The WAN Show - Microsoft Did It First Apple - WAN Show September 11, 2026

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

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What's up everybody? Welcome to the Wandshow. Dude, it was a huge week this week. It was. You saw that Apple released the Microsoft Surface Duo. Whoa, you got your hands on it early? Wow. No, no, no.

No, actually, this one, the Microsoft one folds more ways than the Apple one does. It is remarkably thin considering how old that phone is. You know, it was an interesting idea. One that Apple, in my opinion, has, a better take on than Microsoft did because the whole, yeah, there's an actual gap between your two completely separate displays thing was like obviously not going to work. We're going to talk about Apple's event this week. I assume you didn't probably watch it. So I've seen highlights. Yeah, classic Luke. Classic Luke. So we'll go through some of the things that you might be legitimately

excited about and some that you probably won't care about. I mean, I heard the pricing and just kind of tuned out. No, no, no, no, no, no. Mark my words. Okay. All right. All right. I will make Luke excited. Oh. Between now and the end of talking about this September's Apple event. All right. All right. And other news this week, seriously?

Sony and Hideo Kajima have broken up. So we're going to talk about that. What else we got? Well, if you've been waiting for good video games and you're a really big fan of the Elder Scrolls, I've got news for you. There's an IKEA and Skyrim crossover. We'll figure out what that means.

a little bit later. Skyrim always sounded like the name of a product at IKEA. Kind of, actually. Yeah. A little bit. Also, LGTVs, they've been caught spying on people. Yeah. It, uh, bleep. The show is brought to you today by MSI, along with Cape, Ahrefs, and Corsair with our rap partner, as always being D-brand, our laptop partner, being Dell. You can kind of see their logo if you try really, really, really got to put big old glowing, bring back glowing logos on the backs of laptop lids. I'm so into it.

And of course, our chair partner, Razor, who, oh, I'm so sorry, Razor. Also, your sorry, Razor, too. Also, I'm so sorry, Creator Warehouse. I'm supposed to be wearing this. And you're sorry, too, because you're supposed to be wearing that. Anyway, why don't we jump right into our headline topic this week, which is, of course, Apple's big September event where they launched the iPhone duo along with some other things that I think Luke is actually going to be pretty

excited about. First of all, the duo. It opens to a 7.6 inch inner display that Apple says is 50% larger than the 18 Pro Max. When closed, it's about the size of a passport with a 5.4 inch screen on the outside. When it's open, it is Apple's thinnest phone ever. And in a first for Apple, It has a FaceTime camera hidden under the inner display. The price is the thing that Luke got all upset about, which makes sense, because it starts at $2,000 US dollars with pre-orders opening on October 16th, ahead of an October 23rd launch.

You have never really shown a lot of interest in foldables. No. Does anything about Apple's approach excite you at all? And let me give you a few options. I'll give you some multiple choice options here. One of the things you could pick would be the lack of any kind of hole punch or notch on the large format display.

That's an option. Something else, kind of cool. So like the underscreen camera going mainstream. Yeah. Apple pushing that, okay, I'm inserting my own opinion here a little bit. No, I'm so sorry. But I'm into it.

I'm super into it. Let's push that technology forward. I'm not paying that much for it, but. Okay. Yeah, that's fair. Okay, another thing that people are legitimately excited about with the iPhone duo is this more content consumption-friendly, unfolded form factor, where you're, like, really getting more benefit from folding out the display

when you're watching horizontal and cinematic content. That's something that you could be excited about. Fones being really thin? I don't watch that much, like, content on my phone. Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay, try to think Something else is really, really thin

Which I think removes me from a lot of the target audience It being really, really thin is very important Because of its thickness when it's folded Yeah But in general, I don't really care about thin phones It's also kind of been a thing for a couple generations now The fold seven is like Functionally, very thin

Phone in a case Feels like a normal phone Yeah, and then it unfolds so like I don't know, whatever Even like I was saying, even the Microsoft duo Is actually really thin Yeah, but it also doesn't have a folding display. So they didn't have to deal with the complexity around how to handle the hinge there. Okay, okay, okay, okay, hold on, I'm going to come up with something.

Okay, A18 Pro processor, two nanometer processor. It has two of what, what are they calling them? Like super cores, mega cores? Can it like send emails faster? Okay, people use their phones from a lot more than emails. Can it like, can it like play chess? You're being such a troll. You're being such a troll right now. Okay, wait. Okay, they put another neural engine in it. So it can do more on on device AI. On device AI. You like on device AI. I do actually like on device AI. He does. The reason why I was laughing is there's like a joke basically in the lab about NPUs and just how they never actually use them for anything. Yeah. So it's like sick. More of my

die space is taken up by this thing that's just never used. The best, baddest NPUs, they have a tendency to show up on machines that also have a GPU. Yeah. Which has like so many tops. Yeah. Just so many. They're tops when it comes to tops. Yeah.

Compared to this like, and to be clear, if you built a big neural processor, like a big specialized NPU, like the size of a freaking GPU, it would crush it. I mean, that's one of the reasons that Intel's data center products are Intel. Invidia's data center products don't just use the same dyes as their consumer gaming products anymore because they put like way more A&A. in them. It's just that the NPU on your like laptop chip

a little tiny small part of the die because it also has to contain connectivity and like a memory controller and you know CPU cores and a GPU and like all those other things that it needs so yeah they just end up being like kind of a bad joke a lot of the time not always but I think Apple will do stuff

that you could make gen mojis faster on device language processing is something I could get kind of excited about However, the caveat on that last one is that this exact same chip will also be in the iPhone 18 Pro. Yeah. So it's not exclusive to the deal. I want to see how it ends up being used. That could be a thing that is exciting.

Okay. But I've been burned on the whole NPU thing for too long. So I would want to see the use cases first. Okay. So, yeah. Anything, let's say it was $1,000. Would you be tempted? Okay.

A fragile phone. They, okay, they like locked in on durability, apparently. Beat a case. And to their credit, to their credit, have taken, you know, six years to, you know, figure that out. So maybe they say their inner screen, they do say their inner screen is stronger. They are, they're using their ceramic shield too. And you're talking to $1,000 U.S. dollars still. so it's still like 1,300 Canadian dollars.

Try 1400. I'm not buying that. I'm not buying that. And that's half the price of what it is right now. People will buy this and love it. And I think they will genuinely love it. I don't think they'll just love it because they're Apple fans. So this isn't a Vision Pro?

No, I don't think so. Yeah. I think this will do okay and people really like it. I also think it's going to be entirely priced out from an incredibly large portion of the audience. Two grand is an insane amount. spend on a phone. Counterpoint. Yes.

For that last one. Yeah. In North America, it is still a pretty normal thing to buy a phone with a carrier subsidy and a long-term contract. In that context, Apple has, you can hate on them for a lot of things, okay? Lots of things. But Apple, to their credit, has an incredible track record when it comes to long-term software

support for their devices. Yeah. With those two things. in mind, if you were someone who is going to baby it and take care of it and you know you're going to use this thing for five, six, seven years, I think the price can be justified. If we're talking, not now. If we're talking like $300 a year for something that you use literally every single day, that much, I think some people could find the justification for that. I also think some people will really actually like use a lot of the features of this device. I could even see it not

just for entertainment stuff. Just having that big of a screen could be useful in a variety of scenarios. Just the things I'm using my phone for, I would not, I think, gain a ton of benefit out of being able to turn it into a freaking book. I also think... You're also not a tablet guy. I'm not a, I'm really Whereas if I had an aging iPhone and an aging iPad and I'm looking at it going, well, what I could do is buy an iPhone and an iPad or hear me out. I could buy the one phone. I could, I genuinely really like I was watching the, again, the highlights of the keynote and stuff. And I was like, okay, cool. Some people are going to love this thing.

But my God, I'm immediately priced out just because like, just in general. It's a lot of money. The phone that is like the most attractive to me if I don't look at price right now. is that, what is it, the Experia, the new Experia. Yeah. And those are crazy expensive. Yeah. And that's holding me back from buying that phone, which is more in my normal ecosystem

and is in the form factor that I like and has the massive battery that I would want and stuff. And the price is still too high on that. This price is higher and is like... It's trying to sell you things that someone likes. Yes, but not really me. So it's not a phone for me. That being said, I will defend. Like, I do think there is actively an audience for this that isn't just,

like mind-controlled Apple fanboys that are going to really like it. Hathos has a really good point. And we've explored this idea on PCs a lot, but we've talked about it less in the context of phones. He goes, well, why use a $2,000 phone for seven years when you could upgrade a $700 phone three times in that time and by the end of it be having a much better experience? And I legitimately think that it's a really good point.

And it's something that I think about a lot when I'm trying to find that bang for the buck, how much does it make sense to spend on something mark? Isn't the battery on foldables? Aren't they like a nightmare to replace? I think you mean the batteries. Yeah. Like there's two batteries across both sides.

It's a whole thing. And so there are a couple counterpoints, though, that I'm going to hit you with. One is that it is, I don't know about likely versus probable versus possible, but it is some degree of possible that in that seven years, foldables will not get more price attainable.

These folding screens and the very complicated mechanical engineering of these hinges and the precision manufacturing might just stay expensive. So your options, if the larger fold-out screen appeals to you at all, your options might be buy the foldable once and use it for seven years or never have a foldable. And so if that matters to you, that could be a reason to do that. another one is that and this is something that I feel is really hard for us to wrap our brains around as enthusiasts

who like new technology a lot of people don't I didn't realize until very recently that my aunt is still using the iPhone 10 the iPhone X that I gifted her and this like to Apple's credit feels a lot more common

with Apple phones and no here's the kicker I asked her I was like Auntie you've had that for a long time you are one of the most important people in my life I would be happy to get you a brand new phone of your choosing any kind you want

this is my aunt Connie Oh no I put that together And she's like And I was like I will set it up for you And she's like I'm comfortable with this one And I go okay

For some people actually Using the same thing for a really really long time is worth paying extra that's a feature not a bug I actually I had a really similar conversation with a customer

back at NCIX who I insisted should not buy this like it was right when DDR was DDR3 I think DDR3 was cutting edge and it was like

an extreme edition quad core on DDR3 and he was getting the part that really blew my mind was he was buying four Raptor 10,000 RPM drive

in Raid Zero, like, and an SSD or something, or maybe SSDs weren't a thing yet? I forget the exact timing. The point is, I think this was pre-X-25M, like, SSDs. And I was like, buddy, Fred, not actually a pseudonym. What up, Fred? I remember you. He shows up on my LinkedIn every once in a while as, like, a suggested contact.

So I guess he's just, like, still killing it in Vancouver or something. I don't know. Cool. Glad things are going well for you, Fred. Super nice guy. But I'm like, Fred, look, I actually did a house call for him once. His system was so expensive that he had like some issue with it. And I was like, NCIX literally didn't have a mobile service.

But just of my own accord, without even asking anybody. Like, looking back on it, that's like crazy. We had no like insurance for that. Like, I could have been killed. Like, there's no... I had no permission even. Anyway, he had an issue with the system and I was like, I will come to your house and I'll fix it.

because it was like a $10,000 computer, which I tried to talk him out of because I was like, bro, you could buy a $2,000 computer every two years for the next five years and have... Way better off. You'd have a better computer probably by year two. Yeah. And even better in those other years.

And then you could keep all those other computers. And then you'd have so many computers, which to me made a lot of sense. But to him didn't. He's like, no, I just want a really good one that I can use for a really long time. and that actually has way more values to me. And it took me until now to maybe, as I was making an argument for this, to finally understand what he meant,

that had a value to him. And sorry, I forget what even the question was anymore, but let's move on. Being able to buy a duo and keep it for like seven years ago. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, why someone might care about that. I totally forgot about that time I did a house call for Fred. Anywho, right, the part that you might be interested in.

So, new AirPods, but not the pros with the silicone tips. Apple's AirPods announcement was low-key, my favorite part of the whole keynote. I didn't see anything about the AirPods. Yeah, because no one's talking about it. So AirPods 5 now has active noise cancellation on both the more expensive tier that has five-hour battery with ANC running and has a wireless charging case and it now has ANC on the basic version that is just

129 to start now. That is crazy. Apple actually kept pricing consistent or dropped it across both tiers of the AirPods 5s while saying I think they improved the ANC by some double digit percentage. I want to say it was like 40% or something like that. I can't remember

the details. But when I was watching through that section of the keynote and then seeing all the discourse about the Apple event afterward I was like yeah sure. Like the now there's a folding iPhone or whatever, but like as someone who's been dailying a folding phone off and on for the last seven years or however the first fold from Samsung came out, I'm like, yeah, and cheaper AirPods, bro?

Yeah, that's cool. That's really cool, especially because I lost mine in Taiwan. Oh, good timing. Yeah, this is actually pretty good timing. I really, really hope that they improved, I don't know what I would even call it, Because I need the non-silicon tip ones. Yeah. Because my ears are weird.

He's an ear canal virgin. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he wants to stay that. He's saving himself for ear canal marriage. I am. Yeah. So one of my problems is the ones that I had, which I think were the fours, pretty

sure they were the fours. They would like, I don't know, maybe the seal would break or something. And you'd get this like, woo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo. Oh, okay, sure. And it was, like, pretty annoying. Well, they don't have a seal. No, I know. So it's probably more just like some kind of airflow.

on the mics. Make sure you clean your mics. Apple actually has like special instructions on their site for some kind of like non-conductive special water you're supposed to use to clean the mics. How to clean. No, it's not distilled water on AirPods Pro Apple. Hold on. I got to find the guide now because Apple has a specific thing you're supposed to use. My cellar water. What the hell is that? Yeah. So I had to like look this up too. because I don't, and then I still haven't done it. What? To clean, you need ore.

My cellar water that includes P.EG6 caprylic slash capric glycerides, such as from bioderma or nutrigena. What? And distilled water? Apparently, soft bristled children's toothbrush, two paper cups, paper towel. And so I, so especially sleeping with my AirPods, I, I build up wax on them, like, like a lot, to the point where the noise cancellation like barely even works.

