Two Hundred A Day - Episode 71: Black Lives Matter (A Plus Expenses Special)

Episode Date: June 14, 2020

Black Lives Matter. We support the ongoing uprisings against police brutality in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and we wanted to both reflect on what this means for us and talk to our audience directly about how you can help. We start the conversation with our standard Plus Expenses-style check-in, and transition about half an hour in to talking about the protests and what we're currently grappling with as next steps towards a future without police. Ways to help: We are donating funds from our Patreon to < ahref = "https://secure.actblue.com/donate/wp4bl">the Los Angeles Action Bail Fund Educate yourself and find more places to donate at Blacklivesmatter.carrd.co Find a bail fund in your state Verso Books is hosting free ebooks on the topic of police abolition, check out their page on Abolition and Black Struggle for links and more information Thanks to Nathan Ward for mentioning us in his article Falling in Love with The Rockford Files All Over Again! 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.

Hi everyone, Nathan here. This Plus Expenses episode is going out on our main feed because we think it's important to be as public as possible with our support for Black Lives Matter and the ongoing uprisings and protests against police brutality sparked by the murder of George Floyd. Because we don't outline or aim for specific talking points in these episodes, we start in our usual check-in mode before specifically getting into our Black Lives Matter discussion. We thought about cutting up the episode to put that first, but it seems important to capture how a lot of conversations we've been having as white privileged men, how they go as we try to uplift black voices while staying present and involved in what's going on as bearers of that privilege. We know this podcast

isn't a huge platform, but we would like to try and use it to help. And so that's why we're having this conversation. So if you'd like to skip the preliminaries, we get into our Black Lives Matter conversation at about the half hour mark. We ended up with some thoughts directed towards our audience who may be uncomfortable with what's going on, but also unsure about what to do. These started about the 15 minute mark. We know that listeners to our show hold a broad set of opinions, and we do want to encourage you to tune into that last 15 minutes if your first reaction to us talking about this is just to skip the episode. We understand that everything is a lot right now, and we're just a drop in the bucket of the outpouring of support, which is amazing. But also, sometimes those of us who aren't involved directly in the struggle feel some pushback against listening to and engaging

with these topics. And we want to try and bridge that gap for anyone who maybe is unsure or, or, or is looking for a may expanded set of ways to grapple with their role in these struggles. Finally, as a podcast built on a show that is based in LA, we will be donating all of our Patreon income from this month and next month, at least to the Los Angeles Action Bail Fund.

Black Lives Matter LA is currently directing support there. You can find links at blmla.org, and we'll have more links in the show notes for everything that we've discussed in this episode. We'll have a regular episode talking about the Rockford Files later in the month as well, but hopefully you'll find something helpful to think about in our conversation here. So stay safe out there, and thank you for listening. Let me see if I can, if I make the darker. You look good.

Well, it's not so much that as I'm also having a little trouble seeing the screen. Okay, fine. There you go. Okay. Well, let's start off with the good news. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I have received my spell of the wolf. I didn't realize there was spot gloss. That's so nice. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I received my spell of the wolf.

I didn't realize there was spot gloss. That's so nice. Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't show up well on photography, the spot gloss. It means it's a nice surprise. I also like that it's on the stars, or at least some of the stars. Yeah.

It's nice. Yeah. I'm so glad, so happy to see them in the wild. If you will. And I cannot, yes, and I cannot wait to an appropriate moment when I can celebrate that. I know. The tiniest of sad violins for us who are like, oh no, this is a weirdly, let me tell you, a weird time to try and tell people about my detective murder game. Yes, yes.

I mean, now you can be like, own a piece of history. Own something of the past. Well, before we get into all of that, I have now encountered the, hopefully, maybe I'm wrong, but the final stress of a Kickstarter. Oh, yeah. Which is when you ship out a whole bunch of product at once, a small percentage of that is going to get damaged. Yeah. But because you shipped out a lot of it all at the same time, you're going to get all those complaints at the same time and have a moment where you think, I ruined an entire shipment. Yeah. same time and have a moment where you think i ruined an entire shipment yeah you know and seeing people show copies online i'm like oh thank god like uh because obviously the first people to

reach out are well i mean everyone that's excited to get it is reaching out but like if i do the same if i get a product that i ordered and there's something wrong with it. I contact the person and let them know. Right. And like the early news was four people that had damaged products. And I was like, the trend line on that is straight up until I started seeing other ones online. I was like, oh, oh, thank God. Yeah. Yeah. What percentage is this?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so you have that to get through and then i think you'll have the last bit which will be which which is a trailing long tail that may be depending on the size of the backer uh pool maybe for a long time which is people being like hey i forgot to fill out my uh survey like a year after you've not just not just the out my survey like a year after you've, not just the campaigns ended,

but like a year after you have finished everything and you've moved on to different projects. And you get these like, hey, so I never got my book. Or in your case, I never got my album cover. And then you go and you look at the survey and it's like, oh, you never filled out your survey. And then you have to very nicely be like, well, because you didn't fill out your survey, i wasn't able to send it to you can you please

give me your address yes and then you don't hear anything for six months and then you get one from the same person being like hey i never got my thing yeah fortunately i i know a good pi the um kickstarter is going to stop me from being able to access my backers. So this is something new to me. And I don't know if it's because they changed how they do it or if it just hasn't come up for me with other projects. Because I recently had like two people contact me. Very nicely being like, oh, I never got around to this yeah uh for input the perverse and uh i think it's two calendar years after your campaign ends yeah kickstarter no

longer allows you to access the backer information right you can request backer information but that's like a whole formal process where you request it and they restore access to the entire list so if you need one address for someone who fills out their survey two years after your campaign closed the kickstarter support document says contact them individually like yeah you can't just like auto like you can't pull that information out of a spreadsheet like you have to have them give it to you manually and i think that's like a backer privacy thing, which makes sense, but it's a pain in the ass. It makes sense and it doesn't.

