075 = Roman Recursion and Role-Play Immersion

We're making a spreadsheet.

What does it involve?

Listen, sending us problems to solve.

Problem squared is coming to town.

Your hosts are Matt Parker, who does maths on YouTube.

And me, Beck Hill, the comedian, but with maths, I am a noob.

Oh, you better watch out, you better not cry.

If someone shouts, tail's better than pie.

Problem squared is coming to tale.

Wow, wow, hang on, hang on.

Your commitments

are amazing.

Thanks, man.

Everyone knows my feelings about singing, but I went for it anyway.

Your feelings about singing are not as intense, almost as intense, but not as intense as your feelings about a joke well executed.

Yes, exactly.

Your commitment to the bit

overrules everything else.

That's right, exactly.

And that's probably everything you need to know about this show if you're a new listener.

Yeah.

On this episode, I have found the biggest Roman numeral word.

I'm going to be talking about D and D.

Spoiler, there's going to be a stump date.

Oh, and we'll explain what that is later.

Oh, we will.

As well as featuring some any other business.

I mean, I was going to try and do a Christmas Eve party.

Did you want to sing that?

No, okay, fine.

Any other business to town?

Like, if you change the lyrics, but you run out of new lyrics, you just revert to the original lyrics.

Mid-sentence.

Matt, how are you?

I'm good.

I'm in Australia.

So you are?

And you're not in the cupboard.

I'm not in the cupboard.

I've rearranged my office,

the old bedroom that's now the old boffers.

So I've actually got a nice little setup to record and do many other things.

You've got a Boffcording studio?

Yep, sure.

Just keep stacking users of the room into the portmanteau.

I like how you say portmanteau.

How is Australia treating you, Matt?

It's great.

So, obviously, it's a season inversion.

So, I went from getting progressively colder England to heat wave Western Australia, which was an abrupt change.

But

it snowed a couple of days ago.

So, I heard.

It wasn't magical.

It was gross.

I'm kind of happy with my life choices.

But because I am now back in Perth, Western Australia, we can have yet another stump date.

And oh my goodness, am I excited?

I feel like we're going to have to do a very quick recap for everyone who's unfamiliar with the stump journey thus far.

Yeah.

Also, I think we had someone write in, I think, to say that whenever you said stump date, it took them a really long time to realize it was a play on the word update.

Oh.

They were thinking it was like a date with a stump.

It's kind of,

it started that way.

It started with my family having stump dates to remove a stump from the backyard of my parents' place.

And for new listeners, this is what started the stump date, which is because I couldn't go.

I could not go join my family because it was during the lockdowns.

I was trapped in a different hemisphere.

And so I felt like I was missing out on this new Parker family tradition where they would get together routinely and try and burn a massive stump.

to get it down to a size at which it could be removed.

And by the time I got back to Australia, the stump was gone.

But then I was doing unrelated gardening in my parents' garden, and I managed to unearth part of one of the roots from the original tree that had caused the stump.

I then

wanted to bring that back to the UK, and then we realized there are regulations against bringing untreated wood, and so we realized I'd have to get it turned into a product or an item or somehow be processed.

Someone called James reached out and it's done.

Do you want to see it?

Oh my gosh, yes.

Yeah, I've got it here.

So while I was away, my brother collected it.

Can I just say that Matt just held up a paper bag and for a second I was like, no,

I've got to turn it into paper.

They turned it into a notebook.

Just mulched it.

Wouldn't that be amazing?

I get it back.

It's just like a bean bag full of sawdust.

Oh, thanks.

Yeah, yeah.

They've actually made two things out of the stuff.

Oh, my gosh.

That's so cool.

Sorry, I was very loud just then, but it's a tiny clock.

That's incredible.

It's a cool clock.

Look at that.

Can we give you a complete rotation?

So on the back is the original outside surface of the stump in all its stumpy glory.

They've used resin because when I heat treated it, it cracked quite a bit.

That's because I'm an amateur.

Yeah, and by heat treating, you mean you choked it in the oven.

You choked it in the oven.

Okay, okay, let's not dig into

the exact way I do things.

Let's just go with my professional phrasing of them.

