War With A Mate - Episode 76: Lies I Tell My Parents

Episode Date: May 16, 2026

Hellfire has rained down upon the central column of the map, as the guys let loose their airforces, with the dice coming along with some real vigour today! A Mailbag that brings comparisons to war and Ghostbusters, a History Segment that concludes the Italo-Turkish War and a Common Ground that can only be resolved with a little bit of roleplay.

Stop wasting your nights on a mattress that doesn't get you. Experience the most comfortable mattress in the world. The Sleep Number Smart Bed. At the touch of a button, you can personalize your comfort. Choose firmer or softer. Adjust cooler to warmer. And right now, save up to $2,500 during our massive Labor Day event. Hurry into your local Sleep Number store today.

Because we have your number. Hello, welcome to War with a Mate. It's me, Andy. Me, James. Oh, shit, we've done that the wrong way around. It's a bit of a Freaky Friday situation. Oh, God, no, I'm wearing your clothes. Yeah, looking good.

Yeah, we wear actually quite similar clothes for the most part. Yeah, it's just the size difference that makes it not work for me. I'm 12 feet tall and you are a little measly 4 feet tall. That's crazy. Well, that's what happens when we swap bodies because of Freaky Friday. Oh, goddammit. You're more of a t-shirt guy, I'm more of a jumper guy. I guess, yeah. But we both wear, well, you always wear glasses, I sometimes wear glasses. you should always wear glasses you need to wear glasses all the time who said that

me i can't see who's saying that i mean yes i do get regular text messages from vision expressing your eye test is very overdue but i feel like that's just scaremongering also you're constantly squinting or being like i don't have my glasses i can't see yeah because i can't see stuff when i don't have my glasses on i can see up to about five feet in front of me and everything else is just kind of blur but it's good because it makes the world seem like a surprise everything's new everything it's like it's like fog of war in a game yeah that's bad you try to get rid of that i try to get rid of that by wandering around just like you do in the games and we've been playing a game today we've been playing spi's the campaign for north africa

a game with a lot of rules but no fog of war no fog of war everything is clear as day there's a very detailed 10 foot long map you can't really get less fog of worry everything is spelled out to a tee so detailed in fact that's why it's never been finished before as far as we know until well not today until we do it in 30 years we're making solid progress though yeah we're making progress what progress did we make today well today we started off off stage two of turn five for which you gave me first go which is great because that's exactly what i needed i'm a nice guy you're not you're it was a tactical move that you made to try and screw me over in some way i'm just not entirely sure how yet actually i've got a pretty good idea of how i think you're going to

move the guys from fort madeleine up towards dubruque you're making a sort of confused furrowed brow expression and you do that when you're lying you my friend are a fool no i've called you out with freaky friday in it i'm in your head i think that's how freaky friday works actually that's the opposite of how freaky friday yeah you keep your head you keep your mind and your soul but you switched bodies actually they didn't cover the soul i'm i'm reading between the lines i'm very much a literalist when it comes to textual analysis so you haven't read the novelization of freaky friday no written by lindsey lohan wow she's a triple quadruple threat she's a real renaissance woman a writer an actress a musician i haven't followed her since wrecking

ball wrecking ball so you're thinking of miley cyrus yes yes i see what you've done there yeah i was gonna say a musician losing me on that yeah that was a now i know who i'm talking about think of a different mean girls great film yeah great cast stop trying to make war with the maid happen that's a quote from well that's a direct quote that's actually where we got the name from it's from mean girls we stole a lot of stuff from mean girls our our bitchy attitude our fashion sense our our mean girl culture yeah however digressing from our influence that we took from mean girls i took some influence from previous turns and decided to go for an organization phase um this actually that tangent doesn't work very well because i did do some

organization for the first time in maybe the entirety of the practice scenario i use the organization phase to organize stuff you should have been doing that the entire time you should certainly have been doing like attrition and water distribution well i did that but i don't feel like that's organization i feel like that's that's just sort of paperwork to be done but i actually moved around units and attached and detached yeah you got some trucks i did those trucks that i slinked over to the second black shirts are now part of the second black shirts in the sense that those men have wheels now they are hot rods they are speed racers here i come here comes speed racer i'm a demon on wheels i believe that's what speed racer said i'll take your word for it and that's

what they are now they are demons on wheels the demon part comes from their fascist movement the wheels come from the trucks that have attached to them so now they are ready to go balding across the desert at breakneck speeds and probably recklessly as well i guess that's the plan We haven't got to movement yet. Well, you did some things that cause a bit of friction with that plan of mine. Yeah, don't thumbs up me. This is something I'm annoyed about.

So we moved on to air stuff, which is actually what I titled the top of that page of my book today. It was just air stuff. Nice and precise. Well, you know. That'll make sense when you're going back through it. Well, it will.

I've got five comma two air stuff. Oh, that's fine then, yeah. So that's fine. As long as you've got the turn on offstage. Yeah, so it's fine. I know what air stuff means. it means things are in the air like the situation we're in i literally can't follow that so now that i've i've spread out how i organize things very precisely what i did with that is drop some bombs

literal and metaphorical so the literal was 300 bomb points right on the sixth australian the metaphorical was also 300 bomb points so i i hit the sixth australian division and i hit them hard and i i prayed to the dice gods and they bestowed a bounty upon me and it was double sixes it was double bullshit it's what it was no we call that six eyes of uh six snakes of ice snakes snake eyes six snake eyes is what we call that and you have to you have to say that whole thing i'm gonna say you should probably take that one back to the drawing board i i think you can go fuck yourself because i dropped 300 bombs on them and i came out pinning five five of your guys it's pretty nice i pinned five guys burgers and fries so that's a nice little group of them stuck

there only one i believe is not pinned you are correct nice so that's perfect those guys are really good i don't care it's one group so all i need to do is is get up in their in their business well they have a close defense rating of five or six they don't have a close defense rating of five have you been looking at my stuff i have a very good feeling that they don't have a close defense rating of five or six well as long as you don't know it you know what i'm gonna go so far as to say i know then you're cheating guessing something correctly and making educated deductions it's not cheating you can make an educated guess but if you know you've cheated yeah but you can say no in a lot of senses yeah you can use words in the scenario again using a word wrong no that that's

that's correct because i have an all-seeing knowledge i'm omniscient when it comes to the game apart from some of the mistakes i've made i'm not omniscient in that sense in the sense that you know things i don't know everything you know no one who is omniscient knows everything oh it's so frustrating talking to you well we've we've still got another hour and a bit of this so buckle up sunshine you signed up for this this happens every week for the rest of our lives so that's that's unfortunate it's elective though yeah so speaking of elective torture i then allowed you to have your go you know i felt i did my bomb drop so you should probably we get to do that and you had four emissions yes that's too much it's less than last time

it should be measured it should be ratioed against mine the ratio shouldn't be one to four that seems to be about what it's been that is actually what it's been i think for the most part so what did you do andy uh i saw you getting all excited about the second new zealand uh second black shirts yeah so i dropped bombs on them i dropped 400 bombs you did which is that's a bit much 404 bombs to be precise precision is important in this game that can be the difference between a column or not it wasn't this time no this time it was pretty firmly within there yep so they came in they dropped their bombs and i got five as well yes that sounds about right and that's unfortunate for me because i i wanted to have more men not

