Wonderful! - Wonderful! 303: Number the Navels

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

Rachel's favorite money-saving fashion trend! Griffin's favorite chill and static puzzle games! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Fair Elections Center: https://www.fairelectionscenter.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Gobble, gobble, haters. This is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Thanks for listening to Wonderful. And this is a show that we use as a soapbox we stand on it to get taller and to shout at you above the crowd um like hey we like spaghetti or like whatever i've never done spaghetti as a segment on the show. I think that's what Evita does in that movie, Evita.

She stands on a soapbox and she goes, I'm here to talk about spaghetti. Spaghetti. To all of you. I've become obsessed with the mistake of words I just used of I've never done spaghetti. It makes it sound like I haven't used spaghetti as a recreational drug. Although I guess it is, right? You put it in your body and it makes you feel things. Well, I could explain why spaghetti is drugs all day if you wanted to give me the runway to do that.

But it doesn't seem like you really do. So do you have any small wonders? doesn't seem like you really do so um do you have any small wonders um well this one's a gamble because i haven't actually tested to make sure it turned out the way i wanted it to but um the lights on the hood for our stovetop burned out yeah and i thought you know what i'm just gonna take that light bulb out i'm to look at it and I'm going to buy some more. Because you know how like those random lights and appliances like have the kind of bulb that like is impossible to find anywhere. So I just thought like I'm going to look at it. I'm going to figure it out.

And I bought them and they're waiting downstairs. And I'm really excited about testing. Should we pause right now and go run down and check this out? Because now I'm going to be on tenterhooks this whole show. Well, we can't go downstairs because our little son is there. That's right. And we'll be trapped for the rest of the day. If he sees you, he will climb on you.

He will stay on you and he will not ever let go. We love that at certain parts of the day, but not when mommy and daddy have to make the content. Yeah. the people. Anyway, I'm optimistic that I did a good thing and that these little tiny light bulbs will fill and that it will change our life. The number of times that a light bulb has burnt out on some sort of specialty appliance and I've just looked at it and been like, well, that just doesn't have lights anymore. I know.

That object will no longer be illuminated in the traditional way yeah um but we live here now and we are going to live here for a long time i hope and so i i applaud your initiative thank you um i'm gonna say i've been watching this show uh called scavengers reign on max formerly hbo max is an animated adult uh animated sci-fi show and i am obsessed with it uh and can't stop thinking about it almost finished with it and i started watching it like two and a half days ago or so it's real real good it's uh i've been describing it to people like if studio ghibli made uh annihilation it's just about people who are marooned on this extremely alien world with this like really intricate alien ecology that they have to kind of like maneuver around. It is like beautifully animated and wonderfully written. And it is just so good.

So, so good. I do not think you would like it even you said that immediately uh which i mean describing it it does sound very good it is not among my first choices though i would say no it's very uh i would say gory at times and troubling hence the adult animation but it is um man it kicks so much ass and uh i'm telling everybody that i can about it uh and this is a show where i can do just that uh do you want to go first you have to that's not the way we do it no but i thought i would you like to i mean to keep up with protocol yes okay cool You know what a rule follower I am. The boss is really cracking down on us about protocol these days.

Okay, so my thing, this may not be familiar to you. I'm hopeful that I can describe it in a way that it will become familiar. And it is the going out top. The going out top. Yes. Like when you do good at a sport and then you quit the sport and say like, I'm going out top. I'm going out top. I just got a grand slam to win the World Series.

I quit. I'm going out top. Some people would say on the top, but. Not me. No. I'm so busy playing sports that sometimes I will just cut words out sentences just to save time for sports. I am talking about a phenomenon that was popular when we were younger that has now returned.

And it is when you wear just a regular pair of pants, maybe a pair of jeans, as was popular when this was big in the early 2000s. And then kind of like a fancy, like a fancy shiny or like a different kind of top. That's interesting that i never think about the bottom half of my body when i go out somewhere really ever unless it's church and then it's khakis and if it's not church then it's usually just jeans or whatever pants i was wearing at

the time when i started getting dressed i wanted to show you some examples just so you would know i found a great picture of the cast of the oc oh my god it's yeah and they're all wearing going out tops jesus can you those are the smallest pictures i've ever i don't know how to make them bigger can you zoom it can you put your fingers on the touchpad and sort of separate them there we go i need to see these i need to see these gorgeous tops yeah i mean those are out of sight those... They're all wearing denim on bottom. Denim on bottom. And then like a frilly party looking shirt on top. A lot of...