So

they fixed what I did with some kind of resin.

Yeah.

And then they've mounted a little tiny clock on the front.

And it's Jarrah.

And I didn't realize how much the root of a Jarra tree, when

done nicely and finished and sanded and varnished, would look like proper Jarra wood.

So I was very, very impressive.

Yeah, it's really red from what I can see on the screen.

Yeah.

So the small one was a clock.

The big one.

Bigger clock.

Bigger clock.

Oh my gosh, I was right.

So this one's quite nice.

Same deal, but bigger bit of woods.

Look at the back of that.

That's all.

And they've left.

Oh, that's really pleasing.

So these are my axe marks.

When I had to hack it out of the ground down there.

Fax marks.

And over here.

Great pun, by the way.

And then in the front, they've put a thermometer and a clock.

Oh, I love that.

Well, I feel like I need to bring these back to the UK and have the stump in the studio.

The only potential downside is the clock.

Oh, yeah, I can hear that.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it's got quite quite a bit of time.

Yeah,

I appreciate yet another reminder that time is finite and unrelenting.

So we'll do some tests.

We'll get it in the studio.

We'll set it up on the table.

Producer Lauren can have opinions about how loud it is.

And then we'll always know what time it is.

when we're recording in the Proper Square Studio.

Which is just

what we call my office.

Yeah, so there you are.

And then the little mini one.

Yeah, love it.

That's great.

I did then find another bit of root, and that's currently in my dad's shed.

So we still have an unfinished chunk of root that I pulled up when we removed the adjacent lemon tree.

So there's still a stump left, but I feel like we've reached a major milestone with this.

So James's dad.

And James, for everyone who made this possible, thank you so much.

Oh, my goodness.

What a product.

Thank you so much.

That's so incredible.

And how are you, Beck?

I'm good.

Speaking of time, I've been guesting on a few other podcasts.

Oh.

Not me.

Yeah.

I did Dan Schreiber from No Such Thing as a Fish.

I did his solo podcast, We Can Be Weirdos.

And the reason I was reminded about that is we ended up having a conversation about whether time exists

about what my concept of time is.

And

broke my brain.

But I'm also very excited because

and I don't mind announcing this on this podcast because I don't feel like it's going to steal any listeners because I think the Venn diagram of interests is so small.

But for people who fit within this Venn diagram on December 20, which is two days from the time that this episode comes out,

I will be releasing another podcast called Enemy in Paris.

And it is...

Yeah, you mentioned this.

Yeah, so it's Sam Kiefer, who's the Earwolf sound engineer for Office Ladies and Comedy Bang Bang and Conan and a bunch of other stuff.

He and I both hate to watch Emily in Paris a lot.

And

we went to Paris and visited all of the shooting locations.

So ridiculous.

And complained the whole time about the show, about the characters and everything.

And I was like, right, this definitely needs to happen.

So, yeah, that's coming out.

If anyone either watches Emily in Paris or doesn't want to watch it but wants to hear two people tear apart each episode scene by scene, then yeah, listen to Emily in Paris.

Producer Lauren Armstrong Carter says she'll be listening.

So

it does make me feel like I'm

cheating on this show.

But

I promise you, it'll only make us stronger.

Our first problem is from Florent, who sent this into the problem posing page, which is a problemsquared.com.

And Florent said, hello, Becca Matt.

I was wondering how many words in the English language can be written using only Roman numerals.

For example, livid, mild,

and then they've just put an ellipsis.

Bonus ding.

What is the, as in, I guess, a bonus question for us to solve for an an extra ding?

What is the longest word you can write with only Roman numerals?

Bonus bonus ding, what is the largest resulting number?

Now, first of all, and this is not an isolated case, we get a lot of people writing in with questions that have a very implied and unsaid statement, which is, oh, Matt, you've got that list of all the words and some terrible code that can analyze them.

Have you tried looking for or have you done whatever, right?

So once again, I saw this, I'm like, I was just I don't want want to be like the list of words guy who writes terrible Python code to analyze it.

And so, this came in.

I was like, another one.

And then a little bit later, I was like, I wonder what it is.

What is like, what is the longest word made out of the seven letters used in Roman numerals?

