Triforce! - Triforce! #19: Homebrew Fanfiction

Episode Date: September 14, 2016

The intricacies of Artificial Intelligence, Deanna Troi in a mud-wrestling battle against herself and the first issue of Pyrion's homebrew fanfiction - Bodega Dives To The Right. Triforce is back, baby!   Production music courtesy of Epidemic Sound Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Please play responsibly. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Triforce podcast. Hello. Welcome. Welcome. Hello. With P-Room Flax. Hello.

And Sips. Pip Pip. And Lewis. Hello. Man, how are you guys doing this morning? It's a very fine morning. I was up early this morning. I'm bad.

I'm doing pretty bad. Why? What happened? Oh no. Just, I took a, I went to the bathroom before we started thinking, you know, it was going to be a quick in and out. And it wasn't. You found a lump. No, it's not as bad as that.

It was just a bit of a messy shit, Lewis. Jeez. Do we really have to start with this? Well, I was intrigued because Sip sip said on the discord he's just going for a poop brb five minutes and i took a poop at the exact same time yeah uh because i i find that now i'm getting older i can time my poops like down to the minute i'm like right i've synchronized coffee yeah had a smoke and the nicotine and the caffeine together combine to force my body as my body's like it's pooping time.

It's like we're on a clock. So I'm now thinking if Mrs. F is like, let's go somewhere today, give it half an hour, love, and then we'll go out. Just got to wait. Because I don't want to poop when I'm out. So once that's done, I'm good to go. But I've got to get my business done first. So I do think it's funny we're on the same clock.

I'll tell you what. I used to poop before I had to. I used to feel the urge and need to poop before i did something exciting right that's a good time to do it you don't want to be bungee jumping and then just like pinching a loaf at the same time exactly but i still really get that before going up on stage to do stuff so we went to insomnia uh week week so back and did a stage show and before that stage stage show, man, needed to go so bad. And then once you're out there on the stage, never had a problem at all the whole time.

It's not like I was holding in a massive poop the whole time. See, I'm the opposite. I get up on stage doing a panel. I'm just like, oh, excuse me, everybody. I'll be back in like 10 minutes. I didn't realize this was gonna happen but wow you don't see that tend to happen too much do you on like live television you know people don't have to rush off to do a poop well i think it's like in porn as well there's just lots of enemas right oh i see and like a lot lot they clear themselves out big time so you think

the news readers and all these people who do live stuff are constantly washing themselves out. Constantly just getting a hose up there and just flushing out their system. Just to make sure, yeah, because you never know. BBC News doesn't get interrupted. That's right, yeah. They're professionals. That's what you have to do if you're a professional.

Welcome to show business, kid. Here's your enema. Gee, I didn't know it was going to be like this, mister. That's pretty much how it works. I mean, on the porn side of things for sure yeah it's like i've never done it with uh i never i'd ever been a real professional journalist or professional actor or anything oh you're professional lewis you're one of the most professional people that i know thanks yeah just you just gotta bring your poop game up to up to code that's it you just gotta flush out to flush out your system and you're ready to rock and roll. Imagine a world where you're about to go on stage at a stage show and you don't need to poop because your system has already been flushed out three days prior.

And there's no chance of you pooping again for like a week. Beautiful. It's a dream. It's my dream. It's a world we can have. We just have to make sure that we get there together. I'm not sure we deserve it, though. it's my dream it's a it's a world we can have we just have to make sure that we we we get there together i'm not sure we deserve it though that's the thing what a world where with planned poop yeah i don't know like i think that's like our curse like this that's that's like more evidence that this this earth of ours is actually hell and we don't realize it yeah we're doomed i wonder if we can fill this entire podcast just chatting about poop because we don't realize it. We're doomed. I wonder if we can fill this entire podcast

just chatting about poop. I hope not. Because we haven't really got anything else to talk about. It feels like no time has gone by since the last time we recorded this podcast. Yeah, me and Lewis are in the vacuum of World of Warcraft right now. We've been playing it heavy for like a week and a bit now.

That's all we've been doing, unfortunately. So we have nothing new to talk about. No. We had to force ourselves to play Hearts of Iron 4 yesterday, pretty much. It was fun, though. No, I'm just joking. We didn't have to force ourselves. It was fantastic.

It was really good. That game is crazy, by the way. Holy shit, it's so weird. It is super weird. I wish I had more manpower, and I wish I had more units so that I could do more. Because all I'm doing is doing air everywhere. Yeah, it is. I mean, the problem is, I think now we've played enough that we could do more? Because all I'm doing is doing air everywhere. Yeah, it is. I mean, the problem is,

I think now we've played enough that we could try and do a game where one of us is Germany, one of us is Japan, and one of us is another, like Italy, maybe. Maybe, yeah. And see if we can conquer it as the Axis.

I think it would be good because there is a bit to manage, but I think we all know the game. Yeah. So I was watching, not watching, I saw on the power survive for subreddit someone completed a complete world conquest right as liberia wow

so they took over every single island they took over every single man that must have been really satisfying to do as liberia imagine just knowing the game so well that you can do that that would be fun i would enjoy doing that it can do that. That would be fun. I would enjoy doing that. It's mad. I would definitely tinker away at that for a couple of weeks. It would be great. I mean, his strategy, okay, if you're interested,

he started off as Liberia, and he basically just joined the Axis and then sort of declared war on the Netherlands very early. Apparently, it's pretty lightly defended and just took over the netherlands as liberia completely just you know like ambushed them and then moved in on the uk took that and then from there well yeah i suppose once you take over the uk you're like pretty pretty good to go yeah with hearts of iron four i mean it's an early edition of it really i mean i know that it was in development for a long time and they were struggling with quite a lot of a lot of it for sort of quite a while and i think one of the