And so I was like, I ended up using a brand new pair to like do a short circuit or something. I was like, man, mine's like, it's mine wearing out. So I looked it up and apparently no, it's just because the microphones get gunked up and in order to clean it, you have to do this.

And I was like, what the fuck is this? You know what's funny? Yeah. You know how all three of us were like, what? What? And chat. Chat was like, what are you talking about?

What is that? It's makeup. It's makeup remover. Oh. All the, all the dude bros be like, oh, I've never heard of it. My cellar water. It has to be a thousand dollars a bottle. It's like, well, it is a cosmetic product. It might just be.

At what chemical supply store will I find this fantastic water? And G chemicals doesn't stock it. I got to go right to ExxonMobil. Comes in 80-gallon drums. Oh, no, it's cheaper than bottled ones. water, okay. Oh, man. That's pretty funny.

Noki says, My seller, I barely know her. Okay. So, um, why are demographics like 97% male again? I know there's got to be a reason for it. I can't quite. More like 98. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, so specifically the NutraGina one, because I think they, they called that out, says, like, contains whatever acid, boost skins, moisture while we're moving. makeup and impurities. So yeah, it's supposed, it's probably just like, high alleronic acid I know about. It's like a skin tightening thing. Okay. Yeah. It's, it like is crazy. Like, it actually makes a difference. Huh. Yeah. At what? At what is it accomplishing though? Like, why? So what it does, so it does a couple of things. One is, um, like if you just want to look better rested that day. You literally just like apply it. And it like, like,

like, like, bags aren't going to be as noticeable if your spins all tight it's not gonna, it's not gonna

unage you. Yeah, you're exactly as old as you are and it's like that simple. Yeah. But the other thing that it does is if it's used regularly

by, by making like deeper creases less deep, they take longer to like form. I actually didn't start using it until fairly recently. It, it like works pretty good.

Um, anywho, where are we? So yeah, AirPods five. I'm legit excited about them and I'm excited that I finally know that that water is not some exotic chemical because I honestly didn't even look into how to get it. Because I was like, what is that? How can Apple possibly expect me to obtain that? I've never heard of it before. Honestly? I probably have it in my house already. If we weren't live on the show, I probably would have done the same thing. I just not bothered to even. I would have been like, what the f-okay, whatever.

Forget it. But we're alive on the show. So I was like highlight, search with Google. Oh, okay. That's so funny. One weird thing that I just noticed is the difference between Okay, so you have AirPods 5 and you have AirPods 5 Wireless charging case. Oh yeah, and with the volume swipe. Yeah, there's more too.

Not only just that though, there's more battery life. Yeah, I told you, five hours. Hour. Yeah, yeah. And that one is the one that actually went down in price, I think. Yeah, I mean, it's not that much of a jump, really. Yeah, so it's a really small gap. And I think...

Kind of nice. So if you want to save 30 bucks, you don't mind plugging your case in and you don't necessarily need the extra hour, then you can save 30 bucks. They're a multi-trillion dollar organization and they do nothing without a purpose, sort of interpretation of this, is that previously the most people might have been going for the lower tier, AirPods 4, and they're just trying to get people to go up. Trying to get people, like the lower one is now just like so they can say starting at. And then that's the real one.

But they knew that they couldn't have that high of a job. jump, times are tight out there. What is that they call it like ice cream cone pricing or whatever? Something like that. But basically trying to increase ASP, average sell price. So by eliminating the super high option that maybe most people weren't choosing, making that one more attainable, and then making inherently the starting at one less appealing, they can overall on average sell AirPods this generation for a bit more.

Yeah. And you know what? in this case, whatever their rationale was for it, I like the outcome, so I'm into it. Finally, of course, there's a new iPhone. Live translation. That probably only works if you have an iPhone, I'm assuming. New iPhone has, it's like better.

Oh, the new ProMax stuff, they claim 45 hours of video playback, like over 40 hours. I don't remember the exact number. Which is, you know, we're not going to get there. We never managed to replicate manufacturer claims when it comes to battery life in the lab. But generally speaking, we do get within some proportion of what they claim. Like if they say 20 hours, we might get 16.

And if that same manufacturer says 25, we might get 20. So I would expect this thing to have absolutely monstrous battery. And then on the iPhone side, there were price hikes, but iPhones contain a lot more RAM and storage than AirPods do. So that doesn't really surprise me at this point. Yeah. I had to cut a PO today for a bunch of staging, a bunch of materials for our battery bank.

I didn't cut the PO rather, but I had to approve it or whatever. Yeah. I didn't love it. Oh gosh, this is a long email. I will deal with this later. Cool, good chat. Anyway, let's move on. What do you want to talk about next?

Dude, we have so many creator warehouse things, by the way. This is a better week than ever to send a comm into producer Dan. Let him get an early start before we do the like formal call out for them later. Here's your, apparently we gave this away at the Christmas party. So that's why Sammy had one. See you later, Sammy. Thanks for letting us borrow it for the show. What was I saying?

Right, right, right, right, right. Help save Dan's fingers. Remember Dan's fingers. He can't wave like that if he doesn't have working. fingers. So if you want to send in a com, maybe do it now. We have like so much new stuff. We'll get into it later. Point is, hey, new topic. Let's talk about something that I genuinely thought was just not real when I first read it. Uh, sorry. Okay. Relationship drama alert. Kojima productions and PlayStation Studios break up. Kojima rebounds with...

The other ones. Actually, I mean, it could... Ah, man. Yeah. Okay. So here I was... The thing that's getting me is like how the hell did you let that happen? This feels... How the hell? Not only did you let that happen? You made that happen. This feels like when Final Fantasy 7 launched on PlayStation instead of N64. Maybe not quite that.

But it... It's like, like that one, it's in there with the top 10 video game, gaming industry anime betrayals. Did Nintendo kick them out of the door? Because that's the weird part here is that Sony went out of their way. to break up with Kojima. It's not that Kojima found, like, a better deal and left. Sony booted him out the door.

I feel like Nintendo's toxicity towards third-party developers in that era, and their focus on hardware that did not allow Squarespace to build the worlds they wanted to build, did force Squarespace hand a little bit? Sure. Or were they SquareNix yet at that point? I think they were still Squersoft. Sure. But no, no, it is different.

This is like, and like, here's my question. Here's my question. Has he ever had a not commercially successful game? I guess it depends how you define commercial success. I looked up, because Death Stranding was like definitely the weirdest thing that I know of that he output it and had the least fanfare around it. As far as I can tell,

Des Stranding 1 was a success. It wasn't a blockbuster success that they might have wanted, but they made money off of it. Destrining 2 seems a little bit less conclusive. People in Chatter saying apparently it didn't do so well. But the thing about Death Stranding 1 that's weird is if you look it up, there's a bunch of people saying that it didn't do well, but it did profit. enough to make a second

and I don't know what well that might have been Kojima pushing them really hard because Death Training one wasn't like a wasn't the big success that they wanted So maybe they just they've just had enough of his Autour sort of era and they're willing to let him walk

Yeah but it's just like I don't know Maybe he's not making a walking simulator this time Here we should probably run through the actual like thing and then we'll discuss a bit more So PlayStation dropped Fizint, physical intelligence, Kajima production's spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid after deciding to end its collaboration with the studio. PlayStation framed it as a difficult, considered decision,

while Hideo Kajima said the cancellation notice from PlayStation Studios came unexpectedly in June. Polygon suggests that Death Stranding 2 on the beach's disappointing sales might have been a catalyst for the split. Earlier today, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier wrote that Sony ditched the project because of concerns about the game's budget, missed deadlines and timed exclusivity. Now Xbox and Kojima Productions have confirmed a new partnership with Fisn's production

continuing and Xbox publishing the game. Just to take a pause mid mid read, I genuinely think this could be a killer title for Xbox, which is insane. And the crazy thing is like I can understand Death Stranding is a weird game. And Death Stranding 2, the fact that it had a sequel is kind of weird. And I'm, you know, I'm not surprised I didn't do that well. But the spiritual successor to Metal Gear

and it's called Fizint, which like kind of ties a little bit into AI stuff, which is very topical right now. And like this feels, and Metal Gear's whole thing was AI stuff realistically. Like this is a very timely game. This is very much square in his wheelhouse.

Like this feels like the thing that would bang and they kick him out the door for this. I feel like this could pull people back to Xbox in like a fairly real way. With that said, neither you nor I knows the guy. Nope. Or has worked with him. Yep. Notably, Hideo Kajima previously had a much publicized breakup with Konami,

the publisher of the Metal Gear Solid series. So this isn't the first time that... Totally. He's been shown the door. And, you know, so... Artists somewhat famously can be difficult to work with. I mean, I think we should. see that here even. Yeah. I'm not always, I can be very opinionated. And no, I'm, no, I'm serious.

Like it's, no, I, yeah, I know. But I, but I, but I think that's something that, and I run into that with other people here as well too. I actually, I shot an AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade with Lisa yesterday, who literally is an artist. Um, like she's, uh, she, she, she does design for creator warehouse. Yeah, yeah. And, um, and, and, and, it's funny because one of the things, one of the, I actually love shooting AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade because a lot of the time it's the first full day I've ever spent with that person. Yeah. Even though they've like, in some cases, worked here for years. Lisa and I have worked together for years. Many, many hours we've spent together. We've never

actually spent a whole day together. And one of the, one of the, one of the, probably rarely had off-topic conversations too. One of the walls or barriers or some things that we broke down during the shoot was that we both made what we felt we intended was a joke or a slap meant to be banter the very first time we met that I think neither of us we moved on from it but neither of us really felt quite right about for all these years and it turned out that we were both just doing ADHD things and not coming across correctly. Oh, my goodness. So she joined the company when Bridget, who's the head of fashion, went on Matleaf.

And she came in, and so I made what I thought was kind of just like a funny banter joke. Obviously, I know your real name. Oh, hi, you must be new Bridget. to which she gave me some of her trademark Irish sass plus, you know, maybe coming on a little stronger, maybe she, neither of us remember. It was like years ago. So neither of us really remembers exactly what was in our heads at that time.

But what we know is that she took away like, oh, this guy a little bit. And I took away, oh, this relationship's going to be tough a little bit. and then over the years like it's been fine and then neither of us has ever really gone back and revisited okay what happened there like why did we have such a rough start

anyway so the reason I bring up Lisa is that your starts with people are awesome I know I know anyway the point is maybe something to visit she and I

because of our directness and passion and strong opinions do still sometimes disagree quite strongly about things and we find, because we've been working together a long time, I think we find ways to resolve them very respectfully now and we can yield when it's very clear

that the other one really will die on this hill and it's that important and it's like that, you know, that's okay. But shoot, I had in my mind one of the things that she was like very, very, very passionate about, shoot, well, I don't remember anymore. The point is, um, we had also had a really good conversation yesterday about how excited she was about, uh, you liking the, uh, Siberia design. Oh. Yeah. I got, uh, I wore it down to packs last weekend. Oh, this isn't in the dock, but I want to talk about packs. Okay. Um, this might even be something that I can attach to this topic,

because we're kind of talking about video games, but I wore it down to packs and I got comments on it from people that had no idea what it was or who I was. So people just thought it was cool people I saw there was a couple people that were like reading I'm not pointing at anything real We're like reading the map because the one that I had was the one at the map on the front Yeah, and I could look at them like kind of figuring it out and they go like oh that's a cool shirt There was at least two comments never get comments on my shirts that's cool and and that kind of like okay I remember I was going with this that kind of Commitment because she's not a tech tech tech person and this will really come across

in the upgrade. Right, I remember I was going with this. She's not a techie person. So in order to create that, she had to like do a lot of research. It's informed. And be very committed. It's a cool sure. And put in a lot of work that is not obvious necessarily to just any person who looks at it. Yeah. And when you're someone who is passionate like that and you're the kind of person who also manages to survive in difficult creative industries, you're, you're You've got to be the kind of person who's ready to stand up for your ideas, especially if you make your way into a more leadership type position, a senior position.

And so I think it's the kind of thing that just invites personality conflict. If other people don't know how to absorb that energy and push it back constructively. And so I guess what I was trying to say is it's something that we encounter a lot here too, where we have very passionate, very creative people who could easily find themselves in personality conflicts, especially with people that they don't know well, like Lisa and I did initially,

but it doesn't come from a place of, like, malice or negative intent or anything. It just comes from, and in the case of someone like a Kajima, having experience, having passion, having a vision, and being willing to stand your ground. And so I don't want to blame the guy

for having been through multiple breakups. I'm just saying that from a complete outsider's perspective, it doesn't surprise me that you might have these kinds of differences. And I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't want him to make Destranging in the first place and then didn't want him to make Descranning too

and then we're just kind of frustrated with him. And now he's finally making something that's like actually probably like, you know, a commercial success in the waiting but he's asking for more money and more time and you know what? Forget it. We're done. Like I could see that.

Well, I think it's going to end up being a bad move. Something in my gut is telling me this game's going to bang. I don't know what. I feel like the stars are kind of aligning. Well, it's also getting a major, totally unpaid publicity hit right now. Yeah. Or not like a, not like a hit.

He's not really saying from us, like everybody's talking about this. Yeah. This is pretty big news. Yeah, okay, sorry. I think you were like halfway through so we can keep going. No, I'm done. There was just one funny thing in. Domino's UK apparently joined in on the drama saying PlayStation thought the game was called physical.

So they had to back out. Oh man, that's pretty good. Actually, the sickest of burns. I hadn't seen that one yet. Sickest of those. Yeah, I don't know. Have you played any Kojima games? Honestly, one of the biggest problem for me was we were not a PlayStation house.

We didn't have every console. Right. So, like, we couldn't really. I would play Metal Gear every once in a blue moon at a friend's house, but when I was growing up, there were single player games. I don't know if I think there was eventually a Metal Gear game that was multiplayer or co-op or something. When I was growing up there, single player games,

I remember seeing that, like, fighting one of the bosses, you had to, like, move your controller from Port 1 to Port 2 or something. There was, like, some really, I remember thinking, like, these games seemed really inspired. But just like the Uncharted games, I just didn't really have access to them. Uncharted looked really cool. Metal Gear Solid games looked really cool. A bunch of the different Kojima games looked really cool.

