Two Hundred A Day - Episode 64: A Plus Expenses Special

Episode Date: February 9, 2020

Time for a state of the podcast episode! We're using the first half of the episode to update our listeners on some of our life events before going back in time to talk about those events before they happened on the Plus Expenses episode that goes out to all of our Patreon backers. This includes Eppy's visit to Chicago, Nathan's post-mortem on a recent Kickstarter project, and our thoughts on the show Banacek. Plus, we introduce an upcoming March event: MALIBU MADNESS! 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 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 Jay Adan's Miniature Painting 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.

Why hello there. Hello. And hello listeners. This is a addendum, a prequel. It's a sequel, actually, technically. Yeah. Errata. I think it's mostly a preface.

Preface. Okay, good. Yeah. So welcome to this preface for a Plus Expenses episode. Plus Expenses is the show that we record before we record our show that goes out to all of our Patreon backers over at patreon.com slash 200 a day. And it's where we talk about what's going on in our lives and media stuff that we've been into and things that we want to complain about, etc.

The reason that you are hearing this now, if you are not a Patreon backer, which is absolutely understandable and we value all of our listeners. That was a weird way to put it. No, it was good. We love all of our listeners. We love some a little better than others. But only because they give us money. We really appreciate uh uh support of the show um the monetary support goes a really long way towards keeping us actually continuously

doing it as opposed to occasionally doing it um but obviously we wouldn't do it if people weren't listening and giving us feedback and letting us know that they like the show that's all amazing stuff so uh so this is a public plus expenses going out on our public feed. So those of you who haven't had a chance to hear one before kind of get a sense of what's over there at the Patreon. But also this is syncing up with a pretty big change in our, well, in my life particularly, but kind of a tumultuous time. in my life particularly, but kind of a tumultuous time. And so because most of our updates really do go out to the Patreon, here is a kind of more public update about the show and what's happening.

So listeners for a while may have noticed that we kind of go between a two-episode-a-month to one-episode-a-month posting pattern. It kind of depends on time of year and busyness and whatnot. I can say that for the foreseeable future, we will be going back to one episode a month, primarily because I, in addition to recording and doing all the research and whatnot, I also do the editing of the show, and I am now a parent.

Congrats! Thank you. Kicking off 2020, my wife and I welcomed a wonderful baby into our lives. And as you might imagine, you know, I have to be much more smart about how I use my time for a while. So just having one editing gig a month is going to fit much better into my life for a while. So that's happening. But we also talked about that on this Plus Expenses as kind of a preview of coming attractions. This is the preface to the 2020 edition, right? That was late 2019, and so much has changed. Yes, exactly. So,

so what you're going to hear after this is going to be a flashback to December of 2019, the state of the podcast, the state of our lives at that moment in time. And we don't release those timely. I don't, I don't know about Nathan, but I've had this experience now where people will respond to me about something we've said either in an episode or in a plus expenses as if we're picking up the conversation right where it left off. I think our delay between when we record them and when they're released is probably two months, I think.

It's between a month and two months again depending on time of year because sometimes we're able to we record a bunch in like two weeks and then they come out over the next two months so they will slowly accordion the amount of time between when they were recorded and when they're released and and my my ancient brain has lost track of what we said the previous time. And I usually have to take a moment to figure out what exactly we were talking about. But, I mean, I'm not complaining. I do enjoy talking about the stuff.

That's why we talk about it in the podcast. But that's why this update, right? Because the previous one was recorded just before life-changing events. And now we need to just let people know what's happening with those life-changing events. And also, we're going to talk a little bit about a stunt we're going to pull. We have a good gimmick coming up. Should we go right into that? In our Plus Expenses, we also discuss an upcoming event for you that has ended up going in a different direction, I think, than you had anticipated.

So if you don't mind giving us maybe a little update about that. Yeah. Being supremely jealous of Nathan, I wanted to also welcome someone into my home. My wife and I decided we wanted to help out a network of trans asylum seekers here in the U.S. to try and offer our home, because we have plenty of space in our home, to someone who is leaving a bad situation in their country and coming into kind of a bad situation in our country and trying to alleviate that as best we can and when last we recorded the podcast we were um paired up with uh an asylum seeker who was in a detention center and uh uh facing the uh appeals process i don't under i'm not a lawyer so i don't understand all the different legal steps that this person has gone through but she was denied the ability to leave the detention center twice through two different hearings for two different reasons

it's one of those technical things where i'm not entirely sure if this is just uh her asylum was denied or or whatever but she has chosen not to appeal it uh. It's a bit of a heartbreaking situation because we were ready to help this person out. But the system is definitely pushing against us. So the situation that we're in now is kind of a limbo. We don't know what her fate is, but we're fairly certain that it won't involve living with us. But that's just sort of where we stand now. So that's the sad news. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. Unfortunately, kind of. I mean, very unfortunately. Very a bummer. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very sad to hear that.

And it sucks that this is the system that we live in. Yeah. So in the upcoming Plus Expenses, you'll, I probably sound hopeful about what's coming. And I am still hopeful we're still working with the network and we're still trying to see where we fit in and how we can help out. That has not come to fruition in the way that we had hoped. But fortunately, Nathan's situation did come to fruition in the way we would hope. It has come to fruition. And I feel like as someone who has, you know, kind of seen a lot of my peers having kids a little, you know, earlier in their lives and everything. All the language around having a kid just is so it's also so kind of commodified. Like there's a whole,

I believe I mentioned the baby industrial complex in, uh, plus expenses, but everything about being pregnant, having a kid, all the stuff is like very commercialized, um, in our,

in our society. So it's hard for me to like use particular phrases without feeling like they're really, I don't know, banal and bad. But yeah, she's a mitzvah. She's really great. Excellent. And now I get to learn how to be a dad, which is pretty excellent. It's a fun adventure. One other thing I wanted to note for what you are going to hear is that we also go into talking about a show that neither of us have seen.

