The WAN Show - Ding Dong the Witch is Dead - WAN Show December 22, 2023

Starting point is 00:00:00 What is up everyone and welcome to the WAN Show! We've got a great topic for you guys today, that's right! One great topic, it's happened! Sony has patented the automatic difficulty curve. Wow! That and somebody made the build corner out of Lego. There. I went out of my way, Luke. I went out of my way Luke. I went out of my way so hard to leave Your topics for you. You couldn't possibly have chosen either of those. No, I didn't Yeah, I thought you were gonna go for it

Starting point is 00:00:33 I thought you're gonna go for it But anyways ding dong the witch is dead Bobby Kotick is out and I am a happy boy and we'll talk about that later Also, Google gives everybody kind of at least like two dollars, maybe more. What? Yeah. Okay, I don't know anything about that. Yeah. why don't we jump into the headline topic today which is of course that apple may be investigated over beeper i'm gonna try so harder. Gonna try so hard.

Starting point is 00:01:25 Gonna try so hard. We can do it. I don't mind waiting. A consulting firm used AI to reduce layoffs. We can do that one too. Sure. The Last of Us multiplayer game has been canceled. Yep.

Starting point is 00:01:37 They gotta remaster it again. It got just as canceled as me. It's good. What? So they're still making it? Well, no. I'm coming back. it's the different kind of canceled eventually eventually all right let's do it ding dong the witch is dead bobby coddick

Starting point is 00:01:52 go bobby coddick will be leaving activision december 29th after 32 years unfortunately entirely voluntarily 20 of those years have been as ceo coddick oversaw the creation of many of the company's most beloved ips including call of duty and guitar hero does anyone actually beloved call of duty guitar hero yes but as far as i can tell the only people who hate cod as much as cod haters are cod lovers yeah um yeah it is one of those communities i do believe. He was also allegedly in a recently settled lawsuit to have knowingly created and for years ignored a hostile workplace culture, which has included multiple employee walkouts and strenuous calls for his resignation. Also, including allegedly things like, you know, I'm going to jump to this screen. Where is it?

Starting point is 00:02:44 I think we need to do like a trigger warning here if you're going to talk about what I think you're going to talk about. Yeah. Okay. I was going to be somewhat indirect. But yeah, there's that. We don't necessarily 100% know what this means, but he was in Epstein's black book.

Starting point is 00:02:58 We'll probably learn, I think, in January. Yeah, yeah. I heard the black book is going to be becoming a white book with black letters on it yeah so we'll know like what that actually means because you know just being in the book doesn't necessarily mean anything i don't know i think well i think the only thing that's happening is they're publishing the flight logs to the island right okay well that would also that would be i mean that's a pretty big it would be a solid indicator that would that's a pretty that's a pretty big one i think yeah be a solid indicator. That's a pretty big one, I think.

Starting point is 00:03:25 Yeah. Also. Are you in the flight logs? Because I'd like to get a heads up. No, we're good. If I'm going to find out that, you know, I'm going to be under fire because my longtime collaborator was in the flight logs to Epstein's Island. I would really like to know about it right now. I like dangerous vacations, but not where i'm the danger so i did i did not go to the island

Starting point is 00:03:50 cool um there's also uh like allegedly he uh has hid uh multiple because i've had enough luke i've had enough surprises dan were you on that island we might have to talk after the show how could you do this to me this is going in your employee review um anyways uh yeah there's there's uh multiple accounts of him hiding things that he knew were going on at the company including uh i'm not gonna go into details of things but including pretty much the worst things you could imagine when it comes to things like sexual harassment and sexual misconduct um at a company that should definitely have none of that

Starting point is 00:04:39 um there's also the time that he uh called his assistant and left a voicemail threatening to kill her and then settled a legal agreement for it uh so that's another allegedly but just in general uh i'm very happy he's gone so that's that's great uh microsoft has not appointed a direct replacement for kodak hold on here Here's my question though. Before we get, before we move on from that. Yeah. I mean, what is left of the company that you love?

Starting point is 00:05:14 Oh, nothing at this point. Nothing at all. Like, is, is there really anything to celebrate? Like, okay.

Starting point is 00:05:19 You know, this is kind of like, um, yeah, honestly, it's like the end of the dark crystal. Okay. So the Skeksis,

Starting point is 00:05:26 like, I don't know. They, they eventually die or some shit because they don't have life force to draw on or, you know, what, whatever ultimately happens to a Skeksis. Um,

Starting point is 00:05:37 but like the world is ruined. Yeah. Everything is, uh, this is honestly, I'm happy he's gone, but in a way this is actually a victory lap for him uh yeah because he waited it out yeah he he had a long prosperous career in the gaming industry insane thing that he did that would have like just destroyed other

Starting point is 00:06:01 people he was made of rubber he just bounced it right off didn't care didn't even bother him really well i mean stock price go boom yeah did it take a hit here or there yep and then it went right back up we don't know for sure it didn't bother him at all the boy makes money that is conjecture i'm not saying that bobby bills i'm not saying i disagree with your speculation but neither of us know him personally i haven't been to his island have you been to his island no he probably has one he might have a few okay you can't say things like he probably has an island in the context of us talking about epstein's island i'm not saying you're wrong i'm just saying that we can't say that yeah all right that's his opinion allegedly he doesn't have an island no okay oh man oh boy cool so how's it going bobby look i mean we're

Starting point is 00:07:09 just don't get us in legal trouble okay yeah yeah yeah okay we're we're not in any legal trouble okay it's been seven minutes it's been seven minutes microsoft has not appointed were you muted no i think i got muted for that okay microsoft has not appointed a direct replacement for kodak instead activision's existing leadership will be placed under microsoft's game content and studios president matt booty discussion question what is bobby kottick's legacy what would you like to see out of activision now that he's gone bobby kottick's legacy i'd like to see blizzard out of activision now that he's gone because i never really gave two shits about anything activision

Starting point is 00:07:55 ever did i mean it's never happening like the diablo is a stupid like gotcha game now well his whole thing was that he didn't want to invest in anything that couldn't be i believe his terminology was annualized he didn't want to invest in anything that couldn't have a release every year something big for people to purchase every year the ea strategy yeah that was like that was his big push um his legacy for the the finance bros is going to be line go up his legacy for the gamers is going to be quality go down um i think okay so you can talk about quality go down but like we have to have this conversation why do the gamers keep buying it if the quality go down is the quality okay this is a tough one is the quality bad if people willingly part with their money to have the product more than ever i think i think what is quality luke i think it's like addiction i i think the the things that are going up so you're saying it's quality crack cocaine quality methamphetamine no so it's quality wait you just don't like the product they make

Starting point is 00:09:13 i think the i think that i think things like gameplay because if you tried it i'm not getting past this one I'm stuck here boys um sopcanon asks well is there bad cocaine Linus I don't know isn't that where the whole I don't understand things about drugs but no crack is

Starting point is 00:09:38 the low quality cocaine is my understanding but this is all based on me reading on Wikipedia I actually know nothing about drugs I think that's right though breaking back division what even is this show anymore oh man that's great um but yeah i don't know i'm just happy he's gone because it feels like now maybe possibly there's a chance uh because i think there was effectively no real chance

Starting point is 00:10:11 how is there a chance because this is this is bobby's team this is this is a culture that for better or for worse he oversaw this is um yeah i know like a lot of the the team that was good being gone is because he had this philosophy of like uh blizzard games and and activision games there are a lot of like obsession games for people so he was like people are going to grow up wanting to be developers or writers or game designers or level designers or whatever so that they can work on these games. So we'll just pay them trash and massively overwork them. And we'll just always have employees because everyone loves our games. And that was actually a thing that they actually did.

Starting point is 00:10:57 That's such a quiet out loud moment. Yeah. Like, oh, man, there's there's tons of reports of people working at blizzard and then working at other game development studios in the same area making similar games and being like wow this is a wildly different experience i get paid way more i work way less there's a bigger focus on quality like this is this is a whole thing like i i i was i was blown away when i discovered what the margins are like in the model plane industry like like to run a hobby shop um i was just this was back when i was working at ncix and i i picked up some transmitter and like in an expensive plane because i was like oh this seems

Starting point is 00:11:39 pretty cool and i'm just like kind of i wanted to try it right and i was just i was chatting with them because i i just i'm curious i'm a curious person and i walked into their store and kind of like with keith's tech shop there was a lot of you know dead stock you know a lot of um like there were obvious challenges that i was looking at in this in this hobby shop that was in like coquitlam or something it was just like a like a random like mom and pop style shop yeah and um i've always noticed those types of shops have insane amount of dead stock yeah and i and i i was i was like chatting with the guy about it and as someone who has worked in retail i have a pretty good understanding of that just because something is six hundred dollars doesn't necessarily mean that you are being ripped off. It could mean that the shopkeep got ripped off at some point.

Starting point is 00:12:27 Anyone could be doing the ripping off, or in fact, there could be no ripping off being done, and it's actually just a really expensive product to develop. You can't make any assumptions. And so I was just chatting about it, and I was just blown away by how little margin there was in it. And the guy's basically like, yeah, well, the problem is that this is an industry

Starting point is 00:12:48 where the only way to survive is not if you're a more successful businessman than your neighbor, but if you are more passionate and more willing to do it for nothing out of the sheer joy of it because someone else will.

Starting point is 00:13:07 And I was just like, ah, but it's almost like it, it, as far as I can tell now, there's a lot of problems since then. That was a long time ago. And since then there's been a massive amount of consolidation in that

Starting point is 00:13:20 industry. Like as far as I can tell between horizon hobby, um, hold on i don't want to i don't want to uh i don't want to say the wrong companies but i'm not alerica okay blah blah blah blah blah yeah i think it's uh i think it's horizon here who owns e-flight it's been a long time yeah horizon hobby is one of the big ones for sure uh between horizon hobby and i think there's like one other one or something like that they've basically consolidated absolutely everyone they own absolutely everything and they have all the power hobby lobby people are saying hobby lobby is the other

Starting point is 00:14:05 big one don't they also like buy like historical relics and hoard them i know this yeah um hobby lobby historical artifacts okay that i don't hobby lobby smuggling scandal the hobby lobby smuggling scandal started in 2009 when representatives of hobby lobby chain or craft stores received a large number of clay belay and tablets originating in the ancient near east the artifacts were intended for the museum of the bible funded by the evangelical christian green family which owns the ok owns the Oklahoma based chain international staff. Yeah. This is like a thing.

Starting point is 00:14:50 Anyways, that's a fun rabbit hole. People can go down. We don't need to figure that out right now. Hobby lobby. Yeah. Own all the things. Okay,

Starting point is 00:14:58 cool. Any who, um, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh, um yeah yeah okay uh traxxas is still doing their own thing as far as i can tell i wonder if that's a matter of time anyway i've heard very good things about my my point was back then before as much consolidation had occurred um i was just i was i had this sort of realization that i was never going to be able to make money doing something that i was passionate about because there would always be someone who was willing to do it for nothing oh yeah and then i figured it out anyway which is great i i get to do this job and

Starting point is 00:15:37 you know this was this was pre the sort of youtube influencer boom and these days what's cool is you don't have to work in the traditional supply chain with the traditional um with the traditional pressures right there is no mega corporation that's going to come in and consolidate and then you know uh force your margins down to absolutely nothing and then just just dominate you with their retail presence or whatever else right like you could just you can just talk about these things and then you can take sponsorships from those consolidators and mourn what was lost in the small community shops but hey at least you have your online community now yeah you know it's luke it's something it's a way of the world it's it's something there's only so much stuff you can fight i didn't make the rules something

Starting point is 00:16:31 that took me a long time to accept but it is what it is yeah anyway i forget your battles but i forget how i got on this topic but um hobby hobby bobby kodik bobby yeah so so it's one of those things where oh right what the point i was trying to make is those dynamics existed in industries where it's competitive and especially when it's niche right there's there's an incentive to to drive margins down and the computer industry has seen this a lot like back when i got into the industry, there were countless little computer shops along Bridgeport Road in Richmond. They are basically all gone. Not because Omega Corporation, you know, consolidated and whatever. Amazon moving into Canada, Newegg moving into Canada, that came way later. And I'm not even convinced that Newegg is that successful in the country. I think Amazon is. Newegg, I doubt it's to the same degree. successful in the country i think amazon is new egg i doubt it's to the same degree that was just because they were all at each other's throats they would kill each other for a nickel of margin on a hard drive um and it was because you just had these people who were super passionate about

Starting point is 00:17:35 computers and building computers and electronics and all this stuff and i guess what i'm the point i'm trying to make is that in some industries where people are excited and passionate there's always going to be that dynamic but it takes a certain type of f***ing a**hole to exploit it to to go oh this is good and min max it yeah yeah his exact term is was that they, they need annualizable IPS that are exploitable. Yeah. So when I talk about line goes up, this has been talked about by like a billion people, but I'm going to bring it up anyways. Where I have my mouse here,

Starting point is 00:18:16 2003 is when Bobby took over as CEO. I think it said 20 years ago, you know, that should be right. You can see how the line was pretty flat before then. Bobby takes over. Line starts going up. Line goes up.

Starting point is 00:18:29 Line goes up. Line goes up. Line goes up. Big hit. Line goes right back up. That's why people liked Bobby. That's it. Yep.

Starting point is 00:18:48 All right, then. yep all right then when it comes to like nameless faceless shares and people investing and just trying to make money it doesn't really matter what they did as long as that doesn't reflect in line go down and when it did reflect in line go down he got the line back up again so nobody really cared yeah and he was protected because he got the lineup that's how it works to me i'm protect tip not protected yeah speaking of which move on protect tip protect tip uh sony pad that's the worst thing I've ever said Protective? Yeah, protective Can I do like a sad ding?

Starting point is 00:19:32 Like a There you go No, no, I'm not done I'm not done with that topic yet So we're talking about Sort of line go up And Right, right, right, right, right

Starting point is 00:19:43 We're talking about Is a game. What's the is the quality of the game good? You know, if everybody keeps buying it, something, something. Anyway, I want to talk about this. Sony PlayStation is reportedly has come up with a strategy to break through the the game's pricing barrier that we've talked about extensively in the past like the fact that a a game has gone from being what like excuse me 59.99 in my childhood on the super nintendo to being like 69.99 today 79.99 and again this is canadian currency so you know there's some some of that's because

Starting point is 00:20:22 our dollar's not doing as well yeah exactly um it is is is wild when you consider that the the end credits of a triple a title you know in 1994 was like it might have taken five minutes but that was because they had one name on the screen at a time and they'd have like animations between them and stuff. And stuff, right? Not that many people worked on Super Mario World. And that was a big game at the time, right? And so we've kind of talked about how wild that is and how is this sustainable. And obviously, the industry has come up with some strategies. Ten people.