But I, yeah, it just didn't really have direct. long-term, okay, I can beat this entire game access to them. Play a couple minutes here, there, everybody. So it's just because they'd be excited to, like, kind of show what the game was off. I was always into stealth games, always interesting. But for me, it was, you know, the things I had access to, Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell, stuff like that. So, yeah, no, I'm excited, though. I mean, if it's coming to Xbox, hopefully that means it's coming to PC as well.

I mean, no guarantees these days. Love to jump on it. They've been kind of wishy-washy about what exactly. Exactly. That's true. You know, building a great library for Xbox means in the context of... This feels like the first serious win in that regard, though. Largely from Ash, it's Asha Sharma, right?

Largely from Asha, we've seen cutting things down. Talk of growth, yeah. Talk of growth, actions mostly being cutting things down. This is the first one where it feels like this is just growth. Making moves. And it's interesting. and it's a title that I really feel like could pull people in. And it could also potentially pull people in that weren't traditionally Xbox people,

which is very, very interesting. So we'll see how that goes. I want to talk about Paxe real quick. Sure. I went to Pax last weekend, Penny Arcade Expo. They call it West now, which hurts my soul,

because traditionally it was called Prime, which was way better. Well, traditionally, it was called Pax. Yeah, yeah. And then Pax Prime, and then now Pax West. Just one of the Paxes. Yeah. That's Saj.

It's kind of weird now because there's like two convention centers that it's in. Oh, really? The Seattle Convention Center is two completely separate buildings. Not that, yeah. And it's not that big overall. Like any one of the buildings alone could not contain. Oh, bro. The newest Seattle Convention Center is enormous.

Oh, I haven't seen that. Dude, it's called, it's like probably the biggest convention center I've ever been in. It's likely closer to one of the bigger buildings I've ever been in. Oh, okay. It's called Summit. But wait, Pax isn't in that. Pax is in that. They're in that.

Pax is also in Arch. No way. Which is like the original Seattle Convention Center. Okay. It shows you what I haven't been in years. So the Arch building, which is where, you know, Pax bounced around a few different convention centers eventually landed on the primary convention center in Seattle, which is now called Arch. Well, which is the Seattle Convention Center. And the building at that time was called Arch.

It should have been called Arch, by the way. And now that building is used as like the Video Game Expo. Oh. But not much else. all the rest of the stuff is in Summit. There's some panels at Arch, but mostly it's just a video game expo, and then Summit has like the PC freeplay,

console free play, something that I feel like they added this year because I haven't seen it before, but the arcade free play, which is actually really fun. Oh, that's cool. BIOC is there. They have a bunch of tabletop stuff.

They have an entire floor, which is just tabletop things and tabletop free play. And then they have a whole other massive area, which is still tabletop, but it's like tabletop RPG area or like war gaming style play along with something that

my friend group ended up playing for a surprising amount of time which is crocanol which you slide the little disc around and whatever that was actually really fun but really interesting year we went for two days just one overnight the first day we spent almost the entire time in the video game expo hall

after we got back to the place we were staying, I asked everyone I was there with, which was like three, you know, two of my buddies and my brother. I was like, name one AAA game we saw on the floor. Nobody had an answer.

We saw the entire expo hall. No one was there. It was super weird. To the point where apparently I heard a lot of rumor, this is why I wanted to talk about it. I heard a lot of rumor mill stuff while we were there, including from Pankrats, because I ran into Pankrats on the floor. Not like physically, but that there was, there was, okay, first of all, you've been to pass before.

The hallways were really wide. Oh. Like, drive a car down at wide, comfortably with some people standing in there as well. Super, super wide. There was also a massive area, which was just art vendors. Like the person sitting there would be the person who drew the art. and you could buy the art, which is cool, but also not something you would see in the...

It's cool on the boardwalk, like... Oh, they're pretty premium. I've seen them at Expos before, but you would expect that at the Summit building with more of the, like, tabletop stuff or whatever else. You wouldn't expect it in the prime video game expo hall thing. And apparently, they weren't. They were originally going to be in the Summit building

where you'd expect them to be, along with, like, other kind of trinkety things that you can buy, not the video game hall, but they were there, which means if you look at the massive area that they took up, that not only are the hallways super wide, but this huge area of artists also is people that didn't show up, talked to a couple vendors,

which were more willing to be open about it, and they were like, yeah, we were like begged to be here last minute. Apparently, rumor mill, entirely rumor mill. I have none of this as fact. Not super long before the event, Nintendo fully pulled out, and that caused like a cascade. of a bunch of other vendors to be like, well, if they're not doing it, maybe we shouldn't either.

And apparently the reason is GTA6. Really? Just everyone's saying they're going, why bother? Yeah. GTA6 will literally hoover up every single dollar and every single playtime hour. This was the rumor on the floor from like everyone I talked to

when I talked to a bunch of different people, they all have the same opinion. It was GTA6. The little indies are just like, I don't know, whatever. it's it's going to plow over everyone anyways. We're just doing what we're doing. And the big names are just trying to dodge it.

So they're not going to bother due marketing spend, which was really interesting because that made it that an event that GTA didn't sponsor, most of the chatter was about GTA because everyone else bailed out. Whereas if people showed up, they might have actually been talked about. But this was like, as far as apparently everyone I talked to is concerned, by an insane degree, the worst year for Pax's, like,

video game expo hall ever. And, like, that's been kind of happening almost every year for a while now, but this is, like, the biggest drop. It was, it was not good. I kind of wonder, does GTA matter to Nintendo, though? This was interesting. There's, there's some thought. It's a really different gamer.

Again, this is all purely rumor mill. Um, there's, there's some thought that they didn't want to cannibalize their, Nintendo Direct where they announced the Yeah. Okina Time remake. Sure. So maybe Nintendo's reason was different. And then other booths like assumed what their reason was.

And they assumed it was GTA. So they all bailed. But the assumption might not even be real. Because it's, it's rumors about people who made assumptions based on something that they weren't sure about. Yeah. Which is like, so we really have no idea. To me, Nintendo making a decision on.

ego versus Nintendo making a decision on fear. I'm going to go ego every time. And if Nintendo's going, we don't need your event. This thing doesn't matter. Our direct is going to bang anyways. Yeah. Wasn't Nintendo the first to bail on E3 out of the big three? I'm not sure.

I actually don't remember. But I know that they've been doing Nintendo Direct for a long time now. And that's kind of been, that's been the play for the big dogs. for ages now. Like Apple doesn't bother. They will literally just drop a product in the middle of the week

with no fanfare whatsoever before they would bother to show up at a CES. Yeah. You know what I mean? And like it's funny because you'll go to CES. Like I forget what year it was

when Google bought like all the banner space to push RCS and Apple's refusal to adopt it. But like they, They're shouting into a void. Yeah. Apple might have some people there, but Apple ain't there. They're not at the show.

They wouldn't stoop to announce, to make a big announcement at CES. And so in the same way, it's become kind of a like, you know, primary sex characteristic swinging move to just be too good to do your stuff at someone else. this event. You just stand on your own stage with your own friendly, invited audience, and you do your big announcements. Yeah, and like Crystal's mentioning, it may have honestly been a case of the economy here being utterly trapped. The economy here, the economy everywhere. But the economy, I'm going to, you know, editorially insert everywhere, just being utterly trash, blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, whatever reason it was, the talk on the

floor was mostly about GTA. Yeah. And there was some cool indies and stuff. And like we had, we had a good time. But we mostly had a good time because it was like fun to hang out for a couple days. Not because like, um, the, the gaming expo hall really gave us much to work with. The, the tabletop area and the, the like free play stuff has been cool for a while.

The fact that they have VR free play there is pretty sweet. Hey, speaking of VR. you found your base stations. Have you played on your big screen? I haven't had time to set them up yet. I will probably have time on Sunday. Sir, you bought a big screen beyond two. And you still have not used it.

Have you put it on your face? No. By next WAN, I will have used it. If my base station still work, which is a concern. You are killing me. By next WAN, I will have used it. As much as I am crushing the soul

of one Mr. John Panazzo. CEO of Eshtek. Okay. Makes HexOS. You know the feature... You know the feature... It's a really good one. You're going to like this.

You know the feature that I've been asking for to exist for literally like 10 years? An easy, no hassle, no configuration way to do buddy backup. Yeah. He gave me access. Like a week ago. And he's like, he's like, bro, I'm piped into... because, like, he's piped into my system for telemetry and stuff, because I'm, like, an early tester.

He's like, bro, I know you haven't opened it. He called me yesterday. Anyway, this is a really exciting milestone. Investment disclosure. Users of Eshtex, HXOS, NAS operating system, have a new option for off-site backups. It's here. Holy crap, it's in beta right now.

users are using it. Buddy backup allows users to request space on a friends server. Both parties must have a valid HXOS license to participate. Friends control if they accept the request, which server and storage pool the backup will land on, and they can adjust storage limits for buddies at any time. It is their server after all. Backup arrangements can be ended at any time for any reason. When possible, servers will connect directly to each other over a secure peer-to-peer link, but they can utilize a relay if your ISP doesn't allow direct connection. The HXOS blog post states that the relay service is free during the beta, which implies that it might not always be, which makes sense.

I mean, if it's a, if they are... It's an ongoing service. Yep, that makes sense. You can backup to multiple buddies, and you can host multiple backups for multiple buddies. Backup schedules can be managed and rate limited manually, or you can let HXOS handle it. and your data is fully encrypted before the transfer. Sorry, you might have even said this. Do you have to use the relay?

Nope. Okay. That's only if for like an ISP block or some kind of like enterprise grade NAT or whatever, they cannot establish a direct connection. Yeah, got it. Your data is fully encrypted before the transfer, meaning that it never exists in a readable form on your buddy's server or during transmission. And if you want to learn exactly how it all works,

Maybe Dan, you want to throw the article from the HXOS blog in the docs? Okay, cool. And then you can also sign up for the beta at the bottom of the blog post. These guys, I know I haven't talked about HXOS much lately, but like, dude, they have been absolutely cooking with gas. The way that new features have been developed that we thought were going to be like years into the roadmap is mind-blowing to see. Yeah, they're really executing. We're going to be doing like some videos over the next little bit, just cleaning up my whole server situation.

I have never really talked about this because overall, I thought it was a really cool product, but I have never fully made the switch to image, even though I've actually done not one but two guides over the years for how to do it. And the reason that I haven't done it, which I've never really talked about, is every time I go to do it on my system, I come up against, oh, man, they still make you use their weird, proprietary, nonsense, jumble of characters folder structure for, as far as I can tell, no reason other than that I'll be locked into it forever now.

Because it, like, messes up all of my file structure. Sure. It doesn't change anything that you already had in a given file structure, but everything you ingest into it, it just makes some random string of characters name folder and starts dumping things into it and then makes more and starts dumping things into that. And I just can't wrap my brain around that. I like a clean, at least to the greatest extent that I can have one, a clean folder structure. and HexOS is working on a partnership with another tool that has very image-like capabilities but allows you to keep your folder structure.

I mean, even Plex doesn't have the audacity to tell me that they're going to just create their own folder structure and not consult me. Like, that's exactly the sort of thing that I'm trying to avoid. Like proprietary metadata storing schemes and folder structures, it's like what I've,

ran into with Canon Zoom browser back in the day, where I painstakingly tagged and organized all of my pictures, and then I did a reformat without keeping the dot DB file or whatever, and it was all gone. I'm not vendor locking in on a freaking photo browser. Never again, and so I'm actually really excited about the partnership that they're building. They've got all kinds of really cool stuff that they're working on. Etzelm says, have you considered Photoprism? Let me have a look. I wonder if that's the one. Actually, I literally don't know if that's the one.

It could be. I powered privacy first for browsing, organizing, sharing photos, and videos. It helps tag, search, and rediscover media without getting in the way. Yeah, maybe I'll have to check it out. I'm actually not sure if, uh, if this is the one. I don't think so. I, hmm, I don't think so. I'd have to find out.

Anyway, what were we talking about again? Oh yeah, so yeah, HexOS. They're cooking and I'm really, really excited about the roadmap. Line go up and to the right. What's that? What are you looking at? I'm sneak peeking at another upcoming topic. Okay, let's do it.

Let's do it. Do we do comms or do we do the topic? Oh, we should do the comms. We should do the comms. There's so much stuff here. We are apparently, this is the first time hearing of it, moving away. from individual apparel drops, and instead we're grouping them together into a monthly drop,

so we can bring you guys more of the stuff we're excited about all at once. Oh, this will probably help people consolidate their orders and pay less shipping. That's cool. That's cool, because you know what? Diesel just hit over $6 a gallon in the U.S. Holy freaking bananas fuel costs, so why don't we just, why don't we do fewer shipments? So we've got some new and some returning items for September.

Okay, I guess this is the part where I start modeling all the cool stuff on the show. First up is our new RGB baseball cap. It has a minimal silicone LTT logo at the front with that RGB design that we've been known for in some of our hoodies and T-shirts over the years that adds a little bit of color without being too loud. Actually, Luke, do you want to follow along

so I can throw over to the site? Right. I'm on it. When ready? Oh, okay. Yeah, there it is. Get us like a zoom. So we can, or one of the zoom shots so that we can really see that the little flex of color. Yeah, there we go.

Just with a little bit of fun. And that's a custom silicone thing that also has the flex in it on the, on the LTT logo. All about the subtle branding. Yeah. All right. We also have a new tote bag. Oh, yeah, there you go. Blank tote bag available in black.

and kangaroo I am not much of a tote bag guy but the tote bag people that we have in creator warehouse assure me that this is an excellent tote bag Is it a real kangaroo or faux kangaroo? No, it is not made of kangaroo Dan Oh, faux kangaroo.

We've got two new flannel shirts This time, Luke is modeling it So I'm going to actually, oh wait, so I'm going to go to the Luke cam There we go, hey, there he is We have it in Buffalo, and in RGB. So if you get a close-up, look,

hold on, wait for it, wait for it. I love that our photos are always so good now that I can count on the thing that I want to show you having a photo for it. It is really nice. These are great for layering as we head into the colder months. That is such a cool flannel.

