Two Hundred A Day - Episode 56: A Plus Expenses Special

Episode Date: September 15, 2019

This is our latest Plus Expenses episode, the show we release to our patrons over at our Patreon. Plus Expenses is our pre-show chatter, where we catch up with each other and talk about other media we've been into and what's going on in our lives as self-employed game designers. In this episode, we talk about: Amazon and capitalism, pricing games, Youtube radicalization, the Star Wars Minute podcast, Godzilla, meat shields vs jobbers, pro wrestling in Japan, a book of essays on David Chase, the cultural influence of television, location as character, place in RPGs, psychogeography, the World of Darkness "By Night" books, "I lived in New York for 5 years" stories, Mill Creek DVD collections, and of course the value of public libraries. Plus Expenses is a free podcast available to all of our patrons. If you like what you hear, please consider joining them in supporting the show for only $1 an episode! We now have a second, patron-exclusive, podcast - Plus Expenses. Covering our non-Rockford media, games and life chatter, Plus Expenses is available via our Patreon at ALL levels of support. Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files! Support the podcast by subscribing at patreon.com/twohundredaday. Big thanks to our Gumshoe patrons! Check them out: Richard Hatem Victor DiSanto Brian Perrera Eric Antener Bill Anderson Jim Crocker - keep an eye out for Jim selling our games east of the Mississippi, and follow him on twitter @jimlikesgames Shane Liebling's Roll For Your Party dieroller app Kevin Lovecraft and the Wednesday Evening Podcast Allstars And thank you to Dael Norwood, Dylan Winslow, Dave P, and Dale Church! Thanks to: fireside.fm for hosting us Audio Hijack for helping us record and capture clips from the show spoileralerts.org for the adding machine audio clip Freesound.org for other audio clips Two Hundred a Day is a podcast by game and narrative designers Nathan D. Paoletta and Epidiah Ravachol. In each episode we pick an episode of The Rockford Files, recap and review it as fans of the show, and tease out specific elements from that episode that hold lessons for writers, gamers and anyone else interested in making better narratives.

Nathan here. As you will shortly hear, this is not a usual 200 a day episode where we cover an episode of the Rockford Files. Rather, this is one of our Plus Expenses episodes. Plus Expenses is the show we've been putting out exclusively for our Patreon backers over at patreon.com slash 200 a day. And it's where Epi and I kind of chat about things going on in our lives and other media that we're watching and uh spend a little more time um catching up on game design stuff and things out in the world that are of note to us and it's fun and we enjoy doing it and it's a little more low-key and less heavily edited than our normal discussions. So we just wanted to throw out an example episode onto the main feed

so you can check it out. And if there's stuff that we talk about or you like the tone of our conversation, we invite you to come join us on Patreon. All of our patrons get a RSS link, so you can just add this right into your podcast app of choice. And all of our patrons get it from the $1 an episode level on up. This conversation touches on subjects from capitalism to radicalization on YouTube to Godzilla to professional wrestling in Japan, to David Chase, to the cultural influence of television, to psychogeography, to 90s role-playing games, and so much more.

So please enjoy this episode of Plus Expenses. Nothing is ever, no one's ever satisfied. Yeah, and I'm like, oh, okay. I guess I should know better and just save things all the time. But I don't, so that's where we're at. All right, I got notes. I'm going to bring up the IMD. The source of all truth.

Yes, which we're supposed to boycott next week. Eat it, Amazon Prime Day. Yeah. Eat it. I'll deny you of your fractional advertising revenue on IMDb. Yeah. The problem with... Let me, a white guy with a podcast, tell you the problem with Amazon.

Yes. Please do. Because that has not yet uh been in the world um the thing is there's there's so much stuff that like if it's a commodity it's not like there's other options that are any less ethically fraught yeah like like for, if you want to buy a Yeti microphone, it's not like there's some like local audio provisioner that I can go to and spend my money locally in order to get this device. That would be awesome, though, like a town that was made of podcasters that just had like artisanal, locally sourced podcast equipment. I mean, back when I did audio, like actual audio engineering stuff for theater for a short period of time, you know, I would buy stuff from, you know, from audio manufacturers. And there's a whole industry of, you know, basically of distributors for technical equipment, right?