I mean, it's weird because part of it is just that I, well, I've got the data. I've got all the data that they've given me so far. I've got their email addresses and names because I've downloaded the backer PDF. Technically, you agree not to keep that data when you click those boxes, when you go to see your backer pdf or uh technically you agree not to keep that data when you click those boxes when you go to see your backer report one of them uh one of them is like i will not maintain a record of this information past when delivery happens or something like that i'm waiting at least a year

no yeah exactly i think there's like a like understandable good faith record keeping to make sure you get people what they paid for um but i think that kickstarter on some level either legally or strategically has been investing in the backer experience yeah um and the privacy stuff is one part of it which is fine and the other part is the request and update thing which you probably didn't see did you ever get a message being like three backers have requested an update oh no i have seen that actually i saw that um uh yeah a couple times which i mean that i find more helpful than like a public post about it or whatever you mean like like a like backers like being like hey where is where's it yeah yeah yeah it's fine whatever like i know that like i get into my stuff and

then forget to notify people that all the business is happening also i don't know what level of of uh access people really want like right i know i ignore most kickstarter updates i like i back a kickstarter because i want the product and then i'm just like let me know when i have to fill out a survey or when it's delivered which makes me really bad at guessing what customers want because i am not uh i'm not a good customer the request and update thing is like an exact bullseye from my bundle of anxieties. Oh, yeah. So a couple of weeks ago, for whatever reason, I had to look up something. So I went to Kickstarter through the creator side.

And there's this big red banner that's like, your backers have requested an update. It's like, oh, God. And then you get an email, a couple, like I got an email like a day or two after that. Some of the backers for, it was for the second edition for World Blood Wrestling. Like some of the backers have requested an update. And the email was a slightly, it was phrased slightly less stringently. It's not that I don't want to communicate, but it's like when my last thing was, there isn't going to be much to say for the first couple months.

I will send out a monthly update. Yeah. And I said that sometime, or no, in mid-April. And so it was like the second, the back half of May. And I'm like, if there's nothing much to say, and I'll get to you next month, that I give myself the grace to be like i have till the end of the month yeah yeah you know it's not like every four weeks on the dot you'll get a thing i don't know it's like i'm already stressing out about not having anything to

say uh and putting together the contentless update um because those are better than than silence plus i was in the middle of doing art direction. So it was like, once I finished getting this stuff signed off on, I can be like, and you know, the artist has started on this stuff. But I don't want to say that when I'm in the middle of the emails, right? And so like, all that is happening at the same time. I'm like, Oh my god, now I'm getting red banners being like, where's the update? I understand from the backer perspective, but it is it was very stressful for me. Oh, yeah.'s such a weird business yeah it's just i feel the same way i've like i have i have discovered that kickstarter really really makes me anxious in that secret way right like where three or four days in uh you're like well i'm like why the hell do i hate everything i don't

know what's going on and then like something gets fixed with the kickstarter something happens with the kickstarter i'm like oh i was just waiting for that to be resolved and just like my brain was panicking about it but not telling me that's what it was panicking about. I don't, I don't know what it is about Kickstarter that does that to me, but yeah, it's, it accesses a lot of the, uh, I think there's a term for this.

I forget what it is, but it's like the, the gambling brain, like all the reward centers that are associated with gambling are also, I think we've talked about this before, like watching the number go up and all that kind of stuff. Um, I feel like there must be a term for this,

but, uh, so all the anxieties that come with that, I feel like is similar. It's like the opposite kind of anxiety that Patreon creates. Yes. This is all in the context of our, you know, Patreon people who support us on Patreon will be hearing this.

Yes. So thank you. And the anxiety created by Patreon is not a backer related one. It's not from, for me at least, it's not from the people who are contributing. Because my experience generally is that, you know, I never hear anyone from Patreon being like, hey, where's my thing? Right. Because they didn't buy a specific thing. They're about supporting the artists or the process. Exactly. Which is amazing.

But Patreon as a platform continues making decisions that are very stressful. Yes. Yeah, but very excited to see some Wolfspell in the wild. And yeah.

I read that article you sent me. Yes. The Crime Reads. Nathan Ward.. Nathan Ward. By Nathan Ward. I got an email that was like from one Nathan to another. Yes, that was great. And also our patrons, a patron or two got in touch to alert us about it as well.

Yeah, the article was great. It's really good. I know we haven't done the first episode yet, but when he started talking about the first episode and then he started going, I'm like, oh, this scene, this scene. And then they specifically said that that was the scene that they thought sold the show.

Yeah. It was just like, yeah, I can see why. Yeah, so this is an article at crimereads.com titled Falling in Love with the Rockford Files All Over Again. Yeah. like yeah i can see why yeah so this is a an article at crime reads.com titled falling in love with the rockford files all over again yeah and we're talking about it just because it actually went up the day before we we recorded this so uh you know we got a couple couple notes about it and big thanks to nathan ward for keeping us in the loop and for mentioning us in the column which is the other uh remarkable thing

but it's i mean it's pretty long and it's pretty i like his his um his conceptual angel spinoff show yeah yeah where you just watch the 37 episodes that have angel in it uh that i mean that's a a really kind of a fun approach to a body of work like this right like to to be like okay uh not you don't have to re-edit episodes just re-edit the order or the ones you see right i know people have done that with star wars probably still are doing that with star wars yeah where it's like here's the list of like the good ones yeah over here we just finished watching the first two seasons of the land of the law speaking of the good ones and uh it's clear to me that episodes from the second season are a little out of order they like some of them reference things or forget to reference things that that uh

clearly have happened it's not like a giant continuity show but it does have some continuity and it made me think of that too like wanting to figure out what the original intended order was and and maybe not re-watch them again because i've re-watched them now enough times for an adult who doesn't have kids but uh yeah uh there's um a bunch of television shows that i like from the past that were aired in really bad orders or out of order or whatever that uh you can go to fan sites now and look up the correct order and to take that and make it more intentional and not just like what did the original creators intend but to be like what what what experience do i want from it uh is is it uh an interesting endeavor

i saw something, this was a while ago now, but something going around on, on Twitter that was like this, this was one crisis ago in early lockdown. And it was like a, I forget what it's called, but there's the,

there's a name for the 80% of everything is crap. Oh yeah. It's the Sturgeon's law. Yeah. Sturgeon's law. So it was this someone who was positing a Sturgeon's Law binge system that scales to whatever. So, you know, the top 20% of a good show is better than the bottom 80% of the good show, right? Right.