Thanks to a listener. A while ago now, we got an email from, I think we've had some, in some of our specials, I think we've given a shout out before. But Sean Walsh, who listens to the show, sent us an email about another 70s detective show called Banachek. I had never heard of it. You had kind of heard of it. And so we kind of talk about that show. We look it up and go into what Sean has to say about it, because they sent a really great little write-up in email as well.

So we kind of go through that and kind of explore the possibility space of this show that sounds pretty cool that neither of us have seen and comparing it to, you know, other, you know, shows of the era. So that is a fun conversation that hopefully will be fun for all of you to hear. And another big thanks to Sean for the putting us down a new road. I still haven't watched it because as you would imagine, things got busy. A little busy. uh yeah i'm glad it's on my radar with all of the prequel to coming events right stated we also have a preview of a later set of coming events um as we record this we're we're getting ever closer to March, which is when we traditionally indulge in the college basketball craziness known as March Madness.

I'm not particularly a huge basketball fan. I have nothing against it. I just don't really watch a lot of sports. Well, I don't watch a lot of fake sports. I watch the King of Sports, pro wrestling. But all those fake sports, I don't watch too much but you've worked in an office though right because if you've worked in an office you've done march madness i've managed to thread this strange needle in my life where anywhere that i worked that would do march madness is full of people who don't do march madness like okay like

theaters yes oh that's true yes or like art school office like yeah you know it's just culturally it's uh the only places where people don't don't pay attention this kind of stuff too too much but yes uh the the fun of it is the bracket right the tournament bracket yeah you uh go through you make your picks about who's gonna advance to the next round etc etc um and this happens to coincide with us coming up on about the halfway point of The Rockford Files. Yes. In terms of episode count, we were about halfway through the total number of shows and movies, which is wild. For a moment, I want to reflect on that bit.

I don't know if plus expensive listeners are sick of hearing this from me, but I marvel at the fact that we are doing this, this thing that's just like, hey, we both like this show. What if we talk about it? And then it becomes sustainable and it's a thing that we can enjoy together

with a bunch of other people. The fact that people still reach out to us and say, hey, I really enjoyed, you know, episode 60 of our podcast. It still to me feels like we're just started off. I don't know. Like there's just something about it that I'm like, wait, hold on. How did we get here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure sure But yeah, so kind of in the name So I had this kind of idea at some point in the last year Of oh, we should do like a full like 64 episode March Madness bracket And then we've been talking about it a little bit

And I think the structure sounds fun But you pointed out that maybe there would be a more interesting way to talk about the actual uh brackets the you know the actual regions if you will that would go into what what we are calling uh malibu madness yes malibu madness uh yeah so to me one of the interesting or fun things about a bracket structure like this not to get too nerdy about it, but not to get too game design-y about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Is that it's not a particularly good way to pit the best of the best against each other because the best of the best could be paired up against each other in the first round. Right. Which guarantees that the, from there on out, you never see the best of the best against each other, because one of them has to beat the other.

Right. The second place will then never be the actual second best in that structure. So rather than trying to fix that, I enjoy it when you can lean into it. The idea here is that instead of taking 64 episodes and pitting them against each other to find out in our structure which one would come out on top, we would take different categories of things we can arbitrarily rate or pit against each other in the rock profile. So we might have one section that are eight episodes that we think could compete to be the top eight episodes of the ones we've discussed so far we can have another one that is the reoccurring uh cast of characters uh that aren't jim himself uh and pit those against each other to see who might come out on top uh we could have another category that are the eight best car chases that we've seen in all of the episodes that we had we could

have a category that are the uh eight reoccurring uh actors who play different roles because we do have some wonderful actors that come back and play a different character or maybe the eight uh answering machine messages or eight bits of just rockford dialogue because there's some gorgeous dialogue and then as those sift out and and choose their champions then you end up with the sort of nonsense that i love right which is the best bit of dialogue versus the best reoccurring character to see who's going to go against the best car chase versus the best overall episode. Right. That's just a fun nonsense structure for us to talk about everything that we love about the show. Exactly. And I think, you know, at the end of the day, it might be a little hard to imagine, like, best answering machine message going up against best recurring cast character.

Right. Because, like, is there an answering machine message that's better than Angel? I don't know. I doubt it, but maybe. Yeah, who knows? Who knows? Whichever one bubbles to the top, we might be going, oh my god, we've ignored this for so long.

Okay, so here's the plan. In March, we will have two episodes. I feel like I can commit to that. And they will not be reviews of the show. They will be two halves of our Malibu Madness. So we will, in our first episode in March, we will be filling out all of the brackets and talking about all those entries and maybe do the first round. And then our second episode will be the semi or the quarterfinals through the finals to crown our Malibu Madness champion 2020.

Not to get into this live, but are we running polls? Are we just deciding amongst ourselves? Are we doing that concurrently? I was thinking we'd do it concurrently. Okay, yeah. concurrently so okay yeah so the purpose of this being on this recording that's going out to all of our listeners among other reasons is to uh let you know that we will be putting up at least some of these up either for a vote probably through patreon but it'll be a public poll and we'll tweet out the link and stuff um or if you have suggestions for individual entrants, you can either tweet at us at 200 pod or email us at 200 a day podcast at

gmail.com. I had to disable the contact form on our website because we were getting a ton of spam, which was really just annoying to deal with, but you can email or if you're a patron, get in touch through Patreon. We'll also put up a post about this on Patreon or just tweet at us. But right now we should go ahead and hash out what our brackets should be, what our regions should be. I think

you threw out a bunch of good ideas. Let's pin them down now. And then if listeners want to go to bat for a particular entrant, they can let us know. And we'll incorporate those into just us settling out what we think should go and and we'll kind of decide on the seeds and stuff and maybe if there's a bunch of people who like like maybe if we get a suggestion for something and it's something we already had maybe we'll bump it up to a first seed or something like that yeah yeah the purview is only episodes that we have reviewed on the show so far yes and so what we want are four categories in which there will be eight entrants we're going to do a 64 bracket 64 that's eight eight times eight right eight categories unless

you think that's too much should we do uh that's a good question well let's talk about this can we come up with eight categories right so i mean episode is that worth breaking out is it like see that was the thing if there's one to drop i think it's the episode just because uh it is i think it would just dominate but maybe i'm wrong i mean that's the whole point of these is that you you can't actually tell um but let's okay so let's list them real quick okay so episode i'm gonna i'm taking notes here so kind of the ones we've already mentioned. Four doesn't seem like enough. Yeah.