Starting point is 00:21:01 Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I think when you watch the end credits um video sometimes people's names come up more than once because they did multiple roles on the game don't quote me on that but because this would be a memory from like being a kid but i think i was like hey wait a minute i'm not an expert of japanese names but wasn't that the same one I saw? Yeah, don't quote me on that. Don't quote me on that. But I've definitely seen it in some game or another,

Starting point is 00:21:31 even if it wasn't Super Mario World. Yeah, over 6,000 people worked on Grand Theft Auto V. So how is it even possible that these games cost the same amount? Now, obviously, there's economies of scale, right? We're selling way more games these days to a much broader, more diverse array of gamers. But, and GTA Online is a huge part of that success being able to continually collect money from the gamers that microtransactions that are playing your game cosmetics all of that good stuff but sony and actually nintendo to a

Starting point is 00:22:01 significant extent neither of them have really embraced that the same way as other developers have. Sony still does big single-player games. Nintendo still does buy once, cry once. We never discount our games, but for better or for worse,

Starting point is 00:22:21 you own them. Kind of. Just don't stream them. or have a tournament of them or probably talk about them or something or expect to have your save game unless you give us a cloud subscription fee you know just nintendo things yeah seem like an intense bunch over there yeah um so sony has a plan or playstation excuse me they're reportedly planning on selling games in parts now for 50 each which would raise overall prices i have no idea how the math works on nichegamer.com um but by my math would raise overall prices by 82 100 not to 82 100 because

Starting point is 00:23:12 according to the article here uh they are and this is this is from the leak uh from insomniac games according to the article they are planning to release the next spider-man game in three parts for 50 each and this is something we've seen before with last of us uh with the final fantasy 7 remake um is episodic big thing with telltale back in the day is episodic gaming back is this and and whether you want it whatever you want to brand it, episodic gaming, one game in parts, however you want to sort of brand it, is this a reasonable compromise to you? Hold on. I'm thinking. Think, think, think.

Starting point is 00:23:57 Okay, so Bobby Kotick, for better or for worse, figured out a way to make that game company successful for its shareholders and if it isn't successful for its shareholders it won't exist yeah which is a cold hard truth and it sucks but it's it's cold and it's hard and it's the truth nice is this a better solution than some you know refried beans you know we scraped some cheese off the floor we threw it kind of back in there and it's it's it's call of duty modern warfare 2 the second modern warfare 2 black ops so my counter to that is that you're assuming that it's not just going to be both well these are single player experiences okay they probably will still have some cosmetics i'm sure you can buy a spider-man suit and you know flamboyant pink if you really want to or whatever but like is this

Starting point is 00:24:56 is parts of a game better than a whole other game that's just like a crappier game like would you rather have bought baldur's gate three in three times because one of each act one for each act sorry and for like 150 dollars yeah or would you rather or or or would you rather have well okay or would you rather have baldur's gate 2024 baldur's gate 2025 baldur's gate 2026 and them not be an enormous beautifully voice acted rich immersive game now obviously okay they made it work with baldur's gate 3 yeah Yeah, they smashed it. But the thing is that they took a home run swing. They did. And those home run swings either go over the fence or they're a pop fly and you're out and you're done.

Starting point is 00:25:53 A lot of companies die because of that. Obviously, they killed it. Amazing game. Yada, yada. Look, I was talking to a creator not that long ago who was planning to alter their release schedule from more frequent to, I think, to a creator not that long ago who was planning to alter their release schedule from uh more frequent to i think their target was going to be one a month or one every two months hold on

Starting point is 00:26:11 with the rationale being that mark rober does it and i kind of went right but here's the problem there is one person on earth who is mark rober his name is mark rober just because mark rober can especially when you have a team behind you can consistently knock it out of the park or at least into the upper bleachers right just because he can do the guy's a literal rocket scientist okay and no offense this was a very very smart person who I respect a lot. If they're watching, you know, um, but they're not Mark Rober. I'm not Mark Rober. Maybe someday Mark Rober won't even be Mark Rober.

Starting point is 00:26:59 And you also do that forever. You also need to be in the right like content sphere as well. Yeah. Because you might make a type of content that even if you did smash it out of the park, there just isn't enough people that are interested in that at all to watch it. So like there's some problems there too. So it's very, it's very, very, it's very challenging. It's a challenging business model to just swing for

Starting point is 00:27:26 the fences every single time it's like it feels it feels dangerous so are we back to episodic gaming and is it here for real this time i guess is my question is episodic gaming gonna fix gonna fix that because i feel like it's not episodic gaming i feel like it's one game multiple parts because like if it was episodic gaming it feels like uh warcraft 3 frozen throne is the one in that case i'm totally down genuinely good expansions totally down if father's gate 3 was like hey there's an act 4 it took us a long time it's gonna cost some money i'm down okay so then you are totally but i don't think this is what they're talking about did you play wolf among us no have you did you play any of telltale games games no okay so what's i get so

Starting point is 00:28:19 then i can't even have this conversation with you okay dan did you play wolf among us uh yeah i played among us okay cool wonderful wait wait hold on no i just i had to make that joke i'm sorry no i played i played that yeah yes yes this guy's sus no um okay is it one game or is it six games or however many pieces it was in yeah i don't know it's it's difficult like if it's all dlc right the story was certainly not over after part one and as someone who wasn't familiar with episodic gaming i was like kind of annoyed like when's the next part coming out but i mean that's the result right give me

Starting point is 00:29:01 give me half-life episode one half-life episode two same sort of vein maybe yeah like the story wasn't over yeah i don't know if i agree though because like but were they full price within like 60 for each of the six i forget how much was episode bg3 hits a conclusion it could continue but it hit a conclusion warcraft 3 hit a conclusion it obviously could continue because frozen throne but it did hit a conclusion like these are games that come to an end yeah a reasonable end but you could continue the story it's not a problem yeah but it's you're not feeling left out um it's not like oh and they just entered the building that they've been trying to get to this whole time. $24, please. Please buy part two.

Starting point is 00:29:46 And that's what's going to happen with this. I think there's a level of intention, in my opinion, because I've seen some games that launch with day one DLC that's on the disc, you know, that sort of thing. But if you're kind of releasing a $30 game and you're reusing the same assets and you're kind of just expanding on the story and maybe there's more work that has to be done that way i could see that as a reasonable level of business model i don't think

Starting point is 00:30:08 just expanding on the story is fair to the writers just saying i mean yeah you don't but no i mean okay sorry i meant like from the non-technical side of things right you don't have to remake the engine or redesign the concept or anything like that, right? I don't know, man. I think that you put a lot of pressure on yourself with an episodic model, though, because people are not necessarily going to... I think that whether it's developers putting pressure on themselves or whether it's gamers putting pressure on developers, there is some expectation that if you have five episodes that release over a span of several years the last episode is probably going to look a little better than the first one oh yeah i mean star wars return of the jedi the special effects are a lot

Starting point is 00:30:54 better than a new hope because they like are and probably should be like i don't think the technical team just goes on permanent vacation after you release episode one and you just leave it completely to the storytellers i think you'd have to keep that somewhat within reason what about it's still very likely that they're not going to iterate on the engine itself but they might get better at doing certain things they might expand their their library of tools that the uh level designers and stuff can use what about like the requirement of the player to buy all every single expansion just to get the complete story well the thing is that i actually okay so i don't mind that and here's the reason basically episodic gaming is attacks on the people who can't wait to play it

Starting point is 00:31:41 and that already exists is it yeah can't wait to play it yeah because you're saying it's going to be discounted in a bundle at some point at some point if you're patient just like with any other just like with a game that is in one piece you can buy it at launch and you'll pay 80 or 90 or i don't know however many dollars that this all seems to be very much in flux right now the games industry seems to be trying to figure out how to make that number higher and i get it because we went from yeah 10 people working on super mario world to 6 000 working it's unfortunate timing because the entire world is broke but but yes i also understand it yeah but like part of salaries are very difficult what did they say they lost like 5 000 or 6 000 jobs or something like that

Starting point is 00:32:24 like you're not going to fix people being broke by developers not getting paid yeah no i i'm i both sides of this suck basically it just sucks um so so one way or another if you were so excited to play it that you're willing to buy it in pieces for 50 each and then if at the end of the day the whole thing is available for probably some reduced rate because games do go down in price as long as they're not made by nintendo is it really any different than what we're doing now like what difference would it have made that's that's what i'm almost sure kind of trying to want like is is ano uh whatever year it currently is is ano 18 whatever 1800 uh oh i thought it had additional they all add up to nine oh i know fun right yeah that actually helps but yeah yeah

Starting point is 00:33:15 okay um ano 1800 is that episodic gaming no that's expansion expansion packs yes those are expansion i don't think i like episodic gaming but i actually very much like expansion packs i am very down with expansion packs i also don't see expansion packs as dlc okay so i think they are they it has to be different i see dlc is like you have a new shirt let's go to a movie okay okay is empire strikes back an expansion pack yeah or is it an episodic game okay so now now we're getting weird because i don't think it's i don't think it's either i think it's just well next one what i'm asking is did a new hope give you enough closure to the story that you consider it to be a standalone piece of media if there's um what about a plot and b plot like star wars all of them would be the a plot and then each individual episode is more like the b

Starting point is 00:34:18 plot and they resolve every episode right yeah that's like the point i'm trying to make exactly exactly exactly each movie is substantial enough piece of content that i don't feel like it would be considered a a part i don't know there were some balls bluer than the surface of hoth after empire that story was clearly not over yeah but it was a full movie so like if we're taking if we're taking spider-man i believe that's a sony game yeah with sony ip if we're taking spider-man not the movie yeah but the game yes if it just chops literally midway through the game then that feels like i'm getting ripped in an episodic way sure but if they're like this is episodic gaming you get a whole game and

Starting point is 00:35:05 then later you get another whole game it's like okay sure i don't think that's what they're going for i don't think they're trying to deliver two movies i don't think that luke and i are ever going to see 100 eye to eye on this because honestly i am mostly just kind of talking through it i don't really know how i feel about it and i think it's going to come down to the individual ips and and how they get handled because i can fully imagine that there's going to be scenarios where this is totally fine and i'll tolerate a lot of bullshit from something that i'm really really excited about yeah um i am i'm still playing that stupid f***ing fantasian game.

Starting point is 00:35:49 I've put another probably 12 to 15 hours into it in the last couple of weeks, because I'm just like, darn it, it's beautiful, and the music is amazing, and it sort of tickles all the right spots on me for that kind of retro RPGie rpg sort of vibe but with some modern sensibilities but it's a bad game and it was done as two parts i shouldn't say it's a bad game it has very big problems and some of them are caused by the fact that it was done in two parts and it was done in two parts for business reasons in this case not to make you buy part one and part two but

Starting point is 00:36:25 to keep you subscribed to apple arcade and i put up with it so basically what i'm saying is i'm just as bad as all of you not quite who are but well not quite i am giving do you know how much i've spent on apple arcade because i have taken so long to finish the game and i have been just like i know someone personally who has spent over two thousand dollars on league of legends skins and i guarantee you in saying that there will be a bunch of people in chat that are like, that's low. I don't think it's the same. Okay. Do you want to know how much I have spent on Apple arcade? $150.

Starting point is 00:37:13 Hold on. I don't know how much it costs monthly. Okay. So it's six bucks billing problem. Okay. They didn't manage to take the six bucks from me there. Okay. I got a few billing problem okay they didn't manage to take the six bucks from me there okay i got a few billing problem things someone at floatplane chat forty nine hundred dollars on league skins hold

Starting point is 00:37:31 on okay i gotta add this up twelve damn eighteen oh they increased the price someone who apparently spent a few grand on valorant skins but why someone i'm gonna flip in chat i mean i spent fifteen thousand dollars on a pay to win mmo and let's not even talk about overwatch 2's complete farce of a sequel that i lost money okay well i've only spent thirty four dollars on fantasia lol just my cs2 skins are six thousand usd not league but forty seven hundred and twelve dollars in star citizen um yeah i don't think it's the same twenty four 24 000 on puzzle and dragons i also would have spent about double that if my subscription hadn't had a problem because the only reason i didn't fix it was because i didn't know because i didn't check that email

Starting point is 00:38:15 so i would have spent like 70 on fantasia which i guess is a perfectly reasonable amount of money to spend i'm on the final boss now okay the point is i don't remember what the point is anymore you made you made your point how about that you happy yes you feel good yeah you like that all right um i don't know episode of gaming i i i see the problems but i think we're gonna accept it for the ips and the experiences that we really love i mean if if valve came out and said yeah we're gonna do episodes three four and five people would buy the out of them oh yeah no question i wonder no hesitation they would pre-order the out of them do you think there's

Starting point is 00:39:01 a risk here of shoot self in foot like what if episode one comes out it's cheaper than you'd normally sell a full game for and people don't like it and they don't buy the episodes i mean if i had to guess i'd say that might be the problem with episodic gaming yeah i mean i i'm not in the boardrooms at any of these you know at telltale or at valve or whatever does valve even have a boardroom or do they just have like lounge chairs i'm not sure probably lounge chairs who knows are they in are the lounge chairs in new zealand or like the boardroom is one enormous circular table that everyone can fit at um yeah i don't know i honestly because the the first thing this makes me think of

Starting point is 00:39:49 is things like telltale games where the first one that comes out has a ton of hype and like everyone plays it and then the further episodes come out and people fall off yeah yeah knight aaron dykes i don't know what this is anyway the point is that says people are accepting it with the final fantasy 7 remake and are paying 70 bucks for part one and two with the supposed part three on the way and a potential part four coming too yeah i mean personally i'm just gonna wait 280 for a game yeah it's all just final fantasy 7 well final fantasy 7 remake which is has the story has apparently been retooled significantly. But it's one game.