So their thing was, I want to like catch up on all this TV I haven't seen. I want to like catch up on all this TV I haven't seen. So the system was something along the lines of like, watch the pilot or first episode or whatever. And the last episode. And then in between, rank them. I think they're going by IMDB ratings. But like rank them on a per episode basis. Drop the bottom 80% based on those ratings.

And then if there's individual episodes that are like generally considered must-sees they're not in that top like add that in as well um so out of a 60 episode series uh quick epi what's 20 of 60 that's 12 12 is it yes yes nice so say 12 plus a couple episodes so it's like yeah the 60 episode, I'll watch 15 episodes, the best 15 episodes. And that gets me at least 80% of the way to knowing the series, right? To like getting what there is to get out of it. I don't know how successful that is. But I thought that was a fun approach. You know, if you're not a completionist. I mean, there's definitely a thing about how we interact with fiction where I kind of got into this a little bit, but there's the way fiction is presented, which is often very enjoyable. And we could talk about that, like, you know, how a scene is shot or how somebody acts something out or, you know, like how the set is dressed or whatever. But then there's also the plot and your like deeply ingrained

human curiosity about what happens next and uh a lot of shows i don't want to say i've almost said prey upon that but what i mean is rely upon that i should i should you know i mean this is what soap operas or the game of thrones does does when it's done to like a greater extent where it's like we'll bring you to a point where you're like, what? What will happen next? And then we'll deny you that for a bit. So you come back for it. And a friend of mine and friend of the show, Sam, he does that. He does it with shows where he'll get to a point and he's like okay i'm now i'm just gonna read the wikipedia

to find out because and i think it's partly because of that i mean i'm now i'm putting words into his mouth and i shouldn't do that but i if i were to do that it would be this urge to scratch that itch to find out like okay well actually i do do that i do that all the time with weirdo horror movies and sci-fi movies where like you get done and you're like i really enjoyed that and i don't know what that was about so now i'm just going to go online and read a bunch of stuff that talks about what the intentions were or fan theories about it but i guess what what's interesting about what sam does is he does it as a again following that sturgeon's law bit like as a way to just relieve

himself of having to get through all of it right all right i've i i get it now if i just read summaries or plot summaries i can understand and and also probably visualize how the rest it's going to end up yeah i'm not so interested in seeing the moment to moment of the rest of this story but how does it come out in the end yeah and sometimes like my experience as a kid uh i it took me a while to see et in theaters i think it actually had to be a second run before my family saw et can i do a quick side note uh that one of my favorite parts of this article oh yes is uh and i quote run by two young gamers who found the show decades after its network reign um so i hope you felt felt seen yeah not only did i read

that but i went and sorry nathan ward i looked you up found out and you you're older than me so congrats uh i am a young gamer. That works. I'm holding on to every one of those straws that remains in my grasp. And I will finish out the sentence because it's extremely good. In some ways, their project resembles paleontologists studying the lost age when long, high-powered vehicles roam the earth in California car chases. Yes, that's very true. 100% accurate. vehicles roam the earth in california car chases yes that's very true 100 accurate yes i was a very young kid when uh rock profiles was first on so uh it definitely feels like the paleontology yeah

like like i remember i vaguely remember that world sorry i didn't mean to cut you oh no no that's absolutely what was i uh as a kid watching TV. E.T. The movie E.T. And some friends explained it to me and it sounded terrifying, which may have been why it took so long to see it. This young gamer is now going to tell you about what it was like when it was old. Olden days, you couldn't stream videos or like you had to wait for movies to come back to the especially in my non cable household. But anyways, the point is, friends explained the movie to me and I had a completely different understanding of how that movie was. So when I saw it, I did not like it.

As a kid, I was like, this is nowhere near as good as the horrific thing that was going on inside my brain uh based on first-hand accounts of kids who didn't quite understand et sure sure you know but i've i've grown to enjoy et i'm not gonna be i'm not a monster i only saw i mean i saw when i was a kid probably on tv like on a movie night special or something uh and i really only remembered a couple images so i really feel like i've only really seen it recently like we watched it a couple years ago maybe um in its entirety that that again felt a little bit like looking into a window to the past which i think a lot of the spielberg 80s stuff kind of is my nostalgia is for movies that are nostalgia for movies 30 years before.

Well, it didn't feel nostalgic to me in terms of my connection to that time. It was more like I 100% see why this movie has the place it has in the cultural canon. Yeah. And it is good, but it's also just not how movies are made anymore. Yeah. So I don't have that emotional connection don't have that like emotional connection. Like I do to like Jurassic park. Right.

Where like, I saw that when I was a kid, when I was old enough to understand it and have an attachment and have those like, like I was terrified of moments in that movie. Yeah. Cause they're scary. And also it's basically a thriller,

which I think people kind of forget. There's a lot of setup and then it's like a monster movie thriller and then you know there's the end yes but like so those emotions right i still i always associate with jurassic park like i will yeah and it doesn't feel old to me um especially because the effects that era of practical effects ages so much better than that era of digital effects right so oh yeah no absolutely the digital effects around that time were there was like t2 which was good and then everything else yeah and even t2 if you watch it now it's like yeah that was made in like because was made in like, because that's like 89 or something. Is that true? We can't have one of these without an IMDB.

But yeah, so like T2, even that now looks like old effects, even though it looked pretty good all the way until like I was in high school, at least, I think. Yeah, T2 is 91. And Jurassic Park was... I think 94, unless I've been misremembering that my entire life. 93. 93, okay. In between that, they had Lawnmower Man. So if you want to know the state of the art in special effects...

