The Tea Kettle - DesiQuest After Show Podcast - Episode 5 with Erika Ishii & Noxweiler Berf *SNEAK PEAK*

When the kettle whistles and the tea is ready, it's time for the DesiQuest after-show—and what a show it is! Omar Najam and I, Sandeep Parikh, are all cozied up inside the teapot, steaming with excitement.  After every episode of DesiQuest is launched, we'll release another episode of the Tea Kettle with me and Omar and a very special guest, or guest from either behind or in front of the camera.

As we cracked open the doors after Episode 5, it was nothing short of a party where Erika Ishii and Noxweiler Berf, the creative forces behind our show's beloved Nuri and its exquisitely crafted miniatures, joined us at the mic. Their stories of meticulous brushstrokes and imaginative design had us riveted, offering a rare peek into the artistry that fuels DesiQuest. Between hearty laughs, we teased the relaunch of the ABCD podcast, a melting pot of culture and comedy that promises to tickle your funny bone and tug at your heartstrings.

Then, we wandered down the cobblestone paths of nostalgia to the halls of Fonco (Studios), a place stitched with the threads of our past. It was here, among the echoes of weddings and the clinking of glasses from celebrations past, that we found our way back to the warm embrace of familiarity. For those who've ever yearned to revisit the haunts of their memories, this chapter is a heartfelt homage.  And for the insatiably curious, our Patreon is brimming with more anecdotes and secrets and the rest of this conversation continues, just a click and a pledge away.

Website: https://www.desiquest.com/

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DesiQuest

Wanna play D&D with the cast? Buy a seat at the table here: www.desiquest/playwiththepros

DesiQuest merch: www.desiquest.com/merch

Sponsors:
Darrington Press: https://darringtonpress.com/candela/
Gharana Foods: https://www.gharanafoods.com/desiquest.html
Die Hard Dice: https://DesiQuest.com/DHD
Hero Forge: https://www.heroforge.com
Misty Mountain Gaming: https://desiquest.com/misty

Episode Transcript

Sandeep Parikh (00:11):
Hello and welcome to The Tea Kettle, the
DesiQuest after show podcast,exclusive to our patreon backers
.
We love you all.
Thank you so much.
You make all this stuff happen.
This entire endeavor cannot bepossible without you guys, so
thank you so much.
I'm your host and SandeepParikh, executive producer and
cast member who plays Ash, andwe got my co-pilot here.
None other than oh, I need tocome up with a good.

(00:32):
I forget to come up with a goodadjective.
So many yeah, there's so manythe large and in charge, the
unfathomable thank you, OmarNajam, who plays Murkha, thank
you, thank you Omar theunknowable unknowable and large
and in charge and unfathomableall those things.

(00:56):
After every episode of DesiQuestis launched, we release another
episode of this The Tea Kettlewith me and Omar and some very
special guests from from theshow behind in front of the
cameras, and this week, ho ho,we have Erika Ishii hello, erika
everyone.
Erika plays Nuri (Ghafoor) andwe're so happy to have you.

(01:19):
And then, of course, we got NoxBerf, who was our minis painter
and, like, essentially, minisproduction designer, whats your
official title?

Noxweiler Berf (01:31):
I don't know that there's a title for what I
do, but yeah, I definitely builta lot of models for you and
built some sets and we did themini man mini man.

Sandeep Parikh (01:42):
Yes, mini man, large and in charge, mini man I
guess we could go with a withminiature designer.

Noxweiler Berf (01:49):
I at this point just roll with it.

Sandeep Parikh (01:52):
Yeah now that's it before we dive in, that is
unfathomable.
Before we dive into ourdissection of episode five,
we're gonna ask you to do thatthing where you drop us the
likes and the comments.
So go ahead.
That's, that's my call toaction now.
I'm supposed to do that now andI did it, and if you haven't
already, maybe go over DesiQuest.
com and jump on to our mailinglist and you get a special

(02:15):
discount for all of our sweet,sweet merch.
And we have.
We've had a handful of sponsorsthat truly took a big chance on
us to make this show possible,and so in each of these we want
to shout one of them out, andtoday the honor is going to go
to Lethal Shadows, and theseguys make premium minis.
They donated, I think, all ofthe like enemy and many, many of

(02:36):
the NPC minis.
So a lot of the spiders thatyou saw in this episode the
goblin riding spider and stuffcame from lethal shadows.
So thank you, thank you to themfor lending us their beautiful
art.
I mean, these are trulymagnificent minis.
I don't know, nox, you want tojust kind of talk about them for
a minute, like your experiencepainting them and yeah, I can.

