Sad Boyz - Spending Your Rent Money on Games (w/ NakeyJakey)

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

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Welcome to Sad Boys, a podcast about feelings and other things also. I'm Jarvis. I'm Jordan. And today we're joined by South Dakota's finest. You may know him as a gamer, a video essayist on an exercise ball, a yoga ball style gamer, a musician, a beautiful, I don't even know what you'd call it, like hip-hop magic. Hip-hop music icon. What the hell? Clean up. Jakey, Nakey Jakey is here joining us today. Thank you for having me.

Jakey, Jakey, Jakey. You gotta go, man. I'm happy to be here, but I will go. Okay. That's been the show. Thanks. We're going to do another hour and a half of that. Thanks so much for joining us, man. Thanks me how the hell are you i'm good like we were talking about a little bit before this i'm like a little sleep deprived and oh yeah mode from editing you are in the thick of it right now i'm in the thickie you've got a video coming

out tomorrow lemony thicket you're in lemony Thicket because you're in a series of unfortunate events. That's right. Videos. Unfortunate videos. Series of unfortunate edits. A series of unfortunate green screen edits where I'm like holding swords and guns. How does it, okay. Do you suffer from, this happens to a lot of us.

A lot of us. That would be a very funny transition point. Do you suffer from mental illness? Do you suffer from it? Is it part of your family? Have you or a friend been affected by... Let me see a picture of your dad. Let's go over there.

Because I have an image in my head. There's this thing that happens in like... This happened in like the corporate world when you're like making a project. Maybe it's like you're like doing, making a project. Maybe it's like you're working on Patreon, the website. You're working on a new feature or in this case a video. You have the idea for the video, but as you're working on it, you get new ideas that add more and more work. And it's called scope creep, you know, in like the professional world but like um or in the the corporate world but the

i feel like as creators we can fall in love with so many ideas during the process you were exactly describing what keeps happening with this yeah you described all the swords and shit i was like i know it's no that the prime example is like like two that i feel like i just did is one it's like I'm talking about in Dark Souls, like, oh, you rest at a bonfire. And when you do, you get your Estus back and all the enemies respawn. And I'm like, I guess I could cut to footage of enemies respawning, but you don't see them respawn. And I'm like, oh, that's fine. And then as it goes on, I'm like, wait, I have this B-roll of a bunch of takes of me going, I'll kill you. And so I like made it red and had him hold a sword.

And so when I say the enemy spawn, it's another me that comes out towards me going, i'll kill you and so i like made it red and had him hold a sword and so when i say the enemy spawn it's another me that comes out towards me going i'll kill you and it's like that took like fucking 30 minutes i premieres just a two second bit and it's just like oh good more rendering sick no thanks man i kind of miss i i like recently haven't um just like there's been a lot going on and like with creator clash and moving and all that shit um but i want to get back to like you had time really to lose i know these are excuses but the um the feeling of like oh i'm gonna spend a lot of time on like a five second bit yeah like but uh before we get too ahead of ourselves, the video that you're working on that should be out as of the release of this comment,

as of this podcast is about from soft. That's right. Do you want to give us a little bit of a background? Give the audience a little bit of a background. Yeah, it is from software's game design changed. Everything is the title. And it's like people that have seen my channel will know from that title phrasing it's

it's in the same spirit or series as the naughty dog video or the yeah you're like this shit you're like i'm on an exercise ball and some shit and gaming is cool or it needs to change or it needs that's how i should open it instead of some thesis it's, look, some stuff makes me go, ah. What's going on, guys? Stuff that makes me go, ah. Kojima is good or bad. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it.

Yeah, it's like a Good Mythical Morning episode. I was going to say, that sounded like 2012 era, like IGN excerpts or something. Yeah, yeah. What was that review? What's going on, gamers? And then like, the title flies out it's like a after effects plug-in and then i'm having to clean up because i'm peeing and that's because you're excited because you're peeing from excitement you can just cut that out yeah

you're just like jumping around you got the zoomies my mom hears me in the computer room slamming against the wall i Oh, you must be recording. Before I forget, I want to shout out the hoodie that I'm wearing today. It was sent to me and I just want to like help out a friend. The friend is Cutie Pie Sensei. So this is a company that she co-founded called Fura Wear. And it's like pop culture inspired like swimwear and like hoodies and stuff comfort wear this hoodie is extremely comfortable i feel like i

look like an anime protagonist or leather bits are they yeah i'm super into it i'm super into it and uh yeah just wanted to help out somebody i've known since we met when I was doing an overnight in high school at Georgia tech. I like committed to go to college there. And then I was like, Oh, I should probably go to the campus and like, see what it's like, you know,

after I've already committed, you guys both graduate from college. Did we finish college? Yeah. Yeah. I guess I should have led with, did you go to college? No, I graduated. I did not go to college no i graduated i did

not yeah i did not go but i did get the degree because it's really weird it's a weird way of asking i graduated a day uh yeah i did i didn't finish high school though i mixed it up a little bit i finished high school didn't finish college what'd you do at college i went for like two weeks and realized i couldn't afford it but also that I just didn't really want to go. I was majoring in psychology, which is a given that I didn't know what the hell. There's no offense to anyone that's majoring in psychology. Props to my psychiatrist.

Honestly, I don't respect anybody who does that bullshit career path. My psychiatrist is watching this episode. Yeah, she's like, what? No, I need a psychiatrist. Yeah, being so mean that they have to go to therapy. They go to the mirror. So what's going on? It'd be funny during the mirror.

Hey, what's going on? Wait, I'm talking. Hey, you're supposed to be listening to me. Venmoing themselves $500. Oh my God. I do Venmo my therapist. I Venmo my therapist. Yeah, what's that about?

That feels a little... Venmo is the domain of paying therapists and drug dealers. Yeah, in a way, therapy is a drug. It's a drug of words. Go on. Okay. And elaborate. A drug of ideas and a drug of the mind is high sort of a gateway

drug to your own thoughts ass yeah dude and you swallow the pill of knowledge of self-knowledge there we go and remember guys don't forget to pick up ape juice supplement to boost your freaking balls in your head gamer Gamercum.gg. It's got the perfect amount of taurine and caffeine. Gamercum would have like a crunchy texture. Oh, dude, it's never new. I straight up for a while have wanted to, I've never thought of the right context to do it, but to bury too much time and money

into a fake April Fool's project called called gamer milk is very funny to me i i'm with you i think about april and then i never do it but i think about like oh next april fools we'll all like make our thumbnails look like jarvis's and upload on the same day or some shit like yeah and then never it's exactly the same as just a shower argument. I love. Then I would have said this and Einstein would have applauded. And GamerCon would have taken off. And I would be rich by now. I would get to have sex one time.

April Fool's is a funny thing because it's, I think in my old age, I've started to hate it. It's been like, oh, I can't take the internet seriously today. Yeah. Or different, like specifically with gaming gaming there's always like game announcements that you're like damn this actually looks kind of cool but i don't know if it's real it has like definitely drifted into the region of market research like uh the death of sonic the hedgehog we have a a friend that was attached to that yeah the what it's it was an indie well indie scale game release but first party murder mystery from sega oh in the kind of vein of overboard it was apparently was great point and click looks really cute well written funny whatever i do know

what you're talking about yeah but that was an april fool's release that just you know did extremely well and was beloved so how much of a joke is that even? Yeah, exactly. Or like, I remember like Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon. That is awesome. But it was like a spinoff, its own game that had like a super satirical, like over the top 80s tone. It's like one of the best Far Cry games,

but it was, I think it was announced on April Fool's, but it was like, no, this has been in development and it ended up being amazing. And so it's like, oh. But it's really short because it was just like, we don't want to take too much of a risk on a synth wave Robocop. Right. It's like for those types of games, this is getting at a tangent.

It's one I would replay because they give you most of the abilities right from the start and it doesn't overstay its welcome. Like you said, it's really short. And it's like, those games don't, games are too long. Controversial take. Games are way too big however uh i will say i am like 50 60 hours of the tears of the kingdom i'm like i was taking my sweet time yeah there's an asterisk next to what i said because i just made a video about elden ring being like it's 200 hours and they're all amazing yeah no i mean if

you if you call your shot you know what i mean if you're like in a babe ruth you'd better get the home run if you're going to be like our game is 1700 hours right and is you'll die before it's done that it needs to be perfect that's what i feel about tears of the kingdom being like it's 70 i know it's a switch game i know it essentially runs on fucking a rights brother brother-esque degree of technology. It's a launch switch. And as I've been playing it, it's made sounds I have never heard it make. Kill me!

Fans turn on that I didn't even know were in there. Yeah, my switch, it feels like a TI-84 silver edition. It feels like my switch is one of the devices that's being fucked with in the game. It's like, you shouldn't be doing this right now but uh it's like a sheikah slave they did uh i have a fun fact about that um but uh so yeah they they made the game 70 and everybody was like come on but then it came out and they were like okay maybe it's worth a hundred dollars actually no i i genuinely think the game is incredible um sure it's got switch problems like performance issues sometimes but who doesn't but yeah who doesn't sometimes we can't perform

i thought sexy like i've been avoiding spoilers and the amount of surprises that i i thought that there's no way that everybody on the internet was like respectful enough to keep some of this stuff close to the chest. But they have been. But they have. And I won't say anything here. Because I've only played it a smidgen because of working on this video for the past month so much.

But that's exactly like now that it's coming out. But wow, like I'm 60 hours in and last night I was up until 2 a.m. because I couldn't believe what was happening. I was like, no way. For real? I had no clue. That was like Elden Ring.

It just kept going and going and going. And it's like, that's when I'm with you. I remember for speaking of like 2010 IGN stuff, I remember the GTA 4 review on IGN. And I remember a quote that stuck with me because it's like the games that are like, like everything is just $60. That's like a flat,

like I think donkey has a really great video talking about pricing and how some games are actually worth more. And I remember in the IGN review, he says like, this is not only worth $60. Like I would have paid 200 for this for the amount of like experience that was amazing i got out of it and it's like really it's like fucking from soft rock star nintendo like those those studios are like naughty dog that put out games that you're like okay this was worth every

penny and right that's the dilemma, right? Because first-party productions that have hundreds of millions of dollars behind them are almost obliged now to deliver a certain level of quality for a certain number of hours to the point where, I mean, the thing that's embarrassing about the latter Assassin's Creed games

is that they have obscene budgets. They're way too long, but they're also bad. Most of them are bad for most of the time. Is it like a Call of Duty thing with Assassin's Creed where they swap studios every... I think... Teams. People in the team, yes.