pinned so that was frustrating 56 i believe your rule was yes not quite a 66 is it andy or should i say andrew um i guess uh you can okay thanks 66 would have been nice it would have been better would have been six guys we've got six guys burgers and fry they carry the s so with that you then decided that wasn't enough pinning all of those guys wasn't enough for you so you moved in with a bloody strafe i did strafe them killed a an infantry a measly toe point a measly hundred guys plus the truck they're in oh bugger yeah oh no what a waste of a truck we have to check and see if that was a a medium a bunch of medium well no it would just be one medium or did you take out half of a heavy truck well i took out a full heavy so if they were

in a heavy, the other tow point from that doesn't have a truck anymore. Then I'd better hope it's a medium. Odds are it's a medium. Sure. It's very likely it's a medium. Right. I have a lot more mediums than I do heavies, but I will consult the deck on that one. That's

good. Because I don't like the idea of losing that truck. That would be a shame. I don't want you to get two for one on this. Take out the tyres, the other men die. You can just leave. Actually, you can't leave one tow point. no i have no way to do that there's no there's no way to split them up beyond the current organization which is good we don't want the game to get too complicated yeah you could go down to

individual guys and then after that you can go down to their individual body parts this game has vats style target oh richard berg what have you done you've added vats you've added bullet time you've added that annoying thing that they had in gta 5 where all of the characters had superpowers they were just focused focused that's not i've been focused before and that doesn't happen i don't believe you you think that happened when i was focused no i don't think you've ever been focused oh okay that's fair enough i i'm i'm inclined to agree with that i'm rarely focused yeah kind of a scatterbrain of sorts as this conversation i'm an ideas man

And you're just a man Yeah And it's cool I'm enjoying it Yeah you would Check your privilege Anyway I think you're done positing

That was it It was we had a short one Yeah well I mean we ticked off all of the air stuff Yes Which is good I did some organising I also chopped off my supplies with my naval not well coastal convoy yeah not quite the big navy the fishing boats came up from tripoli to

was it to brook they dropped stuff off it was indeed it was indeed to brook got a big old influx of supplies how much stuff is in them um it varied there's a few boats but one's got like one's two thousand tons one's a thousand tons oh you have to do turn yeah yeah there's a little mixture of um of cargo threshold so it's a decent amount i think overall it's like nine thousand and tons oh that's a good influx yeah so it drops off a big old load i've had to keep them at bay for a little while and they were waiting to get into bardia for a couple of op stages while you were hanging about there and then when i kicked you out i managed to drop some stuff in oh and then i dropping stuff onto brook on like the way back yeah because bardia you know it can have some

supplies that doesn't need everything yeah i also think i've capped out one of the supplies like categories there yeah it's full let me have some fuel or water yeah yeah i'm pretty sure there's a cap anywhere there's a cap i don't know if you've hit it but there is a cap no no cap that's what the kids say when it's truthful and there's no capacity on that storage oh that's what that means yeah uh i was i always thought i was a trendsetter google storage boost no cap i believe you you don't need a no capper i don't care if you believe me it has no cap a bit like our our ferocity and our approach on this game our belief that we'll finish it and you know off stage two is is well underway with the s stuff gone all we've really got is

land and trucks that's the way i see the game now i just see it as three categories air, land, and trucks. You could almost describe them as air, land, and logistics. You could if you were to be cynical. If you were to be writing the rules of this game, for instance. No, I think you would break it down into like 12 subcategories

and then you would split it further. Except we would just ignore most of those sections because we don't use them very often. Like construction. More like con. I was thinking about dancing construction. You didn't, no? So kind of a moot point. I was going to build that road which one there's a lot of roads the north one i was gonna start filling that gap in oh you

don't need to worry about that game's nearly over well also they have to not do anything for an upstage and that includes like not using any cpa i was just like if like a single guy comes down here it's just a waste just gonna interrupt there that little turn yeah and your your forces at the moment they're all up in in my up in my area up in your face up in my face i'm gonna say up my butt but i don't yeah don't say that they're not they're not up my butt no in a way they are you know speaking in metaphor here they are up my butt oh okay they're a they're a bug up my butt they're an itch that i can't quite scratch itchy and scratchy it's not about that i know but they are they are two uh they're also two guys who you know despite their

you just loudly thought there andy the mic didn't pick it i'd be amazed if the mic didn't that sounded like a tear in space time that yeah fantastic um i'm i'm not editing that out god no okay you're invoking you're invoking fruit zone you're invoking fruit zone now that is deplorable the fruit zone cantaloupe or strawberry it's obviously strawberry i'm going cantaloupe okay the fruit zone you know what a cruel way to use fruit zone so what have you got planned for next stop the movement do you think i'm gonna thank you such a git using it like that um i'm gonna be trying to utilize my oh that caught me off guard i'm gonna be utilizing

the trucks, of course. That's really phony. What are you doing in your movement? I'm going to be utilizing the trucks, of course. Well, Andy, you shit your pants and then you invoke fruit zone. And you know what?

I'm going to pull the curtain back immediately on this, by the way. Because we decided if we're going to do fruit zone, we need a way to signal that we're instigating fruit zone. I thought maybe some sort of prop fruit that we could hold up would be handy so we can do it at the drop of a hat and you brought through some sort of knitted submarine yeah it's a submarine my mom

yeah but it's not at all fruit based so i so why would you mention it because this isn't the fucking fruit zone anymore i'm going to use the trucks that i've attached to my second to get them moving around they're going to be zipping about and i also need to reinforce the brook a little bit because you're going to show up so i want to be able to nab you i'd also like fort madalena back so a two-pronged approach of fortify to brook and then when i drive you away from madalena you don't go to to brook i'd be fine if you fuck off into the west i'm as i'm saying that no i wouldn't because i've got lots of airfields there okay so i'm gonna have to try and catch you before you go over

that direction ah i see i see what's happening i've lost either way this is sort of a lose-lose situation unless i managed to dart some people around real quick along that road and thus expose the little canyon next to um next to bardia yeah i'm sort of thinking out loud here and realizing what's gone wrong and it's most of my strategy for the whole game well that's encouraging for me that's quite devastating for me so i guess to help with that what are you planning i mean keep trying to disrupt that wall you've got that's fair and it and that's that's quite a broad statement very cleverly put because that could be done by either just slamming units against them or by playing these kind of mind games that you're playing now where you uh you loudly shit

your pants and then ask what my tactic is i feel like it's a very derren brown move where you put suggestion in my head of shitting my pants and then you ask me what my plan is so now all i can think is well i'm going to make a shit move is it what's worked it has it has worked um i i guess i think less of you as well the psychological warfare leader of the game has begun you've already dropped some shock and awe on me here between that and fruit zone don't let them recover yeah i honestly i'm not that specific because part of the reason i let you go first year is because i didn't have like a solid move i was happy with you don't say i'm just explaining my thinking i know but i'm gonna rag on you a little bit okay i think it's important to have

this healthy competent competitive aspect to the to the game tripping all over my words it's been a long time it's not actually long i've had i've had great sleep oh good i slept really well um nice i finished work a bit later today which is you know part of the reason it worked down to be a shorter session and um despite that don't really feel too tired i'm almost having a coffee right now you're drinking a coffee at 9 p.m that's that's not very so i guess tomorrow you won't be saying i had good sleep well i'm on another late shift so i'll be getting up later but yeah you shouldn't be drinking caffeine um anytime in that 10 hour window before bedtime i mentioned this a while ago and i i still stand by that i just don't practice what i preach

