Wonderful! - Wonderful! Ep. 34: Master Bwuce

Episode Date: May 16, 2018

Griffin's favorite defunct video platform! Rachel's favorite TED Talk about talkin'! Griffin's favorite decisions in video games! Rachel's favorite appendage decoration! Music: "Money Won't Pay" by bo en and Augustus - https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hey, it's Griffin McElroy. This is wonderful. I have hand, foot, and mouth disease. Just starting out. I have hand, foot, and mouth disease. Just starting out. I have hand, foot, and mouth disease. For me, it's mostly the mouth, and I got it from a baby that I know very well. Well.

You know, I thought I knew him. I thought I knew him pretty well. Do you have any hand and feet ailments? My hands and my feet got through this one unscathed, which is a curse because I'd rather I spread it around a little bit more, you know, so that my mouth wasn't doing all the heavy lifting. But yeah, my baby gave me a hand foot mouth that he got from probably some other baby. So thanks for that, other kiddo. And it makes it hard to talk. And that's why I sound like a real mush mouth over here.

And we'll continue to for the rest of the episode. Every word that comes out of my mouth is like a little bee that I'm spitting out. It's like every word is like a small bee that just spent a little time in my mouth and got comfortable in there. Oh, boy. So I basically wanted to just put it out there

that this one is a sacrifice I'm making for you, the audience, to listen to. I'm sorry, Griffin. Hey, you know what? You gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them. That doesn't apply here. And really, every dumb joke I make that doesn't work is to like 14 or 16 Bs. And so it's just bad. It's real bad.

But what's good this week, I guess, to focus on for the Small Wonders segment? For the Small Wonders. Oh, my gosh. The pot roast you made. I made a pot roast. Oh, it was so good. It was a special day for moms. And so I made a roast in a crock pot.

Not a big deal. Just seared a big old five-pound boy. I have eaten it a roast in a crock pot uh not a big deal just seared a big old five pound boy and uh i have eaten it three days in a row now yeah i'm looking forward i'm about to take round three myself uh let the good hot pot roast juices soothe my ailing uh head hole and uh yeah it turned out real nice i'm glad you enjoyed it why you chose that as your your meal yeah i like uh crockpot based things yes because for sure and it's not just the laziness of it there's something almost it's almost like wine making to me where it's like you know you let the tannins mature for a few hours for many hours yeah well this is I guess it would be like prison wine in this case. But, I mean,

something cool happens when you put meat and a bunch of other stuff into a pot where you just kind of let it get hot together for six hours or so. Flavors are real good. And the flavors get interesting. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Yes. I wanted to do eating a hot dog at a baseball game. Oh, man.

That's another good one. I'm a red-blooded American, and there's just something about eating one of these hot dogs at a baseball game that really does it for me um baseball is either a fun exciting sport it's a sport that takes about four hours to complete and in there you're gonna get a few like 10 second long chunks of genuine excitement and enjoyment. And the rest of the time, I recommend if you've never gone to one of these baseball games is to fill that time with hot dogs. Yeah, I do want to eat constantly when I'm at a baseball game. It's because there's not much else to do.

I do enjoy every baseball players walkout music, though. I feel like I'm getting a little window into their soul. There was a dude for the Round Rock Express, which is the local Austin minor league team, whose walkout music is China Grove, which I think is a Steely Dan song, if I'm not mistaken. I am mistaken. China Grove is from the Doobie Brothers. Oh, okay. But it's an unexpected walkout jam and it made me so happy rooted for him every time but he struck out a lot but that's okay because the hot dogs i think i go first this week my first thing oh it breaks my heart to talk about it in the past tense my first thing is vine

oh griffin vine was too good for this world we did not deserve vine and vine ascended to heaven um did you see some folks in the wonderful facebook group that were talking specifically about your vines no i did not see this there was a post just this week i was looking through it of people talking about how much they enjoyed your vines. Oh, that's sweet. I have seen recently folks say that's like how they found my body of work, which is very strange to me because I was under the impression that nobody used Vine. No, I wanted to talk about it because Vine, if you weren't familiar, it was a video platform that was acquired by Twitter where you could upload these six second long video loops um and it launched in 2013 but it was shuttered tragically in 2017 mostly because

twitter couldn't find out a way to monetize it which is like it's a it's a museum at that point like do we really need the profits guys because it's providing a broader cultural thing for for the world um and i mourn its death every waking moment of my days um but last year one of the co-founders announced that he was working on a squeak wall called v2 that sadly last week uh he announced was on indefinite hiatus oh my gosh so really jerking me around with Vine. But in the four years where it was in operation, it was the best social media platform ever created. And there's a lot of things about it that make it really special. I think it was special among other social media platforms in how explicitly performative it was. And maybe this is sort of a crass way