Lawnmower Man. Anyway, it's something I've been thinking about, and this is like, I don't know. Welcome to Nathan's New Parenthood Corner. Oh, yes. Feel free to skip if this is boring. Epi, you don't have the choice, but the rest of you. Yeah, that's fine. But no, but it's something that's on my mind as like, you know, knock on wood.

As we get to later years, you know, our baby starts growing up and starts to be able to watch things. This is years off now, right? Right. But I still think about like, A, is she going to be interested in any of this stuff? Like, maybe not yeah right uh but assuming that this is you know someone who's going to want to watch movies uh where do you even begin and like how different is the context um for the movies that i'm like oh here's the must watch movies it's just going to be so i feel like you know the time from 93 to 2023 let's say yeah it's

30 years like that's that's a long ass time we have a subscription to the criterion channel and on it there was an interview with patten oswalt and he describes when he and his friends first you know they had kids and they went out and find found an original print of the original star wars as he describes it i think he said it didn't even have a new hope written as the the the subtitle or whatever so like this is like the original star wars and they did a screening and he talked about how at that screening half the kids were locked in wonder and the other half were bored just completely bored with it and just saying that like because he's a huge movie fan and just how he doesn't want to be the the football dad who's like you

gotta play football like you gotta enjoy these films i do not have kids but i do think you know if i was a father one of my big failings would have been that I would have imposed my tastes on my kids so draconianly without without thinking about it, without even just just being like, well, clearly we're going to watch the Rockford Files kids. That's what we're going to do. Well, that's the thing. It's like, yeah, what what stuff is going to end up end up like oh this is something my dad likes yeah um yeah there's also this whole kind of vetting process i i mean for me for like watching movies now where i'm like all right when was this movie made how likely is it to be like full of like homophobic content and like terrible stereotypes like some stuff has not aged well like there's some stuff that i watch now or that i have i've re-watched where i'm like oh i remember how some of this content i just didn't

even notice when i first saw this when i was a teenager or whatever and now i'm like oh yeah no this isn't this movie isn't good enough to be worth trying to explain why it has this shit stuff in it. Because that was just a cultural swamp that everything was in at that time. It's no surprise to viewers or listeners that I engage in a lot of the 70s and early 80s media. For instance, we've started watching some Cagney and Lacey. we've we've started watching some cagney and lacey uh this is a cop show when right now as a country we are really closely examining what purpose if any cops serve in society yeah and this show is uh we've only seen a few episodes in it but it has tackled some some difficult issues unrelated to the current issues like the sexism issues of the time uh i should i

mean of the time as if they disappeared but uh like well very a specific flavor of sexism from the time right like there was an episode where all of the the male cops were going to one of the male cops home for a uh baby shower i think and the Cagney and Lacey weren't invited because the women at home were worried that Cagney and Lacey were being the two women in an all-male workplace were trying to steal their husbands from them. And it's just like that feels so out of date now. Yeah. But also probably was part of a national discussion back then uh like i see what

you're doing but you're grappling with this issue in a way that the grappling itself is of its time uh but like the show does some some really interesting things that way but also i'm always waiting for some moment for it to do the really really bad take sure because a lot of those old shows when you look at them and you're watching them and you're enjoying them and you're going along and then suddenly they may even have their heart in the right place. And it's just the really bad take. And you're like, oh, yeah, well, that happened.

I guess we don't get here without that happening. So. And I think there's something to like part of being a part of being an informed media consumer, whatever that means, or like part of engaging with what you watch as opposed to just having it be noise is sometimes being like, wow, this didn't work.

Yeah. And like, I can appreciate other things about this, even though there are portions of it that are not, are not cool. Everything isn't a one drop of spoils the well. Right. Necessarily necessarily there's things going on right now again with the media that we're engaging with like i shared a little doodle that an artist

had done there's a picture of judge dread and he's firing his gun up in the air and along the arc of the fire it says fascism is bad or something like that. And then underneath it, there's somebody who's just staring with these big, you know, cutesy eyes saying, wow, cool cop, clearly saying the point to Judge Dredd is that fascism is bad. And if you're looking at it thinking Judge Dredd is cool, then it's gone over your head. That's part of the failure of irony. Yeah. We've probably mentioned this before, but I feel like this is something that's really become apparent, I don't know, at least to me, in the last couple of years. But I feel like personally, I would really start marking it around like Gamergate-ish stuff. So that's, you know, 2012, 2013, I think, kind of when that got rolling.

kind of when that got rolling um the absolute failure of irony as a as a mode of communication to be like yeah i am going to give you the most exaggerated version of this thing in order to call out its flaws and when you have a segment of the audience that's like yeah we like the flaws like yeah that's why we're here to see that stuff the power that irony has just just disappears as that segment of the population of the audience gets more gets gets larger to to the point where it gets irresponsible is my yeah this is kind of where i've gotten to where it's like you can't lampoon trump right like there's no way to have an ironic take that isn't just exactly what his supporters want to see. It took me a long time to get to that point because like for me, the thing that stuck in my head was, well, I've consumed this media and I understand it. And I'm going to say that that was the defense that was in my brain.

Like I don't want to say that that was even a true statement. the the defense that was in my brain like i don't want to say that that was even a true statement right like uh because you can often consume media and understand 80 of it but it's that significant 20 that you're not understanding that's uh like the big shift for me went from being like well i can figure it out so anyone can so i can go ahead and recommend that but like that that stopped somewhere along the line and i I was like, OK, now now I have to be careful about who I'm recommending it to. I mean, part of what happened also is that my own personal audience for people who hear when I say something has grown. I'm still developing skills for that, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah.

But where before, if a friend of mine had the wrong take on Judge Dredd after I recommended Judge Dredd, I could argue with them. Yeah, it's a weird spot. And then the irony thing. Not only is it not effective, but it doesn't even keep up. Like when I read Onion headlines now, I'm just exasperated by them. I'm just like, yeah, nope, you've been saying that. You're right. That's the thing. Exasperated by them. Just like, yeah, nope, you've been saying that. You're right.

