Wonderful! - Wonderful! 382: Consider Yourselves Invited, Vampires

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

Rachel's favorite car rebus! Griffin's favorite game-building platform!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaImmigrant Defenders Law Center: https://www.immdef.org/

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hey, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. This is a podcast where we talk about things we like that's good that we're into. And we formally welcome you into it. And that's, if you're a vampire, that's important. Did you know that a vampire can't listen to a podcast? Do you think they've been turning on the podcast

and then having to turn it off? Yeah, I guess that's a good point. How's the vampire gonna know that they've been invited unless they've been listened to it? It probably burns, right? So it's like burning them a little bit and they're like, oh God, certainly they're gonna welcome us in at some point. They just go through like the podcast app

and they're like, oh, maybe one of these one day will invite me. Well, consider yourselves invited vampires. I don't understand the downside of vampirism. Obviously the sunlight thing's not great, but to turn into a bat and fly away, hello? Do you have any small wonders, my love? I was thinking about this on my way home from work. So this is kind of related to Daniel Tiger.

Oh, sure. One, our son at age four has returned to Daniel Tiger. Thank Christ. But we're being very cautious about it. Griffin and I are very careful anytime Gus expresses an interest in something that is age appropriate. Wholesome, yeah.

But part of it reminds me of this song that he I think maybe invented. If he didn't invent it, I don't think I wanna know. Okay. But he has this song called I Can Do It Lonely. I Can Do It Lonely? There was a time when he needed to go downstairs to get something and I was trying to encourage him

to do it by himself and I think he was a little scared to do it and he was like, oh, I can just sing my song, I Can Do It Lonely and I was like, oh my God. That's too pure and good, babe. I'm obsessed with that. Like that is, I mean, one, the most emo thing I've ever heard. Oh God, yes.

But also just like a very sweet lesson to take with you your whole life. I can do it lonely. I can do it lonely. But I can also do it not, ideally he won't be lonely. I know, yes. Obviously he's substituted by myself with lonely.

Well, you know, like those things like going to the movie theater or going out to dinner, like sometimes the stuff that you're afraid to do if you're by yourself. I can do it lonely. I can do it lonely. There's no law against doing it lonely. The song, by the way, is just that phrase.

I don't think there are other words. Yeah, well, I'll put some, you know, I'll get the guys in the studio. I did a big bike ride today to pick Henry up from his camp because traffic is such a disaster. How was it? It was great. And my small wonder is when it's super hot,

cause it's like 94 degrees or something out there and going on a long bike ride and you get super sweaty, but then when the bike's going fast and the breeze is like blowing through your shirt under your sweaty bod, damn, that's good stuff. That's real good stuff. And I was zooming. My legs have gotten stronger, so I was able to crank up a speed setting on my bike and I was like, I was fucking.

How did Big Sun do? He did great. His legs almost touched the ground now. So that is an issue. But yeah, man, it was a good fucking time. I had a lot, I had a blast out there. Good, I'm glad, because that is much better than having to sit in the car

when we're only like, you know. And it's also a million billion degrees. A mile away. You go first this week. Yes. What do you wanna do? My topic this week is vanity license plates. Yeah, babe.

Good for you. Good for you for getting it done. This is not something that I have or have ever wanted. Well, I mean, as a kid, you kind of think like, oh yeah, cause when you're in your bumper sticker age where you think like, maybe I'll put a sticker on my car. This is something most people went through.

This is not something you and I really, um, never been a bumper sticker participated in. Yeah. But like, if you're a person who's like, I want to communicate my interests on my license plate. I don't know. I always enjoy it when you're in traffic and you look over. Oh, I love fucking getting out there Dan Brown style with a confusing vanity license plate

and trying to like break down the codec to piece it together, I love that. There is a car, I won't say where it was just to protect the person's identity in some way, but I saw a vanity license plate once that just said good. Yeah. And I was like, man, love vanity license plate once that just said good. Yeah. And I was like, man, love it. I love that one too.

