler.
AUSTIN: Oh, my bad.
KEITH: Oh no, they also have a cooler too.
[Ali giggles]
KEITH: No, it’s a little fan that got a base of water underneath and it shoots water vapor at you.
AUSTIN: Oh yeah! Yeah.
KEITH: And I’m very lucky, I tested it out earlier...I have it next to my desk and it does not pick up on the mic at all.
AUSTIN: Hell yeah.
KEITH: And it’s very, very nice.
AUSTIN: [sighs] That sounds good.
KEITH: It was like twenty bucks!
AUSTIN: Nice.
KEITH: Yeah. And it glows, the bottom glows. You can get a red or blue, maybe like a seafoam.
ALI: I have to figure out a thing to put in my house to catch flies in.
AUSTIN: Oh boy.
JANINE: What size of fly?
ALI: Just like a house fly. Half the size of a penny, I guess, I don’t know [laughs].
AUSTIN: You could hang those things, but those things are so gross.
ALI: Yeah, I’m seeing some Youtube suggestions of like a bottle you put stuff in and then they go into the bottle.
AUSTIN: Mhm, yeah.
JANINE: I think that’s usually for smaller flies though. I don’t know that I’ve seen that for house flies. Like, for—like a fruit fly trap. Flute fry, fruit fry—fff. Fruit fly traps—
AUSTIN: [amused] Uh-huh?
JANINE: —are super easy and ridiculously effective. But I don’t—I mean, I guess you just have to put different stuff in them, probably.
ALI: These look like sizeable flies to me. So I think maybe it’s just that—
KEITH: You guys want to hear a curse that was cast on me? This is related.
SYLVIA: Absolutely.
KEITH: I—three apartments in a row of mine, the week that I was moving out all of a sudden had enormous fly infestations. House flies.
JANINE: Ew.
KEITH: Three places in a row.
AUSTIN: Gross. Buddy.
KEITH: The last week nothing changed, except all of a sudden: house flies everywhere.
SYLVIA: Yeah, that does sound like some sort of divine plague.
KEITH: Yeah, it really does, yeah.
SYLVIA: Yeah.
KEITH: So the third time wasn’t as bad, there was a few dozen, but the first two times there was, like, a couple hundred flies in my house.
DRE: What the fuck?
JANINE: Ugh.
KEITH: So my advice is: pesticides.
[coughing in background]
ALI: This is horrid.
KEITH: They really—you know, you spray some Raid or whatever, and they’re just dead.
JANINE: We had an ant issue.
ALI: Ew.
JANINE: And I—it was, it was really stupid. It was an ant issues because a few years ago, I saw, like, two ants, and I was like, “Oh, I should put ant traps all over this house.”
KEITH: Maternal or paternal?
[Austin groans]
JANINE: Both. And, ant traps have an expiry date. And apparently the thing that happens after that expiry date is the poison part stops but the delicious sweetness continues.
AUSTIN: [horrified] Nooo! Nooo! Nooo! You fed them!
KEITH: Oh no!
JANINE: So we had this ant problem and I followed the ants, and it was just like there hundreds of ants in these traps specifically having a fucking party.
AUSTIN: Oh my Goddddd.
JANINE: And I was like, “No, this can’t be happening,” so I picked one up and it smelled like—there was immediately this waft of, like, sweet, kinda peanut-buttery, and I was like “Aw, fuck. Okay.”
AUSTIN: Christ.
JANINE: So we had to get rid of the traps and stuff. And a really nice thing—a really fun thing if you’re dealing with ground insects—this does not work with flying insects. If you’re dealing with ground insects though, diatomaceous earth is amazing. The non-food grade stuff is very dangerous, especially if you have pets, and you should not use it. But food-grade diatomaceous earth, you just spray it under stuff with a, like, little spray puffer thing, or along the corners, or, um, I sort of dust our front step with it, ‘cause that’s where they mostly come in. And then it just stops. There’s no more ants.
KEITH: I almost bought this stuff, ‘cause my cats have fleas right now.
ALI: Eee.
KEITH: And I ended up not buying it, ‘cause I started to get things pretty much under control, but yeah, it’s like ground up fossilized algae, right? It’s like something—
JANINE: Yeah. Yeah. The reason the non-food grade stuff is dangerous is because it’s so sharp that if it gets into you it can damage you ‘cause it’s like, microscopically sharp.