Let's do eight. We can do eight. Are these all the same superlative? Are these all best, right? Yeah, I think because that is completely arbitrary. Right, exactly. And that's what you want. All right, so we've got best episode, best recurring character who isn't, or it's like recurring cast.

Yeah, that'll be an easy one to or it's like recurring cast. Yeah. That'll be an easy one to fill out. We know what we know. As far as, yeah. Episode, recurring core character. We liked recurring actor. Yeah. And that one, I'm not sure if we have enough for eight.

Like, are there, like, we might have to do a little bit of research on that one. Yeah. Best car chase. Best car chase. I mean, if we're doing eight we should do best answering machine message because if nothing else we at least get a champion in each region yeah uh best line of dialogue right i would say best not best goon in terms of individual but like best goons and i'm i'm not sure if that's by episode, like the best goons are in these episodes, or if it's like the mob goon, the FBI goon, goon typologies.

Yeah, that's a good question. We might go with like best heavy and then you could have your goon typologies in it, maybe. See, because you could have like the mob boss versus the mob. Or like best villain. Well, no, because villains are different from goons. Yeah, if we just do best antagonist and we leave that open. Because then we can have John Saxon's character, the urban horticulturalist. There's definitely eight major villains that we can come up with.

There's eight villains, yeah. We should at least have that so here's the thing like i was gonna say like do we do best like best use like best use of food best use of money oh oh okay so here's the thing uh and maybe this is revealing how the sausage is made but uh we are looking also at something that it would be easy for us to research without having to go back and rewatch all the episodes. Right. Yeah. So that may not work. I think the most borderline of all the ones we've mentioned so far would be the car chases in that category of like easy to research.

How many do we have right now? So we have more than eight now if food and money are separate. Also, if we have goons and villains if food and money are separate also if we have goons and villains as separate those are two different categories um in the name of just kind of throwing stuff out and then we'll we'll edit this down maybe um what about i was thinking like best like best weird premise i mean i know what you're getting at or best oh the best con might work uh we maybe we could say the best con which is a wide like that covers that could be a rockford con that could be the con whether it's played on

yeah yeah yeah it's best best con in terms of like making a fun episode yeah yeah like best con plot not best success of a con although there's like these little moments that aren't like the whole episode like when jim cons his way into like uh yeah well i feel like that would be different like there's best con like as an episode scale and then there's like best jim con yeah uh because we don't have anything about jim yet actually because he's exempt from the recurring categories right yeah no you're right maybe we should do like a best well we'll call it jim khan for now but i think that there's definitely the best um the best way he's he's talked himself into a place how about the most rockfordness moment or something like that yeah

there's a um a writer for the old doctor who who he passed away recently uh terence dicks who used to say hey that uh every episode had to have a moment of who ishness yeah emily started using the term rock for rock fruitishness in our live episode i think it's where i started picking that up yeah i think so yeah i think that's a good one best moment of rock traditionists and i feel like but that's like that's a good catch-all wild card category yeah yeah okay like something that we haven't thought of that we're like, this needs to be honored in some way. Right. All right. So, that's...

So, if these are split apart as opposed to combining into ones that might be combined, that's 13. So, I think we can cut some of these. Okay, that's plenty to choose from then. Even though we do like the food and money, I do think that those are less interesting, more work to find and less interesting to talk about because they're just kind of little moments. And if one is superlative, it could fall under Rockfordishness fairly easily. All right. So are Jim Kahn and Rockfordishness separate? Let's say yes.

Okay. I feel like we can easily come up with eight different gym cons yeah so i i would agitate for taking out recurring actor a because i'm not sure how many of them are really that we've seen so far like i can think of like two or three off the top of my head but that'll take like more research are they mostly background characters i'm i'm okay with that too because i'm also slightly uncomfortable with it like and that's also not fictional yeah i was gonna say i didn't didn't suggest like best director best writer because i don't want to pitch pit uh people against each other i want to pit the

so yeah and also recurring actor like what are we not going to end up saying billings like the guy who plays billings right like kind of similar for best answering machine like it's that's almost more rock traditionists like a really good one yeah yeah do i really need to like listen to a bunch of them to come up with eight that i really like because they are a little arbitrary but if you feel strongly about it no uh no we could drop that uh i think that one actually if we wanted to we could we could just throughout march just run twitter polls on them and just that's it like those don't require commentary yeah or in fact they may not even inspire yeah most of them are like oh that's a fun bit okay so that does bring

us down to nine so we can cut we have one more cut okay so what we have right now are best episode best recurring core character other than jim best car chase best line of dialogue best villain best goons in terms of best goon typology i think right best con episode scale best Jim con, a specific fun thing that Jim does, and then most Rockfordishness as our wild card catch all category. Yeah. Does one of those stick out as less interesting or harder to do? There's two pairs that overlap a bit, right? Like there's the con and the Jim con. And the Jim con also does overlap a bit with rockfordishness and then there's the villains and the goon that kind of overlap too uh can we come up with eight

categories of goons it depends on how wide the typology goes i guess do we start differentiating between local mob goons and new york mobons. Right. Like, is that fun? Or is that stretching just to fill the category? Yeah, maybe we'll drop that one for now, too. Some of the goons are just very Rockford-y. So maybe that's where my favorite goons, maybe I'll sneak them into the Rockfordishness. Rockfordishness. Okay.