Love it. When I was younger, I knew a teacher who taught French and her license plate was four in Lang. That's cool too. I mean. Like four, number four in Lang. Damn, that's good. I love it.

Again, it's a game for me, the person who's tailgating you to solve when I should be paying attention to the road, but instead I'm doing like a very simple rebus. I love that. I know. My favorite is still Hot Boy. Nothing's ever topped it.

Oh, I forgot about that. In Cincinnati for Travis's bachelor party and for whatever, we were just like driving to the liquor store, I think, and coming back we were behind a car with a license plate that said Hot Boy. And so we shouted it and I made a vine of that. Yeah, you did make a vine of that.

That got a bit of attention. Hot Boy, Hot Boy. I didn't even, it's hard to put yourself in the mind of the person who goes to the DMV and requests that particular. I know. I'll take Hot boy, please. It must say hot boy.

Okay, so the idea of personalizing a license plate actually started in 1931, but it was not in the sense that we know it today. Pennsylvania became the first state to issue customized license plates, but you could just add your initials. Okay. So like it wasn't really anything significant.

No. It was just like you could put like, you know, RM and then, you know, a whole bunch of numbers. Yeah. But when we talk about like the highly personalized options, that's like the 1960s, which became a source of government revenue, cause you know most places will charge extra.

Although when I was doing research, I don't know if this is still true, but Virginia has among the lowest cost for a personalized plate, and thus has the most personalized plates. At least as of a few years ago. $10 for custom plates in Virginia. That's nothing.

It's like, why not at that point? If I'm at the DMV and I see that checkbox, I'm $10, I'm going to spring for it. I'm not going to have anything prepared and it's not gonna be good, but how can you pass it? Here are the parameters around what you can and can't put. Oh, sure. I just use Virginia as an example.

Obviously nothing profane, sexually explicit, excretory related. Huh, that's okay. So if you're like a proctologist or something along those lines. You can't do like poop me. Poop me, put Dr. Poop. Nothing used to describe intimate body parts or genitals. Okay.

Nothing used to condone or encourage violence and nothing used to describe illegal activities or illegal substances. Also, your license plate can be recalled if you are discovered to have used- Snuck one by him? No, like a bumper sticker or a decal or a magnet to kind of alter the expression of the license plate

in some way. So like the license plate would be like the beginning of a word that the bumper sticker. So if you did like, U-C-K. And you put a big F next to it? Yeah, something like that. They can say no, you put the sticker, does somebody come by?

It says, in term determining whether a personalized license plate may be recalled and canceled for violating guidelines, DMV may consider bumper stickers, decals, magnets, and or other material affixed to the vehicle, which would influence how a person viewing the license plate would interpret the message conveyed by the care of the government. Yeah, I mean, if you're the Virginia DMV,

you can't have people out there thinking that you, you know, rubber stamped somebody driving around with Dr. Poop just because they put, I guess they would have put the word poop on a bumper sticker next to their vanity license plate that said doctor. There are some great examples of people choosing personalized vanity license plates

and then getting themselves in trouble because of the way things are coded in the computer system in their location. Okay. So for example, and this is from LA Times 1979, there was a maritime sportsman named Robert Barber who put in sailing and boating as his top two picks. He didn't have a third, so he wrote no plate in that slot, assuming it would revert

him to a regular random one. Instead, he got no plate as his license plate, and then he started getting citations. Seven months later, he was up to 2,500 notices because the DMV was writing no plate on citations. So let me get this straight. So it was going to him. My man wanted a vanity license plate. He had two in the chamber. Those two were boating and sailing. And then he didn't have a third interest.

There was no third Jaren. If it's not sailing or boating, what's the point? Those are the ones he wanted. Damn dude, why do you have a car at all? Why aren't you out there on the big, beautiful blue ocean? I don't know. Currently most states charge $25 to $50 for vanity plates. There are places where you can bid. This happened not long ago.