of looking at social media platforms but i think there is an element of performance to most of the stuff that you that you do on there that's an interesting point yeah because the things on vine always seem to be like creative pursuits it wasn't necessarily like sharing information or yeah like here i got a haircut here's seven seconds of me with a haircut right exactly it was it was it was a performance there was something about the honesty of that um that made it that made it different that i think made it kind of special it wasn't this avenue for um necessarily communication or like broadcasting updates about your life uh it was like a small stage and it was competitive in a way because people saw how other people were using this not

just a platform but this like new medium and then tried to do bigger and funnier and more clever stuff with it and being like on the on the you know ground floor of of that and watching it change and grow over those four years was really exciting and um i it was the it for when it was alive it was the the platform that i used the most far more than than twitter and and facebook um for comedy specifically i think vine represented something really really neat um because we're like a long form platform like youtube or whatever video flat facebook video whatever um represented like a sketch or a scene or like a stand-up set vine a vine was just a single joke. Um, and I, I think there's a way of reading that as like a condemnation of like a reflection of our,

uh, our, our attention span in, in the modern age when we're using online social media. But I think there's another way of looking at it and that it's just a different thing. It was in and you do the thing and, and you get out.

And so for comedy, like there are jokes that were on Vine that only worked on Vine because they were six seconds long. Well, and I think, too, it's like the equalizer, like, as far as I know, everybody used their phone to do Vine. Right. It wasn't like there was this big differential between people depending on the equipment or you know with like with youtube

you know you can put a fair amount of investment into your equipment whereas when vine's on phone like everybody's kind of on the same playing field yeah and so like a lot of like the best vines were people just like shooting it themselves on their phone i think uh there were a lot of vines from like visual artists and stuff who weren't necessarily doing comedy they were doing like cool visual shit with their six seconds and playing with the loops. And there were people who did comedy and visual art stuff together in a way that was really,

really successful. But there is specifically about comedy. Like there was a, I tweeted a video from him earlier this week. There was a Vine username, Gabe Gundacker, who is a comedian who did a series of Vines called guy who likes music that i've shown rachel many times and the premise is just it is a man who doesn't know what music is it is his first time discovering what music is and so

he's like pointing at the corner of the room like i like this the music where is it coming from the the green the the green and the black and he's pointing to like a house plant and a speaker oh it's coming from the black i love that um and that joke if it was a saturday night live sketch would be fucking terrible um and i've seen i cannot tell you how many saturday night live sketches throughout the you know it's history i have seen that would work better as a vine was basically a vine was just one joke that they're like all right lauren says we need four minutes of this and it's like oh but you got about six good seconds um and i i so i think that there was something inherent to mine where it was just like these are things that wouldn't work anywhere else be it's be and it's because of the fact that they are constrained to just six seconds and then and then you're done um and is it like a creator of vines i thought that

vine was like kind of a powerful learning tool for like honing your your comedy because one of the most important things i've learned from like making and editing podcasts all these years is that one of the best things you can do to improve the quality of your content is to prioritize a respect for your audience's time and attention. And that was a pitfall that we fell into a lot starting out like every second of your podcast or video or whatever that you spend not doing something entertaining is whether that's like a long pause or a bit that you perform that you know wasn't necessarily very good, but you leave it in anyways, just to pad out the time, is a second of your consumer's

time that you're just like wasting. And at scale, if you have a lot of people watching your content, that's a lot of seconds that you're just kind of flushing down the toilet. And that accumulates really, really quickly. And it reflects so poorly on the content you create. Meanwhile, if you hone it down until it's just the good stuff, then people don't know about the bad stuff that you did, or the pauses that you did, or the suboptimal stuff that you did. They just think like, oh, well, this is really great. And Vine, with Vine, there's nowhere to hide. Like it is explicitly an exercise in concision um and it's it's one that i found very very valuable while it was still active um and so i don't know i i i i am so sad that vine is gone i'm very sad that v2 is apparently indefinitely canceled and probably

won't come back and that makes me so sad because the people who like liked vine loved vine and it had such a die-hard audience and it had a community of creators also who have like kind of gone on to do other things but it was strange that for four years there was this cult of personality of of viners and those people were so established and now like there's you know i think about it you used to watch, we would watch Vines together at night, and now we're watching tasty videos and flipping through craft videos to try and scratch that same itch. I'll tell you, though, craft videos are getting there. Rachel, one of our favorite pastimes, this counts as a small wonder,