i'm a hypocrite do as i say not as i do exactly i'm a i'm a dictator i'm a trendsetter i'm a leader i'm a hero i'm an inspiration call it what you want i'm not going to pick the words for you you can say what you want you're not saying anything oh sorry i was saying in my head probably can't publish this what were you saying in your head come on come on i was just accurately describing don't say that in the mic don't dox my person well with that being a fairly concise game session i suppose what we can do is delve into a lengthy mailbag yes let's uh let's pop the mailbag open pop it pop it lock it poke it dot it what have we got in the mailbag got one from our friend arrow arrow flying through the air

into the mailbag don't do that actually you'll tear it it's burlap it's very fragile it's it's a combination of burlap and very fragile crystal so uh arrow has emailed in with um an aptly named another email to read on the show well arrow i got good news we're going to be doing just that hey guys arrow again just finished listening to episode 62 these days instead of listening while playing Kenshi I've been listening during my work breaks while showering and while doing household chores brackets still fresh out of the shower and brushing my teeth as I write the draft for this email and then another set of brackets I like the use of different brackets to get further in very nested narrative and now doing an editing pass the next day I have started episode 63 on my

work break close brackets one close brackets two typically I take most of the week to listen to a full episode this way i i worry a little bit about the brushing your teeth while watching something because i've fallen uh victim to that mistress several times where i'm watching something on my phone because i can't go without stimulus i can't i can't brush my teeth without a video playing in the background right i've absolutely destroyed my attention span over the course of the last five years i think ever since covid yeah i think since then i've needed constant stimulation so i'll be watching a video um or or tiktok unfortunately and i'll be brushing my teeth and i'll splash my phone with toothpaste isn't that why they make them waterproof now it's

basically so people can drop them in the like toilet slash bath slash sink when they're brushing their teeth i i hope not because i that feels like a personal attack on me it feels like they know what might happen i'm really careful with my stuff like i really do take care of my stuff occasionally you know it breaks but for the most part i think my breakage rate of my my belongings is like so low compared to other people it's gotta be yeah anyway i digress i was trying to think back to times you broke stuff but um no i'm not limbiscus anyway i hope this is another good email from me and here are four things i want to tackle and talk about i'll take the first one andy okay firstly it's great you guys have been enjoying and having an easier time

with the game but after your second appearance on cam sandwiches channel i've been thinking about how much the game still probably sucks you've made it somewhat easy to forget the enormity of the paperwork actually involved in taking the actions you describe in the podcast what do you guys think about that yeah i do i think it's streamlined because also we've both been doing homework yeah because we realized we can't we can't do that in the time we have for play sessions well that's it we can but as we saw early on in our playthrough of the sort of first turn and maybe first two turns that eats into a lot of it yeah if we're spending a play session going through that side of admin then that that sort of doubles the length of a turn because we end up

eating into a week where it's just an admin week which was also they weren't great i don't think they were probably great listening when it was like what do we do in the game this week it was an admin week we have nothing yeah it becomes very riffy yeah and we'd like it to have at least some aspect of game reflection forward movement in terms of the like visible stuff yeah because even if we're doing a brief air combat or some land movement that isn't particularly extravagant at least we can still talk about what what's changed in the game state but if i just tell you that my water has evaporated at the rate it always will apart from hot weather that isn't really much of a narrative to weave not super compelling no no and not to say we're entirely

compelling all the time but we need all the help we can get to be honest yeah we need to lean on this a bit so we've been able to abstract that a bit by doing that in between play sessions which i think has probably made it seem less arduous but we do still have that going on in the background our spreadsheets our ways of doing it made it a bit quicker yes simpler um and we've worked on a bit of a progress uh process rather to streamline it further for the the full game when we get into it so it means that that should also be quicker easier to do maybe even to the point where we don't have to do homework and we can just do it there and then but that's a dream i'm also fine to do it as homework still it's not the end of the world so in that sense arrow i think maybe we

misrepresent the game to an extent but it's all it's all the theatrics of showbiz it's all smoke and mirrors we do still have to fill out loads of spreadsheets every single week yeah it's just become a background abstracted part of my life where i'll take my laptop to work and i'll do it on breaks or lunches or sometimes on the bus if it's a particularly quiet bus ride so yeah i think um that's that's probably why it seems that way it is still a terrible game in that regard but i have some fun yeah uh so second point uh the interconnectedness of world war one and world war two in the research i did for you before i did touch on exactly this uh how the treaty of size set the stage for world war ii rather than preventing it i don't know if i've mentioned this

previously uh i probably have uh but the interwar years are sometimes described as more like a very long armistice in one war which is an angle that very much helps illustrate the direct uh connection world war true uh truly is deserving of its sequel name likely more than any hyphen prophetical world war three that hopefully won't happen um yeah that's something i've realized is doing the history section as well as like how tightly connected the two wars are which is why i've been pulling it back a bit because like world war one sets the stage for all the grievances that create world war two yeah no arrow you make a very good point the world wars are very much like the ghostbusters franchise in that the first two very much sequel to another uh they they work

back to back and it all ties in together and then you've got the next world war which will be led by the the the finn wolfhard of of the political landscape and it'll be it'll be a drop-off it'll it'll have more special effects it'll be grander in scale but it won't really have the charm of the first two it won't feel like it's part of it it it's it's in the same shared universe of course it's in the canon of earth yeah but it does kind of drop off and in between world war three is the oceans eight prometheus of the world wars i guess promethea that's a difficult one to weave in because it's a prequel you can't really do a prequel war anymore no i guess not i guess more just like dropping the naming and doing your own

if we had to look at the ghostbusters franchise for this analogy then you've got world war three being the ghostbusters three uh ghostbusters afterlife is what it's called i forgot the name there but in between that you had the remake the melissa mccarthy one um i can't remember any of the other names in that i think chris hemsworth's in it i've not seen it i don't know i i watched it once and i think i was hung over i think it got pretty bad reviews so i missed it well that's it It was slated, and it's been sort of almost dropped from canon, I believe. What war would you say is that? Ghostbusters isn't a super big franchise for me.

Oh, which war's been dropped from canon? Which war would you say is, it wanted to be World War, but it fell out of favour of that narrative? I'm inclined to say the Cold War. Yeah, the Cold War. Because it didn't quite hit the mark. That was a bit of a nonce. it didn't quite hit any crescendo thank god uh which i hear is the issue with that ghostbusters

film yeah i think you can't really have like a a world war that doesn't yeah get the label well that's it you've got you i think that is the closest thing it's a world war that's all lip service it's it it all it's playing up to the idea of a world war it's like oh here it comes nuclear war we're gonna pay that off we didn't actually follow that through i guess another this is probably not a great analogy but the like war being forgotten thing there's those huge like civil wars in ancient china which have like comparable casualty rates to like the world war where it's like you look at the biggest wars ever by casualty and like four or five of them are like yellow table like chinese wars where like that maybe they're like

battle royale to hunger games yes the the precursor maybe don't get the credit they deserve in terms of like huge wars yes it's um it's instead being rebranded reappropriated and changed into something else yeah that's that's artful we then move on to your third point arrow fashion i previously said i am primarily a historian of the late 1800s to world war one and the cold war hey there we go you can chip in with us then arrow and i am of course you can point out how wrong yeah you can tell me that that was a very jaded and stupid analogy to make i'm also very interested in material history in general and increasingly clothing specifically I started with uniforms, and over the past several years this has become a more general interest in the fashions of these time periods.

