 But I will not be recording any metadata. Only regular data. But that metadata, we need it. No, we don't, apparently. We specifically do not, based on all the evidence we have. What does it do? Nothing. Maybe it does do something. Someday we'll find out there's some fatal flaw in the audio that we couldn't detect. One day your hard drive is just broken. It's breaking your hard drive somehow, like the old ogre. Mm-hmm. All right. Click on this. It's Tuesday, January 12th, 2021. I'm rim. I'm Scott. And this is Geek Nights. Tonight, we are talking about nerds online. So whatever fuckery I was up to over the weekend doesn't really matter, because if you're paying attention, we did do a show last week toward the end of the week because there was a literal coup in the United States, or at least an attempted coup. There have been many things that you could argue were coups. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But I think this one was the biggest one to date. This is the most clearly visible, right? It's like, you know, sometimes there's a thing where it's like it definitely happened, but it's still like an idea, right? It's just, you know. It never got to the point of like the MAGA judge literally stormed the capital and tried to object that you cannot deny, right? The physical undeniable manifestation of the things. You can't just be like, oh, words, words, words. There are already truthers saying it didn't happen. A lot of them. Sure there are. Yeah, OK. The people said the moon landing didn't happen too. Whatever. You know, there's always going to be that person. You can't do anything about that. Yeah. And there are way smarter and more informed people to like learn about this from than us. But the reason we bring it up now is that this is not something you can ignore. Like this is not something you can say, oh, I just want to go do something with video games and escape from this. Because I don't think anybody listening to Geek Nights is ignoring. If somehow someone's like that and listening to this, like I don't know what you were listening to for the last 15 years, like when I kicked that Gamer Gator out of our YouTube channel a while ago. Yeah, if you participated in that event in any way whatsoever, you are banned from all Geek Nights forever. Oh yeah, you're just like a disgraceful human being. I guess I can't stop you from listening to Geek Nights. I would if I could. I would if I could. Like if you were there. No, if you were there, let us know. Because we'd really like to call the FBI on you. That's for sure. Unless you were part of one of the few people not participating, but just happening to be there, right? There were journalists who were there. Yeah. Congress people who were there. There was that one cop who led the violent mob away from the Senate long enough for them to lock it. Yeah, maybe. I'm still not 100% sure on that story. But clearly, that cop was actually trying to do something and not taking selfies, right? So. Yep. I saw a selfie guy got in trouble finally. So the FBI is starting to move. Definitely saw a video of at least one cop actually beating up a white person. So you're still a bad cop. You're not supposed to beat up anybody. But if they're with the problem is, yeah, the problem is they beat up people. They shouldn't beat up. But then the one time there is a literal violent insurrection. They're like, you know what? Now we're just going to hang back mostly. We're going to let this happen. Yeah, she's not beat up anybody, but you should also not let anyone in the building. Yeah, you can do both. That's your job. But just the thing to bear in mind, and we'll move on to our gaming stuff tonight, this wasn't a failed coup attempt. This is an ongoing coup attempt. Like this is not over or resolved. Well, it's been ongoing. It's been ongoing for about four years, but it's starting to culminate. It's sort of like how people are like, you know, Vietnam War was just part of the Cold War. Right? So it's like the coup is like ongoing. And this was just sort of like a Vietnam War in the larger coup situation. Yep. So stay informed. And more importantly, stay safe because there are very credible threats against literally every state capital in America on Inauguration Day. Like there's to quote one police officer that we both know, Chief Wiggum. This is going to get worse before it gets better. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's what we said before and it's gotten worse. Yeah, we're not sure if it's going to get better yet. It might get worse for a while. Like in past times, we said, this is going to get worse and it's gotten worse. And we're saying it's going to get worse still. We're not we have not reached yet. The point at which we can say the betterness is happening. Right? It's like we have a COVID vaccine out, for example. Another two catastrophes were suffering at once. You know, that technology led to a potential likely vaccine for both MS and HIV. And that didn't even make the news. No. But the point is that I'm trying to make is that if you go to Google and you look at the COVID numbers, right, even though the vaccine is starting to be distributed to people who, you know, in places, a mountain is the highest it's been. Yep. You look at the little graph and it's like, you know, the graph says April 4th, right? There's a first mountain and this first mountain on April 4th, at least for New York. Is this New York? I don't know when this is or I guess it's New York, because that's where I am. It says, yeah, like 12,000 something cases. And that was when it was horrifying and there was like nobody was going outside at all. Yep. Like in New York, you just hear sirens in the distance and the streets were just empty. And that was when the graph was at 12,000. So that mountain went down to like a really low kind of rumble, right? Like it wasn't zero, but it sort of flattened out into like the hundreds up from down from 12,000 something, right? You know, May, July, September and then in November, it started to go up again and it's now January and it's not a 12,000. It's almost 20,000. Yep. And you can see this very clearly. Like the Y is pretty simple. Like schools are open, restaurants are open, driving to go like hike in the wilderness. We went out of New York City through New Jersey. And you know what I saw all along those roads, packed restaurants. Well, that's the thing. I'm still staying at home as if it was still, you know, as still the times with the sirens. Yeah, it's been siren time since, you know, we got home from Pax East and hasn't stopped. I'd recommend you do the same. Yep. Don't don't go anywhere unless you need to. And particularly don't go into other buildings. Don't go to a restaurant. Don't visit your family. Like what the hell? Even if I get two vaccines and then time passes and I'm fine and such, I'm not going outside until this big mountain graph goes way down lower than the low rumble of the summer. Like, you know, it's got to go down, down. Yeah. It's got to look like the measles graph, right? Yeah, it's going to be tough, though, because the vaccine is not rolling out very quickly for a lot of reasons in America. I'm saying it's like you think about it like I have a measles vaccine. There are still people out there with measles, though. It's not eliminated, right? But I still go outside without worrying about measles. I need to reach that sort of level where like I have a covid vaccine, but the number of covid cases out there is, you know, around the number of like measles cases, right? And I'm not even though there's people out there who have it, I'm not going to be I can go outside without worrying about getting it, right? And then I'll go outside again. Yeah, I think the real trouble is going to be just how many people are going to refuse that vaccine and how we deal with that situation. Then they're not allowed to do anything. You can say you can't go to you can't come to an office to work. You have to work from home or not work. You have to you can't come into a play. You know, just