Wonderful! - Wonderful! 296: Murder Gossip Twins!

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

Griffin's favorite esoteric video game genre! Rachel's favorite fancy beverage! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Reproductive Freedom for All: https://www.prochoiceamerica.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

hi this is rachel mcelroy hi this is griffin mcelroy and this is wonderful thanks for listening to our show we never do that We never thank them at the top, but I'm, I thank you. We know there's lots of podcasts. Uh huh. Being. Freakers.

Chris angels. New project. New project. Being freakers. There's the dance kids. There's money. With a bunch of ease at the end. Money. Yeah yeah with a bunch of e's at the end they're so fucking funny why aren't you listening to them all married couples all of them married uh all

talking about you know things related to things that they like murder gossip murder gossip exclamation point they're twins and they gossip about murders. And they're so funny. And they're married. And they're married. But you have joined us and I'm so thankful. There's so many airlines of podcasts that you could have flown, listened to. You are in an improv-y mood today.

Yeah. Just saying yes all over the place. To myself. Yes, me. Yes, me yes is the new way of doing it um hey do you have any of those small wonders that i crave so much oh i mean okay you don't say you're chilly i'm probably gonna say you've talked about my chili well i just had it for dinner and lunch two chilies in a row my My doctor says not to do that. Yeah, this is probably not going to end well for you. My doctor says don't eat chili two meals, two days in a row. Yeah.

And I said, whatever you say, doc. Wink. And then a bean falls out of my tear duct because of how full of fucking chili I am. No, I was going to say, and I'm hesitant. Okay. Because it's early. Uh-oh. But I did enjoy watching the golden bachelor well let's get into this um i i'm not totally bought in yet i'm gonna need a little bit more

i think uh first episode as i reminded griffin is always rough there's too many people you know you're getting like five seconds everybody's super gimmicky You know, like the whole point of the episode is like you're not going to get enough of anyone and everyone's going to be uncomfortable. I got enough of a lot of them,

I would say. Some of them were a little much, but I love that the ladies were supportive of each other. A lot of those earrings are incredible. Your dress looks amazing.

Yeah. The quiet competition. Everybody here is so beautiful. Yes. The quiet competition that usually takes place in the first episode of a bachelor bachelorette season was not extant at all no fights no fights uh no like backstabbing no so-and-so is here for the wrong reasons yeah um it was just like it was very sweet um but i'm gonna need a little bit more i'm gonna need to get like a little bit complicated i think i wanted it to be a little bit more different because it was still very um first impression rose everybody like standing around drinking cocktails like yeah and a lot of it did feel like the guiding hand of the producer

felt very visible and tangible at times. Yeah, somebody played a song on a guitar. That didn't do it for me. I didn't like that. There was like, here's a letter from my grandchild supporting me on this journey. We'll see. The first episode is always usually the worst.

But I think this Bachelor has potential. He seems comfortable on camera. He's a nice enough guy. You know, definitely rooting for him. You got to. He's up there.

So yeah, I mean, I'm excited to see how it plays out. Yeah. We'll see. I think I have some nostalgia for the franchise,

obviously. So I was like, oh, it might be good to get back in there. And then I was like, no, there's still a lot I don't like about it. But I'm optimistic that they've changed just enough to make it a new adventure. We're also watching Love is Blind right now. And I'm pretty sure the first time only two couples have made it through the terrible crucible of the pods.

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a spoiler, but not because we're not going to give any details about which two. Okay, yeah, sure. But they're setting it up kind of like they did last season, where it's like some couples didn't make it out of the pods, but maybe they'll get together. Yeah, I hope not. Because there's just not. There's some real dirtbags this,'s some real dirtbags this season. Like some real dirtbags this season. Yeah.

Even for a Netflix romance reality show, there's some real dirtbags in the mix. Yeah. So hopefully they don't get any more screen time than they've already had, but they probably will. As long as we're doing this roundup, Survivor's back

and it has maybe the worst tribe. This poor tribe has, it's just a bad, it's a bad crew. It's a crew that couldn't shoot straight. It was a little refreshing in a way, right? Because people come to this show so prepared now. Like everyone's studied the puzzles.