Company and developers in the same. I think because Origins and Odyssey, which I actually played a lot of Odyssey and there were some cool aspects to it, but I know that they were developed concurrent concurrently but i think different teams kind of like a dark souls 2 and bloodborne because sorry my head is just so fucking no dude i i was the same like black flag and uh sasuke 3 where it's like there's they're developed kind of concurrently and it's the same studio but different teams but ubisoft is also different because it's like fucking so many teams all over the world it's like i couldn't tell no oversight i think i remember

when i looked up with origins and odyssey that they were kind of developed concurrently because they came out like bang bang and they're both fucking huge so yeah yeah there's no way you did one and then immediately rushed yeah i'm curious about your guys's thoughts on this right like i love and i've always loved games criticism and critique and just thinking about and investigating mechanics it's just it's fascinating right i am always so conflicted about the purpose of games reviews. Like, embargo goes up, game review released. And the emphasis they have to place because they're consumer marketed. Yeah.

The emphasis they have to place on value for, because that is like, that archives very badly. If I now read a review of like a PS3 launch title and it's, well, the PS3 costs this much. Okay, but that's basically completely unrelated to whether or not like i know she is any good right it's it's i'm totally with you that there's like it's still there's so many reviewers that that that the bottom line kind of is like this is okay but it's not worth this price or whatever like different reviewers do it

differently but i'm with you because it's like someone like me, I have the luxury where I do this for a job. So the price isn't really a factor. I mean, I write it off because like it's... I mean, it's baked into the job. So I, you know, like new Destiny expansion comes out and I play it whether it's as a write-off or just because I want to play it.

It's so much easier of a pill to swallow that a whole ass light fall expansion that's pretty mid is 50 bucks and it's like i you know i get it because it's like yeah i want to check it out but then it's like i think back to not that long ago when i could like barely afford shit when my youtube was first starting out it's like i never would have bought that so So I have to remember that. I think that as long as it's not the guiding principle of the review for me, I do think that it's valuable to consider value because a lot of people don't have a lot of... Most people do not have a lot of discretionary spending to spend on games or all the time or the time and so like when i was younger getting a game that was

like really long was like super valuable to me oh it was gonna be the game that was gonna be that's what like ubisoft i think is banking on right of that that's why they think it's attractive to have that like hundreds hundreds of hours because people will see that and be like well i could get pokemon snap and i'll play it for eight hours or i could get assassin's creed and so trilogy that's a great example too because i played pokemon snap uh all the way through on stream and it isn't a long game the new one and i thought it was gorgeous and the the value to me of being able to literally just be in a world on a fucking uh uh on it on a trail on rails and then i go oh oh there's a there's a guy there's like oh there and there's another guy oh this and like that like my my dopamine's firing

and firing and firing for like six hours eight hours and we all but you know we all know our share of disney adults right yeah money into time experienced at the park is is it's not a great one-to-one but it's a memory and a sentiment to hold on to yeah it's it's like a i think that's a i think i was definitely guilty of when i was getting into like high school and starting to like think more critically about games and stuff that I think that I was a bit more glued to like Metacritic or just like oh what did critics think of this game before I try it right and I think I slowly realized a lot of the times what would generally be considered like a 7 or 8 out of 10 like you know like a Max Payne or

something yeah was like a 10 out of 10 for me personally, just because it was a niche thing that specifically appealed to me. Yeah. And it's like, I, again, going back to like, this is a game I would have paid $100 or $200 for. It's like, yeah, there's a lot of games that I think back on. And even when I was like, you know,

could barely afford games, it's like, no, that still would have been worth like the experience that i got out of it are there games that you adore that reviewed extremely poorly i have one that actually maybe is semi-related not super poorly but relative to the expectations max paint three dude oh my god i think it's it's the good version of candlish too dude like i was actually about to go into that specifically being an example that like in terms of play time you can get out of it it's not super long and unless you're playing the pc version with a mod that

lets you skip cut scenes you can't skip the cut scenes because they're masking the loading screens they're really not a lot of the time which is kind of bullshit also just not optimized for pc so it's like we can't let you skip this yeah 720p presentation even when i was playing it on the 360 where you had to watch all the cut scenes every time you replayed a level or whatever i was so just like enamored with the uh soundtrack and the gameplay and everything which by the way dude i fucking met uh from health from health johnny it was him it was i was going crazy no dude because i was late to that party so i wasn't how the fuck do i go up and no it was the second he walked in i was like i'm pretty sure i know that guy like not personally i guess for uh listeners viewers uh sad folk we should for context max pain three

as of this very moment emotional perverts was the default uh max pain three features in my opinion oh man it's my most listened to ost ever i didn't know this about you i obviously we're all already pals but i'm like damn i it is with max pain three and this was something that when i talked with johnny so this was like this goes in the story goes into it that it was one of the coolest like having not you know made youtube videos or made music or anything and then meeting someone that again health isn't the biggest band but i go up to him and he's talking with Billy and Chrissy. I think that they were already talking and I go up and I like, I put my hand out and I was like, Hey Johnny, like I'm, and he like turns to me and he's like, you're Jake.

And I'm like, Oh, that's no fucking way. He's like, you, I know you, you made that fucking rockstar video. Yeah. But I sent that to some of my friends that like worked there and I'm like, what? And he's like, yeah, dude, your shit's fucking great. And I'm like, and like a lot of the rest of the night that i was there a couple hours he's such a sweet dude he like told me different cool places to go here but he and he's also like a huge creative drive for health right yeah and he i talked about the basis but he's also the song right or like one of yeah and he he i was specifically telling him that their twitter they upload so many shitpost memes in their Discord,

apparently it's just hilarious and amazing. But hearing him say different anecdotes about how they made the soundtrack or XYZ and talking about different people with Rockstar and whatever was so, I don't know, it was awesome. Because specifically to me, I replayed that game so many times and the soundtrack is so perfect and i specifically told him i was like dude the song in panama with like the drum machine and this and he's like oh yeah for that we did this and this and it was like that's so cool to me that game was worth like a hundred dollars shout out shout out to him if he can i ask okay so so this is a question that I feel like I should have asked earlier.

What type of game is Max Payne? Because it's a series that I have heard of for so long that I've never learned anything about. It's third person. The first one was like one of the earliest, I think, third person shooters on PC. I think it came out in like 2000 because i was gonna say like i used to go to a cyber cafe like a gaming cafe in my hometown college town

because i didn't have like a gaming pc and so me and when i was in middle school we would go and we'd play like um you know source engine games and shit like that people in my town would go to the library to play runescape because the computers weren't star wars battlefront we would all meet up at the library to as every single day and we failed for my entire time at high school to try and play the matrix online oh yeah and it never worked once ever at all and then i remember like serious sam Sam was a game around that time. And then I remembered Max Payne was another game on PC that I just never learned anything about. So it's a third person shooter.

Yeah. So it's super inspired by not only like Matrix, but like what inspired the Matrix, which is, is it John Woo? Yeah. John Woo like Hongong action movies like hard-boiled and stuff where it's cool it's super like it it was i think i'm kind of talking out of my ass but i think as far as like a shooter or like combat was one of the first games to use like slow motion or like bullet time oh yeah that's the loop is like combat encounter go in two guns equipped slow-mo goes i love me some bullet because you can manually activate bullet

time and it like drains your thing really time. Because you can manually activate bullet time and it like drains your thing really fast. But what you can always do is press a button and you jump sideways in slow-mo and that never runs out. Like you can always do that. So a lot of the gameplay loop is just like going into rooms or situations

where if you tried to do it without slow-mo, you'd probably die pretty quickly, especially in Max Payne 3 because they like ramped it up. But, and it's also just like neo noir like a big appeal of it is that it's like he has like the voiceover and the writing and there's like comic book panels and he's like emphasis yeah the rain series say what is it an active series or did it no not that we know of relative to like game sales max pain one sold

really well max pain 2 didn't sell as well but it's like amazing and it was on ps2 so it got more right at least it didn't max pain two didn't sell like amazing and so rock star published the first two on consoles and then the third one is just made by rock star but the first two were made by remedy the people that made alan wake and control and quantum break quantum break yeah everyone's favorite uh for the remedy heads out there um but uh sam lake's quantum wake matt rockstar made max pain three and it's like other than uh like you know gta and red dead like Other than Max Payne, that was the last linear story game that they made

that wasn't an open world game. Since then, I'm pretty sure they've only made either GTA or Red Dead. That's one of the special things about it is it's between GTA 4 and GTA 5 is this completely linear project. And it clearly informed a lot of the gunplay in GTA V,

but it sucks compared to Max Payne. That's why we're so disappointed. Red Dead or GTA V both feel... Red Dead 2 has its own feel and it's fine. I actually kind of like it, but GTA V after Max Payne 3 felt like a lot of steps backwards in terms of the physics physics and like the responsiveness and like fidelity is such a focus in max pain three kind of to its own detriment like the game

is like the loading screen the loading screens the phone it still looks amazing the art direction is really good every bullet is rendered so when you go in slow motion it's like you can see the bullets enter and leave bodies oh that's crazy it's fucking awesome literally i would just before the end of any firefight when i was replaying it in college i would pause and i would deliberately be killed or just pause and reset to checkpoint so that i could go back through again and every second playthrough if you pause you can still move the camera and just like kind of like a photo mode before photo modes and you can just individually look at the bullets as the sound waves ripple behind them it's like oh that's so

cool it's a level of focus that like to be fair some resource probably could have gone towards improving other things about the game yeah but the complaints were and this is i'll stop rambling about max pain no i mean this could just become the Max Payne podcast. I mean, hey, I'm extremely painful. Yeah. Max Payne. So we shot this one rat in slow motion. There's rats in the first game.

It's in New York. You can shoot them and they go. Well, I mean, that's one of the things people didn't like. And it's kind of a shame. It feels like they were being disincentivized to experiment. People were like, it's in Brazil. But that's not where Max Payne takes place i that's against the rules i i think it's one of the most fascinating sequels i love it i think that as far as like nothing else a different person handling an ip that's beloved and taking it in a new direction

while also staying pretty true to it i think this is rockstar's first tape on it and it's written by uh uh dan hauser who he wrote red dead 2 which i think is like his opus like flaws aside red dead 2 is such an amazing story and the writing and everything but he was the main writer and he wrote max paint 3 and like relative to other game companies max paint 3 sold fine like i think it it it probably made back its budget but as far as rockstar numbers it was nothing compared to, which is why it's like, why would they ever revisit it? It's like that and ping pong tournament game.