Starting point is 00:40:27 It is just Final Fantasy VII. But it's Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 1, 2, 3, and 4. But what are the parts? Is it all just Final Fantasy VII? I mean, theoretically, I guess. Like this isn't, you're not getting 7, 8, 9, and 10 or something? I mean, Final Fantasy VII came on, I think it was four discs. So like, you know, it doesn't seem that unreasonable. I mean, the last disc was basically just like very little content because it had to contain so many of the areas that you had already explored,

Starting point is 00:40:49 but that's neither here nor there, Luke. Each part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake feels like a complete game. So then if you're okay with that, then it's all good, right? I am personally okay with that. Well, then what if the writers for Baldur's Gate 3, who are obviously very talented, what if they were just given the objective of making Acts 1, 2, and 3 tie up

Starting point is 00:41:08 in a nice little bow at the end of each one and then they could release a year apart and give everyone something to do in that constant cash flow? I don't think it would have worked as well. Look, it won Game of the Year. So obviously, to go back

Starting point is 00:41:24 and say, well, maybe we should have done it, is kind of stupid, because it's been a huge financial success for Larian, and been beloved by gamers. But we're not talking necessarily specifically about Baldur's Gate 3. We're talking strategically about how swinging for the fences every time

Starting point is 00:41:40 may not be viable for everyone whose name is not Larian Studios. Because I pretty much guarantee you, whatever their next whatever they're not mark rober you know you're not mark rober you're not larry in studios sorry um yeah because i'm not trying to make games worse i'm trying to have a conversation i i think it's a risky move just like not doing it is also a risky move i think there isn't really like a safe bet here because if you release an act one is bad uh you you might be able to decide to just stop making the other ones so that might actually be helpful except theirs was good and they just decided to stop making it anyways um whatever but yeah like

Starting point is 00:42:27 so like that might be helpful from a financial investment standpoint um but i think your chance at like a really big splash kind of falls off after the first one yeah like i'm wondering if like if if larian dropped bg3 act one and it killed because it would have are they going to see the same amount of total success at the end if they release they're going to have a full year for that hype to kind of die down for people to get distracted and go play other games um you know maybe you don't get the same kind of you know incredible community around the game no constant discussion like i'm sure overall it still would have killed absolutely because it's a fantastic game we're gonna find out done as well though i don't know we're gonna find out

Starting point is 00:43:14 because clearly this is going to happen yeah um it did early access i know they had early access but that's not what we're talking it's not the same thing okay the last thing that i wanted to talk about like gaming wise before we say goodbye to this topic is do i have to beat the final boss of fantasia or can i just like call it here i uh you know it did that like classic jrpg thing where the final boss has like three stupid f***ing phases where they get like increasingly ridiculously difficult i've already spent about an hour fighting it and then it's like oh yeah it's there's another phase this is like their true god form and i just like i like quickly looked i was like how hard is this stupid fight because i like scraped by the second phase and

Starting point is 00:44:06 the third phase is like ludicrous like i'm basically gonna have to go reload a save point somewhere else like at this point can i say look i i played there's a there was a no progression bug this like stone golem at a river didn't fall over when i killed him so i can't walk over his body and like get to some good stuff on the other side and i'm just like can i just be done with this thing and can i just watch the end credits like on youtube what do you think philosophically i've put like 60 hours into it philosophically it's a video game who cares well no i just i just mean i just mean like like look do i have i invested enough time to say look i i played the game i had stuff like have i told you about my um oh crap what is the xcom 2 have i

Starting point is 00:44:52 told you about that right yeah where you had the non-progression bug yeah yeah that sucked um it was a it was a hardcore run so you you only had the one save because they wanted like if people died and stuff on your team there was permadeath so they didn't want you to be able to go back and get them back again yeah and then i got into a non-progression bug so i couldn't load a previous save and then avoid it yeah so frustrating yeah final fantasy tactics was famous for that too i want to clarify because there seems to be confusion no episodic content and lyrian releasing act one as a uh standalone game no not a standalone game a um early access thing oh is super not the same thing okay very very very much not the same thing yeah we're talking about marketing investment we're talking about a lot of people just straight up

Starting point is 00:45:39 ignoring stuff because of the early access flag i had pre-ordered bald's gate 3 because i was a huge fan of original sin 2 and i was pretty sure it was going to be good i had it loaded and never launched the early access version because i'm like it's early access i don't care that people say it's good i'm going to wait till it's out a lot of people are going to act that way it is very much not the same thing at all so just we're moving on from man they say i have to beat it you don't have to beat it like leveling in this game is so hard and it's because it was like part one part two so the leveling and xp curve is super messed up because they didn't want you to level too much toward the end of part one and then in part two i don't know what happened like there's a whole thing with

Starting point is 00:46:25 this game like it in conclusion don't have apple fund your game and make it exclusive to apple arcade because there's a lot of problems with it it's gonna take forever this was something like diablo 1 you would use like a trainer or a glitch to boost your team up and then you would just go through the fight and by doing that who cares anyways so just go watch it on youtube but if it was diablo 1 then you would just respawn back at the thing spawn a new generated dungeon go fight level 17 a couple more times and then fight him the problem is that it's really really difficult in this game to farm xp that's the issue oh is that it's it will take i forever to grind levels and i just don't think the tedium of that does not sound valuable to me yeah right um if it was a difficulty thing and yes jack jack smoo says

Starting point is 00:47:29 you don't have to beat a game that's basically forcing you to keep a subscription by making the game harder than it needs to be now to be clear there's a lot of things about the game that are hard in ways that are really creative and really cool i don't think i have ever played an rpg where the boss fights are that unique and that different. Like you have a party that's, I think, a total of eight characters, and you can swap them in and out anytime you want in a fight, except when you can't, which is really obnoxious. And I don't think anyone has had exactly the same strategy.

Starting point is 00:48:01 You know, everything from, you know, rocks that go around the boss that you have to like time to try to get your attacks through or around because uh different attacks either strike from the top down or they go around or they penetrate or they can be blocked but they're more powerful like there's there's it's actually got a ton of depth to the combat i had some people really upset with me about uh what i said about sea of stars last week where i said i found the combat kind of bland um is it because of in contrast in contrast to fantasia and chained echoes it's it is bland i mean chained echoes is easy so that's that's a problem with that because it just you just highlight any enemy and it's like yeah here's the weaknesses and like here's how much health it

Starting point is 00:48:38 has so i hear all of that but ether dark and full plane chat said it well he said you're being milked of that but ether dark and full plane chat said it well he said you're being milked if part of the game design is like make them make them take a long time make it make it really annoying they're really invested by the end of the game they're gonna keep going like i don't know i'll get them hooked on the meth that is excellent boss battles yeah all right here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna cancel my apple arcade subscription right now and if you can beat it in time then good and if i beat it in time then i'm done and if i don't then i'm not and as far as i can tell seems fair enough my save game will not be retained um that was a big thing for me it's the reason that i waited so long to play this game save game will not be yeah because it's

Starting point is 00:49:17 starting the cloud isn't that ridiculous so that's why i i held out for so long until i found out because i didn't actually know because i didn't look into it that the game was completely funded by apple and i was like oh all right well this is just never coming to anything like i thought it was just an exclusivity deal as far as i can tell like backup save game in icloud that's disgusting well yeah but i'm not gonna pay for it makes me angry i thought there was a certain amount of icloud that's free like google drive i don't know i don't know. I don't know. I have no idea. Maybe.

Starting point is 00:49:47 Guys, let me know. Let me know. Can you pirate the game? I mean, not unless you've found an iOS emulator. Not that I'm aware of. Five gigs of storage for free. I don't know if that's possible at all. I don't know if your Apple Arcade save games go there.

Starting point is 00:50:04 Apparently it's restored when you resubscribe but i mean after how long because i will never resubscribe to apple arcade so i would yeah i really wanted to wait until it was available on a platform where i could back up my save game i wanted to play it on pc but now at least you know what i'm saying i've played it yeah i i left it i left it paused last night because it was really late and i was like this is ridiculous i can't believe this is going to be like another hour of fighting this stupid thing his health and his uh damage double with each phase and you've seen each phase right i've seen the first two phases i'm about to see the third phase okay i think that i could just say yeah i could have gone in gone in like got the legendary

Starting point is 00:50:50 you know whatever's and grinded for more upgrade crystals and whatever is there adventure slash story to getting that legendary thing you just mentioned or is it just grinding not much uh i've i've solved most of the quest stuff there's like this void realm that you can go to as far as i can tell it just has like some juiced up uh versions of some monsters you fought before it seems kind of lazy and tacked on okay so i think i'm just not gonna bother i'll try tacked on like a pool of experience that they decided to increase the difficulty by so that you had to spend more time playing the game yeah yeah um phantasyon playtest on steam phantasyon playtest i know that it's listed i know that it was listed on steam this happened

Starting point is 00:51:34 well after i had uh already moved pretty deep into it last recorded update was five months ago yeah this this showed up then and as far as I can tell, nothing has really changed since then. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. It's possible it'll get released, but like I said, it turned out that it was pretty much completely funded by Apple, as far as I can tell, so I don't know if Apple is strongly incentivized. Like, does Apple really need the, like, you know,

Starting point is 00:52:02 hundred grand or whatever that this game is going to make when it releases on Steam? I don't know how much hype there is around it anymore. There was a lot of lead up. There was a lot at the start, yeah. But now it's also, there's also been, like, a retro RPG renaissance. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:52:18 Since then, where the games just have been available and you can just, like, buy them. So there's not a lot of, and they're going to have to do a lot of fixes to make this game ready for a broader release i think i don't know if i told you or not but uh amd gpu update no longer crashing oh you got a driver update that fixed it theoretically all right i haven't had problems since i didn't have problems for like six months and now i haven't had problems for like a week so i don't know if i trust it or not yet but i will probably be diving back into Final Fantasy six this weekend,

Starting point is 00:52:49 uh, with the hopes that it doesn't delete my progress again. Um, Oh, here, no, the suck of Gucci apparently, uh,

Starting point is 00:52:55 always wanted to release it on other platforms and it's been talking about it a lot because you can't. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Cause Apple paid for it. What a, what a bummer. Uh, all right. Oh, we're supposed to explain merch messages and do two messages all right dan i'll do it i'll do it merch messages are

Starting point is 00:53:12 the way to interact with the show oh and we have something really exciting for you guys this week have you seen all these i was creeping them before the show what i was looking at why are you ruining things why are you ruining things luke okay well why don't you show them yeah why don't you show them the pins yeah we have floatplane dark mode because you can't get on the website so you might as well get a pin of it oh say the line bart yeah poor guy oh boy okay then we have rainbow and non-rainbow versions of the float plane logo these are actually super clean when we when we did the like fail print ones i was like oh these are pretty good actually like these are probably fine they seemed okay to me and then these are these are really nice Sarah did such a great job of the backings for these we've got the rest of series 3

Starting point is 00:54:11 drew some inspiration from the screwdriver from the classic intro from the ABCs of gaming and then this my personal favorite you whined you b****d and now you've got it yeah the luke enamel pin from that old pin series that had all of the lmg staff at the time luke technically didn't work for

Starting point is 00:54:37 linus media group at the time so he didn't get a pin yeah and he has been writing me about that for like five years. Did you see what the background is? Yeah, it's Salty Luke. From one specific episode on the show. Wow. Amazing. And it's resolved now. We good?

Starting point is 00:54:57 Nope. We're good. So we've got our series three pins. I don't remember exactly how it works with the like hollow one uh one yeah there's there's one special one like the yeah the float plane one yeah the the dark mode one i think that one is i don't know if you can like it says series three on it yeah but i don't know if you can choose that one or if it's random i can't remember um anyway they're in the bonus bin now so that's cool oh hey we have a correction from last week's

Starting point is 00:55:33 newsletter uh one of the features that we mentioned for our upcoming precision driver is that we said and just below the end cap you'll find what we believe is a first-fer driver of this size, organized in-handle bit storage. This wasn't correct, as the plastic version of iFixit's precision driver does feature a removable end cap with integrated SIM tool and three slots in the end cap for bits. That is a thing they have. Yeah, I have never actually used that one and the only precision drivers that we bought for comparison were metal ones um thank you to the community for the feedback and correction because i mean ifixit is still a collaborator of ours so we weren't we weren't trying to like

Starting point is 00:56:20 we're trying to like dump on their uh their glory there with the integrated bit storage our bit storage is different than what they did and we don't consider that the plastic driver to be a competing product in any way but yeah we should have definitely been more accurate with our language there hey make sure to sign up for the creative creator warehouse newsletter for more new content in the next few weeks we're gonna have that at the bottom of lttstore.com all right why don't we go ahead and get to a couple merch messages oh right how do you send them uh they show up down here or they go to our producer dan who will reply to them or forward them to someone who can help or maybe sometimes forward them to me and luke to talk about all you got to do is go to the cart see the merch message box that

Starting point is 00:57:04 shows up whenever we're live and type see the merch message box that shows up whenever we're live and type out your merch message and then dan will uh maybe pick one for us to talk about what do we got dan yeah i've got one kind of on the last topic if you're okay with that uh sure oh no wait no i uncurated that one never mind uh loved the asl discussion last week i actually took my first asl class this fall um Asides from cochlear implants, what new tech do you think may help deaf and hearing people communicate with each other? Honestly, this is such a cop-out answer, but AI. The ability for computers to interpret sign language is basically negligible without... Guestimations involved.

