Tech Over Tea - Every AAA Game Developer Is Being Bought | Solo

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

All the AAA game devs are slowly becoming one, now even Bungie is being purchased but hey at least we'll always have the indie scene. ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, good evening. I am as always your host, Brody Robertson, and today we are back for episode 101 of Tech of a T. I'm pretty sure in like 5, maybe 10 years, there's not going to be, you know, AAA game devs. There's just going to be the AAA game devs, there's just gonna be the AAA game dev. I think I forgot to I forgot to do my overlay I'll fix that right now actually You may have heard this by now. That is the wrong window that way you may have heard this by now, but Bungie Bungie is being acquired So Bungie who were the original developers of the Halo franchise, are now going to be purchased by Sony.

So, Sony, do I have a link here? Yes, I do have a link here. Why am I searching for it? Here we go. So, the deal is for $3.6 billion, which is, you know, considerably smaller than Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzard, but with Blizzard, you got King, Blizzard, Activision, lots of money makers. Not to say that Bungie isn't a big money maker right now. Destiny 2, I don't actually know its play numbers,

but I know it is one of the most popular games on Steam. I want to put it in, like, the top... I want to say top five. Now... I want to show you this fucking capture on my screen. Boats. There we go. Show me the web...

I don't care what you stupid capture. Show me the website. Thank you. Let's see. I don't care what you stupid catcher show me the website thank you um let's see charts uh destiny 2 destiny 2 there we go so where is the charts here we go play charts charts, here we go, play charts so 61,000 65,000 peak in the last 25 hours

24 hours 56,000 right now, all time peak is 300,000, so obviously not like at it's absolute peak, but that is still you know, a really really popular game. Um, I just realized

because I zoomed, oh, I made the window, you couldn't see all of it, but like Destiny 2 is a really big game. Does Bungie have anything else they're really managing right now? What is Bungie doing right now besides Destiny? Bungie, let's see. What do they have? What do they do? What is... Besides Destiny, I literally have no idea what's going on in the Bungie studios. Probably more Destiny stuff, to be honest. Yeah, basically. They've just been doing Destiny for a while, games developed, here we go, anything of note, uh, nope, literally nothing of note, like, not just nothing of note, just nothing, so they did Destiny in 2014, I remember when that came out, that was a, apparently it was a good

game, I don't, I never actually played the original destiny then they did the um halo mcc and then destiny 2 and that's all i've done okay so i was right basically destiny 2 is the only thing they're doing right now um yeah so we can't really say anything's happening you know until the acquisition has finalized until money has changed hands and they are on Sony's books. But this is a really weird, really weird shift in the gaming industry. I don't think there's going to be a situation, here's my thing, I don't think we're ever going to hit a situation where all of the game development is being done. By a very small number of companies. But I think amongst the.

Because you know. There will always be the indie developers. Coming up. Making a new game. Maybe they'll be purchased at some point. But I think when it comes to. Just the gaming landscape. I think indie stuff is always going to be indie.

Like indie stuff isn't going away. As long as people have a computer and they can make games, that will always be a thing. But in the AAA space, the number of companies that actually exist in that space as independent entities is really shrinking. When i said that in a couple of years like there's just going to be the the triple a get the triple a game dev i'm like sort of joking there but honestly like the direction we're going that is entirely possible because what the three biggest companies right now are Microsoft that I think much of the biggest now with the acquisition of Activision Blizzard only the second biggest are Tencent because Tencent is massive in China but they've expanded outside of China as well with our I don't get to get this wrong genshin is a ten cent game i want to say um

genshin impact uh maybe i'm wrong there actually no okay i'm wrong there uh my bad but ten cent is oh yeah is it a wait hold up it's just not listening properly uh genshin ten cent genshin Genshin, Tencent, Genshin. No, okay, they're not involved. But MiHoYo is partnered with Tencent. Okay. But anyway, Tencent is also massive as well. They're in the top three and Sony is in the top three. Sony will be just bigger now, I guess. Now, once again, I want to say this again I want to say this I want to repeat this

actually maybe in Sony's case is different I don't think that by buying Bungie they will take Destiny 2 and whatever other games that Bungie does in the future off of the other platforms the reason why Destiny 2 is so popular is because of its current users and the reason why bungie is valuable is because of you know the current money they are making i don't think there is any chance that sony's gonna do that just like i don't think there's any chance that microsoft is gonna you know pull cooler duty off of the playstation especially like the dumb ones that people who have said they're gonna pull it off of the pc. Especially, like, the dumb ones are the people who have said they're going to pull it off of the PC.

I've actually heard that. It's like, you do realize who owns Windows, right? You do realize who the developers of Windows are, right? Like, anyone who actually said that was dumb. I could at least see the logic in the playstation argument but that's about as far as it goes but yeah that's how it is the uh the game industry is is uh basically shrinking but speaking of the game industry i want to talk a bit about the steam deck so i just recorded a video about this earlier today.

I guess you would have seen it by now if you watch the main channel. Valve, I was going to say Steam Deck. Steam Deck is not the company. Valve seems to be pulling a bit of, I want to call it a bit of marketing fuckery with the way they are handling the Steam Deck Verified program. So the Steam Deck Verified program, if you don't know, is basically a, it's a program, it's a certification program that indicates what games are gonna work well on the Steam Deck. And they're opening up the, um, the testing process. So previously, the queuing for it was entirely automated.

So they would just go through games based on a, I guess, heuristic queue sorted by what the people who had reserved the Steam Deck actually were interested in. So, you know, you'd get whatever the big games on Steam are. Maybe it's a bit skewed because a lot of people who are going to buy a Steam deck may already be Linux

users. So there's going to be a bit of skewing there towards more Linux-y focused games. But even so, a lot of games that people want to play on Windows would be tested in this queue. Now, according to Valve, they say they have tested, in the last

several months, thousands of titles. Now, I can either prove this wrong or prove that they have a list they have not released. So if we go back over to SteamDB, is this the one? Yes, this is the list. So back over on SteamDB, there is a list of games that basically have support and don't have support and all that fun stuff. So right now, oh, it's gone up just a little bit again. There are 91 games that are verified. There are 79 that are playable and 30 that are unsupported. Now, doing a bit of quick napkin math, I can tell you that 91 plus 79 plus 30 does not equal thousands. At all.

So, if we have supposedly thousands of games that have been tested over the past couple of months a bit under 200 games that are on the list um well clearly there's more of a list here than we've seen and it surely

surely you haven't tested like 800 games in the past couple of weeks it doesn't take a couple of months to release your testing results. So, what I'm one... 99.9% confirmed...

Whatever. What I'm almost certain of is that Valve has a list of games that they are not releasing yet probably for marketing reasons so if they can get to just before the launch of the steam deck or maybe like just after before people actually get them you know no i think they should release it just before the orders actually are allowed to be paid

for so you release it like maybe the day before and what happens is all of the gaming outlets even all the tech outlets will be reporting on this saying okay the steam deck has 10 000 games that are playable on it and boom look at all of the marketing hype that is now surrounding the steam deck you go from. A hundred and fifty. Well two hundred games. Yeah two hundred games. I was a hundred and fifty when I was planning the video yesterday. You go from two hundred games.

To let's just give it a conservative estimate. And say. Three thousand playable games. Like there's a lot more games that are playable on Linux. And most of the games that are playable on Linux. Are also playable on the Steam Deck, um, that creates a lot of marketing hype, because all of those media outlets talk about it, all of the YouTubers talk about it, everybody starts talking about the Steam Deck, and you know what that means? Lots and lots of money. Chase, can you stop rubbing your head on the power button?

What are you doing, cat? Anyway, yeah. I know for a fact that Valve is going to release this list. There's no chance. Unless whoever wrote that announcement has no idea what they're talking about. And for whatever reason wrote thousands, even though there is literally not thousands of games they attested. That is the only way that I see that list not existing. And weirdly though, there's actually a lot of the games on the playable list.

And actually the unsupported list, which I don't know why they are there. So if we go to the unsupported list, here we go. So Persona 4 Golden, technically it's unsupported. I guess you could argue. So the problem with P4G is there are issues with the codec that the

cutscenes are using. Because of that, it doesn't work with the base version of Proton, but you can use a different version. You can mess around with some Proton settings, and it literally works perfectly. You cannot play with base

Proton, but Glorious Egg Roll, it works. It's got a gold rating. Like, it plays perfectly fine. Like, there are people, like Ren, who stream it on like, you can play this game. Basically, you can play this game. Halo MCC

is another game that also has a gold rating. Now, in the case of Halo, Halo technically, that's that also has a gold rating. Now, in the case of Halo... Halo... Technically that's accurate and it doesn't have a... full support. So the multiplayer is the problem. Single player? Gold. It works basically perfectly, but multiplayer currently uses EAC and the developers have not enabled EAC support for it

so also fair other things in here I think are generally more fair a lot of these games are exclusively multiplayer games and have antitreat issues things like Dead by Daylight uh Warhammer which the developers literally come out and said yeah our, our game doesn't work, but we do want to get it to work if we can do so. Fall Guys, also EAEC game, I want to say. And most of the other games in here

pretty much are the same. Or, Back 4 Blood's another one where, yeah, exact same problem. Now, on the playable list, like, there's nothing wrong with the verified list. The verified list is all games that I know work perfectly. The problem is with the playable list, and I don't agree with some of the games that have been put on here. Wait, why are you marked as playable and all?

Wait, what the fuck? You're marked as verified and also playable. Oh, wait, no. I might have clicked the wrong one. Anyway. So, let's see. Cookie Clicker. The problem with that one is it doesn't have controller support.

That's one of the criteria that will get your game kicked out of the verified program. And that's, yeah, just totally fair. If you're new playing on a controller, like, yeah, makes sense. It takes two. And also, where is the other one? Maybe it's on the other list. Game by the same developer, A Way Out.