So it's like there's this one that I liked that I would order microphones from and stuff. And it's like, I mean, I guess technically they're, they're, they're a family owned business or whatever. But they're one of the largest audio and like audio visual and effects distributors in the world. And buying microphones from them is like still you know it's not like they're it's not like they're sourcing their products from ethically produced uh uh local you know made in the usa factories or something like it's the same

equipment it is still you know made in in China somewhere and shipped and then made available to, to customers. Um, so yeah, at a certain point, like it's different with stuff that you can, that you have options for, but that's, that's the problem with capitalism. Monopolies grow. Capitalism. He says in the throne that the castle that capitalism sold him. Right.

Well, as they say, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there's no divesting from the system if you want to continue interacting with it. Yeah. That's something everyone has to come to terms with in their own special way. What if we don't like coming to terms with things that way lies uh increasingly radicalized youtube videos i think uh we were talking today about i was talking to elliot the middle of the baker kids uh because of uh that game stigmata that had like a 14 hour youtube hate review of it right and so this is the uh avowedly anti-fascist yes role-playing game

and it came up because i did the thing where i was like uh now I want to buy that game, but also I want a physical copy because I'm a hypocrite who doesn't print physical copies, but also knows that he won't read it if it's not a physical copy. But also, just looking at my finances for this month, I'm not going to spend $ on a game uh on a whim i mean i could but uh uh i don't really want to it would not be the responsible choice yeah yeah and i like the internet we've been doing a lot of talking about responsibly pricing games so that we could pay people what they're worth and whatnot and that's a whole complex discussion and blah, blah, blah. And the thing that, one of the reasons why this came, oh man, I'm on a tangent. We were talking about, okay, so the night before,

or two nights ago, we went to our library, local library. They had a series of Stranger Things inspired programs, ostensibly for teens, which i found out after attending one but um the first one was dungeons and dragons and then uh there'll be another one about role playing how to role play or how to play role playing games put on by the local game store here which is pretty good um as far as understanding and knowing that there are indie game designers in the area and whatnot but anyways we went for the dungeons and dragons one and one of the persons putting on the presentation uh held up a third party supplement

to warhammer fantasy role-playing game from i'm gonna going to guess, the 80s or early 90s. Nice. He was just showing this as a thing that he loved, that he enjoyed. And he opened it up, and you could see this, like, I'm going to say six or seven point font, two column, you know, like this is walls of text. And on one hand, that's bad. But on the other hand, he also probably paid 12 for this thing right like that's my i'm like just seeing that wall of text i wanted that object because that is the objects that i remember right like there's a nostalgic hook there but also man i don't want to pay a lot of money like there's a lot of games i'd like to

own and uh i can't afford all of them but again capitalism i guess i am no real i'm not complaining about that game uh what i wanted to say was just that uh the reason why there's a 14 hour uh hate review of this game is because the people doing that hate review are producing so much content they have to do it right like that's their model that's how they survive they spout hate into the internet right it. It's all about engagement. Yes. And they have to do it for like, that is just their nine to five, which doesn't excuse them for any of it. I don't mean to do that, but I'm just saying that whatever model we have going that encourages people to shout about things for 14 hours straight is maybe a bad model, maybe A model worth investigating, I guess. Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's the whole anyone doing kind of analysis of what has happened to YouTube. Yeah. That's the dynamic, is that YouTube rewards proliferation of content. It is easier to make content about stuff you don't like than it is about stuff you like and when you are then trying to monetize your content and what keeps

the train rolling is you know and yeah spouting off spout is spouting off hate uh that is how things get increasingly worse and worse. And there's this thing where if you, not even getting into the real fundamental problem of hate speech on YouTube, but just getting into this thing about doing angry reviews

or reviewing things you don't like, they're just by the numbers going to do better than reviewing things you like because people that hate them are going to watch and people that like them are going to hate watch and the other way around where i'm like i really like polar seltzer let me uh review polar seltzer for you uh the only people that are going to watch that are the six polar seltzer fans that also happen to know like nobody who hates polar seltzer

is going to watch a loving 14 hour loving review of their cranberry lime flavor which perhaps to bring it closer to home nobody who hates the Rockford Files is going to listen to us talk about the Rockford Files for an hour and a half. And that's our problem.