And so, I wrote some terrible code to search all the words to find all the ones where the letters.

So, you've got M for a thousand.

Yep.

You've got D for 500, C for 100, 100, L for 50, V for 5,

X for 10, I for 1.

Not in exact descending order.

I apologize.

I skipped ahead to V.

So I just wrote some code.

It went through all the words.

A little reminder for anyone

new around here.

I have a text document with 370,105

words in it.

And you just download this.

That was Matt using quotation marks for

the market.

Yeah, I think so.

It's any string of characters that someone might plausibly have used on a website or somewhere.

Yeah.

It often, like, it's good.

It's good to overshoot.

Like, you go too wide, get all the results, and then you can kind of slim them down.

So I ran all 370,000 words through a thing that just picked out all the ones that only had Roman letters, and there are 126.

Ooh.

That's more than I expected.

Yeah, that's a lot.

But then you realize I looked at them and some of them are just numbers in Roman numerals.

One of them is the word X-V-I-I-I.

And I'm pretty sure that's just a number in Roman numerals that someone's put in there.

Because that code that you did to bring in all the words also brought up strings of letters which happened to be Roman numerals.

Exactly, exactly.

But then there's there's some that are on the cusp, like VC,

is that 95 or is that venture capital?

You know?

DL, is that venture centers?

It's not a word, I'd say.

Abbreviations, yeah.

What about four Ms?

Is that a word?

I think that's a word.

I don't know.

I went and took out, and it's a bit of an arbitrary line.

I took out all the ones I thought

were definitely not words.

And if I wasn't sure, I left them in as words.

And there's 88 once you take out ones that are like obviously Roman numerals or something ridiculous.

So, so at most 126, realistically, closer to 90, I would say 88-ish.

Fewer than 100.

Yep.

I'm very confident to say fewer than 100.

But then their follow-on question was: well, actually, they said, what's the longest?

You know, I haven't actually didn't check that.

Let me just very quickly sort the data by the length of the string.

The longest one, C-I-M-I-C-I-D.

Chimachid?

What is that?

Oh, it's a bed bug.

Oh, it's a bed.

It's a single.

So

chimachids, I'm pronouncing that wrong, are a specialized group of blood-sucking parasites that primarily feed on bats.

Oh, C-I-M-I-C-I-D.

Simicid?

I'm going to say Simicid.

But I'm only seeing it in a plural fashion.

Simicids.

Because if you Google Simicids,

not a plural.

It's like, did you mean

Simicidae?

Simicidae.

Are you going to count that one, or do you mean to give you the next longest one?

I like Simicid.

I know.

It looks like I'm at least seeing Simicid as a singular coming up elsewhere.

So I'm going to accept Simicid.

Seven letters, yeah?

Yeah, seven letters.

Yeah, there's a handful of six.

I-M-I-D-I-C.

Imidic.

Imidic.

Imidic.

Oh, it's a type of acid.

Imidic acid.

Yeah.

There you go.

I'm going to leave that one.

Yeah, good.

Now, the bonus-bonus one, the third ding, is which is the biggest value?

It kind of hinges on do we count mmm as a word, four amps?

Because that would be 4,000.

Yeah, we could do that.

Okay.

So

if, listeners, you can decide.

If you're happy with mm,

then

that's 4,000.

If you think, no no no that's not it's like it's mimicking a Roman numeral but it's not a real Roman numeral word then the next biggest is the word mimic M-I-M-I-C look at those M's and they've only got I's to subtract and a C for a hundred so mimic is two thousand ninety eight which is if you discount mm mimic and that's that's like legitimate like that's uncontested Roman numeral rules on mimic at 2098.

Well

Matt, you did it.

Well, now, here's the thing.

Oh.

All I've done so far is just looked up the words I already had and compare them to standard Roman numerals.

But then I thought, well, hang on, what if the Romans had used different letters?

Because they happened to use those seven letters to represent those different values.

And potentially they could have picked different letters.

So I thought, wouldn't it be wouldn't it be kind of conclusive to search all 370,000 words for every possible combination of seven letters and every possible arrangement of those seven letters for which values they represent to find the word which in that parallel universe version of Roman numerals would give you the biggest value?