So, I would not say, okay, I have played A Way Out on Linux. It is technically playable, but it's not in a state, I think they need an extra category. Honestly, I feel like they should have just used the rating system that ProtonDB has, rather than having it's perfect, it works, or it doesn't work. Because A Way Out, it works great if you can get it launched. The problem with A Way Out and It Takes Two is they are both origin games. it takes two, is they are both Origin games. Now, anyone who's tried to play an Origin game on Linux

should know that Origin is a mess. Origin is a complete fucking mess, and it's because it just doesn't have a Linux version. Like, you run Proton through, you run Origin

through Proton. Like, it run Proton through... You run Origin through Proton. Like, it's not a good experience. There's a lot of other games on this list that are in the same camp. Like, I know Battlefield... A lot of the Battlefield games are on the playable list. Battlefield 4, Battlefront 2, that's also in the same camp. Battlefield 1, Battlefield 5. All of these are origin games, and

yeah, they're technically playable if you manage to get past the origin client. Getting past that can be a bit of a hassle. So, there is clearly some fuckery going on here with the list. Look, if they

don't have a list that has a thousand games on it by the time. Look, if they don't have a list that has a thousand games on it by the time we launch, I'm going to be really surprised. I'm genuinely going to be surprised and I'm going to have no idea how Valve has cocked up this launch as much as they did with the Steam Machines. The Steam Machines never should have been released.

The Steam Machines... Like, okay. If the Steam Machines never should have been released. The Steam Machines... Okay, if the Steam Machines came out with the announcement of Proton, if Proton was how you push those machines, how you push that version of Linux, that would have been a whole different system. It actually probably maybe would have had some level of success. But because they didn't release Proton until years later, like, it's, yeah.

Oh, the other problem with the unsupported list. Games that I know are unsupported are missing. Same with the verified list. Actually, I think I mentioned the verified list before. So on the unsupported list, Apex Legends is in here. And Apex Legends is like one of the biggest games on Steam. And it's not on your unsupported list

even though it's unsupported. So clearly something's going on here. Maybe they're giving the Apex devs time to, you know, enable EAC. Battle.i? EAC. Wait, what does Apex use? Wait, what does Apex use? I want to say EAC? BattleEye EAC? Wait, what does Apex use? Wait, what does Apex use?

I want to say EAC. It uses EAC. Yes, okay, I was right. Yeah. Maybe they're giving them time to enable it. Maybe. I could believe that, but... I'm going to stick with my theory for now.

But since we're on the topic of the Steam Deck I just want to touch on another really cool thing so ages back, probably like 5-6 months ago FSR support was added into I want to say Proton GE and then later came to the base

version of Proton now the way that FSR works under Linux, and I guess whenever you want to force FSR when it's not in the game settings, is you need to have the game resolution turned lower and the monitor resolution turned higher. The problem with this though is it requires you, you know, having virtual monitor resolutions, which in a lot of cases doesn't really play nicely. And going above your native monitor resolution is a bit of a hack to get working.

So the compositor that's being used on the Steam Deck, the GameScope compositor. Here we go. GameScope. The SteamOS compositing a window manager so game scope also used to be called steam comp manager one of its features is actually forcing these higher virtual resolutions allowing you to actually i guess upscale on the Steam Deck and hopefully get hopefully get better performance with less of a cost uh than doing like uh straight up MSAA yes better than doing like straight up MSAA it's not perfect I've run it on my system it like not GameScope but fsr it's not perfect but it does definitely give you a

a better level of performance if you're willing to accept the extra not artifacting would be a good way to put it i guess graininess maybe maybe that's a good way to put it uh which probably isn't an issue on a screen at the size of the Steam Deck. Which is probably why they're putting the effort in to actually getting FSR working. Because, yeah, if it was a bigger screen, let's say it was a 10-inch screen, a 13-inch, let's say they just made a laptop. Let's just say the Steam Deck was actually a laptop. 10 inch screen, a 13 inch, let's say they just made a laptop. Let's just say the Steam Deck was

actually a laptop. In that case, I think that FSR at 720p especially would not be viable. But I don't know. It's a question of how it's going to go.

I am interested to see what it's like on launch. I don't have a Steam Deck, but a lot of people are making Steam Deck videos. I'm probably going to end up trying SteamOS 3 when it comes out. It's not going to have, like, there's not going to be as much of a reason to run it on a desktop system, but just because I know there's going to be a lot of people who download SteamOS thinking that something is special about this version of Linux that makes it easier to use. Because I know there are people on ProtonDB,

like up until, what, a year ago, who are still running SteamOS 2. SteamOS 2, based on... Debian 9? Wait, what version? SteamOS 2. SteamOS 2. Based on. Debian 9? Wait. What version? SteamOS 2.

What is it based on? Debian 8. It was based on Debian 8. It is incredibly out of date. And you should not be using it. And I have no idea why this page is still up. And it still talks about setting up Steam machines. Why are they still talking about Steam machines? I don't understand.

Why is there no warning on here saying, hey, this is incredibly out of date, you should not be using this. Look at the GPU it recommends. An NVIDIA graphics card. Just an NVIDIA graphics card, doesn't matter which one. A AMD graphics card, Just an Nvidia graphics card. Doesn't matter which one. A AMD graphics card.

Radeon 8500. Oh lordy lord. I will be very happy when they actually release the beta. Or something. Or anything. Look at this. There's actually people who are still trying. Still trying to download-

Okay, this is four years ago. Even so, four years ago, you shouldn't have been using it. It was already out of date four years ago. Wait, why are there still no subforum on the Steam controller? Nobody's posted here in a very long time, but- Why do they still have a subforum publicly active on the Steam Controller? I don't know. I never used the Steam Controller, actually.

For anyone who doesn't know, actually, I'll bring up the Steam Controller. Because I guess it was a while ago now. Steam Controller. Here we go. When did it come out, actually? It was discontinued in 2019, so maybe, maybe that version of, no, no, you shouldn't have been using SteamOS 2 in 2017 anyway, like, it would still be out of date, they basically made the project and then ditched it, um, the Steam controller was a very weird controller so a lot of it was fairly standard

like it had you know your xbox style buttons it had your paws and stuff here but rather than having thumbsticks and i guess a d-pad it had one thumbstick so you could use that for whatever you use that thumb stick for. I guess walking around. But you're also intended to use the touch pads. This is the weird thing. So its main input method was using touch pads. And supposedly these touchads are actually pretty good i don't know if you can like i know they're discontinued i don't know if there's anyone

still selling them uh they're probably honestly probably like sell for ridiculous amounts now uh steam controller let's see but I think it was a really... Oh no, you can buy them for like $90... $35. You can buy a USB dongle for a Steam controller for $3. Lovely. Why do they

sell the dongles separately? $355 for a sealed version. Jesus Christ. But anyway. $355 for a sealed version Jesus Christ but anyway apparently it was a really good controller and by having these touchpads it was a lot easier to play games that traditionally you couldn't play

with a controller, things like RTS games mainly RTS games city builders, things like that. Things where they just don't have a controller-based interface. And if I remember correctly, they actually acted both as a part of the same trackpad. So you could move both thumbs at the same time, and move further. It was very odd,

very very odd input device, and I kind of wish that Valve does try something like this again. Like, part of this design did live on inside of the Steam Deck, so the Steam Deck doesn't just have its face buttons and thumbsticks. It also has the same... Not the same, I guess. It also has trackpads. That's a terrible picture. Show me a bigger picture. No, that's

also a small picture. Where is it? There we go. I'm going to load the picture, damn it. There? There. Okay, we're good now. Cool. So it's got these thumbsticks here, but also these trackpads as well.

Presumably they are better than they were back on the Steam controller, you know, because of improvements in trackpad technology or whatever you want to call it. But I'm very happy to see this input method did live on. For some games, you're probably very happy to see this input method did live on. For some games, you're probably gonna have to use this method. This is why a lot of games aren't going to be verified, but they will be playable.

As I said, there's a lot of games out there that just don't have controller support, so you sort of have to use these In a lot of cases you're probably better off just plugging in a mouse and keyboard and then playing it on a TV But if you don't want to do that, I'm sure in a lot of cases where the game is entirely mouse driven You can get away with just using these trackpads.

get away with just using these trackpads. Oh, so I mentioned games that they showed off in their marketing material. Doom Eternals here. That wasn't on the list. That wasn't on the list of verified games. Even though we know it works and, uh, yeah. So, like, Valve,

release your numbers. I know they exist. Just release them. Release them so I can drop my damn conspiracy theory. And I don't know how people are going to react to it, actually. I'm almost certain that people have, like... I know, like, the games journalists, the media class are really dumb and somehow just didn't manage to put two and two together. I generally have a higher expectation of

my audience, so hopefully with me laying out how it's actually going, how they've said this, how many games they have, how they've said or how SteamDB shows how many games there are, there's clearly a discrepancy there, and we'll see

what they say. I'll let you guys know if i remember in the in the next episode so since we are on the topic of gaming i want to talk about a news story that sort of didn't slip my radar the other week i just forgot to actually talk about it so it. So, where is it? Here we go. So, this is about Pokemon Go, a game that even though, you know, it's not as popular as it once was, it's still a massive moneymaker and is still incredibly popular and tons of people still play it. So, two US cops, uh ditching robbery call for a Pokemon Go hunt. Two Los Angeles police officers have lost their jobs after they went off searching for creatures in Pokemon Go instead of responding to a robbery. So, okay, we already read that.

Robbery. So, okay, we already read that. Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell cruise the streets searching for fantastic creatures in the augmented reality smartphone game. Documents show bagging a relatively rare Snorlax, as well as a difficult-to-trap toga tick, but no criminals. In-car recording of their conversation revealed

they had heard the call for help at the Los Angeles department store, but decided instead to drive off. Officer Mitchell alerted Lozano that Snorlax just popped up, legal documents relating to their dismissal show. recording captured petitioners discussing Pokemon as they drove to a different location where the virtual creatures appeared on their mobile phones. The Los Angeles police officers snagged the Snorlax and then turned their attention to a Togetic, which proved to be a little tricky to subdue.

