Triforce! - Triforce! #153: Snooper Elite

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Triforce! Episode 153! Pyrion bonded with a Doctor over Football Manager, Sips can't imagine the life of a female streamer and Lewis hits back at Blizzard's monetisation! Support your favourite podcast on Patreon: https://bit.ly/2SMnzk6 Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello, everyone. Welcome back. Good afternoon. Good evening. It's the Triforce Podcast. I'm joined by Mr. Pirian Flax Hello Author, old man I knew that was coming Hero, philanthropist Yes Killer of his local community in Twickenham Watches people out the window

and judges them Snooper, not Peeper That's much better Snooper It's like a step down from sniper but sips uh is uh garage dweller yeah um family man turtle owner yeah uh car driver and island liver hey also uh garbage removal man too. I had this, well, yesterday was the, just to give you an idea, I know Lewis hates when we spill the beans on when we record, but yesterday was the 18th of November,

which is quite a few days away from Halloween, right? Halloween is a distant memory. Well, my carved pumpkins were still sitting on my doorstep yesterday as you can imagine and they were black and horrible yeah it's been like hurricanes here since rain you name it do you think they were summoned by the evil pumpkin spirits i don't know but it was time to throw them out and let me tell you that is the true horror of halloween yeah when it's time to throw pumpkins out that have been out for like three weeks. They turn to soup immediately when you touch them. Yeah, they do.

It's gross. Really, really gross. You were saying that Snooper is one level down from Sniper. I'd quite like to play, you know, the Sniper Elite games. Snooper Elite, I think, would be interesting. You have to sneak in there and like observe stuff. Yeah. Because I watched a thing about uh the police

i think i think i spoke about it where they uh the drugs thing we spoke about it last week one of the guys on the show it looks like a really boring job all he did was observe the the main target day in day out followed him to the golf course reported what kind of golf clubs he had what he was wearing who he was with and just went garden center followed him to the garden center i'm thinking there isn't really a game where you just watch and try and divine something about people, is there? How do you... I mean, I love... First of all, I love the idea that you are snooping on your neighbour

and like, oh, yeah, their mother-in-law came over and they had an argument and, you know, the kids went out on the trampoline. I love that but I also like the idea of a spy being so bored that he like sneaks up to someone

at a golf club and finds out what golf clubs they are just to keep his hand in yeah it's just like you're using ping golf clubs

they are good clubs just sneaks off again let me just make a little note in my book but you've got to think because What kind of ball is that? A titleist? Excellent It's a titleist

It's like Dracula playing fucking golf Like the clubs Nice Dracula would be a great spy He'd be able to like you know Bat his way out of situations Bat his way out of situations.

Bat his way out? Yeah, he could. Sneaking through the windows and stuff. Well done. These would be useful. I'm surprised there's no Dracula detective TV show on TV right now. You've got to question his motives. His motive would be, is there blood in it?

You know, well, we need you to solve the case, Dracula. That's your job. My job is to get the blood. Here is looking at you, kid. Here's biting you. Yeah, it would have been a different show if Tully Samalis just sunk his teeth into the victim's neck.

Will you help me, Tully? Yes, one second. Yes, delicious. You are my thrall now. You have no problems. The chief is like, I will do what you say, Telly Savalas. I read, interestingly, this week that someone translated Dracula into Icelandic in 1901. Right.

And they used Bram Stoker's original manuscript, apparently. And so as a result, no one even noticed this for 100 years, but there was a lot more sex in it, and it was a lot shorter. And I think what had happened was Bram Stoker, I think, or at least his editors, or someone had edited it down for popular English sort of consumers, and they'd taken out a lot of the sexy bits because they were worried that there would be an uproar.

And people wouldn't focus on the Dracula bit. They'd focus on all the sex, and it would be some sort of sex book. Which is ironic, because that's all that the vampire fiction now is just. Yeah, it's come full circle, I guess, hasn't it? People's reluctance to to uh to read about sex and to write it i guess and you know gender norms and everything else has changed so i think people are just kind of like they're cool with it now you know people aren't as well the good thing about reading about sex in a book is that you can do it on the sofa with your parents

and not feel like totally awkward well you can you can like just look around and see like do they realize i'm reading a sexy bit? And then you're like, oh no, they can't. They're not in my head. It's okay. You know? Right. Do you ever get that?

You know? Whereas if you're watching like a movie with sex in it, it's always like, oh shit. Even though I'm 37 and my parents are like in their 70s, you know, I'll still watch a movie at Christmas with them and there'll be some sort of sexy going on. Yeah. And I'll like like i'll look at

my i'll awkwardly side eye over to my parents or whatever and they'll just like roll their eyes at me i've been re-watching the sopranos recently i'm on the last episode well i need to watch last episode tonight but there is a lot of awkward rough humping in that series as well where like you're just watching and all of a sudden like the the scene will change to just some humping and you sort of look over at like your wife or whoever you're watching it with and you're just like oh geez really again like there's there's just so much a little uncomfortable so much uncomfortable humping in that series yeah it's just like i don't know game of thrones is a little bit like that at times as well, especially early on. Like the first season or two, there was lots of rough humping, you know?

I think what me and Mrs. F do, if we're watching the show and there's that in it, we just look at each other and go, my goodness, that's about it. Because it's just, what else did he do? It's just kind of funny, really. It is. It almost feels planned as well.

It feels like we need one set of tits per episode, someone getting their head chopped off per episode. I'm pretty sure early Game of Thrones was just that. Yeah, I think it was. They actually stipulated that they had to have these sort of raunchy sex scenes because it'll gain more interest in the show. You know what? I definitely think the Sopranos had random sex stuff thrown in. Like I said, when we were talking about it the other the other month i felt that a lot

of time they were like right someone's gonna die this episode there's gonna be some sexist episode and tony's gotta see his therapist work those three things in yeah there were times when tony was fucking someone he thought what's this for like what is this for like there's one where he goes to an office and the receptionist is there and he just bangs her over the desk and i'm like i get it it's in the character of tony's meant to be there but he's not exactly irresistible you know but it's meant to show that he's he's beyond help right like the entire series is meant to show that he he's it's impossible for him to change everything everything is stacked against him to ever become a better person right but i guess you could say the same thing about game

of thrones is that you know it all had a purpose like yeah yeah of course i mean it just it still manages to feel gratuitous even if it has yeah sometimes it does yeah it's sometimes definitely you're right i'm watching a tv show and i'm at odds with the slightly older uglier guy getting a hot woman and i'm like oh but this i realized that they they're in a position of power so maybe it's okay well it's not it's not okay but i'll tell you like it's all right it's believable that someone who's the president might have a hot model wife i don't know maybe that's but it is now whereas i feel like just like george cost in Steinfeld. So I felt getting like hot women every episode felt ludicrous. It's a weird thing though.

