295: Otakon, 2025

In this episode, Professor Mouse, the Cosmologist, and Teddy discuss Wendy's Frosties, Otakon, and give some movie and dessert recs.  

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Time. It's like a clown.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
No, don't this little page.

Speaker 3 (00:02):
He's just bagging boarding batman and the gutter like a
maze story tellers me some fellas, we some felons.

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Isn't amazing.

Speaker 3 (00:06):
It's like a Pella bearver sell it because this shit
is so contagious. Mouths on the Summer. He's co pilot,
got the show while the cycle spinning knowledge on the
getty like appro beat the babo, be the rabbit, don't
step to the squad, we get activic and hate. It's
like a stepla parts you don't like fish talk do
you hate?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
It's a batl with.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
The cuttle fish killers tended pools on the taping the
Greatest Five of Stars. If you cherish your life, Bucky
Barneshit squad, spray and leg and your pipe.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hey here ready, Welcome to another edition of Is It's
Just Bad? Is It's Just Bad? The best podcast You've
never heard of? I'm your host, Professor Mouse Jordan is
always bay to see becausemologist, and we're starting off with
a little banger of a question, a little uh amuse
bouche for the app just to kind of establish the tone.

(00:56):
And I'm not drawing this out because Teddy just joined
the zoom and I need him to also hear the question.
And I'm going to continue to vamp until we know
good and well that he's here to also hear what
I'm about to ask, and that I have not been
vamping and leading up to this question for thirty five seconds. Teddy,
are you here?

Speaker 1 (01:17):
I am here.

Speaker 4 (01:21):
It's not even Monstoverer yet and we're already vamping. Love it.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
So I just talked to my wife about this. There
are and this blew my mind different ways to consume
a Wendy's frosty, and that intravenously. This is what I'm

(01:47):
asking you, is how do you eat a Wendy's frosty?

Speaker 1 (01:51):
And are we talking about the fry? Are we talking
about the fry method? Or are we talking about like
the drinking? Are we talking about mixing? What are we
talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
All of that? So my so with in my mind
a Wendy's frosty, you get it with fries. You dip
fries in it, and then you eat the rest with
a spoon. And that's the only correct way to do it.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
I have technique is off.

Speaker 4 (02:18):
Oh man, do you want to like blow out your
lungs trying to the slurp or is that good practice?

Speaker 2 (02:25):
I think slurping of frosty is incorrect. It's not a milkshake,
it's a fucking it's ice cream.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
It's icy. It's just soft serf right, with a little
bit of liquid in it. So when I was saying
it's not a dip because the fries will break, you
gotta get make sure that you don't get unsalted fries.
You bend the fry in half and then.

Speaker 4 (02:47):
Scoop yea, turn into like a little tostito scoop spoon.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
And you instead of scooping and licking like a spoon,
you just eat it all at once because the salty
mixes with the sweet and the crate. I listen, I
have not been the most sober human being on the planet,
and I am certainly not a petite man. I know
what I'm talking about when it comes to flavor.

Speaker 4 (03:09):
Oh. I love this technique. This is great. Fry engineering
is important.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
That's fine to me.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
I don't I don't.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
I don't actually care how you do the fry, but
you gotta do the fry. I just feel like the
fry and the frosty are on, uh, you like, you
can't separate them. This idea that that that there are
people on earth who think of the frosty or consume
the frosty the way you would consume a milkshake, which
I believe they serve at Wendy's as a separate thing,

(03:40):
is insane to me. Also, like because with a McDonald's milkshake,
you have to suck hard Monstoberfest suck hard for like
the first you know, for like the first couple of
ounces before that they gives. I feel like with a

(04:02):
frosty you're sucking hard, deep deep down.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Well, I would say there is one, there are, there
are a couple of things that you have missed, But
just straight up trying to consume the frosty like a
mixed milkshake is map that this way leads madness. You
will collapse many a straw. A plastic straw can't hold
up metal straw. You will just give yourself brain freeze

(04:26):
paper straw. I don't know, it won't work. The other
thing you can do is you gotta mix it. If
you do a float, frosty floats work really well.

Speaker 4 (04:36):
So are you ordering a soda and the frosty has
two separate items and then like mixing them essentially.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
Yeah, the the middle school version was you make a
hole in the middle of the frosty and then you
pour the soda in. Oh, so then it's like exactly,
and then you drink it that way because it breaks
it down. A slightly more mature version, if you want
to have an alcoholic one, uh, you mix that with

(05:04):
Bailey's or some other type of non dairy curdling alcohol
like vodka or something like that, and you can make
like alcoholic floats. That makes sense to me, And some
people do mix it with coffee too, as like a
cream and sugar at at the same time. But that
is all to say, don't freak a frosty just on

(05:26):
its own.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
That is madness that that to me is venturing into
the realm of too much, where like you you see
the tiktoks of people buying eight cones of McDonald's like
and then and then putting them into a tupperwar and
then covering those cones with mcflurries and then covering that

(05:48):
with like Eminem's that they brought from home, and then
eating that out of the fucking uproar with the spoon
like there's there, there are There's like this whole sub
section of TikTok that my sister in law showed me
have like the fast food food Hack, and most of
it is like the stuff that Teddy is talking about,

(06:08):
where let's take this home and get nuts.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (06:13):
I like the being able to take it home and
then adding I went through in college, you know, like
a Campbell's canned soup phase. But it was like, all right,
I'm gonna start with the bass soup and then you
can dress it up and you add spices, and you
start adding pasta, and you start adding like bits and
pieces to it until it's basically just an ingredient. You
elevate it.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, that's like where when you see my TikTok food
thing is like variations of ramen where people will take
like well, not like the Bulldog ramens or like the
ramins that are like kind of like fancier, but like
the Nissan ramens or the top ramens, and then like

(06:55):
really deck them out by like doing weird like adding
American cheese to ramen creates like a sort of like
an Alfredo type thing, adding like ground beef to it,
making your own eggs where you like have them marinating
and and ginger and garlic and soy sauce and and

(07:19):
meran and shit like that, and just like getting really
fucking fancy with your you know, one dollar ramen in
ways that also are not expensive, Like American cheese is
not expensive, soy sauce and ginger and shit like that
is not expensive.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
But that's butter and peanut butter and a little bit
of mirror to make like a.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yup. I've seen these as well. I've seen some dessert
ramens that look extremely gross. But you know, how can
I how can I dispute the person in the video
going yum with that random?

Speaker 4 (07:57):
Why do you?

Speaker 1 (07:58):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (08:00):
How would would they dare? But that's so funny? Yeah?
We has anybody done a like a truly crazy thing
of like dipping a baconator in a frosty? I feel
like that would be good as fuck.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
I something similar, not a frosty. But do you remember
the Texas Roadhouse?

Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yeah, so Texas Roadhouse had a similar very thick shake
And what you could do is take there and you
had to get it the crispy version, but the crispy
bacon blot off some of the excess oil. And then
scoop that with the shake. It worked best with like

(08:49):
a caramel one, but you have to also, but it
didn't work well with whip cream. Look look trust me,
I like I up many a time. But yeah, there's
one there that you could do. I feel Baconator, though
I feel like the bread would like get in the way.

(09:09):
And I don't know about mao in a frosty that
feels a little.

Speaker 4 (09:14):
Yeah, I wonder about like Baconator for a while with
like a pretzel bun. I feel like the pretzel bun
with the frosty that that would really work well together.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
There there's a This is an urban legend, but it
kind of seems to be true because Prince By and
I had this foot item. There's a place called Portillo's
which is now nationally franchising. It is like a dipped
beef lace in Chicago. It's like if you've seen the Bear.

(09:47):
They work at like one of these like Italian beef spots,
and they have a milkshake and there is a it's
they don't know how they may it's so goddamn creamy.
But one of the theories is that they put mayonnaise
it in.