ALI: Oh my God.
JANINE: The Food-grade is not as sharp but it still—it has a desiccating property, so it sucks the liquid out of bugs, basically, is my understanding.
ALI: Eww.
KEITH: So the thing that I—
JANINE: So they avoid it because they notice, “Oh hey, this thing is sucking the liquid out of me, bye!”
KEITH: Yeah. The thing that I saw when I was looking up how to get these bugs out of my house was, um, a lot of people using diatomaceous earth but a lot of people saying, like, that diatomaceous earth works better but you should maybe just do it outside and inside you can use salt. ‘Cause salt does the same thing to bugs.
ALI: Oh, huh.
JANINE: Mm.
KEITH: And put it, like, in between your couch cushions and under your couch.
JANINE: Yeah.
KEITH: And behind—near your refrigerator.
JANINE: I mean, that’s the thing, is diatomaceous earth is such a fine powder that, like, it’s very clingy, especially to cloths and stuff .
KEITH: It just gets everywhere
JANINE: So it just—yeah. It’s like corn starch, almost, so once you get it somewhere it’s difficult to get it back up.
ALI: Two things. Once my mom—I learned that you can deter ants from getting into cat food by putting cinnamon around it.
KEITH: Huh.
ALI: And it won’t bother the cats but it will bother the ants. And my mom put a bunch of cumin down and didn’t notice [laughs].
AUSTIN: No! Oh nooooooooooo.
ALI: [laughing] It’s like, how do you not understand the difference between these two herbs!
AUSTIN: Those are different thingggggggs!
KEITH: Same color! Pretty much.
ALI: Same color but very different scents, in my opinion.
KEITH: Not, like, hugely.
JANINE: And both strong scents that you should anticipate and be familiar with.
ALI: Yeah. Maybe she was just like, “I find this scent offensive and I don’t know—I assume that it’s the thing that it should be.”
JACK: I’m back.
AUSTIN: Ants will also!
ALI: Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. The second thing is that I watched this video on how to make a genius fly trap and I hate it. The instruction is one: get a bottle. Two: put a bunch of syrup in it. Three: put a bunch of water in it. Four: cut up a bunch of shrimp and put that into this bottle?
AUSTIN: No! No! No!
JACK: No!
JANINE: Ew!
JACK: I was following you up to the shrimp!
AUSTIN: This is how to get rats, that’s what this is.
ALI: No. No. No.
AUSTIN: This is how to get animals in your house.
ART: And the rats eat the flies, checkmate.
[Austin and Ali laugh]
KEITH: This is how to make home-brewed shrimp soup.
AUSTIN: Oh, I hate it. We’re gonna get back to this game.
ALI: It’s just smelly. Ugh. No, no. no.
AUSTIN: We’re gonna keep playing this game and not talk about gross things.
ALI: [emphatically] Mm-hm.
[musical interlude, 1:13:45]
AUSTIN: Oh, we should clap. We should do a clap. We should do a clap.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Nicely, this is also the clap right before winter. So.
DRE: Mhm.
AUSTIN: Also, Keith, are you going to draw a community on that branch, or are you just gonna—?
KEITH: I am. Yeah, I’m gonna draw.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: Sorry, my whole—my computer, like, logged me out. Or like, basically everything went dark for a minute and then it popped me out back on the sign-in screen.
AUSTIN: Okay. Yikes.
KEITH: But luckily everything was still going. I dunno, it was weird, lasted almost three minutes.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: Alright. Thirty, or we can just do 3-2-1 maybe?
AUSTIN: No, let’s do a time.is, let’s do a real clap here. And not thirty. I don’t know if everyone—Is everyone there now?
DRE: Mm-hm.
AUSTIN: Alright. Let’s—
JANINE: Oh, do we all have to?
AUSTIN: We should all do it because it’s the mark of winter.
JANINE: Mhm.
AUSTIN: So it would be cool to be able to be like, “Hey, here’s where winter starts.” Just have one extra little thing. Y’all wanna do, uh, fifty five?
DRE: Sure.
JANINE: Yeah.
ART: Sure.
[pause, followed by claps]
[groans from the table]
AUSTIN: Okay, someone was way off. Someone was way early.