Starting point is 00:57:52 Exactly. Yeah. Without some kind of neural network to rely on. Because it's not going to be an exact thing every time. Not only, like you were talking about last time, is some amount of it creative. Yes. every time not only like you were talking about last time is some amount of it creative yes um but it's also physical movements that could be slightly off here or there or someone might have a slightly unique twist to how they do it um and it might be able to be inferred uh but would yeah uh mickers os in floatplane chat says i want to learn sign language just so i can talk to my wife

Starting point is 00:58:22 across a public space like a pool it is way more useful than you would even think it's incredible crowded restaurant it's loud let's go and you can do that from across a freaking room yeah i've noticed i'll meet you over there like oh i've noticed this too uh not in just you but i have also noticed it in you because you're probably the person i've seen do asl more than anyone else but um you'll whisper while you do it that's for lip reading reasons right uh no actually a lot of signs have a mouth gesture that goes with them so like like like you'll like there's facial expressions it's it's a whole thing it's what you're saying it's where you're saying it it's how big you're saying it like if i say um oh so you know i uh like i got in my car this is a little car but if i say i got in my car well i'm in i'm probably

Starting point is 00:59:28 in a truck or something yeah okay okay okay that matters yeah um so everything matters um how big you're gesturing how sharp you're gesturing like if you're like i'm angry like you stop okay stop it's enough you know stop like it like every it's it has expression exactly the same way that our that our voices do yeah um and i forget what you were saying before but i was responding to it and i think i'm done i think so i don't know. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, you did. I, I, I said, uh, you whisper when you, Oh yeah. Oh, one great example of that is that the bird in ASL still means like,

Starting point is 01:00:12 you know, yeah, yeah. Kind of what it means, but it's not nearly as strong as it is to like hearing people. And the, the mouth gesture for it is like, yeah yeah yeah like but it doesn't actually mean like you the way that it does in in like hearing culture or like you know up yours or

Starting point is 01:00:35 whatever like it doesn't it's not as bad is my understanding of it anyway but yeah no there's definitely there's definitely mouth things but if you see me mouthing along it's probably just because i don't speak not quite as fluent so you're kind of running a lot of the time so i'm yeah i'm not at the level of fluency where i just think in sign interesting okay yeah sorry guys how long will pins series 3 be on sale for uh wrong side of christmas to buy them all um i don't know we produce them and then they are gone forever forever is a big word uh we've talked about it internally no real like intention to bring it back though yeah uh well that's good for me to know because i gotta answer these people right yeah it's it's it's

Starting point is 01:01:29 it's something we've talked about and it's one of those things where it's like we don't want to we don't want to create like artificial scarcity uh that that's not the point but we also we also don't want to just have every pin ever like as a stocked item on the store forever uh so i i think that it is never impossible that something would ever come back but i would say at this time that we have so many ideas for pins that to loop back around and reprint them seems improbable yeah yeah might not be as cool for collectory people too one more what do you think yeah actually that's an interesting question is it a favor to the people who haven't bought one or is it to reprint something is it more of a favor to the people who haven't bought one or is it more of an fu to the people who are

Starting point is 01:02:26 collectors and who bought it wanting something exclusive nft yeah that's that's a whole other thing that's this is an actual physical like thing that was crafted and and is like i mean that's me saying i'm entirely sure i would feel bad if uh if i wanted something that was exclusive and then somebody else got it and then it was like oh well i thought i was special but you're not marketing it as like a this will only be made once there's only a hundred of them there's been a couple pins that way but not in general yeah i've seen i've seen people get very angry at we're doing a serialized number of 1 to 100 and that's all we'll ever make. And then, like, they

Starting point is 01:03:07 do another run of... Oh, yeah, that's super bad. I hate that. I don't think it's the same as that at all. That's not a good thing to do. No. Yeah. Evil. Alright, hit me again, Dan. Sure. Just flying back from Disney on my honeymoon. Linus, what did you and your wife do for your honeymoon?

Starting point is 01:03:25 And have you ever built a lightsaber? We went to Greece. We went to Santorini. Our intention was to stay there for two weeks. It took about four days, I think, for us to start getting bored. We didn't realize, you know, we're from Canada, where places are really big. you know we're from canada where places are really big and we atv'd the entire circumference of the island like on like the something-eth day and kind of ripped around across it as well and we were like oh um and we started kind of memeing on what there was to do on the Island. Um, so we'd be on the ATV and we'd be like,

Starting point is 01:04:07 uh, we'd like get each other's attention. Like, like really excited. We'd be like, look, honey, scenery.

Starting point is 01:04:17 Um, we're more doers than viewers. Yeah. If that kind of makes sense. This is a problem that i run into when when traveling because there's like some specific stuff i like to do in traveling but i find not a ton of people like doing that so there often isn't like actually that many opportunities for it yvonne and i since then usually come back from vacation far more tired than we were when we left for it it's not a refreshing thing for us absolutely we went to mexico once for i believe it was seven days and we dived 13 times

Starting point is 01:04:52 or something like that like it was ridiculous we went as many times as you can go without it becoming a problem for your health yeah that's what that's what i when i was in greece a while back that's what i did i was either out on the water, out under the water, studying or sleeping. There was like pretty much nothing in between, I guess eating, but I would usually only eat one meal a day because I didn't have time. So after that, we, we kind of went, we had the, I had the idea of visiting one of our like left for dead gaming buddies in Dubai because we happened to be a lot closer than normal and it just turned out that it didn't really work out we found flights and everything

Starting point is 01:05:30 and we were i think oh the visas would have taken too long um so again ignorant canadian thing we just thought that you know canadians just walked into any country they felt like because we do have a pretty good passport uh but it turns out dubai needed like a few days and it would have eaten up a lot of our vacation, our limited amount of time because we still had to fly back out of I think it was Athens or something like that. So we didn't end's go to rome uh where i have to man this is going to be super unpopular i did not like the food in greece rome rome i didn't like the food in greece either it's really oily i'm not that into i don't like oil on my food i found so i mentioned that I was having one meal a day. I found this one cafe that I really liked. I had food at a few places that I really didn't like.

Starting point is 01:06:30 Then I found one cafe that was amazing. I ate there every day. People are so upset with me. Like, man, maybe it was just the touristy places or whatever. That's a big problem. No offense to the birthplace of like pizza or whatever, but wow. Where, where, like, is that all the cheese you're going're gonna put on it i had the best pizza i've ever had at a extremely italian pizzeria in germany so i i believe it's a thing it's probably the tourist trappy stuff though because

Starting point is 01:06:58 the places i was eating in greece that were garbagio um yeah were tourist trappy sure and then i found this cafe place that was like a little bit off the road didn't have anything on their menu in english type of situation and it was fantastic very good yeah i um i i just it was so expensive and it's just like remember guys this we were we were on our our honeymoon, which means we were splurging a little, but we had a house to pay for. Like we had just bought a house the year prior and we were trying to put in double our monthly mortgage payments

Starting point is 01:07:35 in order to pay down as much principal as possible. So maybe if you go to Rome and you blow a bunch of money on like really high end food, like it's better but i remember at the time feeling like these meals are costing double literally double of what we would pay for a nice meal at home and it's like a flat thing of bread with like a bit of sauce and like some cheese sprinkled on it that's a pizza are you kidding me that is sort of a thing where's my toppings oh boy yeah well i think that is a very

Starting point is 01:08:11 canadian yeah i mean that and that's fair enough but it just it offends me from a bill of materials standpoint this is the thing that's gonna get you canceled this show yeah yeah it's like you can't you can't you can't tell me that like 14 cents worth of flour and like half of a friggin cherry tomato and like a little bit a little couple sprinklings of cheese is worth like the 20 euros or whatever it was costing me at the time there's also a single leaf of basil you're forgetting about the single leaf of basil do you know the price of basil it's basil dan but okay no i'll get canceled from my side of the pond oh man there's things i can i can say about this but neither i nor anyone in chat is going to change his mind so it doesn't really matter no i want to hear it i want to hear it there's there's

Starting point is 01:09:07 matter no i want to hear it i want to hear it there's there's to to include expenses the the oven at like dominoes and the oven at whatever wherever you ate is probably not exactly the same caliber sure but why would i why would i give two shits what oven it came out of i'm i'm eating the food not the oven yeah but that is going to result in a difference people do this thing where like when they when they analyze pizza they like look at the bottom of it to see the like the cook marks and all this other type of stuff because it like influences stuff that i don't understand or care about personally but it's like it's a whole thing it didn't taste good okay and the portions were small and i was still hungry this set okay was it a tourist trap spot though

Starting point is 01:09:47 i don't know yeah it was well rated that doesn't mean much i know yeah i know i found when i was in japan by the way they are brutal like nothing is rated five stars most of the like good stuff is like 3.8 like it's it's they are so brutal i was looking around like wow there's like nowhere good what's going on i was like oh good is like 4.2 there is like it's like the highest rating in this entire town yeah i can see that yeah anyways uh okay yeah let's do some more topics before i get myself super canceled by the europeans yeah avon fox said do you charge for the two minute it fix or the years of experience gained to make it two minutes well it depends if the it fix like f**king sucks that argument hates the pizza yeah it just didn't taste good yeah and it's it's look it's not like i can't

Starting point is 01:10:45 accept different kinds of pizza like i'll go to new york and eat like a new york style pizza or whatever like i don't care have you had chicago deep dish uh yes i went to a yeah so that's a whole thing reportedly fame i'm gonna get canceled now i went to a reportedly like famous very well known chicago deep dish place i can't say I'm a fan that ain't it man that was a mistake you're gonna get uncancelled by the entirety you're gonna get Americans mad at us all of New York now loves you

Starting point is 01:11:13 they can't do anything from over there the Americans are gonna be like hey yeah what's up I don't know I can't do an American accent it doesn't matter they're gonna come up here that's how you sound Americans Hey y'all what's it

Starting point is 01:11:29 Yeah I found it Soggy Soggy bread is not A feature that's a bug It's just like a cheese meat pie at this point Sorry not sorry Just make a lasagna Yeah you know There's better things you can do with

Starting point is 01:11:47 that mix of ingredients a wheat product that is not so susceptible to being a disgusting mushy mess yeah god i was like actually pretty excited for it and we went and we had to wait in line for this place because it's like i don't even remember who i was with probably brandon but we had to wait in line for this place because it's like i don't even remember who i was with probably brandon but we had to wait in line for this place uh that was like all well known blah blah blah blah blah we wait in line we get our pizza one bite in i'm just like man i went to a supposedly famous jewish deli in new york like in manhattan and i ordered a reuben yeah and i was just like it's fucking dry like are you kidding me how do you even like make a ruben dry i don't know i didn't have enough mustard on it i was like what it's dry it ruben is like that's like covered yeah that's like covered in sauerkraut how do you even manage

Starting point is 01:12:39 i don't know okay to be clear you can make an amazing ruben and you can make a disgusting ruben and there's basically nothing in between it's it's pretty but like imagine screwing up it just being dry what the heck and like again there was like a line yeah i'm just sitting here going well i find a lot of the line places basic sandwich that like every everything else was like i was like okay i'm just sitting here going well i find a lot of the line places basic sandwich that like every everything else was like i was like okay i'm just gonna go with like the one you know it's like going to a thai restaurant being like i'll have your pad thai and some you know peanut sauce chicken skewers if you can't get this right realistically nothing else on your menu is probably any good anyway yeah yeah yeah i i find a lot of

Starting point is 01:13:26 the places that get the lines uh yeah it's it's not the way to go like uh my it's all hype man it's hype when my brother and i were in japan um i think i've told this story before but all the food that we had in tokyo was honestly like not very good but it's because we weren't really trying we're just like walk by okay we'll just go in there whatever just like a random ramen place yeah so it was it was like fine probably fine but it wasn't amazing or anything and then we went to everything i had in japan when i went was not bad though no none of it couldn't find anything bad i ended up having uh one thing that i didn't like but it was a mistake on my part i ordered

Starting point is 01:14:05 something i shouldn't have i just didn't take enough time when i was looking at the menu so it's not their fault and then we went to the smaller town that we were staying at for when we were doing the drifting event yeah and spent a little bit more time picking the places and stuff every single time it was like mind-blowingly good every single time but it was a lot of like you know not the first result on google type of stuff i just like to jump in and say that canadian food is too yeah like we don't even have a cuisine poutine honestly oh come on putin when's the last time you had good poutine uh have you ever yes had good poutine cost because legitimately i think it's eight years ago the costco one is no montreal montreal is where this okay so here's the problem even in montreal i found it's pretty

Starting point is 01:15:02 hit or miss i lived there for an entire summer even in mont's pretty hit or miss. I lived there for an entire summer. Even in Montreal, very hit or miss. And it is always something basic. They can have great fries, delicious gravy, real curds of cheese, real curds. And if you don't fucking heat up the gravy enough and it doesn't melt the f***ing cheese, you're not eating poutine. You're eating fries in gravy that are cold,

Starting point is 01:15:33 and hunks of cheese. You're eating them separately now. If the cheese is not melted, it's disgusting. What do you think about poutine abominations? That's a thing i came up with on the spot but uh there's a there's a i'm not even gonna be able to find it and like honestly we put way too much sugar in everything i i blame the americans they're they're a bad influence on our dietary habits i put i eat too much sugar 100 yeah the amount of stuff that

Starting point is 01:16:02 poutine crimes on reddit I haven't heard about that. But yeah, there's this restaurant called Streets that's local. It's not streets as in the road. It's STR and then eats. Sure. But it's one word, whatever. They have poutine. There's no menu.

Starting point is 01:16:21 There's just order online. How do I see the menu? Hello? What a weird website um but i've seen i've seen their menu before which i don't know if i can even find it right now um but they have they have some weird it's definitely not poutine but it's in the poutine category but it's kind of poutine related poutine um can i find it okay here we go i got a menu bowls fries all right classic classic poutine okay fine sure kebap kwa fries cheese curds gravy then they get it oh they just call it hot no pierogi poutine mini pierogies bacon sauteed onions shredded cheese green onions

Starting point is 01:17:01 sour cream there's no gravy there's no cheese curds buffalo chicken poutine crispy chicken frank's red hot sauce gravy cheese i think they're taking some artistic license with the word poutine yeah they're talking fries in a bowl with stuff on top of it that's as that's the minimum requirement for poutine i mean by that logic you can get fish poutine and it's just like deep fried haddock on top of fries yeah yeah it's fish and chips but in a different physical orientation yeah so i i think that's how like most people get around it is they just ditch the original what poutine actually is and they're like i'll have this other stuff yeah and like on it like japa dog japa dog is supposed to be like super famous it's like it's a hot dog yeah i had one of those i was

Starting point is 01:17:48 like that is definitely a hot dog with stuff on top of it i find a lot of the famous places personally i enjoy more flavor i find a lot of them to be on the more mild side both spice but then general flavor as well i find them to be more chilled out Both spice, but then general flavor as well. I find them to be more chilled out. So, yeah, I know we've kind of dunked on everyone's food. I guess what I'm trying to say is we're just haters. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:18:14 So don't take it personal. Yeah. Please, America, don't come after us. None of my favorite places to eat around here serve Canadian food, let alone North American food. So it is what it is yeah honestly i think that's one of the best things about living in vancouver yeah food melting pot very good yeah you can get like anything here yeah and it's and it's good i think honestly that's part of what kind of spoils me um like going back to um

Starting point is 01:18:41 so i was thinking going back to something we're talking about before but I forgot now but yeah no it's uh no it's great it's great yeah all right why don't we uh oh yeah we're supposed to do some topics sorry Dan how did we start talking about I don't know it doesn't matter um Sony patents an automatic difficulty curve right no this was the one I wanted to talk about with my what if you don't quite finish the game thing. Because beating games, all of a sudden, what, it's just not gonna be a thing anymore? Sony has filed a patent for a system

Starting point is 01:19:17 that dynamically tweaks the difficulty of a game based on player performance using specially designed algorithms. The algorithms would assess and project player performance, then automatically and incrementally adjust parameters relating to movement speed, delay or hesitation, character strength, number of competitors, or other metrics until the player's performance matches an expected level. This is never going to work.