the biggest problems it's got at the moment with the ai is the national focuses because i think that a lot of the time the ai is involved in something way you know it's it's really really difficult for the ai to win a war or to to secure an objective and the national focus comes along and says something to the nazis like um uh invade scandinavia and they go okay that's what we're doing now and they abandon the plans that they've got to go off and do that and we we saw that where they were at war with the french which and they always attack the magno line for some reason because i think the ai thinks oh i'd have to spend time you know i mean there needs to be a national focus that says, we're going to go through Belgium. That needs to be a national focus, to go through the Netherlands and Belgium, rather than throw

thousands of men at the Maginot Line to die. I think it is one of them. The AI is just not very good. It's a long-running problem. The best coders of AI in the world have to be people who are making video games right and in fact ai programming and ai education and stuff like this has been driven by video games often because yeah it's very very difficult if you imagine how to because often computers are given these things where it's said like you know if this happens do

this and then do this you know but they don't yeah imagine like all right it's like but then again what's fine for much like civ are very complicated games and the ai doesn't do them very well unless it gets to cheat well it's never very fluid in games though it you you're the ai is only as good as what whoever's coding it can think up of that's going to happen and that how it can respond to it sort of thing you know what i mean mean? I think there's a reason for that. And I've actually been doing, I don't know if I mentioned this, I've been doing some stuff with York University, right? And about three months ago, I went up there for a visit to York University and they're doing this thing about statistics in esports. They're working towards a project on that and they want to use machine learning to do it.

So they're sort of, they've got this really cool thing where they they want to use machine learning to do it. So they've got this really cool thing where they've got all this machine learning stuff and this neural net and everything like that. And it can go over, it's working with Dota and CSGO at the moment and a few other games. And because of the way that Valve coded the API for their games, you can pull all this statistical data out of the game using things like, I don't know what programs they have, but you can have millions and millions and millions of games, and you could present, for instance, the average location of a hero across 10 million games. So you can compare your positioning with what the average is, and then you can scale that so, well, what's the average positioning of 5k MMR, 6K MMR, and sort of see what differences there are

between bad players and good players. Now, most of the AI that happens for games, it's self-contained. It has no way of learning. It has no way, like you can figure out what the AI is going to do and sort of play it. You know what I mean? You can sort of play the AI because you think,

well, it always does this in this situation. So I know that if I do this, this, and this, I'm in position. Yeah, and that's because it'll have been coded to respond to like a situation in x number of ways right and it's really easy to learn it doesn't learn and what it needs to do is is learn and what that what needs to happen is that that the developers of the game I think this will happen eventually will say the game's going to start off fairly simply and the AI is going to be as good as we can make it but it is going to learn over all of your games and it's going to figure out ways to beat people in certain situations and what's the best i mean

it'll find the best balance of forces because it's got millions of games to compare it to so it can say that on average in this situation the best thing to do is this or that so i think that that's the next evolution of ai is that to use the data from all those people playing the game to improve it for everybody. That's the next step, I think. Yeah, I mean, in some examples though, like the AI in Hearthstone, for example, I think sometimes it's coded, not badly,

but it's coded in a certain way that from the outside, like from you as the player perceiving it, it's like this ai coding is terrible like what were they thinking but i think sometimes they do it for like comedy effect or yeah you know they do it very specifically in that way so that you can get through it or or that you yourself learn something by them making like a bad mistake which is kind of clever in itself actually like i think people just dismiss it straight away as like oh this is too easy you know this is dumb we're talking about you know yeah yeah but i think i think in in some specific cases it's it's done on purpose for for you to

learn something or or or for yeah maybe you know just just for like some sort of like story or comedy effect and i think you know that, that's a totally different situation. You know, that AI never does need to learn sort of thing. But certainly in something like Hearts of Iron or like Stellaris or something, the AI would totally benefit from being able to learn and adapt and do different things. But like, what if it went like too far

and became like really, really, really, really good and you could never beat it? Well, that's where that planning award... And then Skynet, and then Vordaer. And then it actually does it, yeah. I mean, that's where the difficulty level would be, that you would set the difficulty level and that would limit it to a certain depth of search, if you like.

Because if you give a machine long enough, it'll run through enough permutations that it'll arrive at an optimal sort of strategy. So what you want to say is limit the depth of its search and also maybe it has to choose from a few within a range. Whereas if you want to play on lethal difficulty, it always chooses the absolute optimal strategy. That would be amazing. Imagine a world where the military just got so lazy that they they depended

on you know like game ai to to you know manage and i don't think it's hard to imagine it's crazy that'd be pretty good let the computer do this can we uh phone a paradox we're gonna need the klauswitz uh engine uh to plan out this one deploy klauswitz mr president the Clausewitz engine to plan out this one. Deploy Clausewitz. Mr. President, your Clausewitz launch codes, please. Oh, shit. That'd be so good. Put up Hot Survive 5. There's a war going on.

Let's run a simulation. Now, the simulation says it's 1945, but let's, for argument's sake, say it's 2020 and uh we're you know nukes actually matter and uh they don't just take out train tracks anymore mr president oh my god so sorry yeah spoilers uh so basically like this is a really interesting thing because elon musk believes that we're living in a computer simulation yeah simulation theory is a is a big thing i've been i've been reading about it it's an interesting one but it's it's kind of a philosophical thing yeah the other thing elon musk said though is that um and a lot of people have said this there was a book called super intelligence by this philosopher and he talked a lot and it became very popular and

it was basically talking about how if machine brains surpass human brains, the super brains will replace humans. Basically, it's the doom scenario that the post-human society will not, well, obviously a post-human society won't involve humans, but AIs are the biggest danger, more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

That's what Elon Musk actually said. Because we were playing Divinity, right? The pre-alpha. And one of the things that was talked about there I found really interesting was that they were talking about how they coded the AI to make it harder. And the way they coded the AI to make it harder was not to do with self-learning or anything like that. It was that they watched a load of humans playing Divinity on YouTube

and then found out what they did and then deliberately coded the encounters to counter that stuff. Okay, so that is like garbage. That's a garbage level of intelligence. But the other thing that's interesting is that when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov back in the day at chess, I think that's what it was called, everyone thought, oh, chess is over. It's just going to be a computer game now.