KEITH: I—I think my thing might still be a little weird. Some I’m gonna—
AUSTIN: [laughing] Okay.
KEITH: Okay. Alright. Maybe ten?
AUSTIN: Ten, yeah.
[pause, followed by claps]
AUSTIN: That felt like a good clap to me, I don’t know.
DRE: It did.
AUSTIN: Alright. So—
ART: Can we maybe take five here?
AUSTIN: We can take five. Totally.
DRE: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Happy to do that.
ART: Just a bathroom and stretch run.
AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ART: Separate activities.
AUSTIN: Yeah, please don’t combine those.
SYLVIA: No judgement.
AUSTIN: A little bit.
ART: Sure.
AUSTIN: A little judgement.
[Dre laughs]
AUSTIN: Alright, BRB.
ART: I’ll see how it goes, I dunno.
SYLVIA: I’ll be right back as well.
ART: Not committing to anything.
[long pause]
JACK: I’m back.
KEITH: Hello.
ART: Hey.
KEITH: I’m struggling with Roll20.
JACK: Oh yeah?
KEITH: Yeah, it’s not letting me what I want to select and it’s also not letting me draw little teeny boxes.
JACK: Mm.
KEITH: I keep trying to start a second box and it’s like, “You’re trying to edit that first box.”
JACK: That sucks.
KEITH: Yeah. Please let me give these little mossy stone homes windows and doors.
JACK: Oh, are these like little hobbit holes?
KEITH: Um, yeah. I think that they carved houses out of rock.
JACK: Oh damn. Too heavy.
KEITH: And that’s why it’s heavy.
ART: None of that’s coming through on the mic right? It doesn’t seem to be coming through on Audacity but there seems to be a bunch of people talking directly outside my window.
JACK: Oh man.
KEITH: Not in here.
ART: Alright, great.
KEITH: It seems like the best I’m ever gonna be able to do is one window per house [laughs]. It just won’t work.
[long pause]
JACK: Hey Janine?
JANINE: Mm-hm?
JACK: Could you describe for me what the video you just posted in our main chat is?
JANINE: Uh, it’s—there’s two hands and a pink wastebasket.
KEITH: Good start.
JANINE: And the two hands are holding a melon. There seems to be some kind of curtain in the background that has a gardeny leaf motif. And the two—so the two hands are holding a watermelon and there is clearly a split down the middle of the watermelon. Also, there’s dance—there’s like Youtube dance music playing.
JACK: Like very cheery.
JANINE: Yeah. And then the watermelon splits open and there’s a—I believe it’s a French bulldog? A French bulldog—I don’t want to say “a French bulldog’s head” inside of it because that sounds very sinister—but the watermelon has been hollowed out in such a way, and also a hole cut in the bottom, so that the French bulldog, which has been sitting in the pink trash can this entire time—[Jack chuckles] its head is inside of the watermelon like an astronaut helmet [Austin laughs]. And then the watermelon splits open by the hands, the hands guide it open, and the dog is inside and it is smiling.
AUSTIN: That’s a cute dog
JACK: The dog is—and the beat drops and—I bet the dog liked being in that watermelon. I bet it smelled great.
JANINE: Yeah. Dogs like watermelon a lot.
JACK: Oh yeah?
JANINE: Yeah.
KEITH: Really?
JANINE: It’s mostly just like sugar and water and crunch.
JACK: Crunch is the most important.
KEITH: Oh, dogs love crunch. Yeah.
JACK: So important.
AUSTIN: How are we doing?
KEITH: I have figured something out about Roll20.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh?
KEITH: Which is exactly how small you can make a square before Roll20 doesn’t think you’ve finished making your square.
AUSTIN: Mm-hm.
JANINE: I’ve found a really good generator for anime boys, and I put that in Season Six in case someone wants to play an anime boy.
DRE: Oh!
JANINE: Anime men, really. They’re very—they’re like, strong features.
KEITH: What’s it generating?
JANINE: ...Men.
KEITH: Faces? It’s generating faces?
JANINE: Yeah.
JACK: It’s like a Picro thing.
DRE: Mm-hm.
JANINE: Yeah.
JACK: Oh yeah.
DRE: Ooh.
JACK: I could probably get my character out of this, maybe.