That's the thing. It's like as, or satire, I suppose, is a more accurate word than irony. Yeah. They're wrapped up together. But yeah, once the actual thing meets the satirical thing, the satirical no longer has any power. When Disney starts using their employees in Stormtrooper costumes to enforce social distancing we're done there's no more like like signifier signified like it's all just the thing is the thing there is nothing but the thing i mean don't get me wrong people choose social distance i'm not saying that enforcing social distancing is fascism but there's a lot of fascism out there right now yeah i had some

dumb tweet that was like there's the strain going around a little bit last week of i can't believe that that this generation that you know was brought up on star wars and and harry potter and and like you know people fighting back against the forces of repression how they're not uh on the right side of this right right i would be more uh sympathetic to that viewpoint if the uh i forget what it's called but like the stormtrooper cosplayers yeah there's like a division number or something if like people in like stormtrooper and darth vader costumes were not the most visible part of star wars fandom yeah it's first of all it's not like those movies are searing indictments of the fascist state like they're adventure movies that happen to have good guys and bad guys they're adventure movies with a

nostalgia for war films yeah fought nazis like that's yeah yeah they were already bleeding the meaning out of it when, oh, God, maybe I shouldn't go into that. Or it already started muddling that message when the, like, when, like, the metal bestowal ceremony at the end of A New Hope was echoing Lenny Riefenstahl,

like, Nazi propaganda movies, right? Like, for a reason, that's a powerful image, but, like, sorry to get all film film history nerd on you but uh lenny riefenstahl so uh yeah so how are you i'm doing all right i think uh we're still doing the social distancing the the stats look stats look on that whole coronavirus thing. I don't know. By the time

people listen to this, they'll be different. But they look promising out this way. But also trending towards not promising. So, who knows? Yeah, so that's good. I talked to my sister yesterday.

I was on the phone with her and i'm not gonna say her name because she was driving and on the phone with me hands free but she was driving and on the phone with me um she is a essential worker she does food delivery and suddenly had to get off the phone with me and i cannot tell you like all of the fearful images that came into my mind as to why that was or what was happening and it turned out that like it's the the run-of-the-mill reason which is uh like a two thousand dollar repair needed to be done to her car like you know which really really sucks but also in the world of 2020 that's great that's. So, yeah. So life's been weirdly on edge.

I shouldn't say weirdly. Life's been on edge. How are things out where you are? You're more in the thick of it than I am. I mean, we're fine. We technically just went into the next phase of reopening, which seems not great. So for Illinois, all that stuff, they're basing it off of aggregate figures and it is evidence based, but it's mostly about like occupancy rates at hospitals and new infection rates.

Right. And so those have been below the thresholds that, so they're like, okay, we can start reopening and we still have a full, like all indoor spaces. You have to wear a face mask and stuff like that. But, you know, it's all going to be totally muddled by the last couple of weeks because there are, there's differing numbers depending on who's reporting and exactly what, and exactly what definition they're using for arrest. what definition they're using for arrest yeah the legal observer group the national lawyers guild out here um put out a number that said that there's about 1500 people that have been arrested and detained um in the last week in illinois and that is a huge spike in the prison population which is like one of the biggest hotbeds for coronavirus infection yeah and so not all those

people are going to be there forever like a lot of you know a lot of those are you know one day arrests and stuff but like um yeah it's uh that sucks yeah the measures being taken to protect people from coronavirus in this situation are almost none are almost none yeah uh like that's the thing that i don't see a whole lot of talk about right now. But I do see a whole lot of talk. So I don't like it's hard to filter noise and signal and whatever. But like I think that's going to be one of the really tragic things about it. And one of the things that when we come out of it, there's going to be a lot of finger pointing. People are going to point at the protesters saying that they're responsible for when the protesters are outside.

Wearing masks. Yeah, wearing masks, generally socially distancing. People are going to point at the protesters saying that they're responsible for when the protesters are outside. Wearing masks. Yeah, wearing masks, generally socially distancing. And it's when they get kettled in, put in detention centers. Tear gassed. Tear gassed, which during a respiratory pandemic. Yeah. It's clear who's responsible.

The narrative is already shaping to blame protesters. Yeah, it sucks. And by it, I mean, police brutality. Yeah. So, you know, to be totally clear, here's our two white guy podcast. But right. Black Lives Matter. Police brutality sucks.

ACAB. Yeah. I was wondering going into this being who we are. We're not the voice you should be listening to about this. Right. There's definitely other voices you should be listening to. There's books and you should be reading and news reports and whatnot. Yeah.

And if it hasn't crossed your transom, I'll put it in the show notes. But there's a really good one-stop, like, I don't even know what to do site. That's the blacklivesmatter.card, C-A-R-R-D dot C-O. It is a great compilation of petitions, places to donate, and educational resources to educate yourself. Yeah. Which I'm finding really helpful for stuff around police abolition because it's something that, like, I kind of vibe with that idea. But I don't really actually know much about what that means past you know friends who are supporters and and stuff like that um so uh yeah i'll link that in the show notes but um i think we're you know may going to

talk about our responses maybe but like you don't need to listen to us talk about black lives matter right go listen to black people so right now as we're recording it is what the hell is it day nine day ten of the protests maybe even more than that we we've reached the point where twitter no longer trends protests which i guess is like a one they only trend the same thing for up for a day oh okay anyway this was something I learned. So this isn't like something that they're deliberately setting up? Yeah, it's not like a suppression thing other than just the algorithm. But yeah, they only trend the same hashtag for like 12 or 24 hours or something.