Computers can do it better. It's going to be boring. We're going to watch computers play against computers. But what he did was after he did that, he actually made a league. You can identify yourself as a human or a computer and you can actually play anything so you can actually just you can actually get a computer and have a computer play with you or you can be a team of people like i didn't realize that was the thing because i actually identify as a computer so for a league to accept me with open arms like you can identify it's

whatever you want i'll be whatever you want. But the best chess players in the world right now are actually a combination of computers and people. Cyborgs. So it's not, yeah. No. You know what I find, something that it's worth mentioning as well,

something I always find really depressing when I'm playing Fallout, for example, and this maybe could happen to us as well. Like something I always find really depressing, like when I'm playing, you know, like Fallout, for example. And like, you know, this maybe could happen to us as well. You know, imagine AI becomes so strong and imagine somehow we are wiped out by robots or something like that. And then, you know, thousands and thousands of years later on, because like the robots just don't know what to do. They just sort of meander around and do whatever it was that they were intended to do in the first place. And then some other distant civilization lands on planet Earth, which is still totally intact and everything. But it's just completely sort of run by these like boring ass weird robots with like, you know, Coca-Cola slogans that they're chanting out every once in a while and stuff and like what what what is another civilization gonna think of us if that's what

they see you know what i mean like when you're playing fallout and you you see like a like a nuka cola robot like walking around saying like hey bring your kids down to nuka world and stuff like that you're sort of like oh fuck that like the old world is like funny and and charming in its own way but man it's like kind of depressing as well right like and like and that's the only insight they get into your civilization is these crappy shitty robots that you've made that are now just like shuffling around on this beautiful earth where there's like no humans left sort of thing i don't want it i don't want i don't want to be embarrassed like that thousands of years after my death i find that game depressing anyway like there's the whole thing it's it's super depressing yeah everyone's so sad there's a thing about

futurism though right and that's basically that trying to predict the future is very very difficult um especially the near future but the more distant future is actually not so difficult to predict in a sense because, you know, for example, I think the analogy, I can't remember who said this, but the analogy is that when it rains on a mountain, you can't predict where that rain is going to go, but you can predict that it's going to go down.

You can predict that it's going to run down into a river and that river is going to go into the sea. You can't predict where, how, you know, it's very difficult to predict all the little raindrops, but it's very easy to know where the big direction is. And the reality of what that means is, though, that if this alien race came along and saw

this happening on Earth, it would be familiar to them from their own experiences, their own past. It's an experience that the way that civilizations evolve is not unlikely to be similar. They are going to develop nuclear weapons at some point, and maybe they will Armageddon themselves.

Maybe they'll move past that to another point where they've developed another thing, and then maybe they'll Armageddon themselves, and they'll develop past that point to another thing, and then maybe they'll Armageddon themselves to the point where they get to go and explore our planet, and they'll think, okay, these guys only reached this stage. And they think, we never Armageddon themselves to the point where they get to go and explore our planet. And they'll think, okay, these guys only reached this stage. And they think, we never Armageddoned anything.

Let's try it on these guys. You never know though. I mean, that's like, we're basing that based on human nature and like, you know, the way that we are, the way that like at a very basic level we operate. And like we've always, humans have always had some sort of you know uh idea of like conflict and um being stronger than than somebody else and like the whole sort of um you know concept of like alpha male and this and that and like you know what if an alien race just doesn't have any of that maybe maybe they're just like all fun loving you know buddhas or something

and they just you know they spend all their loving you know buddhas or something and they just you know they spend all their time like examining the feelings of like insects and and stuff and i mean if the nazis had won imagine that world that we'd have now imagine that you can so there's a netflix series about it based on a philip k dick book called the man in the high castle yeah i mean that that sounds great i going to watch it when I get home after I've played WoW and Deus Ex and the new Fallout DLC. There's a movie.

I've got a lot to do. I'm busy. There's a movie. I'm busy, P-Fax. There's a movie. He's stressing out about video games, P-Fax. I know. It's depressing.

There's a film in The Man in the High Castle, in that world. There's a film called The Grasshopper Lies Sleepy or something like that i can't remember what it's called and it's a film of world war ii being lost by the nazis and they're not quite sure like they're looking at historical footage of world war ii being lost by the nazis despite living in a universe where the nazis won and that's the premise it's very interesting grasshopper lies heavy heavy yeah there you go yeah um but it's a yeah it's it's interesting the book is very interesting it's

weird because america is split in half between the japanese west coast and the uh nazi east coast oh i remember hearing about this actually yeah yeah it's it's worth a watch it's okay um but the japanese have a very different cultural approach to the fact that they've conquered america because they're obsessed with american culture and arcana so they're like any kind of american pre-war uh relics they're really really interested in and they live this very strange sort of life where they're still into the have you heard of the i ching oh yeah it's like a collection of you you sort of throw these sort of sticks that have things on them and you look them up in that order and the book will tell you what you should do in any given circumstance so

it's like a sort of all right a sort of portable uh it's like a divination horoscope yeah that sort of thing yeah so there's they're still living by that kind of thing it's an it's interesting anyway it's pretty good if you like alternate history i love i love alternate reality and alternate history stuff yeah i love historical fiction. I love reading kind of stories that... Because history can be very boring if you just read out the facts. But actually, history is, I think, sometimes extremely cool. Yeah. And dramatic and exciting.