We have positioned what we're doing here in the wrong direction. Even people who kind of like the Rockford Files aren't going to listen to us do it for an hour and a half. I mean, we appreciate those of you who do. We are speaking to you directly right now. Yes. You're the best.

Better than all the rest. It is. It's the it's the problem with really liking really liking things. You end up talking about them more than their actual footprint. Did you ever I haven't actually listened to it, but I know it exists. There's a podcast that each episode was like one minute of runtime of, I think of Star Wars. Oh, wow.

Are you familiar with this? No. I guess Star Wars Minute, Star Wars, one minute at a time, which I feel like has been around for a while. I mean, Star Wars is an old thing. Says the co-host of a Rockford Files podcast. Right. So it just ended, apparently.

The last episode was May 23rd, 2019. Oh, okay. According to StarWarsMinute.com. I'm trying to see when it started. Ah, Minute 1. A period of Civil War. So the first episode was in 2013. So they got six years out of a minute-by-minute podcast.

Also, this first episode is 11 minutes long, talking about a minute of Star Wars. Yeah. So that sounds about right. The crawl, right? The word crawl at the beginning. I mean, this is all of them. It goes through all the...

Does it start at the beginning? It says a period of Civil War. It starts at Star Wars. Yeah. Your new hope, if you will. Yeah, and it looks like it goes through chronologically. Like, it looks like it goes through the release order. Ah, okay.

I don't know. Anyway, so just clicking around, some of these are half hour long, some of them longer than that. Ooh, they do the holiday special. This is very interesting for our listeners. This is just a... I cannot attest to the quality of this podcast. As I said, I have not listened to it. However, the idea of spending 10 to 20 times as much time on each unit of runtime sounds about right.

Oh, speaking of attesting to the quality of podcasts. Last time we spoke, we're going to have some continuity here. This is exciting, I think, for you, dear listeners. You recommended the Pairing podcast to me, particularly their Godzilla episodes. Yes. And I am one and a half in

to those. I've listened to one and I'm partway through the second one. It's a lot of fun. I am going to say this from the get-go, that I am going to listen to more of this podcast, and if folks want to check it out um they can google it uh but uh i was gonna say something oh there was an interesting thing that came up uh that had me thinking because uh i'm gonna do that thing where i disagree with with something said in a different podcast and uh where they cannot defend themselves yes but i'm not i'm not like i don't want to do that thing where i disagree with with something said in a different podcast and uh where they cannot defend themselves yes but i'm not i'm not like i don't want to do this

aggressively because i'm not actually intending to do this aggressively i'm just it is a i'm using it as a launching point to make a different statement but um they were talking about oh my god on gears i think is the name i'm'm just going to go with that. Sure. I don't know. Yeah. So if you recall your Godzillas, if you've seen them, sometimes Godzilla's got his little buddy who is like an ankylosaurus, right? Like a little four-legged. He's got a bunch of spikes on him.

That's Anguirus. Anguirus is the first monster that godzilla fought uh in the second godzilla film called godzilla raids again uh it is on garris and godzilla fighting they're not friends and i think godzilla defeats on garris well no spoilers it doesn't matter anyways it's a fun film enjoy watching it uh but they become buddies blah blah blah and then they this podcast they're talking about this uh and they're trying to sort of put on gears position in the fiction into context for the viewers right like so what does this character mean in the greater godzilla verse or whatever like what what is the the deal with this character mean in the greater Godzilla-verse or whatever? Like, what is the deal with this character?