Everyone's like, like you know worked on their fitness but there's one tribe this year which it almost seems intentional because they took every person that was likely to have trouble being on survivor and put them just in the one tribe yeah so we'll see how that goes sometimes that tribe can have a fun place post-merge because all of a sudden they're the spoilers who can tilt the scales in one direction or the other, assuming there's not just one or maybe even no one left from that tribe

by the time the merge rolls around. That would be interesting. I will say they definitely did that challenge where they made him get real muddy. Right off the jump, yeah. Which we assume is somebody somebody's thing some nasty producer it might be jeffrey who knows yeah true um but i think that might be enough for me i think i might be like i don't want to be here anymore because i'm yeah there was someone who did that

played that car which you don't see a lot of on Survivor. Someone's saying, actually, this sucks out here. The food situation, you guys gotta get it figured out. I go first this week. I'm getting pretty esoteric on this one, and I sent you some videos to watch, so you're

probably prepared for that, I hope. Yeah, you sent me three kind of related but unrelated videos, so I. Yeah, you sent me three kind of related but unrelated videos. So I'm curious how you're lumping this together. So I have talked about peripheral-based rhythm games before on this show, stuff like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which were very formative and important to my college experience. It came out right in that sweet spot. And I spent so many nights playing those games with my friends. But before that genre of rhythm games came around,

there was a different type of rhythm game that was popular. And this one doesn't rely so much on special controllers and licensed songs. So specifically, I'm talking about character-based rhythm games, rhythm games with like original stories and soundtracks and characters, arguably the most, not arguably, the most iconic of which is Parappa the Rapper, the 1996 PlayStation 1.

I don't think it was a launch title, but it was pretty early. This is something that you've mentioned on a variety of podcasts. And so I was kind of surprised that we hadn't talked about it yet. Yes. But I think it's just because every time you say that phrase. Parappa the Rapper. It like checks off a little like chalkboard tick

in my brain because it's such an unusual combination. It is an unusual title and game and everything about it is just super duper weird uh i i was inspired to talk about this after a song from parappa the rapper came up on a like a spotify playlist uh and then i had to explain to henry like what it was we were listening to yeah because he wasn't really ready for that uh so parappa the rapper it is a game about a rapping dog named parappa who lives in this weird, flat sort of paper craft world.

All of the characters are two dimensional. And when they move and turn, you just see them like sheets of paper twirling about. And throughout this game, which is incredibly short, it's six levels, it's six very short songs. You could power through this thing in like half an hour which back in the day not great not what you wanted when you've just spent you know what is essentially probably about 90 counting inflation uh on a game uh throughout the game you take parappa through uh different scenarios as he learns karate bakes a cake waits in line

for a bathroom and then ultimately performs a concert to impress his crush, who is a living flower named Sonny Funny. Can you say, I don't know if you said this and I missed it, but when did it come out? 1996. Okay. So each level, sort of each song has kind of call and response lines where you had to copy your tutor for whatever level you're playing through a series of very, very precise timed controller inputs. The songs are iconic. I can remember all six of them

really, really well. And inevitably, though, you would just kind of butcher the songs every time because if you missed by a frame the input, then all of a sudden it is just like, kick, chop, uh-oh. It just doesn't sound like words anymore. So I want to play the song that started this, the song that came on that Henry heard, my favorite song from Parappa the Rapper called Driver's Test, where a moose driving teacher who's named Inspector Mussolini, which is very good, teaches Parappa how to operate a motor vehicle. Step on the brakes Step on the brakes Now step on the gas Step on the gas

When I say boom, boom, boom You say bam, bam, bam No pause in between Come on, let's jam So this kind of launched this developer named Nana Onsha, which is a Japanese game company, and they would go on to release a sequel to Parappa the Rapper and a remaster of this original game.