And people are horrible to each other. I think this goes back to the whole AI thing and what Xavier was talking about. And it's basically basically if you create an ai that is aware and self-aware its main overriding factor is not to die people really do not want to die and this thing this these things these things are these ais they created will really just i think that's the major thing like the chances of you ever creating a benevolent like the chances of you ever creating a benevolent ai that that will be willing to die is zero everything that is alive fights so hard to carry on living yeah so that's that's what it's all about i mean have you heard about the the basilisk no no this is supposed that there is some guy

proposed there's a forum uh i can't remember what internet forum it is i apologize it's like people philosophize about the near future stuff and future technology sounds like there's something awful.com forums yeah it sounds like a lot of that kind of stuff happens there for sure yeah go check it out uh listeners um this is a uh this is a different forum and someone was talking about this the the uh we live in a simulation, all that kind of stuff. The thing is this, if there is a super advanced AI, perhaps their entire outlook on humanity would be that they will retroactively punish you for not doing everything that you could in your power to assist in the creation

of this AI. The AI will run a simulation of your life. And if at no point in that simulation do you assist in the creation of this AI, you are obviously not a benevolent person, given that the AI is benevolent and is looking out for people and we now have harmony and all the rest of it. So it will retroactively punish you and you'll spend a simulated eternity in hell." Which I thought was a really crazy, mind-melting idea, but a lot of people got very freaked out by it. But my problem with the whole we're living in a simulation thing is that I don't think it serves any purpose.

The idea that some superintelligence would have come up with an idea why we should all live in a simulation and manage it and all the rest of it doesn't really make sense. I don't quite understand why it would bother. No. I don't think it's too relevant. I think there are a couple of interesting things about the future. One of the ideas is that we will eventually be able to basically either live forever through kind of health and genetic modification to some extent plus there's in a couple of hundred years when computers have advanced sufficiently we'll be able to basically just download our consciousness or our brain into a computer and mimic it in a computer and live in this virtual world like like world of warcraft live there right and other and

it will become slowly this thing where no one has to die your grandma doesn't have to die no one has to just like preserve your brain in a jar and hook you up to world of warcraft no they don't even preserve your brain they just copy all the electrical impulses uh they scan your brain and it gets put into a hard drive and you know you can store people in hard drives. So death will become this taboo. I mean, honestly, I know people are saying like, oh, you know, we desperately don't want to die. But actually when I'm 90, I'm ready.

Like I will die. Like I'm good with that. I'm cool. Like just, you know. Just live in World of Warcraft. Not even. Just like, just fucking pull the plug. I'm done.

I'm, you know, I, 90 years is enough for me. Like, I don't need to live, like, much longer than that. I don't know if I'd want to. Like, you know, if I could live forever with, like, my 18-year-old body and stuff, cool. But, like, I don't want to live forever with, like, a fucking old decrepit geriatrics body. Or in a virtual world or anything. Like, I don't want to fucking. You can you can always ask to be deleted yeah just come on sips imagine you know the thing is it will be like you are in this 18 year old's body because the

technology will be so advanced it'll be like going to the holodeck you know i think like i think you know cremation i think that's why it exists you're not gonna have to worry about this because it's not gonna be in your lifetime i know but this idea of like burning somebody's body i think people do that on purpose because they're like i'm done like i don't want there to be any ifs ends or buts nothing you know just fucking burn me and that's it i'm done right i don't want to accidentally like come back and be stuck in the morgue like alive somehow like overnight or something i want to have my brain frozen and i want to come back in like a thousand years and they'll be like welcome to the future i'd fucking love that i'm just so curious somebody else's problem oh no you can't

do that i i think having your brain frozen is a real danger i mean we've got to understand that you know i had a really bad dream last night. Okay. I'm sorry. Really horrible. A really bad dream. Right. Yeah.

Imagine if I had my brain frozen at the moment of having a nightmare. Oh, God. I mean, I would have, it would be horrible to have be living that nightmare out. But you're assuming that your brain is going to be active. The point is it's frozen. Yeah. It's not doing anything. It's not doing anything. There's no thought going on.

Yeah. Your brain is essentially dead but preserved. It's like in Aliens when they travel very far and they go into the cryo sleep chamber thing. There's nothing happening. I think they do dream there though, don't they, maybe? I feel like if all the electrical impulses in your brain are frozen and stopped anyway, aren't you dead anyway?

Yeah, but then you come back. That's the point. And they reanimate you. I don't think you can though.'s the point and they can though i think the electrical impulses that are happening right now are what are making you up and as soon as that stops you're dead i don't think you can i don't think no i think that chamber's got like a built-in defib so like when they thaw you out just like in your back just like i love how we're theorizing i think there's a lot i think we can i write pfx i will concede that that is a possible

i think there's some some things in science we can. All right, P-Facts. I will concede that that is a possibility. I think there's some things in science which are impossible, right? That's silly. So, for example, traveling faster than light is a very difficult concept. It's very difficult, but I would never say it's impossible. I don't think it's impossible. I think what a lot of us, I think nowadays, I think we have the time and the luxury to sit around and think up all this crazy shit um but the reality is that none of it is going to happen in our

lifetimes or our children's lifetimes i disagree i disagree have you not heard about the the em drive that's just yeah but that's not going to go faster than light there's a lot of rules of the universe the only way to go faster than light is to go through some sort of wormhole or whatever. But doing that is so crazy and out there. I don't even think it's wormholes. The fact is, though, that humans are not made to really go into space either. No, I don't really want to be in space. We go up into a plane and we get bombarded by radiation.

We'll be fine. They'll figure it out. It would be silly to say otherwise. I think there are two issues. Number one is, will we destroy ourselves before then, which is the biggest concern, and it is a real possibility. And number two is time dilation, I think, is the biggest issue we're going to have about faster-than-light travel.

Because what's the fucking point in setting off on a six-month mission where you're travelling faster than light and you get to some other system, and behind you the world has aged two or three hundred years what's the point it destroys what's the point i mean by the time you get there everything and everybody you left behind is gone they might have even come there's a there are many sci-fi stories about this where a ship sets off on this voyage and but when it gets there it finds that the system it's arrived that is already developed and colonized because they were overtaken yeah the people of earth 300 years in the future have managed to come up with warp gates or something and got there and they were like yeah sorry we didn't tell you guys when you're five mission to this star we had no way of stopping this ship once it started started getting going so

uh we just left you yeah so i think that's's the issue is we're not mentally ready for dealing with it. I think the difficulty, though, for me is that I love, I know a lot about science, but not too much. I'm not like a fucking doctor or none of us are, right? If you actually want to read a thing about science or any of this stuff, go ahead and do it, right? We're not the experts. But I think that when I was a kid, magic was so special because I didn't really understand the rules of the universe. Whereas now, I have a better idea of futurism and what sci-fi or some shows in the same way that I don't get that kind of joy about mystery necessarily anymore because some of it's just so, you know, I see things happening

and I'm like, wow, this is so kind of bollocks. You know, I don't like it. I don't know. I like the hard. I've always read. I started off reading some hard sci-fi, it's so-called. Right. Because it's more. You just got I like the hard... I've always read... I started off reading hard sci-fi, so-called, because it's more... Right, the hard stuff. You just got right into the hard stuff.