Speaker 4 (10:09):
Yeah, I have heard this as a long oft repeated
urban legend about milkshakes as mayo as a creamy.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
I can see mayo on fries, but mayo in milk
that I wouldn't want to have a seizure. I would be.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
I was on your page and I still am like,
I wouldn't want to see somebody put mayonnaise in a
blender with ice cream and milk and other ship and
feed it to me. But because we were unsure, and
because I did not see it get made, and I
just tasted it and it tasted extremely good, then you

(10:50):
know I was if there's mayo in this, they did
a good job.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
But I have heard that avocado can be a dairy
replacement for like a milkshake adjacent a shake adjacent drink. Yeah, Czar,
but I have not tried that. So listeners will get
back to you.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
No, my wife does, does it? Yes, because there are
natural fats in avocados, and so it has to be
it has to be at a certain level of ripeness
right before it starts bruising, so like that that kind
of that no man's land before it, like avocado just
becomes completely inedible. It has to be kind of at

(11:35):
that level, and yeah, they it gets extremely creamy. You
could do you could use avocados to do a bunch
of different types of like smoothie variations with just like ice,
ice and avocado as the base, and then it gets
very thick. Yeah, you get like a thick milkshake. She

(11:57):
eats them with a spoon, and she's also big frosty fan.

Speaker 4 (12:02):
Does she dip fries in the avocado because that sounds
very good?

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Well, this is this is when she's trying to be healthy,
So this is her sort of like her the Superman
to her Bizarro.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
Frosty fries are very nutrient dense, so there is an
argument to be made.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, but I don't think she wants a rusted potato
at home. I think she wants the nasty shit from Wendy's.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
Oh yeah, okay, well I saw in that vein, I
saw a very interesting ice cream that was just like
when you take bananas that are about to be like
banana bread bananas.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
Oh this is we give this to Munchie.

Speaker 1 (12:46):
But the fro like you basically get them really like
really ripe, then peel them, freeze the frozen like freeze
it and then put it in an ice cream churn.
You can't just regular blend it. You gotta put in
a churn when you refreeze. Oh that becomes a that Basically,
it's consistency is like a soft ice cream. It doesn't

(13:09):
it doesn't stay frozen as long as regular ice cream,
but it stays really uh really nice. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (13:15):
I imagine the custard consistency of mashed banana or shaken
up like that would work really well.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
We do. We do it differently because we don't have
one of those. We do we mash the banana, ah,
put almond butter in it, stir it up, put it
in the freezer. And it's like it's called baby ice
cream because they can't have ice cream before they're one.
And I mean, she loves that shit, and I think

(13:43):
it's only because she doesn't really know what it's replacing.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
I will say it is as somebody who has tried
something similar it it It is pretty bomb. Like I
would say, you could serve that to like other people
and they'd be like, oh, this is great.

Speaker 4 (13:57):
Yeah for sure.

Speaker 2 (13:58):
Yeah, but when when she went she gets the genuine article.

Speaker 4 (14:01):
That's never going back. But honestly, like doing like a
Ben and Jerry's style swirl of like the banana almond
butter in the raid cow ice cream, probably very good.

Speaker 1 (14:19):
Bit of jelly in there too.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
That's kind of my beef with Ben and Jerry's ice
cream is that they they box themselves into certain fixings
and then just like different combinations of those fixings where
you see other places or like Jenny's ice Cream like
creates like different flavors, using like novel ingredients, and I'm

(14:43):
sure it's like a cost thing where Ben and Jerry's
are like, we have a brownie, we have you know, Yeah,
we're mixing and matching.

Speaker 4 (14:51):
It's like Italian food. You get four different ingredients and
you're gonna just keep doing different variations of them exactly.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, it feels like that. But yeah, we we're really excited.
A Bunchie turns one in two weeks, yes, and we are.
We're we're kind of sort of because her her birthday, uh,

(15:22):
which all invited to a v is a week after
her birthday, but we're not gonna deprive her of you know,
like like something good on her actual birthday. So on
the twenty ninth, we're trying to figure out what her
first suite is gonna Wow, is gonna be and I

(15:48):
don't know, maybe we can brain what would you want
your first see to have been?

Speaker 1 (15:55):
There's somewhat mine was. Are you familiar with meishti?

Speaker 4 (16:03):
Tell us yes, tellble listeners if they're not.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
Uh So, it's so. Meishti is a genre of food
which is sweet sweets. But this one particular meshti that
the first thing I ever had was this like I
don't know how to really say. It doesn't really have
a good translation in English, but it's this really syrupy

(16:29):
semi fried doughball.

Speaker 4 (16:32):
Oh the German.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
It doesn't really have like a good translation. A little
bit of gold of jamen. Apparently I was into it.
I was down.

Speaker 4 (16:43):
I bet yeah, that's that's.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
American sweet was probably I think it was black forest cake.

Speaker 4 (16:50):
Mmmm. That's very very American by way of being very German.
Glub Drama is interesting to me because it's like in
the same family as blah bla blah in my head
of like this very syrupy baked fried wow. Okay, So

(17:11):
is there something specific to one of her Munchi's cultures
that you'd want to like get her started on as
like a home base too.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
That's a good question because the MUNCHI has uh munchie
is white primarily German, a quarter quarter Indian, half Puerto Rican.
Puerto Rican sweets are and I'm willing to admit this

(17:43):
not great. There there are some that are really good,
but I consider them to sort of be like sweet
adult sweets. Every time I think about this, I associate
it with my dad eating like guave a paste, and
like sweet cheese is like a really good dessert, or

(18:07):
something called but aswhitna, which is essentially just like a
jelly roll. And then like the various pastries that they have.
We have one pastry called a gasito, which is like
a it's like a it's like a sugared pastry full
of like cream, cheese and all that stuff is really good,

(18:27):
but for a baby it seems like too complicated to
get into and on her on her sort of Indian
side globjoban we thought about. I've kind of sworn off
those because I ate probably two hundred and fifty of

(18:49):
those after our wedding because we got it catered and
for some reason, I think they accidentally doubled the order.
They came with like six enormous things full of like
we have like two thousand.

Speaker 1 (19:06):
They see people really like their desserts, so it was
probably like, oh, yeah, they're just going to be eating
a lot of this after.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
Well, I mean I think I think at that at
that event, half of that was was consumed, but that's
still left like a thousand and cool situation.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
I don't know if it's a been goalic. I think
it might be a Bengalic thing. But have you have
you all tried a mihidana?

Speaker 2 (19:35):
No, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
The powdered rice, saffron and flour, that's like, ah, I
think that might be great for munchi just because it's
it's small and mashable enough like gulab jamen is a
little more like even though it's kind of soft because
it's diggory. I think this one is can be broken

(19:59):
down way more easily.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (20:02):
On the other side, if you know she's really liking
the banana almond butter thing now and you want to
go German before it and just something it's simple, not
too many ingredients, you know, familiar in the family of
what she's eating, but fantastic.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
What I really want to do is give her my
favorite dessert, which is carrot cake. Okay, okay, because the
other calculation you have to make whenever you feed a
child is that who's going to eat this? Because they're not.

(20:44):
They're gonna eat. They're gonna eat like what seems like
a lot, and then you you realize that it's just
kind of just all over the place. So that that
made it to the calculation. And then we were gonna
get her like one of our favorite pop or something like.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
That delicious Sorry.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yes, which is a pie? We discussed it cause and
I in person, which is this like double franchise forked
chain where there's like beef beef the Beltway pie wars
have begun.

Speaker 4 (21:23):
Yeah, this is a very like New York Pizza. Who's
the original famous Joe situation?

Speaker 2 (21:29):
Yeah? This is the Pats and Gino's Who's the original
cheese Steak? But like with the cake thing, my wof
made a good point, which was that the image of
her grabbing a handful of cake and stuffing it into
her face, we have to save that for the.

Speaker 4 (21:52):
People, and so to give the people what they want.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
Yeah, so I think we we'll go with a pie
or an ice cream. I don't know if if like,
would you just want a regular vanilla ice.