It's a weird standard, isn't it? Because you do occasionally see, or maybe more than occasionally, I don't know. But it is a thing for older men to get younger women. I believe like you do see it from time to time. Whereas it's very rare that you would see a really young man with an older woman, right? It's true.

A far older woman. It's a stigma though, isn't it? It's such a weird, such a weird standard. It feels like the power dynamic is in the hands of the older person. So when you have that, you tend to think that it's a hungry cougar, you know, after a supple young man. But the other way around, if it's like a young man taking advantage of an older lady, that feels also kind of seedy, doesn't it? I don't think it's ever felt that the young man

is taking advantage of the older woman. I think the assumption is that older people have more experience and make these decisions, and they're inevitably taking advantage of the younger person, even if that's not the case. Because I have known a few couples where the man is substantially older than the woman. I have known of very few couples where the woman is older than the man, but not by much, not by as much. But in Hollywood, I was watching Outbreak. The movie Outbreak was on TV the other week.

Again, we spoke about this recently because of COVID and we noticed it again uh renee russo is in that movie renee russo was the go-to woman who looks old enough to be with a slightly older guy and she doesn't look like ultra young she never really looked like youthful no yeah you always got the impression she was middle-aged dustin hoffman was old as fuck when that movie was made the age difference between this couple is nearly 20 years every time you watch a hollywood movie go and look at the age of the woman who's meant to be the main love interest of the fella and it's he was 61 i think or something like that it's crazy it's like every every time hollywood's like well our leading man is in his 70s so let's get a hot 40 year old to

be his wife it's like come on if you see if you see like a young young woman okay so you see see like a like a i don't know a 25 year old woman very like so basically an average hollywood woman so she would pass as being a high school student but she would also pass being a 60 year old's wife remember yeah remember um back in like the 90s and i mean it still happens now but i remember there was a couple of like really high profile younger women getting with like these crusty old 90 year old oil billionaires oh what was her name anna nicole smith yeah she she died like yeah she a while back didn't she yeah it was like the whole thing was really weird but

when you when when you see that you you just think, oh, whatever. She's just after his money, right? Like that's your first thought. Your immediate thought was like, oh, she's just after his money. But your first thought, if it's like a 25-year-old guy dating a 90-year-old woman, is, oh, he's mentally ill. Like there's no like. I don't think mentally ill.

I do. I'd be like, oh, he's got some issues or something like he's after a money. Come on. No, I wouldn't even know. That's the thing. I feel like I'm like conditioned, like in certain ways somehow where I wouldn't,

my immediate thought about that situation with the guy and the older woman wouldn't be, Oh, you think it must be like a sex thing. Like he's one of those granny chasers. Yeah. Yeah. Like,

it's just, I don't know. Like it, I don't know if that's just me being like like some having some weird bias it's not something i think about i think i think it probably is a bias and i think the bias is probably that we assume that women aren't into anything for the sex they've they must have some ulterior motive like some kind of sinister force but whereas men of course we're far too man i will

i will immediately like seek out the deviancy because right maybe because we don't trust men yeah i guess so i don't know it's really fucking weird isn't it it's uh yeah i think there is some weird uh some weird norm there that where we we automatically assume if a guy's fucking a granny you know that dude would probably fuck a pavement as well you know or a bicycle or a bike yeah or some some weird shit yeah but like but if it's if it's a woman doing it to a guy it's like there's probably somewhere down the line some fucking involved but the goal isn't any of that right whereas with the guy i would say the goal is to like be some deviant weird sex ape or something you know like yeah it's like i don't know it's

just such a weird standard maybe maybe i'm alone in thinking that i don't know what that says about me but it's bizarrely infatuated with this like idea i think that you can't i don't think that you know i trump and old what's this what's the, to have a good relationship. You know, I think when you end up with these very one-sided systems, they don't, I don't think they're sustainable. I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I would be really surprised if they had a healthy relationship. I mean, there's all those, there's video compilations of her refusing to hold his hand or like smiling.

And then as soon as he turns his back, frowning, you know, I don't think they have a particularly good relationship there's a vast age difference but not only that really big cultural differences as well right yeah yeah you know it's i think i i think even without age being a factor or anything i think sometimes cultural differences are enough to to cause huge problems in relationships right like the your expectations of like, sociability and like a whole bunch of other stuff can can definitely seeping into things, right? Yeah, for sure. So oh, I have a P Flax's ticker update. Oh, oh, a heart. I went to see a cardiologist. Okay. And

he was he was a top lad. He was a top lad big fan um we got chatting we got chatting tiny tiny penis no no no no no but he he did we did talk about video games because you know oh you were a big fan of him yeah all right rather than the other way around sorry i would never say something that would be incredibly egotistical no i'm a big fan of him he's what's his podcast he doesn't have one, but I would listen to it. He could just get two of his friends together. Job done, right? He's just one of those guys, you know, you meet a doctor,

sometimes they're just chill. You just think, wow, this guy's a really cool dude and has interesting stories and talks to you in a nice way. Because some doctors have kind of a shitty bedside manner because they're just doctors. They're good at fixing people up, but they have no social skills. How old was he for a start? He was almost was almost exactly my age i would say that's what you want okay because i've been last time at the dentist and the doctor they they looked like they were fresh out of university and i was like i could smell the malibu and show me like i was i

felt like i was like i was like being looked after by a child. But they did a great job. In fact, if anything, I was very pleased. In fact, I was like, damn, this guy clearly knows his shit because he's fresh out of training kind of thing. Right. So I was actually cool with it. But there was this little bias in my head now that I am older than... You're like, you young whippersnappers.