This is something that the K-pop stan army apparently has been educating people about because they already do a thing where they slightly change their hashtags so that they're continually trending because you can't keep the same one trending for a long period of time so thanks k-pop stans yeah oh my god the yeah i mean if you if you're not on twitter you may not know what's happening here but the k-pop phenomena fans of korean pop music i guess is this is really well out of my element here so holy educate yourself and don't listen to epi but they have stepped up yeah they're basically uh filling hashtags with like like like blowing out white nationalist hashtags by filling it with like

k-pop stuff and uh crashing um snitch lines for the cops uh by posting videos that overwhelm the servers and stuff like that so hell yeah yeah and i mean i will be honest with you my experience with k-pop in the past has been it's almost been exactly this where i see something trending on twitter and it's a name and i'm like, oh no, why should I know that name or why don't I know that name? And I click on it and it's usually about like a sports figure or something like that. But all it is is K-pop people posting about their favorite music using that hashtag. Right. Yeah. So to me, it was like, I literally, I have no reference for any part of any of this. And I'm only frustrated because I was curious.

My curiosity was piqued and it was denied. So I'm very happy to see this particular. Yeah. There's a tweet going around from two years ago that was like, okay, so the right wing has the anime fans and the left wing has the furries. The future is going to depend on who gets K-pop first or who gets the k-pop stands first it's like one of the most prescient tweets or prescient yeah but yeah uh there's been a lot of uh marches here we had curfew we had the goddamn declare curfew right before it happens that was on saturday we're like at 8 30 uh the mayor declared a curfew for nine o'clock which didn't come through people's phones because they did an emergency alert for

curfew like i didn't get it till after nine o'clock right and most most people didn't while there were thousands of people downtown with the bridges raised uh if you if you don't if you don't know anything about chicago uh but you've seen um uh batman right um batman begins there's the bit where they want to constrate all the prisoners on the island and they raise the bridges that is chicago uh like that's how chicago works uh downtown has a bunch of bridges or over the chicago river anyway so yeah there were just like it's just such like a flagrant like criminalizing dissent tactic yeah and uh so we had curfews for a couple nights uh we haven't had had one for a couple nights uh you'll be surprised to hear that uh the times when the police do not move in with tear gas and batons,

there is generally very little to no property damage along the routes of these marches. Um, but you know, we're coming into the weekend. So I know there's a big, there's a big protest scheduled for, for later today.

Um, which I think is probably going to be a pretty, yeah, that'll be one to watch, uh, in terms of police response. So there's a lot of, uh,

a lot of misery coming across all of our screens right now, because what's happening is people can record what the police are doing. And, uh, they're doing the job that the media in the past has failed to do. Uh, I suspect the media is going to do a little better this time around just because they're being shot and tear gassed as,

as much. Um, I don't want to be like all dismissive of the media but it is it's been frustrating because this is not new none of this is new what what's new is the technology to record it you know yeah there's a little bit of frustration with like the like we're just seeing this for the first time yeah i mean for a, for a lot of people, yes. And like, let this radicalize you. That's like good. Um, but also,

uh, a lot of the movement now, like the people actually organizing these marches, the black lives matter people, a lot of these bail funds came out as a result of Ferguson, which was in 2014. And those protests, uh,

many of those protesters who have been mysteriously murdered by the way in the intervening years uh and there's this weird like sense that people kind of forgot that that happened and they're like oh my god have you can you believe that it's this bad it's like it's been this bad um i don't know i don't want to blame like i yeah it's a little frustrating but it's also like let us use this moment to make it clear to as many people as possible what black people and other people of color have been living under since slavery yeah I mean there there's a lot of things to reckon with here and one of them that I've I've been trying to internalize a bit is just to let let the people

who have suffered the most from this uh let them be angry let them you know and definitely be angry for them but i can't then turn that into like the a hammer that i use against other people you know what i mean like like like if i'm not directly in the line of fire here then my job is to then help people who are i shouldn't say my job your your role perhaps my yeah i should i should i should be helping my friends who are just coming to this to not be pushed away by my own personal anger about it because i don't like my what the f is my anger i don't have the direct experience with it i just have this you know uh uh red experience from it you know just so it would be really easy for me to be like hey when i was a young idiot going to

college for the first time and i first learned about all this you made fun of me. Like, I can't be that that way because like I am definitely seeing a lot of people, friends and family who wouldn't have been aware of this. Yeah. Becoming very much aware of this. Yeah. So earlier this week, I was very I was pretty down. It's just so it's just so grinding just to see how little cops care about. Yeah. Even appearing to...

There's not even good PR going on. Right, right. And then, like, officials, especially Democratic officials, right? Yeah. Like, basically doing all they can to, if not support police brutality, make it as easy as possible for them to continue what they're doing. Yeah. Or actively support in the cases of these curfews.

So that's extremely depressing. But on the other hand, like there are actual changes happening in places you wouldn't expect as a direct result of seeing all this. That seems like it's the first step towards a better future um especially in minneapolis right uh where like i forget what the what the school is if it's a state school or or what but like there's a university that uh is like the biggest employer in in minneapolis that like terminated their contract with the minneapolis police i think their public schools

did too their public schools did it as well the public schools and or public schools somewhere in portland i think also uh severed their ties with their police department certainly not as many as should be and certainly with no guarantee that there's ever going to be any actual justice but cops being arrested and yeah being charged at least with something is such a sea change yeah like the fact that four cops have been arrested for murdering a black man for no reason yeah and the fact that that's so different than it's been is like mind-boggling uh people pointed out that look what had to be done to get those four cops arrested. Like,

but it just, it does definitely feel like more so than, than Ferguson, more so than in the past. Like, and, but again, like this is two white guys feels right.

Right. At the remove where I'm not like directly involved, you know, protesting or organizing or anything, being able to see some of that stuff happening as a direct result yeah the fact that something seems to be happening at all makes us feel different than the women's march then marches against immigration cracked down like stuff in the past that i've been involved with or aware of where it's like it happens maybe some legislation stuff happens and then things go back to normal or get worse. There's a problem with Bob Kroll, the head of the police union. All the unions where, like, they're not part of our union.