Starting point is 01:19:45 They're never going to get this patent. Similar systems have been implemented in past games, notably in Beat'em Up God Hand from 2006, which grows more challenging in response to player successes. So the discussion question here is not about Sony's patent. I think they're going to have an extremely difficult time patenting this concept but what i would like to talk about is are the days of beating games gone dead over no are you just being stubborn no i don't think so actually okay i i think maybe stuff like that is going to invade certain triple a things um but people are gonna resist some amount of game developers are always

Starting point is 01:20:35 gonna resist to some degree and we saw like when was that like 2014 2015 uh we saw triple a games go kind of in the hole a little bit and the indie scene just exploded because they saw a hole because triple a industry was leaving that hole open um i don't i don't think you'd see a uh you know elden ring style game make itself completely unbeatable i don't think you'd see a baldur's gate 3 make itself completely unbeatable i don't think you'd see a balder's gate 3 make itself completely unbeatable there's gonna be these franchises that are like no there's a conclusion hold on that's not what i really meant i meant the achievement of beating a game being over oh yeah i think people will beat games because they're going to design it so that when you're playing spider-man you could barely be able to hold a controller and still be an unbeatable

Starting point is 01:21:23 badass so i was going completely the opposite way with this i still don't think that's going to be a thing though because okay um i'm gonna just constantly use baller skate i really tried to find another one with elden ring but even yeah i don't think this is a thing on elden ring i think there's just one difficulty right uh i actually don't know i mean you just you can definitely make life harder for yourself if you just you know don't wear any custom challenges and stuff but i think there just is elden ring it just is the game it is it is one difficulty um but like there's three difficulties wow okay i didn't know that i thought there was literally one but anyways yeah there's there's

Starting point is 01:21:58 only one to him yeah giga chad gamer um bothers gate oh elven ring has one sorry what got him uh ball gate three which is what they were probably talking about um has different difficulty levels that are actually very specific and change the game significantly um and i think there's also other games where people will play that game or at least find replayability from that game due to specifically the difficulty levels yep i think there's going to be other games like i think you mentioned spider-man yeah totally and at a certain level like i mean i haven't played the game but probably like who cares uh you heard it here first folks what i mean you play spider-man i mean no i don't mean that i don't mean that i've actually heard it's a fantastic game but like is the difficulty level of the game

Starting point is 01:22:49 what matters uh i i mean to someone i mean if we didn't feel a sense of accomplishment in gaming why would we do it like that's that's the part of our brain that it you know lights up that's the whole point of it as far as i can tell yeah it's to make you feel like you achieved something we literally have achievements that's what we actually call them yeah i guess i guess the the hidden nature of the difficulty change is the annoying part because that's what i'm talking about there's a billion games that will do suggested sure difficulty changes yep or even you can manually adjust it like um back to sea of stars there's a whole class of items that as far as i can tell exists as a way of adjusting the difficulty curve so i stubbornly refused to equip any of them um which made things just take longer as

Starting point is 01:23:43 far as i can tell to go back, I probably just wouldn't bother. But doing it automatically, I guess, is what kind of bugs me about it, because it's a matter of time. That has also existed, but it's usually revealed to the player. Yeah, it's a matter of time until they just don't, until they just release the game.

Starting point is 01:24:01 And because, remember, what the goal of the developer is is to make sure the player has a good time right yeah and if they're going to do episodic episodes they need to make sure that you don't get stuck so i could totally see them shipping a game like this where even if you can toggle it off it's enabled by default and i just i um i don't know it just feels like too much hand holding to me like i mean even just the fact that mario kart 8 has the assistance on by default you basically can't crash a kart out of the box and the process of turning it off is i couldn't believe how obtuse it was to turn off the assist you can't do it from the menu of the game

Starting point is 01:24:47 you have to be in a race and turn it off when the pause met why to reaper and float plane said something that sparked a thought in my mind uh they said ubisoft would make it harder to sell boosts and skips what about yeah you just have the same thought I did. What if this started being used nefariously where they started crushing you with difficulty to try to incentivize, like. What do you mean, what if? I literally talked about that like 25 minutes ago.

Starting point is 01:25:16 Yeah, but it's dynamic. Yeah. It's dynamic. So they have ideas, they have some, I don't know, Cambridge Analytica data or whatever on like who you are how much money you're going to spend on games and stuff and they push you just enough if they're like yeah this person will probably spend like 15 bucks on microtransactions to get it to the end of this game then they'll poke you for 15 and then let you win oh sticklier says you can change the

Starting point is 01:25:40 auto drive settings from the cart selection screen why isn't it on the main menu i'm i'm sorry i had to look it up by default i had to look well no that's not even my issue or that is an issue but i had to look it up i couldn't find it on the main menu of the game which is where settings go sorry not sorry it's still dumb oh man yeah games will also lower difficulty without you knowing if you're having issues playing on hard parts yeah but usually that's still it's still granular like if you looked into the settings you could see it there whiskey nerd 88 says capcom uses this in resident evil after you die too many times in a spot they lower the enemies and the hit damage it it very often communicates that to you. And if it doesn't,

Starting point is 01:26:26 it's usually a setting that you can still go manually change yourself. But yeah, this is, this has been a thing for guys forever. That is not the point. There's people are telling me some people want to use it and some people don't. I,

Starting point is 01:26:37 I know. Okay. I know it. None of that matters. The fact is that it's not obvious to find the settings menu is on the title screen of a game. That's where the settings menu is. It feels like a setting,

Starting point is 01:26:56 not a like feature on the cart. Yes. It's not a, it's not a wheel. I understand it's, it's training wheels, but it's like, it's not the way that people would think about it.

Starting point is 01:27:04 Okay. Linus likes hot hot dogs so he hates burgers oh man speaking of hot dogs and burgers should we talk about the next subject uh yeah sure what is it i don't know somebody made the build corner in lego oh i haven't actually seen this yet. Me neither. Are you opening it? Yeah. Oh, that's super cute. Oh, no way. Oh, wow. That's actually pretty cool.

Starting point is 01:27:35 That is freaking awesome. In awe of the Microsoft Easy Ball. I don't even know what that is. Yeah, it was this like for kids mouse controller thing that we did a video about a little while ago that is so cool it always blows me away how detailed people can make even a small lego model when you know the pieces are are so large right like like this is super recognizably yeah the workshop if you showed this to someone they'd just be like oh yeah that's i would have immediately been like wait what

Starting point is 01:28:11 is that is that the workshop corner at work this is pretty cool oh my god people are still telling me it's a feature of the cart yes i know it should be a feature of the game i know a lot of people myself included that have been surprised that they had trading wheels on um it's totally a thing and you should be able to just turn it off at the menu level yeah if you are just all playing the game and no one should be using assists yeah like it's guys please uh i don't know uh google gives everybody two dollars sort of google has agreed no guys please we got to tell you about our sponsors oh okay this week's show is sponsored by notion a versatile tool meticulously crafted to supercharge your productivity and

Starting point is 01:29:21 efficiency introducing notion's latest innovation, Q&A, a virtual assistant that delivers instant, precise responses right within your documents. And in conjunction with Notion AI, these tools can now give you instant answer to your questions using information from across your wiki, projects, docs, and meeting notes. Sven from the business team leverages the efficiency of Q&A to obtain clear and concise answers directly from his workspace. Say goodbye to sifting through countless documents. Now the information you need is at your fingertips. What sets Notion apart is its seamless integration of Q&A functionality. You can effortlessly pose

Starting point is 01:29:56 questions from any corner of Notion, ensuring you locate the information you seek without leaving your current document. Security is a top priority at Notion, so your data is safeguarded through encryption. And rest assured, no AI models are trained with your personal information, and answers generated will never access data from pages you don't have permission to view. So try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com. to try out the incredible power of notion ai today and

Starting point is 01:30:26 when you use our link you're supporting our show notion.com slash when thanks to sweetwater for sponsoring today's show when we need to upgrade our audio gear at lmg we can count on the fine folks at sweetwater to carry the latest and greatest whether it's mics headphones sound mixers or preamps they've got everything not sure what products you need use a comprehensive resources on their site to help guide you or speak to a sweetwater sales engineer for personalized gear advice and with their total confidence coverage warranty most of their products are covered for two years with most repairs done on site by their award-winning factory certified service department sound clearer crisper and cleaner with sweet. Check them out at lmg.gg slash Sweetwater.

Starting point is 01:31:08 Thanks to Magic Spoon for sponsoring this week's show. They've recently launched their new grain-free treats cereal snacks, which have 11 grams of protein, 1 to 2 grams of net carbs, and only 1 gram of sugar per serving. These crispy snacks currently come in two delectable flavors, marshmallow and chocolatey peanut butter. Snap, crackle, and pop your way to lmg.gg slash magicspoon

Starting point is 01:31:28 and use code WAN for $5 off a treats combo pack. I feel like half the merch messages today are just going to be people attacking us for our takes. repeatedly yelling at Linus saying that he's naughty and then Linus told Dan to hit him and I'm feeling

Starting point is 01:31:44 very weird. I've got the cuffs on the shelf. I mean... You've been naughty, Linus? Let me get my stockings. Oh, no. I got some extra sandals for you. Hey-o, DLL.

Starting point is 01:32:04 Any updates on the LDD cable management clip availability my stand-up desk is jonesing from some magnetically held cable runs to tame the mess i don't have any to sell you but we did set up electro boom with a bunch of them nice nice uh next year if you got like a 25 backpack credit for example you will be able to buy magnetic cable management stuff with it if you wanted cool um i had someone ask literally that question in full-blown chat i don't know if you saw that oh i did earlier in the show someone yeah will i be able to use this on that no the timing was not random um it was a combination of that we can't have things on our books forever and we wanted to

Starting point is 01:32:45 make sure that there was some very compelling stuff cool to check out with it if you know people didn't see anything that that they were interested in today sweet yeah hi dll i'm attending ces for the first time as a pm with significant purchasing power i'm in my mid-twenties, introverted, and don't drink, but have been invited to several after parties with vendors. Do you have any tips? Go. Yep. Talk to people.

Starting point is 01:33:14 Neither of us drink. Yeah, find the quietest corner and talk to the people who, you know, don't make it all business all the time, but, like, a lot of people are there to get deals done that's like kind of why they're there and you just got to kind of you got to kind of vibe it out like is this person in working mode or is this person in uh i'm so drunk that i can't tell that the waitress is not actually into me mode, you know, right? Like it's, and, and some people are in one mode and some people are in the other mode and some people

Starting point is 01:33:50 are somewhere in between the modes. But you can get a lot of work done, you know, just having conversations, making connections, you know, just, it never came naturally to me either. A huge part of, you know, why, uh, we have a leadership team that handles all outbound communications to anyone, but you guys is that I just don't, I'm not just, it's not really a people person. I,

Starting point is 01:34:15 um, what? I just, some of my calls with companies, I just, I probably need that at some point. I told you about the most recent one, right? Where I thought it was to re-sign a contract and it wasn't.

Starting point is 01:34:34 And I was just like, why are we even here? I just wanted to talk to you. Why? I'm not that great. We really don't need to know each other. Anyways. i'm not that great we really don't need to know each other but okay um anyways yeah yeah um all car in twitch says do people still fall for the flirty waitress routine i've never seen it happen personally do you leave your house dude i that's the whole routine that's like most of modern civilization as far as i can tell is i have a friend sex friend group that has a large amount of oh man

Starting point is 01:35:17 female waitresses at least when we they have a large amount of female waitresses that friend group does so they run they run a restaurant at one point in time they were the entire staff of one restaurant i was pretending to misunderstand you anyways i i don't i don't know if any of them still work in that industry or not but uh they made bank back then like tons of money and it was off of that strategy alone so like yeah it works it definitely works they made more money than like everyone i knew like it was a big deal yeah and the main uh like huge demographic of people that they would make money from was when there was like a group of dudes going out to eat and one of them wanted to like show off to their friends like appear cool to the like waitress person that was like totally it so like sports nights trying to trying to like be flirty but with the whole group so that they're like fighting

Starting point is 01:36:17 against each other and stuff totally a thing and people eat it up just like microtransactions like microtransactions that's what tipping is to believe whatever you go luke's hot takes tipping is microtransactions actually i think microtransactions are the ones that happen continuously and i don't think that's typical at a restaurant luke i mean i don't know what kind of restaurants you go to you could load up the game more than one time you go back to the restaurant multiple times it is what it is um at a bar your tab stays open that's true got him that's true got him um casper asks hey i noticed you take your audio seriously with home theater, headphones, but I see a distinct lack of Linus using monitor speakers

Starting point is 01:37:10 for ear freedom at his house gaming setup or at work. What speakers are best for people who can't wear headphones for long because their ears get hot and showetty? Well, I don't find that my ears get hot and sweaty with the HD 600s, so it's not a problem for me. I used to be a speakers at my desk guy.

Starting point is 01:37:26 I had the Clips Pro Media Ultra 5.1s. Before that, I had a pretty cool pair of our set of Monsoons. I also tried out the Creative GigaWorks back in the day. Not because I, you know, it was so unimaginative that I could only know of, you know, computer brands for speakers, but because that was a lot easier to hook up back then. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:48 Uh, later on I picked up a calf set with an on cue receiver that I ran as my surround set up at my gaming set up at Yvonne's parents place. Like I was always a speakers guy. And then I had a kid and my kid was not a good sleeper and I am 100% converted to headphones and speakers don't exist for me. I shouldn't say they don't exist. I still have a pair of Corsair SP2500s just sitting on my desk.

Starting point is 01:38:14 Occasionally, Yvonne and I will do a conference call from my desk at the office or in the office at home, in our office room at home. And so I'll put on the speakers because it's hard to share headphones unless i had two pairs of headphones which i don't but that's it and the sp2500s are fine they're okay i wouldn't recommend them because i don't know how they compare to something more modern but they were like decent back then and i actually have the same ones on my desk at work because they were just speakers that nobody was going to need for anything and so i grabbed them and they are better than the built-in

Starting point is 01:38:51 ones in my monitor yeah i'm still running my corsair speakers because i also am headphones 99 of the time and when it needs to be speakers they're definitely more than good enough so it is what it is last one i got for you here keep the content going happy holidays any updates on the old i thought it was gonna end there i was like oh thanks that was easy there's not a question any updates on the old pc equipment signature lottery i think we're waiting to release the last video in the series which has taken far longer than we'd like because it was tectober et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's always reasons things take longer than we'd like.