Speaker 1 (22:05):
Cream as a starting. It doesn't sound like the worst thing.

Speaker 4 (22:10):
Ever, as long as it's a good one, you know,
with the little dots in it.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Yeah, yeah, like that actual vanilla bean.

Speaker 4 (22:16):
Yeah, like a real vanilla bean, because that is good.
It's underrated, you know, but it has to be legit
or like a Strachia tella mostly, you know, it's got
some of the coccount nymps, though you might want to
stay away from any like little crunchy bits like that.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah, crunchy bits and chocolate. Chocolate is also because it
has caffeine. If it's like real, if it's like fake
bullshit out of the box chocolate, it probably isn't even
real chocolate. But like if it, if it's like a
legit thing, then you're fucked. Yes, oh, speak.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
Of ice cream. I don't know if it would give
too much away, but there is a particular ice cream
place that it is illegal toll outside of a very
particular place that you literally cannot get unless you are there.
And I feel like if you're if you're going for
first a really good first but kind of simple ice

(23:13):
cream might be from this.

Speaker 4 (23:14):
Place, because that's cute. Yes, we have this in common.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
This is good and it wouldn't docks us to say,
and because I kind of just found this out because
of a trip my my wife took. At the trip
to where she got COVID. Most land grant universities have
dairies and as a result have their own ice creams,

(23:44):
and so she was at Penn State and brought back
like this exact version of their version of this. Theirs
is a little more extensive though, because they do also
slaughter cows and make like like sticks and ship wow.

Speaker 4 (24:02):
Okay, yeah, just comes with the cows.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
Well because school here, but there they were like agricultural universities,
and like that has carried over in most of them
where they still have agricultural programs which are like this
is the basis of this university. Yet the only way
you know about it is because there's ice cream available
at the student union.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
Right, and you can stick your hand inside of a cow.

Speaker 4 (24:32):
Yep on.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
I do remember people doing doing that or wanting to
do that and being excited about doing that. That was crazy.

Speaker 4 (24:42):
Yeah, truly, the Cronenberg cow just having cut out and
do its stomachs.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
But yeah, so let's get into it a little bit.
There's a, yeah, So I became a single parent for
two and a half weeks, friend.

Speaker 4 (25:06):
Just like casually dropping COVID and then you know, I
became a single Apparently you're.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Text what she's fine, She's she's she's she's she's back
in action. So it's got better. She was she was
gone for a week at the Summer Institute, and during
that week there was like one thing that they did

(25:34):
off campus that only like a few people went to,
and she was one of them, and everybody who went
to that thing tested positive for COVID. And it's gotten
to the point where we we we get like the
the latest boosters every time, and uh, you know, our

(25:58):
daughters twice backs, twice boosted at this point, so that
the this it's not like terribly symptomatic. And she didn't
even really kind of notice it. There was one day
where she's like, I feel sick, and then it kind
of took a COVID test out of it, like an

(26:21):
overabundance of caution, and it tested positive. And she was
shocked because we've had COVID in the past, and like,
I think we got COVID before the vaccines came and
were like developed, and I remember that being like a
truly abhorrent experience. This was like one Christmas, we weren't

(26:44):
able to travel to see my folks, and we were
like totally bedridden for a couple of days. And this
was pre Munchy. Thank god. I don't know how we
would have how that would have worked. But so she
has a quarantine because we can't get Munchie having COVID.

(27:07):
So so she was up and around for two days.
And during those two days, I was able to sleep
in the basement and I was able to sleep in
so I did get like a kind of like a
weekend in between weeks where I was watching Munchie. And

(27:28):
so this is a crazy thing about kids at this age.
She's just about to turn one. She is now able
to fully stand up by herself, but she cannot walk

(27:49):
and she's uncoordinated, and so this is the most dangerous
time for her to be doing that, cause it's like
she has all of them muscles in her body to
be able to walk. What she's lacking is the motor
function to execute that, and so she is falling every

(28:11):
which way. This is also a period in which children
become sensitive to sound, such that if their dad snores,
they wake up in the middle of the night. So
on top of on top of dealing with having a

(28:35):
partner who is like out, I also had to evict
Munchie from our room so she no longer sleeps with us.
She sleeps in her own room in a nursery, and
I have a monitor. So it was a thing of

(28:57):
like I I was like watching this kid. Schools about
to start up. I'm going back, and I have to
do all this like syllabus preparation, I have to do
revisions on an article I have to do. I agreed
to review a book for a journal for some reason,
so I had to read this book and the like

(29:17):
write this Like I just had all this shit that
I had to do, and I also had this kid,
and I had nobody to be like, hey, can I
get an hour of just like silent. So every task
became It took me two weeks to read this book
that would have otherwise taken me like two or three days.
Every task just becomes elongated and elongated. And what is

(29:43):
like so weird and strange is that we have started
now developing a relationship that is like approximating the relationship
between two human beings and not between like a a animal, yeah,

(30:08):
a person and like a dog, not saying that kids
are dogs, but like.

Speaker 4 (30:14):
Like a puppy, you know, like a small animal that
needs milk and care and you know little baby mammal.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah, and that is fairly immobile and that does not
really have desires or an ability to like act upon
those desires in a kind of like affective way. So
one of the things that she started doing throughout those
two weeks is like, because I had to become a disciplinarian,

(30:44):
which is something that I don't mind being, but I
also don't love doing it of telling her no and
stuff like that. So we started to get into straight
up arguments me and yeah, me and this one year
old where I would be doing I would be trying
to do something, and usually with something for her, Like

(31:07):
I'm trying to change the water out of of this
formula maker that we have for her, and she's trying
to lick an outlet that's and so and so I'm
holding this thing, the water's coming out into the jug.

(31:28):
I turn around, she's licking an outlet. I go, hey, no,
and then she looks back at me and she goes no, no, no,
no no, And that's her rebuttal to me yep, and then.

Speaker 4 (31:42):
Not just copying. She understands what it means and it's
using it.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
And at that point I realized that she now recognizes
when I am unable to grab her, so she it's like,
as soon as this motherfucker goes over there grabs that
tank out of that machine and starts filling the water up,

(32:08):
I'm gonna go electrocute myself. As soon as this motherfucker
starts cooking on that stove for even a half second,
I'm gonna try to open the gate and climb up
the stairs. And she's so fast with the crawling, like

(32:29):
you can tell that she's gonna she's gonna walk soon
because she is so fast. She's going like a mile
a minute. And all of a sudden, there's something crashing,
there's something breaking, And so we just got into like
these little arguments, and then I found myself in the
middle of them, being like, I'm arguing with a fucking
one year old.

Speaker 4 (32:49):
This is crazy, and she's winning.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
I mean there's no Also, yeah, there's no winning those arguments.
Those arguments are like totally because there's not do we
haven't reached the point of being like let's sit down
and talk this through and reach a resolution. There's only
I'm winning. She also does this thing where she now
knows that that we are worried about her safety, and

(33:16):
she thinks it's funny when we get scared when she's
in dangerous positions. So we would at the end of
and I have like so many get wrecked recks because
at like, I did a thing where I'm like, at five,
I have to stop. I can't keep working into the night.
I need some kind of rest because while like the

(33:40):
summer Institute week, I was trying to like really push
through and get a ton of work done. And then
those two days where I slept and I slept for
like twelve thirteen hours, I realized how exhausted I was
making myself. So the second round I had learned, so
I was like, at five, we're shuting it down and
like watching movies, I don't care if I'm a bad parent,

(34:01):
She's gonna watch them with me, and some of these
I do kind of regret. So we would be on
the bed, and one of the things that we always
are protecting is the edge of the bed. We're always
boxing her out, like you can't you can't get over here,

(34:22):
and she knows why now it's because if she falls,
it's bad. So what she does is lightning quick runs
to the edge of the bed and then turns around
to see if we notice, and then fucking laughs in
our face. The other thing that she started doing is

(34:44):
another thing that I hate, is when she throws things
in places that are hard to get to. So she's
been going above our headboard and dangling toys and doing
so like just holding it over until somebody looks at her,
and then dropping them and then laughing, and then going

(35:06):
to the edge of the bed and pretending that she's
gonna jump off, like and it's just this whole game
of like it's now what can I get away with?
How can I make my parents freak out? What can
I do? After she finally tested negative for COVID, I

(35:27):
literally just handed the baby off and was like, I'm done.
I can't I can't do this, yeah, which was just
so short lived because she had been sick so long
that she had a stack meetings. So like she tested
negative and then and then I was like, here, take

(35:48):
this baby, and she was like, I have back to
back meetings in an hour. It's almost like this is
gonna be one of the best hours of my life. Uh,
but yeah, Munchie is growing up, and yeah, by the

(36:09):
time you hear this two weeks she'll be one years old.
She also is old enough to wear the panda onesie
that you got for her, and so yeah, it's it's great.