Sounds good. Because villains are more fun to talk about. Yeah. For sure. Yeah, so that's eight. Is it best Jim Conhan or is it like best jim like bit is this all just things that that he does in order to gain information or is this like making uh making business cards on his printing press or like keeping the gun in the

cookie jar like is that a jim bit or is that a rock for dishness yeah that's a hard one to uh maybe maybe let's narrow that down so that it doesn't bleed into rock for dishness too much so we just call it uh best moment of jim fast talking or something like that that's jim fast talk yeah and that also differentiates a little bit from con where he's like setting up a con because that's not fast talk. Because if we're going to do best jib con, I would nominate. Oh, man, I can't remember the one that he has to go through and explain to Angel over and over again. Yes. Yeah. And Angel's like, this isn't going to work. And it doesn't. Chicken Little is a little chicken. Yeah. All right. So which because ultimately each pair of brackets will play each other.

So, the pairs are, yeah, how do we want to pair these? Right. Like, do we want like and like, like core character versus villain? Or do we want like and unlike? I think it's like and unlike. Because I think what you want is you want to come down to Rocky versus the urban horticulturist. In the end. Right.

Right. Or like the queen of Peru versus, you know, bees die of loneliness. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Not to forecast our picks, but. Yeah. Yeah. You want the ending to be more epic than the beginning.

Right. All right. So I'll just go from the top and we more epic than the beginning. Right. All right. So I'll just go from the top and we'll figure out the best pair. So what pairs best with best episode? Episode versus. That's hard because these all occur inside episodes. Episode versus core character? Yeah, sure.

Because those are both just like big, like those will knock out anything else. Yeah. Or. Oh, my God will knock out anything else. Yeah. Or. Oh my God, this is very hard to do. This one's the hardest one. Episode versus dialogue? Like biggest and smallest? Or is it best episode versus most rock-furtishness?

Like are those the two biggest categories? That might be it. So that we don't just have them dominate each other's. Each of their partners? Yeah. Yeah. We'll do that for now and see if that makes sense okay so recurring core character is another heavy yeah um oh that one we could just pit against a dialogue right oh okay yeah i think those are sufficiently different okay that's car chase um Maybe car chase versus villain?

Yeah, actually, I was just thinking that. Is it best villain? Is it most, is it just best to keep it open for different kinds of villains? I think so. I think we want to be able to like justify it and then lose that justification when you're up against something else. Right. Great. And so that leaves, so that does leave best con versus best Jim Fast Talk sure uh well let's get that over with in the beginning then because they're sufficiently close that uh maybe it wouldn't

be interesting if it came down to those two at the very end yeah yeah i see what you're saying i think i've i've put forth like contradictory theories of what makes this interesting but i think i'm sticking to them here let me pitch this and see what you think so if we swap uh jim fast talk with dialogue then we would get recurring core character versus jim fast talk and best con versus best dialogue okay yeah do those seem yeah that's fine they're not seamy enough that they yeah and i feel like there's a fun conversation to be had of like yeah of like the benefit of like micro macro like yeah like what makes it

fun like is it the whole story is it the little bit um the recurring character versus jim fast talk and i like that because that's kind of pitting the characters against jim yeah is beth better than the best jim fast talk she might be yeah she might be i i'm having trouble envisioning a world where our winner for core character doesn't end up winning the the series like i feel like the core character decision is going to be the toughest one and then once you do that you're like well how can it not be this person i've grown to love right but that's okay i think it'll be having division champions will be yeah will be worthwhile yeah cool so uh we've hashed it out this is this is the process this is how the sausage is made everyone and this will go

up on our patreon uh as a public post so you can go check it out there. We'll also be tweeting about it as we get into March. But we will post the brackets and we will sit down at some point this month and come up with our list. And then we will incorporate any feedback we've gotten by then. Yeah. Once you hear this, if you have any thoughts, go ahead and get those to us before the end of February. Yeah, sounds good. And then we'll finalize our bracket March 1st and then we'll go from there how about that sounds good and and uh i definitely encourage people to tell us what they think because i think some of these categories well actually once you get started you fill these categories pretty fast yeah i think

it's going to be helpful to have uh listener feedback to make the decisions about which ones go into the category. I think we can easily fill these categories, but we can also easily fill 16 into each category or something like that. And so having the user feedback early is going to help us. They kind of wait how they go in seed wise, which I think we won't overthink too much. It's supposed to be fun. which I think we won't overthink too much. It's, it's supposed to be fun. This is,

yeah, we are, we are creating a structure just so that we can keep talking about the rock profiles without having to watch an episode. So yes. Um, awesome. So yeah.

So, uh, you know, stay tuned. Yeah. We'll be talking about this, um, in the episodes that start dropping in March.

Uh, our next episode this month will be the second of our two-part journey into Anthony Boy Gaglio. Oh, yeah. The man who saw the alligators, which is very exciting. So it's a nice little chunk of fun off-the-beaten-path

Rockford character study drama, I think. And stay tuned right now to go back in time to hear us talk about how our lives were immediately prior to the holidays and to recording the Man Who Saw the Alligators episode.

Yeah, enjoy. Yeah, gotta get back in time. Have you seen Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead? I've heard of it. I've not seen it. It's a 95 film, which is not something I knew off the top of my head. I just looked it up now.

I remember watching it. I don't know if it's a good film. I don't know if it entertained me. I can't offer any review except to say my friend Navik and I went to see it. I can't offer any review except to say my friend Navic and I went to see it. There were like a couple phrases in the film that people were using over and over again that felt like they were trying to make them make them catchphrases. Yeah. What's the God?

Now I'm trying to think of another film. Is it Mean Girls where they like stop trying to make fetch a thing? I don't know where that comes from. It might come from Mean Girls where they like stop trying to make fetch a thing? I don't know where that comes from. It might come from Mean Girls. Yeah. In this one, it was give it a name and boat drinks. Those were two phrases. I don't even know what they meant. I don't even know the context.

I just remember that Navic and I used them all the time afterwards to mean nothing. Just nonsensical give it a name anyways uh if you're a big andy garcia fan i'd watch it that is a strong opening to plus expenses one of our stronger openings how have you been uh okay um i was gonna say we were a little out of practice. Yeah. I feel like it has been so long since we did a recording. Last I saw you, we were live, but we weren't recording. Right. I did. Yes, we have been able to spend some time together, just not for the show.