In 2015, there was an article, Texas put vanity plate auction up. One branded Porsche sold for 7,500. A vanity license plate that said Porsche on it. That's so cool. America went for $3,000. Oh, man. This is just another way that states can create revenue

for themselves. It does not surprise me, Texas found a way to get more money without having state taxes. Yeah. I'm sure they'll reinvest it into vital infrastructure. But I found a stat from 2007 from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators saying 4% of all cars in the United States

have vanity license plates. Virginia topped the list with nearly 17% of its cars having vanity license plates. That's wild. Virginia's really going hog wild out there. I haven't noticed it. Now that when we drive in Virginia, we'll have to look around and see.

I feel like I do see a lot of vanity license plates. I don't know, more than the mean, but I don't know if it's when we drive to visit our friends in Virginia. I will say, I went to the Virginia site because it lets you look at all the different types of plates you can get. Yeah.

And so I saw one that had like said, Margaritaville on it. Oh, fuck yeah. And then I- That's a lot of letters. And then I, well, no, like the decor. Oh. The coloring of the plate is like palm trees

and it says Margaritaville. So then I typed in Buffett. Yeah. As an option and it let me have it. And then, so you got that? No. It's a beautiful tribute to our friend. No, but it made me wonder like,

is this just the first step and then would they come back to me? Or is really Buffett on a Margaritaville license plate in Virginia available? Cause that seems unlikely. It sounds like Virginia will let you fucking do whatever, man. That's possible. Man, what a cool state.

Sorry, Commonwealth. Hey, can I steal your way, man. That's possible. Man, what a cool state. Sorry, Commonwealth. Hey, can I steal you away? Yes. Thanks. Thanks. ["The Last of Us"] My thing this week is, it has an asterisk on it. We never really do that, but it's in an attempt to couch it a bit.

I think we kind of do a lot of couching. For example, vanity license plates, not something I ever have owned or probably will own. Right, my thing has some stink about it, if not moderated properly. I would like to talk today about Roblox. And I realized that I'm a 38 year old man. Is that the stink? So there's a bit of stink just there. No, I mean, the stink is that Roblox And I realized that I'm a 38 year old man.

Is that the stink? So there's a bit of stink just there. No, I mean the stink is that like Roblox is a user generated content platform. So there could be nasty stuff on it. So there is nasty stuff on it, they moderate it. And there is to their credit like a suite of parental control tools that we utilize fairly strictly and there's ways to play games

on private servers and stuff like that. But the asterisk there is to say like, if you don't pay attention to that stuff, it can break very bad. Also, there's microtransactions out the wazoo and so your kids could fall prey to some sort of scam. Aside from that stuff, I think Roblox is kind of is dope. Yeah, if that had existed when we were kids.

That is my very next point. I don't think there's anything even remotely comparable. It's not like, oh, this is like Club Penguin. I was gonna ask you, I'm a little old for Club Penguin, but I know that that was a thing that people did. I mean, Club Penguin was even like, after my time, for me it was like Neopets, which is like fucking. Oh yeah, you've talked about Neopets.

Which is a website with pictures of space dogs on it and shit, it's like not, this is a whole platform with an assortment of like experiences and social scenarios that just like, it boggles the mind. And RollerDocs came up when I was still like writing about games professionally, fairly early on in my career actually when I was still at Joystick. And it's one of those like, I have a few of these

like huge oversights where I didn't pay any attention to it and then all of a sudden it was the biggest thing in the whole world. I remember I learned about Roblox because they started selling like Robux gift cards at checkouts at like other stores. I was like, what the fuck is Roblox? Yeah, you could go to like a hardware store and they have. Yeah, they would have Robux there for you.

And then it was like the biggest thing ever. It was first released to the public back in 2006, created by David Bazooki and Eric Castle. And together they had made some like physics playground style software. Did you say 2006? This is 2006, yes. I know, it's been around for quite a long time.