And our LTT Boxer Briefs are getting two new prints, like two new sets of prints. So we've got video games Creatively named video games So like unlimited video games You get to see these now You got games on your junk

What about unlimited bacon Hold them up Yeah you gotta hold them up He'll never figure this out Dan It's just one of his learning disabilities Pretend to look at them But in front of your face in focus Wow

There you go You could you could let the Then you could look at the back of them While you show them to the people Oh I am Oh okay You can do that when they're folded too Get it? Get it? Get it?

the family jewels. Yeah, yeah. Okay, what is this one? And potions and stuff? What do you mean, what are they? No, but that one has like a pun, family jewels. What is it? I mean, it's just cool. I don't know, your sword and health. Yeah. Sword and hilt. Yeah, I don't know. It's just cool weapons and stuff. You got two shields and a long sword. Lisa worked hard on a nice repeating pattern that has lots of fun little stuff on it. You got to show them the whole thing. There you go. How cute is that? And then we always try to have just like a more, someone might see my underwear today, like very just wearable. blind. You don't want them to see your potions and your jewels? Well, some people

I might like to see that. Yeah. And then our other underwear collection is our error collection. So we've got kind of like a, you know, red because that's the color of errors. That's just kind of our plane on that. And then also our glitch as well as

a cute little blue screen. It says stuff on it. You can't just gloss over it. I was trying to what this one is. Yeah, it's just, it's a glitch. It's glitchy. your PC has run into a problem but I just got lazy and shut down oh this is the same thing that's on like the mouse pad and the water ball and stuff

yeah it's to kind of your PC is running into a problem I was going to fix it but I just got lazy and shut down and hopefully it turns back on 69% complete very nice very nice also we're restocking our blank baseball caps and those are available now

you can check out the September drop at LMGG slash September drop did we have like kangaroo in the blank baseball cap before I don't think so. You know what? I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not 100% sure.

The blank baseball caps, a big part of what we're doing here is we are slowly, painstakingly, laboriously making our way towards creator warehouse becoming more of a brand of just quality products, reasonably priced, that other creators can apply their branding to. So you'll see over the coming. years, it's going to be a long transition, you're going to see more and more of the LTT branded products on Creator Warehouse branded blanks that could be available to other creators if they just, you know, like our style.

Because as someone asked, someone asked them full punch out there, like, Creator Warehouse question mark, it's like, yeah, Creator Warehouse is the actual company behind LTT store. So Creator Warehouse could make things for other stores. Yeah. I think on the legal side, we either do have it set up or it doesn't matter because they have the same ownership so we could just deal with it later.

But Creator Warehouse is a completely separate legal entity. That I know for sure. And I think it's just that they have a license effectively to create LTT branded apparel and products. And so there would be no reason that Creator Warehouse couldn't also work on a licensing agreement or some other mutually beneficial agreement with another creator.

It's just taking us a really, really long time to learn to be an apparel company because other than some of the people who came in with experience, the top level leadership had never done it before. And we did the Larian Backpacks, but there was some...

It took a really long time. Learning pains. An embarrassingly long time if I'm being perfectly upfront about it. I don't think we ever really acknowledge, that before, but that took way too long and not because we were malicious or lazy. There were some reasons we had to, we were switching who we worked with. Ooh, that I think we have not talked about.

I didn't give a ton of details. All right, screw it. At some point, we changed backpack suppliers. Have I talked about that? I don't know if I did. Maybe the WAN conversations blend together. Yeah, that's fair. At some point, we changed backpack suppliers because...

It's a long time ago. There was some, you know, issues around double layers and what was done to rectify that. And long story short, it was not good enough, in my opinion. And so we moved on. And the one that we're working with now, great partner. been an outstanding partner ever since and it took a while to get things going.

But not into detail. Okay, got it. Yep. So nobody noticed if they didn't hear me talk about it because this new supplier actually came back to us and said they're a very experienced manufacturer

and they were like, hey, there's a lot of ways that we could actually save quite a bit of money on this backpack. Would you like us to do that? And we said, no, do it exactly the same way. with exactly the same materials because we do not want, other than two layers on the bottom, please, because we do not want people to like accidentally get a revised one.

It's not what they expected. It's not a V2. You're still trying to make the same backpack. Exactly. But, you know, if you made other backpacks with them or something, whatever, then maybe you could have discussions there. But yeah, you're not. Speaking of backpacks, did you ever feel that our OG backpack wasn't big enough?

Yes. Okay. Is there some? Oh my. I might like that one. Whoa. Heavy breathing. Whoa.

Okay. All right. Can't wait to see that later. Oh, hot damn. Yeah, okay. That's interesting. That is interesting. I found like the,

that old bag that I have. Oh, the murky. Yeah. Yeah. That thing can hold a lot. And the LTA-D pack can. can't hold as much.

He's still looking at it. It's intriguing to me. But then my LLT bag has the Larian stuff on it. It's so cool. Oh, wow, that's pretty sweet too, actually. Well, we know somebody who could embroider you another fake one. Oh. So don't worry at all.

Okay. You're fine. All right. Okay. Oh, whoa, that's sick. Oh, my God. Really? Oh, my God.

That's wicked. When are we properly showing them? When are we talking about that? Is that far out? This is, I think this is sample. Two handles? Don't worry about that. Okay.

That's not going to be a thing. Okay. Oh, God. Look at that part. Matthew does, Matthew experiments, and the right time to experiment with ideas is in the early sampling stage. Yeah. And that's an experiment that we've talked about. Which one do you prefer, I guess?

Well, so one of the challenges people have with the commuter bag is that when you hang it, you can't open the laptop pouch while still leaving it on a hook. The OG backpack you can. Its handle slash hook is in a position where you can still open it and do everything you would need to do while it's hanging. And for some people, that's an important feature. Yeah. Yeah, there's an OG.

No, I know. And so we were trying to address both use cases of picking it up from a more balanced central location so that it doesn't like hang all a kilter. and then also making it so you can open it. And one of his ideas was, what about second handle? And I think what we're going to do is a hanger hook at the back one, like a dedicated hanger hook.

Yeah. And also a handle. Doesn't the current one have a hanger hook? That's, it's also the handle. It's a hanger hook handle. Ah, okay. There you go. Thank you, Dan.

Yeah, okay. All right. Okay. I don't want this one anymore, though. Anyway, still, this one's, I think, on sample three. For OG backpack, I think we ended up doing like six. I don't think we'll do six for this one. I was going to say it feels pretty close. Maybe one more, maybe two more after this.

Well, that would be pretty close to six. We want to get it right. I was going to say it also makes sense that the first backpack you make would have the most revisions. And every cycle, it takes, you know, a couple months. And then we need to do mass production. Then we need to wait for shipping and marketing and packaging and like all that stuff. So realistically, this is probably like a year out. Yeah, who knows, maybe a new tariffs will come in too.

Yeah, you know, that's always, it's always helpful when you're planning out your product roadmap and your suppliers and everything. Yeah. Just like randomly. Yeah. Barriers get erected. Yeah. Build the wall. Anyway, you can follow at Made by Creator Warehouse for more launch updates. We're going to be posting launch updates, fun reels, and some behind-the-scenes content as well that you're not going to want to miss.

Oh, apparently there's a really good one that came out today. Apparently a lot of them feature Sammy. That makes, oh, wow. Wow. Wow. They're so accurate. Wow. His feet cross the wrong way.

Come on. Okay, so at Made by Creator Warehouse over on Instagram, make sure you follow. Impressive. And we're back with another new newsletter for you. This time we're kicking off a new series called Meet the Makers, where we interview one of the creator warehouse creators and do a deeper dive into who they are and what they're working on and what they've got coming down the pipe. You might even get a few sneak peek at what's coming next.

Battery Bank, hint, hint. And you'll have to read the newsletter to find out what they're working on. So check it out at elmg.g.g.g. slash newsletter. There it is. Hey, it's Nate Martin. who's working on a battery bank. I love that picture of Riley. All right.

What do we want to? Oh, right, right, right. So why are we talking about all the products available at Creator Warehouse? Because we believe that if you're going to throw money at your screen during a stream, that you should get something great in return, like these great products. But that doesn't mean we don't also want you to be able to, you know, send in chats. We just don't want you to do super chats or like Twitch bits or whatever. We want you to use checkout messages.

So all you got to do is head on over to LTTStore.com, add any one of these great items to your cart. Actually, I think we have all lengths of the Type C to Type C true spec cables in stock right now as well. So now's a great time to pick up some true spec cables. Just go ahead and add anything to your cart, and you will see the checkout message interface. Just type something up. It'll go to Producer Dan once you place your order. There he is. Who will pop it up on screen like that one that's up there.

if you're just like, hi, mom, or whatever, or he'll reply to it, or he will curate it for me and Luke to respond to. And also, Dan, people, people like talking to Dan through the check-out messages as well. What do you got for us today, Mr. Dan? Oh, well, the first one here is for Luke, Luke, I met you at Pax briefly this week. How did you like it this year? I went for the first time this year, had tons of fun, despite people saying it's been lacking recently. He talked about Pax for like five minutes earlier, Dan. I did. I did. If you have anything more to say, This one came in like minutes into the show.

That's fair. That's fair. That's why it's first. Yeah, the shortish form of it was I had a great time, but I had a great time because of like the friend group I went with and the people we met while we were there. Maybe the great time was the friends we made along the way. Pretty much. The Expo itself was pretty lackluster. There was some cool stuff in the tabletop area.

Summit has become a more and more interesting part of the event. And the video game Expo Hall has been been. become a progressively less interesting part of the event. Hardware vendors are absent these days. There's no like Intel, AMD, Nvidia. None of those guys show up. Very, very few peripheral companies are there. And there just isn't really the presence of really like anyone amazing new games either.

So there's really just not a ton to go for. Was the Indy Zone still cool at least? The Indy Zone is usually what I liked going there for. this year, I don't know. I saw a lot of indie games that I saw there last year. I mean, game development do be taken a long time these days, so that makes sense. Yeah, I think the indie games I was most interested in this year were games that I had already seen. I'm trying to think of like standout indie games.

There was definitely a few that like I took their card for and I'm going to go wish list and like to see what happens with them. there was some game where you like play as a bird and you have to learn bird songs so I was like well okay I guess I'm buying that for Emma but yeah man there's there was one I'm not going to remember the name of it but there was like a crazy football game and I used to really like blitz for n64 and it but it it seemed like kind of too crazy in some ways and not crazy enough in others like they would have like rocks on the field that you could trip on, which was like a little. And like every once in a while, this like, I don't know, giant, enormous snake would bust out of the ground and like eat you.

And I was like, okay, well, that's, it feels like almost too much. Oh. Okay. And then in Blitz, after the play, you could tackle each other really hard and try to, like, injure the other team by just like spamming tackle. And like the play would end. And then you just see like all the players dive because both, both people, playing the game, we're just spamming tackle.

Yeah. And, you know, it's just supposed to be kind of fun. In this one, you like square up and punch each other. And it's just, it doesn't feel like, it feels like kind of out of place. Like, no, it's a football game. We should be tackling each other.

You know what I'm saying? Right. We do violence this way. Not that way. To be honest, yeah, kind of. That way is not okay. So it feels like a football tape to tape, but taken too far in certain ways

and not far enough in others. We'll see, but it's, you know, it's indie game at PACs, so I'm probably still working on it. All right, I'm going to jump in with one quick thing before the next checkout message. Narnal O2 says, did you see that buddy backups is coming to unraid?

I actually did know that. I didn't know you knew that, which is why I didn't mention it. But buddy backups, like hexOS buddy backups is coming as a, I don't know what the, I have no idea what the pricing model will be for it. But it's coming as a feature to third-party NASOSs.

Cool. Including UnRID. That's all. So you could buddy backup from your hexOS to your buddies not hexOS setup. That's cool too because then you don't have to, not everyone has to software change. Yeah. That's pretty sick. Pretty based. I like that a lot, actually. Yeah. Because that was going to be a bit of a problem. Yeah. Like if you're doing it for your family, maybe no one else in your family has a setup yet. So you just hexOS all of them and then it's easy. but if you're trying to do it with buddies that might already be into HomeLab, they might already have a setup that they like...

I hope I'm not talking out of turn here, but one of the platforms that will be supported is Trunus. Yeah. So literally you will be able to install buddy backup as like a feature without the full XOS experience. And in my humble opinion, this is like the smartest move

that the Eshtech team has made so far. far because buddy backup is absolutely something that you can just do already. You can set up schedules and you can set up automated jobs and you can set up whatever like port forwarding or whatever tunneling encrypted tunneling that you want to set up. You can set up your data encryption. You can set up all of this stuff. You can make your own buddy backup. But or you could just press this one button. And so it's going to be it's going to be, it's going to be people's first exposure to like the hexOS magic which is yeah you could totally just do this yourself but what if it was easy there's people in full plan chat asking will you still need the license requirement

uh i don't know how they're planning to do licensing for that um i could foresee the possibility that it would be a paid thing i i don't know exactly how they're going to handle that like at the end of the day i'm i am an investor and i am an advisor and there are certain things that I did make conditions of my investment, like that I needed buddy backup built. I wanted just there to be an easy way to do this for just like any random, you know, travel creator. They should not have to buy some proprietary box that has a lockdown hardware software ecosystem.

And they should not have to, on the other end of the spectrum, jump through a bunch of hoops with some like arcane, like it's meant to be administrative. by someone with a degree in administering this thing. There had to be somewhere in between, and that's what I wanted Hexos to be. But beyond, like, you know, the stuff I laid out in the beginning, I can't just, like, tell them how to run their business every day. It doesn't work like that.

So it's up to them what kind of model they want to have. Okay. I think Dan had one more. Any updates on the Auto Linux switchover program, and it's actually viable. Is it actually viable? I was not ours. Yeah.

Did I say we were making one? No. Oh. We talked about that there's a community project. Oh, I haven't looked at it again since then. No, me neither. So I would go to the person who makes it. Sorry about that.

Yeah. We'll just go through one more quick one here. Hello, Wanners. Any changes have been made from the old flannel design to the new one? Good question. Oh, that's a terrific question for the creator warehouse team. I do believe we made some adjustments to the fit. Yeah, it is work hours.