is watching craft videos from Facebook channels, especially life hacks that are just we watched one where somebody took some fucking rubber out of a keyboard they dismantled the keyboard and took the rubber underneath the keys that are like the padding and then they cut it into a square and then hot glued that onto a cup and it's like why did you do that and they're like now my cup has a rubber on it one last night with legos and it was all about the different ways you can use legos and pretty much all of them were like you can glue a lego onto another thing you can glue it onto a keychain or a tie

clip or a and now it has a lego and now the lego's just on it vine was better than any of this because like vine wasn't really a social media platform. It was a short-form entertainment channel featuring content that did not exist and has not existed since it was on there. And you're somebody that, you know, part of your job at Polygon used to be producing unique video content. And now that you have left that job. I know. I need the vine outlet. I need V3 this, this time for sure.

Um, I, I am sad that it's gone, but I still, a vine still lives on in like compilation videos that are on YouTube. And I watch these several times a week of, of just the best, the best stuff,

not out of pure nostalgia, but because it's like another, it's a different form of entertainment that I enjoy that doesn't exist anywhere else on earth what is your first thing uh my first thing is a ted talk a ted talk it's very specific ted talk okay it's called why you don't like the sound of your own voice now hold on a minute you don't like the sound of your own voice i didn't used to. Until we started doing this podcast? Until I got used to it.

Oh, okay. So this is a PhD candidate at MIT, their Media Lab program. It's Rebecca Kleinberger. And she gives a talk about the different voices we have and why there's a disconnect between hearing your voice on a recording versus how you hear it in your own head so the different voices is normal voice sad voice angry voice and michael caine i think those are the four everybody has so there's the normal voice angry son and then michael caine there it is why do we fall master brush

that was the first impression you ever did, right? Was Michael Caine or no? That's the only impression because everyone does it. It's one of our four voices. So go ahead and do your Michael Caine now and just say, why do we fall Master Bruce? No, it'll be really good. Please give me something to say. Why do we fall Master Bruce?

Oh, it's going to be good. Buckle the fuck up. Why do we fall, Master Bruce? I felt like I had it with fall. Why do we fall? No, you lost it. I had, like, baby cane. Why do we fall, Master Bruce?

We had Muppet Babies, Michael Caine. Some people just want to watch the world burn. No, the voices she's talking about. I love you, by the way. I didn't mean to make fun of your Michael Caine. It was very good. No, I knew what was happening when you asked me to do it.

I knew where we were going. So the different voices are the outward voice, the inward voice, and the inner voice. Okay. So the outward voice is the voice that you hear. On your podcast that you do. Yes, exactly. It's the voice that other people hear. Okay.

And it's a voice that can change. Well, here's the other thing that's interesting. You have a different voice for every person you talk to. Whoa. Sorry, were you talk to. Whoa. Sorry, were you talking to me specifically or was that sort of the royal you? No, everybody. Okay. That researchers can hear differences in your voice when you're talking to your spouse or a parent or a sibling or a boss, for example.

A child is the one that gets me really bad because I, um, Henry has started to really enjoy watching videos of himself and I will watch them and hear myself talking. And I'm really trying not to do like baby, baby voice stuff because they encourage you not, not to do that. They encourage you to just like speak with your regular voice because it helps with speech development and stuff. But sure enough, man, it's just like, are you playing with the water table? Oh, is it the squirt gun? Oh, my buddy. And it's like, I don't talk, I don't say buddy.

Well, I feel like he wouldn't get your affection for him if you were like, are you playing with a water table? Yeah. Oh, my buddy. Oh, my buddy. I even did it there. And there's the inward voice, which is the voice you hear when you're talking. And it sounds lower and more musical because you're hearing it through bone in your inner ear and the cochlea and a neurological filter.

Now, this is interesting to me. So there's something called corollary discharge, which is the motor command to your muscles to produce movement. So it's not the movement itself. It's just a command that goes to various parts of your body to do things. And apparently that is the same for when you speak. So you're not really listening when you speak. Oh, that's entirely true for me in general.

It's just kind of an impulse being sent to the parts of you that need to work to say what you're saying. Oh, man. I get really existentially freaked the fuck out when we talk about this kind of stuff because I know it's like cool and science and stuff, but just thinking like, yeah, your brain sends electricity to your meat so that you fucking expel wind in the way that makes sound happen. And it's like, no, my words come from my soul. Well, and these are all examples of why when you hear your own voice, it sounds different because you're not especially used to hearing it because you're hearing it differently than you would when you speak.

you would when you speak. It's funny we're talking about this right now because I feel like we're locked in a strange science experiment every time we record this show because I am wearing headphones and monitoring both of our audio. So I am actually getting both and you are not. And so I hear the sort of deep, sinewy, luscious tones that my ruined cords produce. But you don't get that. No. And the final voice is the inner voice.