Let me... Number the navels. I cannot. I could not hope to number the navels. This was a thing that really came in handy in like high school and college where you didn't have a lot of extra income and you were going to a place that you know you couldn't wear your normal clothes but you couldn't wear a formal outfit either and it was just like i'm gonna spend twelve dollars on a shirt yeah

and then i'm set for the night yeah uh and this i never really thought of it with a name you know like when we were uh when i was in college we would go out and do this and i don't think we had a name for it but then i heard about this going out top phenomenon how it's coming back and i was like oh that's yeah no that was the thing we didn't think about it that way but that was the thing that we did what i like about this, there's a lot I like about this, but what I really like about it is that it is the omission of concern for the pants that defines this thing. So it's not so much the going out top. It is the all the time bottom, like the off court buddies of the waist down. Yeah.

You know, you can't really have a going out top without a regular bottom that's right or else you're just dressing now it's just yeah you're just dressing up yeah um part of it too was in the early 2000s like designer jeans started to be really popular i mean i guess they really started to be popular in the 80s but like this idea that you would spend like 300 on on jeans and like $17 on a shirt. I love that. Not anything I ever did, but I did some, I'm going out top and I don't know that I ever actually wore it because I was too much of a coward, but I had this like black velour spaghetti strap top that just tied in the back. Oh my goodness, babe.

And I could never bring myself, I don't think I ever actually wore it. I think it sat in my closet forever. Do you still have it? No, honey, I'm sorry. That'd be a weird vibe, I feel like. People talk about like, oh yeah, I still have, but that was like 20 years ago.

I don't have any, that would be so wild. I don't have any clothes from 20 years ago. I think the half-life of the shirts I would buy. True. like 20 years ago i don't have any that would be so wild clothes from 20 years i think i the the half-life of the shirts i would buy true would would have reduced them to their base particulate components i feel like at this point uh so when you when you research the history of the going out top uh is it all just screenshots of the oc is i mean it largely like paris hilton lindsey lohan i mean it's it's all the favorites um i showed you a picture that was next to the oc that had pink maya christina aguilera and lil kim all wearing their going

out tops but apparently the origins according to the Washington Post in 2023, they said that it dates back to the 40s and 50s when ready-to-wear separates entered the market. Ready-to-wear separates. Instead of being yoked to the outfit sets, you had the ability to mix and match a skirt with a more formal top. You said this was the 1930s when this idea was? No, 40s and 50s. Okay. A separate. Yeah, no, I mean, that's just why the idea

of just going to a store and buying, well, hold on, because I like that actually. I'm saying this, but I would love it if I could just go to a store and it would be like shopping for a Halloween costume

where they would just be like, here's pants and socks and shoes and hat because it's the 30s and 40s and 50s. Here's hat and pants and shirt and socks and shoes and go, go. That's it. Well, and here's the 30s and 40s and 50s here's hat and pants and shirt and socks and shoes and go go that's it well and here's the thing right because when you think about uh the idea of the going out top if you're like how would that even go out of fashion but the washington post article said in 2010s dresses jumpsuits and match sets became more standard. Oh, interesting. So 2010s had a return to what you're talking about.

Yeah. Be like, this shirt goes specifically with this skirt. Yeah. But then during COVID shutdown, we were all like itching to get back out there, looking our fucking best. Well, that, so that is what's interesting. So like 2020s, it was more like 2017 when I started to see articles that was like, the going out top is back. And then, you know, there was, of course, COVID.

And then there was a suggestion that maybe the going out top is popular because people don't want to wear uncomfortable clothes anymore. And so they're like, want to keep their jeans on, but dress it up. The velour breastplate that you have described does not sound like the most comfortable sort of experience um i mean i don't know i don't think i ever actually never wore it out we have no empirical evidence either supporting or to the contrary the other thing that i mean worked in my favor was there was no social media yes i don't think i have a picture of me in any going out top now that I think about it. Yeah.