But I actually prefer they released another sort of side story in the Parappaverse called Um Jammer Lammy, which is a character that was voiced by Sarah Ramirez, star of Stage and Screen. They were on Grey's Anatomy and Spamalot. They've done a bunch of stuff. I was surprised to see their name on the IMDb for this one. Same sort of conceit, like flat paper world. And she is a lamb who is learning how to be confident in her guitar playing.

At some point, she has to land a plane. At some point, she has to put out a fire with the fire department through the power of guitar playing at some point she has to land a plane at some point she has to like put out a fire with the fire department through the power of guitar playing at one point she dies and goes to hell and then has to escape from hell with the power of her uh her her guitar playing so she can go play the the world's greatest rock show with her band milk can um but it's very much the same thing as per app the rapper is like somebody says a line and then you have to press the exact same inputs in time, only instead of rapping, you play guitar. And the songs in this one, I actually like better than Parappa the Rapper.

It doesn't have the sort of like cultural impact that Parappa had, but I love me some Um Jammer Lammy. Here's a song, it's the last song, which the title of it is, this game came out in 1999. It's a very 1999 game, very 1999 song title. It's called Got to Move, Millennium Girl. I'm going to play that now. My favorite game from this genre is called G Guitaroo Man.

It came out on PlayStation 2 in 2002. And they don't make games like these. Like this genre that I'm describing does not exist and has not really existed since the PS2. Although they definitely have some like iOS games that are kind of like this. They have lots of iOS games, but not so many that have like original songs, original characters. Like I can't think of a rhythm game I've played that had like original music

that is in the Parappa style since then. Guitar Man was from a developer called Inus, which is a Japanese company. It's an acronym that means infinite noise of the inner soul, which is very powerful. In Guitar Man, you play as a boy named U-1, who kind of like Parappa, unpopular

nerd, until he learns that he is this guitar hero of legend, guided by a robot dog named Puma. The soundtrack for this game fucking rips. It goes through a bunch of different genres of music. And unlike Parappa and I'm Jeremy Lambie, it's not call and response.

There's like different stages where you have to like sort of follow a line and press a button to like play guitar riffs. And then your enemy will attack you and you have to like block it with like different timed inputs. So it's not just back and forth. So the songs are, i don't know more listenable i guess because they're songs uh and all of this culminates in just this fucking sick like wild stallions uh guitar duet called the legendary theme which is just this over the top shredding guitar ballad that i'm gonna play play last year. these games were all really short and really weird and like I said, they don't really make them anymore. Once Guitar Hero came out, there was this huge title shift in the genre where all of a sudden people just wanted to play songs that were real songs that they knew and play them with controllers, which rules. And I love all that.

But I have so much nostalgia for these games because they symbolize like a lot of the PlayStation generation for me. Like that is, those have been sort of melded into like retro game nostalgia in the way that like Super Nintendo was once it reached a certain age. I feel that way about, you know, Parappa and Crash Bandicoot and games from that era. And I know a lot of the people who played those games growing up also have like extreme fondness for them, which feels very special and nice. And sometimes I'll go back and just listen to the Guitar Room Man soundtrack

because it slaps. A lot of those games aren't fun to play. Like I said, Parappa the Rapper, if you miss a beat by like a second, the song drops into a minor key and there's duck quacking noises over it to let you know how bad you are. That's what was so confusing is Griffin wanted to show it to us and he put on a playthrough, which we assumed would be somebody doing well, but that was not. No, they failed several times, which was a real disappointment.

But that's character-based rhythm games. I love them very much and maybe one day they'll make a real disappointment. But that's character-based rhythm games. I love them very much. And maybe one day they'll make a new one. Yeah. A comeback. Can I steal you away? Yes. Great.