JANINE: They have good hairstyles. They do like the fluffy, curly ones that are really nice.
JACK: I love these fish.
DRE: This is good.
ART: Are the fish part of it?
AUSTIN: The fish are part of it.
JANINE: They’re like a piece. They’re a component that you can select.
ART: Oh, okay.
DRE: How do I save one of these?
JANINE: Once you finish it you can click “completed” and then it will export it. ‘Cause I did one in another generator that Jared Ray linked and it’s good. It’s cute.
JACK: This fuckin’ rules.
JANINE: Yeah.
DRE: Yeah this is good, Janine.
JANINE: It’s nice. There are sooo many of those but that’s the first one I’ve seen in that style. They’re normally like—they’re normally more like the one that Jared linked, which is kinda cutesy, anime, shiny—
AUSTIN: Mm-hm.
DRE: Oh, this is just a Final Fantasy XIV villain. This person that I just made.
AUSTIN: Oh, definitely. I think a lot of these are.
KEITH: It’s—the eyes are so tired, it’s the eyes only a villain—only a villain is this tired.
[Dre laughs]
AUSTIN: Call me a villain then [chuckles].
DRE: [laughing] God.
JACK: How does the villain get that tired?
AUSTIN: Work. Gotta do villain work.
KEITH: Yeah, work. Too much work makes you a villain.
JACK: No rest for the wicked, et cetera.
AUSTIN: Mm-hm.
[musical interlude, 1:20:44]
ART: Yeah, Jack, it would be awesome if you just recreated the end of the Sopranos right here.
AUSTIN: Just an incredible song that just cuts and that’s it.
ART: Just cuts, yeah.
AUSTIN: Oh my God. We could just—could we license Don’t Stop Believing [laughs]?
KEITH: Is that—was that the last song of the Sopranos?
ART: Not unless it’s much cheaper than I think it is.
AUSTIN: Yeah, dude. Everyone should watch the last—everyone should watch the Sopranos, the Sopranos is real good. But that last sequence is incredible. There’s a song—Don’t Stop Believing plays, and it cuts off super abruptly. At the time, the big conversation was everyone thought their TV provider—the cable went out, basically.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Like, that’s how abrupt it was. It’s just done.
KEITH: Yeah. It’s actually the only scene that I’ve seen from the show is the last scene of the show.
AUSTIN: Yeah. It’s fantastic.
KEITH: But I don’t remember Don’t Stop Believing, ‘cause I wasn’t in it for that.
AUSTIN: Yeah. People should watch it just to see the way that that goes. [exhales] But I want to talk about this.
KEITH: I mean, we could just talk all this out now, right? We at least can talk about the stuff surrounding the frost shepherds.
AUSTIN: We could talk about that, we could talk about—we can talk whatever—we could also walk away and talk later, it’s totally—
ART: I was actually gonna suggest a brief cooling-off period break. Like, everyone gather your thoughts.
AUSTIN: I have to run to the laundromat and pick up some laundry.
[Ali laughs]
KEITH: Do you?
ART: That’s probably a longer break than I was thinking but, you know, whatever.
AUSTIN: It’s like a fifteen minute break, it’s not that far.
KEITH: Do you—did you leave your clothes in a dryer?
ART: But we would have to stop recording, right?
AUSTIN: It’s like a, it’s like a, what are they called, a drop off.
ART: A wash-and-fold?
AUSTIN: A wash-and-fold, yeah.
DRE: Oh, yeah.
AUSTIN: They close at 9 so I was gonna have to take a break to do that anyway at some point.
KEITH: Maybe I’ll do a wash-and-fold—I got a place that does wash-and-fold, I usually just do it myself though.
AUSTIN: I used to—I normally do it—I like to do it myself, I have not done it myself in too long. I feel bad about it, but it’s also super cheap and lets me come do this.
DRE: No, wash-and-fold’s are great. They’re great, they’re great.
AUSTIN: Yeah, so. If I had a washer in my apartment it would easier, but it’s all the way in the basement and it’s—
ALI: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Anyway.
DRE: When I was working in a place that required me to live in a dorm, I exclusively did wash-and-fold.
AUSTIN: Right. Right.
KEITH: I just did all my own laundry. I know that I said—I said one time that I’ve never done laundry and I always remember that as a thing that I should’ve said was obviously a joke.