But of course, you know, anybody that went out in the late 2000s probably had that. Absolutely. So part of the return, there is the suggestion that trends come back every 20 years, which, I mean, would make it about right for when i was in college yeah but apparently like the the what is it the gen z they're like super interested it's just gins now they like gins what they like and how do you know friends friends friends young young friends um well we i mean i don't know i don't know if i call them friends we're like razor scooter and my fellow razor scooter oh okay yeah when you have your meetups and the other mall rats yes so anyway so like this whole y2k period is apparently of great interest fuck yes to the young people. I'm ready. I've been ready

for this my whole life. We went to a party that was thrown that had a 2003 theme. Yes. And it was really eye opening because I'd never been to a party that was themed after a particular

year before. Yeah. So it was really interesting to go back in that time period uh and and really re-experience a lot of a lot of this i did not wear a going out top to that party no um but there were a lot of them in attendance yes um no i mean 2003 was a great year for media that was a lot of fun to play with at that party um but yes very disorienting because the last time I had been to a party like that was, I mean, not exactly 2003, maybe closer to 2009 or so, but still a harrowing sort of flashback. Yeah. So I still kind of think this way. Like if you were telling me we were going to a bar tonight, I would-

You would say, what? I would. What are you talking about? I would say, Griffin, I don't know when the last time we went to a bar was. Yeah. But the second thing I would do is I would prepare an outfit, which would probably be very similar to this, like regular comfortable pants and then a shirt that suggests like, I know I'm somewhere.

Yeah. That's the going out top. Yeah. That's i love that i love fashion i know and so do you yes we both love it so that's a big thing people say about us we are at the forefront of a bold new fashion movement and i don't know what it is because we're so at the forefront of it that like we are ahead of what it actually is yeah finding it uh-huh but whatever it is is going to be big and lucrative this is the last episode of our podcast where you're getting into fashion lines now yes and the fashion will be something that you wear. Yes. And you will have never worn it before. Join us next week as we discuss going out bottoms.

This is where you wear the worst shirt you own. Yeah. But the pants. Hey, can I steal you away? Yes. Okay. Oh, darling, why won't you accept my love? My dear, even though you are a duke, I could never love you. You, you borrowed a book from me and never returned it.

Save yourself from this terrible fate by listening to Reading Glasses. We'll help you get those borrowed books back and solve all your other reader problems. Reading Glasses, every Thursday on Maximum Fun. I'm Emily Heller. And I'm Lisa Hanawalt. And we're the hosts of Baby Geniuses. We've been doing our podcast for over 10 years. When we started, it was about trying to learn something new every episode.

Now it's about us trying to actively get stupider. And it's working. Hang out with us and you'll hear us chat about... Gardening. Horses. Various problems with our butts. And all the weird stuff that makes us horny. That's so weird, all that stuff.

Baby Geniuses, a show for adult idiots. Every other week on Maximum Fun. Baby Geniuses, we know everything. Baby Geniuses, tell us something we don't know. I do not know if you have much experience with the subject i'm going to discuss i think you may i want to talk about point and click adventure games oh i know that you played a lot of uh like pc games with your grandma who was an early adopter of of pcs and pc gaming i know that that was more in the sort of like Wolfenstein area, but would like a Myst or a Monkey Island or anything along those lines?

I did play a little Myst. I found it impossible. Everyone felt that way about Myst. No one ever beat Myst. I played some Tomb Raider on the computer. Yeah, Doom, Heretic, Wolfenstein. Yeah, those are all shooters. Madccree uh mad dog mccree we're getting closer that that one at least has clicking in it uh i am talking about uh a a genre

that much like when i talked about sort of like character-based rhythm games is not around so much anymore these days or if it is it is like it is like in the realm of sort of indie games. But in the 80s and 90s, this was the biggest shit in the whole wide world. Yeah. No, I remember when this idea of you being in constant movement came to video games. Right.