So I do actually know a decent bit about the development of the suit, and have opinions on modern fashion. Firstly, you're right. The clear precursor to the modern suit originates in the very late 1700s and early 1800s, around the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, which is also when the concept of the long 19th century begins. the top hat was developed at this time and completely superseded tricorns more commonly called cocked hats because of the pinned up sides that's what i prefer a tricorn to a to a top hat i think i i like i think that was a step in the wrong direction how was well it feels like they took almost like a basic template and and rebranded for that to be the thing it feels like the top hat is the the precursor it's the most generic looking hat ever yeah it's like the tricorn's got a bit more flair you almost like you do the sort of boxy

top hat first and then you get creative with them they did the the minimalist logo redesign that happened to every company over the last 10 years they did that with hats and male fashion in general yeah they did that fashion was was an indicator as to where logos would go yeah it's all one cycle time is a flat circle as rust cole would say and the jacket that would turned into the modern blazer slash suit jacket also developed by the way double-breasted means two parallel rows of buttons instead of one older double-breasted coats and jackets may also be called uh be what i call true double-breasted where there is also a second row of button holes allowing the garment to be buttoned up either way or both buttons side buttoned up both sides

buttoned up sorry the classic revolutionary war military coats work like this and were most commonly seen buttoned open but would be buttoned closed in the cold well that makes sense yeah i like that a bit of a flexibility yeah i like that i like i like clothes that have versatility i always like to wear a jacket wherever i am i like to have a jacket on and we're in we're in the north of england sometimes that gets frowned upon to to wear a jacket when you're out and about or like on an evening going out to the going out the bar i'll always wear a jacket soft i don't care weak i i would much rather have a jacket you should be wearing shorts and the tank top regardless of whether it's snowing or not i first of all andy you know i can't pull off a tank top

can you imagine me in a tank top yeah i don't think either of us are tank top guys because we're on the we're either side of the right physique for a tank top yeah this this scrawny man in a tank top i would look i would look pathetic it's not a look that i can pull off And I would look like a diner owner. You'd look like a what? A diner owner. I think if I was wearing a tank top I'd look like the guy

Obi-Wan goes to meet to find out about the community. Why is that the same guy I pictured when you said diner owner? Is that the universal archetype of diner owner? I guess it's for me as a diner owner. Do you have some sort of similarity

with this guy that I'm missing? Apparently. Because we both thought of him is he called frank i don't think he might be he's the guy who tells obi-wan about the the poison dart that boba not boba jango fett used yeah yeah sends him off to sends him on a wild goose chase is what he does to camino that sounds like the kind of thing you would do you would send me on a wild goose chase to camino oh yeah not that i'm obi-wan i could never be obi-wan anyway i would also love more diversity in men's formal fashion i was thinking about how what you were discussing may just result in us sort of going back to 60s to 80s fashion ideas those

decades really were an experimental time in menswear and you can find some pictures from fashion magazines of people wearing some cool and wacky things i'll attach some pictures we'll have to have a little look through those i do like those they are like good uh and they're all varied yeah which is the thing well that's it that's that's the issue now variation, or lack thereof. Because some of them might be good, some of them might be bad, but it's at least not all the same.

And then you have the issue of things like the Met Gala. That we discussed not too long ago. Was that last week? Yeah. And the notion that you can also go too far with variation. You can get too wacky with it. Oh, yeah. Don't go too expensive. Just something

like a poncho. Just a bit of flair. Poncho days coming, folks. Remember. Next year. Next year, it is. Mark that in the calendar. We'll have to do something special for it. We'll start selling ponchos. Of the entire month. See if that's that bit, if you want to

pick up from that. Also, there's a video where Adam Savage of Mistbusters, who's basically a YouTuber these days, meets with a guy to check out his medieval armor collection and he talks about how he got married in his favorite suit of armor. That's pretty cool.

Full steel, up to the altar and everything. reproduction armor by the way not original he also said the style rules for his wedding guests was formal wear from any past era so yeah kind of what you guys eventually agreed on and generally idea i really love i do like that i yeah i think it should be the case that formal wear should be formal wear on any spectrum in time yeah you should be able to just go if it's formal it's smart it's smart yeah you can't go picking the year that it's from i imagine if i said to you Andy, you have to come to this event as formal wear from specifically 2023.

I'd come as from 2024, just to mess with you. I would know, though. Except the issue is they're exactly the same part of our problem, as you wouldn't be able to tell. So, with that, you can't go so specific, you know. What's the cut-off? Is it from this decade? I think it's... Is it from the century?

Most theme stuff tends to be decade. Well, I think people need to get a hold of themselves and realise that. This isn't something that needs to be enforced. personally i hate wearing black i will probably ban the wearing of black at my own wedding should i have one and likely also generally encourage people to wear some fun and funky but still sort of formally vibey stuff yeah that's the way to do it i was also thinking about how in japan the

western suit has also become default formal wear and how the same goes for china and other asian countries however there is still a traditional japanese formal wear culture and you can occasionally see some japanese politicians and such wearing kimonos rather than suits if we can find a way to not have it feel like cultural appropriation i think a sort of reverse colonial trend would be very interesting where things like kimonos become the global formal default or even some other traditional costume let them go out there and undergo developments and such i do like that because like the un everyone's wearing a suit yeah it would be kind to because that is something we've exported so why not yeah if if other nations would be generous

enough to let us have a little bit of that as well then i'd gobble that up i'd like to try some formal wear from other nations and other cultures it'd be cool if the un was like every like ambassador the un was wearing like formal wear from their countries like fashion traditions yeah i guess the issue is that if it's sort of like if it has to be the case if it's almost oh no not like enforced it would just be cool that like yeah you wouldn't no you're not like you have to come in in like yeah yeah because i feel at that point the un just becomes something that's trying to stereotype it does become like massively yeah yeah that is kind of the other issue of like yeah cultural appropriation is a thing so it is the line which is why i can't

really do the kimono i don't think i i could pull off a kimono without it coming across as just kind of jarring i certainly need some other people to walk through the door first yes you do a vibe check on the kimono before yeah i can't show up as the only one in the kimono that's good that's a bad look for james oh yeah uh whatever happens i basically do agree that shaking up formal wear and fashion in general through looking at the past other cultures and even proper future speculation are good pursuits well we agree on that arrow absolutely and and i'm glad to hear that there are other rational people out there i get in touch i do like that fashion's become a weird through line we didn't expect from two very non-fashion focused people

i wear the same like five outfits on rotation jeans that are either blue or black and the same pair of shoes constantly until they're worn out and you buy the same pair of shoes exactly like converse sand shoe kind of vibe and some sort of jumper on a t-shirt yeah and that's it that's it all year round sometimes i'll wear a shirt on top of the t-shirt if i'm feeling particularly summer vibe really really testing the waters i've got to go crazy i wear a shirt where i'm feeling crazy i wish i could wear a kimono it's such a joke well that's it i feel so enclosed in my little box and arrow continues lastly the penny farthing metaphor is spectacular and i do actually know of a great example of a situation very reminiscent of it