And they described him as the meat shield because he doesn't win fights, but he goes in and takes a lot of beating. And then somebody else comes in and wins the day for him or what have you. And Meat Shield is terminology from video games that sort of are of this genre that has come out of the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, right? So you have Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons inspires video games. And those video games, most notably the MMOs, the multi... Multiplayer... I don't even know what it means. Multiplayer Multiversal Online?

Yeah. Something like that? Wow. It's been so long. Yeah. World of Warcraft. We're talking about World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft.

That sort of stuff. So in those games, then, you have characters that have different powers. But because it's a game on top of this fiction or this fiction on top of a game, however you want to look at it, they serve certain roles that are tactically important right and so one of these roles is a person that has can take a lot of damage and does so uh so that the rest of the crew doesn't have to take that damage the tank if you will the tank yes the tank the meat shield uh what have you and so that exists i'm not going to get too into game stuff here i apologize if this isn't your thing. So that exists within an economy in that game, right? So over the course of a fight, there's a limited amount of damage that can be delivered, and that's measurable.

And then we have a character who can soak that up right there is a there's a tactical value to directing the finite damage in to a certain yes to one of the party members so that the other ones can survive long enough to do the things that they do which are do damage move people around the battlefield or whatever yeah so all right so this is what uh they say in that podcast about angeris uh and presented to an audience that probably understands it like i'm uh over explaining it but the reason why i'm over explaining it is because there's over 30 godzilla films most of which predate this phenomenon sure right so uh what i want to say without getting like saying that that was a bad take, because I don't want to say that. I think that is its own take.

But my take on that, and I think you know where I'm going with this, is that Anguirus's job is not to soak up a finite amount of damage that's being put out over the course of a combat. Anguirus's job is to make the other monsters that Godzilla will eventually defeat look badass, right? Right. So Geras is the jobber of the Godzilla universe is where you're going with this. Yes. So this is it, right? I think this is an interesting split in an understanding of what's happening in these stories. Now, there may be some understanding of pro wrestling going on in the later Godzilla films or maybe even the earlier ones.

I know that the way Godzilla walks is inspired by sumo wrestling. But like I don't know the crossover there like i don't i don't have that um uh there's i mean there's an interesting historical thing about that but i'll let you finish i'm i'm gonna let you finish and then we can talk about wrestling well i might actually i might actually be finished but i guess what i'm trying to say is uh there are other ways to look at things and yeah there's kind of the the default framing is yeah is different if you're coming from a different context and so hearing this podcast i had like two ways to go right i could be because i obviously frame it differently than they do i could be like here i am pushing up my glasses he's actually

literally doing this uh yes i can see it actually what's happening there or i can say hey this other framework has an interesting take on it as well right like uh and uh i don't know why i'm turning this into a moral lesson for our readers so So instead, I'm going to trail off there and let you tell us about pro wrestling and kaiju. So the interesting historical parallel is that both Godzilla and professional wrestling in Japan, as distinct from sumo wrestling which is, has a different, you know, is, is more of an indigenous tradition, but, um,

professional wrestling, uh, where it's fake, uh, if you will, or if it were, it was predetermined. Um,

uh, they, they are simultaneous cultural responses to Japan's imperial power being defeated by the West. Um, okay. So obviously Godzillazilla as we talked about on our previous uh plus expenses um so if you are if this is the first one you're listening to perhaps you'll need to go go back and check that one out um but as as we talked about there so and

as is kind of a i think fairly generally taken as red, you know, the Godzilla is, is a response to, uh, uh, the bombing of, uh,

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Um, it's a response to the horror of the, the atomic age and the literal danger that it presents to Japan. Literally. Yeah. Right. Like as a physical space.

Professional wrestling in the post-war era came to Japan with other American cultural, like, presence. So, like, you know, Japan got army bases, Coca-Cola, Disney, and Carl Gotch, one of the big, like, 50 Carl Gotch, one of the big 50s classic wrestlers. Oh, okay. There was transmission of this into Japan, and it kind of got mingled in with sports culture in Japan, which has its own thing going on. Yeah. And then, so there's this guy named Ricky Dozen, who's

considered the father of Japanese professional wrestling. He's the one who, like, started the first Japanese wrestling company, and he's actually Korean, so it's kind of an interesting cultural analysis there. But anyway, now I'm going down the rabbit hole, which is probably not interesting for our listeners.