Speaker 4 (36:26):
Yeah, very glad to see. I was thinking about what
you're describing with kind of brinksmanship of messing around is
also very much kind of the level that cats start
and stay at. Their ability is to like freak people
out and you're like smacking stuff off the table. It's

(36:48):
just so interesting to see sort of the the level
of human cognitive development as they pass through these stages
of where other mammals kind of plateau why some humans
also there are just like.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
That was very true. But when so when cats are
doing it, there's something instinctual about them knocking shit off
of high surfaces, or at least this is my understanding,
they are not consciously thinking like this is going to
make my human angry.

Speaker 4 (37:27):
Are Oh, I don't know. I mean, I guess you're
in the different corners of social media, but there are
whole compilations of cats doing things and then their owners
recording them before the cat is aware that the owner
is watching them, and then you know, clearing your throat
or saying excuse me, and the cat freezing and be

(37:47):
like and pretending to do something else, and they had
this like oh no, and then they'll immediately start grooming
themselves like no, it wasn't me, I wasn't planning to
do that. If you're lucky. If you're not lucky, the
cat will then stare at you straight in the eye
and knock it over anyway they know.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Yeah, that's so crazy.

Speaker 4 (38:12):
Yeah, there's very little that separates us. We're all just animals.
That's exactly right. So it's a privilege and a pleasure
too to be a witness to munchies development joining going
up the stages of mass less hierarchy of needs and self.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
Is definitely in one of the level.

Speaker 4 (38:35):
Yeah, that's self actualization right.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
Yeah, And it's so true too, because like I troll
my dad so much still to this day, Like it's
never it just it has just started and it will
never act. Yeah, Like I troll I troll my dad
by like lying and saying I haven't I haven't watched things,

(38:59):
or that I don't like things that he likes. Yeah,
just to mess with him. He really likes to show
the expanse. He was the one who got me on it,
and I watched it, and I watched the whole series
and the entire time every time he asked me about it,
I was like, this show sucks, dude, this is the
worst show. This is the worst show I've ever seen.

(39:22):
But and I'm watching it and watching all of it,
and I'm like reading the author's like next books and stuff,
like he knows that, but he still gets like mad
at me. He's like, how can you think this is bad?
How could you think this is bad? It's like explaining
plot points to me and shit, And I'm like, just

(39:42):
never as well.

Speaker 4 (39:45):
At least you're aware of what's in store for you.
I s post if that's an inherited trait.

Speaker 1 (39:50):
Yeah, at some point in time, Munchie's just gonna be like,
you know, I can really take your leave the bad batch.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah, She's gonna be like, like carrot cake ate all that, dude,
it's actually the worst cake.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (40:07):
Yeah, that's awesome. Uh So, speaking of well, I don't
actually have a good transition for this.

Speaker 2 (40:14):
I was gonna say, speaking of cats. Were there a
lot of cat gosplates.

Speaker 4 (40:20):
Various lots of cattiers certainly, yes, absolutely, uh and I did.
I was hunting for like the little Gotcha toys, you know,
come out of the blind box machines, gotcha pond is
that right? Yeah, like cat themed things for my mom.

(40:40):
I ended up up settling on like dollhouse furniture.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
That she likes.

Speaker 4 (40:44):
But Autocon was good, It was a successful It is
interesting we went it like a slightly different route as
we talked about last week in Kimono mostly rather than
you know, anime cosplay and a con like that is
really cool because it's so many flavors of the culture.

(41:07):
There was Ikebana flower arrangement and they're in both very
traditional style and then modern style. There's an arrangement inspired
by Goku ultra instinct with like a bunch of big
silver flowers, and I'll have to send you a picture
of that. But yeah, so like very cool sort of

(41:30):
that melding of modern and traditional is what I think
is really interesting that the Japanese Embassy gave presentations of
like traditional folk dance and then you've also got your
you know, your raves and your anime screenings and your
you know, Pulley and voice actors. We had pulled kimono
outfits together partially from I'm all doing a bunch of

(41:53):
research and finding like Japanese eBay and figuring stuff out,
but then also as a local, wonderful local woman who
who runs a shop imports stuff from Japan, we went
and got a couple of accessories from her, and then
she reached out on her mailing listens like, you know,
if anybody wants to volunteer, I'm running a panel, you know,
come dress up. So she's got a booth of the

(42:15):
dealer's room. We go like, yep, here's what our looks are, like,
I'm all put together a super cool look based around
using art of Utigawa Kuniyoshi. And for the listener, if
you've ever seen a giant Japanese skeleton spector, like just
think spooky, scary skeleton, that's the one. That's what he's

(42:39):
famous for. It's part of the Uka woodblock tradition, and
it's it's made. It's a way into pop art and inspired.
It looks like a Castlevania boss, this enormous skeleton monster.
So we were doing kind of this like modern twist
on things and the woman loved it. And so we

(43:00):
go to the panel and we get there early, like
you know, we were able to skip the line. We
get there, we want to make sure where they are
on time, and staff there is always running around nuts
and they came up and like are you ready to start?
It's just us at the room with the audience, like no,
we're not running the panel or just like here waiting

(43:22):
staff thought that the panel is going to start fifteen
minutes earlier than it actually was scheduled to start. But
we were like very close to having the vamp and go
for it. But and I think that Mal learned that
she probably could have given a little presentation. But everybody
showed up, met some people did some modeling of both

(43:46):
our outfits and other pieces from this woman's stock, and
you know, went through the different kind of stylings and
there's a whole very complex It's like it's like Western
suit culture of you know, levels of fanciness of you know,
tuxedo versus sport coat with a fancy pattern T shirt

(44:09):
and sneakers and like kind of that up and down,
and it's very much what we think of as kimono.
Just means like a thing to wear, but our the
fashion kind of got like crystallized in the Edo period
Samurai and has gone from there and now it's you know,
you can get polyester ones with Goku on them if

(44:30):
you want, So it's cool and a lot of fun.
Got some uh made some fun connections through that. And then,
because I complained about it last week, the adult material ban,
you know, kind of porous. You go to the dealer's room.

(44:52):
There's people they've got there, like eighteen plus booths kind
of uh you know, cortened off in a corner of
the rest of their stock, so there was some of
that stuff, and as I expected, unfortunately, the biggest result
is that it ends up being kind of homophobic because
the uri and the alley is already a smaller percentage

(45:16):
of that stuff, and when you're getting cut down to
no more than twenty five percent of your stock, then
it becomes they It kind of gets cut down to
the most mainstream, the most streamlined, Ohpei, you know, that's
kind of all you get.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
So it was.

Speaker 4 (45:38):
Sign of the times, I suppose, but not a total
uh puritanical shutdown. It still did weird stuff for their
adult panels, though, usually it's just a matter of everything
getting boxed into the same like two hour time slot.
So yeah, good time overall. Definitely interested in going back

(46:01):
and the the the cultural stuff I'm finding more and
more is up my alley because frankly, I haven't watched
an anime like that's newer than ten years old, so
everything I think of his current is retro now, and
I don't know what I'm talking about or I don't
know what any of the characters look like. The big

(46:23):
themes this year that I recognized lots of One Piece,
lots of Final Fantasy, N a lot of Freren for yeah, yep,
and I'm sure a bunch of gens and stuff that
I just like, don't really I don't maybe, but it

(46:47):
wasn't as obvious to me, so I probably just missed it.
It was cool to see like a bunch of clouds
and tifas.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
Is that because are they releasing a new and installments?