Oh, dude, I love, I thought about making a video on table tennis because I think that's such a fascinating game. But it's such a cool thing to see a team that usually doesn't get to do something like that, do something like that. It's like you have to know that there's people at Rockstar that are tired of like all right let's not make another fucking gta let's make like a space sim or something you know right but um yeah i mean that's like probably a weird i mean it's the case with everybody that does creative stuff i'm sure you maybe we can all

relate in different ways when there's not just an audio an audience expectation but also a skill set almost like great power great responsibility issue of well i know what i'm good at yeah and i know i can deliver something that i'll be satisfied with and that people will like but boy i mean like somebody at rockstar would have played dishonored 2 and been like wow i'd love to teleport i'd love for a blink to be in my game but there's just no way i at my level at the salary i have at rockstar and the the resources i have will they let me put like a hadouken in this game so do i experiment with a new type of video you could just do street fighter moves first i mean that's kind of i i don't want to go on this tangent but that's kind of an interesting thing about smash with uh the like street fighter characters and stuff that they where they had

alternate uh control schemes that if you like they were inspired by those games yeah that it's like it your muscle because i played a lot of street Fighter 2 on the Super Nintendo. It's like your muscle memory, you can do the same gestures in Smash and that work in his animations. And it's like, how the fuck? Maybe frame advantage or something. You get something. You get something.

You get a benefit. If you do the influence. If you are like playing like that, you do get some access to stuff that you don't. You get top. Oh, wow. That's a children's game, man. You get shotgun you get shotgun um

i wanted to ask like so this is tying back to from soft and i'm like kind of a from soft noob the first from soft game i played was elden ring yeah but then um in in talking about difference in uh setting in in type of game eldenen Ring has this fantasy setting. Yeah, I guess you could say that. And then at the Game Awards, they did the trailer for, I want to say Armored Core. Is that the other one?

Armored Core 6 or something? And I had no idea FromSoft was even in this genre of this mech, sort of cyberpunky type dude it would kind of be the equivalent is kind of like if naughty dog came out and was like we're doing another jack and daxter like after doing uncharted and last of us for so long like and that's i so my sister's boyfriend who's also named jake shout out j Jacobs. He's huge in Armored Corps. Was he the yoga bowl game?

No, I don't think I've met him. I was like, I don't think you would have met him. No, me and Jake go way back. Okay. Jake the snake. Jake the rake. Cleaning the floor. He's always gardening. He's a tall guy that's always gardening.

He is a huge FromSo fan specifically bloodborne we like we we share that we we always talk about from soft but he actually played the fuck out of the armored core series before so he he's been invested and he's told me that it's so exciting and fascinating because it's like are they gonna just do what they did before is they gonna be influenced by stuff that they've done with the soul series how would you even implement that because it's a completely different genre yeah what genre is armor core it's like a mech fighting game okay where zone of the enders kind of you've played that i've heard of it it's a deep cut kojima deep cut so um the reason i i asked that is because now tying it back to like tears of the kingdom which is on my mind just because i've been playing it so much the she tears on my she

tears on my kingdom um till i came yeah i remember yeah we were no that's what we were at dinner we were at dinner and i said something she gave she she gave my king dome till he tears yeah i just tweeted i saw that you i saw he treated yeah um but the uh she gave my king dome the type of my leash this is definitely like the gaming episode we front loaded this with so much gaming but I guess if people are coming in for Jakey they're gonna I was gonna say yeah that's that's my they're gonna get some bread and boys my bread and buddy but

the style of you know breath of the wild transformed a lot from the Zelda formula so like the you know the because breath of wild is meant to be a reimagining of zelda one yeah which is like this oh it's an nes game but it's like a open world type vibe it's like what if we could do that again but like with all the technology

we have now and it's not this more um i don't want to say linear, but more linear, you know, do the temples, and it's focused more on the puzzles. I mean, obviously it is focused on the puzzles, but the open world exploration is such a big piece, and the combat being so, what's the word, robust, I think, than some of the other games, where there's just so much tech and there's so much like. Feels a bit FromSoft inspired too.

You can, you can parry. Yeah. Because I, I had never played Elden Ring, but then I played Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring hadn't come out yet. And I played Breath of the Wild late and I, my like training wheels for getting excited about Elden Ring was that I

played Breath of the Wild on master mode. And you fought a Lynel. I played with three hearts or whatever. And I didn't get any additional hearts. And then I just like all of the bosses and stuff, I was just like learning their patterns and just like pairing everything or flurry rushing everything. Would you like make food to give you

the extra like yellow hearts? No. Oh, wow. You just straight up. I would do it like if I got hit, I died. Damn. And then I would just over. then and then now in tears of the kingdom it's like i can farm lion was like the back of my hand because i all the timings are the same for the previous game so i'm just like going to town and it's great for me because uh they drop really good stuff but the reason i brought that up is because like it is a complete shift in genre.

And a lot of people were pissed with Breath of the Wild. I think a lot of the people were like, I want traditional temples back. And then people like me were like, wow, I want to play a Zelda game for the first time. No, yeah. Because I think about, I'm like, as much as I like the older Zelda games, like I would say Majora's mask is still my favorite. Um, the such a neat game.

It's such a neat game. It's such an interesting story. And just like the Reese, it reminds me a lot of, uh, tears of the kingdom because it's the same engine. Like, like Majora's mask is like,

they turned around a game. It's like a, almost like a smash brothers melee story where they turned around the game and like a a year and a half or something crazy i think that's right yeah and and in in in doing so they you we used a lot of resources it's almost like they were in like a magic draft tournament or something and they were like okay we have all these like raw ingredients from ocarina of time how can we make something that's not a super sprawling open world because the world is like smaller. But how can we conserve the resources?

Oh, everything is on this like three-day time cycle. There's so many, like there's just thing upon thing that's like, so the best way to say it is Nintendo of them to be like, we're going to make this work because narratively it's going to be this parallel world. And also we're going to reuse the assets because it makes sense with the three day cycle, right? Because we can't make everything.

Yeah. And there's so many things like that where it's like it feel in, it's also darker, which I like a lot. That's what I was going to mention. It's what can we express in every part that we haven't before? Let's make the soundtrack just a little bit more. Let's evoke something a little different. It is a scary mention. It's what can we express in every part that we haven't before? Let's make the soundtrack just a little bit more. Let's evoke something a little different. It is a scary game.

It's so funny. It's really scary. I had nightmares, right? Yeah. I couldn't play the game alone. I had to invite my friend Malcolm over to play with me. Specifically the ending when you, I mean, I guess spoilers, if you don't listen for the next 10 seconds,

but when you go to the moon to fight him and he like the mask becomes i remember watching my older brother play that and like the whole vibe of the moon and it feels like heaven and you're talking to these different mass kids and stuff i was like this is scary it's cosmic horror is not appropriate for a child there's like what it's like body horror or something where it's like what is the term for like grotesque like yeah yeah because that kind of that is like very spooky prevalent now in in breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom there's a lot of that and it's like genuinely like unnerving some of the stuff but what i was going to say was um tears of the kingdom feels like majora's mask in a way because it is reused the game took what five six years to develop the game is quote unquote reusing a lot of stuff but really it's building

on an engine yeah i've played it for like five hours and i can already tell like no they they just they they kept it and did more right it is people the people who there's a early critique from people who did not play the game who were like they just reused 80 of the map and i'm that's like mad in 2023 it's the same no that's like the people who go i can't believe the new spider-man is also in new york or whatever like what can you go to space yeah why can't you go to brazil narratively it would not make sense for him to go to another city too as cool as it would be of like spider-man in tokyo like that'd be awesome but like craven's hunting him where he like lives

that's the point but yeah i went to new zealand to hunt a tiger it's like oh that's the fuck he's not here oh weird but uh but basically like without going into too much spoilers, what they do is such an escalation and such a, what's the word? Like it's so, it's just better. It's like we thought like Breath of the Wild was like, you can't go up from here. But now it's like, how do you i don't like i genuinely can't fathom that it's possible to like improve upon this i feel like you have to go laterally from here but then on top of that like zelda's never been one for story like the story is super convoluted and it's kind of like the dialogue's not super strong it's not like the voice acting

is voice acting is whatever shout out to matthew mercer though um but then uh i was watching like last night i fell asleep to like a lore of like oh i've done that i was i was i was watching a video i was watching a video about the timeline of zelda timelines because they've retconned so much um oh like with the uh this is where link loses and this is where yeah the three timelines spawn and then this is where he lost but he was a kid and this is where Link loses. And this is where- Yeah, the three timelines spawned. And then this is where he lost, but he was a kid. And this is- Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Here's what a fucking loser he is in every timeline. One of my favorite game trailers. I don't know if you guys remember game trailers. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, dude. But like the game trailers timeline videos. Who was the- The guy, the voice.

Brandon. Brandon. Brandon. The most excited I've ever been per patreon project they got in touch with us i got to speak to him i was like 22 the most buttery voice dude he can narrate anything but he's he's the man but uh watching that video i realized how um much tears of the kingdom actually calls back to the lore of like the og zelda games and even ocarina of time because i'd like forgotten so much of it because it's like so forgettable like in a way and i just like i was

like wow this is even more beautiful than i like i appreciated it even more i mean the series thrives on vibes right it does like it's for a series that i don't no matter how big a fan you are without resorting to graphs it is impossible to tell a compelling story about the broader zelda narrative but there's no uh concert in the world that makes more people cry than live zelda music being played oh yeah i cried at the end of breath of the wild then i anticipate uh tears on my king though uh she cried on my kingdom she cried on my kingdom that's my kingdom i think i'll probably beat the game

no that's that's pretty excited that's a super good like parallel to a lot of the shit i talk about in the from soft video is that it's like i was talking about this with eddie the other day because i mean he hasn't seen it because i have to finish it tonight at this point we're recording it yeah but i was telling him i was like i was feeling a little bit nervous you know when you're working on something and you start and you're like this is awesome this is great and you get into the middle of it because this is like a 36 long minute video and you get into that middle section it because this is like a 36 long minute video. And you get into that middle section when you're just watching this middle section without the rest of the context, which in reality is a blip.

Like when people are watching it, it goes by. But when I'm editing it second by second, I'm like, this is so boring. It's not even this three second vibe. This vibe is off. And what I was telling him is that it's so much, I realized that like a lot of it is about the fundamental game design and how Dark Souls specifically influenced a lot of games and then how their other games like influenced things later too, or like innovated on different aspects of Dark Souls.