What do you know? But I want someone exactly my age. age well this guy was almost exactly my age because we were both he they inevitably ask what do you do and i have to say what i play video games and they're like oh you test video games i was like no i just sort of play them and then stream it and and then you have to explain that because people haven't really a lot of people of our age haven't really heard of this as a job well it's all kind of new and interesting. So he wanted to know more. And then he said, I used to play a lot of video games.

I was like, oh, really? He goes, yeah. Have you ever heard of Football Manager? I was like, oh, yeah. We started talking about Football Manager. And we were talking about tactics, formations. We were talking about players. And he used to play it the late 90s and the very early 2000s, which is when I used to play a load of football manager

and championship manager, as it was about them. And we were talking, and he was saying, you know, there was a broken formation in the early ones where you could play five attackers and you'd always win. I was like, I know. And my friend even figured out that you could not play a goalie and the left back would just fill in in the goalie slot if you needed to. So he'd always play with 11 outfield players.

We were laughing about that for like five minutes. And he was like, oh, yeah, anyway, let's get on with it. Back to your heart. But I was just like, this yeah, anyway, let's get on with, back to your heart. But I was just like, this guy's awesome. He's going to do this operation. We could talk about video games the whole time. Perfect. Oh my gosh, he's got to do an operation.

Well, sorry, a procedure. Procedure. Oh, is that what they call it now? So it's called an ablation. I spoke to him about SVT. Sounds horrible. No, no, no. I spoke to him about SVT and he was like,

I do this all the time. It's way more common than you think. I was like, great. And he said, and whilst, you know, the nurse, when I went in last time said, oh, it's really dangerous. He was like, it's really not that dangerous. You'll be okay. I was like, great. So what they do is they make an incision, two incisions at the very top of your thigh, where there's that big vein as you, I think it's your femoral artery coming up from, from your leg or something. And they put these lines up there, it's very very thin cords a bunch of them that have a load of electrodes in and they go all the way up the veins to your heart and then they sort of surround your heart with these

electrodes and then they look at this monitor and it's got all these wiggly lines on that show the electrical signals going across your heart and then they induce an attack of svt and then they look and they say oh that's the problem bit there and then they induce an attack of svt and then they look and they say oh that's the problem bit there and then they burn a tiny bit of the nerve there on your heart with this little heater and they shut it off as soon as it's done and that's you cured and like 99% of the time you're good you won't have an attack again wow you should have asked him about pab while you were there too or did you get a chance to ask him what's PAB I forgot pussy ass bitch I didn't got him again I didn't I should have oh my god did he ask you for a quick uh

nine holes around the golf course afterwards no we didn't get to golf um oh that's a shame because I think you could have made a new challenge when you when you have to describe what you do to people right because I find it goes one of two ways uh one of the ways is the way that flax you just described you you find you you explain to them and then they they don't really know much about it but they start talking about video games and then you find that you know they've played a game that you've played and you can talk to them about that or whatever yeah you know that bit in surgeon simulator Simulator where you get the hammer, smash the skull open? We'll be doing that.

And hopefully I'll be able to find all the bits and put them back together. But the other way it goes is when you say, oh yeah, you know, like I stream or like I make videos on YouTube. They're like, oh yeah, my son is like mad into that. He watches this guy called XX xxx69 sephiroth xxx69 you ever heard of him do you know him or or whatever you're like uh no i don't know

because it's always something like it's it's never like a really big name it's always just like some obscure ass like they're obsessed with yeah that they're like totally obsessed with that you're expected to know somehow like out of the millions of other people that do this stuff on a daily basis i know my youngest was really disappointed that i didn't know azyland right the youtuber i remember this yeah she does like react videos i think and she does some other things and it's all very high tempo for young people vids and she used to love she has massive tits no she doesn't no she doesn't she's she's she's very like i watched these to make sure it wasn't like you know that it wasn't like my daughter and a bunch of simps watching this this youtube channel

it's literally just stuff for kids like oh my god we're gonna open loads of chocolate today yeah you know that i'm pretty lucky my son's only ever really watched um stampy and and squid and right i know them both so it's like tdm as well like those are the ones that yeah they watch those as well and honestly he doesn't watch it like any of it at all anymore he's just yeah same gravitated away from it now he just like he he plays games like when he can sort of thing but we're we're super sort of like we limit him on how much sort of time he gets to play games and then otherwise he's just like doing other stuff but he went through a phase where he really liked watching youtube videos and now he never watches them at all same really weird they both used to watch

loads and now they just they just don't i don don't know why. It's really odd, isn't it? Which makes me think that most of these YouTubers, like 98% of their audience must be six and seven-year-old kids. Like refreshed as well. Right. Constantly. And then they grow out of it. It's like a revolving door, right?

Oh, it's crazy. The minute your fan base gets to a certain age, you just get this influx of new fresh meat in to replace them. It's weird. But they will go through your entire back catalog because they'll just go next, next, next. And they'll watch them all. They never seem to get bored.

I don't want to think about this. Lou's been racking his brains on this one for like 10 years. How do we get to the six-year-old demographic, folks? I want ideas, goddammit. And it's like, maybe we can have a miniatures painting. Miniatures are out!

Six-year-olds aren't into miniatures. Kinder eggs. I want you all to open Kinder eggs on stream endlessly. It's interesting hearing what's trending because Fortnite,

you hear less about it now because I feel like Fortnite's kind of had its time and maybe is on its way out a little bit. I don't want to say too soon because I don't know i'm basing this off of information that my son brings back from uh year four school yeah no he he knows about it he he comes back and he's like have you ever played

among us it's like yeah i've played it he's like could i play that it's like well you know it's you need like a big group of people and you need to be able to like give each other information and stuff it's not it's not that straightforward and stuff he's like oh yeah but you can kill people in a spaceship right oh okay yeah yeah you can like it's weird it's weird the things that appeal to them about these games like i got i got it for my uh for my eldest actually i i got it on her Steam account that I have total control over. Yeah. And it's got this thing, this parental lock, where you can allow certain games through.