Holy crap, man, this thing is fighting the crap out of me, Mitchell said, according to the documents, which were published last week, both men were charged with multiple counts of misconduct and admitted and, and admitted and admitted failing to respond to the robbery call during the incident in April, 2017, but denied they'd been playing Pokemon go.

Like there is literally a police in car recording of you playing Pokemon go talking about playing Pokemon go Driving to locations so you can catch Pokemon and Pokemon go but officer Judge judge we weren't playing Pokemon go that didn't happen ignore the recordings the recordings are fake This is fake news we don't we weren't doing that we're doing our job ignore all of that uh the pair insisted in disciplinary hearings that they've uh they had been the pair insisted in disciplinary meetings hearings they'd merely been discussed in the game and challenged Los Angeles City's dismissal.

California's Court of Appeal, however, did not believe their explanations and upheld their hearings. There's literally a recording of you doing it. Like, what are you talking about? Wait, is this an explanation of what Pokemon is? This is beautiful. Okay, let's read about news.com.au explaining to us what Pokemon Go actually is.

Pokemon Go took the mid-2010s by storm, with millions around the world glued to their smartphones in the hunt for fantastical creatures. In one of the first mainstream adoptions of augmented reality, In one of the first mainstream adoptions of augmented reality, players would look around for round-eyed pocket monsters that would appear in the real world if viewed on a smartphone screen. Participants would use Pokeballs to capture the creatures, which were inspired by everything from mice to dragons, and then train them in Pokegyms to take part in battles.

Such was the popularity of the game at one point that several military installations felt the need to warn troops about the perils of playing on bases including near run wait hold up i i never heard about that story were there people who like got injured trying to catch Pokemon on a runway, who are part of the military. That can't be real. There's no way that, surely not. Surely that's not a thing that actually happened. I can't believe that. Look, I'm going to look it up right now.

Military, let's see. We look up military Pokemon Go. Let's see. Let's see. Wait, what? Evacuated US military base in Afghanistan had a Pokemon Go community. A US military newspaper recently published an article on soldiers leaving their base in Afghanistan, which happened to have a lot... What?

Wait, what? Right. I also forgot about this. There was a time. When they didn't blacklist certain locations. So. So Pokemon could spawn. In military bases.

And other places like that. And people would trespass on military bases just to catch Pokemon. Man, I miss. I genuinely miss the early days of Pokemon Go. It's beautiful. Fans have also been blamed for causing traffic accidents. I can believe that. And at least one illegal border crossing.

Someone's playing Pokemon Go and jumped the border. Oh, my lord. Wait, where the hell were they? There was no security. Did you just... Was it one of those back... Wait, were they hell were they? There was no security. Did you just... Was it one of those back... Wait, were they just playing... No.

Surely they weren't playing Pokemon Go on, like, some side... Like, some side highway. I hope it was in one of those towns that sort of, like, sit on both sides of a border. Surely it has to be that. Otherwise, that's... Surely, surely. Pokemon Go. what a fun time that was. Sadly I actually when Pokemon Go was really popular I didn't actually have a smartphone so that would have been in what 2010 so I would have been 11? 12? Yeah, like 11 or 12.

I didn't get a smartphone until I was maybe 14 or 15, I want to say. Not because I couldn't get a smartphone. The reason was because I didn't want one. So at the time, I genuinely thought smartphones were stupid. And there was no reason that anybody would actually want one. Like, why would you want, what's the purpose of a smartphone? Why would you want apps in your pocket, like you can play games on a computer? What a simpler time that was.

What a simpler time it was when not everybody by default had a smartphone. I know, sure, like if I didn't want a smartphone, like I can get rid of this thing. And there are flip phones that I can buy. You know, flip phones that actually have 4G and 5G support and are going to be working on cell networks for a very long time. but I realized not long after that, there is, you know, some level of convenience you do get by actually having a smartphone, and then, like, everybody that time, I got very addicted to my smartphone, was playing games on it all the time, always checking stuff, and now I try to avoid using it as much as possible. I don't even have, like, I don't think I have any, like, games. No, I don't have any games installed on my phone.

I use my phone basically to get calls and messages from work. And, yeah. I think that's actually pretty much everything. Like, I do have Facebook Messenger on there on, like, the off chance I need it. Oh, yeah, I listen to music and podcasts, and that's pretty much it. But I could replace that very easily and use literally anything else that can play audio. You know, I don't really use the smartphone that much for a lot of its extra functionality.

And honestly, I don't think most people should either. A lot of people spend... I'm sure you've heard this spiel before. A lot of people spend way too much time on their phone basically to the state of what looks like addiction. And smartphone addiction is something that is actually being researched nowadays and treated as like a legitimate problem that a lot of people actually do have. Go anywhere.

Most people are addicted to their smartphones. Go have like dinner or something. Go out with some mates. If you don't use your phone all the time, you'll be the one person who's not on their phone. And that's just how it goes. But hey, that's enough for the

Zuma Boomerant. I'm not gonna get too far into that one. But because we are on the topic of pokemon i do want to talk about one thing i haven't played this yet because i don't have a switch yet but as games keep coming out for the switch as really cool looking games keep coming out there are more and more games that are making me want to buy it so legend Legend of Arceus just came out like, what, three, four days ago?

And it honestly looks, it also looks really fun. It's a very different style of game from what Pokemon traditionally has been. When we initially saw the alpha and the beta footage, whatever it was, a lot of people were comparing it to something like, uh, Let's Go or Pokemon Go, but it seems, like, it's not, like, you know, I, I don't want to call, like, Pokemon hardcore. Pokemon, like, none of the Pokemon games are hardcore, but it's definitely not like a mainstream Pokemon game. Absolutely not. It's a very different style of gameplay, but from the Let's Plays I've seen, and from all the footage I've seen, it looks like a really good direction for the franchise. And

honestly, who made it? Game Freak developed it. I'm really surprised that it's not by some like extra developer, because Game Freak, Game Freak is one of the'm really surprised that it's not by some like extra developer because Game Freak Game Freak is one of the laziest game developers you will ever see the mainline Pokemon games are basically all the same game Every single time it's the same game sure you might add some extra gimmicks from generation to generation but besides that the same game. Sure, you might add some extra gimmicks from generation to generation, but, besides that, it's

basically just the same formula over and over and over again. So, if you haven't seen anything about Legend of Arceus, the big difference it has, firstly, it has its full, like, actual 3D, which is good, which Sword and Shield had.

The problem that Sword and Shield had is it sort of, like, broke a lot of the models. So, a lot of the models, they, like, shrunk down to ridiculous sizes. Same in, uh, in the new Diamond and Pearl remake as well. Like,

Gyarados, for example, is a fucking, like, little snake. It's way smaller than it should be, but in Legend of Arceus, it seems like they actually put some level of effort into it and made the Pokemon that should be big actually big. So, actually, some of them bigger than I thought they actually were. For example, Lopunny.

Lopunny, if I remember correctly, is fucking massive. Where is it? Here we... Look at how fucking big this Lopunny is! Look how big this guard of war is! Like, what the fuck? I'm pretty sure that's actually how they're big. how big they are like in the uh how big they actually should be for anyone who's just watching or just listening uh this

lopunny is probably with its ears included 10 11 12 foot tall same Same with the Gardevoir. Like this Gardevoir, easily, easily 10, 11 foot. Like this thing is fucking massive. And it's same with the legendaries as well. Like Palkia, I think is like fucking 18 foot high. Like it's much smaller than it would be in the Pokemon lore. But some of the Pokemon are just stupidly big, like hundreds of meters high. So sure, you can't make them that big, but you can certainly scale them to a point where the Pokemon that are supposed to be big actually are big. I think what really helps this game

is the fact that one, it looks like a PS2 game. It really that one it looks like a ps2 game uh it really really really does look like a ps2 game a late ps2 game granted but a ps2 game uh it's running on a switch and it probably looks no better than like ff10 or you know any of the really good looking like shadow colossus that's a game that really holds up it's not a good looking, like Shadow of Colossus, that's a game that really holds up. It's not a good looking game, but it does help them in the fact they can actually put development effort into the game. Plus, you know, we've gotten rid of the national decks at this point. So there is a much smaller set of Pokemon to actually deal with. The national decks, I think is one of the things that was really holding the franchise back i didn't like when the national decks was removed but one of the benefits you do get or one of the benefits you can get assuming you actually have developers who care is spending

time actually working on gameplay mechanics spending time on the game itself and making it different. The other thing you have is you have, this is one of the gimmicks that it has, you have like strong style and agile style moves. I don't really know what the deal is there, as I said, I haven't played the game, but when a battle is actually happening, firstly, moves are actually coming from the Pokemon. So if you use like a Hyper Beam, a Hyper Beam comes from the Pokemon and it hits the Pokemon that you're battling. And you can actually like walk around the battle and examine what's going on. You're not just stuck in this static location. If you want to go and see like what's happening from some of the side,

you're totally free to do that. And I think that's really, really cool. It's still a, a turn-based game, like, it's not a, a full, like, real-time Pokemon battle game, um, but it is a lot more dynamic, a lot more real time than, than it was before. Also, uh, because of the different style in, in, I guess, battling it has, it also gives you this, uh, move order as well. So sometimes you can actually have two actions in a row before the other Pokemon can actually do anything. Uh, presumably this has something to do with with your speed and all that fun stuff and abilities and moves you can use. But it is a nice little way

to change up the gameplay without what Diamond and Pearl or the Shining Diamond and Brilliant Diamond, Shining Pearl whatever it was called, where they had the bullshit your Pokemon loves you, so it doesn't die, like, that was a dumb mechanic, I don't know if that's here, but I'm, don't, I

haven't heard about it, I'm sure someone would have found it, and somebody would have talked about it, if that actually was the case, um, what else do we have, I touched on the game looking like a PS2 game. Uh, oh, so you do catch Pokemon in the same Let's Go and Pokemon Go style, where you actually, like, have to throw the ball at the Pokemon. So it's not, it doesn't require skill, but it does require some level of input. But speaking of not requiring skill, I wonder if there actually is an article about this. So this game now has a dodge roll. So that's the other big change. You as the trainer can actually be attacked by other Pokemon. It's not just your Pokemon battling. Like if there's a wild whatever, Charizard or whatever there is in the game, that thing can attack you. And that makes sense because

if you see this wild Pokemon that you just started battling, or you just encountered, why would it not attack you? If it's aggressive, it's going to do that. It doesn't attack you when you're in a battle, but before the battle actually starts, you actually can be, I guess, knocked out by it. You can actually black out,

which makes so much more sense than the way it happened in the earlier games where oh, your party blacked out now you also faint for some reason like, what, why? Why can't I just walk back to the Pokemon Center? So what was I saying? What was I saying?