But I was telling him it's like the Rockstar video and the Naughty Dog video are very much technical. That it's like, it's very much my opinions, but they're rooted in these things that I think are like the game design of this with the from soft video. It's like, I get like a bit more emotional about it. Not, not that it's like, Oh my God, this is, but, but I talk about how, when you're saying the vibes, that it goes off a lot of vibes, it's like,

those narratives are so fucking deliberately obtuse, which I think is great because people piece it together online. like i think verbatim in the video i say the story is so much more about the feeling of exploring a space and the music and the art and everything and it's like that's like the smartest way to do a video game because it's gameplay based like in zelda that's you're 100 right dog souls 2 medulla theme theme, cry every time. Oh, and also there's a game that reviewed poorly that. Yeah. And Dark Souls 2 is like probably my least favorite in the series.

But I say in the video when I'm, I kind of do like a spark notes that I talk a lot about Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, but then for everything before Elden Ring, I kind of go a little faster because I'm like, okay, I think I say I could do a 40 minute feature presentation on any of these games. But the spark notes I give is that it's like, even these games that I say are flaws, they're not bad games. Like Dark Souls 2 is like, yeah, Dark Souls 2 is like the zones feel very unconnected and the art design is kind of all over the place. And like Miyazaki didn't direct that one, but like, it's still fucking great.

Like the combat is amazing. The power stancing like all that shit um yeah i think that for someone like me who loves a lore video or who loves a fun fact video the obtuseness you do zoomies when you see those lord notifications i'm jumping up on the couch you're spinning in your grave but you're alive in its bed yeah and it's great um but i like what would i watch going to bed at night if it weren't for these obtuse like storylines that can now be pieced together over three hours by someone with more time than me yeah that's body video good work to the community for real it's so much more interesting too than like a a game where they're

gonna try to do like a movie type narrative and it's just super predictable and like the same shit anyways just because video game stories are generally like they're not bad that'd be such a whack blanket statement because there's so many games that have good stories especially indie games but i feel like so many specific types of AAA games are just straight up. The writing and voice acting is just not good. Like Zelda is amazing. The writing and voice acting is not good. Like Nintendo is the probably greatest game developer.

Not probably. They are the greatest game developer now and ever, but Holy shit. They it's Mario. And like like they're not focusing on the stories and they shouldn't either but when they dip their toes with breath of the wild and you hear the voice acting in the writing and it's like it's not even the worst but it's just like whoa i just had like a euphoric experience climbing a tree and then i heard rivoli give the speech and i wanted to jump off the tree but it to find a taller one no i mean there's like

a here here's a thing that i said in a draft of my final college essay that was not well received by my professor games are harder to make than television and movies by a huge fucking margin especially since there's like there's just a way shorter archive of examples to go off. They take, especially now, take far longer to make. The people, the scope of skills is way broader. You can't just delegate as easily and say, yeah, just do nice art, please. Just do, hey, do good lensing.

Make the cinematography good, which you kind of can in the position, as long as your cinematography is good enough. And there's just so much like, it's a very stupid game in a lot of ways, especially in retrospect, but I will always have so much love for Bioshock to the point where I have the plasma tattoo right here,

because that was the first time in any medium, especially for games where i was like oh a gaming is a palette it's like a delivery method it's a completely different genre it's a different uh uh language you can't deliver a brainwashing story in the way you can in bioshock in anything else because i did not in the same way that you can't deliver like a narrative about revenge and selfishness in the way that you can in the last of us and last of us too you can't deliver a sense of exploration like you can in breath of the wild it's just not up to the kingdom she'd tear up my penis she teared on my dome. It's, I think it's like- Wait, yeah, get off.

I love, a lot of the media that I like, like creates community around it. Like for example, for my birthday, our good friend Katie got me Lost the Board Game. Lost the Game. And Lost is like one of my favorite shows um part of the reason is because of the like it spawned a community like watching it felt like you could be on the subreddits you could be in the wiki you could be listening to podcasts around it and just like the amount of media that

was like dedicated to everyone collectively enjoying this thing i think is a very special way to experience media and i i i see it a lot with with games like when everyone was playing elden ring or when everyone's playing like tears of the kingdom right now memes the memes it feels like we're all like yeah dude like once i played it a bit and my brother knew the extent i'd played and he's like okay i've seen some memes these won't spoil stuff now that you know that you can you know build stuff whatever yeah he showed me some of the stuff of like the korok fucking rotisseries and things people have made and i'm like this is the funniest shit i think that it's literally the most popular that crucifixion has been in about two thousand years yeah yeah for real i was very good observation i was gonna uh

i don't know why i didn't i think it's in my drafts but i was gonna tweet after i was playing it a bit i was like i don't know if this was intentional or unintentional but nintendo had to be pissing themselves when they made this because this is the funniest game i've ever played it's so funny like there's so many things that you fuck up like i put a rocket on a corak and i just i fucked up and he went my son yeah there's so much of like someone's yeah someone's like falling or no no someone's like building something and they're climbing on something they build and then it like they lose balance and they fall and then they're still crawling on the thing as they like fall into the void it's just like peak slapstick yeah that's what i mean yeah like

comedy in games is is hard because timing is like so the agency of the player is always gonna fuck with timing but slapstick hitman 2016 oh my god especially the hitman games are i i've watched my friend because you know the freelancer mode that came out with super amazing i'll watch him play it all the time because every run's different anyways not to interrupt you but yeah hilarious just like hitman stuff the fucking majesty dude of the way they animate 47 throw stuff like tracks them they have these little prefab lines um like little audio lines that only play after you throw it so it cuts off at the funniest part so if you aim as soon as you hit right trigger to start throwing it they'll go like hey what are you doing? It's like a level nine Smash Brothers. Oh my God, CPUs.

I was like, which letters? The CPUs overload. The level nine CPUs read inputs. And so they can like do things that like, they can perfect carry everything. It's such bullshit, but that is like the perfect application of I know exactly what's going to happen.

I've done the collision detection. I've done the trajectories and stuff. Let's play the audio and do the perfect thing. That's its own little... Those games are like especially, I mean, 2016, and I mean, they're like one big game and all of them are really good like

that one two and three starting in 2016 because it was like they released them anyways they at that point like i don't know if you've read anything about like the development of them and how it was kind of nightmare troubled and like absolution was like the one before it like critics and fans were kind of like oh it's different it's changing whatever those the new ones are so cool because it's like everyone fucking wins because the gameplay is so good. When they were first releasing it, they're like going on a tangent here. It was like episodic and it wasn't.

But as far as like the nonlinear gameplay and specifically how funny it is, you could tell the people making it, they know exactly what they're doing. They're like, we're going to put them in the funniest disguises. We're going to let you do the funniest shit. We're going to let you throw this random like jug of, you know, like that's just. We're going to have you dress up as someone that is a friend of another person. And they're not going to notice that their friend of years is now bald and white. Yeah.

And that's a barcode on the back of his head. And the voice lines that 47 does that like when he's supposed to be impersonating someone and he barely changes his voice and they don't notice and it's like yeah they know what they're doing like they're in on the joke and there's an innuendo that he it's like uh he does a there's one in the um whittleton creek which is like suburban uh u.s level you can take someone on a house tour and oh yeah because you the the method is to like take them on the tour until they get distracted then you can take them out while you do that tour you have to pretend to be a real estate agent

that's so good it's like um this is the bathroom a nice clean floor to clean up any messes because he's basically talking directly to the player of like if you killed them in this room that could be good if you kill them in this room but he's the it's so fucking good the bedroom closed curtains so no visibility it's like when you're talking about uh tears of the kingdom or games that you play them and you're just like fuck i immediately can't ever play the previous game that i thought was the shit and now it's made awful yeah that's how i feel about the hitman games in terms of so many older stealth games that i liked like even like i love metal gear solid 3 i love fucking dishonored or whatever but when it comes to just

mechanics and the sheer like freedom and like non-linear crazy nature especially of like freelancer going back to older stealth games feels so unsatisfying because you you can just do whatever the fuck you want and hit man and it works i emulated uh spinnaker one and chaos theory on pc recently and i was enjoying myself and i'm like fucking let me move man just let me let me go i know what i need to do and i'm operating at 15 fps and i can't see time where you thought that man it can't get better than this yeah it's real or it's even the i think like metal gear solid 5 gameplay wise immediately did that it It's very similar to hit man as well, that it's just like the gameplay is so about being like choice driven and you

can do whatever the fuck you want that immediately story wise it's, but going back to like snake eater metal, you're sold for like, I'm a huge, you know, Kojima fan. It was like, fuck,

this sucks. Like I can't do anything. It's my first solid was two Meta Year Solid was two. Amazing. And I loved it. But it was at the time where everybody was like, Raiden, where's Snake? They were having that little Last Jedi moment.

Yeah, yeah. But man, I was super. Talk about a game that's aged super well. Has it? In the craziest way. That's awesome. That's the thing is one and two because of the the gameplay design and the fixed camera angles and stuff those are actually

still pretty fun to go back and play because they're very basic like oh wait for the guard to move go here yeah yeah and but narratively it's insane i yeah i actually prophetic it was that's what i mean of like it holds up that the fucking speech at the end where he's talking about the ai and what's going to happen to the government and like media and stuff and it's exactly what's happening right now yeah which was tinfoil shit at the time kojima making death stranding before covid and it's about like a country disconnected is jeff ke whispering in his ear? Jeff Keighley is his oracle? You might know.

I have foretold. Their friendship is my favorite thing. But you might know more about this. You probably both know more about this than me. So Konami announced that they're doing a remake of MGS3. Snake beater. But Kojima's like kind of been like unceremoniously ousted from like completely uninvolved yeah no konami's fucking after

metal gear solid 5 they've like and i love how outspoken jeff is of just being like yeah fuck that i saw him on a podcast with like skill up in uh the oh yeah friends is it friends per friends per second friends per second second and he was just very clearly like yeah no fuck that not impressed like Konami is they I think one of the first things they did after cutting ties with Kojima like

released a shitty Metal Gear game yeah like a pachinko machine yeah and Metal Gear survived yeah what like I actually don't know what happened because i don't know internet people were like um metal gear solid five went over budget and so konami got mad but that seems so simple because it made money no metal gear solid five did like crazy well yeah for now he's just bad to work with i remember when reading into it

that was the biggest thing i took away is that lined up with a lot of other moves they were doing at the time of getting into like fucking pachinko machines or doing xyz that's just like bad vibes and but also kojima i'm sure isn't always exactly the easiest person to work with i i still think he's the man i i think he's i think he's hilarious i think he's awesome in his posts and his posts he's my favorite person to follow on captionless instagram post that's just what he's listening to yeah he's like carrying guillermo del toro and holding a pizza and no caption yeah like rio de janeiro yeah he like bought a physical cd of like a song he likes this tangent but there is do you remember a video i had that it's like

i it was for a while it was my pin tweet that it did crazy well it was a video that i took at universal of matt watson drinking a fake beer on the iphone thing where i pan over to him and he's drinking the phone and i pan back to eddie and eddie goes whoa it did so well it was retweeted by not only kojima's account but his like english translation account so whoever was running his social media was like this needs to be seen in all regions this is gonna crush into that that's my only uh interaction with kojima but he's he's someone that if i met i would i would be a little starstruck. Yeah. I'm the same with Jeff. I assume they're holding hands.