like you're just banned from from places. You can't go. No, can't come to this football game. No, can't come in. Yeah. I mean, that's the reasonable and prudent thing to do. But that's not what's going to happen. Can't go. You know, America rolls. America will never do something like that. Can't come past the velvet rope, not allowed. I sadly think what's actually going to happen is all the people who refuse that vaccine are going to slowly just get covid long after everyone else is vaccinated because they'll refuse and no laws will be passed to force them. We'll see. All right. In speaking of things that are going to get worse before they get better. So, Twitch, if you're not familiar with the culture of Twitch, there's this little box where people can type words and it's just a shit storm of chaos on popular Twitch streams. Like, yeah, really, it is like different levels, right? So it's like it's the same stupid box. But if you're on a really unpopular stream, right? Like, nobody's there. You can have like this one on one conversation with the person streaming if they're paying attention to the box. And sometimes that's a really good thing. And sometimes it's a really bad thing. If there's a few people in there, you can actually get like a little community going. Yeah. If you and that go at that few actually goes up to like, you know, hundreds, right? You can have hundreds of people in there and actually, you know, like, depending on what game it is and what the kind of people are in that chat, right? Like, you know, if they're playing, you know, cyberpunk, whatever, a few hundred people in the chat is probably not going to go anywhere. Great. Just based on the kind of community of people who are into that game. But if you were to watch, you know, someone doing Mario speedruns, right? It's like the chat is going to be, you know, better, probably than the cyberpunk one. Yeah. But the thing that will happen, the thing that will usually happen is people will say words and other people will read those specific words. Yeah. Above a certain point, which is very different. Yeah. If you get up to the thousands of people in the chat, the big ones that or depending on what it is that's being watched, right? On the stream, it's just this flood of emojis and random words that no one can read and you can type something and it will contribute to the flood of emojis and random words. And I don't even know what the purpose of it is at that point. Yeah. It's like this weird background rumble. It's not conversation. It's more like the cheering at a concert. You just hear, ah, right? It's not it's not talking. I do think in the long run, like there will be a future where people will look like older, like we will. There'll be a time in Geek Nights future where we'll look back and talk about like, yeah, I remember that weird era when people would like type into that box on Twitch. Well, it's like if you go to a if you're at a baseball game, right? You know, you yell at the players. Yeah, you bump, right? And that's the what is the if you're imagine if you're a player in a baseball, a major league baseball game and it's the stadium is full, right? What do you hear on there? Right, you might hear. You might hear some individual words poking out here. And they're all that's what the Twitch chat becomes when it's a lot of people is that sort of stadium noise and you're either one voice in the crowd of noise or you're the streamer hearing the noise. Yep. So in that context, many of you older people might not be familiar with the concept of poggers or the pog champ, which was one of the default emoji because Twitch has got the whole thing with emojis like Discord does. But one of the emojis happened to just be this dude who's a super piece of shit. By the way, we'll get back to that. Ryan Gutex Gutierrez and basically, you know, I don't know if people know the history of Twitch, but there was a site just in TV around the mid 2000s, early 2000-ish era, right? When Geek Nights started around that time. Yeah. We did a live stream way back then. This dude, Justin, was just like streaming himself, right? And he made a website just in TV. And then eventually they sort of, you know, when Justin TV became like a thing, they said, hey, let's like take our exact same website and put it on a run the same technology to let people live stream on another domain, Twitch TV. And it'll be basically the same kind of thing that you have, because Justin TV was focused on streaming yourself, right? Which was hard to do in that time. Oh, God, I remember what we had, like the ridiculous shit we set up to do our like live stream, which we did on you stream, which is a site that I think is dead now or might still be alive, but no one's using it. Yeah. Anyway, we had those halogen lights on the floor. I was worried they're going to set the carpet on fire. Yeah. Twitch was basically just like, hey, it's the Justin TV technology stack only gaming focused. And those original emojis sort of come from those early times in the mid late 2000s. They're like Greek legends at this point. Like most people use and don't really know. That involved in that community at that time were then used to make those emojis, right? As sort of like the inside jokes of that original community. And then because all of the communities that came in to basically displace the original, the original Twitch community is basically dead, right? It's gone. It got displaced by many, many, many other communities that collectively make up the new Twitch community. But they inherited those, you know, images as sort of like relics, like archaeologists digging up these emojis, right? And giving them new meaning, right? Because the people who signed the Twitch, they don't know anything about that original community, right? All they see are those emojis and they know what podcast they see that face. They know it's called PogChamp and they learn from other people how to use it and what it means. And the way it works, the person, you know, we'd go back to the sports stadium analogy. You know, you're in an arena and it's just like the roar of the crowd. But every now and then, like, let's go, right? Like whatever team it is, like a chancell start. And that cuts above the noise a little bit. And there's this moment where like you can, everyone can hear this. That's kind of what these emojis do, like the Pogs will appear. Like you'll see the same emoji just flooding the chat, right? Like it's a pile of the same one. Yeah, that's a that's like the one doing the wave. So the PogChamp emoji basically has been that for a while. And the PogChamp emoji is basically like, you know, it's like this guy with his lips out like, whoa, like it does not mean I support Brian Gutex, the Street Fighter player from ancient times. It just means it's his face, right? With his lips out like he's surprised or amazed at something like way awesome. Like, whoa. So like, you know, if someone does something awesome, you'd be like, whoa, PogChamp, that's all right. That's the meaning of it, right? So turns out if you're watching a streamer and they like beat a boss in an amazing way or something, you would you would hammer like 10 PogChamp emojis and press enter. Yep. So basically when the insurrectionists, Republicans, stormed the capital, Gutex said some things encouraging to the rioters and basically called for more violence. Yes. So he was already a known piece of shit person, right? This wasn't new. He has gone down the hole. It was not a secret amongst people, right? That he was not a good individual. But, you know, as with many things, right? There are certain people who tolerate too much intolerance and, you know, this the latest physical coup, right, was a camel straw for many of those people. And so, you know, many companies, you know, capitalist corporations that, you know, run the world and have more power than they should. But we're lucky in this case that they have, well, lucky and unlucky, right? The fact that they have so much power has allowed those people to carry on for so