The human mind can be tricky. Your mental health can be complex. Your emotional life can be complicated. So it helps to talk about it. I'm John Moe. Join me each week on my show, Depression Mode with John Moe. It's in-depth conversations about mental health

with writers, musicians, comedians, doctors, and experts. Folks like Noah Kahn, Sashir Zameda, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. We talk about depression, anxiety, trauma, imposter syndrome, and perfectionism. We have the kind of conversations that a lot of folks are hesitant to have themselves. Listen, and you won't feel as alone. And you'll have some laughs, too. Depressed Mode for Maximum Fun at MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. here at Maximum Fun.

October is National Co-op Month, so we're celebrating our brand new co-op and some others with an event called Co-Optober. We've got special events all month long, starting with a live Q&A on YouTube where MaxFun worker owners will answer your questions on Friday, October 6th.

And much more to come. We also want to tell you about some incredible limited edition merch exclusively available to MaxFun members throughout the month of October. If you're already a member of MaxFun, you've shown that you care about our shows and what we do. If you also want to help launch us into this new cooperative era and show off your support, go ahead and get yourself a hat, a pin, a shirt. We worked with some of our favorite artists to make them really special. For details on merch, all of our upcoming events like meetup day and more,

visit MaximumFun.org slash Co-Optober. That's C-O-O-P-T-O-B-E-R. Happy Co-Optober. All right. You want to hear my thing? Yes, so bad. It's a little fancy pants. All right. You want to hear my thing? Yes, so bad. It's a little fancy pants. All right.

You know me. I'm always resistant to being too fancy. Yeah. But I wanted to talk about espresso. Oh, yeah. That's fancy, right? I think so, yeah. I feel real fancy when I drink it.

Well, yeah, it's so little, and little is fancy. When you drink a big, like a big gulp, big gulp not fancy unless you fill it with espresso, but that would get you jacked. It is, it's little. It's also like it looks fancier than coffee. You know, there's like that little layer of what's called like crema on the top.

Oh, is that what you call that? Yeah, so. I call it spume. That's not good. i don't like that at all i sweated it i mean same thing when i worked in the barnes and noble coffee shop we served starbucks products and we had to learn the variety of standards that starbucks required of all employees serving their beverages. So I learned all about like using an espresso machine and what the espresso should look like and how long it could sit out before it wasn't good anymore.

Did you have to use the little whisk, the fun little espresso whisk? Have you seen it? It's like you put, I see the, I get this TikTok a lot and they put like the espresso stuff in a tiny little cup and then they use a whisk to even are you talking about like a milk foamer no not it's like a you know those things that you uh they're like wire like oh yeah on your hair and it feels good it's

like that but you don't put them in your hair you put them in your espresso no we never use that the one thing that was fun though is we had kind of an old machine and it would always make two shots, like regardless of what you wanted to do. Like you would put it in the little like tamped thing. Right. And it would like pour out two shots. And so if somebody only wanted a tall. Okay. You got to keep that extra shot.

Oh, that's cool. For yourself. That's great. So my coffee consumption was out of control i bet i love the all the ritual that goes into like really fancy coffee production at home the amount of gadgets and gizmos really appeals to me the thought that first thing in the morning when both of our kids are awake that I could sneak off to the kitchen and do some quick alchemy uh yeah is not possible yeah so so espresso machine it is a um highly pressurized hot water forced over coffee grounds to produce a very concentrated coffee drink with a deep robust flavor yeah uh there is no standardized process for pulling a shot of espresso, but the recommendation

from Italian coffee maker Ili is a jet of hot water at 88 to 93 degrees. That's so specific. Through a seven gram cake-like layer of ground and tamped coffee. cake-like layer of ground and tamped coffee. This was the big thing, was when I was making espresso, you had to tamp it down dense enough. You've got to have a cake-like layer. Because you would time how long it took the water to get through that tamped layer. Okay. And if it went through too fast, you hadn't tamped enough.