Like, a police union and a workers' union are two different things. Right, yeah. Police unions are not part of the labor movement. Yeah. They share a name, but they're not, they don't do the same thing. They exploit labor movement laws to protect bad cops. But to see, like, establishment, the city council, like, in Minneapolis is considering abolishing the police. And to see that happen in a Midwest town is really kind of important.

Like, they'll never lose the Midwest attitude of, like, oh, well,'s just, cause that happens all the time. Like if, if some, like I grew up in Wisconsin, if like, if something progressive happens in Madison, the rest of Wisconsin will go, well, that's Madison. Right.

If it happens in Milwaukee, they'll say, well, that's Milwaukee. And there'll be super racist saying that. Like that's, yeah, that is a really racist,

uh, a not so clever way for a Wisconsinite to hide their racism. Sure, sure. To, you know, point to Milwaukee as if, anyways. But, and so they'll still do it. They'll be like, well, that's Minneapolis. Because Minneapolis has a university. Of course they're liberal. But it just, it is heartening, like, to see, like, establishments starting to take the.

Taking concrete steps and actually seeing like they're responding not responding to oh god we have to make this go away but actually responding to the actual concerns i think that's what feels different because in the beginning you could see everyone saying okay let we want to hear you yeah but then like that's a very empty like that's that's the mall santa like tell me what you want for christmas he ain't gonna then like that's a very empty like that's that's the mall santa like tell me what you want for christmas he ain't gonna deliver like that's not his job his job is just to play kid yeah i've been thinking about that because there's been that that's been a point to talk about is like all these like police commissioners and and and government and mayors and stuff

having that be the talking point of like we hear your concerns we want to engage in a dialogue right all that stuff and i've been thinking about that in terms of like what the next steps of that are um and kind of in terms of like therapy yeah so you know in therapy that's that's a place to talk in a non-judgmental way. And that idea of, like, I hear you is an important part of the call and response, right? Like, acknowledging what the other person said, and then what? And in therapy, a lot of times, like, okay, I hear you. What does that mean for you? Right?

Like, that's the next step. Yeah. You have put this into words uh now how can we get the result that you want out of the situation you've just described or where does that put you where do we go next there's this like responsiveness part of it that makes that part of actual development yeah that just does not exist in these power structures of like we hear you and we're going to do whatever we want anyway because we don't feel like we have any accountability so that's something i've been thinking about uh i was just thinking like about the like that response

and it being sort of a cynical political thing that politicians do all the time like it's the thoughts and prayers of the left yeah yeah exactly we hear you uh and then when you think about like all the pressures that might if you try to empathize with this politician and all the pressures that are coming from them and you realize that a lot of those pressures are coming from the police yeah who clearly have leverage uh if you read the accounts from the city council uh in min in Minneapolis where they talk about how when they want to curb spending on police, the police will stop patrolling their constituency. And when they get phone calls, show up late and tell them, well, if you have a problem, talk to your council person. This is a protection racket.

It's very clearly a protection racket it's not like they're not even being coy about it right right uh or if they are it's the the thinnest veneer of coyness but then that brings up like okay so i'm going to empathize with these these people they obviously have a problem but that that problem then means that they're not in charge that the the the cops are that they don't have control that your duly elected officials who are supposed to be in charge of the executive you know of of this are not like what what then so yeah so the question becomes how do we change the power dynamic and i think that's where the call for defunding police comes from right like yeah that's where that's

where the power comes from i mentioned earlier mentioned earlier about learning more about police abolition. That doesn't mean – and then we live in a virtuous anarchic state where everyone just is in charge of themselves. That's not the goal. The goal is how do we address the problems in society that we currently use police to address? First, how do we adjust our society so that less of those problems occur yeah and then how do we create intervention in the in a non-violent accountable to community way that does not involve one single armed force for everything from traffic tickets to yeah murders right and that's i don't have any. That's, I'm saying I'm trying to get more educated

on that right now, personally. I mean, I think that's an important thing. Okay, so when we think about what you and I are doing right now, again, just to point out the obvious, two white dudes with a podcast, we are such a stereotype. With a podcast that is,

the Rockford Files isn't a cop show, but it is a show that fundamentally privileges order. Yeah. And there's a cop we like in the show. He's fake. That's a fake character. Dennis Becker isn't real. We could point to things like, obviously, the...

So help me God. And there's the police surveillance one that we haven't done yet um yeah that's similar yeah and and so it does address it and also like to just kind of like directly talk to our audience my gaming audience i i think my general experience of my gaming audience trends in a way that they're very sympathetic to the Black Lives Matters cause. And so at some point there, I'm preaching to the choir, which, you know, it has to be done. But I think here we have a chance to kind of reach maybe a crossover into some audience

that may not be exposed to this sort of stuff yet, right? So, and we should not be your authority on this stuff. Defunding the police police abolition is not a new concept. There are books out there. There are people that have very intelligent people who've thought about it. There's been a lot of work done. And just me telling you what my ideas are, are not going to add to that conversation, but alerting you to it maybe might help you. And like to say that this is also not just it's in the spirit i think of james garner right like he marched on washington he's not alive today i'm not going to put words

into his mouth i don't know where he would stand on all this and you know there are definitely some bits uh like i still love la you know not not super sympathetic towards the riots um but nonetheless like he was a very caring man sure from what we understand of him this feels like it would be in his wheelhouse this would be the kind of thing he would support um what i've noticed online is a lot of people who play cops on television have been donating money to this uh have you seen this i have yeah uh started by the i'm gonna find the actor's name was it started by the guy griffin yeah he's he played arthur in on the amazon's uh version of the tick which i really enjoyed and um kind of got that ball rolling he has a movie podcast

with someone else that is pretty well well regarded i think so he's also kind of a podcast world person i haven't listened to it but it's apparently great but um uh yeah i i think that there's there's that like there's the what role has cop media played uh in i don't want to say covering up but like not highlighting or assuaging fears of this happening because it's certainly they do special episodes and whatnot kind of in creating the creating the mental image of the police that is currently falling apart underneath the witness testimony of all these people who are being brutalized by the police right yeah the shards of that picture are still around the edges right um we kind of know what we think they should be and then it's