Yeah, if you want to ping them, I would ping. Yeah, I would ping Bridget. Probably Bridget. also another good bit of feedback in float playing chat was on hey can you guys add country of origin to the website pages because we do have it as mandated by the law on all of our garments but I don't think we have it on the pages I don't know if there's a reason that they do or don't put that but they had noted that they'd had some import issues around some stuff that was made in China I do know that we have significantly decreased our dependence on

China. These are made in Cambodia, for instance. These underwear are still made in China. I was actually, you guys might have noticed me poking around at some of these things because other than that, you know, we are trying to, you know, mitigate global trade barriers as much as we possibly can. We're mostly just about making sure that we're building the best product that we can for the best price for our customers. So I wasn't actually sure where any of these were sourced from. So I was just checking them. What are these? We never actually opened to these.

These are underwear. Oh, these are more underwear. Oh, okay, so this is just the packaging for the underwear now. Cool. The flannel is a different fabric, heavier weight, and slightly bigger fit to compensate for that, but the same details. Cool. It is warm.

Yeah, I do be warm, even with it open. I am cooking. It is a lit studio here, not a breezy autumn day outside. Yeah. You can take it off of you. Yeah, I might at least unbuttoned it. Okay. But the deal is that you have to wear these over top of your pants for the rest of the show.

No, I mean, we can't see the bottom of you anyway. I could turn it on the camera. Is it still, it's not still down there. You don't still have feet cap. No, I put them away. Okay. I was like, there's no way. Secretly, he's just had this whole time.

Pays for the building. Oh, God. Okay. Hey, do we want to jump into? another topic here? Yeah, the IKEA Skyroom crossover. You never knew that you needed. I did not care about this.

Is here. At all. Didn't even bother reading the article. I literally just left this in the dock because I figured this would tickle you. Lead us on, Luke. What are we looking at here? So it seems like, here, let's just, you know what, let's just check out the trailer on YouTube. Okay.

Can you, can we do that? I'm on you. Dan. Tamriel yearns for a new type. It's definitely just us. Mute. Okay. There we go.

Okay. So we're jumping partway in. Okay. But yeah, Calax Storage Born, a free creation for the Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim. So creation is like official mod.

Yeah. It's just so timely. Yeah, extremely timely. The game definitely just came out. Is it muted? It's muted. It's muted. It's

You loot And send clatterback To the fires Of oblivion Storageborn Your inventory evolves And here Ah, you're finally awake

Jubilation It like froze or something Sure Wow I'm making the same face You know what You know what? Time for another run of Skyrim

You know what? I like it I'm tired of brands taking themselves too seriously. I genuinely think it's fun. I'm surprised they didn't do it with like cyberpunk or something. Even cyberpunk's really old at this point. Maybe there just isn't really a lot of options. Sure.

Bothersgate? Nope. I could have seen it as a companion in Balthersgate. No, I like it. It's a little bit newer. I like it. I think it's just, it's just non- insensical and irrelevant enough to be very relevant and totally make sense to me.

Yeah. I like that it seems like they actually kind of tried. Yeah. Which is just perfect. They put low budget effort into it. Yeah. Which is the right amount of effort and the right kind of effort to put into something like this. Oh yeah.

How many views does that trailer have on YouTube? Like a quarter million. Okay. So some people cared. It's pretty good. Enough to start another SkyRae. run? Probably not. Enough to...

194,000. Enough to buy a copy of Skyrim if you don't happen to already own it. Probably not. But enough to tickle people who like Skyrim and are aware of IKEA? Yes. Sorry, is it free or paid? Free? It's free.

It's got to be free. Right? There's no link. Do you have to compile the mod yourself? It's free, says fake giraffe. Oh my God. There's a bunch of good comments. You know, for people that played Skyrim.

The, like, top comment is a new shelf holds the beacon, which is just great. It's not even April Fool's Day. Ikea collab before all this scroll six is crazy. All right, Todd, you can delay test six for another 20 years. Oh, man. Apparently, to like summon it or something, he yells IKEA. Is it not like a companion? So like Fus Roda, it's IKEA, which,

which is just so good. I don't know. It's very inspired. Whoever approved this, good job. Yeah, I feel like there's one of two ways that this, um,

came to be. One of them was like careful deliberation and, um, like deep thought about brand synergies and gaming community reaction and, and all of that. And then the other way was just like an email rolled in on a Friday afternoon. and it was Sure, whatever, I'm going home. Yeah.

And then it just actually happened. Which one do you think it was? I'm kind of leaning on the ladder, to be honest. From Bethesda standpoint, I lean ladder. From IKEA standpoint, I lean former. Hmm. I think IKEA probably thought carefully about this. I mean, they're a, they're a slick company.

Don't let their sort of friendly brand persona fool you. Or their unfriendly origins. They are a machine. Ikea. There's some discussion questions. Okay, I closed it. I don't know if they matter. They don't.

Okay, sounds good. Oh, you know what? Actually, this is a good one. What's an underrated piece of furniture that people moving out on their own for the first time might not realize they need? Oh, don't forget to get your bedroom chair. Stop.

this guy I already have one it's fine I didn't think a coffee table matters it mattered as much as it turned out it did we we got a we got a we got a we didn't end up paying for one for a while but it was very important to obtain at least a free one because it turns out that if anybody comes to your house they do in fact need somewhere to serve the dixie cups of water that you give them um and a coffee table is as good a place to put that any. Can't do that if you don't have a couch, though. This is true, but I think the question was things that people might not realize they need. I think even Lucas had a couch when we went to, you watched his coffee table. Yeah. And he just like did not own anything, but he did have a couch. I think he said his mother made him buy it because she came to visit and was like,

oh my God, son, you need basic furniture? Yeah. Yeah. Can you think of anything? True minimalist. I don't know. I think you can do without... Yeah, some people buy things

that make them look and feel more minimal. He just didn't. He just skipped that step. Yeah. Just being minimal from the beginning. Just don't buy it in the first place. Problems solved. Don't get rid of things.

Just never own them. Yeah. I think a lot of stuff can be done without. I didn't really have... He's the true you'll own nothing in people. happy. Except he's like, yeah. That sounds great.

I don't know. Yeah, I think a lot can be done without, I feel like, for, you know, for a lot of our audience, I suspect a very high percentage of our audience is people interested in WAMN. The WAMN do like a frame for the bed. that took me a while to figure out instead of just having a mattress on the floor I really like it's on the floor headboard headboard

loved mattress on the floor I don't care if it's mattress on the floor can have a mattress on the floor as long as you get a headboard sure that's all that matters yep are you offering up the women's perspective on this down from what I've learned yeah both surprisingly important

yeah I mean that's something that is honestly I'm I'm experiencing secondhand embarrassment that either of you did not know that. With that said, with that said, in fairness to me, I was still living at home at this time. Futon, not impressive. No. Not comfortable. No.

Yeah. Almost everything, like, almost everything can be worked around. If you don't have it, it can be okay. But try to just make it look like you tried to make it work. it is. Yeah. A plant is honestly probably more important than a lot of different things of furniture. You know what?

Let's go with plant. Yeah. Even a fake plant is better than... Add a little bit of color. Put something on the wall. Yes. Lighting. Yep.

Have a table lamp. Indirect lights. Yes. If you have a room that has one single... They ask for one thing, you guys. Indirect lights, plant or two. You can't buy one thing at IKEA. That's true.

That's illegal. Wait, no, no, I did it once. I've done it. I think I went in for one thing and I came out with one thing once. I went there for lunch once. Oh, once? Oh, I used to do that all the time. No, no, like just.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's too far from me to like. Oh, no, I lived in, I worked in Richmond. Oh, nice. So we would literally go to IKEA for lunch and yeah. Man, this, this IKEA, Skyroom collab is really good marketing. We're talking about IKEA again.

I know, they won. They won. The corporate. Bastards did it again. What happened? We're talking about IKEA. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Neat boss, man.

I wasn't, to be honest. Dude, I was talking about shopping anywhere. The Coquitlam location used to have the best cinnamon buns. They suck now. Dude, the way... It's unfortunate. You don't, do you have any idea how fat I would be if donuts didn't suck now? Like, I'm the kind of person who...

You do delete an entire box of Krispy creams. It's crazy. The speed is the craziest part. It's nuts. You'll be out with it. them he'll buy he'll buy an entire box of crispy creams and you're like oh interesting i guess we're having crispy creams no that is not the case linas is having crispy creams and you won't even notice you'll you'll like you'll see him put one hand in the box and come out with one donut and then

you'll look away and then look back and all the donuts are gone by the time you get back to the car insane and like yeah i eat really slow and he eats i think like slightly above average fast but not like crazy fast but just inhale specifically crispy cream donuts. It's so light. It's crazy. I've genuinely wondered before. Like, do you compress them or something?

I don't know how you do it so fast. I eat them like cotton candy. But like... So, no, like, so you take a bite or like an apple where your bite is not, you don't close your teeth. You just grab it. And then you kind of bird it.

So he'll do a whole box of them in like, I don't know. I bet you you could speed run that at this point. And yeah, so the fact that Tim Horton's donuts are inedible now. Just garbage. And IKEA cinnamon buns are also equally inedible now compared to when I was a teenager is a huge part of how I have maintained a somewhat reasonable physique going into my 40s. Because if Tim Horton's donuts were good, like if they still had a quality baked fresh in-store blueberry fritter, Dude, I used to buy a half dozen of those and eat them in a day.

Have you noticed... I was a teenager, mind you. And I was like, I was teaching swimming lessons and stuff. Like I was like swimming a lot and everything and, you know, whatever. But yeah. You're months into creatine now. Have you noticed body change? No.

Not really. The biggest difference for me has been cognitive. Yeah. I function... I more meant like, because some people, I know, I know, women who, as far as I can tell, based on studies, benefit from it more than men do. But I know a lot of women are concerned about how the extra water weight would be carried. But a lot of times after you've been on it for a while, it kind of like normalizes out anyways.

But I was wondering if you had noticed any... I have been less consistent about going to the gym because I've just been really busy with work lately. I noticed there was a photo of you on like the Reddit or something where you pulled your shirt up and you look meteor. in like a good way. Oh, no, no, yeah, I'm definitely, I'm a little, I'm a little thicker, but I was already working on that before I started the creatine. Right, so it's hard to. And I'm not noticing like a huge difference in recovery time, honestly.

For me, it's only supposed to be about 10%. Okay. It's not even necessarily recovery time. It's supposed to be about 10% of like. Like endurance too, right? Yeah. You can do a little bit more. I don't notice a big difference in endurance.

For me, the big one is cognitive and then how well I function if I've had very little sleep. Yeah, those are the most important parts. to me. I'm too warm. This has to come off. Yeah. I'm still kind of there. Those are the most important parts to me, but people different people respond to it in different ways. So it's comes down to that. Have you been able to convince Yvonne? Have you talked to her about it? Yeah. Yeah, she's, she just started like a week ago. Nice. Let's go. Master of Nunn says we'll need to revisit the apple thing. Like just you put your teeth into the apple and then you like rip off a big chunk. If you can't do that, it's a sucky apple. I also don't normally eat apples like one

chunk at a time even necessarily. Bite, bite, bite, bite, and then chewing it for a little bit. That's crazy. I don't think that's not crazy. I mean, look, this is the man who didn't finish one hamburger in the time that I finished two, two days after I got my braces on. So like, yeah, sure, whatever method you have is super inefficient. So I don't care. Oh man, that's funny. Slice your apples like a gentleman. Dude, man, it must be nice to have time in your life. I mean, I talked about this a couple weeks ago.

Like when the family was out of town for nine days, and I would like sleep in, do chores, work out, cook for myself, clean the house, and be like, man, people must have so much time. I've filled it. I've filled it. I've filled my time. Yeah, but just like... I do also know a lot of people that just have infinite time though. It's crazy.

It is a thing. Like I just, I never like... If I removed like, if I removed extra hours from this job and I removed one other thing that I'm doing, yeah, I would just have like infinite time. I just, yeah. Yachtster reasons not to own a company. Yeah, and kids, I guess.

But, like, I just, man, I, yeah, to be clear, I wouldn't undo either of those things. It's just, I, when it comes down to, like, I would sometimes marvel at, like, other content creators even. Be like, so on top of, like, you know, doing the same thing that I do for a career, you, like, have the side hustle and you have all these hobbies and it's just, right, no kids. Got it. All right. The craziest thing I ever did was start a company with an eight-month-old baby. Yeah, that was nuts. Yeah.

Babies are not good partners. They can't do any math. Their communication skills are terrible. Their math is terrible. Never start a company with an eight-month-old baby. No fiscal responsibility. Such a joke. I think we should probably do a couple sponsor spots.

The show is brought you by... He's not here. Uh. Do we do another topic? Dan? Let's slam through this. Nintendo announces new customer, customer appreciation sale made possible by tariff-related refunds,

which is, I think, exactly what Linus expected when we were talking about this in the past. Nintendo of America is calling it one of its largest promotions ever, with 30% off dozens of Switch digital games, digital, uh, and, and bundles plus discounts on select physical.

games. Okay, cool. DLC accessories, Amibo and Apparel running September 12th to 26 in the U.S. across the e-shop, Nintendo store, and participating retailers. The company's statement says the sale is made possible in part by tariff-related refunds, and that while Nintendo absorbed most tariff-related costs, the refunds helped make promotions like this one possible. Nintendo reported a $300 million dollar tariff refund in its earnings after the tariffs were ruled illegal, and raised U.S. hardware prices, citing those, citing those same tariffs in 2025. Customers sued earlier this year arguing refund money should go back to the buyers, and Nintendo asked the court to dismiss the case, saying players received exactly what they bargained and paid for.

I think this is pretty cool, and I'm going to give myself 0.000-0.01% of the credit for this idea. Credit for the idea. Yeah, I talked about this on Mines Show. No, I know you did. Yeah. I don't know if you get credit for this. I think Nintendo saw the WAN Show and came up with their own idea to do this. I think that's possible.