No, for real. I've seen Jeff on so many different TV screens for so many different years that I would be like, ah. Yeah. Are you? Do you remember the photo with the game of the year? What was with that Bill Clinton kid, huh?

What the? PS6? what was what was with that uh bill clinton kid huh what uh um do ps6 that's all you can think to say your brain is shutting down but like more ps more breath of the wild flight to reality show it's like a survivor style show brett of the wild they just took brett and we dropped him in the it's like naked and afraid but where am i i'm brett um where am i i'm brett is also a good where am i i'm a brett um so i don't know much we were mentioning the golem game i've just seen the screenshots. And I'm so confused. That's almost enough to just tell from the screenshots.

I watched the only stuff I've seen review or trailer wise was I watched Skillup's review. And I really like that he, A, I don't know him, but I really like his videos. I think he's one of the best game critics. I've never watched him. And he's so consistent, and you can tell that he just really cares. And he, talking about reviews before of like, I feel like a lot of people just put it on the value, talk about different things.

I think that he does a really good job of just letting you know, this is what I personally think. If you know my taste, off that you might be different, but I like that. He specifically says like, I don't want to be making these videos. Like he, he's aware that if you're dunking on something,

it'll do better than if you're praising something and that it's so easy to roast this. But he, I like that. He says in the videos, like I'm never rooting for a game to do bad because people's lives and jobs are behind this you know that being said it is so like not only does the game look like it was made on like a ps2 or ps3 but narratively i don't know how the fuck they got the ip of lord of the rings to play with

for example he talks about so much marketing money yeah and like i one of the parts that stuck with me that he talked about in his review is that just narratively gollum is like it's almost like a life sim and you like take care of this baby bird that becomes your sidekick that you can come in and this is golem who's like like eating a fish golem like deep into golem yeah it's before lord of the rings but it's like after the hobbit yeah but it's like it's just again you look at a screenshot and it's like the visuals are enough to yeah that's not even the worst that i love that there's a ten dollar bonus pack precious edition yeah and that includes emotes a compendium of lore, of course.

And that was part of Skillup's video that he's like, I don't want to be making this video. It's not good to be dunking on people. But also, when they're marketing it like this, and there's this $70 thing where they're, part of what you got with the pre-order was something that was like, I don't know, yeah, if it was like the compendium or something that would usually just come with a game like an allure index and the witcher or something and it's like

that was something they that i'm sure it's not on the developers but it's on the publisher or whatever it was like hey reserve that for the pre-order version he's like i feel like it's free game to dunk on this game there's a lot it, especially that compendium and like the emotes and the like where it's like, wow, did you, did you extract this from the development cycle so early that it was actually done a week before it goes gold?

Because the emotes quote, two of them are like catching a fly. That's like an emote, I guess, as opposed to just like an idle animation. I was going to say, it's like when Mario

falls asleep or something, pay an extra $10 and Sonic will tap his foot. But what was the other? Oh, now he's tapping in Morse code. He's saying chili dog. Gotta go chili dog. But then the other thing was,

yeah, that companion was like full of typos. And like, it's like formatted incorrectly like it looks like it was written by like a sixth grader it was a bad guy gpt golem and gandalf and the jedi uh someone said it was a felt like a huge game of red light green light i was watching a little bit of uh criticals playthrough of it um yeah i think it's like a six hour game or something like that okay so it's not very long that's probably for the best or yeah i just know he played it for a few hours and then

he played it again and he was like someone told me i was halfway through and i have three hours left so i think it's one of those things where it would be i could see it happening where it becomes like a popular speed running game that's what people were saying i love that where it becomes like a popular speed running game. Yeah. Because I love that. Like you said, like a community surrounding a game and the lore becoming the development of mechanics for like a summoning salt video or something. That's one of my favorite, one of my favorite things about games.

Another thing about games where our community can be built around it because of, you know, it becomes a good speed, speed game or something. It's like people loving like a movie that was supposed to be good that's really really bad yeah that's like oh let's make this fun i think it's sweet that like really no matter what whether it's sincere or ironic or uh big scale small scale whatever i feel like human beings are so

coded naturally coded like a game a little bit scripted if you will c plus plus by god my god uses python let's kill him well like uh i mean the same applies for you know we all have like little little followers that like build their own little groups and discords and you know like make friends in comment sections people were uh one of our mods um shout out to sarah uh joe biden um that's that's their handle um joe biden joe biden actually it's just spelled different they changed their name to that during a me and nick stream in 2020 yeah i actually don't know if that's their current discord but but they were doing um watch alongs like like getting a group of people together in our discord to like watch the new podcasts that come out and i think that

is so sweet that's that's cute um i mean i mean it makes sense you have a common interest and it's like like you said with like a a game or like a show coming out or like like i just finished barry which no spoilers yeah i haven't finished it so i'm not even i won't even talk about like opinions on it because i feel like i could build a hater in it spoiler alert but he stood in the background immediately after like watching something as it's coming out can be super fun with the discussion and i wish i was doing that for succession i'm behind i'm still in season three and i yeah i'm trying to catch up before i inevitably get spoiled and billy really wants to talk about it because she finished it but i uh i immediately go to reddit after every week every episode because i'm like what do y'all think and it's like such a cool community i love reading i'm just a lurker too i never contribute but yeah

i mean i very rarely see takes that i very rarely have a take that's not also expressed better and more articulately when i'm reading yeah it's a lot of the time it's like well this was my take on it my interpretation and then i read it and it'll be people that were either have like a similar one and i'm like oh okay i wasn't crazy or people that'll take it and go in a different direction and then i'm like oh like i did that a lot with better call sol and that was another one that every week episode would come out and I'd be like, what are these MFs saying about this?

I gotta watch Better Call Saul because I was a late bloomer to Breaking Bad. So it's only natural that I'm a late comer to Better Call Saul. But I didn't know, I think in the initial seasons, people were like, not lukewarm on it, but they weren't like grabbing you by the collar and going you have to it starts pretty slow and then when it ended

everybody was like this could be better than breaking bad i know i'm i mean i was like oh fuck it is weird the show's never boring and what people forget about breaking bad is breaking bad was a catharsis show it was very very very slow for 10 episodes and then one thing would happen and then it's like goes back to edging for another 10 episodes. Better Call Saul is faster paced

than Breaking Bad. Like more happens. There's more like events. It's more like exciting it beats. But it is way better than Breaking Bad. Like in my,

and I like Breaking Bad, but I will rewatch more. I don't even think that that's the most controversial take because there are times especially in watching i think that the first couple seasons of better call saul are they're yeah it's weird because they're not slow like things are happening but i think that they're the type of narrative they're setting up because they have to set up so many different things until you know exactly where it's going you might be if you're like me coming off breaking bad you're going to be a little bit like oh this feels like nothing you know it's slow or whatever but after finishing

better call saul and starting it over i was like oh this is amazing like you know but the uh there were several moments during the last couple seasons especially the last season where i was like this is better than breaking bad like i i still don't know exactly where i fall in the camp but i think that as far as like higher highs i think better call saul reaches higher peaks i think that i think vince gilligan and team were just given so much runway because of the position they built up from Breaking Bad to the point where like, oh my, wow, okay, yeah. Naughty Dog's a reliable studio. Let's give them a shit ton of money and the most advanced engine, to build the most advanced engine we've had so far

and then release The Last of Us and completely change the industry. It feels to that same level where like, well, yeah, you couldn't have made Better Call Saul without Breaking Bad and you couldn't make Tears of the Kingdom without rest of the wild but it feels just incredible i feel like the uh the people say it's like the greatest episode of breaking bad the ozymandias one it's like i think three before the series ends which is amazing and there's so like just

thematically and the direction and the editing and everything feels and i think that one's ryan johnson yeah like last jedi and stuff which is like it's what people i know people yeah people have different opinions but i that episode is amazing but just that feeling of like oh my god where is this going and this feels so like everything built up to this i feel like so much of the especially last season of better call saul because they have breaking bad to go off of and they know your expectations of you know where this is going they build off of that so well that that that last season of better call saul is up there with like true detective season one for like some of my favorite tv ever like it's so good it gets away

with things that like i'd be so curious what some people's experiences are of it that haven't seen Breaking Bad. Because the dialogue it's having with you as someone who knows the lore is entertaining, but in the same way that... When I played Resident Evil 4 Remake, the whole time I'm like, oh, you sneaky bastards, seeing little references.

Or playing Red Dead 2 if you hadn't played Red Dead 1. Which was... In that case, Red Dead 2 stands on its own really, really well, but it is really rewarding to play if you've played the first game and you know. I think there was a video I saw on YouTube talking about Red Dead 2 and Better Call Saul as some of the greatest prequels ever made. What is...

I mean, you mentioned Lost as one, but do you have a earliest or most memorable community that you got pulled into um in any media or any uh it's probably pokemon so when i so when i was in high school i think i've talked about this before but when i was in high school i got into like competitive battling like VGC like Pokemon stuff and I was

listening to this Pokemon VGC yeah video game competition but it's like oh okay I think that's what it stands for

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All one word. Use promo code bright lights. Bright lights. Yeah, so I used to play competitive Pokemon battling, Bright lights. Bright lights. Yeah, so I used to play competitive Pokemon battling, and I was watching this, or I used to listen to this podcast, and I was in a flash chat for the podcast, and I became a moderator of it,

and I became a contributor to the forum. Oh, so you were in it, yeah. And I would write guides aboutb training and stuff like that um and i would guest on the podcast sometimes this was like when i was like 18 like 17 18 and so that was like the first a little bit with runescape earlier than that um but i wasn't a big contributor but definitely i was like listen i listened to a bunch of runescape podcasts i paid attention to like things that were happening in the game i i made runescape content very early on like some of my first videos on youtube were like runescape like pk videos and shit um that's where my uh that's so my username on my YouTube channel,

you know how there's like three different versions of the like channel name on YouTube, like a youtube.com slash user slash. Oh yeah. Yeah. YouTube.com slash channel slash. So the user is the old one, but my username is like V sympathy V, which was the name of my runescape pure account back in the day.