in the late 1800s with the development of smokeless powder and the modern metallic cartridge firearm inventors in europe and the americas were making all sorts of new firearms particularly they were experimenting with the first fully automatic and semi-automatic guns they'll catch on things which would go on to define the combat of both world wars in this pursuit a german man named hugo borschardt uh oh i've actually pronounced that right you give me the pronunciation afterwards i got that right created the fairly revolutionary borschardt c93 pistol 93 there as in 1893 it's kind of a ludicrous contraption from a modern view particularly in that it has a large mass hanging off the back like a tumor that houses a huge clock style coil spring as the pistol's

main spring at the time of its release it was one of the best semi-automatic pistols thus far developed and a fair number were produced however again it is and sort of was also clearly far from the peak of handgun technology and the pistol would quickly be superseded by much better designs and became a footnote in history do you have a picture of that up by any chance andy i feel like you were yeah it's just they're weird looking things actually uh it's a good description was it does look like something's just grown out the back of a normal pistol yeah it's kind of got like a turkey baster yeah hanging off the back like it looks like you'd have to like squeeze it and like pump out the bullets yeah it's almost like a pipette with a handle looks a little bit like

the mars attacks aliens yeah it's weird that you thought that like i've nailed it with this i'm not gonna i feel like that's just someone trying to be quirky and put their mark on it though isn't it this is an experimental time one of those quirky gun makers you don't get those anymore no just get your slick your slick pistols your slick guns everything's all blocky and minimalistic these days yeah let's bring back style for guns minimalism is just a plot by big little to sell less more more less i guess both both both work um but the interesting and relevant part is that supposedly hugo borschart was completely convinced the c93 was the pinnacle of design

and that no improvements could possibly be made to it this was specifically proven wrong when another designer was tasked with continuing the development of the design and did indeed go on to make a far better pistol i do also like that because it says he was tasked with it so this guy clearly went to his superiors and was like i made the perfect gun and then left the office and they were like right you improve it that man was his former assistant george luger who created the principles uh from the principles of the c93 the po8 luger which germany would go on to use as its primary sidearm in both world wars and would be greatly influential on the design of many of the 20th century military pistols and also i believe um han solo's gun in star wars oh really pretty

sure that's a luger oh cool with a little bit of sci-fi stuff glued to it yeah well it's a bit like the um the lightsaber handle do you know what that originally was i don't know i saw a clip of this the other day i saw it years ago as well but it resurfaced it was the you know on the sort of old-timey cameras with like the sort of big flash handle yeah um it's the the handle that comes up from the camera itself to hold up the flash disc oh okay it's that metal bar that is the lightsaber handle with almost no changes whatsoever. That's just what that looks like. It's a cool bit of

lore. So yeah I imagine they just kind of found that around on set and were like we'll use this and then just VFX'd in a light Yeah. Well they cut the film through They what? Because they didn't have it

the way they did the lightsabers I think because they literally cut a hole in the film and then shown a light through it oh wow like physically because they didn't have cgi so they're like all lots of physical effect yeah oh wow i did not know that i'm learning all sorts about star wars well that's a that's a very fun background there yeah on uh on some firearms yeah some good thoughts on fashion and yeah uh good one with the firearm always like a a guy getting beaten by his apprentice that is a favorite trope of mine but you're very much firing on all cylinders

there arrow that's a that's a joke it works on a few levels um i won't talk down to you you clearly know um so yeah fantastic uh we love a bit of fashion we love a bit of firearms and we also love a reminder that this game is much worse than we we usually think it is so thank you for the existential crisis and the fun email if anyone else wants to send an existential crisis or a on email or bundle them together as one you can email at info at war with a mate.co.uk our website is war with a mate.co.uk and our instagram is just war with a mate and we'll take an email a message about pretty much anything and we'll always read it because we're desperate like that we've got a fair backlog going on but we'll we'll get through everything yeah so if you have

sent us one don't worry we will we will get to it we just have we do things somewhat out of order on occasion and that's because we dip between the various platforms they come through and the length we need depending on game talk and stuff well that's it, we've got to do the long ones when it's suitable and as well as that as some of you may well know

we have our first ever live show on the 30th of May it's at the UK Games Expo in Birmingham and if you already have a ticket to the expo, it is free entry it's half four, come along we'll be doing a good old live episodes with all the

usual hits. Talking about the game, moaning about the game, fun tangents. Common Ground will almost definitely make an appearance. Maybe some questions from the audience. Yeah, Q&A. Any folks who haven't heard of us, which will probably be the vast majority of people there.

If anyone wants to come along, you can educate them. You can be part of the loud minority. So, get in touch if you're coming along. Let us know. We'll hit you up. We'll figure out something. but that is it for the mailbag since that is the present we have to go

not forward, not stay in the same place we have to go back into the past We are absolutely not qualified to share views on history. So, Andy, when and where are we? We're finishing off the Italo-Turkish War. And what a war it's been. It has.

War with not quite mates. No, they didn't get on like actual wars tend to. Yeah, ours is a bit of an outlier. Yeah, so historical fatality has its laws which are stronger than those of men. And that's from Giovanni Giolotti, the Italian Prime Minister, talking about the necessity of occupying Libya. Necessity is an interesting word, but we'll use it. It'll be... we'll get to it.

So the Ottomans have turned their attention to the sea, Believing if they can take Ottoman lands, it could force them at the negotiation table at a disadvantage in regards to Libya. I believe that. As well as damaging their supply lines through the Mediterranean. The Italian Navy outweighs the Ottoman fleet by seven times, because you compare fleets by tonnage. Oh, I didn't know that was a thing. I think so, yeah. Oh.

well all the treaties they had that ended up getting broken leading up to World War 2 were like the Germans can only have tonnage oh I didn't know it was weight based I thought it was quantity of ships no so I think it's weight based it's like weight and then category

these won't be the right numbers but you could have like 50,000 tons of battleships which might be 3 or 4 battleships whatever the number you could make really light ships and get around it yeah but then you've got a fire engine yeah and the italian crews of higher standards of training it's an area italy appear to have a

overwhelming advantage the issue with this is if they took the conflict wider they're going to be stepping on other people's toes other european powers in particular austria hungary who are part of a triple alliance with germany and italy their whole thing is keeping the like balkan stable they're not letting that kick off because that's their like buffer with the ottomans and their borders yeah i'm sure that'll pan out perfectly oh yeah so they had a deal yeah not to disable the balkans because they don't want the artemis to be too weak the italians try to convince the austrians to let them do it the austrians are like no so germany puts pressure on them to let them do it because everyone's like got their own secret goals and germany want these guys

disabilized to like clear up a border so the italians first naval strikes are against the ottomans in the red sea and the gulf of aden they're attacking some ports in late 1911 but early 1912 saw an increase on attacks on ottoman ships sinking seven gunboats on a yacht oh the gun seems less impressive yeah it didn't get more detail on the yacht but it was mentioned in several places um definitely got a yacht yeah they're also delivering weapons to rebel groups in um the arabian peninsula in like saudi uh what will become saudi arabia and yemen and so yeah doing the old supply the rebels trick as well yeah i i hear that that's a trick i hear that's a go-to in history yeah they continue this momentum leading into february with a battle

in Beirut harbour where they destroy the Ottoman fleet, giving them total control essentially of the Suez Canal and the Medet, South and Eastern Mediterranean. With the Ottoman navy removed from play, the Italians, one, they can just head through the Suez Canal now and not worry about Ottomans getting in the way, and also they can start heading up to the Strait of Darnot, the Dardanelles Strait, in April 1912. The Strait was and is an incredibly important shipping lane, giving access to constant constantinople and through that trade with asia which both russia and britain heavily rely on the italians try to force the straight but as abc found out three years later it's not easy or particularly possible an endeavor now that's a tough one yeah so there's some skirmishes