I think 0.001% of employees at Nintendo, one employee at Nintendo watched Wanshow and probably didn't talk to anybody there who made this decision. There is probably at least one employee at Nintendo that has seen the WAN show at some point. Yeah. So I'm giving myself just a tiny fraction of the credit. I think it's actually a really cool way for them to generate some sales, create a little bit of buzz around the brand. I definitely understand, I think we talked about this before. I definitely understand people being like, oh, but like I should get some of this.

It shouldn't be a discount on new products. But how do you do it? Like, again, I bought my switch from mom and pop Willow video down the road. How am I going to get my money back for this? I mean... So like the only thing they could realistically do, I think, would end up being refunds if you bought it, like, directly from the Nintendo shop. Counterpoint, they do product recalls. You know, recall notice infrastructure exists.

It's not the same thing. I'm just, I'm playing devil's advocate right now. Yeah, it's not the same thing. Look, I came out in the early days of conversations around who should be getting tariff refunds. Like really early on, you and I were talking about. about this before anybody else was like anyone was suing for for their part of tariff refunds or whatever and basically we talked through the couple scenarios like whose money is it and from a business standpoint the whole tariff

situation carried enormous costs enormous burden that we paid for that that that that that we carried you paid more you did pay more at the till and and some of that was to cover tariff costs but some of it was also to cover just the additional, or some of it was also had to be allocated to those additional costs that we bore. And so who, like, paid for it? Like, we didn't make more margin. In a lot of cases, we made way less.

So, like, who paid for it? I don't know. Everyone did. The whole thing sucked. But I think I said at the time that we have no intention of doing any kind of refund program because no. that would be a ton of work to administer, even if there was some mechanism by which we could do it. And, like, as much as, you know, costs were forwarded to some of the customers, there are other costs to dealing with all of this.

Yeah. We all had to open a freaking warehouse. You want to know what's really crazy. Yeah. A lot of these tariff refunds, there was a company going around trying to buy the rights to the tariff refunds for... Yeah. And the people backing these companies, uh-huh. Yeah.

big big big fun time cantor fitzgerald is like the main one and they have ties to Howard Lutnik's kids because Howard Lutnik used to run it and they went around and scooped up a bunch of the rights to tariff refunds for pennies on the dollar ultimately allegedly knowing what was going to happen or what might happen we we don't know that for sure that's why I said allegedly but boy are there ever a lot of coincidence as like that. Yeah. Fun time.

In the current situation ship that's going on. Very cool. With our southern friends. Sponsors? Yeah, we should do that. The show is brought to you today by MSI. Are you wanting to get even more out of your computer? Well, check out MSI's Meg B850 Tomahawk Max Wi-Fi 2 motherboard.

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should we do the LGTV spying yeah sure gamers Nexus worked with level one techs and security researchers putting retail LG OLEDs through packet captures and firmware analysis on stock TVs they found the sets scanning the local, like TV sets,

scanning the local network and identifying dozens of unrelated devices, including phones, smart watches, and thermostats. With ACR enabled, the TV sampled context across input, content across inputs to figure out exactly what was on screen. The researchers also found plain text transcripts of voice commands, which I think was the most interesting part,

along with conversations they picked up during the surprisingly long recording window afterwards. On compromised units, they went further and showed a TV recording through its microphone while appearing off in standby, then storing that audio locally while disconnected from the network and making it retrievable again once the TV was reconnected. LG told Tom's hardware, the claims in the video are not true. The company says voice data is only processed when the voice button on the remote is held down, or when a wake word like high LG is detected after the user has manually turned on farfield recognition. In standby, LG says the TV only

monitors for the wake word if that feature was enabled and audio without the wake word is processed locally and immediately deleted. LG confirms this TV scan the network for nearby devices, calling it a standard smart TV function for connectivity and content sharing, and says ACR is opt-in and isn't used for advertising without consent to a separate option. optional agreement. The statement never addresses the plain text transcripts. There's some stuff in, like, you know, in all of these back and force that are a little bit funky, something with the like, oh, without consent to a separate optional agreement,

except they would bundle those agreements with other agreements and default all, all of them. Dark patterns. Yeah, there's, like, very excessive dark patterns. There's a lot of other stuff going on here. there's obviously coverage of this from a bunch of different places but I suspect if you use YouTube that you have seen the thumbnail in the last little while because they're currently at 5 million views but the video from GN on it is is pretty intense it's very long and it's a good watch yeah we'll see where the back and forth goes but I mean just right off the hop LG's response

the like oh separate optional agreement is like Okay, yeah, sure, guys. At any time, there's like, obviously dark patterns are a thing. I almost want there to be another term for like consent overloading. Because what I believe this was in the video, but there would be situations, and I've seen this situation, even if it's not the LGTV, let's just talk about something completely separate. Because I think this was in the video, but I don't fully remember, where you'll get like, you're, you're, you know, setting up a device. or doing whatever. And it's like, oh, you need to, like, do these agreements.

But there will be, like, six in a row. Yeah. Yeah, like when you're downloading all of your apps from the Play Store. Yeah. And it used to be, it seems to be less of a thing now, but it used to be that every single one of them would be like, hey, I need all these permissions. And you're installing, like, 40 apps at once.

You just, yeah, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. You know that, like, normal human behavior is just going to be like, oh, yeah, whatever, just, like, get out of the way. I'm trying to use my new phone. Yeah. Or TV. as it were. Like maybe like, yeah, Yula fatigue, there you go.

I kind of like that. Like maybe you'll pay like a little bit of attention to the first one. But then when they start slam you with more and more and more and more and more, you just want them to go away. And there is an unfortunate assumption. And maybe we've been getting more away from that over the last few years. But there's kind of an unfortunate assumption of like, yeah, whatever. this is just like...

It's standard. Yeah. They need this thing because it's standard boilerplate crap because somebody suits somebody at some point and now they need whatever. I'm using this in the normal ways. Have contributed to me feeling like that.

Cookie disclosures are absolutely like that. Like I just, I don't even actually think about what site I'm on and whether I want them to have cookies or not, I just click whatever button's closest to my mouse because I actually don't care about that. There's browser, yeah. I want only necessary, and there's browser add-ons that you can run that will select only necessary

and just plow-p-plast-past it. But those have to be able to read everything that's on your screen all the time. And it's some browser add-on written by whoever. So, like, I don't know. I have not ran it yet. Nice. But, yeah, there's a lot of, it's an interesting video. I think people should be aware of what it could do.

like whether this is actually a problem for you or not is is with all of these things up to you. So the cookie thing or the LG thing? The whole thing. Sure. Like the I think like I think your thing of like I don't really care is like oh. For the cookies? Yeah. Like I hear you.

I'm not going to see their ad anyway. Yeah. And like I was showing you this the other day. I go to like four websites. Which sucks. I barely. touch. But I think is the average... I barely touch Google search.

I think I swear I talked about this like forever ago on Wayne Show. Yeah. Of like we're moving to an internet where it's... The narrowing internet. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And so, you know, if I'm on some, you know, I don't know, things I've been buying recently.

I bought an adapter between my home security system and home assistant. and they probably i don't know maybe they had a cookie pop up i actually don't remember and i will literally never buy anything from them again anyway because that's i already bought the thing i needed yeah but there is there is more the it is fully up to you to not care yeah i just want to put that out there um but i think there is in in kind of similar to this whole idea this the the what's going on with the LG TVs and everything else is that there is more that can be done with these things. Oh yeah. They can sell it. They can and it can be used for other stuff like there was I don't

know in what context this clip was from but if I remember correctly from the Gn video there's an interview with one of the guys on the LG advertising side. Yeah. That's talking about like you know the the user's going to be on their couch very likely using their phone at the same time that they're watching TV and we can like hit them at the same time in both locations with the same thing to like push through and it's just gross there was there's a lot of it that was just icky um but i mean this isn't it's not surprising which is depressing in its own right i mean this is why we've been talking for a really long time about not necessarily wanting smart TVs and we've been talking about like how have tvs

been able to stay cheap it's like yeah well that's in our discussion question here is smart TV makers increasingly make their real money on ads and data after the sale as opposed to the hardware up front LG's own ad division brags about owning the glass. Which is insane. That's so crazy. They say it so many times We own the glass at one point in time they mentioned like they effectively owning the living room because they own the glass and they own the like mic and the data associated with it and it's just like geez man. I mean I guess for me me, um, this is one of those things where I'm just like, it's like this bombshell revelation to people more broadly. And I'm like, it does need to be brought to the people. Yeah, it should. Yeah. But I just, for me, I'm looking at it going like, yeah, now I'm going to pick up the other screen and microphone and camera that I have with me all the time. And I'm going to type,

angrily about it. And it's like, uh, I think, I think part of that might be like the, the devil you know kind of situation. I guess.

And I think part of that might also be, I don't know, I would wager the average consumer is more conscious and knowing that that's going on with your phone than they are with the TV. You think so? And I wouldn't be surprised if someone at some point in time has left their phone

in another room to have a conversation and they had their conversation in their living room with their TV sitting right there. I like... Framework needs to do a TV. Yeah. A TV you actually own...

Can you imagine a TV that you could just upgrade the panel? Or you could just upgrade the processing? Yeah, that would be sick. Just get like a faster chip with like better Wi-Fi or whatever. You know. New shield. Yeah. Whatever the heck. It'd be so cool. To be clear,

I have absolutely, Framework does not give me inside knowledge into their product roadmap. I do not have privileged access to information. I have no idea if they're working on a TV. There's so few people in chat. I've had casual conversations with Nerov, but in terms of, excuse me, sorry,

in terms of like, here's what we're working on or like, here's what our next big bet's going to be, I actually don't know. I'm allowed to tell them ideas, but I just want to lay out what that, like, relationship is. So you guys understand, I'm not giving you a hint. I actually don't know.

You know, a super random hardware vendor that was at Pax? Framework. Framework. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. There really wasn't very many, but Frayb wasn't there out there? No. Okay. Well, not that I saw.

Okay. But I was only there Sunday Monday. A lot of the exhibitors leave early. I mean, he does have a job. That makes sense? Yeah. Yeah. What was I going to say?

Yeah, I saw a bunch of people in the comments saying, like, I would buy a framework TV if it came out. One of the big problems. it would be really expensive. It would be very expensive. Like, literally, might cost double. Like, when, what's their nuts? Was it, which one did Best Buy Buy? Was that Vizio?

I can't remember. We talked about it in our recent video on this very subject where we were looking at, we couldn't decrypt any of it, but we were looking at the sheer volume of data that this TV was sending, just like sitting at the home screen.

And we were like, yeah, so we brought up the, the graph. Actually, the one that Adam and I did on the one remaining dumb TV from SEPter as well, we brought up the numbers from that acquisition because it was fascinating that the majority, not just like some of it, but like the majority of their profit was coming from advertising after the fact, not from people buying the hardware. And so maybe not double, but it wouldn't surprise me if a framework TV, like someone who's not profiting at all after the fact, cost 20, 30, 40, 50% more.

It wouldn't, it wouldn't surprise me. I wouldn't even be surprised with his double. Yeah. Because they don't own glass manufacturing. And they're going to be starting off at much lower volume. And then the people that are going to walk into the store and see one TV that is at one price that has basically the same features as another TV that is 50% more. What if they like branded it privacy TV or something like that? Like, I don't, how do you communicate this?

And also, how do you get around that? people with their just surveillance fatigue are going to be like well whatever i'm already carrying this anyway what i was just going to say is i think uh i think i'd rather have i'd rather have a brighter nits on my screen is very obviously something that a bunch of people do genuinely care about and i also think only until it inconveniences them for one nanosecond yes and obviously that's not everyone there's some people that will deal with incredible inconveniences for their for their own privacy. Um, but I, I also think that there is a lot that won't. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Uh, moving on. It's, it's like a two hour long video. So if you want to be like properly, uh, up to date on it,

maybe you can't watch the video. Um, speaking of being up to date on things, bad transition. The Trump phone just went up by $250. The T1 now costs $749 U.S. up from $499. Of course it would be U.S. dollars. What else would it be? And the verge spotted the change as a quiet website update with no announcement

and no hardware changes. The phone is still the same Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 device that I fix. It's tear down, found to be a lightly re-skinned HTCU24. pro despite originally being marketed as made in the USA. Trump Mobile executives had called the 499 tag introductory and previously suggested that the final price could approach $1,000 and the site has now scrubbed the promotional pricing language.

The timing lines up with memory shortage price hikes hitting the whole industry, but $749 puts the T1 up against phones like the iPhone 17E and Samsung Galaxy's S26FE, which both start at 699 with far newer hardware. Yep. Well, it was kind of dumb before, and now it's just really dumb. Our discussion question is, has branding alone ever let a tech products charge 50% more for identical hardware and get away with it? Can you think of a situation where a light re-skin like this?

Yeah, we turned it gold. We took that phone. We made it gold. got away with a 50% upcharge. Branding alone. Yeah. Because with like the Apple series or whatever, series zero, whatever they called the first one, like they retconned what the name was.

So the first generation Apple Watch. There was the gold one that was like way more for being turned gold. But it had actual gold on it, not much. But it, but that's not like rebadging someone else's hardware. That's so true. Your own hardware. I'm trying to think. rebadging someone else's hardware.

On the subject of turning things gold, Voodoo PC used to have a gold-plated version of their luxury gaming PCs. Oh, are there no pictures? No pictures. Okay, well, we're going to have to try to find a... We're going to have to try and find a picture of this thing. But that too did have actual craftsmanship and was gold-plated.

I wanted one so bad Like not like in the in the in the I will save up for this and own it someday sense But just in the That's whoa cool Wow how cool is that silent X fans man Got the custom water cooling And gold plated case

Um LXFN 724 says that looks like ass LMAO Okay the aesthetics were different The style was different back then, okay? This was 2008, brother. It was a different time. Relax.

I mean, it's a fair point. It's a fair point. Yeah, but relax. It was a different time, okay? You want everything to be boring again? I do not have gold braces on my teeth. I have white braces on my teeth that are extremely, they sit extremely proud off the tooth and they're made of like,

like slightly textured ceramic. So it's like having a bunch of tiny serrated blades all over the insides of my lips. So I use this stuff called Enduro wax. to go over top of it to keep it from shredding up the insides of my lips. And it stains with curry and I love butter chicken. Got ahead to that Ustad G76 on 100th Street and King George Boulevard in Surrey. Have you been to the one in Langley? No, I don't go to their other locations after I tried the one on Scott Road and it sucked.