Noxweiler Berf (03:00):
So lethal shadows is a really bespoke
miniature company where theyhave a wide variety of
prefabricated miniatures thatyou can produce yourself or you
can purchase and the the qualityis pretty outstanding.
We used these exclusively forall of the enemy models, like
Sandeep had said.
But you know the the intricacyof every single one of those

(03:24):
models leaves a lot for any kindof modeler or hobbyist that's
looking for something else topaint.
All of these are competitionlevel models and if you're not
familiar with them, I highlysuggest you go check them out.
You can find them at lethalshadows dot com can you
elaborate on competition level?

Erika Ishii (03:41):
okay, I was already like.

Sandeep Parikh (03:42):
I'm like, oh, I'm so bad at this.

Erika Ishii (03:50):
My eyeballs look weird.
Everything it's okay, it's nota contest.
And now I'm hearing there is acontest there is a contest.

Noxweiler Berf (03:57):
Yeah, yeah, they were lying to you.
I will say it's not a contest.
You're always competing againstyourself.
Erika, that's how I look at itokay whenever I'm competing
against myself to try to dobetter than you.

Omar Najam (04:08):
Last model yeah, and folks, really quick.
Before we hop into the mainpart of our episode, I just want
to say, if you like our banter,that beautiful little
chittering that you hear betweenSandeep and me, you can check
out the ABCD podcast that's Sandeep and I host over on Effin
funny.
We chat about all things beingAmerican born, chatty crafts

(04:32):
folk that's what that last Cstands for maybe?
Desis and we also talk aboutstuff that's in the news that
we're confused about, which ismost of the news.
We talk about some culturalidentity stuff that is confusing
to us, which is most of thecultural stuff, and we play a
ridiculous game which honestlytakes up a good half hour
because we just do bits on topof the game and then finally we

(04:54):
wrap it up with the Desi of theweek.
You can find over 30 episodesof the show over on the EffinF
unny YouTube channel or whereverpodcasts can be found.

Sandeep Parikh (05:03):
So if you want to stay bundled up for the
winter and be entertained, hey,we got you covered we got you
covered, yeah, and so we put apause on that show while we make
this show for now, but we'll beback in action very soon, I
think the next time we mighteven have a date for you.
We don't yet, but withoutfurther ado, the tea kettle is
whistling, so let's spill somechai about episode 105

(05:29):
transition.
Wow, oh, thank you, Han ZImmerpretty good, what do you think
Erika, Nox?
Why don't you just rate ourintro real quick, on a scale of
one, to.
Whatever yeah.

Erika Ishii (05:43):
I get, I give it a, I give it a pun out of ten.

Sandeep Parikh (05:51):
Highly impressive, yeah, highly
impressive Type of those are atype of marks that my parents
will be proud of.

Omar Najam (05:59):
Okay, I'm highly impressive as long as there's
nothing higher than that,they'll be.
Highly impressive words.

Noxweiler Berf (06:08):
I didn't say that but yeah, yeah.

Sandeep Parikh (06:14):
Thank you, thank you.
Well, we're gonna jump in,erika, I want to jump in with
you.
Just, you know something Weasked Most of the guests just
coming in as a guest on thisshow, give us your impression,
or or your take on, like youknow what.
When you first got asked to dothis, what were you thinking?

(06:35):
Why did you?
Why on earth Did you say yes tous?
We were so lucky to have you.
Why did you say yes to us?

Erika Ishii (06:41):
Oh, I just realized why would you?
Say, oh my gosh, I have a wholegiant document of notes about
my, about my character.
But, yeah, when I got asked,it's I.
I think I've gotten a chance tobe at a table with everybody
except for Sand eep, you andOmar.

Sandeep Parikh (07:02):
I think so yeah, played.

Erika Ishii (07:04):
Yeah, cuz you know Rekha.
Either and Anjali and yeah, no,no, we hadn't, like Omar and I,
actually go way back to college.

Omar Najam (07:13):
Yeah.

Erika Ishii (07:17):
Yeah, yeah.
So I at the time I was dating afriend of Omar's that also in
the film program Mm-hmm and Iwould go drive up or or take the
train up to UC Santa Barbaraalmost every weekend and Hang
out, and through that ended upbeing parts of lots of little
film Student projects.
There was the I love Ellisonfilm festival where it was like

(07:43):
they, they changed buildings,they just changed buildings.
But they say good-bye farewellto the old one.