long, but the fact that they have the power has allowed them to finally, you know, silence those people or a deep platform, right? So at first, which was like, we're removing the PogChamp emote and that was fine. But they actually had a cool idea, but this is where I get back into. It's going to get worse before it gets better. And like they were trying to figure out, like, do we just, we want to have an emote that does that same function? Let's control our platform a little bit. Some people talked about making the PogChamp just be a different face or a different thing. But how could we choose, like, just, you know, a new thing to replace, right? It's like, it would have to be perfect, right? And how could you, on short notice, come up with, like, you know, this perfect replacement for a thing? Twitch wouldn't be able to figure that out on their own. You can't be like, hello, children, this is the new thing to be hype about. Whatever you choose to be so forced and unorganic. Unless it had just been poochy, I think that might have been perfect. The only way, I think maybe the only time in recent memory that I've seen someone try to force a thing and have it work is gritty the mascot. It's, oh, yeah, gritty. That went from there was like a four hour window when the whole world said, what the fuck is that? That is terrible. And that immediately turned into this is the most important thing in the history of hockey. Right. They tried to make the city of Philadelphia. Right. You know, they tried to force it. And then somehow the people adopted it and repaired it, right? Yeah, to do that on purpose, right? Is so such a difficult, creative task, right? Like, you know, Van Gogh can't do that. Even if you get the Michelangelo can't do it. It's so hard. So they came up with a clever idea. Well, Sean, Sean Plot tweeted at them and said, this is like, which is like, this is what caused it. Yo, Twitch suggestion for PogChamp, create a database of streamer faces. Whatever someone types PogChamp, display one of those at random. Like that is a good idea. It is a good idea. And Twitch was like, you know what? Fuck it. Yeah. Now, of course, Twitch knows that gamers exist. So they weren't they couldn't just make it like random people's faces without their consent or anything. Like that wouldn't be people who have put themselves, you know, up for this, right? You need to even they even had like a lawsuit with the original guy. They had to give him some money because they're like, hey, you're using my likeness, you know, whatever. Right. Yeah. So what they did is they said, hey, here's what we're going to do. We're going to have one. We're going to have like PogChamp of the day. Every day we'll find someone who agrees to it and we'll get their face and we'll make. So rim will be PogChamp today. And every time someone does PogChamp today, they'll see rims face. And then for 24 hours, it'll be rims face. And at the end of the 24 hours, it'll suddenly switch to someone else's face so we can highlight individual people, right? If it's all random, you don't really get that sort of promotional aspect, right? It's just sort of like, you know, what's it going to be? Who is that person? I don't know who that is, right? But by making it one person a day, it becomes more like the Google Doodle, which is a very good thing. Actually, maybe the best thing Google does. Yeah. It's not evil in any way. It's not evil in any way, right? It's a lot like the Google Doodle. Who's PogChamp today? Let's learn about this streamer. We want to highlight and promote our, you know, our people that make our platform money, right? Today we're going to highlight, you know, Andy, the Lord of the Rings player, or we'll highlight, you know, Abco, the DJ, you know, pick someone different every day who wants to do it. Now, even better, Twitch was like, you know what? For the first one, they didn't just pick a white dude. Yeah. Well, I mean, you couldn't pick a white dude. Not in 2020. No, no. You can have a white dude on there eventually. But if you start with a white dude, that's like common sense. That is like, read the room and you cannot do a white dude. I'm like, you know, like month two, you can start doing a white dude. Right. It's like, come on. Yeah. So they pick critical bard. Awesome dude, like stand up individual. Like I got nothing bad to say about a critical bard. I like me a critical bard. You know, I could, if I was ranking, you know, Twitch people, critical bard would be relatively highly ranked. Because I mean, I like, I watch streams after the fact on YouTube. I basically never, ever watch Twitch, like to be honest, like ever. You know, I have to. Yeah, I just don't like, I don't really follow any streamers except via like topics. But anyway, so critical bar, cool. Like this is awesome. People are into it. Critical Bard was down with it. Yep. Critics, like they got the photo right. Like the icon looked perfect. Like they even captured like the poggishness of the poggers. The problem was critical bard is black and that is not a problem. Yes. It is still Twitch. These are still gamers. The torrents of racist bullshit that came his way was legendary in how awful it was like a holy shit. Did this get bad fast? I've seen this. Oh, gamers are going to get super racist on Twitch. Oh, Lord. Yeah. Who could have seen this coming? I could have seen this coming. I saw this coming. I knew this is coming. Yeah. Now, Captain obvious knew this was coming. Now, Twitch. So did Captain hindsight. They did a tag team. Someone in Twitch had to have seen this coming. But why didn't Twitch like plan to do something about this? Like you had to do is get like a moderator into the critical bards channel. Be like, OK, listen, critical bard, we know you're going to get harassed to hell today because now all these pieces like here is our team. It's like know who you are who didn't know who you were before. It's just like you become president. You get the secret service. You become PogChamp. You get the Twitch service. Like they're going to like they got your back. All these people who didn't know who you were yesterday know who you are today. They know your face and they're coming. And about 40 percent of them are super racist. Yes, some of them are good people and are going to grow your audience, but some of them are super racist. Let's put an army of moderators on you for a little while to ban all those people from Twitch permanently. Yeah, more importantly, that is the thing. Twitch had to like they should have been ready to actually ban the people who reacted to this poorly. That would not be hard. Twitch really walked too thin of a line by not by trying to not like be aggressive with their ban hammers in this situation. Like you need to aggressively pursue racist behavior on your platforms as hard as possible, especially actually, you know, you know, with critical Bards permission, this could have been a good honeypots. I was about to say a sting operation. Yeah, it could have been, you know, like, you know, as long as, you know, the critical Bards was willing to be the bait. You don't want to, you know, victimize someone for the sake of this clothing, right? That's way wrong, but it could have been played like that. Like, ha, ha, ha. Now we can find out how the bad people are and ban them. But no, they didn't really do that, did they? Nope. Now, critical bar took it all in pretty good stride and said, like, you can roll a link to the thread where he talks about it, but his official statement, like, kind of as this started to wind down was with one hour left, this is all I can say. I hope future PogChamps are not just prepared for kickback, but for the ways these folks will twist and say anything you say to make you look like a villain in their privileged story. Especially if you were marginalized, just be careful. The idea of a rotating community PogChamp was an amazing idea. And when I was asked, I hopped out immediately because I knew what it could mean. I expected racism. I didn't expect the chaos that followed. But know that