If they're listening, they're interested. The point is, in wrestling, Japan could beat anyone. The Japanese wrestlers, at the end of the day, the gaijin wrestlers, the big names from America, would come in beat everyone up win a bunch of matches and then would lose to the big you know to the hero of the of the whatever promotion they were in in the big climactic battle and this is not too different from american pro wrestling right like you see this play out right or well i mean it is the idea where, you know, there are athletes performing athletic feats, but it is a predetermined storyline. Yes. Japanese wrestling tends to have more of a veneer of sport to it.

So it's treated as more of an athletic endeavor. And generally people hit really hard. Oh, wow. and generally people hit really hard. Oh, wow. So that's like, it is more like a combat sport and there's some promotions that mix un-predetermined, that historically had mixed un-predetermined

like MMA fights with predetermined wrestling bouts, right? But one of the reasons it got so popular in Japan especially in like the 60s was because it was one of the reasons it got so popular in Japan, especially in the 60s, was because it was one of the few places where you could pay money, go have a good time, and see Japan win. Right. The sense of Japan had lost was so endemic to pop culture in the post-war years. in the post-war years, you can go see the symbols of American power get brought low by the might of the virile Japanese man.

Yeah. Plus also women's wrestling in Japan rules, which is its own parallel track of development. Yeah, so that's a receipt. That's kind of the main line least that's kind of the main line on it i'm sure someone who does more scholarly analysis might have more specific things to say but that's there's some more expression of like how do we how how does this like how do we deal with this defeat like yeah i mean both godzilla and wrestling then seem like

they're parts of the same conversation like i, I mean, in that like works that don't ignore history are like in conversation with history. Right. Like that's the, um, but, uh, yeah,

like, I think that there's, uh, fun to be had looking at, at things from different perspectives and seeing what they can say about themselves, their genre, you know, what they can say about themselves, their genre, you know,

what have you in that perspective, whatever perspective that happens to be. Yeah. Like for instance, I, uh, watching, uh,

seventies detective show. Speaking of looking at historical things from different perspectives, I got a gift recently of a book on David Chase. Oh yeah. I got a gift recently of a book on David Chase. Oh, yeah? It's a series of scholarly essays about David Chase and various shows of his. Probably what prompted this was the success of The Sopranos. Yeah. And most of the essays are about The Sopranos, but there's stuff in there about The Rockford Files, which is why I was interested in this book.

I haven't gotten through all of them yet, but the first one that I read that specifically was talking about the Rockford Files was talking about how, so David Chase, you know, in the modern TV landscape, he's known for the Sopranos, obviously. And then he also was,

he did not create, but he was a big force behind Northern Exposure. Oh, okay. And I guess that is also considered a key television show. I did not know that. But apparently, according to these essays, it goes like Sopranos is at the top, then Northern Exposure, and then everything else David Chase has ever done. That's interesting. I mean, I remember Northern Exposure. and then like everything else David Chase has ever done. It's, that's interesting.

So I, I mean, I remembered Northern Exposure. I remember it being big when it came out, like not popularly big, but, but critically big. Yeah. I think it was like a critically appreciated show. I remember it being on TV when I was a kid. I've never seen an episode and I did not know it was a big deal, but apparently it was. Yeah. Now I'm curious to see if I would go back and watch it because I never had the urge to do it. Not like, say, the Rockford Files, which clearly I had the urge to go back and watch several times.