AUSTIN: But it—but people. But people. Alright, so let’s—can we take fifteen?
ALI: Fresh. [laughing] Yeah.
AUSTIN: Alright. Shall we stop these files?
ART: We want to stop recording?
AUSTIN: Yeah, we should. It’s been going for five hours.
KEITH: Honestly—
ALI: Yeah.
KEITH: Can we—can someone make sure to ping me? Because I’m gonna shut off my computer ‘cause my keyboard is one hundred percent not working right now.
AUSTIN: Let’s time.is, let’s time.is and clap real quick.
JANINE: Okay.
ART: Alright.
KEITH: Oh, I don’t know how to get to time.is!
ART: We should anyway, just so we know when we’re—
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: I have my laptop, I have my laptop.
AUSTIN: Okay.
ART: Is that gonna work?
AUSTIN: Yeah.
KEITH: Yeah, it’s time.is.
AUSTIN: Yeah, he just has to bring it over to his desk.
KEITH: Yeah, I got it right here. We’re good.
ART: Twenty-five?
AUSTIN: Twenty-five.
[pause, followed by claps]
AUSTIN: Good clap.
SYLVIA: Yeah.
[musical interlude, 1:24:12]
ART: I think we should hold a discussion!
AUSTIN: Okay. We need Ali for that and is gone, so someone should buzz Ali.
JACK: I am doing that now.
AUSTIN: Thank you. Keith says, “Is there an opposite of contempt [laughs]? Because I want to take it for the worm.”
ART: Again, it’s not a worm.
AUSTIN: Right, but the idea of a worm [laughs].
[Keith guffaws]
JANINE: Just draw a pair of sunglasses on one of those ghosts and it can be an elation token.
JACK: Beep.
AUSTIN: I’m gonna go turn the lights on in my room ‘cause it’s getting dark. BRB.
KEITH: The sunglasses really tie the whole thing together. Like a nice rug.
ART: It shows that it’s a cool place.
KEITH: Yeah [laughs].
ART: To hang out and take a quick sap dip.
JACK: When I was in Iceland, I saw a geyser for the first time IRL and—
ALI: Oh hey.
JACK: Oh hey.
ALI: Sorry.
JACK: Austin is just turning the lights off in his room.
KEITH: On.
JACK: Wait, on. The thing about a geyser is when it goes up, everyone gets wet. So I don’t feel great about this sap geyser. Are they like bubbling up, Art, or are they shooting up into the sky?
ART: Just don’t stand too close to it!
SYLVIA: Oh my God.
KEITH: Well, here’s the thing that I think, is that the sap is so viscous that it doesn't get—there’s not a lot of spray, I bet.
JACK: I feel like these are the actual conversations that happen when this thing shows up for the first time.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Uh-huh.
JACK: Is people are like, “How bad is this?” And other people are like, “No, it’s probably fine.”
AUSTIN: Art, is this what your discussion is about?
ART: No.
AUSTIN: Okay.
ART: I was gonna discuss something different, if it’s okay.
AUSTIN: You do whatever you want, it’s your turn!
ART Sure, but like if at the end people are like, we should have talked about the recreational value of the sap—
JACK: Oh, there’s plenty of time.
KEITH: They can talk about it on their turn.
ART: Sure.
[musical interlude, 1:25:51]
ALI: What happened while I was gone?
AUSTIN: Uhhh. Oof. Well. You might—okay. You see the bright green thing?
ALI: Yeah, there’s a goo stream?
AUSTIN: Okay! That’s close.
ALI: That’s about all I picked up.
AUSTIN: You know what? That’s closer than I thought you’d get.
ALI: [laughing] Okay.
AUSTIN: That’s it. Yeah. It’s a big weird sap stream.
ALI: Ohhh. Oh, ‘cause trees.
KEITH: It’s a sap hot spring.
AUSTIN: It’s a sap hot spring.
SYLVIA: It’s very warm.
AUSTIN: Yeah. You left, and then we were like, “Let’s have a hot spring episode,” which I think is rude.
ALI: What the fuck!
[Keith and Sylvia laugh]
AUSTIN: But it’s a sap hot spring, which is not good for anyone.
KEITH: Well, Art insists that people like it.
JANINE: Hmm.