Asimov, Asimov and stuff like that, Arthur C. Clarke. Yeah. It's surprising how Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov actually does hold up today. Even though it was written about 50 years ago, it feels like you're still reading some really good science-based sci-fi. I think it's quite philosophical a lot of this stuff like asimov's the rules for robots and stuff that's that's actual that's actual philosophy i mean that's the kind of stuff you can look at that and say this isn't just the and then the robot pulled out his cannon arm and fired at bodega

but bodega using his cyborg legs dive the left, anticipating the robot's cannon arm, and shot back at him with his LAS pistol. It's probably good sci-fi. Please carry on. I'm fucking really enjoying this. I'm reading from his homebrew fanfiction. What happened next to Bodega, period? Bodega. Bodega.

Tell me more about this. Bodega. He sounds great. Does he have a cape? No, he doesn't. I hope so. Bodega shuns capes. He wears a jetega. He sounds great. Does he have a cape? No, he doesn't. I hope so. Bodega shuns capes. He wears a jetpack.

Rightly so. And Bodega fired his jetpack and shut down the caped fool who was wearing a cape. What? Yeah, but there'll be another one in a second. I love how we have a little girl who is part of this podcast. Dan is trying to get a sci-fi on. Jeez. She's interested in Bodega.

Yeah, she wants to find out about the cape and the jet pack. Jeez. Oh, my God. I love it. She's funny. Yeah. Oh, God. So what else have you guys been doing this week?

Anything fun happen? I started playing the Nuka World DLC for Fallout 4. Oh, cool. And it's cool, man. It's pretty fun it's like you can tell that the guys who made it have have been to disneyland uh lots of times because there's all of the sort of the tropes of of you know like a theme park or like a major sort of child-friendly family-friendly theme park in there um but it's it's got the usual sort of fallout stuff in it as well which

has been really cool so far like i've i've barely done any of it and so far it's just been great it's just been really fun like the the whole sort of idea of nuka world um the storyline that's like behind it that the factions and stuff is it's really well done it's really really good it's worth getting the last it's the last dlc isn't it yeah i think it's the last for the season pass so i i don't know what the plans are for future dlc or if they're if if that's it now that like you know because i guess the idea for the season pass is that you you buy it ahead of time and it gives you all of the DLC at a discounted price. It's the roadmap of

DLC, but I haven't heard that there's anything else in development. There were hints that it was going to come along. I think Pete Hines said that we're going to do more than we planned. They've mentioned that they might think about doing another one, but there's no necessarily big plans. I feel like the

DLC and the frequency that's come out in has it has enhanced the game a lot and made it a lot more fun to play you know that definitely it's introduced a lot of like interesting cool things that you can you can do and you can spend time doing and it i i think it's just really well done like i when i first started playing fallout 4 i i liked it because I really liked the Fallout setting. I, you know, I'm generally a fan of Fallout games and stuff,

but for some reason I played for about 50 hours and I got really bogged down in the settlement stuff. And then it was just like, oh, you know, I think like I played enough. I don't really want to play anymore. But coming back to it now, I'm starting to realize more and more that it's,

it, it is a really good game. Like it, and you know, a lot of people dismissed it straight away saying that it wasn't very good but um i i personally think like it's starting to to become almost as memorable as new vegas for me which is hard to actually i think it's just matched the new vegas metacritic score because i think previously it was lower. Yeah.

But the user score certainly has been lower than the... Metacritic has been lower than the reviewer, whatever it is, professional review site score. I don't know why that is. Well, I think we just... We live in this culture now where we don't... We're not willing to spend time or money trying things when when other people have done it already like i i think sometimes we put too much stock into what people are saying and reviewing and stuff you know like i i i i read reviews i listen to people who who

criticize games and review games and you know sometimes i agree with them or whatever but you really like everybody's tastes are so different. You really have to just, you know, if something appeals to you and you want to play it and you want to try it, you should just go for it. Because you might you might be surprised, you know, like Fallout 4. If you read any reviews like, you know, you'd stay away from it. But I'd say if you stay away from it, you're missing out on some potentially really good, really good moments like in gaming. Like there's definitely some good stuff in there. And it's it's just such a rich sort of like the map is i guess smaller than people are used to but man there's so much in there it's crazy like it's just really good if you really like the

setting and the universe and stuff it's it's it's really good i like it yeah well well good good good top top notch review i definitely want to play it again once uh load of mods you know i tend to come back to these games once they're gold yeah and so you know there'll be a whatever it is a gold edition where you get fucking everything i mean i've already got the season pass but it's kind of it's a nice often a nice patch when the gold comes out that yeah i mean if you got the season if you got the season pass and you got all the dlc there's there's enough there to do. Like, Far Harbor itself is huge. Like, it's a big story driven DLC.

Yeah, but I can't help installing a bunch of mods. Like, I always enjoy an alternate start mod where you can start in a little shack and pretend to be someone else. Oh, yeah, that's cool. You know, I like kind of a couple of mods that just add more mobs out in the landscape or weird stuff like that. I got the season pass. Did that. I got the season pass. Did you? I have the season pass. I don't even have the game installed. I only played 21 hours and it was okay. I enjoyed it, but at the time I couldn't stream it. So I kind of

stopped playing it. On my old machine I just couldn't stream it, so I didn't play it. I just kind of, I mean, I did enjoy it. I just, like I said, I do find it, I do find it very depressing. So I just kind of don't enjoy it so much. I've been fielding questions this week, or should I say corrections, because I dared to say that Gandalf didn't change his outfit during Lord of the Rings. And of course, as we all know, Perion,

after defeating the Balrog, he became Gandalf the White and he got a new staff and he got a new cloak. All right, whatever, nerd. I mean, it's only like, you know, it was grey before. He might have just accidentally left it out in the sun or something.