Right. I guess I could go get the book and see if I'm misremembering this right. Misremembering this right. If I am misremembering this or not. Because I feel like whatever his role was, maybe he came at the end of the show or something important there. Anyway, the point is is this is not a point about northern exposure it's a point about the rockford files which is that in the shows that

that chase has been involved with the rockford files is uh considered uh lowbrow while the sopranos is considered highbrow right like golden age, golden age of television starts with The Sopranos, and it's a, you know, critically acclaimed, and it has all these... It's an elevated piece of television, right, in the landscape of TV. While The Rockford Files is like,

oh yeah, that was a fun show, but it's like, not considered in the annals of the great television shows uh which we would disagree with of course yeah i think so yeah but this essay was talking about how um so it was written i think it was at the end of the most of these are from the uh early 2000s early to mid 2000s and there's an and so there's this ongoing conversation and debate about television in particular but like like, especially broadcast TV, it's a democratic form, right? Like it's very easily accessible to lots of people. And so it is considered to be lowbrow and popular entertainment, except when it's not, when for whatever reason a show is critically acclaimed and rise above the pack for whatever reason. Yeah, okay.

And so people assign lower value to, quote, popular entertainment because it's widely accessible. Right. And that also means that that's the stuff that has the most impact on our culture. Yes. Because more people see it and absorb it uh and so you know there's a there's there's kind of pushback against that conception of assigning value based on whether it's popular or not which i'm sure everyone listening has had some form of this debate about things that get popular and whether they're better

or worse and whatever it's you know it's that thing that like the the world will will probably agree when it comes to english authors uh charles dickens is like one of the best but also was like one of the most popular in his you know like yeah literally getting paid by the word pumping out you know as much as he could i bet you i bet you that one well there's probably a couple things at work here that that uh maybe belong more on a show about psychoanalyzing story creators but i bet you like one of the things that's happening is sort of a synchronicity because Sopranos was also popular, right? Right.

Like everyone knows about it. When you say Sopranos, you think of the television show and not about the opera singers that literally are Sopranos. So if it's that like popular critical acclaim, it was HBO, right? So it also had like that uh had a nice rarity to it like not everyone had access to it and and one of the things about it that people that kind of started and i feel like this this feels like it's just normal now but right this is a change that happened which was where one of the reasons it was so critically acclaimed was because it it took things that people generally associated with

movies and put it into tv yeah both i think cinematographically but also storyline wise how characters are you know are handled themes and arcs and motifs and like all that stuff that now is just how tv is because tv has changed to be like the Sopranos. Yeah. And also now, and this is something that I think might have been in the essay, or I might just Osmos from something else, but there's like a crossing of the trend line where TV became more like movies, while movies in having these big serial franchises are now more like TV.

Yeah. Where you have the familiar character that you get to see over and over and sure they change you know there's a plot and stuff happens yeah and they may change incrementally as a response to that but it's not uh uh but we always have the sense of oh we'll we'll be back next time i think also there's a a thing happening with um I'm going to talk out of my ass here. Dear listeners, this is what you signed up for. Yeah. I think that Sopranos is probably a more immediate influence on the current creators in the field.

And I don't think that that's a controversial thing for me to say, because it is temporally more, more close to it. But also, like, I can see a lot of people drawing from that and not going back to the Rockford files and drawing from the Rockford files. And I think that influences how we critically talk about it. Right. It's kind of like a recency bias kind of thing yeah i think you know just in in the fact that it has you know like you could talk about music and say oh this band is uh better than that band but like if that band that you're talking about happens to be the beatles and has influenced like so many around you, then it's hard to have that argument without falling prey to that. Like I have a lot of bands that I enjoy more than the Beatles. And I'm just putting that out there.

What? Yes. But I think that like, that's true of everyone, but also it's a hard thing for people to say, right? Like, because I mean, physically it's, it's a hard thing for people to say right like because uh i mean physically

it's it's easy to say like i could but at what point do you mount a spirited defense of like no the beatles are bad actually versus like right they're not my favorite band but i acknowledge their influence on music and culture yeah yeah and to be clear i don't think the beatles are bad actually no but like like, there are many other bands I would rather listen to in general. Yes. And I think that's basically what I'm getting at there. Is it like, okay, it's fine. You can have your Sopranos Beatles.