Oh, right because there is a dodge roll so you can dodge out of the way of attacks and during battles with some of like the the bigger legendaries and there are these uh i guess there's sort of boss battles in the game as well a lot of those you don't just throw your pokemon out at the start you actually battle it as the trainer, which I think is really cool. Is there an article that says this? Yes! There we go!

I knew it had to exist. This from 2021. Pokemon Legends Arceus is more Souls-like than people realize. Mate, the game has a fucking dodge roll. It's Dark Souls. It's Pokemon Dark Souls.

Oh my, I genuinely hate all games journalists who compare everything to Dark Souls. Andrea Trauma, you're a bad person. Stop it. Stop comparing everything to Dark Souls. Just because the game has a dodge roll and you can die does not mean that it is Dark Souls. But they're not the only one that have done that. Games Radar. Pokemon Legends Arceus reveals a new noble Pokemon

that looks like a Dark Souls boss. That looks nothing like a Dark Souls boss. It looks like a Pokemon. What are you talking about? Stop it. Not everything is Dark Souls! Gamefacts has a thread about this. I know it's a meme at this point to relate every game to Dark Souls, but a new article at Gameran that seemed quite serious wrote, Pokemon Legends Arceus is a more complex game than people thought. This was also seven months before the game came out, by the way.

And it goes as far as including stealth and action elements that make its gameplay similar to Dark Souls in a certain way. Dark Souls does not have stealth! Have you ever played Dark Souls? Sekiro has stealth elements sure I'll give you that one in Dark Souls technically you can like walk around the enemies

but it doesn't have intended stealth mechanics stop this is a comparison that's not going to hold up no shit not everything is Dark Souls oh my lord I hate i hate games journalists but this game looks really cool and i kind of want to play it uh it obviously being pokemon

isn't gonna be that difficult but you know i want to see if this is the direction that the series is actually going to go. Because if you have a mainline game that's actually like this, this is what everybody has been imagining that Pokemon could be like for 15, 20 years. A full, maybe not open world, open zone game that has pokemon running around in the world you can throw pokeballs at them it doesn't look like a ps2 game and it's different it's just different maybe you even get rid of like sure you can even have like the regular pokemon formula you go through eight gyms you you go to the Elite Four, and then you finish the game.

And maybe you do some post-game stuff, but do all of that, but make it Pokemon Arceus. Do that. That would be cool. Maybe, look, Game Freak likes to put in as little effort as possible, but now they have a framework of how to do that in the case of being led to the Arceus, hey, now we can take a regular game and just slap it on Arceus and we're good to go.

Now we don't have to put effort in. We've already done the effort. Speaking of putting effort in um i love this this is beautiful so you may not know this but plane flight data is completely public so you right now can go onto various tools and find out where various planes are. If you know what their flight number is, their flight plane ID, whatever you call it, the identifier for the plane,

you can work out where every plane is going, where every plane has been, and that's pretty much what you can do. You can see what planes are doing. Now, someone took this information and did something that I think is beautiful. So, that doesn't apply to all planes, like military craft aren't included in this, but, uh, private jets, on the other hand, are. So, some guy on twitter made a twitter bot called elon bot now this teen is asking elon musk for fifty thousand dollars to take it down now he's not saying fifty thousand dollars as something completely unsolicited, and Elon doesn't know about it. Elon is fully aware about it.

So, earlier this week, 19-year-old Jack Sweeney won a bit of internet fame when Protocol published a story about one of his Twitter bots. The college student, you say he's a teen. I guess he's technically a teen. Yeah, you're 19. Yeah, sure, I'll give you that. The college student maintains ElonJet, a tracker that tweets out Elon Musk's private jet takeoffs and lands.

Sweeney has several other bots that use publicly available air traffic data to follow the private planes of celebrities like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. However, with 180,000 followers and counting, the ElonJet account is by far Sweeney's most popular creation, and it's that popularity that attracted none other than Elon Musk to the bot. and counting, the Elon Jet account is by far Sweeney's most popular creation, and it's that popularity that attracted none other than Elon Musk to the bot. Elon is totally aware of this. So, last fall, which is autumn for anyone who knows actual season names,

leaves fall down, therefore it's full. Anyway, I can rant on Americans all day. The entrepreneur contacted Sweeney about ElonJet. Can you take this down? It is a security risk. Now, it is not because it's public data. You're taking the private jet. This bot is no more of a security risk than you taking your private jet.

If you don't want people to know the exact location of your jet, stop taking a private jet and instead use public aircrafts. Or use someone else's jet. Musk told Sweeney he would give him $5,000 to delete the account and keep crazy people from finding out his whereabouts. Sweeney made a counter offer. Any chance to up that to $50,000, it would be great support in college and possibly allow me to get a car, maybe even a Model 3. This kid knows exactly what he's doing.

He's like, you know what? I'm not doing anything wrong. I am taking public data and I am posting public data. That is all. Musk told him he would think about it, but the two haven't spoken since. At the time Sweeney told Protocol two haven't spoken since at the time Sweeney told protocol he wasn't bothered by Musk ghosting him his work on Elon jet had taught him how to code and landed him a part-time job at a company called uber jets what a fucking lad he got a job from it uh plus as a self-proclaimed fan he uh he got to share a conversation with one of his idols I didn't read this part. I didn't realize he actually got a job. What is UberJets? This is UberJets. Live, fly, repeat.

UberJets is not affiliated with Uber, so why did you call yourself Uber? Just let's jet. Enter your route, select the perfect match, just tap and book. Oh, so it's a, oh,

basically it's a way to handle flights. That's cool. Uh, yeah, that's, that's, that's cool. Uh, I love that you got a job from it, though. Now the team seems to have changed his tune. In a new interview with Business Insider, he said he decided to go public with Musk's offer

after the billionaire seemingly lost interest in cutting a deal. He went the opposite way of me, so why wouldn't I go the opposite way of him? He asked the publication. I've done a lot of work on this, and $5,000 is not enough. He told Business Insider the initial offer wouldn't replace the fun he's had working on the bot It doesn't seem like Musk has any interest in negotiating with Sweeney following their initial conversation

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO implemented some of the technical advice Sweeney gave him to make his jet harder to track At the time must reportedly also told Sweeney it didn't feel right to pay to shut this down. He probably has a point. Now, the best part of this, like this is already amazing. The best part of this are the replies on Twitter. Because there are so many people here who think this guy is a weird stalker and this is like some illegal thing that he is doing. stalker and this is like some illegal thing that he is doing. So we tracked the plane not who or may not be on board. That's the other thing all we know is Elon's jet is flying. We don't know who's flying on it we don't

know where we don't know if Elon's on it we don't know anyone else is flying on it. It's just a plane is flying around and that is all. Do not sell out for less than 100k. The Elon fanboys are absolutely furious about this account. Keep shining the light. Shining the light. I think a lot

would appreciate if you still post but with a one hour delay the data is public you can literally find it right now the plain details are right here you can go to a website

type in those details and you'll find them you know what actually I'm going to do that let's see ADSB tracker so ADSB tracker tracking DCM 2455 let's see where do I DCM 2455. How do I... You know what? I don't know how to use this site, actually. Ignore what I said.

Wait. DCM... DCM 2455. I... I don't know how to use this website. Ignore what I said. Wait, can I find another one that I can use? Flight... wait can I find another one that I can use flight or am I typing the wrong

information I might be typing the wrong information either way the information is public let's see what else we have here the Streisand effect brought me here I don't think Elon's trying to shut it down. He's like, just...

Take the money. You received a respectable offer of $5,000 to take this down, then asked for more and blasted Musk in the media. He will likely never work with you now. He can just sell the jet, buy a new one somewhere else, and make it very difficult to trace if he hasn't already. In what way did he blast Elon in the media, Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. Good answer.

Make him give you five million at least. I guess a lot of the earlier comments I saw are gone now, but there were so many people who were, like, unironically calling this guy a stalker. Maybe you'll also reply to this one. Stalker. No, I cannot find any of the people calling him a stalker. Hmm. Hmm.