Sandeep Parikh (07:49):
Ellison.

Erika Ishii (08:02):
Happy memories.
They're like no, it's thebuilding still there, it's just
we're moving.
The film department is movingbuildings, I'm like yeah okay,
so we were part of.
I think it was like aScooby-Doo esque, yeah, and you
know it was just like a lot oflate night Crunching on film
projects and papers and likebeing in the edit bay.
I remember I spent a nightthere one time Like, just you

(08:25):
know, I had been hanging out,was waiting for things to render
and then Fell asleep in thechair.
Wake up in the morning.

Sandeep Parikh (08:35):
So yeah.

Erika Ishii (08:36):
Omar and I come from that background together
Ended up re-meeting years later.

Noxweiler Berf (08:42):
I mean cool.

Erika Ishii (08:43):
Yeah, omar did the vloggering the vloggers for Geek
and sundry, and I worked on thetwitch channel.
Mm-hmm and sort of this is our,but this is our first time
getting to roll together, soyeah, this is this episode's
been what so like 12 years inthe making, 12 plus yeah, yeah,
yeah really destiny.

Sandeep Parikh (09:02):
Had you know other things in mind when you
were trying to stay away fromOmar?
It's just like you couldn't doit, did you?

Erika Ishii (09:07):
did you play D&D back then at all?

Sandeep Parikh (09:09):
No, no, not at all oh man.

Erika Ishii (09:13):
Yeah, I was playing with my group back at UCLA.
I was I was attending UCLA atthe time and, like I was in the
transfer dorms and somebody sawI had a Dice necklace.

Noxweiler Berf (09:25):
Uh-huh.

Erika Ishii (09:25):
It was like it's just a d20 in a little cage or
something, and they were like oh, do you play D&D?
I was like yeah, and he's like,oh, I DM.
And that person ended up beingAmy Dallen's brother's roommate.

Omar Najam (09:36):
No.

Erika Ishii (09:38):
I don't know what it is, but I swear to God if you
come through.

Sandeep Parikh (09:42):
LA Play D&D.
At any point in your life youplay with Amy Dallen's brother's
roommate.
At some point, yeah, at somepoint you play with him At some
point.

Erika Ishii (09:49):
Like you all know it all, it all comes together.

Sandeep Parikh (09:53):
I think that was unavoidable, that was actually
technically Ash's and Murkha'srelationship, right yeah.

Erika Ishii (10:11):
But back to your question about being asked in.
Yeah, I've gotten to play withAnjali and Rekha and Jasmine
before, and so it was.

Sandeep Parikh (10:22):
You know this Omar guy?
And, yeah, I know this Omar guyand you and I fun fact Sandeep
we we'd met.

Erika Ishii (10:29):
I interviewed you On my Geek and Sundry twitch
show when I was doing my videogame show and you had the FMV
game on One of those platforms.

Sandeep Parikh (10:41):
I know those platforms that definitely didn't
make it.
It was Eko.
This is the life we lead, thedigital life, digital life.

Erika Ishii (10:49):
Yep um.
And Nox I've known for a coupleof years too through sort of
cosplay Improv nerd, You're justvery much in this scene.
So basically you got a bunch ofyou're like oh I know all these
people, I'll come play withthem and then, plus after that,
I showed up and turned outeverybody on crew was all the

(11:09):
people that I've worked withOver years at Dimension 20 or LA
by night or you know, whatever.
So it just felt like and it wasat Fonco.
It was at Fonco which I hadhelped all of them move in there
back in the day.
What before?
They had all the dividers upand had rooms.
It used to be like a big openwarehouse.
I had friends get married there.
I had like I used to sort oflike I was sort of interning.

(11:32):
I remember one day liketrawling craigslist to see if
there were any mannequins that Icould buy for the, for the
space, so like coming in it feltlike home.

Sandeep Parikh (11:44):
Hey, so sorry to interrupt, but the rest of this
episode is for our patreonsubscribers only.
So if you'd like to hear therest of this juicy conversation,
let me tell you it gets juicy.
There's another 15 minutes 50 50 of this conversation over at
patreon.
com/ Desi quest.

(12:04):
Thank you so much forsupporting the show.