They don't, they're the most unconventional chain restaurant that I've ever encountered. It's potentially the worst name in history. aesthetic style makes no sense. They just put like artificial turf on the wall. And the Surrey location on King George always has animated Mr. Bean on the TV for reasons that I couldn't possibly begin to understand. They use like Christmas lights in their decor. They have all these pictures of the founder and like the gaudiest of outfits pinned up like everywhere. And more weird than any of that, they don't use the same recipes at their different locations.

So I got like my go-to, which is get that vegetable corma, get that butter chicken, get some rice, get some garlic gnawn. I got it at a different location. I was like, this tastes like, but why did I ever come here? So I only go to the, I only go to the 100th in King George address now. There was one night, Emma and I were working on stuff, didn't have time to make dinner. Well, you know, you can always make time, but didn't feel like a cooking dinner night. Yeah. So I was like, you know what?

Linus has talked about this Ustad G place. You went to the wrong one. We didn't go to that one. Just utterly flavorless. Yeah, I don't get it. So if Mr. If Mr. G ever wants to like chat,

I'd be happy to talk with him about like what chain, what chain restaurant means? Why does your name sound like a password? Why is there a 76 at the end? I mean, I can guess, but that's what people do with passwords. Why do you do that with your restaurant name? I wouldn't even get into that.

wouldn't even get into that. I just, I need, I need, look, McDonald's did not become a multi-bazillion dollar empire by making good food. They became a multi-bazillion dollar empire by making consistent food. Yeah, Yachter in full point chat said, flavorless Indian. Question, question, question, question. So wrong. I know. Yeah. I know. I was like, like, offended. You should have been offended because, it was, it was, it was probably, It was probably because you got profiled. It was probably the worst Indian food I've ever had. Yeah.

So you have to specifically go to that location. Yeah. Yeah. I like remembered afterwards. I think we had like kind of finished up and I was just kind of like grumbling about it. And then I was like, oh, no, I think he actually like mentioned that he had tried another one and it sucked. And he had to go to like that specific one. But then I remember sitting there being like, but it's a change.

Like what? What? No. No. Yeah, definitely no. Yeah. Oh, I was going to say something else, but I lost it. Derosol asks, what happened to Ustad G1 through 75?

Oh, man. Same with all the fallouts. Yeah, don't forget all the ABC, D, E, and F, Eustads. Like, a long line of Eustads. All as inconsistent as the last. a fun, a fun one. Yvonne had a thought, she was like, oh yeah, one of the best things about

going for Indian food is that you take the leftover curry as takeout, and then you just take it home and you put more chicken in it, and then you just like make it again. And... You never done that? I was like, what if we just... I'm actually surprised. The restaurants I go to put enough chicken

in it. Oh, or they don't give you enough sauce. Yeah. It's never been a problem. If they don't give me enough chicken, I just Don't go back. Okay, that's fair. Anyway, at Ustadji, Yvonne was like, oh, what if we just, like, skipped all of that? And we just got, like, curry sauce at home.

Like, can we just ask them to just, like, whip us up a batch of curry sauce? And on the way out, I asked last time I was there. And they were like, oh, yeah, sure, we do it all the time. So they'll just, like, make you, like, a thing of curry sauce. And then you just, like, go home and, like, cook chicken in it. I didn't even ever, I've never considered doing that. That's an awesome idea. This is the kind of thing.

Oh, my God. This is the kind of thing that the whole women, so that is my wife and my sister-in-law, it's their last name, grow up. I know, you don't have to say it that way. It's something that it's the way that they think that nobody else would think to think. My wife would ask, hey, can you just like make the sauce and I'll cook chicken in it at home? Other people don't think of that, okay? my sister-in-law would order a vegetable sub at Subway.

I know this one. And she would bring a tin of tuna to work. And she would put the tuna on herself. Tuna sub. Like it's just, I wouldn't think of that. I wouldn't think, I would think to bring a lunch. I would think to go out for lunch. I wouldn't think to bring part of my go-out for lunch.

I just wouldn't think of that. I wouldn't think of it. I've definitely done the extra sauce thing before. Yeah. You can make that go pretty far, actually. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's great. Moro-Morri-ask, is that actually cheaper? It definitely was back then. The vegetable sub was really cheap. Because, like, I don't know, whatever. Subway pricing has completely changed, though.

Dude, Subway made so much sense when it was cheap. $5 foot long. Or, like, man, I don't remember what the deal was. I've remembered for years, but I would somehow walk out of the one across from the Maple Ridge Leisure Center with, like, three, for some obscenely small amount of money on the weekend days that I worked and it was like everything I needed to eat that day in spite of the fact that I was like in the pool all day. Even like the $5 foot long is like

a decent, not huge but decent meal for $2.50 like actually pretty darn good. And then just yeah, not anymore. Dude, every time I go into Subway, I'm just like, yeah, if I was going to spend this kind of money I'd like get a real meal. Like I can't do this. that said, real meal has gotten to the point where we were shooting an Amed

Ultimate Tech upgrade yesterday and I went for dinner like in Vancouver or proper for the first time in a while and then increased rents really do be reflected in the menu pricing like we went for Japanese food and it was five heads I want to say and we were like way clear of $100 and nobody even like got anything fancy to drink or whatever so we're we're like at like 30 bucks ahead now which is insane for just like freaking terriaki don boxes. For, yeah, okay. Like, people didn't even get fancy rolls or anything.

I was going to say, if you guys were getting rolls, not even necessarily that fancy, but if you guys were getting rolls, I'm surprised it wasn't. No, I'm talking, this was lunch, dude. This was lunch boxes. Yeah, yeah. Insane.

There's a reason why I like the, you know, my favorite Indian place locally is closed, which makes me sad, but we've still got, we've still got Fah, which is good. Shout out Langley Vietnamese cuisine, brother. Just always full. There is always a million people there.

It's almost like... And no parking. Well, you just park across the street. Yeah, don't worry about it. Just look real casual while you walk. I got ticketed for that once. Really? They saw me park at the mall and walk across the street

and they came and ticketed me like right away. Whoa. Yeah, I think it was in a Coquitlam Center I want to say. Oh, okay, yeah. I thought you were talking about like that one. No, no, no, no. Yeah, they just like, they were like, no. I'm just like, oh my God.

Next time you're just going to walk in the mall and then leave right away. I get it, but outside of like boxing day, like maybe back to school rush, you're parking lot's empty. Yeah. Like, this is just make work. This is, this is, you could just be, you could just be cool, you know? Like we had, we had our, um, at the last whale land, uh, one of our neighbors who, who occupies one of the units in our building. Just like popped in to like check out the whale land. And I was like chatting with them. I was like, hey, the management like let you guys know that

you get free gym passes and stuff, right? And he was like, yeah, yeah, that's super chill. And like, we had like a big delivery one day or like we had a big thing or something. We needed a bunch of space in the parking lot and your guys were super chill about it. And like, we're, you're using our spots right now and that's chill. And I was like, wow, great. Double high five. This is cooperation. actually the fact that not getting along actually does seem to take mutually make things reasonable effort yeah i feel like there are people out there who seem to actually make a point of not getting along with others and it drives me to what end it's just this guy this guy um was like being like an absolute like

knobbing in traffic a little while ago i was on my i was on my motorbike so first things first he like does a wheelie through an intersection or whatever and I was like okay whatever he's in front of me I don't really care and then I um I got on motorcycles the standard way to pull up to a red light is you pull up beside each other beside each other and then the one on the left goes and then the one on the right goes and you travel kind of offset like that and so I went to like I went to pull up next to him and he like swerves

as I'm as I'm like about to him like okay and then as we're taking off he like break checks me super hard and then like takes off I'm like bud you're on a hog I'm on a street bike was it a Harley?

Yeah this is not about how this is not about who's faster like that question is already answered thing where they have to go first and you have to like give them space and stuff specifically people with Harleys it's like the lamest thing I've ever heard of but I didn't care I wasn't

gonna go first. I was gonna pull up next to him and nod high. Yeah. You know, like motorcycle riders generally do. I don't know if you've noticed this being a thing. If you're not a rider, you might not have noticed it, but but bikers will tend to like just kind of put an arm down or put an arm up or just like, you know, give a little, you know, gesture to each other as they're passing on the road because it's like we have to have each other's backs a little bit because the cages can just plow us over at a moment's notice and then we die and then what their insurance premium goes up. right? And I was so taken aback

because in general, riders are really friendly towards each other and the guy was just such a tool. I just couldn't believe it. And after just like ripping off of that starting line, he didn't even like go fast. It's not a hurry to go anywhere.

Oh yeah. He just wants you to be back. What a weirdo? Yeah. Yeah, they get like super emotional if you pass them too. It really hits them in the feels. he's going faster than me

and then they probably go home and tell their partners about it I think South Park had a word for this really really big really big part of their day yeah really serious probably the biggest thing that happened to them that day really I imagine having so little going on what else we got here oh this is pretty brutal a huge list of Steam achievements surfaced for games that should be private but happen to be pulled and accessible from the Steam API, which means maybe more than you might think. On September 9th, achievement lists leaked onto tracking sites like SteamDB and Xophase,

which I've never heard of, but for unreleased games. According to Xophase owner Mike Bendel, the leaks did not occur because of any hack or data breach, but rather another, just another valve screw up. According to Bendel, the achievements should have been private but were exposed through Steam's API and got pulled onto the tracking sites automatically. It's a pretty significant list with details about certain games like Persona 6, Kingdom Hearts 4, Fable, Gears War, E-Day, etc., leaking some pretty bad spoilers due to achievement names and their descriptions.

So naturally, we're not going to go into them. But mostly, honestly, letting you know so that you can try to avoid it yourself. Because like we said, they got pulled onto these sites automatically, and people have been talking about this. So, yeah, just try to dodge it. I'm not even going to, there's a, there's a list of like the games whose achievements were linked and also the kind of stuff. I'm specifically going to avoid going into those right now because I think the, the primary thing to do here is honestly not engage so that you can, you can keep yourself appropriately unspoiled. Speaking of video games, Nintendo direct September 2026, I alluded to this earlier in the show,

but we've got the legend of Zelda 40th 40th anniversary celebration I'm sure that's a typo it's four it's the four year anniversary continue continue please the Nintendo direct occurred this week and gamers will be eating pretty good

which is good because the switch two has felt a little dry for a while now so Metroid ravenous a sequel to Metroid Dread that is released on January 28th for the Switch 2. Everyone's favorite hoovering pink blob Kirby is returning in a new 3D game called Kirby in the World Beyond. A persona 6 reveal

with no release window, but a persona 4 revival launching on the Switch 2 on May 20th of next year was another announcement. The Witcher 3 remastered confirmed to launch on September 29th with a new paid expansion Song of the Past arriving next year, which is crazy.

I heard Jake told me that there was a panel for this at Pax, but I was too to do another thing as to be able to attend it. But three release date. When did Witcher 3 come out? So Witcher 3 came out in 2015. So this game is getting a paid expansion 11 years, maybe 12 years later, because it might come out. Does it say when it's coming out? Yeah, arriving next year. So 12 years later, it's getting a paid expansion. And honestly, that's really cool, in my opinion. Final Fantasy 7, the final part of the remake trilogy, launching on April 8th, as well as a ton of other announcements. Nintendo also ran a dedicated 30-minute Zelda 40th anniversary presentation separately.

The big announcement was showcasing the Okerine of Time remake, releasing on November 5th of this current year, 2026. Fans very quickly roasted the art style, claiming it looks like a game made an Unreal engine, claiming that the faces look wet and the characters look like porcelain dolls. That being said, the environment has been getting

almost universal praise for being beautiful. The game is available for $60, which is slightly cheaper than some other versions. Oh, this doesn't go into it. The whole art style of the characters ended up being very deliberate. I remember online a bunch of people, this is not in the notes,

but a bunch of people were talking about how they didn't like the art style of the characters. I saw some comments saying like, hey, was this made with AI or whatever else? So the Okarina of Time. You make art style characters. Let's see.

I think it's like specifically inspired. Yeah, it's inspired by Shigeru Miyamoto's love of puppetry and like this specifically Japanese type of puppetry, and they're made to look like those puppets. Oh, are we talking about the look of 40th anniversary? Or no, the fourth anniversary, right? Yes, fourth anniversary. Yeah, so like some people didn't like it.

I think it looks cool. Again, so I saw comments saying it looked bad. I saw comments saying it looked like on Real Engine stuff. I saw comments saying it looked AI inspired. But ultimately the inspiration for it was these certain types of puppets. and yeah, I mean, you can not like the, I'm not finding like examples of pictures of the puppets right now. Okay.

But I did when I was looking this up on my own, and it made a lot more sense once I saw the puppets. And if you're not into it, that's up to you. But my goodness. Yeah, I don't know. I thought it was pretty, I thought it looked pretty cool. Yeah. Maybe I'll finally play Okerina of time.

Maybe I'll finally beat it. Oh, really? I played it as a kid but never beat it. That was true for a ton of games for me when I was a kid. Dude, it didn't even like, okay, part of it is that beating games used to be hard. For some of them anyway, I don't know that Okraena of times particularly hard. Is it? I don't know.

Oh, okay. It didn't seem super hard the parts that I played. Yeah, there was no story mode, though. So whatever the difficulty of the game was, like you had to beat it. Yeah. And then the other thing is like, we were kids and we sucked. Like I wanted to play For whatever reason I had Raymond on my mind

And I was like, oh yeah, I should play Raymond And I was like watching a video on YouTube about it Apparently there are like 16 distinct releases of that game Like several right when it came out And they have differences for different platforms Depending on how powerful they were and such And whether or not they had a disc drive or whatever And then there are like remasters and re-releases

and whatever's like available for like a ton of platforms and this video, the point of it, was like, looking at all the differences. And in the intro of it, it was talking about how, like, unforgivably difficult it was and how probably, like, so many other people, I ended up with it because it had this super cute, charming art style that concealed a depth of gameplay and a difficulty, like unforgiving difficulty that you wouldn't assume on that basis. So it probably had cute box art. it as a gift. And I thought back to it. I was like, oh, no, no, I like, played that game so much.