Sad. I know these comments absolutely do exist. Lots of very angry crypto NFT Musk bros in here. Honestly, there's more people complaining about the angry Musk fans than there are angry Musk fans at this point. Another one. Maybe he should announce where he's landed maybe one hour after he lands. I think the info shouldn't really be time sensitive

to your audience. And I think most Elon fanatics would actually like to know where he is. Most don't need to know in advance. So what is someone going to do? Break through airport security, run up to the plane after it's landed on the tarmac and catch Musk for a few seconds between him

leaving the plane and getting into a car. Oh, lord. This is beautiful. Can you start tracking total carbon emissions? That would be a very different project, and that data is not directly

public, but I guess it wouldn't be that difficult to track. If you know where the plane and that data is not directly public, but I guess it wouldn't be that difficult to to track. If you know where the plane is going, and you know where the plane has been, and you know what the plane is theoretically, and then you you can theoretically work out how much fuel it is used and you should be able to like calculate emissions from that i guess um but that's also far less fun than just tracking elon's jet and seeing how angry people get since we're on the topic of elon musk how about we talk about his company or at least

one of his companies that being tesla this this is a beautiful article. So... I saw this on Twitter the other day. Tesla Australia has done a U-turn over yesterday's bold claim 15,000 examples of Tesla Model 3 were sold last year. A figure that would have... Scuppered? What the hell does that mean? The Toyota Camry's unbeaten 28-year reign in the mid-size sedan class.

There is a 0% chance that the Model 3 sold more than a Toyota Camry. Do you know why we know this? Well, because the numbers were actually wrong. So... Do you know why we know this? Well, because the numbers were actually wrong. So, the Tesla sales claim was at odds with the 12,000 Tesla vehicles registered last year. According to data sourced from the National Transport Commission and reported exclusively by Drive last Friday. When Drive contacted the Electric Vehicle Council of Australia to clarify why there was such a large disparity of 3,000 sales, Australia to clarify why there was such a large disparity of 3,000 sales, 25% higher than the registration data, the electric car lobby implied the registration data was wrong. Our figures are directly from Tesla. The CEO of Electric Vehicle Council was quoted as saying,

we now are officially getting Tesla sales figures and we can start reporting what they have sold in Australia. We're confident our numbers are right. So what the electric vehicle council is saying is that 15,000 cars were sold and 3,000 of them were never registered. That sounds believable. So when asked by Drive whether numbers supplied by Tesla were significantly higher than what registration data showed, Mr. Jafari said, I can't explain it.

I don't know what's gone wrong there. The electric vehicle lobbyist said he would work with registration authorities to see why there's a gap there for what they've got, but it's not going to be something they can turn around very quickly. However, in a major turnaround, a statement issued by the Electric Vehicle Council on behalf of Tesla Australia said, yesterday the Electric Vehicle Council released electric car sales figures for 2021, which showed a massive leap from 2020 numbers. While the massive year-on-year leap reported was correct, there was

an error in the numbers the Electric Vehicle Council provided relating to Tesla deliveries. Due to human error, the Tesla delivery figures for 2020 were erroneously added to the delivery figures for 2021 by Tesla

before the figure was provided to the Electric Vehicle Council. So instead of 15,000 Tesla Model 3s, 2021 by Tesla before the figure was provided the electric vehicle council So instead of 15,000 Tesla model threes the figure reported should have been 12,000 correcting the total Tesla liveries all models reducing the total number of EVs delivered in 2021 from 24,000 to 20,000 this new figure tallies with the registration data sourced by Drive last week that showed 12,058 Tesla cars were registered from January 16th to 2021 to January 21st, 2022.

So 1,294 with only, or with 1,258 actually being registered does make some sense. The anomaly of 36 cars is likely explained by vehicles delivered in the last two weeks of January 2021. The registration data proved to be much closer than the figures supplied by Tesla that were inflated

by 3,000 vehicles. My other theory for that one is there are people who are going to buy this car who are going to try to flip it. Due to the still existing chip market or chip shortage we're in, there are going to be people who are scalping Teslas.

I don't think all of those cars were scalped, but I think you can account for some of them in that situation. Industry insiders are furious with Tesla and the Electric Vehicle Council for reporting false numbers yesterday, especially since the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries switched to a truth in reporting of new car sales data from beginning of 2020 while new car sales data is voluntarily supplied by car companies at the end of each month it is now cross-checked with registration data which takes precedent if there is an anomaly so you basically if your if your car hasn't been registered, it's not on the road, or at least it shouldn't be.

So there's not really any reason to count that data, which makes sense. The Tesla registration data reported exclusively by Drive last week was largely ignored by other media outlets that ran stories based on a press release from the Electric Vehicle Council of Australia. Following the debacle, a senior car company executive who was instrumental in the truth reporting of new car sales

told Drive they need to be subject to the same counting methods as every other car brand in Australia. It's time for Tesla to grow up and stop acting like a startup. You know, man, stop being mean to the multi-billion dollar startup that is literally the most valuable car company in the world Stop being mean to the multi-billion dollar car company. That's Can't manage to ship oh My god, they can't manage to do a bit of like basic addition actually no prop

Sorry, they did too much basic addition. They took last year and added it to this year. That's too much addition. Stop doing that. Maybe less addition is a good step to take. But since we're on the topic of Teslas, I saw this fucking tweet and man

man fucking hardcore Tesla people hardcore Tesla people are a joke hardcore like super anything is really a joke but oh my lord most americans can lower their cost of living by five to ten percent by going ev. That's bullshit. Because there isn't an affordable electric vehicle. On the market. All of the affordable. All of the affordable electric vehicles.

Are minimum. $10,000 more than. What most people would consider. An affordable new car. But even then. If you want an affordable car. You're not buying a new car. You're buying something secondhand.

They're still going to last you like five or six years. My car I bought four or five years ago, it's from 2001. It's still running just fine. If you buy a Tesla, the value of your EV will not go down. So essentially, your cost of transportation becomes almost free. The value of your EV will not go down. not go down your car if you sell it second hand will be the same value as retail now this is nonsense how this guy even managed i didn't i don't know who this guy is i have no idea what he does he's the what is he co-founder and CEO invest human investment advisor

You're an investment advisor and you're saying that cars don't depreciate in value, okay so where this came from is Basically the market we are in right now, so is basically the market we are in right now. So, we are in a market where there is a chip shortage. So, because of this chip shortage, everything that has these chips in them is going to be more valuable. So, if you bought a Tesla back in 2018, 2017, whenever you bought one,

you can likely sell that for the same price you bought it for today. If you buy a new Tesla today, though, and you sell it in three, four, five years, the chip shortage, I really doubt, is going to go on that long. And when the chip shortage is over, you're going to have a functioning second-hand market where people lower the price of vehicles. The only reason they are so expensive is because you just cannot buy new cars in a lot of places, and a lot of the new cars you do want to buy, like, there are new cars available, but it's far more limited than it would be any other time in the history of vehicles, I guess, except for right at the start.

Most of the time, if you wanted to buy a new car and you had the money for it, you could buy a new car. In some cases now, they just don't have a car to sell you. have a car to sell you. This then arbitrarily inflates the price of the second-hand market, leading to dumb investment advisors saying exactly this. But your investment advisor, who is suggesting that someone banks on a supply chain issue, a supply chain issue that is being alleviated how are you that insane and that's with just only focusing on the general degradation that every car on the market has every month or every car you have over time is going to drop in value because of general wear and tear. The parts of the vehicle, the engine, the other parts the cars have,

will drop in value. The problem that an EV has though, especially Tesla, because Tesla has questionable repair practices. By questionable, I mean they don't let you repair batteries. They will replace the battery, that's fine, but they won't let you repair batteries. They will replace the battery. That's fine. But they won't let you actually repair it. So, at least without jumping through 10,000 hoops.

This battery, in some cases, at retail costs $22,000. So, if you have this car for 5, 10 years, which is fairly normal if you buy a new car. If you spend whatever the price of a Model S is, like $80,000, $70,000, something like that, you're going to keep that car for a while, unless you have

millions of dollars and you just want to burn it on stuff. Most people, if they buy a new car, they keep the new car until reasonably the car has broken down a bit. And lithium batteries have this problem where when they break down, unlike a petrol tank, right? Sure, maybe your engine is going to get less efficient, but the amount of efficiency you're going to lose is nothing like the degradation in a lithium battery. So over the 10 year lifecycle... actually let's see what the the the degradation... Tesla battery

degradation graph... here we go. Let's. So how much range are you losing after... Oh, this is in... Kilometers is probably a better measurement. I call bullshit that after 250,000 k's you're losing 5%. Oh, no, wait. 8%, sorry.

Oh. It's just after that point that it tends to drop off quite hard. So other numbers here are showing more like 15%, 20% loss. Basically, as a lithium battery gets recharged, and it's the recharge and the decharge that ends up causing this to degrade you have less range and at some point that range gets so bad that you have to replace it

or maybe the battery is damaged and you have to replace it or whatever other reason you have to replace the battery very expensive so unless the car goes up in value you have lost money sure if you buy the Tesla and flip it right now in the chip shortage after a year. Sure, I'll buy it.

Sure, you can make your money back. But besides that, you're not doing it. So let's see. Let's see if we can see some dumb comments in here. So far, because there are very less EV vehicles in the market, demand scenario in two to three years would start seeing depreciation like now for EV cars, also a bit less for ICE cars.

That's internal combustion engines. Really, my 2012, 2016, what does that mean? Are you saying you have a 2012 and a 2016? Let's say 2016 Model S was purchased for 100k. Will you give me that for it now? Before the shortages, my car was worth maybe 30,000. Now maybe 35,000. Over five years, I can definitely see it dropping that much.

I can see the argument over a year or two. This is only true given the current used car market. This was not the case only three or four years ago and may not continue indefinitely. I think we can change that may not continue indefinitely. I think we can change that may not to will not. If you overpay for something now, you may find yourself upside down, you may find yourself upside down in equity in a few years. Maybe in the US, but not here in Canada. My trading quote was 39,000 Canadian for my Model 3 that I paid $70,000 for or $74,000 for in

2019. That's almost 50% depreciation in less than 3 years. Like, there are areas there are absolutely areas where prices are completely fucked. Apparently the US car market is so much worse

than what exists in australia but outside of those weird bubbles it's not it's not happening you're not selling a five-year-old car for retail it's just not gonna happen stop stop selling people on like abs like absolute false hope especially when you literally say you're an investment advisor. I don't even think he's an actual investment advisor. I don't know who this guy is. I wouldn't be surprised if he runs, like, a fucking TikTok account where he gives investment advice. Oh, Lord.