Yeah, A, maybe he just whittled it, you know, you never know. And B, he did that once in the whole epic saga. He didn't do it every time he killed a bear and found, you know, it's not like every time they're out in the whole epic saga yeah he didn't do it every time he killed a bear and found and got you know it's not like every time they're out in the wild gandalf's like boar and just kills it runs over rummages around in its claws and and its fur and finds a good shield you know he he

killed a barrel gandalf does like at night when he goes home you know he's like all right hobbits well you know it's been been a great day but he smokes a lot of weed that's what they you know that's what they do he just smokes do you think he like washes his cloak ever or like do you think he takes it off and hangs it up and he's just like stark naked underneath he just walks around his house like no no clothes on is this the kind of stuff you think about sips well i wonder when gandalf gets naked yeah what does he look like under that cloak god i wonder what his tongue feels like in my mouth no but like you know what i mean like it's funny kiss me now oh master gandalf i don't know about it kiss me you know like the thing is when you when when you're watching lord of the rings

and you and the hobbits are presented to you and you can see their houses and stuff. You have like a fairly good idea of what their life is like, right? Like the Teletubbies. Yeah. You can imagine that at night they've got the fire going. They're probably making a roast or whatever. Yeah.

Probably talking about some dumb shit and smoking weed and stuff and, you know, drinking a bit. And then they, you can see their little beds and they probably go to sleep in their little beds. And they've always got like some little, some hanging from a line like inside their house and everything but like you never get that insight into gandalf like what does he do he's just like yeah you know does

he just have one of those depressing like one room apartments where like the only light is the tv and it's an infomercial and he's just like drinking a bottle of whiskey shout at the tv yeah you know he's got like pieces of microwave dinner stuck in his beard or whatever like who knows you know you never get that insight we can imagine the hobbits taking a shit but we can't imagine gandalf doing it like no you cannot imagine that guy even you can't even imagine him pissing in a lake i can imagine him mckellan doing it you can imagine a hobbit like just you know ripping into a lake what are you talking about i could definitely imagine gandalf taking a shit with that smiley face with the epic saxophone music playing well no i mean he's not gonna be shitting like that's the thing he just magics the shit away he gives

himself a magic enema in like a hobbit's outhouse you know he like bangs his head on the door on the way out he's in the hobbit's house right oh i see yeah exactly we we have no locale in which there's no context yeah we can't where's gandalf's house he doesn't have one he's got a wagon yeah see this is the thing he's got a wagon what do you mean if he's immortal surely he's had time to build a house why he doesn't need a house he would need one for sure even somebody who's immortal? Surely he's had time to build a house. Why? He doesn't need a house. He would need one for sure. Even somebody who's immortal needs a place to just like put their feet up. You build a house, you're immortal. In 10 years time or a thousand years time, property prices have gone loco. Or, you know, bad neighbors moved in.

Orcs moved in down the road. Saruman's built something, you know, knocked down all the trees. You're like, oh, I wish I'd never built this house. It took me a hundred years to build. What a waste of time. know, knocked down all the trees. You're like, oh, I wish I'd never built this house. It took me 100 years to build. Yeah. What a waste of time. I should have lived in the wagon. He is a Maiar.

That's his name. He's a lesser Ainur who are less powerful than the Valar. Yeah. But still pretty powerful. There you go. That's Lord of the Rings for you. I know. No wonder they didn't put any of that in the fucking films

Anytime there's a cool story The lore behind the story Is always the worst thing Oh it's so dumb That's bad Yeah I mean god It's tough It's like that thing I said about history before

If you just do all the facts it's boring But if you can tell a story around it People love to suck the mystery out of something because if they're interested in something there's a breed of people that want to know every detail of it and understand it completely rather than accept that's right he's a cool guy he's a wizard who comes and goes what more do you know people would love to love to open the mystery box it's like old fucking jj abrams in the lost mystery box that ted talk do you remember the ted talk where he talked about the mystery box No I can only remember one specific Ted talk

Tommy two times The only Ted talk I've ever heard Is the great fucking journey one That you went on My magical fucking journey I think I've spoken about this before But yeah he basically had a box with a question mark on it Like a mystery box like a lucky block

They sell them at all these fucking conventions. Like a Super Mario box. That's trademark, by the way. People love to buy something which they don't know what's in there. Or open something they don't know what's in there. And it could be anything, right? It could be a head out of seven. It could be like fucking Gandalf's shit in there.

He's shat in a box it could be well that's all the rage now like that's how toys work now remember when we were kids you went to the you know like um we had packs of cards and stickers remember sticker books yes you buy a pack of stickers and you'd get like 10 stickers and you'd often get doubles and occasionally get like a hologram or whatever um but now they've they've they've sort of moved on uh past that they still do those by the way but now they do that with toys so collectible toys and they do them in series as well which is even more of a money spinner so like for instance so fucking right duncan buys all of these dota 2 like collectible toys and you don't

know which one you're getting you buy the box and you open it and you're like oh sweet i got a golden fucking penis muncher or whatever is the hero's name is and yeah you know that's queen of pain you're thinking of there sorry sorry yeah so but like with kids toys it's it's the same now you can get these little lego figurines like disney lego figurines it's like series one try to collect pluto and mickey and donald and whatever and you buy like five of them and you get like three donalds and like if you're lucky maybe you get mickey mouse or whatever you know what i mean and it's like so in the end of course you end up spending like way more than you would have just yeah they put this into everything right and so i think the idea is that you trade with other people.