[Ali laughs]
ALI: Well, molasses is n—I don't really. Anyway.
AUSTIN: Mm-hm.
KEITH: A molasses bath.
JANINE: Yeah, swimming in molasses, that’s worked out historically well for people.
ALI: [laughs] If it’s warm and you can step out of it, it’s fine. Um.
ART: It’s very runny, I just want to make sure that everyone knows this.
KEITH: It’s got its own Lazy River, and it’s really, really slow. You could never get a Lazy River that lazy with water.
ALI: And what was the second thing? [laughs]
AUSTIN: Um, so.
JACK: Um.
AUSTIN: Yeah, Jack, go ahead.
JACK: Devar has started running basically a social club for old folks [Austin chuckles] who have been really turbulent-ed up by the—everything happening.
ALI: Mhm.
JACK: And then Rosana went out on a little walk over here and discovered—I drew again! Fuck!
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JACK: And discovered down—like three or four branches deep down seems to be another Velas.
[Ali gasps]
AUSTIN: Uh-huh!
ALI: Ohh.
AUSTIN: An old Velas.
ALI: Uh-oh.
JACK: Like a lamina Velas, I guess.
JANINE: Bless you.
JACK: An un-dragon-burned Velas.
AUSTIN: Right.
[musical interlude, 1:27:46]
[dog barks, followed by squeaking noise]
DRE: Woah, what was—was that an animal?
AUSTIN: Everything alright?
ALI: That was me. [laughing] That was me.
AUSTIN: Okay. You okay?
[Ali keeps laughing]
DRE: Is there a dog?
ALI: No, I’m just tired.
AUSTIN: Okay.
DRE: I feel you.
AUSTIN: Phew.
ALI: There’s a dog outside, I dunno if you can hear that. Anyway, go on.
AUSTIN: Mm-hm.
[musical interlude, 1:28:10]
[Austin and Janine laugh]
AUSTIN: Do you know that thing I remembered? Or, I didn't remember this, I looked it up because I was looking at the transcripts, is the first one of these we did, one: we obviously didn’t have a doc—like a visual presentation at all. I don’t know what was on-screen, probably our logo. And Ali had just sent me the questions via Skype [laughs] and I couldn’t [Janine laughs], I couldn’t—for whatever reason I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t use that, because I was screen-sharing something so I had something else up? I don’t know what the fuck I would have been screen-sharing.
KEITH: Is it possible you were screen-sharing the questions as they came up?
AUSTIN: No. Because then I would have been able to see them, ‘cause the whole thing was I needed Ali to email me the questions so that I could read them into the microphone, cause I couldn’t see them.
KEITH: Is it possible you were screen-sharing—oh, I guess no, that wouldn’t make any sense.
AUSTIN: It’s like, what the fuck was I screen-sharing?
KEITH: Well, this is for—
AUSTIN: This is an answerable question, I guess, isn’t it?
KEITH: This is for, um—the—
AUSTIN: For Autumn.
KEITH: For Autumn?
AUSTIN: Yeah.
KEITH: Maybe we were on a webcam?
AUSTIN: But what would I be screen-sharing?
KEITH: Oh, so—okay, yeah. I was thinking you were wrong that it was a screen-share—
AUSTIN: Maybe the webcam. Maybe it was the webcam. Maybe I was sharing the webcam and I only had one monitor at the time? Hm.
KEITH: That, yeah, it could’ve been that. I don’t know, I don’t remember that.
AUSTIN: I’ll check.
JANINE: That sounds like the most likely thing.
KEITH: No, don’t check, let’s spend fifteen more minutes guessing.
[Austin, Janine, and Keith chuckle]
AUSTIN: Oh, I can’t check, never mind. ‘Cause we definitely did it on the Stream Friends Twitch and it definitely didn’t get archived.
KEITH: Right. I’ve gotta, I have to do, I have to test—[yells] Test! Ahh! Okay.
DRE: Oh!
AUSTIN: Great.
KEITH: We’re good.
AUSTIN: Are we?
KEITH: Yeah, yeah, that was great.
AUSTIN: Should we tell the mods the name of this next season so that they can make the channel right? Or should it be a surprise for them too?
ART: I mean, one of us could just make the channel.
AUSTIN: Yeah, we can just do it.
JACK: Hi.
AUSTIN: Hi.