So, where else do we have? Where else? What else? What things? Words? Chicken. We're going to talk about chicken. Yep, there we go.

That's a segue. Specifically KFC. KFC's Beyond Fried Chicken tastes like KFC fried chicken. Now, I have my doubts. I have my serious doubts. Right now, this isn't in Australia. Um, I think it's in, just in the UK. KFC Beyond Chicken. Uh, no, California, sorry, ignore me. No no it's expanding out to the uk yeah okay that makes sense uh what was i saying right um but

i that looks fucking disgusting That looks like an eraser. Look at these things. They look like an eraser. I am entirely willing to try it. Not because I think it's going to be good. More like because... I think it's good content. Honestly, like...

I feel like it's just good content to eat some... Questionable food. Uh... And, uh... See if they're... I have my doubts they're good. See if they are edible. See if they are... I have my doubts they're good. See if they are edible. See if they are

anything... anything even remotely decent. But with the whole fake meat thing, I genuinely don't understand what we're doing here. Like, let's... Okay. I don't have any problem if you want to be a

vegan, if you want to be a vegan if you want to be vegetarian whatever you want to do but why are we trying to make these incredibly unhealthy foods because we miss the taste of meat like it's fine to admit it if you're a vegan and you like the taste of fake meat because you really miss the taste of meat, that's fine. It's fine that you admit that. That's the only reason these exist. Because these, like, they're made from like all these fucking... All of these processed oils. Just...

Stop. Just stop. Stop. Stop it. There is- is this actual good vegetarian and vegan food. Like there is a vegetarian Indian place near me. Different cultures besides like Western cultures have clearly worked out how to make good food using things that are not meat.

But for some reason we're just in this mindset where if We can't eat meat We have to make the fake meat taste like meat But it's never going to be as good as the actual stuff so everyone who tries it is like oh It's like it's not as bad as I expect like that that seems to be Unless you're already like hardcore in the fake meat thing, some reason I think it's a good idea. The best review that I've heard of this food is it's not as bad as I expected.

And that's not a glowing review. Like if I had the choice between the real chicken or the fake chicken, I think everybody, unless you have like a moral reason for not wanting to eat the chicken or some health reason, I wouldn't even say health, some, some dietary reason. I'm not going to say health because I don't want to say these things are healthy. Some dietary reason why you cannot or you don't want to eat the actual chicken, fine. Just don't order the chicken. Don't eat the actual chicken, fine. Just don't order the chicken.

Don't order the fake chicken. Everyone else, we're going to enjoy the chicken and have fun with it. But from my understanding, like, Beyond Meat has lost a lot of value because the food's not good. Stock. I might be wrong about that. did hear yeah okay um here we go so initially is it not initially oh five years basically initially they started two years ago so initially they they're valued quite high. They dropped off, granted. This was... This here is like Stata Rona.

But they've gone... Why it was on fire? This is not on fire. This is lower than you've ever been. Wait, is it lower i want yes lower than literally lower than your store or no it was lower at the start of rona okay okay oh look i'll give you that one um is uh is is beyond meat uh a stock to buy after the KFC launch? So far, it doesn't look like it.

It doesn't look like it. Hey, maybe when it comes to Australia, I'll try it and I'll love it. And then I'm going to change my tune entirely. And I'm going to become a shill for fake meat. If I do, feel free to show me this clip, and Brody, you're a fucking moron. There you go. Feel free to show that to me if I ever do decide the fake meat tastes good.

I'm happy to... Look, I'm happy to be wrong. I'm entirely happy to be wrong. I just don't think I will be. Let's see. I don't want to go into another big topic before we hit the break, or the, yeah, the break, whatever you want to call it, so I guess we can just talk about a little bit of the final fantasy. So, the Valentine's Day event is coming up quite soon. So that is going to be on February 8th to February 21st.

It's going to be... The NPC is going to be in Old Gridania. And you don't really get anything super exciting. You get some Chocobo Barding. I do think the Chocobo Barding actually looks pretty cool. You get some Chocobo Barding. I do think the Chocobo Barding actually looks pretty cool. It's based on the post-moogle

outfits. And you also get this little, I guess, what do they call it? It's a... I guess it's like a... not a chandelier. What is it? Some sort of decorative ornament. Also, they call Valentine and Valentine in this universe

because I don't know why. One of the things that has sort of made me sad, the modern events that Final Fantasy is getting seem a lot more limited in the prizes you get compared to the old ones.

Like a lot of the older events, you'd get things like pets and you'd get... I guess you got some minions recently, but you'd get some mounts. Mounts are actually a really cool one to have. But at least so far

as I've been playing the game, there hasn't been any events that have given you a mount. Or even, like, a glamour... You got some glamour gear, but it was not really that that exciting um housing I don't particularly care about

because I don't have a house yet um like housing items like oh you want to have like a fucking thing you can put on your wall like oh that's cool um but yeah like things like this like you gotta this was last year's event that's a really cool hack this honestly i feel like is uh much cooler than most of the stuff we've seen recently and the moogle you can

put on your on your your countertop also pretty cool. But it's housing stuff. So I don't particularly care too much. Maybe it will change in the future. And we will see some event happen. In 2022. That actually has some sort of mount. Or maybe some cool looking glamour gear. As much as I appreciate.

The Halloween event. That just finished. That got delayed. because of Endwalker's delay, um, I'm never gonna use the glamour gear we got, uh, FFXIV, uh, let's see, Halloween event, All Saints Wake, here we go, the, uh, the clown gear, I know, look, I know some people really like the clown gear, but I'm not a big fan of it, especially because it's really hard to fit with any other gear because the colouring style they've used for it

is different to all of the other gear in the game. Why they've made it stand out that much is... It's weird to me. It... Unless you're wearing that set, I don't really know how you can make use of it. Actually, I take that back. I did see one glamour that did make use of it well.

I know it was a Lalafell glamour, if I remember correctly. Let's see. So female glamour. I probably won't be able to find it, considering it happened a couple weeks back. Let's see. So if we set it to Lalala Fel, female Lala Fel, should be much, much, I was going to say much, much less,

but also it's Lala Fel. So it's, yeah, it's still Lala Fel. It's still Lala Fel, so you're still going to find tons and tons of it. If I remember, I wish I knew what it was actually called they'll make it much much easier to track down Okay, we have one of the clown sets there It was a clown set. I think they combine it with something you get from the mug shop but I'm not seeing the

Specific one that I remember anywhere, and I don't want to keep dragging this segment out until I find it, because it's very possible that I'm just not gonna find it, but as you can see, I'm still trying to drag it out as much as I can, because I'm still scrolling, and still, I found it, Got it. Okay. Here we go. So rather than using the... Actually, it wasn't... No, maybe it wasn't... It was a separate event gear, actually. So taking the Clown Set and then using the Acacia Tights

from... Where did you get this? Is it... The Lady... Oh! Wait, was this from the previous year? Uh, a vote for Bert. What year was this from? Oh, that was from the previous year.

So that was from 2021. I think that set actually works really well. I still don't like how, like, the coloring of the clown outfit just... It stands out too much compared to all other gear. I feel like they should have used a lot more like the other gear is colored. It wouldn't... Maybe it's a good thing it stands out, because it's a bit of gear that is its own unique style,

but it just makes it really hard to work with Yeah, that's basically how it is I'm gonna do the the the valen that the Valentine event I'm gonna get the chocobo barding and I'm gonna change out my current barding probably because right now I'm using the I Want to say I'm running the gamblers's Barding. You get from the Gold Saucer. Because when I found that one, I was like, wow, this just looks better than all of the other barding I have. I know there's other barding out there that does look pretty nice.

But none of the barding that I have looks that great. While we're on the topic of FFXIV, actually, have I mentioned that unsurprisingly Koalas got incredibly expensive on my server let's see is Universalis updated to support

to support Materia that one how do we change the server we're on I can't remember koala let's see koala joey that makes

me so fucking sad like some places look at how cheap it is on Garuda. $588. Kujata it went up because there was a lot of Australian players there. Tombery it also went up because a lot of Australian players there. It's $26,000. Last time I checked, $ 26,000 on the Australian servers. I don't know where you get this from. I want to find out, actually. FF14 Koala Joey.

What drops it, or what do you get it from? Is it from, like, a treasure map or something? Woodland Exploration. Wait, it's from a level 70 Woodland Exploration. So this is a... Oh!

Oh, you get it from a retainer. Oh, that's actually kind of cool. I don't have any gatherer retainers. I should actually... I probably should respec one of my retainers into a... Into a gatherer. Hmm. Tempting.

Yeah, they're 26 000 right now like that's how just ridiculous absolutely fucking ridiculous it's gotten a lot of the stuff yeah none of the other stuff is even worth it there but koala joey koala joey is actually just like stupidly expensive um which makes sense because it's a koala and it's the australian service so of course people are going to spend a lot for the uh a lot for the koalas but the fucking oh the sad thing is right i thought it would get so on kujata no No, sorry. On Materia, the first day, they were really expensive. So people were trying to sell

them at regular retail price. I presume these were NA players who were selling at around 600 gil. And I wish I'd bought them because there was like 10 of them on the market board. If I'd bought them at 600 gil,

firstly, the market would have shut up way earlier maybe other people would have tried to sell it at that price but I could have made like 200,000 Gil from doing no work whatsoever and the best kind of work is doing no work there's a lot of items on on Kujar on our on Tombery which are actually wait I just realized how to actually change it here we go I am in Sephiroth cool Cool. Here we go. So Koala Joey listed right now at $12,000, but is sold in... That's in Sofia. But one of them from Ravana sold for $20,000. And they sell incredibly frequently.