On the mean streets of Chicago. They're pretty mean. I don't know. Were they mean? No. Actually, everyone was very pleasant. pretty mean i don't know were they mean no actually everyone was very pleasant uh i enjoyed some really good really affordable chicago food that day and some okay super expensive chicago food that day so that was okay the uh the um tamales that we have were good. I really enjoyed them. That whole experience was fun.

The Little Goat Diner, that was alright. Then I paid a bill. Little Goat is the... For those who are not either celebrity chef followers or Chicago food scene knowers.

Which is only two people in our audience, I would guess. I mean, I think most of them. Yeah, you all already know what I'm saying here. Yeah. So Little Goat Diner is the down market extension of Little Goat. There's a celebrity-ish chef named Stephanie Izard who started that. And the original concept was it was a it was goat based um and uh before i god i feel like this was so long ago this was probably like

the late aughts early 2010s um i don't know if that's when it opened or that's when it became a thing but uh anyway i mentioned it because before it was before I stopped eating meat, Liz and I went there, you know, we're in Chicago, you know, there's all this great food. We should experience some of it.

So we went to Little Goat twice. And the first time was amazing. And the second time, I think because I already kind of knew what to expect. It was like, yeah, this is still good. But you know how,

when you don't really know what you're getting into and then if it is good, that kind of like, I think that sticks in your mind more than if you're like, yeah, I know what this is going to be. And yes, it is good. Yeah.

Um, but the things that are really great on that menu are the meat dishes. Like that's the concept. So not that what I, not what I ordered. dishes. Like, that's the concept. Yeah. It's just not what I ordered. Right. So Little Goat Diner is, like, the more, like, affordable, less intense version. And I think I've eaten there once, and I don't really remember it. It was fine.

Yeah. But I enjoyed myself all around. That was a fun trip to meet a bunch of people. Yeah. So. But I enjoyed myself all around. That was a fun trip to meet a bunch of people. Yeah. And how are the rest of your journey's been? It sounds like it's been a bit of an ordeal. Man, it was. Well, the end of it was an ordeal.

So to give our listeners an understanding of what I was up to, I was in Chicago because that is between where I live and where my family lives in Denver. And I was driving with my parents out to Denver. We stopped in Chicago, visited yourself and an old family friend, and then did a 16-hour driving stint starting at 3 in the morning uh that's so much oh my god uh part of it was very pleasant because it was just like a gentle landscape where you just watched a whole bunch of giant windmills go by like that was it that was the the extent of it uh but by the time we got close enough to denver to get traffic it was also snowing and it was just kind of that the very end of it when we were all very tired yeah that's the worst worst driving but we got

there it was pleasant uh got to see family that was good got to go to mile high comics if you are a comic book fan and you're ever in denver i highly recommend it it's this gargantuan warehouse that uh has like a special place in my heart i've never been to it until uh my family moved out to denver but the ads are all over my old comics right because they would you know they would do mail order comics or whatever and so uh to me it was a place yeah like when you're a kid and you you you live in rural ohio uh you don't have access to even like a comic book store you spend time staring at those ads thinking maybe i can maybe i can mail order something you know and like what is this mile high comics like that they have all the comic books so that was fun uh but then when it came time to come back the trip back

was uneventful it was between two different storms uh like right after one in denver and the midwest and then we landed got home around 1 a.m this is just the litany of stuff we had to deal with here um just before we went on vacation our car got totaled. So we had to buy a new car, but we needed to rent a car. And due to various bureaucracies and certain car rental places being open at certain times at night near the airport, we actually had to rent one car then to drive us home and then go and get our car rental for the temporary replacement for our totaled car and return the original car rental yeah go to the bank finalize the loan get home come down with a horrible stomach bug oh no get a foot and a half of snow dropped on us

discovered that while we were out a mouse moved in and decided that the countertops and the cast iron skillet in my kitchen made the best bathroom oh no it was horrendous that sucks so much so uh i was like just almost completely out of it because whatever this bug was, it not only caused gastrointestinal situations, but also just wiped me out. But also we couldn't just sleep. We had to shovel because we had to like do a bunch of car switching. All of that. But we got through it. And we're on the other side.

And I'm happy for that. Yay. Yay. How about yourself? What have you been up to since last I saw you? Good question. Not too much and a lot. Oh, that's good.

Yeah. So as you know, and other close friends and family, my wife and I are expecting a baby. So plus expenses, fans, welcome. Welcome to the inner circle. No, it's not like it's been a secret. It's just that neither her nor I really want to be extremely online about it. Yeah. Because of all the things that seem like they are really dumb to try and deal with,

one of those things seems to be getting into parental advice on the internet. Oh, God. Yeah. But yeah, so she's due at the end of the month, right after, right between Christmas and New Year's. We've kind of transitioned, kind of, we've had kind of a hard transition into like baby prep. Oh, yeah. You know, we've been getting things from our registry, which is great.

Just kind of starting to accumulate items. There's lots of stuff involved. Yeah, yeah. accumulate items there's lots of stuff involved um yeah yeah it's been kind of cool that uh to like kind of try and approach things kind of smartly and be like all right what do we actually need versus what are we going to discover we need and stuff like that but also as you might imagine because there's this whole baby industrial complex there's lots of stuff out there so liz has been pretty on top of the local like facebook mommy groups and we've been like getting stuff like picking up stuff secondhand from you

know people who used it for their recent newborn but then they grow out of things and you don't need this thing anymore so yeah and it's all fine like it's all perfectly usable in good shape stuff because it's only used for two months. Right. Yeah. So that's been kind of interesting, kind of getting into that world. But yeah, so we've been doing that kind of stuff. I've been trying to kind of wrap up projects, I think pretty much entirely between the last time we recorded and this recording. I had the Kickstarter.