So this is the voice when you read or rehearse. It's God and the Holy Spirit inside you telling you not to steal a car. Or you get a song in your head or in your dreams. It's the voice when you're not actually communicating. Does it actually sound like anything? Your inner voice? I don't think so.

The example she gave was dreams. Like dreams is where you can really kind of experience that. Sure, but like you have thoughts and those thoughts have words and coherent sort of structure. Well, one thing she did say is that people with schizophrenia can't control or distinguish the inner voice. Yeah, that makes sense. So that's part of the reason, you know, there are so many issues there.

But, yeah, she didn't talk about whether or not there's a sound quality to it. I think mine is Michael Caine, and that's maybe true for everyone, and that's why he's so successful. And that's why your impression is so great. And that's why it's so great. Bruce. Mine is not Michael Caine, clearly. Yeah. Because I don't have that ability.

It's really good, though. I have baby Michael Caine. Baby Michael Caine is very good also. I'm curious why you brought this. Was there something that happened that made you really think about your own voice for a bit? Well, I think I've gotten, since we started doing the podcast, I've gotten a lot of feedback on how people enjoy the sound of my voice, which is not something I ever really thought about.

And I know when I used to hear recordings of myself. You didn't like it, I remember. I didn't, no. I thought I sounded like a child. I have never gotten that from you. Like a 13-year-old or something. I still am self-conscious on my work voicemail, my office phone. I'm like, oh, people are calling and they're thinking that they're reaching out to a teenager.

Are you doing your baby Michael Caine voice on the office phone? Because that might be a bad problem. Well, there's a certain thing that I have to be careful about. Have you heard of up-talking? Yes. I feel like sometimes I'll do that, especially on like a voicemail message. Like,

hi, this is Rachel. Please leave a message and I'll give you a call back. I think that people who criticize people for up talking and vocal fry and stuff like that are basically just sound dependence. Who are the fucking worst. Um, I see Jesse tweet people who tweet mean things to NPR folks like all the time.

It's just like, chill the fuck out. They sound how they sound. If you don't like it, go listen to something else. Otherwise, huff my duff. He says that exactly. Yes, I just the the TED talk I thought was really interesting to me because I hadn't really thought about a lot of that. They also talk about how vocal indicators can give you a sign of whether or not somebody has an illness, like Parkinson's, for example. Or they said depression, too, like the tempo of the way you speak can indicate your likelihood for depression.

Probably not with 100% accuracy. No, I'm sure not. Obviously, all of this is just, you know, to varying degrees. But another thing they said is that your vocal posture when you talk to a spouse can predict when or if you will divorce. Oh, my God. I know. I'm hunched over real bad right now, and I'm barely opening my mouth to speak.

Vocal posture, like not your physical posture what's vocal posture vocal posture like the the tone and way you are communicating with are we okay i want you to know my vocal posture is probably not good right now but that's because of the hand foot mouth disease this hand foot mouth disease is tearing our romance apart god it really does suck pretty bad, though. Can I steal you away? Wait, I wanted to ask you another question. Please.

How do you feel about your voice? Huh, that's a good one. Good question. Thank you. I also used to not like it, but now I listen to it so fucking much because I edit the podcast that I do to it so fucking much because I edit the podcast that I do enjoy it. Yeah, I think that's what made the difference for me, too. I mean, it speaks to the point of this lecture, too, is that often you don't like the sound of your voice because it sounds so different from what you hear in your head and you're not familiar with it.

But I think doing podcasts has helped me kind of not feel as jarred by it when I hear it. Yeah, I mean, I've listened to my own voice for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours now. And so there's, I'm, I'm, I don't know, I'm a strange use case in this, in this conversation. Can I steal you away, though? You got to do it. My mouth hurts so i could i couldn't do like a fake kazoo or something quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack now folks don't get scared there's not a duck in our room or your room and you probably just looked around for the aflac duck coming to take it. The exciting thing is that I just opened a whole new genre of music that we can do. Farm animals.

For this interstitial, is that what it's called? Yeah. So every time we read a baby book that's about farm animals, there's always a duck or a goose. Or a pig. No, okay, let me. Are we just doing animals no pigs pig is a farm animal is a goose we see this in like charlotte's web or one of these and it's like oh here comes the goose and it's like why have you got a bunch of fucking geese around is it a farm animal no i, I don't think so. Not from my perspective.