Speaker 4 (47:01):
Yeah, the remake, Yeah, the remake which is now like chapterized.
It's gonna end up being like I think the second
one came out pretty recently, so yeah, that was pretty big.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
People keep telling me that game is really good and
then like like stopping me before I go the original
is enough and being like no, this, this is, this
is worth it. I don't know have either of y'all
played it.

Speaker 4 (47:36):
I played the first piece of it, and in my
usual style, it couldn't stick with it, but I enjoyed
the bits of it that I played. It was doing
like a weird Kingdom's Kingdom Hearts time thing of like
being self conscious about its status as both a remake
and reimagining. So there's like force ghosts or specters that

(47:57):
keep showing up to like mess with the timeline or
it's critical points in the story, which is very odd.
I don't know how far that extends, but it does
feel like a self aware reimagining.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
See I'm still I played the og one on a
Don't Hate Me too Much companies, but I played it
on an emulator. I made about halfway through. But I
have played the original before but have not done any
of the remakes.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
I played the original one. I just bought it on Steam.
It was like ten bucks or something. I played it
like relatively real. I mean, it was like during the pandemic,
where like I needed something to do and I and
I think it may have been around the time they
announced Final Fantasy remake or something, and then I played

(48:48):
it and I beat it, and I had a great
time playing it and was totally uninterested in playing it
in a different skin, where Yeah, I don't I don't
get it. It seems like have they remade other games,
like other classic games. It kind of just seems like

(49:09):
the live action Aladdin or whatever.

Speaker 4 (49:12):
Yeah, they're doing remix much more frequently now, and they're
often just like, yeah, remasterings, and it's there's this whole like,
is it they're doing a budget with Silent Hill at
this point, and there's this there's a you have to
slice it real thin of Is it just a new
skin with the same engine? Is it rebuilt in a
new engine? Does that mean that they're changing the way

(49:35):
the gameplay works? And if they aren't, should they because
what if the original gameplay was kind of janky? Like
is that part of the charm? Is it a historical artifact?
If the camera work was, you know, kept getting stuck,
shouldn't you fix that? It's a quality of life improvement.
So it's a lot of that, and the specifically Final
Fantasy seven seems to be more than that, because it's

(49:56):
this like self aware. The best thing I can compare
it to is the uh interview with the Vampire TV
show of like, it's the same story, but we are
messing with it because we are aware of the story
as an object already and so we can comment on
it while we're also reproducing it, which is cool.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Yeah, there's there's something about the like the remake culture
where the for video games or for like movies, where
I mean the Disney remakes are like cash grab ipar yeah,
ip nonsense. Then there then there's something where it's not

(50:41):
like remakes, but it's like a revisitation that seems kind
of like craven cash grabbing, but that at least for
the makers, like uh, George Lucas for instance, was like
with the prequels, I can do something that I wasn't
able to do in the seventies type thing, and that

(51:03):
logic doesn't really for me transfer over to video games
because I didn't ever want to and maybe this is
what people love about it, but I never really kind
of wanted to control Cloud and have them go nuts
with the Buster sword or whatever. I was like perfectly
content in the turn based like I like that. I

(51:27):
enjoyed that and I enjoy like the different versions of gaming.
So if I want like a really like complex, like
fighting engine type thing, I'll just buy whatever new shit
they made, Like I'll buy Final Fantasy sixteen, which I did,
and I played, and I did get bored halfway through

(51:48):
because it was kind of it's kind of boring to
just kill shit a lot.

Speaker 4 (51:54):
Yeah. Now, as a big turn based strategy, I agree,
the seven still had elements of the turn based strategy.
It's not entirely the real time, but there's also an
element of it's like four stops, a lescens of older

(52:15):
meet Older gaming systems theoretically are harder to come by, though,
if you go to any dealer's room at Otacon's kind
of stacks and stacks of end sixty fours if you
really want one. But the lack of I don't know
if it's really a lack of availability, because Steam exists
and emulators exist, but it's sort of the same remake

(52:39):
in movies of Oh, the modern audience won't want to
look at this old, these old YANKI graphics, And I
think maybe that holds up a little bit more for
video games. I know it does with movies because if
its practical effects. Give those to me all day. Keep
using those no CGI ever please. But you know the
this character is made of four polygons, it can be

(53:01):
a little tough running eyes especially.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
Yeah, oh sorry for it.

Speaker 2 (53:06):
Oh, I was just gonna say, like there's something with
like the texture smooth the texture texture smoothing with Nintendo
where a lot of those games hold up really well
to the eye, as opposed to some of the PlayStation
games like Final Fantasy seven included, where it's very spiky.
The polygons are like they are extremely severe, and so

(53:32):
the games are kind of like weird to look at. Well,
Final Fantasy seven it's it's kind of cool because it
was like punk rock to.

Speaker 4 (53:39):
Have like everyone else spike you already.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Yeah, everybody's just kind of spiky. But for a lot
of games from the first PlayStation they they it is true,
they don't hold up that well.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
One of the things that it's interesting to see as
the remakes versus kind of finding old ones to come
up the jumps between technologies and how they interplay. For example,
if you look like MegaMan or the original Castlevania games,
they were designed with CRT in mind, Like the art

(54:12):
was there and one of the things that you get
is with CRT some of the bleed that was existing
was part of shading, and they took into consideration how
that would look when it comes to color. Now, if
you the way the upscaled on most monitors, phones, projectors,

(54:34):
all of that, they have to compensate for it, and
it ends up not looking as good because some of
the bleed because they were thinking about all right, the
way the image is processed isn't the same way that
pixels are processed.

Speaker 4 (54:49):
Now, Yeah, individual sharp pixels. When you see it in
its component parts without the kind of the fuzzy bleed
over the CRT minor gives you, it looks way worse
than it did. It's bizarre.

Speaker 1 (54:59):
Yeah, Weirdly, when it comes to some of these poly
like the kind of polygon art, vector art, how the
rendering looks, it looks like more of the unrendered stuff
that you would see in a movie leak and it
would look like So it's that not Jihari window, overtin window,

(55:23):
but in the way of like, oh, we are so
used to certain things that not just looking at janky graphics,
but the way in which the persistence of vision is
just changed where it causes that cognitive dissonance.

Speaker 4 (55:36):
Yeah, Star Trek is a great example of the same
kind of thing, where the original series, of course, was
used in some ways to sell color TVs, but was
also being broadcast to black and white TVs, and so
a lot of the makeup is to show up in
hide high contrast, and then then leads into do all
vulcans just wear eyeshadow? Is that a biological thing? Is

(55:58):
that a fashion choice? Is Bach made me a very
bold choice that we just don't ever comment on. And
as you go on all of the little panels in
the next generation, I have like goofy sayings on them
because no one was ever going to be see them
in high enough resolution they thought to read any of

(56:22):
the nonsense that they were writing on these panels in
the background on the walls. And then of course you
get upscaling and DVD transfers and bigger TV screens and
suddenly you can read the Okuda grams, named after Michael Okuda,
the chief tech set designer consultant. That they were just
like writing bits of Gilligan's Island on in the background

(56:45):
of the bridge.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Yeah, have y'all seen the new Donkey Kong game.

Speaker 4 (56:53):
I was looking for Donkey Kong stuff for Prince B
beyond one very fright name looking small stuffed animal. I
did not see any Donkey Kong merch. Unfortunately, so.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
Did it did look sweet? Did Prince be get switched to?

Speaker 4 (57:10):
I don't know, but I know he's as a big conganista,
he will be excited to tell us about it.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
That sure, Oh that's wild. The the weird thing with
Nintendo is that, like for the entirety.