And like how nauseating it was to me of just like, oh, I can't play this for very long right point and click adventure games were not that point and click adventure games were largely static screens with a little guy on it that you could make walk around and solve puzzles in a very chill way uh and it really wasn't until sort of computer graphics and processing became fast enough that like first person shooters and action games like tomb raider sort of like became what everybody wanted that people looked at adventure games they're like oh that seems pretty fucking boring you'd like move your cursor over something to see

like is this interactive yes yes that is uh that is a beautiful staple of this uh genre I spent so much of my time playing adventure games growing up. We always had a computer from the time I was born, basically. And it was such a huge genre because when adventure games, point and click adventure games specifically, were coming out like computers couldn't do a lot more intense stuff than just that. Obviously, adventure games as a genre is a pretty huge umbrella starting with text-based adventures like Zork. Zork, of course. I'm looking at you for recognition of Zork. I don't remember Zork. I do remember Hitchhiker's Guide.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That was text-based. That was a fucking great one. hitchhiker's guide oh yeah absolutely that was a fucking great one yeah um you had uh stuff like uh king's quest came out which sort of added visual stuff to it that was made by a company called sierra online which was one of the two uh big sort of creators of of uh adventure games in the 80s uh in 1985 a company called icomulations released a game for the Macintosh computer called Deja Vu, which was the first in a series of Mac venture games. And the Macintosh computer was a sort of like pioneer in making it so that everybody used a mouse in addition to a keyboard.

So these games were just static screens that you would sort of, like you said, just sort of move a cursor around on and try to add. Can you like still hear the sound of a mouse in your head? Like when you'd like move it real fast on the desktop? Yeah, yeah. Like I can hear that when I. Shclonk, shclonk, shclonk. Yeah, when there was no way to adjust sort of like sensitivity. And so like in order to go, you know, coast to coast on your small computer screen,

it would involve several lifts and drops of a two and a half pound piece of computer hardware yes uh yeah a lot of that happened uh playing these sort of mac venture games the biggest name in the game was actually lucasarts which was originally lucasfilm games uh which joined the scene in 1986 they made an adventure game adaptation of labyrinth which i didn't know whoa i never knew that there was an adaptation of Labyrinth, but it was this studio's sort of first foray. It didn't exactly set the world on fire, which may be why I hadn't heard of it. But their second game, LucasArts' second game, was helmed by a programmer named Ron Gilbert, who would go on to sort of become one of the godfathers of this whole genre. And that game is called Maniac Mansion.

Maniac Mansion whips ass. It is like a pastiche of like B-movie tropes and like campy hoarder stuff. You explored, you could control three teens and you would explore this big, just scary house filled with mad scientists and monsters and... Scooby-Doo. Sort of Scooby-Doo-like, yeah, except with death in it.

You could die in this game. There were very high stakes. And it was kind of scary because you would just be like walking around doing the adventure game thing of like, I'm going to click on this, see if this will pick up. But then sometimes like a mad scientist would chase you around with a knife or something. Yeah. Super scary. This game sort of changed also the way that people would interact with adventure games. Ron Gilbert created this system called the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion,

which would be acronymized into SCUMM. Okay. And SCUMM would become the engine for pretty much every adventure game that LucasArts would go on to make. And they made a fucking lot of them. And most of them are club bangers. Sam & Max was a big series.

I played that one. Sam & Max is a classic. All the Monkey Island games. Loom, which was this weird sort of like musical, magical fantasy game. The Dig, Day of the Tentacle, which was this weird sort of like musical, magical fantasy game. The Dig, Day of the Tentacle, which was sort of a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. I think they also made a Last Crusade game.

They were also adapting Lucas franchises as well. They are all so good and so incredible. And they all use this system scum which basically you know you can move around and you click on things to interact with them but then at the bottom of the screen you have like 16 verbs and that's how you know like what you can do so it'll be like turn on turn off pick up push kick open yeah um and so using those like it created a way of sort of parsing what you are seeing in these games. And it made them very enjoyable to play and fun to kind of like experiment with. Those games all also had a like a humorous streak a mile wide.