But I'm going to stick with my Rockford Ronnie James Dio. I knew you were going to say Dio. Yeah. So I feel like this is what I was trying to get at when I originally brought this up with the reframing question, though, which is that one of the interesting things from this essay. So the essay was kind of talking about reconsidering the Rockford Files, right? By not just being like, oh, yeah, it was a popular show that David just happened to work on. But talking, but it was talking about how one of the things that really stands out watching the show now is how it, how it so, not honestly, but how it's so like naturally occupies LA and how LA is such like the LA of the time.

It's such a part of the fabric of the show. And that's a function of it being, uh, in, in that production system where your choice was shoot on the back lot that everyone else shot on or go out and shoot on the streets. And they chose to shoot on the streets because, A, then they didn't have to schedule around sharing the back lot,

and they got to drive the cars, and they got to do things the way they wanted to do them. And I think an aspect is because the landscape is part of the character in a lot of ways with Jim Rockford, but how that kind of thing, the, you know, quote-unquote popular entertainment of a time can capture a time

in a way that it wasn't intent. No one set out with the Rockford Files to be like, we're going to create a historical document of how L.A. was in the mid to late 70s. Right. That's just a byproduct of how they did it. But watching it now, like I have this experience where I watch it and I'm just like,

wow, you just don't see buildings like that anymore. Yeah. I mean, and I, it's not like I know LA at all as, as, as our listeners know,

I'm sure you can go to Rockford files, filming locations.blogspot.com to find out more than you ever wanted to know about all of the physical locations that the show was filmed at. But even just, you know, I spent a decent amount of time in San Francisco because my folks live out there now. And the nature of, even on the West Coast, where stuff lasts for a long time, and, you know, because it doesn't get all ground out

by bad weather and stuff like that. So stuff lasts. But even the stuff that lasts gets torn down and built over. And there's so much stuff in Rock Profile that's just watching them drive around where it's like, oh, yeah, the gas stations just don't look like that anymore. Yeah. You know, built like hotels just don't look like that anymore. Even if the physical shell is still there everything else about it is is different and it's so uh uh just naturally expresses that that sense of place um without even trying and that like makes it a really

that's part of what makes it compelling for me as someone who doesn't didn't live through all that it's a window into that past but it's also like here's actually kind of an interesting and possibly important cultural artifact yeah and i mean like i'm i'm gonna bring up dickens again because uh he predates this medium uh and uh he does the same thing for london of his time like that was the that was like one of the things that you could, you know, you can, I mean,

you could take tours of Dickens, London and all that, but like you could find the places that he was talking about and the way he described it. And so, and I just, it occurred to me, cause I mean,

you and I are involved in a medium where this isn't an easy thing to do, right? Like we couldn't, we'd have to set out to do it, right? We can't accidentally do it like the Rockford files did. I shouldn't say accidentally because it probably is one of those serendipitous things where as the show goes on, it leans into it. Right. Like I mean, obviously cause the,

the first of the nineties films is I Still Love L.A., right? Right, yeah. It's about wildfires and riots and, you know, what have you. But, yeah, like, it would be very, very difficult to do that with a tabletop medium because you you don't rely that visually i feel like games do more what they capture isn't geography necessarily in general unless you're really setting out to do it um in some way yeah i'll footnote that but they capture like a psycho geography right like whatever the mindset that you're in when you make it and whatever is going on in the world around you when it comes out those are a bundle of of of

experiences that do end up making games feel of a time and place as you go through time like playing yeah you know playing early 2000s forge games that has a feel to those games have a feel to them in a large part, because many of them are not a specific setting. They ask you to, you know, do some kind of setting creation or whatever, but they're about a theme or they're about an experience that very tightly

constrains you into that thing and et cetera, et cetera. And that is a noticeably different set of experiences across multiple games than like apocalypse world you know like power by the apocalypse games post apocalypse world or world of darkness mid 90s games i think that's a great segue into my footnote because now that i think about there are, like there's imaginary space that games fill. Like there are people out there that will be able to tell you about all of the world of like Dragonlance, for example. The lore, if you will.