your day will be hard and you're a PogChamp for a reason. That's true. So follow this space, but seriously, if you use Twitch, report people who say race is shit if you see them. And press your Twitch to take more aggressive action in these instances. They have the power to do it. We know they do. Every day that they don't, they're choosing not to. Think of it sort of like we said, the noise of Twitch is like the crowd at the stadium. So when we're safe to go to stadiums again, you got to think of it the same way. If some racist guys yelling in the next section over, racial slurs at the not white player on one of the teams, you got to text the security at the stadium so they come and kick that guy's ass out. Yep, they'll show up. They'll do it. Twitch needs to do the same. And you need to lean on Twitch to do this kind of thing. But the security is watching with their cameras, but they can't hear everyone at the stadium. It's too much, right? You got to help out a little bit, even if there's mods in there. You can't see there's a flood, right? So in some other news, there's going to be a new Indiana Jones game like Bethesda announced this. We don't know anything like we know almost nothing about it, except it's going to be a completely original title. Yes, Indiana Jones games have a long history in the tabletop RPG and the point and click adventure space. And then there's semi-Indiana Jones games like pitfall, which is that's Indiana Jones. Come on, right? Nobody's there's that arcade game that is not actually good. Do not try to pretend otherwise. Super pitfall is not Indiana Jones. Only regular pitfall. Well, super pitfall is a travesty. Yeah. And then you've got ones like Spelunky, which are a little bit of Indiana Jones, right? Anyway, these games have, you know, it's not like other intellectual properties where the games are sort of all hit or all miss. It's a really mixed bag of all sorts of different stuff, right, you know, ranging from like LucasArts stuff to. I mean, Star Wars games are the same way. Like take all the Star Wars games that have been made, and they are all over the place. There's a lot more Star Wars games than Indiana Jones games. There are. There's also the Diana Jones award, right? That's infamous. But anyway, so this new game we know made by Bethesda is coming from the people who have made the recent, quite good, Wolfenstein games. And what does that have in common with Indiana Jones games? They're Nazi killing games. Yep. These are the Nazi killing video game experts. But also the fact that it's not just, oh, the Nazis are killed in these games and the Nazis are the enemy. There's social media and the statements they make in public about their games are very clear about whether or not they are pro or anti-Nazi. I just feel really interesting that it's like, all right, we need someone to make an Indiana Jones game. Let's pick the people who make the shoot Nazi game. I mean, the best Indiana Jones is, right? Indiana Jones, the best part about Indiana Jones is that he's fighting Nazis. Right. It's like they could have picked any other game studio they wanted. They could have been like. Those two movies are fantastic. All two of them. All two. All 2.1. Yeah. There's like one scene in the second one that's OK. But so the other thing that's interesting about this, but I don't think younger people will even notice. Because younger people, LucasArts doesn't mean anything to young people, I don't think. But LucasArts meant a lot to me. They're not releasing this under like the LucasArts label. The title is being made under a something called LucasFilm Games, which was announced yesterday. What they've done is they've sort of revived, you know, thanks to, you know, who owns what these days, Disney owning everything, basically. They have decided to revive. They haven't made a new studio. LucasArts was a studio. Yeah. You know, that made a lot of stuff. A very important studio. Like, someone's got to have made a documentary on it. Just go watch that. Yeah. They made a lot of legendary softwares and other artistic works. But they were dissolved at some point. I remember when they were dissolved, it was a big deal in the news. Everyone was like, no, why, no. So they're reviving this brand. And they're applying this brand to, I assume, video games that are with Lucas-ish properties. Yeah. It's mostly just this. LucasFilm Games sounds a lot like AOL Time Warner. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a lot of movies you go see. And they always say, you know, LucasFilm limited at the start of the movie. Yeah. Basically, if we see from now on, if you see any LucasFilm intellectual property appear in a video game, you're probably going to see, you know, LucasFilm Games at the start of the game as one of the brands that appears. There's no studio behind it. It's just they own in a luxury property, and they want to slap that label on there. If someone comes out with, I don't know, a fucking Willow. Willow's LucasFilm, right? Like, they make a Willow game. Oh, man. The NES game, Willow, was underrated. It's not good, but it was underrated. If they make another Willow game, it'll say LucasFilm. Willow? Oh, yeah, that was right. LucasFilm limited. Yeah. I'm right. OK. So even if, like, this game might not, depending on what this game actually is, it might not be our jam, like, we don't like every game. But American Graffiti, the game, is what you say, Lucas. I am excited about this, like, what will come out of these efforts. We'll see. So in other news about news that made the news again, everyone's talking about Super Mario 3D World plus Bowser's Fury. Yes. I mean, this was announced quite a while ago, but basically what, if you haven't realized, Nintendo knows nobody bought a fucking Wii U. Yeah. Right. And, you know, Nintendo, in terms of re-releasing their old games, has always been, I guess they've always done it, but they've done it slower than some people would like and faster than some people need, right? So someone like me, I'm always like, why do they keep re-releasing this shit? I own all these games. I don't need a fucking Mario Galaxy. I have Mario Galaxy. I'm a Wii, right? Yep. And so does a lot of people because we sold a bunch. So they didn't bother re-releasing Mario Galaxy on the Wii U because everyone had a Wii. It was too soon, right? But when it gets to two, three, four consoles out, it's like, OK, the children today have never played Ocarina of Time. I mean, the Wii was a long, was a long time ago. The N64 was a long time ago. You know, let us re-release Ocarina of Time for the new children. Right. I mean, I've reminded of an anecdote. A situation. Yeah. We got a situation where even though the Wii U was only the previous console, nobody fucking bought one. So all the Nintendo exclusive first-party games that were on the Wii U get and switch re-releases and Bowser's Fury slash Mario 3D Worldland, whatever. It was announced a while ago, but the trailer hit today. And I guess people were having fun with it. Yep. So the trailer is what caused that discussion. And you know what? I'm really looking forward to this. I'll play it because. I was planning to buy it and play it, because obviously I didn't play the original. Yeah, I never had a Wii. You know what? I don't think I've ever seen a Wii U in person. I have seen a Wii U in person, and I touched a Wii U one time. Well, I think I saw one at like a PAX. I've never touched one, though. Not once in my entire life. It's basically a big switch that's not good. Yeah. The switch, I feel like the switch was still like such a groundbreaking piece of hardware that the best you can say about the Wii U is that it was the prototype for the switch. But anyway, things of the day. What do you got? What do I have? So, you know, we love, while we don't necessarily love the Soviet Union itself, as much as we might love democratic socialism, there was no democratic parts of the Soviet Union. That is true. It was just the communism with, you know, anyway. But we do love the artworks of the Soviet