You can block certain games. She can't go to the store at all, all kinds of stuff like that. That's good that you can lock it down like that. It's good, yeah. So I got Among Us for her because a friend of hers was having a birthday party, and it was an Among Us party. So all the kids just played Among Us for like four hours or whatever um watching their meta is fascinating i'm no among us expert but they really are very poor at figuring out who the imposter is uh which is odd

because they're also terrible at being the imposter because they're complete noobs you know and they're just like well having said that though flax i've played with people who are um meant to be really good at the game and they can't figure out who the imposters have the time either yeah it's tough it's tough yeah i mean i'm i like the idea that they i like the idea that there's 10 of them just doing the tasks and there's no imposters i like the idea that that's the game do you know what i mean because that sounds like enough of a game for like kids to play right but they only use the chat they don't use voice so they just say orange is sus yeah i think we talked about this last week yeah but it's funny because now that she's actually playing it we're having discussions about strategies and stuff like that she's oh yeah she's like a prolific liar right like a

very good that's my youngest that's my youngest oh my oldest is a terrible liar yeah my youngest is the liar oh that's right your your youngest is the master criminal she is in evil mastermind in waiting my eldest is just evil but she's she's you know she's to your face evil she's just she's just horribly mean to her younger sister and if you tell her did you tell like my youngest is doing some lego last night and she was making a hospital and my eldest and she made a chair and my eldest said that chair looks like a toilet and my youngest was like no it's a chair she's like yeah that's a toilet and that was enough for my youngest to be in floods of tears stomped downstairs like crying and i went up there and my eldest was just laughing her head off.

Mission accomplished. You know, she's like, that's it. I made my sister cry just by telling her her Lego chair looked like a toilet. And I was like, why are you letting this shit get to you? Just ignore her. But she can't. They want their older siblings validation so much that they can't even vocalize it. Yeah.

It was funny. It's interesting. I think if you go in looking for, like Twitter, sometimes you read comments or things on Twitter, and if you're looking at them with the perspective that someone's going to criticize you or accuse you or something or be nasty to you, then that's what you'll see. Whereas if you don't think that, sometimes you'll read things very differently in a very different tone,

like, oh, that's not a very good joke or whatever. Do you know what I mean by that? Like so often, like obviously YouTube comments, Twitter comments, I never recommend anyone read any of them. I'm quite honest. Because the 99 good ones won't outweigh the horror of the one bad one.

Yeah, you remember the bad one. Yeah, yeah, for sure. There's 99 good things doesn't, for some reason in your head doesn't help. You know, they all just wash over you. But the one bad one sticks and it's the one in your side sometimes. With comments and stuff in general,

isn't like, isn't too bad. I don't think I've ever had a comment where it's been like, I felt really personally offended by like, what somebody said, you know what I mean? Like, there'll be a lot of like, oh, he sucks at this game or whatever. But some of that you can almost say, like, it's a it's like banter, or it's like, you know, part of like, you know, like a like a like a group sort of like thought or whatever. And I wouldn't actually find that offensive but i've never never come across a uh like a a comment where it's been like like anything like really

specific like fuck he's so ugly and stupid you know what i mean like really like personal stuff but i've seen other people have really really mean personal stuff said about them and uh like if that was me reading that i would feel like oh shit you know like that i get a lot of that i always have and and after a while you you just sort of i i think sir action slacks uh is is my uh my role model when it comes to to internet comments because he uses it like he loves that that's what he wants is the salt and he wants to make people react like that and he relishes it and he makes memes and videos out of it and their comments fuel him yeah uh which is amazing to me um me too for a long time like i i don't i don't

really let the bad comments get to me because i don't necessarily believe that either they're really meant that way but also we joke with ourselves in the same manner you know we tease ourselves like for example like with your with your kids like i think that if someone told me that my chair looked like a toilet you know if i would be like that's great i'll turn this whole thing into a bathroom do you know i mean like that's that's kind of the attitude is very much like on board, right? Whereas I think that if you're looking for an insult, you're going to see one.

Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like I think it's the outlook. Yeah, you can, there's very, there's not like a lot of context sometimes on the internet for comments and stuff either. You know, like, of course, they're related to like what you're watching or whatever,

but like there's no facial expressions. you can't really detect sarcasm, you can't really detect these sort of subtle social things, right? So it's very easy for people to take them personally or completely out of context, you know, and get upset about it. I also think some people lack the ability to actually put their thoughts into a sentence that is in any way. Are you saying that based on what I just said no no absolutely not that sounded like it was but i wasn't you've just defied the trifles podcast no it's more like um i think some people are trying to make a joke and it's just fucking horrible and it just just doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah, I'll do that a lot.

I just think a lot of people really lack the ability to make a joke and have it seem like they're like, oh, is he kidding? It's like, well, that doesn't look like a joke. A guy turned up on my chat the other day and just said, hey, Perrin, you bold cunt, and I just banned him because I'm like, I don't know you, dude. That was me. If it was you, I would have banned you as well.

It's like, if you meant that as a jovial, hey, I don't know you. If you said that to me in real life. You're willing to take certain things from certain people, right? Of course. Because there's context to it. But then I know that it's as part of a joke. But if you just turn up in someone's channel, never seen you before, sub don't recognize the username and that's your hello work on your social skills a little bit because I have no idea if you're just this is a symptom of all all of this stuff though

they're living vicariously through somebody watching them play games feeling like you're hanging out with them you know like that it's like there's been a lot of people talking about this stuff, well, forever, but even more recently with like these parasocial relationships with, you know, back in the day it would have been with like big Hollywood actors and stuff. But now more modernly or recently with, you know, big streamers or YouTubers or whatever. These are people that you have more access to, right? You can say something to them and you can see them react to what you're saying sometimes in real time, which is not something people have ever been able to do before sort of thing. So like in the case where that guy came in, you know, being overly familiar with you, for him, somebody who watches you every day and no he doesn't that's what i'm saying i don't think he'd ever watched me okay but let's just say he did you can see you can see from his point of view how that would come to be a thing right he feels

like he's got some connection with you or some rapport with you that you're unaware of because you're just streaming into the void right yeah a lot of these people you'll never interact with but for him he feels like every day he interacts with you so like it's kind of like at work you know you walk into the lunchroom and you see a guy that you worked with forever and you're like what's up bitch or whatever and and that's right that's fine because both of you like know each other but right in this in in this case both of you don't know each other at all. So there's no rapport. It's just that there is no rapport. Yeah, you're right.