Then how come we've been convinced that a goose is a farm animal? I don't know that I grew up thinking that. Well, good. This message is for Wifey. It is from Amy. Hey, you beautiful, powerful Pawnee goddess. I'm sorry it took me so long to jump on the podcast train, but I'm the fucking conductor now.

Sorry, I love when Rachel cusses. It almost never happens. Thanks for being the Pasha to my Yzma, the Kentucky to my Estonia, making Trivia Night the highlight of my week and winning free beer for me. To my favorite Galentine, I love you. Kelly, answer

your phone quick. Oh shit, Kelly. Kelly! This is important. The storm's, the tornado's coming. We gotta lock all the corn in the cellar. That's also my Michael Caine when he did the farming movie. Oh, when he

was in the movie Twister? That's a cow master Bruce. Another cow. That's not that good. I'm just tickled. This message is for Emily. It is from Gabriel.

Hey, dog. Thanks for introducing me to the McElroys and for being such a great mentor, listener, and friend. You've taught me so much about hard work, coping with anxiety, and board games. I wish you many happy years with your amazing wife and adorable pets and hope the earnestness of this message didn't make you too uncomfortable. I will appreciate that that message gave me a chance to say dog, which is not something I usually say when I refer to people. Yeah, not really since Randy Jackson left American Idol do we all have sort of the ability to say dog.

Well, you definitely say dog. Yeah, I guess so. But that's because... You do a lot of, hey, dog? Well, I carry Randy deep in my heart. I carry his heart. I carry it in my heart. Were you a member of the original Dog Pound?

No, I came on when Phillip died. I'm like Ringo, a small dog owner. My dog Pistachio howls when she's excited. And I'm Renee Colvert, a big dog owner. My dog Tugboat tips over when he's sleepy. And we co-host a podcast called Can I Pet Your Dog that airs every Tuesday. We bring you all things dog. Yes, dog news, dog tech,

dogs we met this week. We also have pretty famous guests on, but legs. We're not going to let them talk about their projects. No. Just want to hear about those dogs. We don't want to hear about your stuff. Only your dogs. So join us every Tuesday on MaxFun. Just want to hear about those dogs. We don't want to hear about your stuff.

Only your dogs. So join us every Tuesday on MaxFun. Can I tell you about my second thing? Yes. My second thing is a video game. And I hesitate to bring video games on this show because I know it can be a bit alienating to folks who have not played them before, like yourself. Like me, particularly. But I only want to do it when a game does something like fascinating enough that I think it can be

sort of appreciated by someone who doesn't maybe have interest in games. And so I wanted to talk about a game called Undertale, which I don't know if you're familiar with. I've played it like a dozen times since we've known each other. I remember you playing it, yes. I saw somebody in the Facebook group recently with an Undertale-themed graduation cap design, and so I was kind of inspired to talk about it from that.

So it's a game from a developer named Toby Fox. It came out in 2015, and it's since sort of appeared on multiple platforms. A Switch version is coming out very soon, which is exciting. exciting. It's a role-playing game with sort of simple pixel graphics that is set in this monster-filled world underneath the surface of the Earth, and there is a protagonist who's just a human child that you get to name, who

falls into this world and is kind of looking for a way to escape. What the game does that is very, very cool that not very many games do is, it's not just about going around and killing these monsters as you try to find a way out of the world it turns them into characters themselves and so while you may fight uh you know some big ice bird monster thing later on in the game you may see them sort of at a bar off their patrol shift just kind of hanging out um and the you know they they tell you a story

about their kids or something like that um it's a very very funny game which there are very very few of there are a lot of games that try to be funny and are fucking miserable at it um but but this game does a lot of sort of visual gags and and stuff like that that uh despite the fact that there's like a gag on virtually every screen of the game the density of them never really gets old um but what's really cool about this game and what i wanted to talk about is its take on morality which is something that games attempt to do a lot and usually do like a comedically ham-fisted job of it made me think of one game that you and I did play together is the Walking

Dead Telltale Adventure Game series, which I think did a fairly good job of giving the player sort of these decisions, not because it dealt in black and white morality necessarily, but rather that it put you in extremely bleak and stressful circumstances and then had you make one of two very very bad and painful decisions yeah exactly which was uh i don't know we played through the first series and really really enjoyed it and then by the second series it was just like okay this is the 15th time i've had to decide which character is going to get eaten by zombies and which one's going to survive and so the shine came i will say I appreciate that because my inclination a lot of times when playing games where there are choices and one is clearly the right choice

and one is clearly the wrong choice is my inclination is always to pick the right choice just because I'm like, you know, trying for some invisible approval. So, right. That's what I wanted to talk about is that games do this, are you good or are you evil idea a lot?