Oh, yeah. For one more thing i don't remember if it launched after we recorded or if i just launched it when we recorded but it just ended yesterday so yeah uh so yeah no i was just gonna say i don't remember but yeah so that uh that was kind of a i i anticipated a little more active interest in the beginning of the campaign uh so it was a little stressful but we did end up uh funding kind of in the last day or so um which is great so now it is going to happen yeah like we kind of staged out a plan for different levels of success and we basically hit the minimum level which is fine because that's also kind of the uh shortest timeline yeah it's like it is the

the most flexible in terms of like how much time we need to spend to get it done um it's not a whole bunch of prep to like go to a printer overseas and stuff like that like which would extend the timeline and be more work and all those things what are the fundamental bad feedback loops in kickstarter i'm just gonna say it bad yeah is that um the gambling side of kickstarter right the part where you look at it and you watch that number go up and you're like how far is that gonna go right uh is marked by these milestones that you arbitrarily create uh but the milestones tend to be oh man if you're at least smart about it if you're at least cautious about it they tend to be the minimum of what you need to pull off what you're saying you're going to do right so you're saying this game will fund

at a thousand dollars but if we hit two thousand000 it'll be full color right and so what you're saying is uh at $2,000 we can afford to do you know the the full color thing so you get excited the closer it gets to 2,000 you really wanted to hit 2,000 and that's the exciting bit but really what you wanted to do is just fall a penny short of 2,000 exactly. Because that gives you the most margin without adding more stuff. So the feedback loop is to put you in the least advantageous position.

It gives you the worst result for the level that you're at is the most exciting part of the feedback loop. Because you're like, oh, if we could just get that extra dollar. And it's like,'s like no well worst result in terms of margin yeah yeah but like you know future uh headaches really that's true like i would kind of like i've kind of come to the to the position of i mean there's that could be the result of a strategy right like if the strategy is we want

this to fund early so that there's excitement about it but what we actually want is to print it in color and whatever so that's still like we'll fund it a thousand but our actual goal right what we actually want is this like stretch goal at five thousand or whatever yeah that's one strategy and i've kind of come around to be more like, I just want, like, I want to figure out what I actually want and that will be the goal. Yeah. And then if it doesn't get to the goal, that means that there isn't enough interest in what I actually want and I can change without having like sunk a bunch of money into something that I don't actually want. Yeah. Yeah. So that was, so for this campaign, that's kind of what we did. It was like, I could have set a lower goal, but in terms of like making the numbers work and getting to what we actually want it to be, because we're going to it's going to end up being like a print on demand version of it.

Right. But we can do that in bulk to get some cost savings and we can assemble the pieces from a couple of vendors to make it like a little nicer than doing it all through one and stuff like that. And so it's kind of like to make that effort worth it. This is what the goal needs to be. Right. Plus, and it also builds in a little bit of profit margin and a little bit of like breathing space if something goes wrong and all that stuff. And then what I realized during the campaign, the other thing is we chose to defer the shipping

costs and do those through backer kit, which I traditionally have not really been interested in backer kit, but because this is a, because this is a box. So it's more of a board game. I think shipping is going to be more complicated. And also because of things, the possibility of if it did, you know,

have a great response and we did hit our big goal to like do an overseas print run tariff stuff comes into play. Who knows how that's going to change? Who knows how postal rates are going to change yeah everything is chaos right um so for this one we kind of i kind of built in the margin to be able to do backer kit and do all of the shipping down the line with backer kit figure out exactly what it actually costs everyone and be like all right you know here's the here the shipping. It comes a couple months later after the original pledge and everything. But what that meant for the campaign, what I realized while I was watching it in the first couple weeks was like,

oh, my internalized sense of Kickstarter progression is based on a model where the shipping is built into the pledge levels, which means that when someone pledges, there's basically more money going towards the goal. Yes, Yes. So you get, so you hit the goal with lower backer counts if you have your shipping built in. So I'm like watching, I'm like, man, this feels like it's just crawling along. And I'm like, oh, right. Because there would be an extra six, seven, $8 per person. So this hundred, these hundred backers, we would be almost twice as you know close to the goal if they were all paying shipping right now yeah and so that was a really weird dynamic for

me to kind of internalize why it was different and realize like i'd run the numbers on it but it's right when you're seeing it happen in real time yeah i mean like that's the thing with with kickstarter is that it's well i mean with all things but like there's uh you really need to be aware of your emotions uh tied to like this monetary value that is changing in front of you and yeah set your expectations uh which is hard it's not an easy thing i mean like that's it's not only hard, but it's what the entire gambling industry is based on. Right. Like it's it's it's hard in a way that can be used to con people. So indeed. Yeah. Good times. Good times.

But yeah, overall, I'm glad that it i would have been fine if it hadn't funded because it'd been like one less thing to do uh but i am more glad that it that it funded but at this lowest effort level that we need to put into it to make it happen that's like the happy medium in terms of getting it out into the world it is a good game i do think people will like it uh i'm excited for it i mean you knew that i was but so yeah so i guess i've been working on that um but yeah mostly just trying to get in addition to that just trying to get a freelance work wrapped up so it's all kind of just done in the next week or so uh as we go into the holidays yay um and so one thing that that means for our listeners uh i can just just send out our december preview on the patreon uh in which i i frame it thus um things have been

kind of chaotic and we have been recording but uh haven't been keeping up with the editing and in the in the usual cadence that i try to keep. So, uh, we will have this, you know, this, this that you're listening to now, um, and it's associated episode. Uh, I'm pretty confident those will come out in this, in this month in December. Um, and then, you know, depending on how things go, I might be able to put out a second episode. Um, but I also might not. Yeah. It's, it's going to be, I mean, without the child on the also might not yeah it's it's gonna be i mean without the child on the way uh it's a horrible month right for for planning anything for some reason uh modern western culture is all about hating the end of the year by shoving everything anyways yeah oh

actually okay let me rephrase that by the time you hear this, it will no longer be December that I can actually, I can pretty much promise you, but we should have, so I should have the December episode out. Um, so you're listening from the future. You already know what happened. Uh, but I think the most likely thing is that we'll have one episode in December and then we should have these two episodes that are kind of two parts of a story that are each two episodes long, basically. I'd like to get that all out in January. So that's a nice little set to kick off the year. The year 2020. I know.