Starting point is 01:39:30 We try, but it's one of those things where if we don't push hard enough, you guys are mad that it takes too long. And if we push too hard, you're mad because like we're crunch or something. So whatever, we're just going to get it done when it's done. But we have another video coming in the series. And then I think we were planning to do it after, but then I don't know,

Starting point is 01:39:50 maybe we'll just get lazy and kill it. We'll, we'll see. If people are into it, then yeah, I guess we're down. Maybe that's it. Maybe we should just be gauging like community interest. So for those of you who are wondering, what they're talking about is all the things from the tech shop. We had talked about having me painstakingly sign all of them, destroying my wrist, and then putting them up for sale on lttstore.com for a fixed price.

Starting point is 01:40:24 So for five bucks, you might get a GPU. It's like a loot box. might get a gpu that like works or you might get a gpu that doesn't work or you might get a broken motherboard or you might get like a serial cable like it could be anything but it'll be like signed it's like a piece of memorabilia or something like that we thought it'd be kind of cool uh but maybe it's just dumb i'm not sure oh you want more topics now dan yeah because we can do topics you're better but maybe it's just dumb. I'm not sure. Oh, you want more topics now, Dan? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:40:48 Because we can do topics. You better. I don't know. Are these mostly boring? Yeah. Oh, Steam lets users hide embarrassing games. Finally. Sort of.

Starting point is 01:41:01 I mean, that was the only reason that I didn't buy them. The new Steam client beta is adding several quality of life changes including finally allowing users to mark games in their library or even prior to purchase as private and hide them from other people this will hide players ownership in-game status play time and activity in that game so you no longer have to worry about the social awkwardness of having you know 400 hours in motorboat simulator or whatever the case may be waifu games sales go through the roof yeah the new client will also allow items in the shopping cart to sync across devices cool nice the last of us multiplayer game was canceled i don't think i really have a ton to

Starting point is 01:41:43 say about that. Do you want to do the Google gives everyone $2 spit? Yeah. I'm going to enter the washroom then. Okay. Google has agreed to a settlement of $700 million to end a lawsuit filed by all 50 state attorney generals over this one. That one. That one. Got it.

Starting point is 01:42:01 The state attorney general has. This is written very oddly the state attorneys general have framed this as a major victory for consumers however google has admitted to no wrongdoing and the settlement only guarantees a minimum payout of two dollars per user with larger payouts going to users who've spent more on the app i think that wouldn't include microtransactions within games i think that would just be actually money that you spent on the play store itself just to be clear uh google has also agreed to simplify side loading for at least the next five years and allowed third-party app installations on new phones for at least seven years,

Starting point is 01:42:45 leading to concerns about OEM bloatware. That's weird that there's like a time limit on it, but oh well. In addition, Google's user choice billing system, which was in the pilot phase, will be expanding to allow developers to offer alternative payment methods. However, Google will still be able to charge them a service fee of 26%, as opposed to the Play Store's 30% cut. So it's 4% off.

Starting point is 01:43:13 Hooray! Epic CEO Tim Sweeney expressed dissatisfaction with the ruling and said that he and Epic would continue to pursue their own antitrust case against Google. Attorneys General is technically a plural word. It's a confusing title. Wow, that's odd. My dyslexia hated that. That $2 is like a cheeseburger from McDonald's?

Starting point is 01:43:36 Yeah. It did say $2 minimum. I really wonder what it's going to be for people that have spent a decent amount on the store. Like, okay, if it's $2 per user, if someone has spent $10, do they get, what would that be? $2.60? Is that how that works? Is it 4% instead of 30? Maybe that's it. I don't know. I don't know what the scale is going to be like after the $2. But the main reason why I wanted to talk about it on the show is often case with these things. You have to like claim it.

Starting point is 01:44:18 It doesn't just come to you automatically. And you might as well get your two bucks. So I'm trying to tell everyone so they can take $2 from Google or more. Go get your money. I don't know when it's going to be available, but go get it. Um, I find a lot of the times these lawsuits, they don't end up hitting the company that hard because,

Starting point is 01:44:35 uh, people don't claim it. So yeah, go claim it. Hit them hard. Do another topic, Dan. I don't know if that was one topic

Starting point is 01:44:46 or was it like three topics because you skipped most of them do we have any left? I thought you mean that I just did but you mean in this grouping I think we did two okay do you have any more that you want to talk about if not I'll just turn the lights off I could try to do one more

Starting point is 01:45:02 let's see here I'll do two kind of rapid fire Turn the lights off. I could try to do one more. Let's see here. I'll do two kind of rapid fire. VR declines while Meta spends billions. Sales of VR and AR devices declined by 40% this year, according to industry research firm Circona. The entire market for AR and VR devices was only estimated to be at $1.1 billion last year and is now down to $664 million. Meta has continued to lose over $3 billion on its VR division every quarter of 2023. And the MetaQuest 3 is suspected by some analysts to be selling at a per-unit loss based on its likely material and labor costs

Starting point is 01:45:45 womp womp no one cares about vr and air anymore it's all about that ai baby let's go everybody's moved on but i'm still taking home this like vr haptic vest for the holidays to play with it i'm kind of into it again it's just really expensive i think and everybody's broke it's it's a really very expensive thing to be a part of um i'll do another one really quick just because i find this interesting i'm very interested to hopefully see a follow-up to this to see how well it did uh but consulting firm using ai to reduce layoffs this year london-based consulting forum deloitte hired 130 000 new employees but also found that reduced demand for certain services

Starting point is 01:46:32 meant that they might need to eliminate thousands of existing positions instead deloitte wants to experiment with ai to assess the skills of those at-risk employees and create a strategy to move them into greater demanded roles interesting interesting interesting i can't even imagine operating at the kind of scale oh yeah where you're making a decision about sort of rehoming someone or no longer working together um in the thousands yeah based on anything other than that individual person yeah you know like to to to have so many people working at a company that you take the bucket of people who are in this department doing this thing who might be useful doing other things and split them into smaller buckets for reassignment is unfathomable to me i don't i don't i don't want to do that you heard it here first linus media group and its associated companies will never be

Starting point is 01:47:40 that big because i didn't want to not because i wasn't good enough at managing it there are there are but also because i didn't want to pains and sores and frustrations with getting bigger as a company oh yeah definitely that sounds that sounds awful honestly yeah um there was one other thing that i had wanted to do yeah apple may be investigated over beeper a bipartisan group of lawmakers has requested that the u.s department of justice investigate apple for potentially anti-competitive conduct really huh after apple repeatedly broke beeper's android-based iMessage service by closing the loopholes it relied on. DOJ lawyers reportedly met with representatives of Beeper last week, and the FTC has publicly stated it will be taking a closer look at claims

Starting point is 01:48:30 by large industry gatekeepers that competition threatens security or privacy. Because it turns out that was f***ing horse s*** the whole time. I think there can be some legitimacy here. There can, but this ain't it. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know enough about iMessage but there there can be legit it is definitely possible to encrypt a thing yes it is definitely possible for encrypted thing to pass through other thing can you determine how something must be encrypted and decrypted though as long as a government decide how you do your security i think that the government can decide it could

Starting point is 01:49:06 have been done because it could have been done there's plenty of precedent for that by apple's logic you know but then the mac shouldn't support email because it might have to pass through someone else's server like honestly though yeah i i just security is an interesting one sure i don't know enough about imessage to talk about it too much but um as far as anyone can tell beeper legitimately had just found a workaround so that it never left apple's care unintended uh beeper has officially announced that it will no longer attempt to crack iMessage on the basis that each time that the service falters it impacts their credibility instead they will use a method that they hope apple can tolerate existing using a combination of a jail

Starting point is 01:49:56 broken iphone and a mac or linux computer to register an android phone number for iMessage through the beeper mini app. Beeper has also made the code for their original bypass method open source, which is super cool and could undermine any of Apple's arguments that this was in fact due to security and not due to them. That feels like definitely why they would do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. I think it's time for Land Show After Dark.

Starting point is 01:50:21 All right. I'll help. You just wanted to do it. 8%. Oh, he just turned it off. Oh my gosh. I kind of like that, to be honest. Okay, turn it off.

Starting point is 01:50:37 You want to turn it off? What's 8%? Really? Could this be bad for epilepsy? Oh, sorry. Yeah yeah 12 cycles per second is that a thing i believe that's one of the triggers yeah oh is that eight percent doesn't look like eight percent that looks like eight percent to me that's eight percent okay good it's definitely eight percent i hope i hope it was eight percent i don't remember now it's just making it up just felt right all right what are we up to all right gonna do some merch

Starting point is 01:51:15 messages i guess let's do it hey linus sorry about the wing not my fault why are you sorry then sounds like it might have been your fault yeah admission of guilt yeah are you planning to do a follow-up daily usage video on the fairphone 5 what are your impressions so far been eyeing that as a potential upgrade yes i've been daily driving it for uh there's a bit of a gray zone in between about when the lg wing video came out and sort of the week after that where i still had some stuff i hadn't transitioned over to the fair phone but my intention is not just to daily drive the fair phone for a review but also to make the fair phone my new note 9 if that makes sense like my my fallback if whatever it is that i'm using right now doesn't have something on it um this is like the one that will definitely have like only two fAs

Starting point is 01:52:12 or you know whatever else like this is like the one that i can use if i'm in between other phones that i'm reviewing or something so that's my goal however i'm having some issues. Some things are little, like when I'm watching a TV in the dark, I don't know what it is. The ambient light sensor kind of struggles sometimes, so it'll go bright in the dark and bright in the dark and bright in the dark. And this one's really annoying.

Starting point is 01:52:39 So right now I have my ringer off. And the reason for that is that if you guys would like to do a little experiment with me, uh, watch this Luke. Yeah. Um, I am going to turn my ringer down to the minimum volume while still being above

Starting point is 01:52:54 zero. Okay. So I'm now at the minimum. Okay. So that's off. That's the minimum volume above the lowest setting, right? Okay.

Starting point is 01:53:05 Go ahead and text me. Or like Teams, it doesn't matter. Just notify my phone of something. Okay. Okay, you can send anything. It doesn't have to be... That is really, really f***ing really really that's very loud that's that's quite loud and it's it's those kinds of little quality of life things that are making it kind of hard to like it there's a lot to like about the philosophy but um it's been a while since i've reviewed a phone

Starting point is 01:53:50 and i just kind of assumed they all just kind of worked at this point the fair phone proved me wrong um oh people want the loudest setting i mean sure uh all right hit me again luke uh okay give me one second i'm actually busy texting other people no i'm actually busy texting you oh but give me a second it's okay i just need to send it well it's fine it's you're gonna i'm gonna send it to you're gonna see it in a moment what no that that okay just i think it's not bad okay okay anyway you're making like 10 000 people wait for you to send this text message well i wasn't going to but then but wait that's max volume i think so so there's just no difference

Starting point is 01:54:40 yeah i'm at max now is that actually the notification volume that you're adjusting oh crap you goof no no no no hold on hold on hold on no the ringing notification one is is down at the bottom yeah but it wasn't at the top yeah yeah yeah yeah no do it one more time one more time okay yeah here's max here's max oh yeah that's another thing that's been kind of annoying so it gets louder which is i guess a feature not enough louder for it to go up the entire bar you know yeah so it's that minimum volume is still very high do you want to compare it to mine sure because i don't think i've actually tried this i just realized though there's zero so there's zero without it being silent try one more time maybe there's a maybe maybe zero percent is audible which was not intuitive to me but hey

Starting point is 01:55:34 no that's fine yep so that was minimum volume on this phone which is a problem for me because if i don't have my ringer on i don't notice things because i am distracted doing things and if i have my ringer on but too loud it can't be on when i'm shooting and if it's not on when i'm shooting i won't remember to turn it back on when i'm done shooting so i basically just don't find out about people messaging me until later when i look at my phone anymore uh which is not working why are you saying why do your messages say penis grow up okay let's see how loud your minimum is i should hold in front of my mic though because this is mine only has seven volume levels yeah i think mine only has about that oh okay like on samsung i know that um for media volume anyway there's a third-party app that i installed that are you

Starting point is 01:56:32 holding the same way you're holding your phone no not yet that gives you way more granular control um i don't know if there's an equivalent for this i haven't tried to solve this yet to be very clear but there's just been some annoyances pretty quiet that's super reasonable that's the kind of thing that i could leave on to make sure that i notice things but it you know if it goes off in the middle of a take then i can still continue to do it we honestly don't even need to play full volume it's like reasonably loud what you'd expect yeah yeah that sucks anyways hey dll first time listener long time caller oh hold on i should say there are a lot of things i really like about it though like the fact that you could like kill someone with it yeah like that's good feels many generations ago yeah it's

Starting point is 01:57:23 as big as my wife's in a case but it doesn't have a case on it yeah it is heavy yeah it's thick it's like you know yeah it's fair though yeah all right go ahead first i'm listener long time caller they never said great phone they said fair phone that's a good line i should use how many like fair use jokes do you have in the in the script as long as they're not free use jokes we should get away with it huh the best part is he can't take any kind of moral high ground because he knows what i'm talking about we can't react at all can we

Starting point is 01:58:07 i mean uh luke please explain it to me i don't know i don't know no we're good we're good we're good we're good uh first time listener long time caller what are you looking forward to gaming-wise in 2024? I was hoping you'd have something for this. Is there any games you're looking forward to? Is there a follow-up to CrossCode? I want to try, I want to, oh, yeah. When's Radical Fish's next game coming out?

Starting point is 01:58:38 Radical Fish. I'm one of those people where I just like, I don't really follow things as they're coming up i just i just wait for them to arrive and pleasantly surprise me um i games project terra working title um our list of games is short we've been around for over 10 years something something okay yeah nope i i don't know at some point new action rpg yeah it sounds. I'm really excited to play that. Eventually, at some point. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:59:09 I heard Halo Infinite's really good again, and I'm down to play some more. Oh, man. I don't believe, but I'm down. Wait, I don't think I'm allowed to talk about what it is, but I tried a new piece of hardware that blew my f***ing mind. I swear to you. Okay, have you gamed with ploof before no okay i don't think so very respectable gamer yeah dude's a gamer yeah i could see okay

Starting point is 01:59:40 we were shooting uh unfortunately we didn't catch all of it on camera, but some definitely caught some of it on camera. But we're shooting this video, and I'm putting together combos of just like off the rack, scopeless headshots. I don't think I have encountered a piece of hardware that has changed my gaming performance like this that I can remember.