I must have, no boss fight. And I was like, I have no recollection. I've never seen that before. So I don't think I ever beat it. So I want to, I want to beat Raymond. I mean, there was a lot of games for me where I would find, like, a part of the game that I really liked. And then you would transition to some other part. And I wouldn't necessarily like it as much. And I would just quit, do anything else. I don't know, whatever. Or in the case of, like, Black Flag. I just cared so little about the actually Assassin's Creed part, and I would have had to keep playing that part to beat the game. So I was just like, nope, I'm a pirate.

I don't care. And just like chose my own ending, which was beating the four legendary ships in the corner of the map. And when I did that, I was like, nice. I beat the pirate game. I actually don't care about the rest of it. So I don't know. I went out of my way to not do mainline quests in oblivion

because if I did them then I would be done playing so I just did other stuff and there was at some point it like caused some kind of weird breakage because there was an assumption that I would have like progressed to a certain point like not a not like a broken broken thing

but just like kind of Bethesda broken I forget the exact details because it was 20 years ago or whatever but it was a similar experience for me where what I really wanted to do was just like explore wilderness and like explore random dungeons and fight things and, you know, infiltrate orders and that sort of thing.

Ooh, this is cool. There's an Intel-backed auto-overclocking tool called Hypertoon that optimizes your individual system rather than just using test profiles. This is something that I flagged for the doc this week because it's been promised forever. Literally, do you remember when Asus motherboards in like the 2000s had AI tuning? And AI tuning just meant it turns up the voltage and the frequency a bit.

Okay. This is not AI, but it sounds like what that was sort of intended to be. Hypertoon launched publicly this week after an eight-month beta with over 60,000 users. It's built on Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility SDK with direct engineering support from Intel, and the pitch here is easy. One-click overclocking, where the software scans your specific hardware drivers and Windows configuration, then tunes the CPU, GPU, and memory for your individual machine instead of just applying a canned profile.

Intel Senior Principal designer Dan Regaland endorsed it, saying performance tuning had been locked behind expertise for too long, and record-holding over-clocker, Peter Plasier, better known as Scatterbencher, worked on the methodology. Every change is reversible, and the tool refuses any optimizations a system can't safely support. Hypertoon claims FPS improvements of up to 60% in internal testing, but hasn't publicly shown the system or workload that produced that headline number,

and I suspect most of them would be a lot lower. In fact, the benchmarks they published are considerably lower. On a Core Ultra 9, 285K with an RTX 5090, Homeworld 3 improved by 18.9% with Tomb Raider gaining 28.2. With that said, I mean... Way to go, Tomb Raider. Good old Tomb Raider. Back being a benchmark again. On an older Core 714,700K and RTX 3080 system,

Rainbow Six Siege improved to 9.8%, with Marvel rivals gaining 4.3. These tests were performed with Hypertoons Game Hub disabled, so the gains came from system-level tuning rather than changing any graphics settings. Game Hub can push frame rates considerably higher by automatically adjusting in-game settings, although that's something that G-Force experience and AMD software or the player themselves can already do. There is no way to buy Hypertoon outright. Oh, really? Yeah, I was waiting for you to get to that part. Oh, why? It's like not cheap either.

It's actually, I wouldn't even just say not cheap. It's really expensive. Like very expensive. The website currently lists a service at $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year. So $10.00 a month or $70 a year. Launch coverage originally quoted a $60 a year introductory price, with some reports saying it would eventually rise to roughly $120. An $80 expert tuning service is also available where a technician remotely connects to your machine and tunes it manually.

I'm not talking about this anymore. I'm not interested. Yikes. Someone in chat was saying AI features in the early 2000s. I've got something much newer that also has AI overclocking. This motherboard is from, I want to say 2004, something like that. looks like a 2004 DBR1 brother

AI front and center I believe this one had some kind of AI overclocking nonsense on it also is this wind DVD what am I looking at here I'm not sure what that is

man packaging oh man wow what a motherboard look at that dang dang look at that VRM

this was a high end VRM design look at that IDE port bro Oh dude one IDE port I think you mean two IDE ports Let's go primary and secondary My brain was like

What are those plugs next to the Don't forget the floppy part here You got your IDE got your floppy Yeah dog Is that the Northbridge it's like the same size Yeah it is You're south bridge Remember when a chip set was called such

Because it was a set Yeah of chips They're like as big as the CPUs It's crazy I remember Northbridge fans I love those. Yeah, dog. Yeah, dog.

Yeah. Yeah, we got, I got 17 minutes total before I need to be walking out the door, by the way. Okay. How about let's talk Australia forcing social media platforms to allow users to opt out of algorithms? Yeah, super cool. This is like the most based thing that I saw all week. Australia's government published a proposed law on Tuesday called the Digital Duty of Care, and it is now collecting feedback before it goes to Parliament.

The centerpiece is an initiative that's literally named My Feed My Way. Platforms would have to send a notification to every user over 16, offering a choice for their default feed, either personalized algorithmic recommendations or only the friends and creators they actually follow. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it sensible, pragmatic, practical reform, and noncompliance could cost platforms up to 109.2 million. Australian dollars or about 79 million US. The wider law makes platforms... Is that like yearly or something?

I hope so. I don't know though. The wider law makes platforms responsible for shielding kids from content promoting things like eating disorders, misogyny and dangerous stunts. And it also covers online games and AI chatbots, which would need to rein in addictive design features. The law builds on Australia's world first ban on under 16s holding social media accounts, which is why the feed choice only applies to users 16 and up. Opposition leader Angus Taylor said, the coalition hasn't seen the proposal yet and warned against efforts to censor social media.

Sounds like a loser. Doesn't sound like censoring social media. Yeah, it sounds like Angus Taylor is one of those like opposition politicians that hates any idea that the ruling party puts in place. Even if it was like something that they've been calling for for years. We have some folks kind of like that in Canada. You know, if this took over everywhere, I bet you this would be the one thing. that could affect titles and thumbnails. I'd use Facebook again.

Because your titles and thumbnails would be much more important to be searchable. Yeah. And to be clear exactly like what they are rather than just enticing a click. You're fighting for attention on one mixed page of everything. But if you were searching for something, then you would need to come up in search results. If I knew that I was going to be fed to all the tech users, then I could have a techie title. If I'm going to be next to Mr. Beast, then I have to have a super enticing title. This is actually like, you know, I'm sure there's going to be some way to make it not happen.

But this is basically the one thing that has shown up on my radar that could actually affect clickbait. The EU already requires platforms to offer at least one feed that doesn't rely on profiling under the Digital Services Act. And several platforms have following only feeds buried in their apps today. Australia's draft goes further by forcing platforms to surface the choice to every user directly. given the under 16 ban that became a blueprint for other countries. Outlets like Gizmodo note that this one could also make its way overseas in the same way. All right. I think we do have one.

Oh, Lordy, do we still have a couple more topics? Oh, crap. Oh, that's why it was moving around. Framework cut RAM prices. This is cool. Investment disclosure again. Wow, I really picked the right day to wear this shirt. Framework dropped prices on some LP cam.

two options for the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. The reduced pricing is currently available on a first come first serve basis through batch 10, and this comes after they doubled prices back in July. Framework basically says they were able to source a limited quantity of 32 and 64 gig LP Cam 2 modules at a lower price, and they're passing the savings onto customers. Pretty, pretty based in my totally invested in the company opinion.

They're also retroactively reducing prices for orders that have already shipped at the higher prices, and to a subset of pending pre-orders. Cool. Sweet. I said at the time that Framework would have only raised the prices if they had no choice, and they've really followed through on my guess. Because they didn't have to anymore, so they undid it. I've never heard of a company undoing like a price increase like that.

Like retroactively, here's a partial refund. Yeah, when their costs are down, they keep prices as they are to make more profit. And when their costs go up, they raise prices. It just creeps constantly. Uh, continuing the plow, LTT Labs UPS article. Like power supplies, UPSs have some cool tech if you're into them, uh, but they're quite complex if you're not. This article breaks down some of the interesting numbers and fields to consider when buying a UPS and shows a number of waveforms measured with our oscilloscope. Uh, Lucas had fun with this one.

There's also a note here that says, an interesting aspect of UPS is AVR or automatic voltage regulation, which will treat or transform the input voltage to bring it. closer to the nominal 120 VRMs. We tested, I've only read that in text before. We tested a power supply at a sweep of input voltages to show the transition and change in output waveform. It's a long article, but you can use the table of contents on the left to find stuff,

which it might be because your, yeah, your screen is narrow. Sorry about that. It went up there, but if you're kind of viewing it normally. There it goes, hooray. so you can use that to kind of jump around or use it at the top if you're looking at a narrow screen. Is that a C-920?

No, I can't have spotted it. Time for After Dark. Mr. Daniel Bessor. Hit us with some... Oh, wait, we didn't do floatplane announcements. Oh, crap. This week on Floopplane is all about the nerds.

DMS, known as DMS online, released a very over-explained video on the topic of why iPods sound different. Yep. Oh my goodness. That looks complicated. This is it like the first thing you learn. What? No, I just, it's his joke. Oh my goodness. But what about some other niche hobbies?

3D printing clothes or tufting or cool PC cases. We had an LMG show and talked about. What are these notes? Do you mean show and tell? I don't I don't understand talking about NASA's camera

and fusion frenzy What am I Like what am I clicking on? Yeah! What is this? I'm logged in. Why is this an air table link? I don't know.

What is Sammy doing? I don't understand this man. Why is it an air table? It goes to the shoot reference. Here's a show and tell. Why would it go?

Why would you link that? I don't know. That's going to get shot next week, apparently. I don't know. Okay, anyway. That's tech relute for... My notes also say, but Linus. What if you're all like, I hate float plane exclusives?

Well, you'd be missing out on some gold. But here, we'll also do an early release right now for the people. Do the thing. Tech tips, say my notes. Oh, what? No way. Oh, crap. Hold on.

What is it? This video, this video is coming out. Oh, wow. The steam-cooled steam machine is up for early access on float plane now.

Nice. There's another one to do as well. Oh, man, that's sick. What else is coming out? This is the same one. Graphic content Linus's core childhood memory slash that one clip

that was cut out. What is this? I don't know. Yeah, I don't remember what this is. Okay. Well, it is released now. Graphic content. What did we talk about that was graphic content?

I wasn't, I didn't even... I know, I know, I'm talking to myself. I'm just looking you in the eye. Like it's like the normal thing that people do. Anywho. Oh, man. Time for After Dark, Dan. You want to hit us?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, sure. We will start with this one for Luke, just because... Sweet. I think this is... It's gone. Never mind. Hi, LLD.

Thoughts on Remix taking priority over original, like how Resident Evil Code Veronica is coming out before the original comes to PC, or the original The Last of Us not being available on PC. Yeah, what's up with the original Last of Us not being on PC? And, like, Last of Us Part 2 totally is. Like, is that, has anyone ever explained that? Is that, like, a thing that everyone's kind of, you know, been over? And now they're just like, yeah, Linus, that's like yesterday's annoying news.

Like, like, what's up with that? I have no idea. Anyone? No idea whatsoever. Oh, part one is on PC, says fake giraffe. Okay, well, why did, why did my note say that? Just emulate it, says Nikki Nookie. Okay, so hold on.

Is it available or is it not? They remade it for PC. So the original's not The remake is Okay, okay, okay, okay, that's where I got my... Oh, it's because the first was built for PS3 Which was a little weird to port Okay, all right, okay, okay, okay, okay, all right, hey, chat

I gotta give you guys credit We resolved this completely in like eight chats Pretty quick. That, you know what? Good job. Good job. Good job float plane chat. Oh, okay, you guys are falling apart a little bit here.

Fake giraffe says the remake is faithful. Honest Lierid says, I've heard the port kind of sucks. There's also Biggie, Bidjigig something, 595 says bubble fart. That's also pretty important. Flapping Chalphrey. Oh, that.

Okay. Was that your story? Yeah. Okay. So farts can make a bubble. Yeah. Yeah, on your butt. Okay.

and I know this for a fact more on that on full plane yeah I guess so okay all right yeah we gotta keep going I got six minutes yeah that's it that's the end of the show

wait you didn't you didn't curate any other comms well middle of the day not a lot of what do you mean there weren't a lot of don't lie to the people no no no no no not a lot of like questions and we also did like three or four and then it was overlap so that's all I got yeah we did do more than two we did them kind of in the middle.

Did we? Yeah, we did like three. Yeah. Okay, we normally do a lot more than that. Okay. Normally get a lot more questions. Oh, okay. Well, um...

When you do drops, sometimes a lot of them are just like, thank. Right. That makes sense. Stanton F had a question, and you just sent him to the forum. Too vague. Poor Stanton. Too vague. I think he asked what the debug step was to fix his girlfriend's PC.

Oh. Yeah, that's not really... I can't. I can't do that. Unplug and plug you back in. Sorry, Dave. I'm so sorry. Yeah, okay. Well, I guess that's it.

I feel sort of like... It's weird, isn't it? Yeah, I feel... It's like, so early in the day, I'm going to go, like, write a video script now. Yeah. I have to go help my coworkers with stuff they need. It screws me up when we do Wancho in the middle of the day. It is very strange.

My whole internal clock goes, like... Do you feel tired afterwards? Yeah. Yeah, me too. Like, I'm ready to go home and have a snack and go to bed. Yeah. Same here. Yeah.

Like I can't go do stuff. Maybe I will. Well, it's nighttime now. You could. Yeah. Maybe I'll also go work from home. Because I have no weekend this weekend. I have all, like, obligations.

I won't. I'm going to go write a video of it. All right. We'll see you guys again next week. Same bad time. Wait, not bad. Bad. You know what?

Same good time. Same good channel. It's a good time and a good channel. It probably won't be the same time. Yeah, but same good channel, though. Yeah. Bye. All right.

Okay, so these guys just didn't leave any message at all. We just like bot stuff. Yeah. Okay. How about that? That's my...