And then I'll be trying to kind of edit a bunch of stuff all in the same stretch so I can just schedule it over a couple months. We'll see how it goes. It'll be, you know, we'll keep our patrons informed. But we may have some more single episode months coming ahead, which is fine. We have an interesting addition to our household that is in the works, which I don't know if i told you about this it's no it's not what it's not what you're thinking it's not what you would be thinking if you were my mom right now you're getting more hermit crabs no no we're so what's happening is uh emily and i are sponsoring and housing a transgender asylum seeker oh cool uh yeah so well not cool that

that is necessary but no exactly yeah that's uh because the state that the world is in now uh this is a necessary thing we have we have a house with some guest bedrooms uh we're going to move some furniture around and create a space for her uh i don't know what it's going to be like like that's yeah the reason why uh i'm bringing it up now is because it's very much on my mind because right maybe even as well probably while we were recording she will be going before an immigration judge uh to see if she can be released to us uh Uh, we've, we've gone like that far into the process. And, uh,

I don't know, like they've kind of given us an idea of how it works, but I don't know specifically like what happens next or how soon that, uh, she gets released and, uh, she, she's comes up here.

Uh, and the whole thing is going to be a bit of an adventure. Oh, yeah. Which is going to also have an effect on all sorts of productivity. For sure. Particularly because I don't speak a lick of Spanish and she doesn't speak English. She doesn't speak English. So the one thing I'm doing today is getting another phone line on our plan so that we can text and Google Translate back and forth.

Nice. Because this is the future that we live in that makes that possible. Wow. Yeah. That is a hell of an adventure. So that, too, might have an effect on when and how we're able to record and things going forward. Yeah. I mean, you know, it is what it is. Yeah.

As we have determined that this podcast is not going to take over the world and be some kind of mass market featured thing, featured thing. I assume that everyone understands that as our lives change, it may have an impact on our frequency and ability to do the show. Wow, that's really exciting. I am wishing you

and her the best of luck. I don't know how that process works or what's involved. Fortunately, there's a community here of people who have been through it and have done this sort of thing and organizing. And we're actually meeting with some of them tonight. So I'll have a better idea of what's happening. There's a good community, good support network for what's happening.

I don't feel like we've signed up for something and then they they're like, good luck. Yeah. So that's that's really good. luck. Yeah. So that's, that's really good. That's awesome. And that's fortunate. Uh, but,

uh, well actually by the time this airs, uh, uh, because I, I intend to do my, I do my annual epimus sale, which,

uh, becomes less and less necessary every year because the, uh, internet is starting to do things that i was trying to do by hand uh when epimus started uh but this year i'm like explicitly saying all of my epimus money is going towards because she i don't i'm fairly certain she legally can't have a job yet so just she's going to need support clothing food and and all of that so uh it's uh i'm definitely going to need support, clothing, food and all of that. So it's I'm definitely going to be like, hey, folks, this is a way you can change a life this epimus here.

Yeah, that's awesome. So that's that's my big, exciting plan. Big changes, big changes coming up on coming up for for for us, not on the show, but as we do the show. coming up for for uh for us not on the show but as we do the show i mean it's wild if you you know taking taking a second to step back and think about it because we started our first recordings were in oh god because we recorded at the end of the year and they started at the beginning of the year but i can't i have to look at the date stamps to remember which into which. Okay. Our first episodes, we dropped our first set of episodes right before Christmas of 2016. So three years ago, just about as we record this. Wow.

So we are entering into the fourth year of doing the show. So time both flies and it seems like forever since then, right?'s so weird well that's so we're heading into our fourth season the rockford files went for six seasons is that correct but five and a half but yes six seasons that's right because the the last season is just two discs long in the mill creek rockford file dvd collection yes like actually thinking about this in oh no no because we watched discs long in the Mill Creek Rockford file DVD collection. Yes. Like actually thinking about this in, Oh no,

no. Cause we, we watched a season five one, uh, for this episode. I'm just going to check to see where season four begins, uh, in the Rockford files.

Oh, wow. We didn't do a whole lot of, um, season four, huh? The earliest season four episode we've done is Second Chance. And we just did that this year.

Yeah. Oh, there's Quickie Nirvana, which may have been. Oh, no, we did that one a while ago. Yeah. Yeah. No, but I'm just looking through chronologically the as they aired episodes, trying to figure out which one. Is closest to what this is. Yeah, to what we're feeling. I guess it probably would be the end of season three so yeah end of season three probably so what do we got here at the end of season three we've got uh did we do deserve and protect uh that's the one that we just did

yeah we just okay yes so that one hasn't aired yet oh but that's the first part of this that's the first part of this that's the two--part first part of this two-part series. The third to last episode of season three. So, okay. So, I'll take that. We're on track. We're on track. Yeah.

We need to make this a comparison. I'll take that. Yeah. We're going to have our Rockford Files midlife crisis. Very exciting. And there's a new Rockford Files podcast out there. There is. I have not listened to it yet.

I haven't had a chance to listen to it either because I've been on the holidays and whatnot. But it's 853-OKG. Ah, yes. It's the license plate. So, yeah. I'm going to give that one a shot. Well, I would like to maybe finish this out with bringing up a letter from a listener. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, is this the bandit check? Yeah. Yeah. So, shout out to Sean Walsh who sent an email. This was a while ago now. But again, in kind of the interregnum between our recordings, asking if we were familiar with another NBC mystery movie detective, Thomas Banachick. And I was not. I have not heard of this. I have seen episodes back in the day, but only vaguely remember them yeah so i i was like no tell tell us

more um so i will uh not read this whole thing verbatim because it is a nice summary with with many good details um but it was it was one of the nbc mystery movies anthologies. So it was like Columbo, airing in a similar time. 1972 to 1974. And it was on Wednesdays. Columbo was the Sunday movie. But the premise was that in each episode