with the ottoman guns and then uh they decide to blockade it and when they do the ottomans mine the strait and close it to travel this sounds awfully familiar yeah this one was like damn history yeah it does repeat itself really frequently yeah it's like beat for beat yeah uh both sides receive international political pressure to open the strait internal ottoman division and their isolate isolation means they can't take advantage of this sort of conflict between the european great powers and instead the pressure just gets put on them uh so they eventually end up having to clear the strait so we're skipping a chapter ahead then yeah uh so the straight sort of not an option here because it's too important the italians

decide they're going to capture the various islands the ottomans have in the mediterranean like the Aegean, like the Greek islands and stuff. Oh, okay, yeah. So between the 28th of April and the 21st of March in May 1912, they capture 13 islands with only one of them being like contested at all

which is Rhodes, so they just take them. And this plan actually does work. The anti-war faction in the Ottoman Empire gets stronger and stronger because they've got more like, we should cut a deal, we're losing land. I mean, yeah, you've got to

give up at some point so they do have peace talks in may led by russia the ottomans were ready to deal however the italians weren't willing to compromise also their preemptive declaration of having taken control of libya really sort of stops them being able to like have that as a concession in negotiations so they want to take libya off the ottomans but they said they've already have it so it's like you've gone too early and it's just fucked up the negotiations that's such an awkward thing to have to negotiate yeah we have this but we we do want you to recognize that we have it otherwise we're gonna look real silly in front of our friends so the ottomans are getting internal pressure but so are the italians

uh especially the working class this war is going on way longer than it's supposed to and it's costing way too much money what was it 40 or something 47 at one point um insane yeah actually well i'll just scroll down and do the money part now because it's ridiculous they the war was meant to be 30 million lira a month yeah it ended up being something like 80 and going on longer than it showed off so it was meant to cost 300 million lira and ended up costing 1.3 billion lira and adjusted for inflation that's got to be nasty uh well in british pounds at the time i think i tried to work this out it would be roughly 50 to 55 million pounds at that time in 1912 yeah which is roughly equivalent to 7.5 billion pounds now and also you've got to keep in mind inflation's

gone up also economies have got bigger yes so this is that that would be a much larger slice of the pie at the time yeah well 47 which is yeah sorry we have a number for it so yes the italian let's go back up the italian working class are not happy um feeling the pressure the italians like we've got to do one last like thing to give us the advantage and then we can go back into negotiations uh so they try to send some torpedo boats up the straight uh with the intention that they'll destroy the ottoman fleet at like anchor in the port uh in the sea uh next to constantinople ah so as not to mess with the strait yes um these disguised vessels get spotted and driven away but the italian press spins this as a successful strike

with like several salacious accounts there's one i haven't got the quote for it but it's like insane like describing like the fire and the chaos and the screaming ottomans he wasn't there he just made it up and published it and also i take it there was no screaming or fire they got some like torpedoes off but not anywhere not they hoped no it wasn't maybe they sank another yacht yeah we did it boys we took out another yacht yeah uh so due to the encroaching first balkan wall they have to get back to the negotiation table pretty sharpish uh so there's more pressure inside the ottoman empire they've also got a new leader so they can kind of do a like we've got a new leader that guy can be like well i'm negotiating but i'm getting rid of the baggage almost

like so they're willing to negotiate uh and come to terms to sign a treaty which is the treaty of ouchie uh which is signed on the 18th of october 1913 there's a few parts to this uh part of the italians would return the islands they'd taken and pay some reparations and then the ottomans in a bit of fancy footwork would relinquish uh liberian sovereignty okay and then not contest the italians when they claim it so it's sort of a it's not mine now you can take it but you didn't take it from us oh okay it's not one of our things we've just we've left it on the floor if you want to pick it up yeah uh because the ottomans are also trying to keep the locals on side which just doesn't work um they feel like completely betrayed but part of that was um the sultan would continue

be recognized as the head of Muslims in Libya which they didn't want and they'd also set a regent and a judge which would be appointed by the Ottomans but then the Italians would be able to veto it

it's just a weird non thing it's a very odd treaty overall yeah that's this doesn't seem to make much logistical sense there seems to be a lot of people trying to face yeah so the ottomans leave but then there's the sensu muslim uh who are continuing to fight and with the bulk of the force who are now just like well the ottomans are fucking betrayed us

we hate them now as well but the italians are like these guys are causing us problems we're not it's taking too long to conquer libya so we're not giving you the islands back which was part of the deal so it's a complete shit show of a treaty as all treaties seem to be at this stage in history oh yeah so the treaty failed to bring peace to libya or keep the local muslims happy who saw it as a betrayal and also having no hold over them but the italians did have their coastal holdings the rest of the country is functionally ceded to the censu order uh who will continue to fight the ottomans for decades like you know when i talked about the graziani episode and the libyan genocide in like the late 20s yeah that's the end of like that's them still fighting this

war so when it when it drags on longer than it should have it it really dragged on longer than it should have so yeah the italian elite are happy but everyone else is unenthusiastic their military performance has completely failed to impress the other great powers which was also part of the reason to be like we have a comparable military to you and then it's such a mess they're like no you don't so yeah massively costly as we've said and then human cost the italians had three and a half thousand troops die and then four and a half thousand wounded so you've also got like working class people here and all this stuff in the newspapers and then like the guy from their village comes home wound like missing an arm and is then it's

like no it's a complete shit show that's not gonna do well for their optics no uh so the pipe despite the cost the italians uh this is very encouraging to the balkan states um who this causes bulgaria serbia greece and montenegro to form the baltic league montenegro start proceedings on the 8th of october followed by the bulgarians and the serbians on the 17th this is 1913 and then on the 18th the same day that the peace treaty was signed uh sorry this is 1912 the same day the peace treaty was signed greece joins the war so the ottomans are literally like we someone just declared a war on us 10 days ago yesterday today we need to sign this deal um so by the time this conflict is resolved with the treaty of london seven months later

on the 30th of March, 1913. Incidentally, 113 years and five and a half hours exactly before the first Paul Weaver mate live show. Did you check that? Well, it's the same day, so I just checked what time the tree was signed. Wow, of all the anniversaries. so yeah the baltic league end up smashing the ottomans uh who lose 83 of their european

holdings which just gives them like a little bit um to the west of constantinople just so there's like a tiny buffer they lose 67 of their like european population and uh like 400 000 truths that's insane yeah this is really like they get ended in world war one but this is like the penultimate like this is the blow that weakens them so they can be finished in world war one essentially they're completely tarnished now like whatever might they had it seems like it's been absolutely sundered by this yeah uh so i want to end this uh with a quote because this is also from giovanni gelotti in may 1911 before the invasion just to this is a guy calling his shot but the shot is like i'm gonna shit myself the integrity of the ottoman empire is a condition for europe's

balance and peace is it truly in italy's interest to shatter into pieces one of the cornerstones of the old building and what if after we attack turkey the balkans move as well and what if a balkan war causes a clash among the groups and powers and a european war could we take it upon ourselves the responsibility for igniting the gunpowder so he's just like this will cause world war one and then it does like he says this before the invasion he perfectly calls what he's doing this will cause a war on the balkans that will cause world war one and then he does it anyway Wait, he's done exactly what you did. He shit his pants.