Speaker 5 (57:28):
Of like the existence of the Nintendo Switch, the Mario
Kart eight Deluxe has been the Mario Kart on that system,
and it looks as good now as when it came out.

Speaker 2 (57:43):
And I guess it's just because Nintendo is committed to
this sort of like cartoonish anti anti realism where that
stuff just kind of ages or it does well yeah, yeah, ed,
it just doesn't really age, like like Super Smash Brothers Brawls.
That looks incredible. That game came out forever ago. It's weird,

(58:07):
and it has seemed in some ways to have backfire
to make like evergreen products like that, because at least
I know a lot of people who are who are
just waiting to get a switch to where it's like
I already have this incredible system. The question is like,

(58:29):
how how long can I keep myself from playing Donkey
Kong Bonanza because you can't get that one on the Switch?

Speaker 4 (58:38):
And the new Mario Card I don't think was the
kind of killer launch title that they were hoping it
would be, because the previous one still looks as good
as it did.

Speaker 2 (58:47):
I literally played that with nieces and nephews like last,
like two weeks ago.

Speaker 1 (58:54):
There's also something to be said, sorry, if there's something
to be said for the Switch to being fully a
fully licensed product and not one that you own.

Speaker 4 (59:06):
Oh yeah, I mean the nutty nature of the You
can get physical cartridges, but they're not actually real. They're
just like empty shells, so you still have to download
the thing. And they're also all eighty bucks nuts.

Speaker 1 (59:18):
Also they all weirdly well well, they all aren't owned
by you in the way that if there's any what
they call antipiracy, but they can say it for anything.
Your system can be bricked for almost any reason.

Speaker 4 (59:42):
The whole system, not just the game.

Speaker 1 (59:43):
Yep, whole system can be bricked. So if they see
any modifications that aren't licensed by Nintendo. If they see
if there's any like for the first switch, people who
were doing trying to fix the Joycon drift realized, oh,
switches are Bluetooth compatible. What so they were there were

(01:00:03):
folks who were jail breaking and turning on the bluetooth early,
and then a couple years later they flipped on the
Bluetooth ability. So if there's any types of changes that way,
the system can send a signal and just have whatever
automated system they use, say nah ah, and.

Speaker 4 (01:00:24):
That's crazy, Like I was, I was ranting my my
paranoid screed about Marvel Rus Capcom like a year ago.
Now of get the physical cartridge because this is the
whole thing with that franchise is it keeps disappearing. Why
would you ever do that digitally? And the thing you
can't own, the fact that the hard ware you don't
even own and it's so expensive.

Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
That's so crazy because.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
These aren't.

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
Is this such a big enough This seems like I mean,
there's there's corporate greed and everything, but this seems like
overkill because like is it? Is it the vast majority
of their audience like seven year olds, Like are there
little kids trying to jail break their.

Speaker 4 (01:01:08):
Well, I wish more kids.

Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
There are ten year olds who will do it, but
you must understand their audience isn't the ten year olds.
It's the parents of the ten year olds who have
the money to put the game in it.

Speaker 4 (01:01:22):
It's the forty year old parent who is of the
last and only generation right now who has the technical
know how to jail.

Speaker 2 (01:01:29):
Break right right right right that It just it just
seems like Nintendo's making money hand over fist and this
this this is like apple shit that because I know
my sister. My sister is like a huge Inintendo. Like
she's the kind of person who brings her switch everywhere,
loves a damn thing, is constantly playing, has has played

(01:01:54):
like all those crazy Zelda games that take a billion
hours to multiple times. Has beat these fucking games and
platinumed a bunch of shit. Whoa Okay, it's just like
heartbroken by this, like all this stuff that Teddy was
talking about and hasn't even gotten a switch. We were

(01:02:16):
gonna get her a switch for her for her birthday
and she like We did the thing of like trying
to figure out because we assumed it was like a
wor gone conclusion that somebody was gonna get it. So
we were like trying to suss it out, like his
dad getting you a switch for your birthday, and then

(01:02:37):
she goes on this rant. Uh but that Teddy captured
the spirit of but for like half an hour about
their shit, and I was like, oh my god.

Speaker 4 (01:02:47):
Yeah, when you can really turn off a superfan like that,
like when those folks feel betrayed, you know you have
absolutely overplayed your hand.

Speaker 2 (01:02:57):
But I did say it as a as a joke
of like I can't wait to play Donkey Kong Bananza.
But that is her, Like she like she's gonna get
to a point where she's like, I gotta play.

Speaker 4 (01:03:13):
Just getting the Banana withdrawal.

Speaker 2 (01:03:15):
Yeah, uh okay, Yeah, I think we've gotten to that
point of this show where instead of being whole, we
become wrecked, right, wrecked. It's not the correct antonym, no,

(01:03:39):
but I'll take it like whole whole is to wrecked
is not what cat is to dog.

Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
An tact whole to wrecked. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
Yeah, the I got, I got. I got a bunch
of recommendations, but the primary recommend is the twenty eight
franchise twenty eight days, twenty eight weeks, twenty eight years later.

(01:04:13):
I remember watching twenty eight days later when I was thirteen,
I believe, and it is famously filmed on a toaster
and Danny Boyle made it look as JANKI and fucked

(01:04:33):
up and as punk rock as possible, and it's like
a young Killian Murphy, who I believe is in his
first feature that is insane and like he becomes like
it's this instant star. He's like in Hollywood movies in
the next couple of years, and it introduced all of

(01:04:57):
like these new things, things like the fast zombie is
the most sort of like famous thing that that that
that movie introduces. It is also one of those movies
that is a weird It is a weird critique of
something that hasn't happened yet. So the movie, which I

(01:05:21):
just double checked, so it came out in twenty two
I was twelve, came out a year after September eleventh,
and everybody assumed that the rage virus that was infecting
people and causing them to go insane and to become

(01:05:42):
increasingly militarized. And additionally, the ramp up to the war
in Afghanistan, which was then becoming the case to invade
Iraq was also being sad Arise at the end of
that movie when Christopher Eccleston and a cadre of other

(01:06:06):
uninfected human beings Dawn military outfits and are trying to
rape Naomi Harris and the other Brendan Gleason's daughter in
the in the movie to like repopulate the world and
stuff like that. And there had been all of this,

(01:06:28):
you know, talk of torture and war crime and stuff
like that. And then to find out that Alex Garland
and Danny Boyle didn't know any of that because this
happened all after the movie was conceived, written and shot.
They had just tapped into this very sort of evergreen
part of what they were observing cerculating in just British culture.

Speaker 4 (01:06:53):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
And and that became this kind of like evergreen critique.
And so then fast forward, Danny Boyle is not a
franchise filmmaker, He's an auteur. He's an artist. All of
this you know bullshit whatever Win's oscars. And so twenty

(01:07:14):
eight weeks later, him and Alex Scarland executive produce it. It's
a continuation of the story wherein there's this like a
woman is found, she is infected, she's not symptomatic, and
so there's this sort of like cure floating around. The
United States has occupied the United Kingdom at this point,

(01:07:34):
they've quarantined the disease and so the disease only is
taking hold in the UK and Britain. This is like
one of Jeremy Renner's first roles. That movie is is
totally fine, it's not required watching. So twenty eight years later,
Danny Boyle has made the movie where all of the

(01:07:58):
people forget that The Beatles exists except one guy, and
it ruins his career because it's also the dumbest movie
idea maybe ever pitched. It's like it's like a huge
embarrassment for him that he made that movie, and so

(01:08:19):
he returns to his franchise and twenty eight years later
is like a continuation of twenty eight days later and
twenty eight weeks later insofar as they are dealing with
the same zombies who have the same virus. But that's
where the shit stops. Like Danny Boyle is just trying

(01:08:42):
to make another movie.

Speaker 4 (01:08:45):
But he has to do it in the franchise because
nobody will give him money for any of them.