I think it's about drawing a line though, right? Like obviously that you don't want to establish a precedent that anyone can kind of come into your chat and casually just, you know, throw around stuff like that. You know, I think that there a a line that has to be drawn somewhere you know um i was talking to a female streamer the other day um female i don't want to i don't want to necessarily name it was but she said to me you know someone said um in my chat like um you know a really polite question it was like oh i'm I'm sorry I'm sorry to ask you about this but

I think it's I think it would be interesting to know you know what is your sexuality right and it was like it was like one of these kind of borderline questions and obviously he got banned immediately but like it's one of those borderline questions where you could see it being asked as innocent and you could see it being like almost one of these odd pickup liney type things that's used to like get people to start talking and down a conversation about that kind of thing right the journey of a female um i guess content creator if you like versus a males it's like so vastly different it's unbelievable like the it's so different that that women have to deal with compared to what men have to deal with like on these platforms is

like night and day like it's it's insane i've never i've never felt like people have asked me inappropriate questions about anything like i've never felt i've never felt uh scared that like i'm being stalked somehow or that people are being creepy with me or anything like that i've never felt any of those things and also we like we've never felt that yeah and at an event having dudes follow you around i know lots of women that work in in esports or in gaming in general and there will be dudes at an event say who just follow them yeah around yeah just watching them giving them the old snooper elite and it's fucking creepy and the i honestly that it is it's astonishing that that shit happens like i've seen that happen as well is it well it's the people are so unaware like that that's my next point is i think a lot of the time

we have this crossover where you have gaming now being accepted and embraced by people who wouldn't have done it when i was a kid when i was a kid games were for little children or weirdo adults right that's it like you didn't play games if you'd said what do you do all day i play video games it wasn't a thing they weren't vast social experiences either back exactly they were very yeah for two three people in a living room or whatever you know so it was something you did when you had your mates around when you were a kid, or you'd go to the arcade and hang out with all the creepy adults there and all the kids. That was it.

And there were very few women involved in gaming in any way. And now that there are, these are women who don't look like the archetypal video game nerd. And there are lots of blokes who don't look like the archetypal video game nerd because that's not what it is anymore. It much more accessible anybody can fucking play it which is great because games should not be something just for a tiny group of people it should be for as many people as possible because that's they're fantastic we all love games so i think the thing is you've got people coming into that space or people who are now part of it who are also bumping into the people who are exact throwbacks to that basement dwelling nerd

like i am who lives in his loft and plays plays doter all day and suddenly they're out there in the world having to socialize with people not online but offline in real life in 3d and they have no skills to do that and it's i think that there's there's a couple of things here though one is that obviously um this we we get so few problematic messages that we don't really even recognize them. Whereas girls get problematic messages all the time. And so as a result, things that we wouldn't find problematic, they do. So, for example, I don't know, someone might say, you know, you're looking good today, P-Flex, or something like that in your chat, and you'd be like, thanks.

Whereas that is like almost borderline creepy to a female streamer, right? Unless they know who that is, right? Unless they know them in chat already. And so there's this whole gamma of comments and tweets and messages that are suddenly inappropriate just because of that dynamic right and then also like in real life um when you see someone like at twitch con or at an event you know you know that streamer and you're almost you almost feel like that the stream these events almost advertise you come to these events you'll get to meet these people right and so you go to an event and you

might see someone that you recognize and they might be in a conversation you might think oh i don't do i want to just go up them straight away and say oh hi big fan blah blah that's that's my attitude my attitude is you know i'll see i don't know i'd like when i saw kibler at um a twitch event i went up and i was just like oh kibler i went up i said hello big fan shook his hand whatever and he you know um whatever it was fine it was like i was a little bit of a fan boy okay okay? Because I like the guy. But I was like, I almost wanted to emulate the people that I had met, the fans that I had met, where they saw me, they introduced themselves straight away,

and then they left me alone. They didn't sort of hang around at the periphery of my vision, waiting for a moment. And some of it is excess politeness, and they're shy, obviously. And they're like, oh, he's obviously in a conversation right now i don't want to interrupt him i don't want to show me and then they end up just hovering and lurking around like snoopers or after you've met them after you've met them they they then like just stay on the fringe of your conversation almost like they've they're i understand how it can happen though you want to still hang around

with these people it's like what happened last year at the christmas market street yeah that was but that was that was bad planning as well when people wanted to but the thing is we we'd stream and we we it's almost like i'm watching a live youtube video or twitch video people are automatically almost conditioned i feel sometimes that it's almost in your head it's very easy to think oh well i'm just watching the video here right and everyone else is so why can't i stick why can i not stick around as well and so it kind of is this innocent thing right that actually when you step back and you're like oh what am i doing um i should probably shouldn't be doing this like it's weird but i don't feel

like the people are to blame i don't feel feel like they're deliberately creepy. I think the way it's been created is kind of creepy. It's exactly what Sips was saying, is that if you watch something all the time, someone every day, just like Sips said, people feel like they have a connection. You're familiar to them, but it's almost like, it's like watching a TV show

and people going up and thinking you're like the character on the TV show. Yes. You know what I mean? It's exactly like that, but obviously not for the same scale audience or anything like that but it's the same feeling of familiarity that you have some i think some of it is obviously the very people who are just deluded but but i think 99 of it is just shy people awkward people and people who haven't even really even figured out,

they'll make a comment and then they'll realize, oh shit, actually, that does sound creepy now I've looked at it. And a lot of people will say to you, if you ever call them on it, a lot of the nasty comments that I've got, every time I've actually ever spoken to someone and said, dude, that wasn't very nice thing to say, they were like, oh, I didn't mean it like that.