I don't know why anybody is listing them at this price. Like, look at this. They will sell at $50,000. Why is anybody selling them at $15,000? These people! Why are they so dumb?

But yeah, there's a lot of gear that right now, a lot of gear, a lot of pets and stuff like that. That's not how you spell it. Thavarian. That... Wait. Shit. How do you spell it? FF14.

Thavnarian. That's how it's spelt. Thavnarion... Why is it not autofilling? Thavnarion. Okay, so it's not gonna autofill. Um, what was it called? Thavnarion... Uh, Bustia. The Thavnarion Bustia.

This is a really cool looking bit of glamour. I'll see if I can bring it up. No, it doesn't look good on the males. Here we go. That's not even the same gear. Wait, what the fuck?

This is not the gear. For whatever reason, for the Mikote, they just use a different picture like the wrong picture but yeah this is a really popular bit of glamour Favnarion

Favnarion Bastia let's see if I can actually search for it is it going to show up? there we go oh no the audio doesn't show up until we actually search for it selling for 150k right now let's see how for it. Selling for $150k right now. Let's see how much it's selling over for on Kujata. Or just anything in the elemental region.

So... $50,000. It was selling for a third of the price. And all of these... Wait, hold up. Are these... Are these even... What's the word? Okay, they are high quality.

They are high quality, so at least that. But so much gear on this server is just... It's just fucking insane right now Crystals for example crystals are also very expensive Let's see Like the the where is it the the the the the the the Ice crystal search. I will just search for ice crystal. There we go Jet the any of of the crafting gear.

Oh, it's come down. Okay, good. Day one, that was so expensive. It's still higher than it should be. I think those should actually be closer to 10. Let's see. Wait, no, I am on Kujata. Oh, sorry.

I am on Kujata. I thought it was very cheap. Let's see. Sephiroth yeah it's triple the price right now instead of being at 16 gil per drop it's at 38 so

right now if you're a gatherer if you're a gatherer or a crafter who is also a gatherer, if you get your own shit, it's very easy to make money right now. Electrum, I also remember being expensive. I don't know if it's come down, though. Electrum, because it's a very popular item,

I expect that one to come down fairly quickly. Yeah, that's gone down to $210. So that's where it should be. I think Cobalt actually dropped below its market value. Cobalt or its typical market value. That...

What? Why is Cobalt more expensive than... It makes sense. Okay, this actually makes sense because cobalt is a higher level mat than electrum is. But it's also less used. I'm surprised that's gone up in value. I genuinely thought that wouldn't have been a

higher cost I wonder what Dark Matter's at right now Let's see, Dark Matter Cluster Wait, what? Why is Dark Matter so cheap? Are these people fucking dumb? Wait, what? Why is Dark Matter so cheap? Are you... Are these people fucking dumb? Okay.

What I mean by this... I don't know why we're looking at... Why we're just going through random prices of items in the market board right now. But this item... It sells for $2.3 on Kujata. It will comfortably sell. Why did they drop the price? It will comfortably sell

at $600. Why is it selling for $11? Why have they done that? Oh, God. Okay. So that's no longer a money-making item for me. One of the patrician sets that actually. Patrician used to be a...

I've talked about this one, actually. Where are we selling patrician god they fucking crashed everything okay take back what I said if you're a crafter you're not making money you are not making money

I think in the time it takes to craft a patrician's coat you can literally mine more electrum. Or mine more cobalt. Then I guess the value is. Surely. Tell me the entire patrician set is not fucked. Are these American players...

I feel like these are American players that have destroyed my economy. 8,000... Oh my god, it's selling for 8,000! Why are they... Like, look at this, it'll sell for 21 why I'm checking NA, how much does it sell for NA, I'm almost certain these are NA players

they have to be, I know these are not, there's 0% chance these are these are, yeah 20,000, okay let's see, These are... Yeah, no. 20,000. Okay. Let's see. What are...

Exodus. 17. Diabolus. Nope. They're just stupid. Okay, cool. Good to know. We just got all the stupid people on material.

Why have you dropped the item by so look some items like some this is how fucked the market is right now some of the items are so so insanely more expensive than they should be other things that's just like nope fucking crash it into the ground. What does Cobalt sell for over on Diabolus? 178? Yeah, that's where it should be. The fact that it's selling for 300 on Materia makes no sense. So I'm going to basically have to find new money-making items. Because clearly what I'm messing with right now is not going to work. I wonder if...

Wait, what is Tombery selling for right now? There is a Tombery minion, the Wind-Up Tombery that sells... Did mine sell? Wait, is mine here? Okay, mine did sell. I was selling one for $300,000, so...

The fact... Wait, unless it only shows the top 10 things in the list, it's possible my item's actually... I hope... Oh my god, I hope it sold. I hope it sold and it's not... The price hasn't just dropped down to $200,000.

What does this sell for? On Kujata. hope it's sold and it's not, the price hasn't just dropped down to $200,000. Uh, what is, what does this sell for? Um, on Kujata. Let's see. I'm pretty sure it goes a bit higher than that. Okay. No, no, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's much lower. Uh, Tombury's only $40,000. So look, $200,000 is still, is still, it's still a profit. Um, I got that while running Palace of the Dead. Actually, a lot of stuff, a lot of Palace of the Dead drops right now are fucking broken. Moonfire Halter. No, Moonfire Tanger.

The Moonfire Tanger. How much did this sell for on JP? Yeah, 69,000. Over on, uh, Kujata, I got one of these as a drop the other day, and I'm try- Yeah, it's selling for- Okay, mine did sell. These people are trying to sell it for 400,000.

Uh, I- I've sold mine for... 120,000 then. So it did actually go through, which is good to see. 120,000 then. So it did actually go through. It's good to see. Man, the market's fucked and I love it. It's good if you are willing to adapt what you're making money with.

The market is great right now. If you're not and you're trying to do what you're doing back on your stable server, you're probably going to be fucked. Now we're up to the last part of the podcast and I still have a bunch of things on this list. You know what? I'm not going to power through them. I just want to talk about a couple other things in here. So recently there was this, I don't know why it was a drama. Like, I don't understand. Actually, both of these things I don't understand.

So Linus Tech Tips posted this thing on Twitter. The 2021 update to how LMG makes money, not going to bother making a full video update this year, but the commitment to transparency is still 100%. So they show this graph. Hey, look, this is how much we make from things. Makes sense. I'm surprised they make 2% from

Facebook ads, but apparently they make 2% from Facebook ads. It makes a lot of sense why they make so much from merch, they really do push the merch. Now, weirdly enough, we got okay so we got this comment wow i didn't imagine

adsense to be one-fifth of your income now i feel like a jerk being lazy and not customizing my ad blocker which line of replies to that with online websites and creators are supported by ads. I thought that much, oh, I thought that was pretty common knowledge. Ad blocking is the exact same thing as piracy. Literally the exact same thing. People still do it, and I've been guilty of it at times. We just need to be aware of the impact. Now, calling it piracy, I think this is where,

look, this is where people got angry because a lot of people don't want to admit that adblock is piracy. So, I know people are going to get angry about me even like I guess entertaining this idea but basically

where Linus is approaching this from, the examples he gave were not great. So, some of the, here we go where Linus is approaching this from, the examples he gave were not great. So some of the, uh, here we go. Uh, where, wait, where was the rest of the thread? Ah, here we go. So, some of the examples he gave

weren't great. So conflating blocking ads with piracy is silly. Why not encourage everyone to block ads, but buy some merch? At least your merch segues are amusing, and the desk pads are awesome. Why not encourage everyone to torrent Stranger

Things, rather than subscribing to Netflix, and then buy an AST theme of Stranger Things themed Lego set, and t-shirt? You see now, it's literally the exact same thing. The payment for the content is ads. You're not watching.

You're not paying for it. So. Basically the idea here. I understand why a lot of people. Don't want to entertain the idea. Basically the idea here is. While there is not a direct. Monetary transaction. For you to watch videos on YouTube, you are still making a transaction. That transaction is your time and in part some

of your data. This is what you get for watching videos on YouTube. If you don't want to do that, they provide other means to consume this content, that being on their floatplane, but to access the floatplane, instead of trading time, you are trading money. Basically, the idea is there is still a transaction there, even if you are not directly transacting money. I understand why a lot of people block ads. Like, that totally makes sense, and there are legitimate reasons for doing so. But I think, honestly,

I think Linus's argument holds a lot more water than a lot of people want to admit that it does. I think the idea of conflating it with. Conflating it with stealing a TV show. He made the same argument somewhere else in this thread. About Cirque du Soleil. Saying hey instead of buying a ticket to Cirque du Soleil. Why don't you instead

buy a t-shirt and something else and say, hey, I bought this t-shirt, let me into Cirque du Soleil. That example doesn't work, and Lewis Rossman sort of made this much more articulated than I'm going to. The idea with Cirque du Soleil is the amount you're actually spending on that ticket is vastly different than the amount that you are spending on the t-shirt so when you watch a video on YouTube you watch an ad I get paid like a fraction of a cent a ticket to Cirque du Soleil is a couple hundred dollars so buying that t-shirt is obviously considerably less valuable than buying the ticket to that show. Same with Stranger Things.