Yeah, it's just like, you know the, like, babe roof, like, pointing to the stands and then hitting the home run? It's like that, but just for doing the, like, shittest thing possible. It's like that, but he singles out a small child in the stand. And just beans them. Well, that's a horrible shot to take. It's just, it's just he perfectly knew the results of what would happen, but like political pressure and he says the fatality of history just drag them on anyway

and it's just like you knew what was gonna happen don't act as if you if you can call it and then you do it and it happens he knew yeah that's what knowing is you're talking before about the definition of it this guy did know this is what i meant by the the type of knowing yeah call it you can say you know it it's not looking at the sheets it's just it's it's intuition yeah so uh yeah that's the tallow turkish uh war which destabilizes europe and leads to world war one well that's some history for you yeah oh well the fantastic history segment and one that really sets the stage for world war one which really sets the stage for world war two yeah which really set the stage for war with a mace we're getting there so this is all of the history

segments are actually just a prequel for the podcast oh yeah we need to properly contextualize ourselves with hundreds of history segments yeah the history segment is actually just a get to know the guys of war with a mate and it's it's all prequel leading up to our lives i'm excited to find out about the your birth story that'll be a fun one that'll have to be real late on we'll get your parents on as guests the final episode i'll tell them about the podcast and they can be guests oh yeah because that's that's a that's a fun fact that i don't think we've actually dropped before i'm not sure if we have on the pod or not but yeah i haven't told my parents which is absolutely fantastic that your parents don't know about war with the maid

and you have a live show coming up that's the problem it was like i don't know if this is gonna be a thing and then it's too much of a thing and now it's like yeah we're on our 78th episode i'm going to birmingham to do a live show it's like could you not mention this before i'd love to see how long this goes on until your parents find out this is the equivalent of like you know when you get a text and you don't or a message you don't answer it quickly enough and then you're like oh it's been too long and then you just never reply this is dialed up massively we've spent over we've spent a hundred hours recording this hundreds more play in the game do they know you're playing the game no i don't know anything about this

i don't shut up about this whenever anyone talks to me about hobbies or interest i'm straight on this plug in the podcast your parents don't even fucking know so is that what we're building up to the last history segment the last history segment is telling my parents the history of this podcast your parents will be incredibly geriatric at this point yeah that's true you'll tell your parents they won't have the capacity to retain that information oh god your last confession to them it's going to be warmer than me well that's a that's a fun insight into both

history and modern day well that's that's telling and I suppose a topic of not telling and what we do need to do now is tell the world that we are not

at each other's throats, that we don't hate each other usually instead we're best buddies we're pals, we're friends, we're chums we're bros we are going to unite with the only way we know how common ground

and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground I'm trying the intro for common ground I'm recording maybe yeah

all right andy lay it on me how you bring us together what is your common ground suggestion for us to agree on i think you'll agree with this one as well cgi isn't as good as executives think it is okay um i mean this is going to be fairly straightforward to begin with because i agree yeah i think everyone except executives would agree with this one yeah this might be a bit too basic but uh i think vfx artists agree i think consumers agree actors agree i think everybody agrees with this but for some reason executives except the people making like decisions on films okay so in the case in this case i will play the role of an executive okay and you can come and ground me okay into agreement so i guess we need a vfx shot for this movie right okay uh we need

four weeks to get it done properly. How about two days? But, what? How about two days? No, it'll take four weeks. What's the scene? Okay, there's a ship coming through the atmosphere. It's banking round to the building in a

sci-fi city and then coming into land. It's flying through the vista. It's the whole city. Does it have to be a city? Yes, this is a sci-fi detective noir about a guy who's sent to a planet. It's the establishing shot

Yeah, but what if the establishing shot It's way off So it's on the outskirts of the city So you can see Two or three buildings It's an What are they called? It's one of those city-wide cities

A city-wide city? A planet-wide city Who is this idiot that we hired? This guy doesn't know shit about his job It's like a Coruscant I don't know what a Coruscant is Is that a type of fruit? Jesus Christ, you're a film producer.

Yeah. Okay. I'm going to send Star Wars to you. But yeah, we need four weeks to really nail this. And then we probably need six months to do the whole show. Six months? Yeah. Okay, okay.

So let's trim this down a bit. We'll take it from ten episodes to six. It's already six episodes. We'll condense it down to four then. We'll call it a mini-series. it's already i mean it's a tight script for six episodes we've already handled that we just need time for the vfx shots all right all right uh so we'll we'll we'll say two weeks then all right fine we'll give you two weeks to do it you can have you can have your week and then so the the

shot um just do it do it quickly and don't worry too much about the like banking around the building just show the building show it coming through the atmosphere don't show the buildings in that shot when it comes through the atmosphere and then we'll get like a little I don't know we'll put something together just make the whole city CGI

I think I think this is an important shot it establishes the world it could be iconic if we just people don't care about that people want it to come in and then we get straight into the action we get straight into the action from there okay it's just just so you know it's gonna

it's gonna look bad and the show's not gonna do as well if you don't give us the time it's not gonna look bad it's you're really good at it people love this people love this sort of thing you know big ship and and you know cgi city people people eat that up so that's fine it'll come around and it's only a small part of the of the show it's it's just the what's this the first shot of the city yeah it's the establishing shot yeah yeah so yeah so just quickly do that and then we'll and then for the rest of the show we won't be showing the big scale of the city we'll just be shooting in in small corridors and stuff anyway so it doesn't matter we do need cgi for the in series as well no no i've spoke to the set guys okay we're saving

the cgi specifically for things we could use practical props for but we've decided to cgi in people stunt actors and just things that we don't need cgi for but we thought that way it's quicker and easier especially when i give you no time to do it okay have you heard of the like good fast cheap thing no i've never heard of that okay because we're doing i don't want to hear about that okay and scene i think i quit so yeah i think someone needs to just go in and just be like give them the fucking time you know what what i always look back at and i think this is an example that's almost always used i'm gonna i'm gonna pick out some cgi from i think now it's like 15 20 years ago maybe um can you guess what it is already cgi davy jones it's davy jones yes

incredible there you go and that the reason we both thought of that is because it's some of the best cgi in a film that i've ever seen and it still holds up today incredibly well and that film was like 2008 maybe yeah that's that's outstanding cgi and it'll because they got time on it they got time because they needed time back then it can't be slapdash work it takes time to make something yeah i think that's the thing of like all the tools are so good you can get it's like you can get night eight eighty ninety percent of the way there in like a fraction of the time you used to but you do still need the the like last 10 to 20 for like the artistry yeah and they haven't built the tools no to do that you can't yet automate that part of it

you can not automate so to speak but you can you can speed run a lot of the early stuff the foundational level of putting that that computer image together yeah but and this is someone who has no idea what he's talking about um but you you can you can do that you can you know speed up that part of the process that must be where the technology's got to yeah but they just don't want to allow for it to have a finish they don't want it to have artistic design they don't want it to look polished and to look good and sleek or fitting or to match the lighting of the rest of the scene stranger things um yeah that well that's another thing i think again this is the cgi is not as good as you think it is that we'll fix it in post yep seems to be an attitude