a valuable and heavily insured object would vanish under mysterious or impossible circumstances. Naturally, the insurance company would investigate the disappearance. But if the insurance company would investigate the disappearance, but if they were unable to recover the item, they would offer a finder's fee of 10% of the policy to anyone who could crack the case. Enter Thomas Banaszczak, a Polish-American playboy with a fondness for thin

cigars, beautiful women, and quoting obscure Polish proverbs like, the truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn. Or, just because a dress is made from red satin doesn't mean it comes off easily uh which is amazing um and he was played by george peppered bard or pepard is that i think so that's how i've always pronounced it but i pronounced things wrong so but he noted here of a team fame yeah is he the he's's Hannibal. Oh, he's Hannibal. Yes. Yeah. So, great. Yeah, so there's a pilot in 16 hour and a half

episodes. There's lots of spot the actor, as I think with all of these shows in the 70s. Yeah. Structurally, Sean says, One of the things I liked the most about the series was that it played fairly with the audience. The mystery was the main thrust of the story, so the audience got to see all the same clues that Banachek did. I personally find it very Right.

It's like hiding a piece of a jigsaw puzzle just so the other guy can't solve it first. at first um and that made me think of one of your uh soapbox um things uh about doing things just to justify them to the audience where yeah internally to the show they don't make much sense it's kind of the inverse of that where it's like we we don't want you to figure this out because we want the big reveal to be uh proving what a smart guy or detective is or whatever. But you could not have figured it out because we did not give you all the information. There's like these two sides to that particular, like there's these two competing tropes there. There's the one where the character just behaves that way, even when they're alone, except for the camera. that way even when they're alone except for the camera and right you're just like oh i guess they have to be the bad guy because there's no logical reason why they'd be behaving this way this unless

they know they're being filmed and they're trying to trick us the audience watching and the other side of that are the the the killers uh that reveal themselves like when they go to hug someone and we see their evil look on their face that now that no you know like the the reveal when only the audience can see them and i guess i'm suspicious of both which is unfair to all involved so uh there's that um i don't remember enough of banachek to remember how it plays with all this, but I do like what I hear in Sean's email. Yeah, for sure. He says that he's

a little surprised that he liked him so much as a character because he's pretty much the polar opposite of Jim Rockford. Banachek is wealthy. Rockford is not. Jim has a circle of friends and family that support him on his cases. Banachek seems to have no immediate family or close friends. I guess there's some recurring side characters, but it sounds like he's a lone wolf.

But he's cool and suave, where Rockford is warm and charming. But it seems like this is a character that only works because the actor suits the role so well. And that's what makes it work. In the same way that Jim makes Jim work. James's what makes it work um in the same way that you know jim makes jim work james garner makes jim work um it is it's it's really easy to start describing these characters to somebody with no experience with the character and then have even being aware that as you're describing them they're starting to come off as the just a horrible person right not not necessarily i mean rockford has a moral center and all that but you he also is right and a little judgy and you're

fine with that because of james gardner right you just you feel like yeah he should be judgy about this but if you if if if you're not james gardner and you're portraying this in any way, just telling people about the character, it's easy to come across as, wait, this is a judgy ass. And I can definitely see one of George Pappard's characters being charming, just as Sean describes them, all of these horrible things. But come on, you got to give them a break yeah so i would say that my my interest is is officially peaked um sean says that the there's a fabulous films release of the series from 2014 uh and they are region two so it might be something that you have to do some kind of workaround for us amer in our region one, but there are older region one DVDs. I leave it to the audience to see if this can be tracked down,

um, in, in a helpful viewable form anywhere. Um, but I'll take a look around for sure. Yeah. Um, and then two,

two other fun details. Uh, one is that, uh, as we talk about kind of some of the production stuff with our show so much, there are only two seasons of this show. Not due to the ratings, but because George Pappard was going through a messy divorce. And the terms of the settlement gave his ex-wife a percentage of his earnings for all of his projects. So he quit all of his acting jobs to keep her from getting any of that money.

Oh, Jesus. Which is so messed up on so many levels yeah like oof um and then uh he ends with uh if you guys ever wanted to expand on your theories concerning finances and food as it relates to 70s detective shows bad check has something to offer there as well i did a little bit of quick research. If you're in Region 2, you can get Season 1 for $20 and then Season 2 for another $20 for a total of about $40. If you're in Region 1, like we are,

it's only $400. Oh my god. I think that's just part of the deductible. I wonder if so many of these other shows if it randomly came on to IMDb TV, but it does not appear to be.

Thank you, Sean, for that wonderful for taking the time to do that wonderful write-up. We now have something to take a look at. Something aspirational. Yes. I watched, I went and saw Knives Out. I've heard that it's great.

I have not seen it yet. And I kind of would like to stay, you know, spoiler free. All right. Spoiler free. I will say this. I'll tell you what I told the Internet. It is, as we say in this household, written. The whole thing is very tight.

I really, really enjoyed it. I enjoyed all the performances and everything like that. But I also really enjoyed how everything was written well together and at no point even though there's lots of twists and turns at no point do i go come on right and i know that that's like a dangerous praise for movies like this because it's going to be like that to someone somehow in some respect but for me it worked uh i very much enjoyed it and uh the one of the main characters names is an allusion to a choose your own adventure murder mystery i had as a kid and still have to this day

and i was super happy when it came on screen and i did that thing that you do when a piece of popular culture mentions something that you like enjoyed yeah as a kid it was like oh i know this thing quick let me tell the whole theater right good job yeah no i'm i'm excited to see it i i think liz wants to see it so we're kind of if we can triangulate when it's still running around us that she actually wants to leave the house, we're going to try to see it. So, so far I've, I've, I've heard nothing but good things. So I'm excited. All right. I think that's pretty much brings us, brings us up to date.

That is, that, that was our expenses. Those were our expenses. I have no good, I have no good, I have no good segue. Expenses. I have no good segue. Much like being released from prison after a number of years to go seek revenge, we shall release you from plus expenses and move on to our main show. All right. That's good. I like it. Well played.