They are sort of irreverent and weird. A lot of the humor is, you know, not the funniest stuff I've ever seen, but it was so charming, especially the Monkey Island games are so weird. It's just like a full send-up of all pirate canon. Instead of sword fights, you have insult fights, and you have to learn that minigame in order to finish the entire game. finish the entire game. Sierra, who made King's Quest, which is a sort of more traditional, like, fantasy adventure game series that they made, like, a million of, they would go on to keep making quest games. Basically, they made Space Quest, like, five of those, Police Quest. They would eventually go on to make an RPG adventure game series called Quest for Glory, which is probably my favorite adventure series

ever. What was neat about those games is they were just like other point and click adventure games, except you picked a class at the beginning and you had stats sort of like in D&D or whatever. And the solutions to the puzzles would change depending on what class you were playing. So if you were playing the game as a thief, you would do completely different stuff to solve the puzzles. So it wasn't like Monkey Island where it was like, pick up the rubber chicken and use it on this. It would be like, oh, I'm going to use sneaking here to like go in here or I'll fight with my fighter or magic as a magic user. What's also really cool about those games is that you could save your character

after you finished one game and import them into the next one. So you could have the same characters throughout all five of the Quest for Glory games, which was so incredibly cool. I started playing these games probably when I was like seven years old or so. And then I was able to sort of like keep my same character going throughout the whole run of them. How would that work? Floppy disk. You would save it to a floppy disk.

And so whenever you loaded up a game, you could import right off the floppy disk. Okay. I was going to say like that sounds like a web-based thing, but I know that couldn't have been true. Yeah, no. That's way ahead of their time. Yeah. Despite the fact that they were called Sierra Online was the name of the – I don't know. They didn't have internet in these things.

So Sierra and LucasArts were sort of the two big players in the space. But other games came along and sort of broke the mold, like Myst. There were also a lot of Myst games. Riven was a very good one that was also kind of creepy. It was like Myst, except sometimes you'd be walking around, and then you'd turn a corner, and there'd just be a little ghost boy there. Ooh, spooky stuff. And then, of course, there were, like, full full motion video adventure games uh which were all

pretty universally terrible um don't tell justin i said that uh i i have so much fondness for these games partially because of like you know they really were the only sorts of games that were coming out on the pc for a long time and they were the only types of games that we had. And so I have a lot of nostalgia for them for that reason. I just remembered one. What? The Seventh Guest. The Seventh Guest, absolutely. Yeah.

Seventh Guest fucking rules. And you said Little Ghost Boy. I think they're remaking Seventh Guest. Oh, yeah? It just came out. Yeah, I think so. So these games, they weren't just the only games coming out.

They were also like vast in comparison to like other, other games, like a, like a Wolfenstein, right? Like Wolfenstein, not much for story or really any writing or any character development or anything along those lines. You could get that with adventure games. And so that was just eye-opening for for me somebody who you know had been playing video games my whole life uh as as a child getting to play a game and being like whoa actually this story i'm like vibing with or this joke in day of

the tentacle like actually made me laugh really loud and i didn't know video games could do that yeah but like i said graphics got got better. Processing became stronger. First-person shooters became every game and other sort of action games. And so pretty much around the turn of the century, adventure games just sort of died off completely. In 2004, there was a company called Telltale Games, which tried to revive Sam and Max and some of those old series. Before, there was a company called Telltale Games, which tried to revive Sam and Max and some of those old series. Then they started to do adventure game adaptations of sort of niche franchises. They did The Walking Dead game, didn't they? So, yeah, in 2012, they had this huge smash hit with The Walking Dead, which they made, I think, a few seasons of.

Telltale was unique in that they would make adventure game seasons. So you would play like a two or three hour long chunk that would be like episode one of like a five part season. And we adored those games. Yeah. We played the hell out of those. Looking back on sort of the Walking Dead media property as a whole, I think I like those better than the TV or comic or anything else that really came out of those because they were gritty as hell and fascinating and presented sort of moral dilemmas that were very thoughtful and unique and really like great for same screen sort of like multiplayer like you're watching an interactive movie, which is kind of like the height of what this genre could do.