as well of like wrap it up we got close enough on the shot and we'll fix it with cgi and then they also don't go and fix it in post well i think the thing is they like buy a certain amount of cgi shots because i think that's how you do it i'd expect yeah you must have to assign the budget before yeah you're like we need 600 cgi shots for this film or whatever it is yeah yeah that makes sense but then you waste like 50 of them on like removing coffee cups or any like but like doing the stuff you could have just done if you'd like spent a bit more time yeah so i think they just need to think cgi is like 40 or 30 percent worse yes actually if they if they underestimate rather than overestimate they'll be pleasantly surprised

by the result i think what we need to do then is we need to find some of these executives that are not mean you personally we shouldn't do this but these executives need to be found and there needs to be some sort of shadowy cabal of vfx artists who try and convince them that cgi is is worse i don't know maybe they tell them that the computer broke the big cgi computer that the world uses like a it crowd when they put the internet in the box they're like this is cgi oh no it's broken so i've not actually seen that before oh it's never very good people always tell me i'd like it yeah i think that's a disparaging remark against me but so yeah if we can if we can gaslight these executives into thinking that the cgi machine isn't working properly anymore

and they they just throw together some like horrible janky image of to the point where even the executive can't look at it and go this is fine yeah i'm talking like a stick man in a shot and you just hope it's not someone who goes i've got an art film we'll keep that and instead they go oh this is terrible and they go yeah we're gonna have to spend more time on this yeah you're gonna have to give us more time otherwise this this doesn't work we have to do all from scratch now i don't know if they're not paying for it or it's too tight because like one that comes to mind is uh you know for love and thunder oh yeah that has some one in particular but throughout has some really bad you're thinking of the floating head yeah but there's some other stuff throughout like

the like goat things look really weird they are one of the most frustrating parts of that movie yeah i know it's a it's a cheap shot to take the piss out of thor love and thunder but that is a an egregious affront on not just marvel films just films in general but like that could have looked that could have looked so much better so much more polished because i reckon it's one they're not paying for enough and they're also going you're gonna do it with in like three weeks with 12 hour days yeah like i'm buying this much time off you but i'm contracting it so they don't get any of like the decompression time that actually increases the quality of your work yeah it's just crunch back to back yeah at which point these people don't really have the the zest to put it

yeah and rightly so i think when when this and i don't think this is a particularly hot take this is not the fault of the artists this is no the fault of everything around it it's the like process to get it out fast and but like some of these things it's like the budget is like 300 million dollars or something yeah and you're like where the fuck does that go i understand actors are probably taking a big chunk out of it yeah if you get some big names in there then yes that will hit the budget but like what it just feels like like because you've got a great example you brought up pirates of the caribbean yep fantastic the matrix is a 1999 oh god it was a 99 matrix yeah so and that film looks as far as like action cgi where it's not like doing the thing i'm

talking about where like painting a cityscape but it's like woven in yeah yeah it's not like an establishing shot it is just in the in the moment it's a blend of a continuous scene with action sequences within it that the first matrix is like flawless in a lot of ways in my opinion and like there's not a single shot in that that looks there might be if i was going back with like a fine-tooth comb but nothing about that film comes to mind of looking bad at like any moment yeah it's not the kind of film that gets brought up in these conversations where people go oh and then there's that bit in the matrix that looks terrible yeah it's not like the mummy or scorpion king yeah which is which has a particularly bad scene well the guys um corridor crew that's a

really good youtube channel yes where they go back and they correct i think we are both just saying stuff from corridor crew videos we've seen about this one but yeah yeah but that that is yeah yeah i'd recommend anyone who's interested in this sort of thing if you haven't seen it already the corridor crew youtube channel is really good they look over bad cgi and stunt things as well they get like stuntmen yeah like the stunt ones they have as well that's another one uh we just give the like i think the ones that get thought of almost as like tertiary departments yeah give them more time because they always add more to stuff it really takes you out of a out of a film or a television show when you just have like a jarring shot and it's it's uh

walking dead has a particularly bad one where i know you've not really seen it but there's a cg idea that is just maligned for its i'll show you after this it is absolutely terrible and it looks like a joke yeah when you're looking at it it's like this is so immersion breaking i don't feel like i'm watching the same show anymore it's like get rid of the scene if you can't that's what i'm thinking like if you can't commit to it don't have it yeah go back to basics you don't deserve to have the shot if you won't pay for the shot yeah so that's it i think maybe the common ground is we need to gaslight these executives into weirdly underestimate you guys yeah like are they that confident with the vfx artists that they're willing to just that the vfx they'll say we

need this amount of time and they'll go no you don't you're better than that i think it's kind of a thing where like they can't because i also think they do a thing now where like a lot of them they just like hire them for the movie and fire them all at the end yeah that wouldn't and then hire them back again so there's not even like there's no continuity yeah which is another thing i think is causing the bad cgi things is like have you ever been at a workplace where the person with like a shitload of institutional knowledge like goes and gets another job or something and then you realize like how valuable like oh they've been here for like 10 years and they just they have all the shit in their head like that's the kind of like valuable stuff you lose when you're

doing that cycle yeah well i had an example i think i talked to you about it at length in my previous job yes they let someone go who filled a role their sort of organizational scheduling kind of role and they they let the guy go and a new guy got the job and things just completely fell off and i don't know if the guy was you know just not very good at the job maybe it wasn't for him maybe it was different from what he expected or if it was just change of process but all of a sudden a guy who'd been doing it very well for a very long time was no longer there and a huge plethora of problems came up everyone was unhappy with the way things were going schedules were absolutely out of whack yeah and it's like why not just keep the first guy yeah and that was a

situation where the company got rid of the guy yeah so what what would happen if instead you just keep the guy there work around that and and fix the project around that and don't uproot something that could be so beneficial to have yeah you've got a foundation here to work off just compromise and the rest of the stuff can work in tandem with that so actually that's another reason cgi is probably bad they don't have a chance to build up institutional like knowledge and all the tricks with the software they use and all that stuff that like you will never get in like an onboarding thing but you'll like sit next to a guy who and he'll just tell you yeah you can't you have to if they're vfx artists i imagine that there is a knack that comes with that where you get into a

flow and you get a your own sort of polish on something yeah i mean you think about like puppetry frank oz you know that's a craft that he's perfected over decades but if he got brought on to a project and then they're like halfway through not right well you've done the puppet bit going to this other project then on the other project it's a completely different framework and he's got no creative flair or time to work his his magic into it then all of a sudden you don't have frank oz puppets yeah you know you end up with you go from frank oz yoda to cgi yoda and cgi yoda i don't have much of a problem with but you do lose some flair some character yeah and that's moving from one sort of structure to another but i think again you keep something

long term you get a big benefit a big payoff from that so i think everyone but executives let's think they're great executives take it down a notch if there's any give them some time and think they're slightly worse than they are so you like give them a buffer as this as common ground often comes down to you um executives if you're listening um it's just the case that you should listen to the parts where we say vfx artists are bad at their job so actually don't file them all um give them more time yeah give them a chance they'll they'll they'll do it i promise i swear to god yes vfx artists start a sort of like whisper campaign if you're ever asked to estimate anything add 10 as an industry just sort of push that buffer even if you can do

it in three days say it's gonna take six and we'll give you four and you can do a good job Yeah, act like you're a guy doing roadworks Getting paid by the hour All of a sudden it takes a lot longer But they go the other way They stretch it out for much longer But that's a different common ground That's a story for another time

Because I've been James I've been Andy Stay subtle, humble and brave In those CGI deserts of your mind Oh my god, this looks terrible We'll be right back. We'll be right back.