And if it went through too slow you would tamped too much it was a whole process yeah yeah so that's definitely part of it right is like the the process yeah yeah so the this like method of making espresso is usually attributed to angelo moriando of turin italy who was granted a patent in 1884 for a, quote, new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage. All right. Which, like, at the time, the machine consisted of a large boiler that pushed water through a large bed of coffee grounds with a second boiler producing steam that would flash the

bed of coffee and complete the brew. Okay. So it's just fancy moonshine at that point. Yeah, I'm picturing like an enormous machine. You know how like computers used to be the size of a whole room? Uh-huh. Figuring that's what this was. Yeah.

Just like a huge distillery for like one cup of espresso. Do you think we'll ever have an espresso machine we can fit in our pockets? Ooh. Probably not. Probably not. Okay, cool mean because you'd have to carry hot water yeah and grounds no yeah there's now all of a sudden you're like a mr bean skit uh so so the next kind of stage in it was uh in 1903 there was another patent that invented the first pressure release valve which meant the hot coffee would splash all over the barista

from the instant release of pressure. That's huge. I can't believe how long they went without that. What a high-risk, high-reward beverage. Just decades of people being horribly burned. Yeah, I bet. Well, this is just part of it. That's espresso, baby.

When you see the smile on their satisfied faces, though, it makes the scal scalding hot oh fuck uh the early machines could produce up to a thousand cups of coffee per hour but relied exclusively on steam which had the unfortunate side effect of imbuing the coffee with a burnt or bitter taste oh yeah have you you've probably had like super bitter espresso before. Yes. This used to happen. So prior to my Barnes and Noble, you know, experience, I worked very briefly at like

a bagel shop that also had an espresso machine and they gave us no training whatsoever. Like we just knew that you put the grounds in there and you turned it on and then you took what came out and put it in a cup. And so I had like. I could have told you that. We had people all the time coming up to us like, oh, man, this is really bitter. And I'd be like, yeah, I mean. Yeah, it's espresso. That's just how it is.

I had no idea. That's great. What an incredible power dynamic that that creates of like, yeah, it's bitter. It's espresso dog. I was like 15 maybe. And yeah may have been intelligentsia in chicago all coffee drinks i had had up until then were like kind of bitter and nasty uh and then i had a good cup of coffee and was like oh i didn't know that there was like actually a a scale of quality that could reach this this high uh-huh. Yeah, well, I mean, because most places don't specialize in it.

That's true. You know? I had a good cup. Oh, we went to Founding Farmers for lunch over the weekend, and man, I had a good-ass cup of coffee there. I don't know if you got any. I didn't. Oh, man.

It was past my coffee time. That's right. Once it hits 11, I'm like, I'm not having any more coffee for at least five hours yeah it's very it's a weird rule doctor it's a doctor recommended yeah we should stop seeing this doctor that we go to that tells us when to when to eat chili and when to drink coffee um so i i personally i like espresso with like a little bit, a little bit of milk in there. Yeah, sure.

Um, I don't usually do sugar. Although when I, I did go to Italy and. Just made a face at Rachel. The face, it didn't translate, but you can picture it. Yeah. What that face was. It was like, if I had made a noise with the face, it would have been like. If I had made a noise with the face, it would have been like, oh.

And the big thing I learned prior to going was that like if you're not going to order food, you should just stand at the counter and drink your espresso really fast because sitting at a table is for people that are ordering food. And so I definitely would put sugar in there so I could down that thing super fast and get out of there. Oh, and that time that I mentioned earlier, that's six seconds. So if you let your espresso sit for longer than like six seconds without like turning it into a drink, like it is not supposed to be good anymore. Wait, what does that mean? So like what happens that like crema on the top, that like kind of rich foamy layer, like- Yeah, what happens to it?

The like, the quality will start to like disintegrate and it gets more and more bitter, basically, the longer it sits. So you're supposed to drink it within six seconds of it coming out of the machine? You're supposed to do whatever it is you're going to do with it. So pour it into a bigger drink. Oh, I see. Okay. That's a pretty high margin of error.

Stir it around, whatever you're doing. Okay. No, I know. I know. And this, again, this may not be true. This is what I remember from my experience at the Barnes & Noble Cafe, and I believe the year was 2005. Was there like a Starbucks representative there, hanging over your shoulder, like, one, two, three?