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):
Exactly. Yeah, that is exactly it, and he really does
couch it too because he wants to make He wants
to make a couple of these, so he does it.
So he has a deal with They shot the first
and the second back to back. He shot the first
one and then Nia da Costa, who directed The New

(01:09:10):
Candyman Only one time, I'll say it. And The Marvels,
which is a good movie that didn't make any money
though it was very good. It was it was good.
I liked it. It was totally enjoyable and she's a
fantastic filmmaker. Is directing twenty eight years Later The Bone Temple,
which is something that is introduced in the first movie.

(01:09:32):
So the twenty eight years Later is the best in
the franchise, and it's probably, for my money, the best
movie of twenty twenty five so far. There are a
ton of movies that I haven't seen Eddington and show
like that that people really like. It's just like it's

(01:09:52):
this crazy meditation about aging and like generational passage and
masculinity and fatherhood and motherhood and what it means to
be a kid. It's not it's not dealing with any

(01:10:12):
of the type of things that twenty eight Days Later
is dealing with because in that movie, it's like rage
is the central thematic. Like at by the end, Killian
Murphy has his shirt off and he's like infected with
this with the rage against the human beings that the
Rage monsters have because they have this virus, and it's

(01:10:33):
like this whole sort of parallelism that they're building into
this incisive critique about anger. This movie, they have already
populated this island and they exist there. There are alphas
who are huge that lead packs of smaller Rage monsters.
They're also like slow and lows who are much larger

(01:10:56):
ones who sort of lumber around. So they've like created
and and evolved into these new different types. But what
it's really about is Aaron Taylor Johnson and J. D.
Comer have a kid. The kid is the main character
of the movie, which is hidden in a lot of
the marketing because kid kid main characters are no good.

(01:11:18):
Danny Boyle is like the only one of the only
people who could direct a kid to give like a
truly fantastic performance, and in that movie, that kid delivers
a gut wrenching performance. At the end of the movie,
I absolutely wept and it was all because of like
the emotionality of his performance. He's he's a great actor,
but if he's in a movie that Danny Boyle doesn't direct,

(01:11:40):
we'll find out if he's a really good actor. But yeah,
it's just it's it's incredible. It's like the first time
I've never I've that I've ever not hated Aaron Taylor Johnson.
He's really good in this movie. And it's like in
this movie because it's so funny that the Bond rumors
circulating in this movie, he plays like the absolute like

(01:12:05):
like the the the the the bizarro Bond, Like this
is like the character who is the least Bond of
all Bond and it is the best thing he's ever done.
And if he does become James Bond, it'll be the
worst career decision he ever made because he's not good
at it.

Speaker 4 (01:12:24):
There's something to himself in this like wild man persona instead. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:12:30):
Yeah, he's just like a dirty like like a dirty woodsman,
bad father, super flawed and like he's the dad of
the kid in kick Ass. Essentially is kind of what
he's graduated into into becoming. And it's so interesting those

(01:12:53):
those two sides of his his his career. Now he's grown.
He's actually our age, so now he's grown to be
in his mid thirties and he's really trying to find himself.
He's done a bunch of movies where he's so super
annoying and pretty much everybody hates Hibody keeps getting work
and nobody knows why. And I think Danny Boyle tapped

(01:13:14):
into the essence of what makes him an interesting guy,
which is that he's annoying and flawed and people do
like to kind of hate him, and in this movie
you do. Because he has this wife and Jody Comber,
who's clearly sick, clearly dying. He's keeping it from his kid,
and his kid stalks away with her in the middle

(01:13:38):
of the night onto the island with the people because
he hears that there's a doctor there. And so it's
this strange thing where Jody Comber's showing some signs of
like dementia or some kind of memory loss, something's wrong
with her brain. So it's her this kid who's twelve
years old, who's established in his first outing with Aaron

(01:13:59):
Taylor John and his dad is really bad at hunting
and and shit like that, and he's driven by this
the intense desire to heal his mother, and so there
are it's this like it's that great thing that he
that dating Boyle is able to do where there's so
much tension because they are so vulnerable and what they're

(01:14:22):
and what he's trying to do. This kid is so relatable,
like if you have one parent who you really love,
then you relate to this kid of like, he has
this realization that his mom is dying and this is
the only this is the only shred of a possibility

(01:14:43):
for him to potentially save her life. And then just
like that journey is is the crux of the movie,
and it's it's fantastic And as I'm talking about it
doesn't sound like a fucking zombie.

Speaker 4 (01:14:56):
Movie, no, which is often with the best bombie movies
or why.

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's this totally different thing. I think
if Danny Boyle had his brothers, he would remove the
zombies and just make him like animals or like anything
else that's like spooky in the forest. But because he's
trying to get out of director jail, he's like, yeah,
we're continuing the the story.

Speaker 4 (01:15:23):
First.

Speaker 1 (01:15:23):
Yeah, first of all, let it be was not a
bad movie.

Speaker 4 (01:15:31):
That I think perhaps we're following on different sides of things.
This is just bad spectrum on that one.

Speaker 2 (01:15:39):
I guess. Uh anyway, sorry, so so so let it
Be was not a bad movie. And that was the
documentary that Peter Jackson did about the Beatles. Yesterday was
a horrible movie. And that was the movie that Danny
Boyle directed where everybody forgot the Beatles except one guy.

Speaker 1 (01:15:58):
Okay, I thought I was remembering it because like I thought,
you said let it be earlier, and I was like,
that movie was actually what do you mean they forgot
the whole What I.

Speaker 4 (01:16:08):
Was like documentary, but that remembering the Beatles?

Speaker 2 (01:16:10):
Right, oh no.

Speaker 4 (01:16:12):
At the end of Yesterday, the guy has to show
let it Be to everybody else.

Speaker 2 (01:16:15):
Right, let it be? Was that Peter Jackson found all
this like crazy footage of them movies? Yeah, yeah, that's incredible. Yesterday.
I have heard people defend Yesterday and and them being like,
the premise is goofy, and the way people talk about
it is tarnished. The reputation is actually better than okay,

(01:16:38):
and if that's your opinion, that's fine. The movies the
premise of the movie is so crazy and the fact
that Danny Boyle did it is embarrassing and he has
lost all of his clout in Hollywood and he knows that,
and that's why he returned to the twenty eight franchise

(01:17:00):
to make a movie that like, the zombies are not
in the movie that much. It's it's really weird. It's
a really weird move and a really smart move, and
it's a really great movie. So there's also this like
maybe cause and maybe Teddy, you're more tapped into British culture.

(01:17:25):
Apparently there's so many allusions to British culture around the
time when like basically the Danny Boyle and Alice Garland
made the movie, so that every cultural reference stops at
a certain.

Speaker 4 (01:17:38):
Point, because culture ends when the apocalypse happens.

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):
Yeah, and so there's like this really I can't remember
exactly what it was, but there's like this really like
mister Rogers esque figure who this like gang models himself after,
who was then revealed to you pedophile. Oh yeah, but

(01:18:04):
that didn't happen until like twenty twenty two or something,
so like that never happened.

Speaker 4 (01:18:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:11):
Yeah, And apparently there's like a bunch of shit like
that that that's in the movie where it's just like
subtle nods to British culture and everything is like very
strictly adherent to like the world ended in twenty or
Britain ended in twenty twenty two. Culture didn't move past that.
Every reference, every song is within that time period.

Speaker 4 (01:18:36):
Jimmy Saville, Yeah, that guy.

Speaker 1 (01:18:39):
Yeah, Severe with the with the bowl cut.

Speaker 4 (01:18:42):
Uh Yeah, Blonde Bob and Yep, yep, yep, yep. That's
really point.

Speaker 2 (01:18:48):
Yeah, they played the Tellytubbies at the beginning of the movie.
Is just tinky winky. It was like, yo, I didn't
even know this shit was British dog. That's cool.