KEITH: Hello.
JACK: We’ve got everybody but Ali?
KEITH: Yes.
ART: But also, like the mod can know.
AUSTIN: Eh, you know what? I decided, fuck it. They can hear it with everybody else [laughs]. I don’t know what moved me. I love you, mods, if this goes into a Clapcast or something.
KEITH: Oh, did the Microscope game just go up or something?
AUSTIN: No. Uh, Hieron ended. And so people are excited.
KEITH: Oh, so it’s—
JANINE: Yeah.
JACK: They’re like, “What’s the next thing?”
KEITH: Right.
AUSTIN: Mm-hm.
JACK: Which is fair.
KEITH: I heard there was a road to that thing.
AUSTIN: There was.
ART: Are we gonna rename it “Road to Partizan”?
AUSTIN: I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t know. I’ll think about it. Pre-Partizan?
KEITH: “Road to Season Six” does have a better flow than “Road to Partizan.”
AUSTIN: It’s a great—yeah, yeah.
JANINE: What about Parti Bus? But it’s like Parti with an “I”.
KEITH: Welcome to Partibus.
AUSTIN: Parti with an “I”, yeah.
JANINE: Partibuzz.
AUSTIN: Mm.
KEITH: See, the problem is that I don’t want a road to the Partibus, I want to be on the road in the Partibus.
AUSTIN: In the Partibus [laughs].
JACK: On the road, on the Partibus.
JANINE: I mean—no, that’s the implication of Partibuzz, is that everyone is on the bus, which is on the road. Sorry, on the buzz, which is on the road.
AUSTIN: Oh, sorry. Okay, the buzz is also—[laughs] Okay.
JACK: Oh, buzz—I see.
SYLVIA: Yesterday, Emily and I were waiting for a bus and in front of it there was a party bus with the big letters “Clownbus.com” on it that pulled up beforehand.
JANINE: [laughs] Oh yeah.
SYLVIA: And so when I said, “Oh hey, the bus is almost here,” and “Clownbus.com” pulled up, it didn’t really work out great.
[Austin, Jack, and Janine laugh]
ART: My mom once had a problem, she used a New York car service and booked a car from my house in Los Angeles to LAX, and they were like, “Yeah, we’ll send a car,” and it turns out they don’t work here. So what they did was they sent my mom a party bus
AUSTIN: Wow.
JACK: Oh my God.
ART: [laughing] To take just her to the airport.
JACK: Wow.
AUSTIN: Amazing.
KEITH: Wow. Is that really lonely or is it the funnest time? On a party bus.
ART: Well, I don’t think the party features are on.
AUSTIN: They’re not on? What do you mean? They don’t have like the—
ART: I think it’s just a bus with party features. Like, you wouldn’t turn the music on or the lights or anything.
DRE: Why not?
ART: It’s one old lady going to the airport.
JANINE: It’s like being in a bar at 1pm, but also the bar is rolling down the highway.
ALI: Hello.
AUSTIN: Love it.
ART: Yeah, uh-huh.
JANINE: Great.
AUSTIN: Hi, Ali.
ALI: Hi.
AUSTIN: Are we ready?
KEITH: You can still take a spin on the pole.
AUSTIN: We are recording?
SYLVIA: Yep.
JANINE: Yeah.
ALI: Mm-hm.
AUSTIN: Can I go live to the channel?
ART: Yeah.
DRE: Yeah.
JANINE: You can do a lot of things.
ART: I’m done calling my mom an old lady.
AUSTIN: Sorry, may I go live to the channel?
JANINE: [laughs] I wasn’t—okay.
AUSTIN: Are we already live? Have we been live this whole time?
SYLVIA: No, we’re not. We are not.
ALI: Uh-oh.
KEITH: I feel live.
ALI: Mm.
ART: We’ve got three hundred and thirty two people waiting.
AUSTIN: Alright, here we go. I’m gonna go live. Ready?
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Go live. Going live. [pause] Hi, hello everyone. We should go to time.is.
JANINE: Oh, fuck.
AUSTIN: To do a clap.
ALI: Sorry, I’m making a Tweet.
AUSTIN: Oh, good call. I was starting to do that, and then didn’t. And then I closed Twitter. I logged in on this computer and then closed it.
KEITH: You said, “Fuck this.”