But then again, I think it's a really, I don't know, it's really annoying to me to not have all of them. You know, it's annoying to me to not have all of them. You're going to do an achievement rant now, aren't you? Yeah, it's weird how life, anyway, before we get into that weird thing around unboxing. This is maybe why the unboxing videos on youtube is so popular too right because and why anything that you buy

comes in this you know it's quite exciting to unbox like a phone or whatever you know is it well i don't know it's really or or a thing like a collect edition you know is it oh it's a box with stuffing it really is pflax it really is even i'm not that excited opening it and i buy them i'm just like yeah okay well fuck here i just got a bunch of junk that's gonna sit around and i'm not really gonna look at now oh shut up when that box arrives you're like oh what's in this box every single time when i was 12 years old yeah now that i'm 36 no come on dad lighten the fuck up. Look, we have both witnessed the ultimate unboxing,

which is a child being born, Lewis. Wow. Once you've seen that unboxing, that changes you. I don't care what collector's edition of this, that, or the other. You care to mention. It's not going to be a child, so it's shit. Boom.

I don't care about that art book and that soundtrack CD. I don't even have a fucking CD player. You're right. Fuck. Yeah, Lewis, you don't give a shit about that stuff. I don't want this cheap mouse mat with penis punch on it. Because you're just going to go home and do the same shit. You're not going to read that art book.

You're not going to listen to that CD soundtrack. So what's the point? I'm never going to read that art book. I'll flick through it and be like, this is a nice art book but that's what duncan's like when he opens these dota figurines he shows me it's like oh this isn't and i'm like oh that's a that's not a terrible you know yeah but you have to be positive right it's like yeah that's that's a nice thing put it on the shelf and leave it there you have to be after you've just spent that much money on something you don't even know what you're getting yeah i would want to be positive as well but the idea with jj was to link back around the whole thing is that you know he's

he bought this mystery box he put it on his shelf and he doesn't want to open it because it's full of disappointment right but in its form of mystery mysterious and he doesn't know what's in it it's actually quite exciting yeah it's like oh it could be anything in it use your imagination yeah and that's kind of what he tried to do with lost but that then like i think it ended up being this thing where everyone needed answers everyone was like what's the answer what's the answer what's the answer all the fucking time and then the answer was was almost a pirate with an eye patch living in a hatch somewhere shit in a box but But then, so what was the end of Lost? Was it they were in purgatory or something? No, they had been dead sort of the whole time.

I feel like, yeah, we shouldn't really necessarily. Do you know what? This isn't really a spoiler because I watched all of Lost and I'm still not sure. I think they were dead and they were helping each other get to a settled afterlife not necessarily heaven but they all had problems

and if you like sort of loose ends and they all needed everything to be neatly tied together but what about the people that died though like Mr. Echo and like Walt and Michael they left he was there he's fine he's cool he made it no problem so Echo made it back after getting killed by

the shed weren't they the thing with lost is i read a really good article and it was just like a hundred questions that people had for lost and pretty much every answer was because the island is magical and if you accept that and just say it's just a magic place i mean here's the thing with lost i really enjoyed watching it the ending was a bit of a letdown but i loved every episode especially the episode my my favorite was when they had the underground bunker i can't what it was called and oh it was wonderful so it was like everybody that was that was what everyone was talking about at the time it was it was the game of thrones of its day it was the you know everyone came into work and they talked about the latest episode and they were like what's in that bunker yeah what's gonna be

under that button and stuff and then the polar bear comic and stuff. And then they had that wonderful episode at the start of the series where what's-his-face, who was in the bunker, was doing his daily routine, going in the shower, cooking some eggs, you know,

listening to some music, dancing around. And then he hears this like suddenly rocking explosion and that's, you know, when Locke and Jack, you know, drop the dynamite on that hole

and they're looking down into it. And then when Locke leaves the thing to run too long and it goes, and everything starts to go crazy. I mean, that was fucking great. I was like, what's happening?

That was the thing. It was amazing TV. But that's the same thing with people needing to know, is Gandalf a Valerian, Clolian or a Larian, Lillarian? Because the Larian, Lillarian,

they want to know details so that they can go on and on about how much they know about a thing without accepting mystery because we don't like uncertainty, do we? I think it's partly that but I think as well Lost and Heroes

remember Heroes started off pretty good if you ever watch that the first season or two of Heroes was pretty good and then it got pretty bad Lost was the same the first couple of seasons were really good, and then it got pretty bad. Lost was the same. The first couple of seasons were really good, and then it started getting really bad. Now listen.

It's symptomatic of network television in the US and the way that network television is run. So like ABC, CBS, and NBC and stuff like that. Anything that has a primetime slot on terrestrial television that isn't like hbo or like a paid for thing or whatever the first couple of seasons and like certainly like the pilots and stuff the original team that writes the show are are involved and they control the show right and then and and the show is is really good at that point because the original team that wrote it know what they're doing know how they want to take it forward and stuff but then what happens is the networks start to get involved because of ratings so they're like well you know this episode came out and the ratings are much lower than you know

this episode which aired two years ago or whatever so can we get some of the magic from that episode two years ago into this and then they have to start changing the writing and they have to start changing the formula absolutely to prop up the ratings and that that's what kills the show every single time heroes and lost are like yeah there's a couple of things i've got to say about that the prime example as well is that star trek voyager keeps linking back to the borg all the time because they knew that the borg were a big deal they did well early in the series and they keep having to have these fucking terrible borg episodes much much later into the thing i mean seven of nine i think star trek's a little bit of an exception

because both TNG, DS9 and Voyager all started off very poor. And the reason was because TNG originally had Gene Roddenberry writing it and he wasn't very good at that point. He wasn't really, he wasn't really, he wasn't very good anymore.