It was in development for three years before it was released under a working title, E-blocks, which is not as good as Roblox. And like, I think one of the reasons, the main reason I was kind of slow to really learn what it was when it was first coming up is that it is like, I didn't know what it was, I didn't know how to classify it because it is kind of like a new sort of thing. Like, ultimately the Roblox product is a suite of like game development tools using a coding language

called Lua and it's very, it's compared to other game dev tools, like very straightforward and very tactile. And there's so much, at least now anyway, there's so much stuff on it, like there's so much. So much stuff. I have watched Henry try and kind of navigate the different things he can interact with and play,

and it's overwhelming. And that is the other side of what Roblox is, right? It's these content creation tools and also this browser that you can use to go through those levels that people make. And you can also make a living doing this stuff. There's quite a few game developers who just make Roblox games because of,

there are Robux which you buy with real money and then you spend on items in these games. And then as the creator, you can then take the Robux that people spend on your games and convert them back into cash. So you can make an income making Roblox games. I never really understood how that worked. Yes, that is where things get gross, right?

And we've seen lots of like, I think it's great that people can make a living doing this. I think it's fucking rad. Of course, yeah. But like the number of times we've played a game or it's been like, you know, six dollars and you know, you can have the fart gun. And that pop-up appears every time you touch the screen

is obviously not great. So Henry took a Roblox level creation course at a summer camp this year. And before then, I had never really seen the back end of what Roblox was and getting to sit down and at his little presentation where he showed us the level that he built and seeing all the tools that they used to make this stuff.

It's really genuinely very impressive how much this thing has blown up and how accessible this thing has become to so many, so many kids. I think that they recently put out a, this is again, Roblox put out this number, but said that half of American kids under 16 play Roblox at least on a monthly basis,

which is fucking pretty wild. That's wild. It's again, like not like anything we ever saw, even myself, like who played a lot of games, played like anything we ever saw. Even myself, who played a lot of games, played a lot of online games. I played a lot of Little Big Planet, that whole series that was on PlayStation.

Yeah, you could make levels on that. You could make levels, right? I loved Little Big Planet one, and then two let you do more stuff, and then three let you make whole games. I spent a lot of time messing around with that, and it was very, very satisfying, but it was still like more limited in scope

with what you could actually do. Whereas Roblox, like all the games sort of have the same sort of look and feel to them. But aside from that, like they can slot into any genre or style or type of experience that you can imagine. And that's very, that's very cool. Like on LittleBigPlanet, I would have this idea of like, oh, I wonder if anyone's made any like levels

about like Final Fantasy or whatever. And you could search it and there'd be a hundred levels that someone had made about this niche, you know, topic. Not that Final Fantasy is a niche topic, that was a bad example, but like now on Roblox, you do that and it's 10 million levels come up that people have made. And while most of them are not gonna be amazing,

the fact is that you can like go and see what other people have made. And they're like rated, right? They are rated, yes. Yeah, because there's a way to kind of guess at whether or not it's gonna be worth buying. Yes, there are a few sort of like heuristics that they put on the levels.

Obviously, I think people are probably publishing more levels than could be like ostensibly like rated perfectly 100% of the time. So like I fully encourage you to pay attention to like what your kids or the young people in your life are doing on Roblox, but like, it's not just that like you can go and find some sort of interactive thing based on any imaginable media source

or character or whatever, it's that you can then do that stuff with your friends for free, unless you're playing a game that like wants to charge you six bucks for a fart gun, most of the time that stuff is optional anyway. And seeing the sort of social aspect of it is what really encouraged me to talk about it today. When we were in Huntington last week,

thank you by the way for being chill as we missed last week's episode, we were traveling for Nonny, my grandmother's funeral, and so like, all of our kids and the cousins were all playing together and they were all playing this game on Roblox called Grow a Garden, which is a game where you grow these ridiculous, enormous plants in these little gardens that you have,

and you sell them and you buy new seeds and you raise pets and you grow a garden! And you share a big space where everybody's gardens are and you can come and and you share a big space where everybody's gardens are and you can come and like see what everybody's doing. And like y'all, all the kids were just so into it. I watched them sharing their little fruits and vegetables with each other.