Union, right? And at least, if not the message, the aesthetic of their propaganda, architecture, et cetera. Because it just looks cool, right? You know, it just looks cool. And on Geek Nights, we have featured many times the bus stops of the Soviet Union. That was the one I was thinking of. Yeah. Posters of the Soviet Union, all sorts of different Soviet artworks. But of course, you know, a video games of the Soviet Union we featured for sure, right? So here we have animation of the Soviet Union, obvious. But this is an amazing Twitter account that has come and made, you know, occasionally I would see a Soviet animation here or there, and it might get thing of the day or not. In this case, you have a Twitter account, Soviet animation out of context, that is basically taking clips with subtitles when necessary of many, many, many wide variety of Soviet animation and putting those clips on Twitter frequently. Like I'm just getting like one, more than one a day. It's like, there's a lot to see. I don't know where they're getting it all from. Someone must speak Russian because there's subtitling all of it. But yeah, this is like the only source you need for a Soviet animation in the English speaking world unless you want to watch one of these things in full, which I don't think is necessary because I'm here for the aesthetic and none of these things look like they're something I want to watch. I want to see what's up with this one of the polyphemous because it is some key close energy. I think it all has key close energy. Yeah. Cat concert from 1986. If you appreciate animation and Soviet aesthetic, this is the Twitter account for you to follow and is my thing of the day. All right, so we've been playing, as if you listen to Geek Nights Tuesdays, a lot of train games lately, 18XX games. We have like between one and three going at any given time on 18XX games.net. It's weird that as of right now, I have zero active train games. A long 1817 just ended. I didn't win, of course. Scott was in last place. I was not far ahead of him. I got blocked on the first OR. Yeah, whose fault was that? My fault. I was doing fine until evil forces conspired to short my companies into oblivion at the end of the game. But the thing about 18XX games is that while they have a lot of proper nouns around trains from those eras and often one or two financial components that arguably reflect the kinds of things that happened in stock markets in those eras, they don't really map that well to the real history of trains in the world. Like they are not that accurate if you zoom in to any degree except on very specific parts of these games. So what I just watched recently is a whole bunch of documentaries on the train companies that we keep seeing in these games. And I was trying to decide if I wanted to... So there are two videos we can look at that I was just trying to decide if you were to think of the day. One is the New York Central, the NYC, the history of that railway. The other one is a video that's just called The Pennsylvania Railroad. Why? Because the PRR was a case study and failure. So my thing of the day are these two documentaries. So if you ever played an 18XX game and you wanted to know the story of that token that you picked when you IPO'd your company because that was the coolest looking one, you're about to learn a lot of really boring stuff about trains. And it's just free on YouTube. I don't know if that's legal or not, but who cares? I don't think there's a big market for the... There's not like this big black piracy market for train documentaries. In the meta moment, we're still stuck at home. I can't go anywhere. I don't have anything like new. I haven't started continuing to read The Tale of Hanzo yet. No, I got... A Peacross game came out and no one told me about it but I found it and now I'm playing Peacross. That's trouble. Someone in the stream was saying, oh, we should get an 18XX. Okay, we'll get an 18XX game with some listener. We'll make that happen. I will teach anyone how to play 18XX. You just got to come to the Geeknize Discord and I will teach you to play the train game and we can play it together. Yeah, maybe like tomorrow. We'll post it in the Discord. Come to the Geeknize Discord whenever. There's a board game channel in there and you can talk to people and learn how to train. Yeah, otherwise, Virtual Magfest appears to have been canceled so I guess we won't be a part of that and we don't have any online cons lined up for a while yet now. We'll see which online cons actually happen and which ones don't and which ones are safe to go to and which ones aren't. Yep, and we'll see if and when there is a convention in 2021 that is safe to go to in person. Don't think the odds are great. It will be late if it's at all. It will be late in 2021. Yep, I don't think the odds are great in America right now for that but we'll see. Otherwise, like, yeah, we're stuck at home. Like, you can't, nothing new happens. That's why it's so hard to find opening bits. Like, oh, I woke up today and my computer fan is making a little bit more noise than usual. Like, that's the most exciting thing that happens to me. Ooh, exciting. It actually is making a little bit of noise and I don't want to have to deal with it. I might just buy a new fan. The problem is I got to open the case up to figure out it's like this enclosure with a bunch of fans in it. I'll have to, like, open it and, like, stop them all one by one to figure out which one's making the noise. Hmm, but yeah, just, you know, follow us on all of the internet places because we are not shitty. We are not banned from them. So you can follow us on all those places and as we slowly make content that we have not promised to make in any way, shape or form. But we've only hinted. Yeah, stuff that, you know, working on it and it'll be done whenever we feel like working on it. If I get off my lazy ass, who knows? You'll see it. If you're not following us, you're going to miss it. So yeah, it's, it's funny. I realized something this like during the course of this whole quarantine. The thing that lights a fire under us to get a bunch of stuff done in a hurry is always weirdly conventions. But it's not just we get panels done. Like I noticed this pattern, like looking at old Geek Knight stuff. Whether it's a convention deadline will like have to make a panel because we run out of time. We're going to be in a con and like Pax expects us to present the thing we said we'd present. But once that's a real deadline. Yeah. But whenever we have a real deadline, like I just, I think I saw this pattern. We tend to make a bunch of other stuff that is not related to that deadline around the time of that deadline. Like what? Like, well, like I'll make more YouTube videos that are not the Pax panel I'm trying to put together. Like in the month before that Pax panel has to be ready. Well, I don't do that. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just you. Once the seal is broken of like, oh, I got to make something then a bunch of other things just get made. Like it just happens. I mean, I definitely do. When there is a real legitimate deadline, like, yeah, there's a reason the thing has to be done at that time. It can't be a fake deadline though. It can't be like, if I say like, we got to finish this thing by the end of January, like that neither one of us is going to do that. If there's a real deadline, I get it done by the date that needs to get done. But otherwise I get it done whenever I feel like it or never. No, what we could do is we could put $10,000 in escrow and it will like in Bitcoin and it'll be it'll be destroyed on a date if we don't upload a YouTube video of a particular length. Give ourselves a hard deadline. One way to do that would be to announce something. Or we could shit talk and make a thing, make that as a service for other people. And use it to get us to make itself. You know what we just call it? Deadline, but dead is in caps. Deadline.tv. We are hired assassins. You hire them to kill yourself. Hired an assassin to kill you unless you get this thing done on a certain day. It's the go go 13 of do your stream. Yeah, you can't hire it to kill anyone else and you can't do it to get assisted suicide either. That is also the plot of Bulworth sort of. Oh, yeah, you're right. Yeah, I was thinking about watching that movie again. Todd, thinking back to what we talked about at the very beginning of the show, because I still definitely did not understand even half of what I understand about the world now when I saw that. Yeah, like that movie was not perfect, but much like Strange Days and Robocop. I feel like those three movies, Bulworth, Strange Days and Robocop were way ahead of their time and are like deeply like deeply pressing into the literal reality of the year 2020 and 2021. Because it was also the little reality of the years in which they were made. You just didn't realize that. Yep. All right, so Nerds, Nerds is a game that I didn't really notice. I just didn't think about it. And then Scott one day was like, hey, let's play Nerds. And I was like, okay, whatever. It's only like a day or two after it came out. I didn't even know when it came out. You just said, hey, we should blow that January. It came out very, very recently. Okay, it came out January 5th. So the Sektronics game came out January 5th by like January 7th. We were playing it. Exactly. So basically, here's what happened. So Sektronics, if you don't know, they're the ones who make all the cool programming games as well as some others. For example, the Space Cam, the Codex of Electrical Engineering, TIS 100, Shenzhen IO, all right. They've also made the new one, what's it called Mobius Front 80, something 86. Yep, that's the one I got to play. It's like near the top of my queue. Hades kind of knocked it down because Hades has captured me first, but. Sure. Yeah, they make a lot of games in that sort of same vein of programming, strategy, single player-ish PC games. Mobius Front 83, that's the year. And apparently what happened was when they were at their office working, during lunch, they would play this card game called Nerds. Nerds is not a game that I knew, but apparently it's in the bicycle book. It's in the bicycle book. It's like one of those old card games. Yeah, it is. It's an old card game that like everyone that existed for quite a while. I just didn't personally know about it. And I think part of the reason why I never encountered it is because unlike other card games, you actually need an entire 52 card deck per player. And that would make it, you know, rare to be able to play Nerds. You would have to have someone intentionally buy a shit ton of decks and know the game. Now weirdly, I knew about it because people in my family played it, but I've never liked Solitaire at all. Like I never played Microsoft Solitaire. You're talking about, right? I don't like any card solitaires of any kind. OK, because I never have. How about, you know, like the Mahjong tile solitaires? Not at all. I hate Mahjong tile. Well, I think I get it's a, it's a minor. It's not a huge pet peeve like lectern and podium, but people say solitaire and they mean Klondike solitaire. Yeah, like free sell is also Solitaire, right? Pyramid. Solitaire is just a class of single player card games. Solitaire just means single player game. That's all it means, right? Anyway, but yeah, Klondike solitaire, right? I guess Microsoft Solitaire rims not a fan. I mean, I'm not like a huge. I don't think it's bad. It's just I had better things to do like Microsoft Arts. I think everyone has better things to do than to play Klondike Solitaire. I feel like Klondike Solitaire on Windows machines got the most play in the era when most people did not have access to the internet without dialing up somewhere. Pretty much, yeah. It's still on, it should still be on your computer if you have a Windows computer. Anyway, is it like the Microsoft App Store now or something like it's not there? But you can you can you can even get it. It's there. You can even get Microsoft Solitaire. Ah, Solitaire app. It makes a lot of noise if you start it. Yeah, anyway. So what is nerds? Nerds is everybody or up to six people in the case of this game. But I guess there's no reason it couldn't be even more people all playing Klondike Solitaire simultaneously. So you have you have your deck and you have four free piles, right? That all start with a card on one card each. And those are like your free work piles that you can stack things vertically with the alternating colors just like you do in Klondike. And you have this nerds pile which is a set of face down cards from your deck and one of them is face up. And the only thing you can do with the nerds pile is take the top card, the face up card of the nerds pile and put it in a legal spot and then reveal the next card of the nerds pile. And of course, your regular deck, you can draw three and then work with the top card of the three you drew and then draw three, work with the top card and eventually shuffle, right? That's just like Klondike. So you're playing this, you know, solid is Klondike Solitaire ish game. And the difference is that the piles in which you sort of score out to where you start with, you know, you find an ace, you can put it out in those piles and then start scoring to them. Those piles are shared among all players. So you throw your ace of spade, you might have your two of spade getting ready to go as someone else comes in with their two of spade and puts it on your ace of spade and now you got to hold your two of spade until another ace of spade shows up. Now everyone has all four aces in their 52 card deck. So it's guaranteed that eventually, right, you're going to be able to play out. But who's going to play out first is the question. Now the brilliance of this online, this game is that one is free. Like you can just play like this. You don't have to pay anything. They couldn't charge any money for this game, so they don't. Yeah, I feel like they, if they wanted to, they could have charged like a dollar, 50 cents. Maybe. You know what they go and if I were them, the only thing I would do is I would sell cosmetics. I mean, if you have other Zaktronix games that unlocks different. That is true. I saw like you, I think you were, Chris had the Shenzhen deck. I had the TIS 101. Yeah, I don't know in any other Zaktronix games because they're not my jam. Like they're good games, but that's not the kind of game I like. But the magic of this game, like the reason we're saying you should play it is that it's really easy to teach and just like dive in. Like it's a good game to play when you're having that conversation with your friends of what game should we play like the top right corner of the screen. After you open the game as a question mark, you click on that question mark, it brings up a screen with the instructions. It's literally like five sentences and that's all you need to know how to play. Yep. Two instructions. It's actually surprisingly intense. Like you got to move quick. You've got to like be on point. This game is fast. Who you're playing against. Yeah, if you're playing against Scott, you got to be on point. Like I will get nerds when I am surprised at how quickly that happened. But I just only emptied the nerds pile. Don't do anything else. Yeah, sometimes every now and then my nerds pile is just like three face cards in a row. That happens. Yeah, it does happen. There's luck in this. Like there's luck in all solitary card games. But the real magic of this game, like what I love about it is that it's got a ton of style coupled with you can see everyone else's mouse in real time. So that is a genius game choice there, right? Where anyone's mouse cursor is on the screen, you can see it. So when the game starts, it plays this quite long. Yeah, this fanfare that is announcing the game is about to start. And during this time, you can move your mouse around and everyone you can sort of gesture emotionally with this their mouse arrow, right? Now, I didn't know this. No one said anything. So when I was playing