There's role-playing games like uh mass effects from from bioware uh bioshock uh a bunch of games that do this um and and they are almost always preposterously like black or white uh like you come across a wounded soldier do you want to kill them or not kill them or oh there's an old woman who dropped their wallet do you want to steal it or you want to give it back or there's a little girl full of magic energy do you want to kill them or not kill them or oh there's an old woman who dropped their wallet do you want to steal it or you want to give it back or exactly there's a little girl full of magic energy do you want to save her or consume her power in some way um and like the thing with that uh that sort of the walking dead game stepped around by making it not black and white just like bad or bad uh is that when you approach a decision like that in a game, it carries very

little weight. Because like you said, like, I wanted to be good. And so I just did the good decision every time. Or if you're playing through the game, and it's like, I want to get the dark side Sith powers in this Star Wars game. So I'm just gonna make the bad person decision every time. It doesn't carry any weight, you're just doing it for mechanical reasons, or just to be consistent. And in a lot of ways, that decision's already made for you. What Undertale does that is so, so, so cool and so clever, cleverer than you would expect from a game that looks so simple with such fairly rudimentary art and stuff like that, is it does not allow those decisions to ever be easy. So if you want

to be good, if you want to get the good ending and be a nice person the whole way through, it's not as simple as choosing, like, don't kill. You actually have to work at it a little bit. If you're in a fight with a monster and you want to spare them, you have to, like, figure out what they want and then give it to them. Sometimes you'll be in a boss fight where they won't allow you to walk away, like, peacefully. They want to fight you. they won't allow you to walk away peacefully.

They want to fight you. They want one of you to kill each other. And when you're locked in a circumstance like that, how do you find the peaceful resolution to it? And the answer is work. It's hard. It's mechanically very difficult. You have to survive the fight long enough to find the peaceful solution.

And it's never really explicit. It never really shows you. It plays with that video game expectation of, well, I'm going to either make the good decision or the bad decision to get the good guy points or the bad guy points. So much so that it never really tells you like, hey, you can play through this whole game without killing anybody. It's kind of up to you to figure that out. And once you start trying to do it and challenging yourself to do it, you start to want to do it. And then all of a sudden that decision does have weighed.

The idea that like, I have to work really, really hard and make the game actually more difficult for myself by refusing to ever hurt anybody. And so when you finally do accomplish it, it's like, that was my decision and I worked for it, not because of some silly reason. It's because I wanted to do it. And the same goes for actually the inverse of the game. There's a version of this game where you can play through it without killing anybody. And it's very hard.

And you have to figure out ways to get around these sometimes like violent monsters who just do want to kill you. This is something you do a lot when you play games. Like I'll see you play games a lot. And you'll like try and get through the game without like murdering. Well, I did that with Peacecraft for World of warcraft which was really fun and interesting to to do and that idea is kind of baked into undertale there's an inverse though where you can kill absolutely everybody and it gets pitch black it gets genuinely like upsetting and and troubling um but again it's not easy if

you just go through go through game, and every time you get in a fight, you kill a monster, that doesn't do it. You have to like actually go around the areas until monsters stop appearing. And then you've killed all of them. And then they don't appear in town because you killed all of them. It's really, really dark. But again, it's not nobody ever says to you like you can kill everything if you just keep going through and don't leave an area until monsters stop appearing. So in both cases if you want to get the good guy ending or the bad guy ending you have to work at it and you have to figure it out yourself and i i i think that is such a better way of handling morality in a game than like press x

to shoot the guy or b to walk away what's really cool is that that Undertale is a fairly short game. It takes just a few hours to play. And when you finish it, characters the next time you play the game will remember what you did the last time. And that info doesn't just that data doesn't get deleted. If you like erase your save, it gets like deep in the files of your computer where they are very, very hard to access. You can't cheat your way out of it it so if you have a playthrough where you kill everyone the next time you come back there will be characters who remember what you did what if what if you play through it a bunch of times like you have they remember like every yeah there there's some cool parallel universe shit that happens in the game like it's tied into the plot a little bit that sort of helps explain this stuff

away but it also means that every time you play it you're playing through a parallel like shard that happens in the game. Like it's tied into the plot a little bit that sort of helps explain this stuff away. But it also means that every time you play it, you're playing through a parallel like shard of the game where you might see something you hadn't seen before. But if you go like the pitch black route and kill everything, then like folks never forget that. And it's really, really cool.

And again, like it gives your, it gives the things you do a lot of weight. And it's just so like staggering the first time i played this game i wasn't expecting much from it because it didn't look like this you know triple a polished game but it is one of my favorite video games of all time because despite how like humble it appears it does stuff with morality and uh the the weight of your decisions as a player that I think no other game has ever done before. Also, the music is fucking great.