Starting point is 02:00:10 What? What? I know. What? I was like, dude, I'm Deez. Like, I know how to operate Wazda and a mouse. But you know I'm not this good and he's like dude i know but it was the same for me he actually went on a trip to try this thing a little while

Starting point is 02:00:33 ago before it was sent to us in the studio and he was like brother i was on some wireless mouse on a tablecloth just putting together killstreaks what is it is it like you can't guess it's it's embargoed i can't talk about it yet but there's a video coming okay so i'm like not allowed to guess this we're talking multiplayer games there's no cheating but i just i couldn't believe how much it changed things so i want to guess so bad but i won't i'm definitely excited to jump in some like halo infinite public lobbies wait do you have it yeah nice okay yeah i haven't taken it home though i was kind of thinking should i should i just like buy everything at retail for my house from now on what do you think no well like okay i mean sure there's the obvious reasons why i shouldn't like if there's one sitting collecting dust in a warehouse here already then maybe i should just borrow it and

Starting point is 02:01:30 play with it instead of like buying another one yeah but also i feel like it would make for some good content because it will force me to encounter some of the same challenges that other people would around you know availability as a piece of content doing that sometimes might be good but i don't think you should do it always i think it could be an interesting approach to certain things though i just feel like sometimes we end up with kind of dumb stuff in the videos because okay here's an example when we put together the land center we bought a lot of it and the stuff that i bought has a way different rationale behind it than the stuff that we got for example so i think i think you approached it

Starting point is 02:02:12 in two different ways is this a more recommendation style video or is this a like showcase ferrari version type of no it's just for it's just for like what we're going to talk about like we we we went with 3080s from evga because i thought it was pretty cool to build you know gaming pcs with evga gpus for the last time yeah and so i bought those what what evga is going to like send me gpus no um and so you know there's a cool story there but then for our ssds we went with these like gen 5 t700s from crucial because that was what crucial had in their like sampling inventory not because there's any compelling reason to use that and in fact we ended up with that's fine the build just kind of imbalanced because of that we talked about it in the video we video. We basically said, yeah, we recognize that these are totally overkill.

Starting point is 02:03:06 As long as that's addressed in the video, I think it's fine. But I feel like there's been a, I don't know, man. There's been like a new resentment around us doing crazy projects with stuff provided by sponsors in our videos and if we just bought it then maybe people wouldn't be mad or do you think people are just mad and it doesn't matter i think people are still gonna be mad because then they're gonna be mad that you had the money to buy it i mean that's sad yeah just means there's like nothing i can do about it than in your mind i think so i think there's always going to be a certain pool of haters okay so tell me this you know we're going to have the video coming on the 115 inch tv um do you think it would have made any difference to the

Starting point is 02:03:59 video if we hadn't paid for it we unbox it yes actually in this case because i think a very interesting story is how you got it okay so then shouldn't part of the story of any project we do be how we got it to a certain degree and if how we got it is we dialed a phone number and someone put it in the mail for us um isn't that just boring yeah okay so if it needs it then i don't know yeah like i i i think that's part of the story if you're like we're gonna try to do the most insane home theater room ever and we're getting all this stuff sourced for us and it's gonna be balling. Sure. I don't think you need that prequel story. Right.

Starting point is 02:04:48 I see. But I think with the TV. Yes, it's like the most insane TV I've ever seen in my entire life. And watching it in person was wild. But I think that story actually helps that video a lot. Like the getting this is actually wildly difficult if you're not in china tv is like an interesting story you can't find this in north america yeah i don't know it's tough tech and photo enthusiast and float plane says i think buying it yourself may help review it

Starting point is 02:05:16 differently than it being handed to you and told the price for it but like i i i go out of my way to review things as though i am the customer for it like when i like i took a bunch of flack for this i talked about this last week for the playstation portal i'm not going to buy a playstation portal i could have unlimited money and i would never buy a playstation portal because i'm not interested in the playstation portal but i reviewed it from the perspective of someone with a playstation who wants to play games their playstation games specifically away from their tv and i think that you're you're never going to be able to bridge that gap between people who can understand that i'm trying to review this for the customer for whom it might be applicable um and people who don't understand that i just i just don't think there's any way

Starting point is 02:06:05 to bridge that um yeah fast philly says i yeah luke i think if there's an interesting story like the tv it should be included i mean could the could the story be as interesting as you know yeah they provided it but getting it exported was a challenge i was gonna say honestly i think even if you got the tv for free supplied the how you got it and how exclusive it is and hard it is to get out of china and and some of the details that i know about it that might be exclusives for the video so i'm not gonna say i'm not sure um those things would have been interesting anyways i don't know but i do think there's an angle like if your next computer if you were like i bought everything from my own computer i had to like i don't know the thing is like the decisions more we buy a lot of stuff and my whole thing up until now has been that should never matter

Starting point is 02:07:03 to the content of the video yeah like i've talked to you about that extensively you should one of my aside from disclosure my philosophy this whole time has been that from the conclusion of the video and everything that we say about the product you shouldn't be able to tell if this is a brand that sponsors us and sends us anything that we want a brand that doesn't talk to us at all, and we have to buy absolutely everything or anywhere in between, you should never be able to tell. Has always been our philosophy. And in some cases, we've even swung a little bit hard the other way. Like, I think we've gone pretty hard on Intel, for example, at times, knowing that as long-time sponsor we're going to be under increased

Starting point is 02:07:46 scrutiny for the way that we treat them but that doesn't seem to have i don't know it doesn't seem to have really like resonated that doesn't seem to work anymore so i'm just trying to figure out what's the what's the new meta right now i don't know luke do you still watch the yard currently binging the whole show and love whenever you guys come up hope uh the barn was empty though uh didn't really watch the yard so much as listen to it um and i i started again recently but will also probably quit very soon uh i i started listening to it because i was like way overweight and needed to go on lots of walks and and do things that would take a long time and i was bored because there

Starting point is 02:08:31 was very little that i could actually do in order to get the cardio in so i'd listen to it while i would go on like walks or do whatever cardio stuff um and then i got more in shape and was more in like weight room situations and was less interested in listening to the yard so i stopped and then recently i got very not very sick but i got sick for a very long time and it stuck in my like lungs and whenever i uh would breathe deeply i'd start coughing which made weight room difficult so i I've been walking again. So I've been listening again, but now I think I'm sort of over that. So I'm planning to go to the gym again tomorrow, in which case I'll probably stop listening again. It's a great podcast. I just don't usually like sit there and listen to a podcast for that long. Um, so there's very few podcasts that I, that frequent but whenever i want a podcast i do come

Starting point is 02:09:25 back to it i can think of one podcast you listen to every week i do sort of listen to this i guess yeah yeah it's here i mean sometimes i can't tell if you're listening to yourself talk but you hear you hear me i think most of the time yeah at least dan talks less than i do i can't even see you yeah that might be an i'm doing yeah i'm doing other things i'm distracted i barely listen to this you want me to turn around i mean i prefer to be like in another room um let's see where are we merry christmas lld out of the three of you who's the hardest to choose gifts for and why i'm impossible me too my aunt got me a gift that she says is perfect and i will love it and that is the biggest red flag because the more perfect someone thinks the gift is and

Starting point is 02:10:17 the more they think i'm gonna love it the more certain i am that it's gonna be f***ing terrible yeah and i'm gonna have to like say thank you and because this is someone who comes to my house a lot keep it forever i don't like clutter and i consider most gifts to be clutter like literally go on to a website and go to the gift ideas tab i promise you every single thing there is manufactured garbage it will be thrown in the garbage my family's like frustrated with me because we're all supposed to come up with christmas lifts and i couldn't come up with one for myself because i couldn't find anything i wanted and i i like i had a few people just say like you're like not getting anything then and i was like yeah that's fine that's cool in fact if we could just not do the gift exchange and i could

Starting point is 02:11:11 not buy anything that would be great no i got i got things for everyone else and i and i don't mind i just like i i legitimately really tried i took like a whole evening and was like yeah but you also do prefer if you just don't have to deal with that shit so yeah it is what it is merry christmas by the way i got you nothing yeah nice merry christmas yeah i remember there was there was one year a bunch of employees came together to get linus something and it was like actually pretty cool yeah i remember being like you know what it was pretty cool they got me a badminton racket and they signed the sleeve everyone signed the sleeve and um it ended up being a really good racket not because the people organizing it had any idea how to pick a badminton racket or what my tastes were because it really come at a certain point it's not just higher quality they're all the same quality it just

Starting point is 02:12:08 comes down to personal preference and your play style they happened to pick this kind of spiritual successor to the one that i really liked that was eol and i couldn't get more of anymore because they do break um and so not only did i use that one but i actually bought two or three more of them for my racket bag so that i'd have multiple rackets strung because if you break your strings in the middle of a game and then you switch rackets can be a little discombobulating um so that was a that was a smash hit hey pun intended yeah um pretty much oh there was the keyboard one that was cool but that was a display item i think some people legitimately thought i was going to daily drive it and i was like guys it has no windows key like it was it's a model m that was also like

Starting point is 02:12:49 signed by everybody it was pretty cool yeah in both cases i warned the people organizing it i was like ah don't feel bad if yeah i was like this is a great idea. But just a warning. I wanted to get Luke emotional damage, but I ended up not making it happen. I'm very sad. Okay. It was a funny idea. Oh, yeah. Hi, DLL.

Starting point is 02:13:16 Regarding the Luxe backpack, are you ordering small batches or are they actually made to order? If it is a small batch, have you placed in the first order for them? It's small batches and i am not 100 sure if we place the first order as you might imagine we've got some back and forth to do with our backpack supplier right now so i think we're working on getting all of that resolved and once we do we very much do intend to move forward with the lux backpack we're going to fulfill those orders um but in terms of how many we're ordering and you know what the scheduling for all that looks like and the payment scheduling and blah blah everything it's all businessy stuff that i'll let taryn and nick benny bond deal with i'm just having visions

Starting point is 02:13:58 probably don't interrupt the vision you could probably go to the doctor yeah my vapors have you thought about doing the whole home rgb using rgb strips to have exterior lights programmable for any holiday yes but the only justification i could possibly have for doing that would be to make a video and i don't really feel like doing that as a video i you know it does sound like a kind of boring video unless you bundled it in with other things yeah or if the end result was incredible yeah and that's great but like do i really want to invest that kind of labor hours into a light display on my house i don't think so i think it's going to end up looking weird because if it needs to be incredible then i think they need to take shape and for them to take shape it would be different

Starting point is 02:14:48 shapes for the different holidays then you just have leds that aren't on often which wouldn't look good i don't know hi dll long time enjoyer of the show i'm a junior in a physics lab at stanford and i'm applying for uh applying to google for a quantum information internship i'm curious what your technical thoughts are on quantum computers they asked for our non-technical thoughts which is good i got i got stuck on the years great yeah technical thoughts were going to be a challenge oh you could have tried my my basic understanding of it is that it sounds absolutely incredible and means absolutely nothing for gamers for the foreseeable future so you know for the vast majority of our audience you know this is going to be one of those world

Starting point is 02:15:36 changing um shifts in computing but lord only knows how long it's going to take to actually make its way into something that um you know changes your day-to-day life well so i'm you know back to what i said before i'm in wait and see mode let's see yeah or i'm very interested in the potentiality of the like encryption bomb have i ever talked to you about that before i think so yeah countries organizations individuals are all like collecting encrypted files because there's this theory that once quantum computing gets to a certain degree it'll just be able to like remove encryption extremely easily on basically anything um so there's countries hoarding like incredible amounts

Starting point is 02:16:18 of other countries encrypted data like just monstr monstrous amounts of data that has been fairly easy to intercept for a long time, but has been heavily encrypted. So what was the point? But they've just been collecting it because maybe we can unencrypt it eventually. And that future might happen with quantum computing.

Starting point is 02:16:42 So. Good luck, everybody. Yeah, pretty much hello wan crew question for linus what are some of the oddest or most interesting problems that you have had with your smart home setup uh dropout reasons things uh not talking to each other some of my eco bees drop out for no apparent reason i even went as far as to get a diff i thought maybe it was like a weird ubiquity thing or something i went as far as to bring back one of the ruckus aps and just put in a central location and connect all the eco bees to that and nothing but that and i still have one two that are dropping out for no apparent reason they don't just drop out like i go all the way to the console and like i can see the access point or the ssid in the list and i can connect and i

Starting point is 02:17:24 can put in the password it just won't connect until i rip it off the wall put it back on the wall to power cycle it's just like why just freaking why it just it's wi-fi it's supposed to work at this point um so other than frustrations no uh not that interesting what's up boys what's been your favorite land show topic this year you know i was okay what i just read them like they mean you know right you go is it going to be ad block equals piracy or uh you know what what are we going to go with some what some of the classics i don't think that's even from this year that was ages ago really i don't think that's from this year when was when did the shirt come out when was that minus tech tips

Starting point is 02:18:08 oh wow this is hilarious 2022 whoever whoever this was um i don't know changed their mind i guess yeah uh yeah so that was a while ago 2022 yeah um i don't know i feel like this is a bit of a cop-out because we've had a similar question that i answered with the same thing but i think it was the day that we were messing around with bing chat that was really fun that was fun okay i'll take it yep agreed very nice okay hi dll i work for an underwater robotics company with a pressure tank what tech Yep. Agreed. Very nice. Okay. Hi, DLL. I work for an underwater robotics company with a pressure tank.

Starting point is 02:18:54 What tech or LTT store item would you want to pressurize to deep ocean depths? What? I love this question so much. What? It's so off the wall. None? You wouldn't want a squoosh tech item or or an ltd store item let's see what happens with the backpack like how much we've cut through but have we really put it to how deep could you put a water bottle into the ocean can the single bottom layer hold up to deep ocean pressures

Starting point is 02:19:19 can fairly hold up to screw no one's broken through it ever yet. Maybe the deep ocean will. Bread. Yeah, the whole point of the chat said bread. Can you deep ocean pressurize a loaf of bread? It's water. It's going to melt. But no. It's the pressures.

Starting point is 02:19:42 I don't think. Yeah, I think it would just go into the, it's i don't think yeah i think it would just it would just go into the it would seep into it and then it would also be pressured from the outside like it it would be very boring it has to have a cavity inside it for any any of this to matter at all is my understanding water bottle you gotta do your water bottle i mean that's just gonna yeah everyone knows what's gonna happen yeah but at what depth i don't I don't know. That's the point of an underwater robotics laboratory. It's never going to get there because it's going to be full of air. It's going to float.