with Scott and a bunch of our friends on my laptop, it's just muted by default. Like games are muted just because that. And I didn't know it was playing music. So I just thought for the first couple of games that the game was just really slow to load for some reason. And then Scott started singing and I was like, what, what, what's wrong with you? What's going on? I need the sound on if you, you know, in this game, if you can. All races, no spaces. While you're playing, you see the mouth, you know, you can see where people are thinking about, right? If someone's mouse is like going, people tend to subconsciously move their mouse with their eyes, right? So if you see a mouse arrow, like going across the middle, right, you can sort of tell that person's looking, right? Over there, maybe they got something, you know, maybe you should if they're hovering over this three a heart, maybe then they suddenly the mouse, their arrow disappears, grab your five of heart because they're about to drop a four on it. You can put a five down. Yep. The best moments are when you see some like someone to lay down like a four of hearts and two or three people simultaneously as fast as possible, try to get that next heart over there. Right. Well, I think this is also necessary. If you play this game in person, you're going to have a lot of that experience where you get you're physically picking up a card and trying to lay it down in a pile and someone's hand gets there faster. And you're like, ah, you jerk, right? So they either had to sort of awkwardly put hands into the game, like, which is, I think, not a good idea. They just let everyone see everyone's mouse cursor. It works wonderfully. Yep. It's it's it's such a small thing, but it adds so much emotional value to like the play of the game. Like, you know who got in your way. Like you feel it viscerally the way you would in person. Yeah, everyone's mouse arrow is it matches their color. So you can tell who it was. And you can do things like I have moved my mouse and hovered over a card. I want someone else to play while yelling at them to play the two of diamonds. Jesus, so I can play my three and four. Yep. Something else in this game that I think is a negative is that you really do need to play it with a traditional computer mouse and you need to have an able. Oh, yeah. Like I'm not good at this game. Like, don't think that I'm making an excuse. I am dog shit at this game, but the first several times we played, I was even worse because I was trying to use a laptop trackpad. You cannot play this game with a laptop trackpad. Anything other than a computer mouse, maybe some other device could do it. But it's trackball might work, but like trackpad fart noise. You really need a computer mouse equivalent device and you need to be able to go fast with it and precise with it or you're going to get hosed in this game. It is not very accessible. You also need a in that way, a large enough monitor to see the difference between spades and clubs. If your monitor is tiny, you will probably not be able to see that effectively. I guess that's also true. Like a lower, like an older laptop would have trouble with this. Right. If you have there, there are no subtitles and there is a small amount of the language, right? So like when someone plays an ace to the middle, the game will say this out loud, the suit. Hearts, that ace. Hearts. Yeah, like hearts. So like, and that is extremely useful and important information because even if you, you know, don't have a heart to go out there right now, it's not reminding you to you can play your hearts now, your two of hearts that's been waiting. You know that other people are now playing hearts and you think one's a lot. You can feel I heard heart. I haven't heard hearts in a while, right? Like there isn't a new ace of, you know. Yeah, because then you think, all right, either hearts are backed up. I have you draw a six of hearts and you're like, when did I last hear hearts? You can process that very quickly to decide whether to drag that six of hearts out because what are the odds this up? You know, it's good to go now. So originally, when we were playing this game, the one, one other drawback, it's not really a drawback because this game is like, there's a lot of luck involved in solitary card games, but there is luck involved. Like obviously skill will prevail in the long run, but you are it's pile is all kings and queens. You're going to have a bad time. Yep. Yeah. Your draw pile might just not have anything that can go into your buffer. Like it just might not be able to all be sitting there just drawing through my deck repeatedly and I can't do any move whatsoever. And I have to wait for someone else to do something. Yep. It seems to have a fallback where if that happens for too long, it'll like reshuffle everyone's decks around. Yeah, it doesn't. I don't know. It doesn't say exactly what the rules about shuffling are. It just sort of happens sometimes. And I think it basically my guess is that it does it when it can tell the game is in a state where no one can do anything. Then it will. So did you ever play with a lot of players? It usually doesn't shuffle. So Scott, did you ever think to just read the change log because there's an update from January 10th that explains all of this? What does it say? So on January 10th, they updated the game. I'm just going to read these because these will give you a sense of these are all excellent game design changes. One, increase the number of per player tableau stacks to six in one to two player games and five in three player games. That reduces the amount of luck because when there's a small number of players, luck matters more. When there's a large number of players, there's more churn and you're more likely to be able to play effectively. Like even if you get behind playing over several rounds, you're playing to 100 points. Yeah. So that also eliminates luck because a good player will just score more points over several rounds and get to 100. Oh, yeah. And what they said, the even if they might lose around here or there exactly, the reason they made the change, quote, this changes the strategy a little, but it makes the speed of gameplay consistent regardless of the number of players. Oh, because you can get more cards out of your nerds and not just be blocked on like the king of hearts that's sitting there to they change the rules so that when players get stuck, we end the round instead of shuffling decks for a third time. So but what causes the first two shuffles? It looks like if all players have shuffled through their deck three times. OK, something like that. I suspect certain people we were playing with don't go through their deck that quick. We could we could experiment. Yeah. So the controls because it is a speed game. So it's important to get the controls exactly right. So I the first time I played, I got blitzed because what I was doing was my natural inclination of click on a card, drag it and let go. That is too slow. You will not win that way. Don't do that. I was twice as good when Scott pointed that out. You what you do in this game, it's not obvious, is click on a card to pick it up. So click and now you have the card. You don't need to hold the mouse button down. You have the card and then click a second time to drop the card. If you want to send the card back to where it came, it's like, let's say you grab a five of heart. You dragging it out to the you're going out to the middle to put it on to the four of heart. You're going to click again and somebody else drops theirs first. They beat you in the speed game, right click and that will teleport that five of hearts back to where it came from rather than having to like go and aim the mouse at its original location and regular click again or whatever. Yeah. And the third thing you need to know about controls is that if you press the tab key on your keyboard, right, the one above the caps lock, you will draw your it will draw from your regular deck. So you don't have to ever click on your regular