What's your second thing? So my second thing I am by no means an expert in. Okay. But I thought I would talk about it because it has brought me a lot of pleasure. Okay. And that's manicures and pedicures. Yeah, let's talk about manicure and pedicure because I don't know what that is. I got you one for Mother's Day and I was like, enjoy the foot scouring.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. So there is like an unlimited amount of resources on this, depending on how deep you want to go. I am not somebody that has ever watched, for example, YouTube tutorials. I've never gotten nail art, which is like where you can get very intricately painted or stuck on details on your nails. You more like the experience of it than the result of it, right? No, I like the result, too. Oh, okay. I just, I don't see it as an opportunity to get especially creative.

It more like gives me a, like, and forgive the choice of words here, but it gives me more of a polished feel. Oh, boy. Oh, yikes. I will not forgive you. You can't just say, forgive me. I have to consent to the forgiveness,. I will not forgive you. You can't just say forgive me. I have to consent to the forgiveness and I do not. know how we know all of the things that I was able to find. For example, a lot of what I found said that Cleopatra and Queen Nefertiti were big fans of the manicure. And I was like, how do we know

this? How do we know this, y'all? I mean, I feel this way about a lot of history, which makes you sound like a flat earther, but like, how do we know this? Oh, maybe it's possible. Like, I was wondering, like, in the hieroglyphics of Cleopatra, did she have painted nails? That's how we knew. Or in sculptures of Queen Nefertiti, was her nails prominently? I don't know. I mean, if we can assume that this technology existed back in those days, those two probably did get down on some mad mani-pedis. So here's the thing. So as far back as like 3500 BC, apparently ancient Babylonian men manicured and colored their nails with different colors representing different classes.

This is from a Marie Claire article I found from 2014. Apparently the upper echelons were black while the lower classes were green. And they had found a ancient solid gold manicure set. Whoa, shit. Yeah. And then, as I mentioned, Cleopatra and Queen Nefertiti popularized the manicure by rubbing their hands in rich oils and staining their nails using henna. Oh, that sounds good.

Which they believed signified their wealth and status. The bolder the color, the more power you had. Cleopatra, they say, preferred a blood-red hue, while Nefertiti opted for ruby. How did, same color, how did we know this? I have no idea. I found this in a few articles that I read. Nobody ever explained to me how this is known. Hmm.

And then there's the Ming Dynasty's manicure. Oh, I bet they got fucking buck wild. Both male and female members had perfectly manicured talon-like nails to add a tint. They mixed together egg whites, wax, vegetable dyes, and other materials to create different color varnishes ranging from dark red to black.

Fuck yeah, that is the summer look. Egg whites all up on my nails in the hot sun. Fuck yeah. Little poached eggs that you peel off. Stinky, beautiful nail art. So the manicures we know it today started in the 20s and 30s. Women began to color their nails using high gloss car paint. Well, that's one way to get the job done, I suppose. And then in 1932, Revlon launched a groundbreaking polish that used pigments instead of dyes and was available at drugstores.

In 1932? I know. It didn't really seem like the height of opulence. Didn't seem like a time for industrial expansion, maybe, Revlon. Or maybe, like, shit was rough and you needed something nice to look at. And it's right there at the end of your hand. Yeah. I mean, that is actually, that's a fair point.

Because for me, I'm not somebody that spends a lot of time on my appearance. I don't really put effort into my hair and I don't really wear makeup. But like a manicure and pedicure makes me feel like put together. Like this may be the rest of this is intentional because, because my nails look nice. Yeah. And so I appreciate that. And I didn't get a manicure until I was in my mid twenties,

maybe. It's not anything that I really grew up with, but I became interested in as I got older because it was like, Oh, I look like a fancy person. Sure. You focus mostly on like the painting and design part of it, but there's a certain amount of like nurturing that goes into a good one.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's when I was trying to find the like the health benefits to see if there were any like advantages. Probably not a lot. No. I mean, they talk about the massage and the moisturizing and the circulation. And also, a good manicurist can notice potential issues.

Oh, blast your bunions. Well, if you have a fungus problem, for example. Oh, no. One of my friends was getting a pedicure, and they actually found something on her foot that they thought might be cancerous. And she went to go get it checked out. Was it? It was actually.

She had it removed and now she's fine. Damn. But it was something that she might not have realized otherwise. Yeah. So there are benefits in that sense. But as far as lasting impact to your nail health, I didn't find as much. I think there's also something to it the same way that when I talked about massage,

like just making a decision to do something nice for yourself, divorced from the actual act of receiving that is a form of self care, like deciding that you are worth, you know, doing, doing something nice. Yeah, exactly.