It's like, like the X name of my RuneScape Pure account. Hell yeah. Back in the day. V. It's like the X name, X, but V. Hell yeah. And it was like there were spaces. So those communities, I would say. I'm going back even further. You know, when I was like really young and i would play i would play in tcg tournaments i would play in like uh yugioh tournaments and stuff of my i talked about this someone told me on the

pod or in the comments on patreon that this the the game store closed but that was a little bit like a community but not quite not quite there yeah okay i don't know one that uh came to mind that i feel like i've just kind of when i've gotten into stuff i've been guilty of being a lurker a lot of the time and reading about like different souls games that this or that but i did remember that it wasn't it wasn't something that i was super active for a while but i think as i was getting more into thinking about games as like art or like i played bioshock or like i played shadow of the colossus and i was like yo these mfs are spitting i think speaking of game trailers i think it was either game trailers or destructoid or some gaming public

publication that i frequented that i was actually i think it was game trailers that in the forums that people could just post stuff i remembered i was just like reading stuff and reading people post and i just played call duty 4 and i played that all ghillied up mission that's like a really famous one that's super amazing for the time of like the scripted sequence but you're like stealth and you get in and you snipe the guy and you get out and it's like all scripted and but it's yeah but it's really cinematic and i remember i i totally forgot about this still just now but it's probably one of the first times i actually put like pen to paper of writing my thoughts about a game i remember i had a post that was just like i just played the all ghillied up mission and wow whatever and i just talked about it a bit and it actually did like kind of well

that it had people responding oh yeah that was really great but well and it was like you know around the time that like portal or like bioshock or games were coming out that were more like narratively interesting but yeah i that did remind me of that that i was like oh damn i was in those forums a little bit i had a horrible first post like that yeah you're giving commenting on someone that was criticizing heavy rain when that post came out and me being like no games are finally art because now it's moved dude i love i love heavy rain but yeah not for the reasons that's like it's where gaming is headed but just because it's fun it's the room it's so fun to just sit down with friends and play and like there are moments where with the different choices and stuff where you're, they were kind of onto something here

with different mechanics of like, this is kind of a neat video game. And then there's so many other times where you're like, you just want it. And someone talks. Jordan, didn't you like lie about your age to like contribute to like video game? Oh yeah, I kept trying to get my thoughts published

on like websites that now in retrospect would not have cared if I were under 18, you know, I would just do it under a pseudonym or something. Yeah. But I, I reached out to, and they were so like indie at this point,

I don't even remember the size. I'm sure I did it with IGN as well, but they just never replied. Why would they? But I, I, yeah, I used to write a single dog shit like like that article and be

like why the walking dead game's actually kind of cool and i would like uh i guess some stuff when i was even younger that was like more impressive like oh yeah why uh why uh bioshock 2 uh represents redemption or whatever and then i would too is is great but underrated over overhated i think i like it better than infinite oh well yeah that's good gameplay wise but also we don't have to we come on now um uh well you know what i will say about bioshock infinite is hey there's heroes on both sides man hey i'm a centrist man i can't hey man it's uh revolting against racism and racial purity is exactly the same as being a fascist it's uh you know the part where you can choose to not throw the thing at the guy and it doesn't make any

difference that part's cool look dude makes you think about something not nothing specific someone grabs your arm either way and you yeah cool anyways but yeah i'm not racist i didn't throw the thing i used to write uh bullshit articles and then submit them uh under different names under the fear that they might jordan radica money big money Gordon Ramsey. We can't track this guy. Gordon, not free man. Gordon. That was from the time, right? Gordon Boggs. Remember Half-Life?

I don't know. You went on some? Yeah, I used to submit those under different names, under the impression that they'd have some kind of central communication method, and the next website would reach out to the other, if you've received any submissions. Because were you weren't like posting on like forms or stuff you would submit it to like the i would send it to whatever email contact forms or like the for ign careers at yeah and if they publish it they'd be like oh yeah we'd pay you a nickel for this

and that's the thing too i think one of the reasons that people get so bent out of shape about like the gaming community can be so toxic is that there's like all this mythology around gaming scores and gaming critique. And gamers, air quotes, especially like late 2000s, say Gamergate era gamers, they seem to be under the impression that game reviewers are paid extremely well and have the best job in the world. As opposed to just like scratching minimum wage usually living in a

very i've heard alana talk about that from working at ign where it's just like people have such this predisposed like they're paid off by the publication or they're and it's like maybe there's been some cases of some shitty review site getting paid but it's like to say such a blanket thing that's like all ign reviewers it's like first of all they're yeah they're not making that much money to begin with if anything there's the thing about like um wanting to still be able still receive the game for review like i know that there's been some stuff like that get invited to events get invited to like that that can that makes way more sense to me than like specific payola where it's like hey like give us a good review because i don't care right

like yeah go for it i don't mind if you want to soften your feelings yeah at the end of the day harassed i think yeah i think at the end of the day the reviews are like so there's no way they're never going to be super not like subjective and so i think you're really just going it for a general idea of like is this made well is it a golem is it xyz i think one of the a golem oh that sucks that's going to become industry term yeah damn trademark that this is this game is precious if you know what i'm saying speaking of uh game trailers and brandon i what i really love is that they and it kind of just shows that review scores are like they fluctuate so much that like i think dark souls 1 ign gave it

a nine and then they also will have articles that are like why this is the most important game in the last 10 years and it's like both of those things can be true that game has flaws what scale are you you know rating it on but what i i really love that when game trailers went down one of the last things they did is they edited their bloodborne review that was like a 9.6 or something to a 10 oh i think just because it and it the review is the same i don't think he re-recorded or anything i think all that changed at the end was the score because it was like uh we we had that wrong that it was like actually this game which it's like i don't know it's all i don't know where i'm going with this other than just like review scores don't actually

matter what is kind of what i mean there was a famous review i want to say do you know about the too much water oh yeah not wind waker it was it was which i fucking a lot of people they it's on ign where they have those they put the images up on the review with the positives and the negatives oh and it's like and if you watch the review you know that with that thing they meant more by that little excerpt not trying to just super defend ign but a little bit of like when they have that end score they have those things it it's not negative just because too much water what they mean by that was this whole other thing they probably went into but it's still on them that they put that at the end of two it's like you know how that looks right it's summarizing because 90 of the audience is just scrolling directly to the saw because that's where

exactly discourse gets and so that's why it's still on them that if they know most people are skipping to the end why would they put just too much water or for a call of duty like uh didn't you know innovate enough and then the score next to it is still a 9.8 and it's like you know people aren't gonna have your context so why are you if their minus was like too loud and then the score next to it is still a 9.8. And it's like, you know, people aren't going to have your context. So why are you... If then Minus was like, too loud. And then you read the review and it's like, oh, like thematically. That's a perfect example. Yeah.

Scary. Yeah, it was on Pokemon Omega, Ruby, and Alpha Sapphire. Really? Which are remakes of Ruby and Sapphire, which are games that are kind of built around the water. As in like traversing so context is super important for that one yeah context is important because it's like they didn't revamp one of the core like it's like i don't know it's it's yeah it's a weird context thing

but it just became a meme like it became a meme because almost to the degree of like do you do you think they intentionally did it to drive discourse like oh we know this will piss people off i think it was just like a flippant comment that like, didn't really have that much gravitas to it. But when you exaggerated swagger of a guy, you know, he fully didn't think twice about it at all. But it like,

it has outlived everything else. Every time I hear that, I know the exact footage that's playing while he says it as like miles is walking towards the edge with the exaggerated swagger of a black team. Back flip off. Fingers typing it, words saying it at no point. Yeah.

But I don't even think it's like, I think it is kind of when viewed under the like lens of gamergate right where like no review of a game written by a woman i think it was a like a woman who wrote that ijen review can be valid yeah then like you're gonna nitpick and take things in the most uncharitable way possible so like i think that that's like how it became the meme um because i don't think i mean it's one of those things because i watch so many pokemon fun fact videos i've like heard it referenced in like isolation but when i just looked at the know your meme page i was like that's probably what this is yeah no it is interesting that specifically with uh female game critics that it's like i think the score really doesn't mean that much if you again know that like i have loved games that are

seven out of ten i love max paint three but i remember like the gta5 ign review it is a woman that is at least presenting it i'm pretty sure she's the one that wrote it review, it is a woman that is at least presenting it. And I'm pretty sure she's the one that wrote it and they gave it a 10 out of 10, but she also does touch on how there's stuff in the game that could be a little bit tone deaf or problematic, I think. But I think because she still gave it a 10 out of 10, I think it was a lot more, those criticisms were probably a lot better received in the comments, which is so stupid because the second, if she gave the game anything other than a 10, so many gamers would immediately jump to the fact that she's a woman in their criticism of like, well, of course she did this because blah, blah, blah, blah.

But because she gave it a 10. Of course you're upset about that. Which is so, it's just gamers, man. I was going to say there is a gamer thing where you love something very dearly. And so to see someone criticize it or not share the same, you hold it so close to your identity that someone saying that something is a 7.8 out of 10, which is like that review score. The too much water thing was a 7.8,

which isn't a bad score. That's the thing. It's a Pokemon remake. It's like, whatever. It should be a great score, but the dialect of review scores is so warped by like, you know what?

There's been 10 games in history that have gone to three or below. Anything below. I think it's universally. And I think it's because of IGN and these other critics that it's like, I think it's kind of on them that it's the norm is that it's like anything below an eight is not a good game. Yeah. Which is wild

which is fucking insane that that feels like very good that's four stars i think the movie is terrible it's it's the thing too where it's like i think that uh in theory when you yeah when you look at movies if a movie has like a 60 or above on metacritic like rotten tomatoes you know if it's because it's about the percentage of critics that are just positive. Yeah. But on like Metacritic or something where it is about the score, anything that's like a 60 or up, I'm like,

oh, that's like a pretty good movie. Yeah. I saw that. But if it's a game, it's like Gollum getting like, like reaches out of the fucking screen and punches you in the mouth. Yeah.

Steal your dad or something. I just saw the new like Fast and furious movie which isn't great i guess i'm sure it's fun but you know what i mean like i enjoyed myself at no point was i thinking i was like laughing and having a good time with friends and it got what a 55 on metacritic okay i don't it didn't take away from my enjoyment am i gonna hold it up as like a bastion of cinema no am i gonna tell someone it's amazing if they ask me no but if somebody goes to see that movie It didn't take away from my enjoyment. Am I going to hold it up as like a bastion of cinema? No. Am I going to tell someone it's amazing if they ask me?