Yeah, the lore. But could also say, and if you take a left here and you walk for three days, this is the town you come to. Right. That's the same way that people can do that with Tolkien, where there's an imaginary world made real by the presence of maps and whatnot. And that's interesting. And also like the world of darkness in the 90s did make attempts at being, you know, Chicago by night. You know, like picking a city where it might be neat to envision vampires and place their vampires there. And I make no, I bounced off of World of Darkness, so I don't know how well they did. They're of varying success.

Yeah. None of them ever did. Chicago by night in particular is not the, not the lower, is in the lower half, but not the lowest end, I would say. None of them did Akron by night or Green Bay by night or any of the other places where I lived. So, well, there's probably New York by night, isn't the other places where i lived so uh well there's probably in new york by night isn't there maybe not i think so but i'm not i think it was one of the later ones i don't know i tried so hard not to be the person that lived in new york for five years and tell people i'm from new york like i literally lived in new york for five years that's the end of that

story like that story doesn't go any further. It's funny. Cause I, I associate you with New York because that's cause you were living there when I met you. Yeah. Oh, I have,

and you've probably heard this story, but I do have a, I lived in New York for five years story that I will tell in our upcoming, uh, episode. Uh, cause it, it's,

uh, it's relevant. Yeah. And there are like, there's probably like a half a dozen personal stories that are relevant for this upcoming episode. It's just the way it all mixed together. And that is the one that I'm comfortable telling.

Okay. I think I see where you're going with this. All right. Because there's a few others where I'm like, yeah, I've been in a relationship like that. Yeah. Maybe I shouldn't talk about that on here. Well, I think then that's a good time for us to go ahead and move on to our actual discussion. Oh, excellent.

Yes. Unless you have anything else you want to throw out? I don't know. I mean, normally we do normally in the other two times we've done one how many times have we done the plus expenses i think this is like the fourth one oh wow yeah jesus i feel so old uh do we want to just quick talk about what we've been watching or consuming recently that's of interest i really i actually don't have anything to add to that.

I've been watching Godzilla. Yeah, I know. I don't really have anything in particular I need to call out. Maybe we'll talk about this next time. But I broke into a... Broke into? I finally unpackaged. I finally unpackage.

I have this like set of like martial arts movies, like B movie martial arts. So it's one of those companies. I think it's Mill Creek, which actually is the one that puts out the Rockford files, which is kind of weird, but where they just package up all these, like all these low hanging fruit, bad old movies into collections and sell them for like 15 for 30 kung fu movies or

whatever yeah i'm one of those but it's around bruce lee so like there's four or five actual bruce lee movies and then there's a couple bruce lee movies li the guy who would be in movies kind of as if he was bruce lee right. But is it different Bruce Lee? And then a bunch of stuff. And then there's some Brandon Lee movies, including Laser Mission. Yes. Oh my God.

All right. So this is worth it for that alone. And then a bunch of other stuff. So I've started just watching those kind of, you know, in the background. And so far I have nothing interesting to report uh chinese hercules uh did not did not live up to the title i'll say that okay but maybe the next time we talk i'll have one or two uh uh things to to say about bad kung fu movies i i i held my finger above the order button for a Mill Creek collection earlier this week. They have the first 11 Gamera films.

And I had never seen a Gamera film. And I was like, I can own all but one of them with just the push of the button uh but I but then you looked at your budget yes well that was the thing like I was like it's I mean like it was 30 bucks which is a like a deal that's like less than three dollars a film right like that's uh you know if I want to watch a camera film I'll probably rent it from an online streaming thing for roughly that same cost. Right. So why not?

But the thing that stopped me was just, well, the thing that stopped me is my local public library had a copy and I don't know when I'll get it because it's one and there's several of us waiting for it. But, um, but yeah,

I was like Mill Creek. I like them. They do my Rockford files. Well, speaking of the Rockford files, yeah, I was like, Mill Creek, I like them. They do my Rockford Files. Well, speaking of the Rockford Files, we'll go ahead and get to the main show. Somebody should talk about the Rockford Files.