No. No, but it felt that way. That was the environment. It was a real high stakes situation. Yeah. Oh, here we go. So I found an actual definition of crema. The crema is a layer of dense foam that forms on the top of the drink. It consists of emulsified oils in the ground coffee turned into a colloid, which does not occur in other brewing methods. Crema is produced when water placed under very high pressure

dissolves more carbon dioxide, the gas present inside the coffee that is produced during the roasting process. They didn't say spume anywhere in here. That's weird. That is weird. Because that's what it said in the manual. The manual? Yeah.

For the Bean Squisher 4000 we have downstairs we don't actually have an espresso machine but we have a coffee machine we have a coffee that can make espresso and it does okay i feel fancy every time i drink it we do have special little cups for it i did get the little cup oh that's the best sometimes i got that four o'clock feeling a lot of people get it at three i get it at four and sometimes i don't want to chug down a big you know cup of cup of joe big cup of mud i just want to get a little boost i know and you just knock it back knock it back no problem you're ready to go that's that's espresso there's like a lot of different drinks obviously you know that's true baby There's like a lot of different drinks, obviously, you know.

That's true, baby. I'm always talking about that. Like the latte and the cappuccino and the Americano and all that stuff. I'm not going to talk about that. That's just, you know, icing on an already pretty good cake. Now we can't talk about that. Now we can't talk about this ever because I was actually going to do Americano next week. Hey, thank you so much for listening. Again, I'll thank you at the front and the back, bookend it.

And we have some friends at home. Lucas says, my small wonder right now is the Korean reality competition show on Netflix called The Devil's Plan. Y'all got me and my partner into shows like Physical 100 and Siren and set us on this fun content journey. Thanks. This show is a compelling and engaging new and exciting way and a fun thing we can share after a long week at work or a tiring day. Netflix is trying really hard to get us to watch this show. Yes, we are getting pushed that on our cover page every time we open it up. We watch a trailer and it does look like our shit, but it also didn't tell us anything about what the game or the thing is.

Yeah, I thought it had kind of a traitor's vibe but i may have been reading too much into it yeah uh leora says uh i love and take for granted document recovery slash auto save it is so so nice when you forget to save your computer blue screens and your document is still there nice and safe on your computer rather than lost to the depths yeah i mean yeah this isn't so much i do most of my like document preparation on google docs which like constantly saves like every time you press a button um but i do definitely i had a um like a capstone paper in college that my computer crashed and luckily it autosaved but it was like the scariest 90 seconds of my life yeah um thank you to bowen and augustus for these for our theme song

money won't pay you can find a link to that in the episode description thank you to maximum fun for having us on the network uh go to maximumfun.org check out all the good programming that they have there we have some shows coming up in philly and new y. We're doing Mabim Bam and Taz, Philly, October 11th, and then in New York for New York Comic Con on the 12th and 13th. New York Comic Con has rescinded the requirement that you have a badge for the Comic Con. In order to come to those shows, you just got to get a ticket now, which you can do over at macroy.family and come see us there's plenty of tickets available and we would love to see you it's gonna be fun you do i notice when you do this and it's probably just out of habit you say we and us a lot and i always feel the need to say like i

i am not that i am not part of that way you might attend the shows yes i will be present accurate I am not part of that week. You might attend the shows. Yes, I will be present. It is accurate. But if you are coming to see us perform Wonderful, that is not actually happening. And that's it.

Oh, we have merch over at macroremerge.com. Some new stuff for October, including an Amnesty Lodge candle. And that's great. That's very exciting too. That's it. I gotta go. I gotta go hop on the bike and pick up our son.

Yeah. And maybe deliver some packages along the way as a sort of high octane DC courier. You know, Ted Cruz is like, got to drop off my medicine. I need my medicine. I'm like, I got you, Ted. Yes, me. Yes, me. I can't wait to dump Ted Cruz's medicine down the sewer. Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it.

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