No. But if somebody goes to see that movie, I'm not going to go halt. You can't see it. It's scoring poorly in reviews. I feel like the OG toxic criticism discourse is probably like music criticism. yeah i mean you're close to this than we are yeah because you make you make terrible music and so yeah honestly too much i got my wet track you're like the mixing is just like sloppy honestly it's underwater too much water would be a really cool wrap- up line for like if there's like over processing on a record it's too wet

too much wet reverb too much water let's get a fire mix nirvana is never mind it's a baby too much water that one's called wet baby is that first album wet baby

dollar penis baby it's so hard greedy baby That one's called Wet Baby. Yeah. Was that first album Wet Baby? Wet Baby. With Dollar Penis Baby. It's so hard. Greedy Baby. Speaking of music, how is that? Do you like it? Do you enjoy it? It's good. It's fun.

I feel like I definitely kind of burned myself out in losing my mind trying to finish that album. And it became so much about just like let's just finish it and get it out the door but then obviously like we're talking about editing as you're doing it you're like well this is important i mean i want it to be the best and so it took me a billion years and had to like find myself so to speak that's like a lot of it's hard i bet it's really hard to push yourself through it when you've already kind of like given a lot of your energy to something there were definitely aspects to it where i knew like i just have to get this out the door where i had to just give myself a deadline and be like whatever it is it is and it led to like moments where i think inevitably in a creative process i think

that unless you have some sort of deadline or something that's going to push you things just won't happen that's like a pretty blanket statement but for example it was like some of those verses and different lyrics and things that came together that i might feel like about now at the time only came together because i was like fuck something has to happen like there are tracks like the second track that like totally freaked me out went through so many different versions and there's so many different b-sides and sometimes it was like a house song it was like a dance song and i might actually release some of those versions that'll be coming but the final takes on that like awesome oh wow like that the and the

specific lyrics i was so sick and it was a week before it came out and i recorded those because i was like fuck none of this is working all right i'll do this so you can hear in the mix that i'm like a little nasally or a little like because i was like sitting in my friend's apartment in new york just holding the mic with like a blanket for me and just like but it's like it is what it is i think i sweated it for a while but now i think the beauty just like with videos is once it's out it's like sending your kid off to college you're like I tried my best you're gonna do whatever you're gonna do and I'm just gonna focus on what did you have like kind of a morning period in the same way that like empty nest syndrome almost yeah so glad my kid has gone to college but no that is actually that makes the

metaphor work even better is that it's this thing where it was like I uh and I I touch on it in the from soft video because part of the reason why it's taking me so long to really make a big video on not only from soft but specifically elden ring is because the year it came out i was i was playing it but i was also losing my mind on this album because i had said it would come out in february february came and went that didn't fucking happen a bunch of personal stuff like i uh i anyways it was definitely a thing that once it was out it was kind of this it was this relief but also this immense like oh and then kind of this like hole a little bit but then also like fortunately it was received pretty well it's a great album thank

you yeah i loved it and um but it's i think it's just that thing that anytime you finish something you're like okay on to the next thing but i think specifically with music i've only recently been kind of dipping my toes again because i think i i don't know it kind of like i it really made me real and this is getting into some like deeper territory, but it really made me reevaluate like kind of what I wanted or what I thought about myself and my ego and what I want to be. Like, do you want to be a musician? Do you want to be a YouTuber? Do you want, and it's like, no, I just want to make stuff. But I think also like putting something that was definitely by far like the most

personal project I'd put out. And that's like really draining in itself. And it's this thing where it's like really draining in itself and it's this thing where it's like i don't think it's perfect but it's not would you ever right there's like not a version how could you yeah yeah but and and but it's a thing that it just i don't know i don't know where i'm going with this but it's it's really really i like appreciate it so much that when people say like oh i really connected with this or this meant a lot to me. Yeah. But it's also this struggle with myself that there's times where I think that they're the biggest pieces of shit.

And I think that I'm pitchy and I think that my lyrics are whack. And I think, and then sometimes, you know, you see criticism online. And fortunately it seems to be generally well-received, but you see different criticism, like, you know, the needle drop, like responded to it on stream. And it's like me and fantano we're like pals whatever and eventually in his uh like why you know review like at year end he said some pretty nice things about it of like oh yeah no i think that production wise it's promising and he had talked about my tracks prior but i'm not gonna lie like when it first came out he had a uh a stream highlight where

the thumbnail is just like pretty clickbaity of just like my face and him just being like and like not good in big letters and in the live reaction on stream he like listens to it and tracks that i you know personally am very proud of whatever but again it's like i know that there's other times where i think they're kind of cringy whatever it's just how you feel but it was it was something that i i have no ill will or anything towards him i think that you know i still am watching the videos and i take them all with a grain of salt because at the end of the day he says like you know this is just my opinion but i will say it was kind of disappointing that like not only to be uh i think it did put it in perspective a little

bit of having watched other videos where he has like talked about someone or kind of not like ripped into them but was that on the live uh listening to the album so it's like the first time he's listening to it and he's listening with chat and he even will admit and knows that his chat can be like atrocious on twitch. Right. But he's like playing sound effects or like doing like, and they're like, you know, in the middle of listening to the song or whatever, being like, okay, I think there's enough of that.

But then later on, he talks about how there were elements that he liked. I don't know. I don't know where I'm going with this, but it was definitely a learning lesson where I think I had watched so many game critics and I am myself a game critic and I've watched so many game critics and I am myself a game critic and I've watched so many different music reviews, his included. And I think being on the receiving

end of that was very important criticism. And I think that it fucked me up a little bit more than I kind of realized or like admitted to myself for a while. And now I feel very much at peace with it, but there was definitely a moment where I was like, damn, like it got to me. Like it doesn't feel good to have someone say, but at the same time, it's like specifically to Fantano, I like actually really value his opinion. And I find his videos really entertaining. I'm like, I've been on his podcast and stuff. And we like, we haven't talked since then. But again, I have like, he's just doing his thing you know like i've called videos blah blah is outdated and that's such a blanket statement and i feel like i back it up in different claims and that's just how the that's how this industry

works you know right you have to have a take and even if you have a nuanced take like i feel like we often do all of everyone in this room often does i feel like fantano often does too fantano often does you have to be like you have to leave that that um curiosity open of like oh what's it gonna be you know and in it in it in negativity spreads so much further than like neutral or extremely positive until you get into like the Mr. Beast levels of like extreme philanthropy positivity. It's a thing that I think is also a reminder. And I feel like I rode the line. Like, I'm not going to lie. I still feel pretty good about the rock star in the Naughty Dog video because I felt very passionate about these things and like, I'm criticizing them because I love them,

but I feel like I made it a point in the beginning to really preface like I have friends that worked on The Last of Us Part II. Like I love rockstar games. Like I'm not making these to be like, these fucking suck. These are the worst. And I think that in the case with seeing that like stream highlight,

and it's not even like it was a viral clip or on his main channel. It was on the second. But I think just seeing the title and the thumbnail and watching a bit of it it felt a bit like this wasn't super coming from a place of like respect yeah for the art you know what i mean yeah it's tricky for you especially i think a because you know and respect fantano and like i'm sure i've watched him since high school. I'm like a fan. So there's a, you know.

Probably deepest, most insular worrying moments about the album. What Will Fantano? I think it's probably one of them. Yeah. And I, it took a lot to just put that outside the room. Because it changes nothing. Like when I went in the booth or whatever, it was like, whether I had to like in early days, like not like abuse alcohol, but just get even like a little buzz on or something just to like get you out of that space of like,

it's just me. I'm just doing this for me and what I like, you know. I think one maybe credit you should give yourself and it sounds like you've already processed it very well, but you are being very respectful of your subject matter and the people and peoples you're talking about. But I think studios benefit from being kind of decentralized, right? It's not a video called Neil Druckmann.

This is big stinky. Here's the things I don't like or the issues I have with him. As an artist though, and an independent artist, that's different, right and i and i've i've never like publicly talked about this or anything because it's like it's it's the way it goes i still really respect him i i like i'm just like i said i'm still watching the videos like i watch the second channel stuff i think that he's hilarious but it's i think it was just like a oh damn like that's that's what that feels like and i but it's, I think it was just like a, Oh damn. Like that's, that's what that feels like.

And I think it's, it's the thing of just like, I think especially hearing him talk about it later. And it was a big lesson for me of just realizing like, man, you really have to not care what people think because that's not a good feeling. But I think the fact that, uh, when he talked about it later, he did say some positive things about specifically the production and that he felt like it was promising and he was interested to see what's next or exactly what he said. I think that was really nice, but that also made it a little bit worse too, because it's like, well, if you eventually came to this thing, like, why did you, why did you feel like you had to approach it from this place that maybe wasn't the most professional or like respectful you know and i think for to sort of uh not to defend him but more to give you more credit because like

one obviously there's no objectivity to what he's saying or doing but then also he's, at the end of the day, and I'm a big Fantano fan as well, he's content-brained. He's doing content. Right. And that's often going to mean, you know, when you're pumping out the amount of content that he is, he's got, and we don't even know who's like running the second channel thumbnails and titles. Exactly. You know what I mean? That was something that I think I realized and was thinking about and made me. And it wasn't even this thing that I was like stressing over for a while.

But I'm not going to lie. There was like a day or two after I saw it where I was like, damn. Because you work on this thing for years. And obviously, you know that I watch that. And it's like the initial response from friends and family and my own like followers or people that you know care about my shit thank you was so overwhelming when it first came out that it was like it it was only later that like you know a week or whatever that i saw that that there was a brief moment of like oh man but for the most part i was so like i felt very grateful and thankful and there was a

period of time in uh i guess this would have been middle of last year roundabout um kind of my brain doesn't work so i could be wrong but around middle of last year uh it was after a very the audience knows but like a 2021 2022 very unpleasant a lot of me traveling back and forth to the hospital where my mom was. And I hit some weird like emotional saturation point where I wasn't able to cry anymore. And it can be a release, right? Get the hormones out of your face. No, I get that.