And you were like, oh, right, okay, because're we're using you know yeah yeah to describe there's sort of like the the the again though like the standards and like my like my sort of how i would react to the thing like okay for example i know plenty of women who have gotten really really awful messages from guys who are like, I'm going to fucking put my cock in your throat and all this like really gross shit. Right. Like this happens again daily. Oh, yeah. saying like i'm gonna suffocate you in my tits or you know i'm gonna fucking whatever squirt all over your face or anything like i've never like i've never obviously like i and and i'm pretty sure i can i can safely say that uh most people have never received that from i wonder if like uh

like there's the super hot dude streamers uh get any of that. I wonder if they do. I'd be surprised if they did, because I just feel like it's... Well, some of them are almost like boy band members. Again, it's just such a male thing to do, right? To be sexually aggressive like that. To be really overly sexually inappropriate and aggressive. I know that a lot of... Like, if you've ever been to a Twitch event like we have,

you definitely don't see as many women there as you do men. But when it comes to – I remember my sister was into a boy band back in the day. This is in the 90s. She went to see them and she was on the front page of the Bournemouth Echo. And all these teenage girls were like – had these animal expressions like, ah! They're all reaching to try to get to them. I think that's a little bit different like you see the the ones that you get them in a group sips that's what i'm saying like i think i think if you're if if you're sort of like at an event and if you're like a boy band streamer like you know like that that type you know so like young

attractive whatever um and and there's like a bunch of screaming girls around you. Maybe they would get like a bit grabby or something. You know what I mean? I think they would, yeah. But that's got to be terrifying. I don't think that they would spend time in their spare time writing really lewd emails and tweets to people. I think they would.

I think they would. I feel like they would. But maybe that's just me being like not not understanding or something i just feel like any women listening to this i would not be surprised by a man doing that because i've seen uh examples of men doing this so many times there's a lot of there's a lot of women hating men out there you know and there's not so many uh you know men hating women as much as well as much by default but they i feel like yeah but well but but not on twitch for sure i don't know i feel like it's weird well maybe there is some

i don't know i don't think i've ever had a woman come in my chat and be horrible no i don't think so not that i've noticed anyway like but i mean unless that was a woman that said hey perry new ball cunt i I mean out of character I'd say but you wouldn't know maybe I think the other thing is that person who came in the chat and said you look nice today you wouldn't know if like female streamers I think female streamers think that a lot of their audience

and hope that their audience is female but know that a lot of their audience is again weird standards it's like the default comment I see a reddit post the default thing in my mind is it's read in a male voice i just and it's almost like sometimes even until the end of the story i'm like why is why is a man talking about is his pregnancy yeah again weird standards and i don't know if this says more about me than the situation or whatever but like i feel like if a woman or like a woman came into my chat and called me a bald cunt i would be

more forgiving of that than a guy doing it to me i think i might be yeah you know what i mean i don't know why but i just feel like okay sure but like if it's a guy i'm like oh fuck you the fuck are you bitch exactly it's just such a i also see comments like that as a precursor that this person is not gonna then say something cool and funny oh i guess this is their position from the outset yeah i'd say most evenings we get someone in the chat who's wandered in off the street and he's very it's not exactly the pinnacle of wit is it no but it's also i feel like the the viewers are like ants, you know what I mean?

And they smell the pheromones of a stranger ant who is an aggressive and unwanted intruder very quickly. And I don't look at chat very often, but people always notice that I do tend to look at chat somehow when there's been a negative comment. I spot it straight away. It's like a magnet. Yeah, literally.

It is. But I often take them out of context. negative comment yeah i spot it straight away and i like it's like a magnet yeah literally it is but i often take them out of context so someone will have said something in response to something else like god you're such an idiot and i'll be like fuck you i'm not an idiot they're like no no scroll up period scroll up it's like oh he's responding to someone else that's why i'm so glad twitch put in the reply feature yeah so i can look and say who has replied to it's like oh i think i'm guilty of doing similar as well but not so much i always tend to read like the dumbest comments for some reason i'll glance over and i'll just read what i see but it's never anything useful you know it's somebody trolling or it's somebody like if i've asked for like information on something it's you know i'll read the dumbest

reply like some a lot of the time yeah i will have said something like you fucking asshole and then someone will post do you fucking asshole in chat i'll be like well you called me an asshole and they'll be like no you just said it yeah yeah yeah it's tricky stuff like that like i don't know how those people do it where they read chat while they're playing you're saying that someone's first comment in chat is like their audition for whether like whether they're going to be a good member of the community or not. Yeah, if there was a conversation going on, which essentially Twitch chat is like,

they're all chatting away while I'm playing. And occasionally I'll come in and say something or respond to it. But I mean, you can't, I can't play Dota and read chat. I do see some people doing it. They're streaming and whilst they're like fucking in the middle of a team fight with the awarding, they're like looking at chat. I'm like, how the fuck can you do that? But for me, if you arrive in a conversation or a group of people and that's your opening gambit,

that's a pretty shitty gambit. Like I, I really don't appreciate it. And I, I don't think it's clever. I don't think it's me misreading it. That's just very, very poor social skills, I think. And I see that kind of thing all the time. The first time I've noticed someone's name and then say something, it's something like that. that and you think is that really the best you can do like at least bed yourself in before you start insulting me you can't just turn up i've got no context i've got no context about like seeing people's post history and stuff because that's obviously a thing you can do on reddit you can look up guys to see whether they are just creepers or whatever and their only comments are sleazy if i see a comment on twitch like yeah on twitch like if

you could see all the channels they've posted in and all their chat logs like i mean i'm not saying that this is the this is the world of um well on discord it's similar though right because discord you can um i've joined like 150 servers on discord and so i could certainly i could look up someone in that discord and see if they've made a comment in there or something and see their right their posts but it's definitely something like that keeps all of your history and the same with twitch like the chat every thing you've chatted in twitch you can see often right i think that was we were going through looking through some post history and the other day for some reason barry was messing around with it

because he has all these weird, crazy tools that he can look up. And it's quite terrifying when you realize that everything you post ever, they do this in certain games as well. You don't think that in a fucking Dota game or in an Overwatch game, your chat is all saved. Well, that was a big thing for the players a couple of years ago. Somebody did a dump of all the shit that players had said because if you look at the public match thing it saves the chat like you said and so somebody went and did like a

word cloud for all the top pros of the number one word that they say and like some of them were like super wholesome like gh who's a really wholesome guy um his chat was like the worst thing he said was sorry i'm drunk. Like that was it. But some people were like, you know, dropping all kinds of unbelievable swears and cusses and just being incredibly toxic. And like you said, I don't think that they ever thought that this was going to come out. But I mean, there are screenshots of old chats that people have posted, but this was from the raw data. Like this is not something that you could doctor or fake.

This is from the raw files, the raw replays. So it's just provable right there. Yes, you said that. And it's interesting because people love privacy on the internet, right? That's a big thing. They don't want to be traceable. They don't want anything to be saved.