And I think the reason I appreciate it more than like a massage, for example, is, is that, you know, doing something nice. Yeah, exactly. And I think the reason I appreciate it more than like a massage, for example, is that, you know, I can look down at my nails and it's like a little reminder of like, oh, that looks nice. You know, whereas a massage, honestly, like a few days after, I feel like the benefits have totally disappeared. Yeah, I just get like one hour afterwards where I'm like, oh, my body's so sticky. I love it. My body's so sticky. My hair smells like mint. I love it. My body's so sticky. My hair smells like mint. I did get a massage. Can I tell you what our friends are into this time? Alan says, I'm going to a convention this weekend, so I'm very excited about cosplay.

Whether seeing your favorite character across the showroom floor or working hard all year to debut a new piece and getting to hear people getting excited about your hard work, the ingenuity and passion that goes into the hobby fills me with joy. I love a good cosplay. I am really fascinated by the like the community around this because I it's not anything I was familiar with until a couple years ago. And now I feel like it's everywhere. I look. It's so cool.

It's like it's it's a way of artistic expression that also has a lot of ingenuity behind it. So like how complex a character can you make? And seeing some of the things that people are able to create, like Overwatch characters like Mercy, where they've created full expandable wings out of like Amazon delivery boxes is like, holy shit. Um, is,

is very, very cool. Uh, Hannah says something I think is wonderful is flying on a plane over a big city at nighttime, getting to see city lights bright and twinkling against the dark sky from the bird's eye view of a plane makes everything look magical and gives me such a sense of wonder like this too. Yeah.

I almost never fly at night now that I think about it. I used to cause, uh, Chris Grant, my former boss at Polygon, who I worked for for a decade, especially back in the AOL days, would only allow us to really fly on red-eye flights because especially in the AOL days, we had about $30. That was like the budget for the whole site was $30 or $40. So we have to take red-eye flights. So I got to see a lot of bright lights, big cities at, you know, 3 a.m. Here's one last one from Ian, who says, One thing I love is fixing stuff around the house. I can't do much.

And it's usually very frustrating as I'm doing it, but the feeling of accomplishment when my shower handle works at the end of hard work is fantastic. Oh, man. Oh, it's my shit yes i mean it's not i don't know fucking anything about anything i know literally nothing but when i oh man we had a pipe at our old house that came down from the attic into the garage uh and i think it was our like ac units like drip drip dripping drippy guy yeah where like the water condensation would come

off the ac unit in the attic and then it would go down this pipe and that would empty out into nothing we just drip onto our garage floor what the previous owners were doing i don't either but we put a cooler down there and we just have to remember every day to go and dump the cooler out into our which was probably bad it It was probably full of bad stuff. But then I went and I found a way to, I bought a hacksaw and I bought some PVC pipe and I bought some glue. With the support of the aforementioned Chris Grant.

With the support of the aforementioned Chris Grant and I did the damn thing. That was really impressive to me. And it took me a long time and I did get extremely frustrated. But at the end of it, I was like, hey, I fixed this. I'm an adult.

Yeah, I prefer when you work on this when I'm not at home because if I am present. Oh, you hate hearing me get very, very angry at pipes. Get so angry. I had to go and buy like three different

pipe cutting instruments until I finally went and bought a tool at Lowe's called like a pipe cutter. And I was like, oh yeah, I should have just fucking bought this. We also use that

to trim branches. I've used that pipe cutter for so many things. Anyway, that's the episode trim branches. I've used that pipe cutter for so many things. Anyway, that's the episode. Sorry that I've been talking out of a very narrow aperture of my open mouth the whole time. I promise I'll be back up to fight and wait next week. And I hope so. God, I hope so too. Very mysterious illness for adults. Yeah, we're not supposed to get it. The age is supposed to shield me from some things, but apparently I didn't get the memo.

It doesn't help that I try to eat our son's toes so much, and that's probably... Yeah, well, and you've also worked from home for over a decade. I have no immune system whatsoever. That's an excellent point, Rachel, thank you. And thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. You can go to MaximumFun.org and check out all the great shows

there. Shows like The Great bullseye and bullseye and stop podcasting yourself and a lot more at uh maximum fun.org 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 and uh you know take us out with more michaelaine. Say like, thanks for listening. Everybody catch us, you know, the usual podcast stuff. Thanks for listening. No. You got it. Thanks for listening to Wonderful.

Oh, my God. No, keep doing it. It's good. It's good. It's good. Join us next week, Master Bruce. All right. us next week master bruce all right Money in all. Money in all. Money in all. Money in all.

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