And so when they got rid of him, it got a lot better. They always say about when Riker grew the beard and also the same thing with Cisco, like DS9, the first three series, really bad bad and then it just picks up with the dominion war and it's almost like somebody to take the networks take a step back and just say hey go ahead do what you want and i think voyager was bad in general but ds9 really picked up and actually became one of the best star treks and tng was great deep space nine was was one of the best Star Treks. And TNG was great too. Deep Space Nine was one of the best,

not like best memories I have of being a kid in a good way. It was one of the clearest memories I have of being a kid, of being really hyped for something and then being massively disappointed in it when it came out. A lot of DS9. Man, we were so hyped for Deep Space Nine. We were like, oh shit, this is going to be amazing. It's going to be in the same time slot as The Next Generation,

which was still being aired at the time and stuff. And like, we were just like, oh God, it's going to be amazing. Like, I can't wait for it. And like the first episode was like an hour long and we were like falling asleep halfway through it and stuff. It was like terrible. It was on at 6 p.m. in the UK. And so when I came in from school it was always on

at Deep Space Nine at 6pm and I used to watch it and I really remember hating it and I think it's because I'd watched these early seasons and these bad episodes because they all have them and I don't think the BBC I think that the US networks sell off the episodes you know, anyway I think I just watched the first

three seasons because I've been watching from season 4 onwards and man, I'm really enjoying enjoying it um so the other thing how many seasons are are out of it in total like seven i think it's done now right like yeah oh yeah like like 20 2005 it finished a long time ago but yeah so anyway the other thing i wanted to talk about was that there's a really good awesome wells quote that says if you want a happy ending that depends on where you stop the story right so in many ways a lot of people don't accept the lost was all a dream okay and it's like headcanon it's like you deciding yourself a lot of times in a book often you'll get an ending and then there'll be a an epilogue or another story after or a little bit on from that and and in many ways for the

reader it's optional um you can actually pick in your head whether you want to say ah do you know what i just forget that last chapter you know i'm gonna end my story back when this happy thing happened because you can always sort of think in your head you can always decide you're welcome to choose what endings you want and what you take away from a story and and welcome to to look at things a different way like before when you said to me sips like oh you know imagine uh jar jar binks was a sith or imagine deanna troy was a spy you know i love that we can do that in our own head and say hey shit this thing was great imagine deanna troy says nobody's really sure of what her job on the enterprise is imagine her job turns out and

she like and she totally embraces this is they set up a mud wrestling pit on the bridge right and her only job is to just get in there and mud wrestle herself all the time oh my god and and then there's this episode where bodega comes in wearing his cape and a las gun dive to the right yeah fired his last this mine has gone solid we need something to melt it get bodega and his jetpack jetpack jetpacked into view quick gianna use my cloak to cover your face from the from the jetpack he doesn't have cape lewis this is not canon all right bodega eschews the use of cape you can't have a cape and a jet pack at the same time you want some interesting only boba fett can manage that yeah well darth vader had a cape

and it was so apparently so heavy for the act to wear that's why he stomped around so much he couldn't like lift his arms right now vader and jason bourne have a lot in common because jason bourne stomps around a lot too like for somebody who's meant to be like a little bit undercover and like inconspicuous man that guy has like an angry ass walk like everywhere he goes like if I saw him in public I'd be like that guy is up to something for sure he's pissed off stomping around like there's no tomorrow geez man I fucking love the idea of a cape yeah I was Yeah. You can get a cape, Lewis. If you want to wear a cape, wear a cape. They're not at all fashionable, but you might be able to bring them back. I look like a medieval dandy.

Yeah. You would. I think like, you know what, though? You could wear one. And because sometimes convincing everybody that you're insane and a bit of a write-off is like a good tactic, right? Like there's that. Yeah, do it.

There's that mafia boss in New's that that mafia um boss in new york who used to walk around in a bathrobe and slippers and everybody thought he was insane and not capable of doing anything wrong or whatever they thought that he was just like the you know the black sheep of his family but it turned out he was like the head of the family and he was like fucking responsible for like arranging the murders of like 500 people and stuff and right he was like all ruthless but like his his ruse was that he would parade around acting insane so everybody just like thought it's not him it's gonna be somebody else or whatever cool yeah that's a great you could do that with a cape you could you could be the same like

so hiding in plain sight i'm not saying like run the mafia but like you know you can maybe get up to no good on the side and nobody will suspect you with that cape who's to say i don't already run the mafia jesus man my mind is melting right now it's too much you've been you've been shot by my head bodega's lasgun yeah yeah fucking i love that i just want to hit i just want pflax to write a full-on yeah yeah you could be like in orange is the new in orange is the new black you remember the woman is it like is it suzanne or susan the one that writes she writes that um steamy fiction that everybody gets becomes obsessed with oh it's really funny yeah that's really good i'll have to

be like that period you can do that bodega yeah it's like some like Oh, that's good. You could be like that period and you could do that. Bodega, yeah. It's like some steamy sci-fi. I'll write a bodega short story. Okay, sweet. There you go. I'm going to hold you to that. Maybe you could get your kids to help, actually. Get the kids to help. I like how you

dismissed that. You spat on that idea so hard. You were like, they don't know how to construct a good story. They don't. That's not the point. That's not the point. We're trying to capture that enthusiasm, that childhood stupid stuff.

Have you ever seen Axe Cop? Axe Cop. A series of comics where a guy just got his, I guess it was his nephew or maybe his son, to come up with stories for Axe Cop. No, he's literally just like a New York City cop who has an axe just look up Axe Cop

it's very funny series of comic strips they're very good that's amazing look we're full of good suggestions today yeah yeah I think

let's end it here because this was a great podcast I hope you have enjoyed it it's like you said you know you pick your ending where you want your happy ending to be

I think this is that point this is where I want your ending where you want your happy ending to be. I think this is that point. This is where I want. I think we've reached the happy ending. To have a happy ending. I've got to have one now, actually. I've got it booked.

Happy ending. There's a lovely lady coming round. It's at 11.30. Could I give you a massage? Give you an enema. Nice. Yeah.

Yeah, I've got my... Got to do that. All right. Holy shit. Can we call this episode Bodega... Bodega... Bodega Nights. Bodega wears no cape.

Bodega takes a poop in a box. Bodega's enema. Oh, God. All right. Bye, everybody. Bye. Goodbye.