Speaker 4 (01:19:00):
That's so interesting you're saying about Aaron Tyler Johnson because
we were just talking a couple of weeks ago about
Kyle Gollner and him like breaking out of that mold
of his comps, Aaron Taylor Johnson being one of them
by finding this like crazy bearded, you know, Ratty performances.
So I guess h ATJ's catching up with him.

Speaker 2 (01:19:19):
That's cool.

Speaker 4 (01:19:20):
Good for him.

Speaker 2 (01:19:22):
Yeah, So I would I would wreck that, but I
would also I would also recommend, like you could watch
twenty eight week years later without watching the other two
but twenty eight Days is such a masterpiece. Twenty eight
Weeks I would skip. I mean, that movie was totally fine.
There's like some cool stuff where Jeremy Renner plays like
a sniper and it's like sniping zombies, which is kind
of cool, but like it's it's it's that, it's it's

(01:19:45):
that cringey thing of like, and then they found a
cure and a woman like al for sure.

Speaker 4 (01:19:54):
Well, I did not expect this to be a good transition.
But in terms of uh, movies about aging and parenthood
and generational uh drift and sad kids, I would wreck
secondhand Lions just from two thousand and three. Uh, it's

(01:20:15):
so cute, it's really good. It's we we finished Outicon,
we're exhausted, and we're like looking for a movie to
watch the next day, and we're like, maybe we should
watch Grave Grave of the Fireflies. Like, no, not ready
for this. Well, I saw the trailer for this movie
randomly once. It's written and directed by the guy who
did The Iron Giant, and it is a similar kind

(01:20:37):
of like tugs at the heart strings. It's this classic
kind of American tall Tales. It feels a little bit
like the princess bride, and it's like storytelling and leaning
in on kind of adventure novel tropes. But basically, Haley
Joel Osmond gets dropped off with these two uncles he

(01:20:57):
doesn't know, Texas brothers who had disappeared for forty years
are now living on this farm and are crotchety old
men and have a ton of money and nobody's really
sure why. And there's a bunch of like conspiracies and
mystery around them, and it's Michael Caine and Robert Duvall playing.

(01:21:18):
Is like, if Sam and Dean ever got a chance
to retire together, this is the kind of nonsense they'd
be doing, sitting on the porch shooting a traveling salesman.
So it's got this real. It's very sweet and very
kind and also a really good meditation on like found

(01:21:39):
family and so super cute movie. I highly recommend it. Goofy,
but not to the point of being like cartoonishly annoying.
It's guy walks that line really well. Yeah, great performance.

Speaker 1 (01:21:57):
In the middle. It is almost a little muchismo until
he adds in how sad parts of it make him
where You're like, oh, that's not him being macho. He's
just depressed.

Speaker 4 (01:22:09):
Yes, absolutely, it's this really interesting like toxic masculinity and
also just like when it means to be really depressed dude,
and like how do you figure that out? So yes,
highly recommend, especially if you are as we are, I
think going through you know, a certain kind of midlife crisis.

(01:22:31):
We're worth watching for sure. And again, a child protagonist
who isn't super annoying Hili Joel Osmond crushes it. It's
similar like trying to figure out independence, has a really
fracticus relationship with his mom, is learning to navigate how
to be around these toxic old dudes, and they're learning

(01:22:52):
to navigate how to like open up and be less
toxic in the process. And yeah, really good.

Speaker 2 (01:22:59):
This is like one of those types of movies that
I would I would have loved to have had my
dad like, let us watch There were so many movies
like that where he didn't like I remember we watched
Babe and he was so bored that we never got
to see Babe Pig in the City. He was like,

(01:23:20):
Stuart little fucking sucks. We're gonna watch The Matrix reloaded
or whatever. Like these kinds of movies I never saw
as a kid, I never saw the like the Disney
classic movies Princeville. Always is so shocked when I say
that shit where like I've never seen like The Little
Mermaid and shit. But it's like it's weird.

Speaker 4 (01:23:40):
The weird thing is this movie specifically, like has enough
stuff aimed at your dad? He probably like it wouldn't
give it a chance, which is the same experience I
had not seen was growing up.

Speaker 2 (01:23:55):
That's cool, yeah, or for my.

Speaker 1 (01:24:02):
Sticking with back on my bullshit. When it comes to cooking,
this is a apple and panada. The idea is you
there are a couple. It's very similar to most hand pies.
You make two important changes. Instead of pie crust, you're
using puff pastry, and instead of caramel you are using

(01:24:27):
buch A similar preparation with your Granny Smith is preferred,
but you can use whichever apples you want. Toss that
with lemon juice and a little bit of nutmeg. Then
in prepared but condensed milk, take off the wrapper, put

(01:24:47):
it in boiling water and wait for a bit and
then it becomes dulce de leche. Put that in with
your tossed apples into a puff pastry and cut them
to your desired hand pie slash and panadah desired shape
and size. Pop that in the oven with a quick

(01:25:11):
wash of a low smoke point oil can be whatever
you want and dust with cinnamon and nutmeg.

Speaker 4 (01:25:19):
That sounds amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:25:21):
That sounds really good. Don't say the lecha is like
underrated good down.

Speaker 1 (01:25:33):
Maybe and you don't have to do much besides just
get a bunch of contensed sweet and condensed milk.

Speaker 2 (01:25:40):
That is true. Yeah, we were also thinking about like
a cake, like there's leches, which is like soft.

Speaker 1 (01:25:48):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:25:51):
That weird thing about her, she's she's getting into hot
food now. She used to like cold food and hot
food and I don't understand why, but she was doing
this thing where she kept slapping us yesterday while we're
trying to feed her dinner, and like, what the what's

(01:26:12):
going on? And I was like, let me just heat
this up again, because she was loving at the beginning
and now this diva needs it to be at a
certain temp.

Speaker 4 (01:26:25):
For her to eat it, which is like invest in
that warming plate to keep it right temperature.

Speaker 2 (01:26:34):
For which is why we were like, maybe we should
do like a hot food. Maybe we should give her
pizza as her first, like little thing because like if
we give her ice cream, is she gonna be like
it's over it, spit it out and be like could
you heat this up?

Speaker 1 (01:26:51):
Please? Ice cream a little much for her first?

Speaker 4 (01:26:56):
Maybe cool it on the baked Alaska. Uh, that's funny.
Pizza is tough though, because it like doesn't maintain a
consistent temperature for very long. You gotta like really get
in there.

Speaker 2 (01:27:08):
Yeah yeah, but I but I suspect as soon as
she gets that salt hit, she's gonna get in there.

Speaker 4 (01:27:14):
Yeah for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:27:16):
Because that's the other thing that we haven't been able
to do is salt her food, because oh wow.

Speaker 4 (01:27:22):
That's gonna like open a whole new dimension.

Speaker 2 (01:27:26):
Yeah, well, because she's finally gonna be able to really
taste the food, Like the salt brings out the taste
of like the good taste of the butter and the
eggs and shiit like it totally transforms everything. But yeah,
that's it. Just gonna do it. You gotta make a
couple of them bad boys and watch some movies about

(01:27:46):
some some old people just dying, which I don't think
happens maybe in either movie.

Speaker 4 (01:27:57):
I mean spoilers for second analys, Yes, I mean it.

Speaker 2 (01:28:01):
Did sound like that's where it was going. Well, that'll
do it for this episode of It's just as bad.
We'll see on the next one. Bye.

Speaker 3 (01:28:12):
It's just a.

Speaker 6 (01:28:18):
It's like, Oh, Pirates brought your brain, Robin Kneale's no
joking opening your mind with the probust, so you woke
and hit Hydra Halen Hares had for a time, for
a head of reasons, for more than with the Soldiers,
with the Men for all seasons.

Speaker 2 (01:28:28):
Listen closely while.

Speaker 6 (01:28:29):
We share our expert teas and catolic comics culture. Dean
streetuition to the multiversity. It's like good teaching, perfect balance.
When we snap it, benit gens into your ears, does
the shoulders when we speak Purple Men versuasive speech for
Randy Savage Dadmortal technique