deck. You can keep your mouse out in the play zone. Like hovering over that king of hearts that you're like just waiting for someone to play a jack so you can throw this out when the queen comes. Right. So there have been situations where, for example, I've got a five of heart. I see someone else rim drops his four of heart in the middle on the three that I was waiting for because I don't know where my four of hearts is. It's hiding somewhere in a nurse pile probably. So I'm dragging my five out there to put it down. But I remember that I saw the six in my deck. So while I'm dragging the five out to the middle, I'm hitting that tab key like rapid fire. And at the corner of my eye, I'm looking for that six to show up. So that as soon as I see the drop that five down, I can come and grab the six and put it out there even though the six wasn't face up at the time. I've got it like reserved in that deck somewhere. Right. I can go right back to it. If I, if I, unless I module is math my way away from it and I can't get it to show up right now, but got to try anyway, you know, and usually it works. So yeah, this game is like a case study in minimalist reimagining of an existing traditional game. Like that's what I would replace the experience they had playing the same game at lunch to play with themselves and they released it to the world. The only negative things I can say about this game besides a lack of accessibility is that it's a multiplayer only game effectively speaking. If you're going to play single player, just play Microsoft Solitaire. There's no, yeah, come on. Or free cell or something. The only way to play multiplayer is to play with steam friends. It works perfectly, but you can only be people you're friends with on steam. So you open the game, one of your steam friends opens the game and just joins your game or you join their game or whatever. That's the only way you can't play with random internet strangers. You can't play with people on not steam. It's steam only as far as I'm aware. So you have to be friends with people on steam and get online with them at the same time. And that is, I think, going to be difficult for a lot of people. They won't be able to get the nerd experience. You're going to need to be part of like some gaming community. Like, I don't know, a Geek Nights Discord or something. Say who wants to nerds get people who it's free, but you have to have steam at a computer with a mouse and a tab key on a keyboard. You got to have to get people to be friends together on steam and get them to open nerds at the same time. So I think that's a high bar for a lot of people, right? Let's keep them from playing this even at $0 free. Yep. Of course, the alternative is online play with Rando's, which I don't know if that would ever be fun. I'm just saying they don't have it though. Whether it's fun or not, they don't have it. There's only one way. So that's that. Yeah, totally worth playing them. Game communication that I'm aware of. So you sort of have to set up a voice chat on the side to get the full fun experience. Yeah, because the the the the primary one of my relatives said, this is a common saying in Michigan, phrase slightly differently, but it comes down to people play card games. So they have an excuse to complain about their hands. This game is just that. Like when we play it, it's just all of everyone in the table just alternately going, come on. No one's got a two of diamonds. Not one of you fuckers has a two of diamonds. No, no, Scott, you have one right there. And it's like, oh, I'm not going to play it. You can definitely see some strategy tips, right? That the other than the speed tip of click to pick up, click to put down your tab key a lot is you have to maintain a one, a sort of some memory of what was in your deck. The last time you shuffled through so that you could, you know, it's so that like, you know, if it's like, oh, I got a bunch of middling hearts. I got some face like diamonds and clubs. OK, right. And also there's like wide vision of like, because it's the board, then, you know, so wide, you you have to be able to see, you know, the not necessarily, you don't really have to pay attention to other people's play areas that much, but the middle area and yours, you have to like keep all those cards in your vision and in your mind at once. To see all the possible places, a thing can go. And then, of course, the scoring is every time you put a card in the middle area, you get a point. And when someone calls nerds, any cards in your nerds pile that are left would be negative two points. Yeah. So just all I do is I just pull things out. If I can take the nerds card and put it somewhere, I do it. You don't have to get it into the middle. Just get it into your like into your tableau and you're done. It's gone. You don't need to worry about it. Even if it seems like it's a really bad card to put into my tableau, like, let's say I'm sitting there and I've got an empty hole in my tableau, like any card could go there. Well, obviously you'd want to put a king there, right? But what if there's like a six of hearts that's been blocking your nerds pile? I'll put it to a hearts in that empty spot. Because even though it might be stuck there for a while and taking up a whole spot and a king would be the best to go there and not to like the worst, an ace of hearts is likely to show up. Yeah. More importantly, now you are twice as likely to get rid of a nerd because either you'll be able to play that to thus allowing the next nerd to go into that slot or the nerd you couldn't see before that's visible could now be played. Exactly. That next nerd being visible is like, well, now you've got another card you can see and move around and get rid of like do whatever you can to see the next nerd even if it isn't good, solitary play. Yep. I do that constantly. It's very rare. The only time I won't do that is like if I see a move where like I can rearrange some cards and put the nerd card like under them or something like that. But other than that, yeah, always take the nerd card. Yep. And the last piece of advice is honestly, you really have to concentrate and give this game your complete attention. Like I know all the same strategies. Scott knows I'm just slower. Like that's it. I'm just slower at it. Yep. I do kind of want to whenever it's safe to do so get a whole bunch of decks of cards and play in person nerds. Yeah. That'll be fun. You know, it'll be a little bit more accessible, but a little bit less in some ways. Right. The trickiest part is if two like if two people try to throw a card down at the same time, it'll have to be whoever's card is laying flat. I think the trickiest part actually is that the in person people can make mistakes. Right. Oh, people will make a ton of mistakes. Possibly. We see that was spotted. We see that with like every game that involves real time cards and in a fast game, you don't you don't have time to check people for mistakes. You know, it'll just be found out at the end or never. And the video game version that obviously can't happen. It won't let you make an illegal move or an illegal. Yep. Four people all try to lay the same card on the same spot. Someone had better frame timing and gets it. Like that's it. Yep. As opposed to we hurt our hands. Yeah. Jungle speed. Or yeah. Who knows what. I don't think you could play this with six people reasonably in person. I'd like to try it in person at their office. That's the only reason they spend lunchtime. I guess if you reason that they made this to replace that. So my guess is that the reason they could is that they'd been playing it for so long and so intensely that they're like the pros. Like I think our group of friends could play this in person with a little bit of practice. I just don't think most people could. Maybe I think that would be a difficult ask of many groups of gamers. But yeah, this game is totally worth playing if you can find some people to play with. Yeah. Zero dollars. I think that's enough of a show. I'd say a whole lot about it. Not much.