Sure, the amount that individual shows get when you watch it on Netflix is small, but it's much, much larger than you would get with an ad. I think in the case of Netflix, you can make that argument, but I don't think you can... Like, I've made this argument before regarding anime. I, for the most part, don't pay for anime. I buy merch, I buy light novels,

and I'm not saying it's not piracy. Like, that... I don't think I've ever made that argument. If I have, I want to take back that i've made that argument i don't if i have made that i don't think that's the case i think it is piracy i think you can just make an ethical argument for it if you are giving the property more money than you ever would have gave it if you had watched it through non-pirated means. So rather than having a Crunchyroll subscription, if I buy 13 light novels for Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon, that's way more money than the show ever would have gotten by just me watching

the show on Crunchyroll. Or if I buy a figure or anything like that, it's way more money than I ever would have gotten. So if you're saying, hey, instead of buying a ticket to Cirque du Soleil, I donated $10,000. Sure. I'm sure that if you donated $10,000 to the show, they would be willing to give you a free ticket or two. Like, that makes sense. But

where a lot of people got hung up on this was in the term piracy. Because they're arguing it's not illegal to watch videos on YouTube without ads, therefore

it's not piracy. There's a lot of things that are not illegal by the letter of the law, which are still that thing. So, obvious example being, let's say, jaywalking. Jaywalking is a crime, right? But I don't think anybody is going to actually,

unless you're in some weird totalitarian state, nobody's been convicted of jaywalking. Unless you're fucking jaywalking on a highway. Don't do that. That's just stupid. Like, jaywalking on a regular road, it's a crime.

But it's a, it's not the same sort of crime as most other crimes out there. Maybe this is a bad example actually, because I'm actually talking about something that is a crime. Yeah, that's a really bad example, ignore what I'm saying. Terrible example. Basically, my argument here is, it's basically the same as Linus'. my argument here is, it's basically the same as Linus's. I don't think that it's necessarily wrong that you do adblock.

But if you are going to adblock, I think it's also part of your moral responsibility to understand what you're actually doing. If you are adblocking, you are saying, I am going to pirate the content and I am happy to do so. Not saying you're a bad person for pirating the content, not saying that you shouldn't do it,

but you are making the active decision to pirate that content. Now, I know in Lewis Rossman's video, he brought up this weird way of defining piracy, that piracy isn't the person who is downloading something, it is the person who is distributing it. But both sides of that interaction are both against the law.

It's just different scales. Like, if you're running the Pirate Bay for example, that is a much larger scale operation than downloading individual movies or individual games from the Pirate

Bay, but both actions are still an act of piracy only one of them is ever going to be prosecuted though because only one of them only one of them is really a to be prosecuted though, because only one of them, only one of them's a really a big deal, if you then go from that download to then distribute it yourself, that is a different action, but I think it's still, I think it's still fair to call it piracy either way, I don't know, I'm sure some people, uh, I'm sure some people have a very different, uh, way of looking at the situation, but while I do run adblock, I think it's, it's important to understand that by doing so, you are making a, You're actively taking a step towards pirating content. I think that's about as far as I can go with that.

I think you should probably donate like a dollar. A dollar is more than you're ever going to watch in videos. And then pirate to your heart's content. If you don't want to do that, though, that's also fine. Do whatever you want. It's your computer and I can't really stop you. But what else do we have here? I guess we can end off with this.

Oh, you know, we're going to end off with two things. So Elgato is a company that makes a lot of fairly good products. So, the Stream Deck is a great device. The Cam Link, which I'm using right now for the camera, that's a great device. Works great on Linux. The HD60S, which is probably the world's most popular capture card, amazing device, doesn't work on Linux. I believe another version of the HD60S does, like HD60SX or something. I don't remember

exactly what it's called. Another... I haven't tried it. It's not exactly part of what I need. I'm running my AvaMedia right now and that does everything I need. HD60S Plus. That one does work on Linux because I think

it makes use of The v4l v4l drivers, so it's considered a webcam rather than a capture card like you typically see Also good product, and I'm sure Elgato has a lot of other Yeah, no they do. I'm not gonna say this sure they do has a lot of other... Yeah, no, they do. I'm not going to say they're sure. They do have a lot of other great things. Like, what was it? You've got the...

They've got a really popular microphone. The Wave microphones are really good. Their mic arms, from what I can see, are also really good. I don't know if the mic arms are very expensive. They probably are, considering it's Elgato. But this... Before we get into anything else, this. I don't know if the mic arms are very expensive. They probably are considering Salgado, but this Before we get into anything else this this right here. You shouldn't buy this is the stream deck pedal This is a foot pedal now

Foot pedals are a totally legitimate way to interact with your computer. I'm not saying don't buy a foot pedal. I'm saying don't buy the Elgato one. Do you want to know why you shouldn't buy the Elgato one? Because it's 90 US dollars. It's 90 dollars for a foot pedal. Now, you can go to Amazon. You can go to eBay.

You can go to a lot of these stores. Buy a foot pedal for $20. $30 maybe, maybe $50 if you want to get a good one. You don't need to pay $90 to get a foot pedal. There's nothing special it's going to do.

Like, oh, it has tactile control at your feet. Like, yep, that is what a pedal does. That is correct. True. Look at all the ways they're trying to sell feet. Like, yep, that is what a pedal does. That is correct. True. Look at all the ways they're trying to sell it. Like, oh, yeah, you got a button at your feet. You can just press it. Like, yep, that is certainly what a pedal does.

The only benefit you get from this is integration with the Elgato software. But what if I told you that keyboard's integrated with that as well? is integration with the Elgato software. But what if I told you that keyboard's integrated with that as well? So if you get something that emulates a keyboard, you could just do the same thing. Like, all... You just... Stop it. Stop it.

Elgato. Stop selling Gamer Snake Oil. But that's not the only Gamer Snake Oil there is. I'm using Push to Talk with your feet. I love that. I love the way they're trying to, like, sell the use cases, though. It's like, oh, Push to Talk with your feet. Look at this.

You can, like, bind buttons and stuff. Like, yup. Yup. Yup. But this isn't the only snake oil they have. So let's go back to the list of Elgato products. Go to audio. Wave panels.

Now, sound foam is really useful. Sound foam, acoustic foam, whatever you want to call it. Acoustic foam. Don't use acoustic. Acoustic foam is useful. This is not useful. Having acoustic foam that's like, what? This room's probably a massive room.

Like, having foam right here is not doing anything for you. What about your roof? Is this floor carpet? I actually don't know. It might be, but it also might be...

I think it might be carpet. What about your roof? What about the wall behind you? What about the walls to left and right? Those ones don't matter as much, but definitely the ones above you and behind you. Having this bit of foam here is not stopping anything. Having this bit of foam here is literally doing nothing, and you're not even using it to make your backdrop look cool.

You've got it in front of the camera. But the worst part about this. It would be one thing. If they were selling. Wait. Do they just have a bit of foam in a wall? On like. In a meeting room.

The problem with the snake oil. Is how expensive. The snake oil is. So. You will be paying $130 US dollars for six, six foam panels. Now, if you have no idea how much foam panels actually are, you might think, you know, doing that's actually, like, getting foam up in your room is actually expensive.

It's not. Now, there are different qualities of acoustic foam, and sure, you can make the argument that maybe this is actually higher quality foam. Fair. But, when you're at such an introductory level, you are making videos on the internet, you're a streamer, you don't need, you know, the sort of sound foam you would have in a recording studio where you are, what, like, recording multi-million dollar tracks. That's not what you're doing.

You're a dude who makes videos on the internet. So here you go. Here is a 50 pack of foam for 70 Australian dollars. This is $70 for 50 panels. Sure, they don't look as cool. I'll give you that one. They definitely don't look as cool. But it's also considerably more expensive.

Why is there a negative review here? The red is slightly smaller than the... Okay. Well, that's actually beautiful. It's slightly smaller, but if you just place them on your wall, you're not going to notice. So, like, it's also not a big deal. Wait.

I had to return the product as not functional for purpose as described. They do not absorb sound. Measured 1 decibel to 1.5 decibel. 10 to 20% absorption. Very poor. Foam is not acoustic type. You measured a drop in sound.

You measured a drop in sound, but it's not acoustic foam. Also, like like the whole acoustic foam thing is you want to have something that is uneven on your wall to distribute the sound also it's not okay if anyone doesn't understand acoustic foam it's not blocking sound coming from outside of the room right it's for treating the inside of the room to eliminate the echoes

if you think it's soundproofing, it's not doing that and you're looking for the wrong product. There are ways to soundproof a room, but this is not the way that you go about it. You want to have like big, thick, they're sort of foam panels anyway but these big thick uh sheets behind the wall to actually block out sound just it's so much cheaper to just buy regular foam and you'll be it's gonna do the basically the same job for what you're gonna be doing. If you do need something that is actually... That is actually, I guess, treating a recording... Like a professional recording studio.

You don't want to buy the Elgato from them anyway. Because there's still cheaper stuff you can get that does a better job. So, like, I can't actually find a reason why you buy the Elgato version. Unless you just like the look and that's That's pretty much it Let's see if we can find I want to see if I can find a ripoff of Those panels so there's the Elgato wave panels Let's see can I find?

Okay, you know what the one reason to buy it is the aesthetics. I cannot find something that matches the aesthetics of the Elgato version. So if that's what you're buying them for, sure. If you're buying them for actual sound treatment, just buy anything else. It's going to do the same job. So that's going to be pretty much it for me actually. We are now at the end of the show. And I don't have any other plans after this actually. I think I'm gonna like maybe get... we've got videos to get uploaded and the stuff

and I'll probably do the the clipping for this tomorrow because it's like almost six o'clock here. Um, but apart from that, yeah, this is episode one. I, I, uh,

it's still playing Spyro. Oh, one thing I didn't get around to talking about. I'm thinking about starting streaming, um, uh, needy streamer overload. Uh, if you've been seeing vtubers recently a lot of them are playing it it looks like a really fun game uh it's like a it's a game where you are a producer for a a a you're a producer for a

streamer and it's it's got some content warnings it's got some doki doki vibes to it so it's definitely right up my alley and I want to try it, plus it's got a lot of amusing amusing humour to it as well so definitely right up my alley

so if you like this podcast and you want to hear the audio version the audio version is available basically anywhere you can find audio podcasts the video version on YouTube and Odyssey I've got a main channel that is Brody Robertson

Brody Robertson, yes, main channel is Brody Robertson I do Linux videos there I've got a gaming channel that is called Brody Robertson Plays and that's going to be it for me so I'm out