I have to like watch a Ghibli movie or something. Yeah, that's got to be some kind of trigger. With movies and games i always get locked into analysis mode and it and it takes away the opportunity to really get into it unless i re-watch certain movies but soundtracks and certain artists can do it for me and pine barrens became which you know i'd listened to seven eight months prior whenever it actually came out but it was just in my like general rotation playlist and then i was listening to it on the bus back home 40 minute trip shouldn't have listened at the beginning of the trip and i cried for 40 minutes

and i played it literally once paused and then just like cried and then played it again walked home crying god and i felt literally that was like a turning point between the most, it being stressful, but emotionally stunted, like not processing anything. And then immediately after just like, you know, problems not solved, but at least showing myself that I had like some, I could evoke some feelings. And I won't say more because I'll'll just start crying again but thanks for that record

thank you man got me a little bit goofy with projects though that's almost like you're it's almost like a parasite a little bit where the parasite is waiting it's waiting

desperately for just the right yeah dude it's less placas and you you need to be able to throw a flashbang and instantly kill it but instead they hoard those flash keeps growing and then the moment that someone actually does tickle the exact fear that you had yeah i don't like the term disproportionate because it is it's a responsive response as sensations sensation is valid no matter what, right? But the 10,000th comment that happens to be the first negative comment means so much more because you were waiting for it. You're anticipating a firework kind of feeling. I understand the hesitation around disproportionate, but I will say that there's like a, not that I know the psychology of it, but there's like that thing where it like takes 10 positive things to like outweigh one negative thing.

Like we, I think it's like a survival instinct or something where we have like a negativity bias because it's like a negative, a negative thing might help us survive. Like, oh, like how do I avoid? I need to remember the negative experience I had. I need to remember because avoiding it will help me stay alive in the event of like, you know. Yeah, maybe it's rooted in some primal. Your brain. Yeah.

And so that could be pseudoscience. I don't know. But it's something that resonates with me and resonates with my own experience because, like Jordan said, in any of my creative outlets, like whenever I see, like,'t bear to watch someone react to me. It's valid and I want it to happen. Great. But I don't want to see it because he's going to be eating on stream. He's going to be standing up. He's going to be walking away. He's going to be playing with his dog.'s gonna get bored they're gonna and all this stuff is everyone's immune to it or no one is immune to it and it doesn't actually mean anything yeah you know what i mean because like in the same because he's filling time he's taking a break he's like doing content and then in the same breath like uh you you know, he'll later reference, I don't think any, like he's ever said anything negative about my videos, but like, I'm always nervous that I'm going to have something that doesn't keep someone's attention. That's your biggest fear while editing, right?

We talked about, you get to the middle of a video and you're like, this is the most boring. Or it gives a shit about bonfires. Or like my second channel is very like impromptu and improvised and like premium it's it's premium but it's not it's it's not a the type of content where i labor over the script because there isn't one oftentimes and it's not content where i'm laboring over the edit because i'm not usually like i'm watching and giving notes but i'm not like in the edit for it for hours but that's also that's the whole beauty of the second channel is that it gives you a space exactly and that's that's like what i'm trying to do with mine yeah but that's but sorry just a real quick

finish this is like um but that there's a vulnerability in that because someone might not see you at your best in your best light. If you're like, oh, I need someone to watch this with full attention with blah, blah, blah. And you're like, you like, oh, this five second clip is like, maybe this five second segment is not retaining or you're editing the from soft video. And you're like this couple of seconds thing isn't the most bombastic attention grabbing intermediary seconds. someone's like looking down and eating their golden grams you know what i mean and they like completely missed it well i'll finish a video in the next morning like i think the age of broken games like the last one i finished it while i was

with family and it was like no disrespect to them at all they were super supportive my dad was like oh let's throw it on let's watch it throw. Throw it on. It was exactly that people were eating, kids were playing and stuff. And I realized myself, I'll put on a video and yeah, I'll be eating my Chipotle and then looking up at my phone or whatever. And it's like, you're listening to it. And so I think at the end of the day, I, when I edit my videos, I go through the raw footage and I go through the audio and you trim it down. And a lot of the times I'll just like, I'll watch it to be like, Oh, was this take funny? Was I looking at the camera? But a lot of the times I'm just listening to it and i remember that like if that's good you're good like have the visuals be good i definitely am a perfectionist with it in some

cases in other cases it looks like it was made with fucking crayons and that's the beauty of it but yeah i uh it's really like i realized most people are just listening a lot of the time. I mean, I mean, yeah. You guys know, like, I think there's a, uh, I've never loved the sentiment of, uh, look, I think perfectionism is dangerous. I think perfect is the enemy of the good.

Uh, it's a, it's a mode of self oppression. Yeah. Yeah. The only thing perfection exists to do is prevent you from doing things. That's all it's there for.

It's to iterate and frustrate and perfection never makes you happy because you can't reach it. And if you think you have, you release it and then you realize you didn't and you regret it. It is what it is.

But a healthy pursuit of perfection or at least indulging in it a little bit, I think is perfectly healthy if you know that it doesn't matter. If you know that it's indulgent. If you know it's a little treat. That is the embodiment of when I do these extensive edits

is because I know from having gone back and watched my own videos, like the Rockstar one or whatever, that I go back and I watch it and I forget that I've done something and I'm on the receiving end and I'm like, did you just put a little guy up there?

I'm like, Oh, that was the feeling I was going for when I made that. So that's for me. That not being there would not get a bad comment. No, that is like flourish. Most people would not even like notice or care.

Yeah. And it's effort to, to like feedback, right? Like the, the record is so much fucking work over such a large amount of time in so many different emotional states maybe in a way that a video just couldn't be because it doesn't ask the same of you maybe like uh you can't really it's an especially since it's an

this is all me projecting i've not made an album right but i feel like with an album, you are doing 10 different jigsaw puzzles and then trying to make them one image and put them in the right order that feels right or like runs through a theme or a story. And that is just not the case with a single video. No. like like uh if we release one video in between part one and part two of this recent event we're reacting to it's not as if it like ruins the canon yeah the season's out of order so that's its own no you're sure it's definitely the hardest thing i've ever done like over there were moments that were easy there were moments that were hard but i think behind it would be like the naughty dog video in terms of how long it took me to write that and then record it and then edit it it's like the longest video i've ever made and

just the amount of like research and thought and whatever i thought that that was like damn but thinking about doing that because i kind of did it again with this from soft video that's pretty chunky i'm like okay this is hard but i think it's having done it you kind of know and so even though the album was like the hardest thing i've ever done and right after it i was like i'm never making any fucking music again this is awful i think the fact that now i think about making like an ep or something and i'm like oh it doesn't sound as hard because i've kind of been through it you know is it it is the music real estate kind of taken up by video production stuff right now or do they operate in two different hemispheres i think a big part of it is the laptop that I made all my music on,

like literally blew up. The battery exploded. That's like a beautiful metaphor. Dude, this shit is fire, literally fire. It was this Razer laptop. Shout out Razer. I'm pretty sure it was. Dude, your shit is on fire, dude.

It was, it turned. I don't know if it turned itself on or if i just forgot to shut it off hello in my backpack a while ago when i was flying here from new york and ever since then it's had a heating issue where i would have to prop it up when i play games because it was a gaming laptop and over time the battery just kept expanding which i think happens on its own with laptops and eventually i replaced the battery and took the laptop apart and fixed the thermal paste and stuff so it wouldn't overheat anymore but i think it was the replacement battery i got off amazon that was sus and that's why i'm like

this isn't like yo razor fuck your shit i'm pretty sure i goofied that i had replaced the battery after i finished the album because i was like yeah I golem'd it. I was like, I'm not going to take this thing apart until the album is done. And then it, you know, it was done and I was like staying at my brother's and stuff. And I wanted to just be able to play games more. So I finally took it apart and did it.

And I was like, hell yeah, I got a new replacement from eBay and this and that. And then I came home after I'd moved here and it had exploded in my absence and was had like goopy battery jizz all over my desk that was new and it got it literally was like this gray weird i could see where it had blasted out because it was like the laptop was like on like one of those stands that was next to my monitor and it had like fucking back on the back of the monitor in the window so i could see when

it exploded like battery fragments whatever and it's like i wasn't there probably could have started a fire thankfully everything was fine but that's like they shouldn't be able to do that yeah so that was the laptop that i used machine to make the album which is supposed to be just for like beat sampling and loops. And I did it for the entire record. You're a fucking crazy person. I am. And so it was kind of divine intervention that I,

I have a Mac book now, what I love and I use for editing and stuff. And I have logic on there and I've been meaning to switch, switch over to logic because I know in the long run, it would be so much better so i think it was a combination of things where now i'm like okay i'm ready to like learn that da i'm ready to start there's a lot of projects that fortunately were backed up and exported in my dropbox so i can go back and listen to them i don't know if i can find like the original

projects because they might be on the exploded laptop. Right, right. That laptop might still turn on. I just haven't tried. I'm scared to plug it in because yeah, the battery exploded but I don't know if I plug it in if I'm going to time travel

to the hurt locker where he pulls and all the bombs are there. You just have your laptop covered in goo. I'm just going to leave it. It's in like a box in my closet

because I didn't want to throw it away because there is stuff on there but I also, also I don't closet because I didn't want to throw it away because there is stuff on there. But I also, so I don't know if it'd be safe to throw it away. I'd say keep it in that flammable box in closed space. Make sure you get rid of the battery gunk.

But it's a laptop that turns on when it doesn't have a battery in it by plugging it into the wall. Yes. So that's the thing you can do. You can also take out the hard drive. I think what I plan to do is to take off the bottom but because it exploded it really warped a lot of the screws that were already pretty stripped the tiny ones to take the case

off so i might just have to like rip the bottom off to get the battery oh yeah um but yeah at the very least you can, you know, take the, before you even turn the computer on, this could be a thing you do. Just take the hard drive, take the hard drive out,

get up, mount for it. You know, you can, I've done that for the family computer. Yeah. Yeah. And then after that exploded,

and then yeah, after that, it's kind of this problem that follows me around. I installed native instruments in my family. Yeah. The fruity instruments in my family. Yeah, the Fruity Loop explosion in 2019. The serum VS. The bass was crazy. Oh, man.

Well, I think this is a great place to call it for today's episode of Sad Boys. Jakey, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. So we are going to relax on the couch for a special patreon bonus episode of sad boys sad boys nights every week an extra episode of the show for five dollars oh i'm like you get all the episodes five dollars jordan jordan really goes horizontal jordan gets full horizontal. I misaligned my spine. It was the horizontal hokey pokey. We've been reading public freak out customer service stories. And we did a call out.

We've got a bunch of those lined up to check out. We're going to laugh. We're going to cry probably. And we're going to relax on Sad Boys Nights. So that's available on patreon.com slash sadboys. but that about does it for today's episode of sad boys thanks again to jakey thanks for having me joining us is a fantastic time and we end every episode of sad boys with a particular phrase we love you and we're sorry boom one time some guy came into the store i work at and wanted to buy a pack of beer for five pounds he handed me a poly pocket full of loose change the coins were wet with an unknown

brown liquid you can't have me you know what's actually happening is you can't have it.