just like here is just rampant evidence of how overfunding, unaccountability to their community, you know, lack of any kind of systemic stops to abuse of power. How it all just comes together right in this moment. Right. What I would say, you know, stuff like police abolition, that's a pretty radical position. Right. Like I acknowledge that. Maybe. And if that if you hear that and you're like, I don't even understand why you would say that, or I don't know what that means. What I would say

is maybe give yourself a little bit of space to think about how do we swing the pendulum from this extreme that we're at right now, where there's no accountability and there's so much underinvestment in communities of color and underinvestment in infrastructure in our society that that helps everyone public schools yeah health care right like we're in a coronavirus pandemic just looking at these numbers of how much money is diverted is given to police budgets versus everything else in the city look at the la budget where they're like oh we're going to try and trim 100 million dollars you're like a hundred million dollars. That sounds like so much money. And then if you look at what they actually allocate in their city budgets,

that's like nothing. That's like 5%. I looked that up. It was like, yeah. How many more positive things could we have in our cities and our rural communities are, you know, everywhere that, you know, has this infrastructure that is currently underfunded, has lots of problems attracting, you know, qualified people, doesn't serve their communities as well as they could. If we just like diverted some of what goes to over militarized, unaccountable police forces, how do we start swinging that pendulum back? And the other end of that pendulum is like, do we need police at all? I understand that's a that's a big question, but like that's the other end. Any big question, you can break that down, right? And you can find out where you're comfortable.

Like even ridiculous things, right? Like when you think of city, you know, public works people trying to deal with a busted sewer main, right? You have a cop out there directing traffic. What if instead of having a cop out there, you had somebody whose job it was, was to direct traffic? If you think of all the different jobs that you give to cops and then think about which ones you personally are comfortable giving to another service that might be better trained to do that.

Right. Who has specific training, doesn't have to carry a gun yeah and think about the ones where you yourself are going to be put in a spot like okay this is not a hypothetical because i think this has happened to many people where if especially if you live in an apartment complex or something like that you hear neighbors fighting right and it's getting loud And maybe you even heard something fall. And all of this might just be people being exasperated from quarantine or what. And it could legitimately just be somebody storming off and something falling off a table. Or it could be a case of some sort of domestic abuse.

The question you have to ask yourself then is, given the statistics, the cops, when you look at it, they tend not to help the situation and you increase the odds of somebody in that situation being shot. is to come in unarmed, to de-escalate, to offer the help that people need, even if it's just like an actual legitimate argument and they just need to cool off in two separate places. Like the police aren't going to provide that. They may throw someone in a jail cell, but that's not going to cool someone off. Anyways, so the point is like on the other end where you have the big just start thinking about places where you feel comfortable removing police from the equation and replacing them with people that are trained specifically for that

situation does it make in your estimation does it make it a healthier situation does it you know um that's all like you like again yeah we don't have to ask everyone to be for the complete abolition of the police we just need to start rethinking what it is we're building a military for right like because that's what we're doing yeah so you know sorry if that came off as luxury but i think that's the that is maybe maybe one of our roles as white dudes podcast who do think about this stuff um yeah if you're if you're seeing what's going on and you feel like this isn't right something needs to change sit with that feeling and think about what that actually means for you and your community and i think

that's like that's the start yeah and if you're moved to help donate money always helps um find somewhere again i keep saying in your community, just because this is happening. There's been protests in every state in the U.S. There's been protests in multiple countries worldwide in support of this stuff. You're local. There is a group in your community, whether that's your city, your state, your affiliation community, your hobby community, whatever you feel part of, there's a group involved with that that could actively use some money right now to help get people masks and water and help with actual protest support, help out bail funds to help bail out people who are being wrongfully accused of felonies for getting the shit beat out of them by cops. beat out of them by cops uh community organizations that are working with elected community officials to do things like get the police out of public schools so that schools are no longer a militarized

police zone times are tough we all get that but if you are able to spare some resources uh i encourage you to do so that's all yeah uh just i guess maybe also a plea to empathize with the anger uh of the black community and and people of color and and i mean we're in pride month too so uh lgbtq plus um yeah i guess that's the other thing if you're going to see a lot of resources poured into making uh these protesters look like violent thugs and because hundreds and hundreds of years of history have been behind making our internal image of what a thug looks like match that it's going to be hard just realize what they're up against i guess is what it's saying and what i'm saying i get what you're saying we're trying to figure this out as we go right right report from the front lines

there was uh there has been some property damage up in my north side. I mean, I don't know the demographics, but it our dog to did have one of their windows broken after a protest. And you know what? That's fine. If that's the price that we have to pay, I'm willing to pay that price. Again, we're talking about little heartening things. But to hear some of the store owners in Minneapolis that are like, it's more important to see justice than to you know a smashed window or whatever yeah i mean we could get into the whole uh how a lot of the this is the good protester as the bad protester uh that propaganda works but again yeah no we've it's a little out of our pay grade and we've gone

all long enough i think just you know stay safe out there yeah what you can. If you have a cough, stay inside. Don't forget there's a pandemic. Oof. But, you know, because we do have the privilege to continue doing our kind of day-to-day things, we're going to keep, you know, keep doing the podcast. It is interesting to look at how much the world has changed since we first started doing this podcast. Okay. Interesting or exhausting. Yeah yeah i don't know there should be a portman 2 in socks thing i don't know someone smarter than me needs to figure that out yes uh i mean like the joke has been since well i mean obviously since 2016 the joke has been about how fast the year has been going. This is still, but it really does.

Like this year has ramped up so fast. Was it like, it's been, it's been 20 years since yesterday or whatever. Everything feels very long ago and also very fast. In this household, we sometimes say, we don't know what tomorrow year will bring. Well, that's a good note to end on for this. Hopefully the next year that tomorrow brings will have some more points of hope to it than the last.

The yesterday year. Than the yesterday year.