The oldest cousin was running around making sure that everyone liked everyone else's farms, everyone else's gardens. And then when I like, Henry told me to get in and join them and I hopped in and they were just showering me with produce to help me get started. It was just very sweet, but like, I don't know, I feel like I've seen that so many times, of just, you know, kids all kind of stacking

into these experiences and these games. And it's just cool to see, man, because it's a new type of experience. I don't know how else to put it. There's not much to compare it to. And while there is a certain fear factor to that, I do think that that can be mitigated somewhat just by sort of being thoughtful

about how you use the platform and how your kids or whatever use it. But just like, I don't know, seeing it, knowing that like, because it's sort of a big toy box that you can find something that the kids in your life will be able to get into together, it really makes it stand apart from, you know,

other kind of huge viral games, like your Minecrafts at all. Yeah. Even though the games are not as polished, these aren't huge, grow a garden is not animal crossing, but it's cute and watching our kids all play it together is really wonderful stuff. Yeah.

Do you wanna know what our friends at home are talking about? Yes. Catherine says, I'm an economist by day and I spend a lot of time in spreadsheets and building dashboards to tell non-economists what my work actually means. It absolutely rocks when all my conditional formatting,

weird little macros and pivot charts all work together correctly on the first try. It happened today and it made me feel like I'm Angelina Jolie in Hackers and I always wanted to group up to be Angelina Jolie in Hackers, and I always wanted to group up to be Angelina Jolie in Hackers. I barely know how to use spreadsheets, and it still feels like fucking great.

When I make a column so that it adds up and shits out an answer in the last entry in the column, oh, I feel like a god. Yeah, this is something I have had to learn on the job. Basically, in the like basically in the verb like the past like 15 20 years of me being in the working world every job I have had has required me at some point to like figure out how to do something in a spreadsheet. Yeah, and It can't be really satisfying. It's so also if you just like look up online like how do I? Count the number of yeses

in this spreadsheet, it'll tell you how to do it. It tells you how to do it. God, the internet. Cecil says, I could go on and on about how cool terrestrial isopods are, but the thing I find really wonderful about them is their plethora of names. Pill bugs, potato bugs, doodle bugs, cheesy bugs,

Parsons pig, and my personal favorite from our friends in Australia, Butchy Boys. Those are just a few of my favorites. I highly recommend checking out the full list of names for these little guys. Y'all got to see what they are called in the Netherlands, and then in parentheses, it's bed pisser. I didn't even know what, what did you call these guys?

I mean, Roly Poly. Roly Poly. Yeah. Pill Bug. I'd heard Pill Bug. If I'm feeling fancy. I heard Pill Bug and Rolly Polly. Yeah, I had never heard of Doodle Bug

and I certainly had never heard of Butchy Boys, but that's almost like a magic spell in how like phonetically powerful it is. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description and thanks to Maximum Fun for having us on the network.

Go to maximumfun.org, check out all the great stuff that they have over there. We have some new merch in the merch store. There's a Don't Do a Hit Magnet Bumper sticker. Well, I guess it's a bumper magnet, huh? Not a sticker. And you can find all that over at macquariemurch.com. And we got some more live shows coming up

from a Bim Bam and Taz later this year. We're gonna be in Atlanta next month. And you can find links to all the tickets and information for those show dates over at bit.ly slash MacRoy Tours. Did you have something? Oh, I was gonna say the merch isn't new anymore, babe. It's the end of the month.

Yeah, well, we will be adding new stuff once August rolls up. So keep an eye on, keep an eye on it and don't turn, don't look away. Not even for a second. Cause you don't wanna miss it when it updates, man. All your friends are gonna be talking about the great merch refresh.

You're gonna be left behind. Like a goofball. All right, bye! I'm fucking all day, I'm all day I'm fucking all day, I'm all day I'm fucking all day, I'm all day