Starting point is 02:20:10 Neither of you have just fun ever. I have fun. You don't just like doing stuff because you want to know things. I have fun vicariously through my children. That is really sad. Ask them. That is kind of sad ask them what they would want to de-motion pressurize maybe it may be a sheep which is a comment that no one's gonna understand except for linus and dan

Starting point is 02:20:36 and it will not be explained i'll explain it a. I got a letter from one of my kids' teachers about a gruesome story that they wrote in their creative writing class that involved a sheep being nuked from the inside. I have good kids. If you read the whole thing, it's like... It actually doesn't not make sense. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:21:07 Just kid creativity, but also like... Yeah yeah maybe a little far on that one yeah you know minecraft i guess or something yeah oh man any updates on the bidet yeah no well it's nice and easy hey when xE noticed LTT is now Dan can you not you're driving me crazy what do you want really when XE what the fuck Dan you know he's doing

Starting point is 02:21:37 look at him doing this on purpose do you see this that is the face of a that is the face of a man doing it on purpose. Is an XC a hockey player too? Look. Look at this. Oh, no.

Starting point is 02:21:52 Hold on. How do I... How do I F11 this stupid computer? Okay. When I'm an XC. Okay. No. No.

Starting point is 02:22:04 That is not what we do. What do we do, Linus? Not that. What do we do? Okay, carry on. When full stop XE. Noticed LDT. How would you prefer? You're the writer here.

Starting point is 02:22:23 When dot EXE. Don't you say rog as well? No. Oh, okay. So I can't say exe, but you can say gif. Gif is correct. I don't want to open this debate up again, Dan. We're going to fight about this.

Starting point is 02:22:44 I've always said exE this is like are you actually serious I thought no no I thought you were taking the piss no I'm gonna take the L on this one I have always said XE yeah why I don't know okay I actually don't know You read it for a really long time but no one said it No well I mean it's Executable People went like this For being mad at me No no no

Starting point is 02:23:14 Being mad at Dan about I knew we'd have some sort of solidarity on this Executable You don't say executable though You're still doing it wrong Dan You know how right I have to be executable you don't say executable though you're still doing it wrong executable dan you know how right i have to be for them to side with me right oh it's actually this is my favorite thing for years is you just generally automatically win against linus because people like watching

Starting point is 02:23:37 them lose no no losing is fun it's it's entertaining i didn't even know that this was like a thing like nobody nobody says the word ever yeah i mean yeah they do yeah i've probably said something.exe like a lot of times i just assumed that both were acceptable no it still drives me nuts this is amazing i'm having like an epiphany moment here your explanation was xe for executable yeah it's easier then you don't say executable you say exec you don't say jaffix either you know jaffix is nothing that's not anything. Jaffix. Jaffix entertained format? Yeah, sure. Oh, man. Damn, this is life-altering. I have to go

Starting point is 02:24:32 for a spirit walk after this. SteveJ3D, I don't think he's trolling anymore. No, no, no. Swear on my life, I have always said X-E. Wow. I feel like I want to pull this. This is weird. This is very weird okay i hear i'm gonna start texting you some things and i'd like you to say them out oh this is a brilliant idea i love it

Starting point is 02:24:53 i'm gonna make a poll at the same time i'm gonna lose my uh my job for this no no no no we might just have to use ai to find you a new job can you find a job for someone whose primary skill is being wrong okay i'm the chief vision officer of linus media group yeah you had to wait for him to take a drink down we almost got him thank you for that setup oh i'm proud of myself for that okay oh i'm really interested in the uh in the results of this poll i never messaged you i messaged you exe exe all right let's have a look let's see uh 20 roughly 20 of people are trolls png okay you do png, not PNG. Hold on, I have to send him more stuff.

Starting point is 02:25:46 Well, see, I would kind of use EXE and XE interchangeably occasionally, right? Like, I'd never say... I would never say PNG. Even though I kind of want to now. I like that a lot more, to be honest. If you're going to do one of them, you might as well do PNG.

Starting point is 02:26:03 I'm so sorry, Lydus, because you sent this to to me as a ping uh i would just call that a text file what txt i would just call text oh oh i thought you said no i'm just i'm sending him sorry extensions yeah sorry so we have png we have txt which you've never said txt i would never ever say txt i would always say send it to me in a text file yeah but how would you what if it's a directory what do you mean if it's a directory like what what if what if you are what what if you're on the phone with someone and you're like okay file extension yeah uh cd cd whatever and then just open i would spell it obviously i mean i would do the same with with xe i would do the same with exe right

Starting point is 02:26:45 uh okay all right well i've sent you more yeah okay uh jpg uh i would say jpeg okay okay well let's do okay so far uh okay i mean i sent you more yeah so uh bmp like i know what a jpeg is I put that in the documentation So BMP Again I would say bitmap But You know we would spell it If we're talking about it Oh Innie No!

Starting point is 02:27:17 Or I and I both interchangeably No! Yeah that's an interesting one Throws it on the ground I'm learning about myself You got an X, C, and an N Do a I want to find more

Starting point is 02:27:35 N, really? Wave Can I try one? Oh man, this is awful You're always on your phone during the show. It's for work! The one time you can't find your phone. Oh man.

Starting point is 02:27:56 What'd you send? Doc X? Okay, alright. I'm scared now. I gotta be honest because this is hilarious all right no i'm using i'm dot msi is all i'm saying now yeah it's great because i'm keeping that dot msi yeah yeah you just say that i would say msi yeah we need more that it's the big it's also the beginning of the word why is it xe no why is it xe and

Starting point is 02:28:26 any uh it's not well no but like but why those in particular because like you know png or like bitmap well right at least they're letters that conceivably could go together whereas like because i would never say i would never say wan.executable that would be weird but would you say WAN.executable. That would be weird. Would you say WAN.exe? I mean, you did, right? I did, of course. Because I'm just like reading it as words.

Starting point is 02:28:55 I forgot. I forgot that such a thing was possible. It's like short form. You know, it's WAN.exe, not WAN.exe, which I didn't read, right? You know, it's WANXE, not WAN.EXE, which I didn't read, right? If you lose the dot, then I don't know. Anyway, I'm canceled. Yeah. Way to go, Dan.

Starting point is 02:29:19 Don't worry, you're doing great, Dan. Okay, hit us again. Oh, wait, did we ever actually finish the i didn't the question all right jacob's question let's let's let's get there oh you want me to read it yeah okay fine noticed ltd is now a sponsor of the mcmaster university baja team yeah what would love to hear how that partnership came about and if you'd sponsor more canadian baja teams in the future um we had a co-op student here who um was very passionate about this sponsorship opportunity and made a made a case internally for why we should consider it and so i basically said you know from my point of view um i leave this to i believe it was colton and taryn who ultimately made the decision um i

Starting point is 02:30:13 think gary was involved as well and i basically said okay i mean if you guys think there's a good business reason to do this then do it and so evidently they did it based on well no this is not the first time finding out about it it was actually uh that particular uh co-op student who came into my office and was like thank you so much for sponsoring the team and i was like huh i mean i definitely had some involvement i guess Apparently. I hadn't found out about it yet. Didn't get my statement yet. But, you know, I did yellow light it. You know, I basically said, I'm good if everyone else is good.

Starting point is 02:30:55 You guys make the decision. But, you know, you may want to go talk to them about it as well. But our pleasure, I suppose. Yeah, no, it should be cool. I think it looks like a really cool project a baja team they build like buggies or something like that and then they race them it sounds incredibly dangerous and i i hope that um this student doesn't die yeah oh the students in the chat i guess i don't have to anonymize it anymore hey ariel i just sent dan a few more because i'm curious oh god these are all

Starting point is 02:31:27 like contextually dependent on like what you're talking about no dan they aren't uh they're all file extensions they're all dot and then that yeah but would you say 7z would you call it a 7-zip file? The question is, would you? No, I'd call it a 7-zip file. So you would go wan.7zip? No, because if you say the dot, then you would spell the extension. Yeah, I tried to think of ones that were interesting.

Starting point is 02:31:58 7zip, who would say that? It's just 7z. It's just 7 and then the character z. I didn't say when i would have said when dot exe if i had said the dot yeah well that's not an extension then so seven yeah i would say seven zed what about does okay dot zip though right i sent you a few i sent you a few go for go through oh jesus you're putting him on the spot again yeah that's the whole point uh img would you call that

Starting point is 02:32:25 an image i don't think i've actually ever used that extension i don't know what it is okay uh tar i would say tar okay tar ball i think that's i think most people say tar yeah okay all right you can have a couple of them but you can't hate this liz r says luke i adopted two cockatiels and i love to spoil them what are your birds favorite toys anything they can destroy uh seriously though that's a thing birds like picking at things and pulling it apart sure doing stuff like that so um they like there's like this confetti paper really thin strings of confetti paper that will be in like yeah kind of wrapped around things and stuff and they enjoy like pulling at that and pulling them apart

Starting point is 02:33:09 anything with strings um so violins then i mean honestly if they got up the you know the bravery to approach the violin and start messing with the strings they'd probably love it that's fair yeah because they can pick at something and it like makes weird noises and stuff yeah they'd probably absolutely love that okay i've got one for you guys then i'd be worried about the material of the string we are never moving on from this topic are we i'm just asking you guys must feel when i'm digging myself into a hole yeah yeah okay so i'm okay let's come back to it i'm not allowed to say xe but you can say tar what about r a r r r r yeah so what's that so why is xe wrong or any wrong but you can say r or tar it just is i mean i mean i get it but like yeah this is english even when there is rules there isn't rules i didn't know that this was a rule i feel i feel like i've been i've been just wrong my whole life yeah yeah and and nobody told me that's not a feeling dan that's a fact and it doesn't care about your feelings oh got him oh

Starting point is 02:34:18 shrek uh okay uh linus would you ever move to the states uh okay uh linus would you ever move to the states okay so i see that your goal now is to get back at me for making fun of you by asking me questions that are going to get me canceled i love it uh no i wouldn't i um believe it or not and this may come as a surprise to americans but other people who live in other countries are actually proud of their countries too it's's, I know it's, it's one of those, it's hard, but yeah, sometimes it's hard. We have, we have our own challenges. Um, but I, uh, I'm a, I'm a proud Canadian. What can I say? Uh, there are places that I would consider moving, but I haven't seen anywhere in the States that has floated my, floated my boat. Um,

Starting point is 02:35:06 I, at one point considered Vancouver, Washington, the other Vancouver, but that wasn't because, you know, I looked at it and I went like, wow,

Starting point is 02:35:14 I really want to leave the Pacific Northwest because it is in the Pacific Northwest. I wasn't because I was thinking, wow, I really want to leave Canada. It was more along the lines of there are significant financial advantages to living there yeah you live in uh washington state where income tax is if i recall correctly at least at the time nothing um and then you're right across the oregon border so you can cross border shop in oregon state where there's no sales tax

Starting point is 02:35:40 so your money you're you're, you have like a tax, you can double dip on the taxation policies, the taxation approach of these two states to really stretch your money in Vancouver, Washington. That was what I was kind of into. And as far as I can tell, everyone kind of in uh and as far as i can tell everyone kind of in the pacific northwest is our you know pnw bros yeah like we um we ran it we've we've multiple times when traveling we've

Starting point is 02:36:15 run into you know oregoners washingtoners whatever they call themselves we all feel pretty similar and it's like it's almost like being being forged in the fires of no fire and just constant rain and cold and miserable all the time just gives you a certain outlook yeah everyone's pretty similar yeah um oh yeah apparently that's still true washington still has no state income tax so yeah that would be that would be just like a supreme hack um hanging out there, especially because, like I said, as far as I can tell culturally, we're pretty, I'd say we probably have more in common

Starting point is 02:36:51 with our PNW Americans up here than we do with like the rest of Canada. Some Eastern Canadians. The Rockies is quite the divide, to be honest. Canada changes a lot once you cross the mountain loving my windbreaker and backpack combo in unseasonably rainy chicago question for all how do you handle being told you are the best for promotion by higher-ups and developed for it but passed up i mean i think the way you handle that is you start handing out resumes. I don't think there's another real answer.

Starting point is 02:37:25 If you don't get any bites, then maybe they were just giving it to you soft. And if you do get any bites, well, then you've got a bite. And then you've got either a new position or ammunition. Recently received a screwdriver and flannel the other day and will definitely buy more linus you once mentioned how using primer paint combo is lazy would you mind elaborating on that when and why that may be one of those things where i'm a little bit old school um it's possible that there are primer paint combos these days that are really really really really great but the thing is that primer and paint have different compositions.

Starting point is 02:38:07 Primer is designed to be an adhesion layer to act as an intermediary for the wood or metal or whatever it is that you're trying to coat and the paint that's going on top of it. Paint is designed to act as a barrier layer and it has good adhesion. I mean, if you've ever tried to get paint off of something you'll have some idea but it's not necessarily designed for blocking stains or for that that that maximum adhesion so as far as i've ever been able to tell a paint primer combo is not going to get you quite the level of resilience that primer with two layers of paint is going to get you and to be clear i'm talking like house painting i don't know the first thing about air brushing or like various other ways of applying paint i'm talking like your typical uh you know latex uh acrylic latex house paint or yeah i mean even yeah i mean oil-based, like an alkyd-based coating as well. So that's, you know, maybe not as true anymore,

Starting point is 02:39:08 but primer still exists. And if it didn't need to still exist, it probably wouldn't. And if what you're trying to do is reduce the number of coats, A, don't do that. And B, there are ways that you can kind of hack around it. You can tint your primer.

Starting point is 02:39:24 So that way, at least if you're using something with a really deep base, like a really vibrant orange or something like that, that way you can reduce the number of coats of that poor coverage orange by having an orange primer underneath it rather than like a vibrant white primer. Because the more coloration pigment you have to put into the paint, the less blocking pigment you can have in the paint. So there's definitely reasons to use tinted primers,

Starting point is 02:39:53 but I would personally avoid paint primer combos because I'd rather just do it properly, traditionally. I think that's it uh yeah it looks like people it looks like my knowledge is not out of date yeah primer and two thin even coats that's apparently still the way to do it repaint you're right and you're right separate separate products because my products are a lot better than they used to be okay yeah there you go um so they have improved but um yeah no i was gonna say something then i forgot what it was so goodbye see you again next week same bad time same bad channel bye happy holidays merry christmas all that fun stuff

Starting point is 02:40:50 oh yeah i kind of forgot this is the last show before then i know right i snuck up i know all right i insist that we take the apple boxes up for super checks tonight sure because i think that your poor performance the last couple of weeks might be ergonomic because you've been terrible no i think i did pretty good last week actually yeah but you lost okay

The WAN Show - Ding Dong the Witch is Dead - WAN Show December 22, 2023

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.