And you've got to think, well, if you're in a public public place which a twitch chat essentially is a public place and you're saying stuff and you think i should be able to say whatever i like and there should be no record of it and no comeuppance for that then really what you're advocating is for your own private space where you can say whatever you like but the moment you're around other people the stuff you say has to have consequences if otherwise what's the fucking point it's like selective memory though it's like i can act like a cunt whenever i want and um and i'm relying on all these places and and people to to keep it quiet so that i can cultivate this new image for myself it's like i mean internet trolling is fucking a big problem if you if you're if you're a toxic asshole like and people find out about it and then get

some sort of measure of what you're really like well that's your fault you shouldn't have been like that in the first place yeah you know what i mean like it's like i think the reddit post thing you were saying it's your fault that we found out that you're actually a cunt right right it's not i think we've all said things online that we thought were private. I think sometimes, I don't know, I'm sure back in the day I said some racy stuff in World of Warcraft and Guild Chat

or whatever, to the point where we were kind of, even then we were joking about reporting. A few people did get banned from Guild Chat reports, do you remember? And that was a thing that we used to used to do before we gave a shit you know when we were being edgy and and that kind of stuff we thought you know just stupid yeah yeah but i don't look back on it with a sense of pride

i think i was an idiot and i deserved to get called out so everyone's done stuff that they were stupid about and it's okay. And I, I don't live my life of a feared of one day that being posted, you know, I, I regret it, you know, but I don't like, I,

I, but I've changed. I think, I think, I think we have like, that's the other thing that's interesting. I think nowadays, like the first time we'd ever did the jingle jam,

right. It was very much something where we thought it would be fun and funny to kind of troll oxfam almost if you like by buying all of their goats right and sent and the it's still a funny idea that we would send goats to simon i think that's still a fun idea right let's simon wants goats for christmas you know and i still like the idea that one day we get simon a goat and it just turns up at his house and he starts eating the grass jeremy i like the idea of that still and and so that was something which we felt like was in tune with who we are back then which

was kind of slightly slightly reckless but in a good way right slightly edgy but in a good way like like mr beast does nowadays where he's very much kind of um willing to sort of do stuff that isn't necessarily kosher like i don't know drive through a mcdonald's drive-thru a thousand times or whatever the kind of things he's done that feel like they're kind of slightly trolls right but also fun and good and and make a good video um and so in the sense like that was the first thing we did and then the bees thing and what actually happened was we actually went to oxfam. They actually invited us to their distribution center after we'd raised a couple of hundred grand for goats and bees and stuff.

And they were like, look, it's all very funny, but we really don't need you to spend any more money on goats. Every penny that we've had, we've had to spend on goats. And there were a lot of more important things that we could be spending charity money on. And i was like oh crikey all right so we kind of had to grow up pretty fast in a sense and that's why we ended up sort of changing the way the bundle was done and stuff in in in the sort of in those first years you know because it was and i think we did grow up and change and like and be become more responsible and it was it was something which we grew out of being kind of that edgy i guess but i i hope that we didn't lose our sense of humor in a sense like i feel like i feel like it became more i guess like this is the thing that games have as well right or communities or other things

they feel like it becomes it's not theirs anymore like you know i think we not lost ownership of minecraft we've sort of lost ownership of the alsoosu in a sense like it's it's kind of become something which our audience are invested in and care about and like like a lot of controversy this week around blizzard and how they've put out this sort of uh sort of um battle pass for hearthstone and a lot of people are complaining about blizzard because it feels like the classic world of warcraft triple payment model is you know you buy the game you subscribe to the game and it's got microtransactions in it plus hearthstone is traditionally being a game that you have to spend you know if you want to spend if you want to buy all the cards for the new hearthstone expansion that's either 200 quid probably or like six months of doing daily quests and daily quests shouldn't be called daily quests

they should be called daily chores anyone or chores like no one should use the word daily that is awful like as a psychology thing like it's not a positive thing to like and wonderful warcraft is full of these things to keep people subscribing their triple payment package no well i i checked it out because the new expansion comes out in a week's time. And so by the time this podcast is out, I'll probably be tweeting about the new expansion because I always check them out because it's such a big part of my history. It's very nostalgic. I've got a lot of hours invested.

I'm trying to grow as an individual, so I'm boycotting it this time around. Well, this is it. Maybe that's it. Maybe you should do. But I feel like certainly... I just know what it's going to be, though. ...they haven't enamored themselves to their community with their greedy sort of practices. sits maybe you should do but but i i feel like certainly i just know what it's gonna be themselves to their community with their greedy sort of practices and they've almost left their community

in the dust and not really respected the community that have helped them get to this point and what i'm saying is that i feel like blizzard should maybe grow up as well and stop you know being so exploitative and so cruel they won't't. Every studio goes this way after a certain amount of money is made. It's weird, isn't it? The more money they make, the more they determine to make money. That becomes the central focus for them all.

But that's at their cost, though. I think that's at their detriment. They damage themselves by being so money-hungry. If they were generous, they wouldn't have this problem, I think. i don't think i know there's this sunk costs idea that sometimes that people actually even the fallacy that you know if you spent money on something and you can't get it back you can't change this the thing that keeps people hooked into league of legends or dota as well it's like people don't switch between the two games because they feel like they've invested a

lot of money into that library right and they don't want to get started again that was free it's not it's the most expensive free game i ever played i spent two or three grand you don't have to you don't have to you have to spend money on league do you see what i mean as soon as you spend money in one of these games you're hooked in right because it's like you can't you you're like well i can't i'm not gonna start paying for a brand new one i don't know i definitely put put quite a bit of money into Hearthstone, buying packs and shit. You do. Well, you have to.

I haven't played it in years. The psychology is you play your first couple of matches against paid actors, basically, who just are terrible. And you win. And you feel like, holy crap, maybe I'm actually kind of good at this game. I made this deck on a shoestring. And now my plan is to, wow,

I'm just going to take over the world with my smarts, my brilliance. I'm going to beat everybody with this budget deck. And then they put you against the guy who spent like 300 bucks on packs, and then immediately you change your mind, right? You're like, oh, fuck, I can't compete. What if everybody's like this guy?