ART: We’ve been off for, like, six weeks and all of us have forgotten how the show works.
AUSTIN: Yeah. You know. [laughs] We’ll figure it out again, we’ll pick it back up. The actual thing I did was I opened up Twitter, saw Keith talking about the corn pop discourse, and closed it.
KEITH: Oh [laughs].
ALI: Mm.
AUSTIN: I was like, “I gotta go.” Um.
KEITH: I tried not to, but it stuck with me all afternoon.
AUSTIN: Oh, I looped our sound by mistake. Apologies, we’re good.
ART: Wow, our chat is moving fast.
AUSTIN: Yeah, we’re not gonna be able to keep up with it.
KEITH: Holy moley, you’re right, yeah.
[Ali laughs]
DRE: Is there like not a slow chat on Youtube or something?
SYLVIA: You can set it to top chat.
ALI: Well, they’re just saying hi.
AUSTIN: They’re just saying hi. I don’t want to put it on top chat, that feels rude.
SYLVIA: I don’t either, it feels weird.
[noises of agreement]
AUSTIN: Doesn’t it?
KEITH: Oh, mine is going super fast and it was already on top chat.
SYLVIA: Marx would have thoughts about that, I’m just saying.
AUSTIN: Marx would have—you’re right. Mm-hm.
ALI: Mm.
AUSTIN: We should do a clap.
SYLVIA: We have class and stuff, you know. Yeah, we should.
AUSTIN: That’s class.
SYLVIA: It’s class.
ART: Commenters of the world, unite.
[Austin laughs, Ali hums]
AUSTIN: Oh, God. Ten? Ten seconds?
ALI: Mm-hm.
DRE: Sure.
[pause, followed by clap]
AUSTIN: I think it sounded real good.
KEITH: Got it in there, it was close.
AUSTIN: Good job, Keith. I believed in your ability.
KEITH: I changed tabs and it was not cooperating, but I did get it.
AUSTIN: God. Alright, are we ready to do this? [pause] Okay. That sounds—
SYLVIA: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Wow. Everyone’s real ready.
KEITH: Yes, all ready!
ALI: Mm-hm.
KEITH: Wow!
AUSTIN: Thank you, Keith. Thank you.
DRE: I was typing “happy birthday” in the chat, ‘cause someone said it was their birthday.
AUSTIN: Aw, happy birthday to that person.
KEITH: Happy birthday.
ART: Happy birthday.
AUSTIN: Um, alright.
[musical interlude, 1:35:06]
AUSTIN: Uh, we should start recording.
KEITH: Alright.
AUSTIN: I already have been, but we should time.is.
DRE: Let’s break hearts, and then I’m gonna get some chicken wings.
AUSTIN: Y-yeah. That sounds good, honestly.
SYLVIA: Yeah.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: That might be the play, altogether.
KEITH: Isaac was like, “Hey, what do you want for dinner?” and I was like, “I have no idea.”
[Austin laughs]
KEITH: But the answer really is, “Fucking treat myself ‘cause it’s the end of Hieron.”
DRE: Uh-huh.
JANINE: Yeah.
ALI: Mm.
AUSTIN: We should time.is, talk about how this is the end of Hieron.
JACK: Ten after?
AUSTIN: Ten after. Ten after. Ooh, that’s so much time to sit and think. Let’s do it though.
ALI: Five, five.
AUSTIN: Five!
JANINE: Too much time—ah, what?!
[multiple claps]
JANINE: I clapped at four ‘cause I panicked so hard.
AUSTIN: Ten, ten, ten, ten!
[multiple claps]
ART: I wasn’t even looking.
AUSTIN: [laughing] Oh my God.
KEITH: Someone choked. Someone choked.
[Ali laughs]
ART: I was checking that my Audacity was on, and I was like, “Well, it feels like it’s been five seconds.”
KEITH: Jeez.
AUSTIN: [laughing] You can’t do it by feel, that’s the whole thing!
KEITH: By feel.
[Janine laughs]
AUSTIN: [catches breath] Thirty.
DRE: You’ve turned off your computer—
AUSTIN: Thirty, thirty!
KEITH: Malcolm Gladwell says you’re allowed to clap after—
[claps]
AUSTIN: Okay.
[Outro music: The Turning of the Year]