Unfortunately, Telltale had a huge success with Walking Dead. They did a bunch of other like really great adventure game adaptations, but unfortunately they like expanded way too far, way too fast. They overstaffed like a ridiculous degree and took on all of these different

like licensing deals to like make a game of thrones one and make a x y or z one and uh they shut down in like 2018 because they just sort of uh they they bloated a little too fast um so now point and click adventure games are like i said sort of the indie game, uh, territory and they're doing like incredibly interesting stuff with them. There's stuff like, uh, there is no game, which we actually watched a video, I believe of lanky box playing with Henry, which is very, very good. Uh, or curse of the golden idol is one that came out last year that I really liked. Um, they're keeping the spirit alive of, of adventure games and sort of innovating them

and in, in cool new ways. But like, like I talked about games and sort of innovating them in in cool new ways but like like i talked about in sort of the character-based rhythm game segment i did a few weeks ago like there will never be another time like the 80s and 90s for adventure games or for any genre of game ever uh again because you know the i right now i have Steam open on my computer. I could click on three buttons and play any of like 50,000 games or something like that. So I have, like I said, a lot of nostalgia for point and click adventure games. And I will still go back and replay Quest for Glory or some of those old ones. Because once you know what to use the rubber chicken on,

you can pretty much burn through those games in like 30 minutes or so. Can I tell you what our friends at home are talking about? Yes. Hemlock says, my small wonder is farmer's market vendors recognizing me. I go to my town farmer's market every week and the vendor who sells cheese recognizes me now.

It makes me feel so cool and like I'm in a little video game and our friendship level has increased. that ever happen to us um there yes at uh the austin farmer's market we used to get ginger beer from the same vendor and there was a woman there who because the ginger beer vendor you could bring your old bottle of ginger yeah she would she would be like more of this more of the same mr mcelroy she didn? She didn't know me by now. But there was a flash of recognition

in her face whenever she saw us. Yeah, we used to go almost every weekend and we would get like the same five things. Yeah. And I don't remember

anyone ever being like, the usual? There was like a Thai meal kit placed too. Yeah. Do they remember this? I remember one time

I walked up and they're like, what did you think of that, you know, tom ka soup? And I'd, you know they're like, what did you think of that Tom Ka soup? And I say like, well, it was very, very good. Chris says, my small wonder is shirts without physical tags. They don't irritate your skin and you don't have to try to cut them only to have them sharp and itchy or end up cutting the shirt. Bonus points if they have a printed graphic on the inside of the shirt, all the useful material and washing information with none of the irritation. Yes.

This is like almost the only kind of shirt I will buy for our children. Yeah. Just because I remember that sensation as a kid. The worst. Like for whatever reason, in children's clothes, the tags were always like they would jut straight out. And there would be like six of them. Yeah.

It was like a mattress situation inside of there. Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for these for our theme song, Money Won't Pay pay you'll find a link to that in the episode description thank you to maximum fun for having us on the network go to maximum fun.org check out all the great shows that they have there and uh download them all download every episode 10 times and oh candlelights is coming up yeah but before that till death do us part oh shit that's right i don't know i'm saying no shit i already had to watch the movie this is gonna come out the day before for those of you that don't know uh every american thanksgiving they released this podcast uh and it is a delight yes this is our ninth year uh of watching paul blart mall cop tour with our friends tim and Guy from The Worst Idea of All Time. And, well, the ninth viewing of Paul Bart Mall Cop 2 is when you really start to unlock a lot of stuff.

And then Candle Nights, of course. And then Candle Nights is coming in December. You can find a link to tickets for that at macroy.family. As always, proceeds for that show, It's a virtual live holiday spectacular. Not live. A virtual holiday spectacular. We'll go to Benefit Harmony House in Huntington, an organization we adore. And we have other merch and stuff over at McElroyMerch.com.

So why don't you go check that out, too? There's some great Blart merch, actually, on there. I saw that. That's it. I have to go right now because I have an appointment to get to. Thank you so much. Thank you that. That's it. I have to go right now because I have an appointment to get to. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for joining us. Namaste. As always, like we say at the end of every show, namaste. Namaste.

And also with you. Exactly. Sort of mixing my spiritual. Okay. my spiritual Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

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