They've all spent 300 bucks. Guess I'm going to have to spend 300 bucks and be just as good as this guy and then so i always went on those websites i can't remember what one of them is called the one that gives loads of decks for hearthstone i'm sure there's a bunch yeah there's there's hs replays the one which i used there was yeah anyway whichever one and i was like i'm looking for a deck that doesn't require me to burn a bunch of cards and buy a load of shit and it was like oh this is a great deck this got me to so and so rank and I think it's a bit like a top footballer recommending a pair of football boots in that you get those boots and you think now I'm going to score free kicks like Lionel Messi but you don't know because you still suck yeah and because Lionel Messi has played so much football it and is so good at it that he could

he could wear like clown shoes and still exactly so i think a lot of the time those decks lull you into thinking it's just oh it's just mathematics but a lot of the time these guys are like disgustingly good yeah but there's a there's a lot of good stuff in these games like there's a lot of fun stuff in hearthstone and the tavern brawls and like mucking around and playing the game i got a lot of joy out of it and the same thing wow like a lot of the story stuff's good and a lot of the stuff's good but as soon as it starts being like oh i have to log in in order to get this thing or i have to turn up at this time to to grind my head against this like i don't know like you you have to know when to stop with all blizzard games though i didn't know that back in the day

when i was young i really didn't know when to. I didn't have anything else in my life. I was very depressed. I was investing money in World of Warcraft and I felt like it was an escape, but also it was an addiction. Right. That's how I feel about almost every Blizzard game. Is that why you loaded it back up again the other day? But I think I have a different...

At least I hope that I have a different outlook on things now and I've got a different perspective. What has brought you back to it, though, out of interest? Well, I wanted to play through the latest storyline, which I've done now. And I feel like as soon as it started giving me daily chores, I was like, I'm done. Yeah, yeah. See, I feel like...

I don't want a game doing that. I fucking hate that. I feel like every Blizzard game has been like that for me. I refuse to do a daily quest. That's my rule every blizzard to do a daily quest for me that's that's my rule i refuse to do a daily but they this like like sip said this this is every blizzard game yeah because the whole point is that they they obviously think how can we keep people playing the game and spending money on it we'll just give them tasks that they have to come back and do every day because i'm sure if you have an in-game store, the number one hurdle to people spending money is not the game, but making them come to the page.

Like people will buy, if my homepage was Amazon, I'm sure I'd buy a bunch more shit on Amazon. Well. Because you'd go on the page and you'd think, oh, that's there. And it's cheaper than it was yesterday. I actually would kind of like one of those.

And I'm sure that these games design around, we just need to get people onto the main screen, into the game, then they'll spend money. Like that's the biggest hurdle, getting them on the phone, if you like. If I look back on all the Blizzard games that I've played, including World of Warcraft to an extent, I don't look back and think I had fun playing those games.

Because actually, I don't think I did. World of Warcraft, I had fun playing those games because actually I don't think I did. World of Warcraft, I had fun playing the game, but it wasn't the game itself. It was the community within the game, right? That's what it was. Because the game allowed for a big community of people all doing stuff together or whatever. And I enjoyed that about World of Warcraft.

Overwatch and Hearthstone, I don't look back on those as fun experiences i i look back on both of those games as feeling compelled to be competitive in them just to climb a ladder or get some points or something like that i i never had the like maybe i'm just like doing it wrong or whatever you're right is this is this odd compulsion you feel compelled to to be very hyper competitive in those games where you know they're they're they are fun enough games where it would just be fun to dick around in them and stuff but i never felt like it was ever worth dicking around honestly like everyone feels as well when they play it like everyone i speak to

with overwatch you know you ask them you ask them like the question like do you ever think you could have like you know gone pro or do you ever think you could have, like, you know, gone pro? Or do you ever think you could have entered a tournament? You know, and they were like, yeah, well, if I played a bit more, I was pretty good. You know, people say that to me. You know, and I'm like, no, no, you couldn't have. That's not how it works. You know, you can't.

I think that's what they make you think. Right. That's how they. There's all the gold and platinum and double platinum and masters and grandmasters and master grandmaster and titanium and diamond and diamond too. You know, they've got this odd, odd structure that tricks you. You know what it's like? It's like the, the classes of boarding on a plane. We now invite our ultra diamond titanium platinum passengers to board it's like

that so do you feel like you're better than everybody else because you get to go on third no but it almost works in the same way as well because it's like with a lot of those airline things the longer you've been part of that club the more solidified you are in it right like it auto renews it does and and most competitive games are the same if you've been masters in a game before um you could have even like the unluckiest streak and you'll still wind up back in masters because somehow like the algorithm just favors you for your your past sort of play time here's an interesting thing yeah like ben um plays this card game called horus heresy which is basically hearthstone but war, and it's terrible.

But he played it on the bus for like six months into The Office of Back. Is it a mobile game, is it? Yeah, it's a mobile game. But he has obviously, he was really good at it, right? Because he was the only fucking person who played it when it came out. And now he's ranked like 10th globally in it. And so he can't stop playing it. It's the only game he plays and it's because he feels like he's at that pro level, right?

And that's alluring. And I think it's a little bit of that that people try and tap into with these competitive games like Overwatch and Hearthstone. If you feel like you're reaching legend or you're getting to a high thing, you think, i'm good at this game i'm gonna keep playing it because you know i'm i could get even better i could become maybe even the best in the universe at this game if i just put more time just feels you don't have to be the best you just have to

be like among the best you know you have to be you have to feel like you're competitive i don't know it's a trick and there's all these tricks you have to try and see them for what they are right yeah because you know it doesn't mean anything it well maybe it does to you and maybe that's enough and if you feel good about it go for it like do do your own thing just be aware of yourselves look after yourselves everyone i love you uh all i care about you he's ending the podcast he's had ending it. I'm ending the podcast. He's had enough. I've said my piece. I've said everything

I wanted to say. Yeah. And I'm happy. Thank you for joining me, Sips, B-Flex. It's good to chat. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for having us

on your podcast. Yeah, we really enjoy it. Next podcast that comes out, Jingle Jam will be in full swing. Will it? Yeah, it will. We're having a CSGO tournament.

I can't wait. That's going to be exciting. That'll be really interesting. That's going to be exciting. That'll be really interesting. That's going to be terrible and wonderful at the same time. I was actually dreaming about it last night. Yeah, scrub CSGO. It's going to be great. All right, thanks, everybody.

See you next time. Bye! Bye!