Okay.

So I wrote some terrible Python code and

stick it off your bingo cards if you wanted to.

Yeah, well, it was going to take 10 years to run.

So

I I had to sit down and make it less terrible.

So, and I had to write my own Roman numeral converter because now I wasn't using like standard Roman numeral conversion.

I was using it because I had to be able to put any word into it and turn it into a value, assuming they were Roman numeral characters.

And so you've got situations normally where if you put like a smaller value in before a bigger one, so I and then X, that's nine.

But then what if you have more things in front of it?

Or Or if you have like II and then X?

And there is historical evidence that was used for 8.

And so I was like, oh, now the sky's the limit because you could have a whole new Roman numeral value inside a Roman numeral number.

And because there's a bigger value after it, it has to work as a subtraction from the bigger value later on.

So I had to write a recursive Roman numeral little bit of code that would start at the end, work its way back, and it's happy as long as each next one's bigger than the previous, it's very happy, coming in from the right towards the left.

If it ever finds there's a smaller value, it finds all the smaller value before there's a big enough value that matches the last one it saw on the way in, and it takes that whole internal bit and feeds it into the same program as if it's a whole new Roman numeral number.

And so that way, recursively it can work to solve any combination of characters.

It can work it out as a Roman numeral thing by chunking it up to be bits that are subtracted from other bits.

It was a lot of fun to write.

If anyone's ever

challenged

recursion was not the only way to do it.

That was just the way I my brain understood the problem.

But I then had a general purpose Roman numeral converter.

Then I just ran it against every possible arrangement of the letters.

And so I can give give you, do you want the word which gives you the biggest possible value in Roman numerals?

So you have to assume that the Romans used a U for a thousand.

And how do you decide which one means what?

I checked every possible combination of letters that could mean different things.

I'm confused.

So you've got 26 letters in the alphabet.

Yes.

You can then choose seven of them to be your seven characters.

But how did you decide what values that each of the letters that you ended up with, how did you decide what their values would be?

I first of all did the 26 letters in the alphabet, choose the seven you're going to use, which then gives you 657,800 sets of seven letters.

And then for each of those seven letters, I did every possible way to assign them values.

Okay.

Of which they're seven factorial, which is just over 5,000, I think.

Let me just make sure I got that right.

And then you went with which one would have the highest value.

Yeah.

And then I checked every single one of them.

Yep.

And then picked the one that had the highest value.

So

you're looking at every way of choosing the letters, and then you're looking at every way of arranging them to match the values.

Yeah.

So my first version of the code just did that the long way, and that's what was going to take over 10 years.

So then what I ended up doing was, first of all, I removed all the words that had more than seven distinct letters in them because there was no way they could ever be a Roman numeral for any system because they have too many characters.

I drew the line at at having a new character for like 5,000 or you know 10,000 or anything.

I was like, no wait, that's ridiculous.

So I took out all the ones that couldn't be a Roman numeral and then I ranked them starting at the biggest one first.

So if I ran out of time or the code was going to take too long, I'm at least doing the big ones first, which are the ones most likely to give a big value.

And then for each one, I just looked at how many letters it had, what they are, and then every possible way they could be assigned to a Roman numeral system.

And then found the biggest biggest value that could be produced, and then made a note of what the system was, made a note of the value, moved on to the next word.

Did that for all

the words?

Wow.

And then just sorted them by the biggest value they could produce.

Okay.

And so the biggest, so the system for the biggest word, I won't read this out every time, but in descending order, so going 1,500, 100 all the way down, is U-A-P-K-M-N-H.

And if you use that system for Roman numerals on the the Hawaiian word for a type of fish, which is huma-huma nuka nuka upawa, I've obviously got that very wrong,

you get a Roman numeral value of 9,268.

Whoa!

Yeah, that's quite the scrabble score.

It's pretty impressive.

Now, some people are going to say that doesn't work because the Romans didn't have the letter U.

They didn't have U or W.

They had fewer letters.

I then did it again without U's or W's, and it's possessionlessness.

And again, you've got to have S for a thousand, L for 500, I O P N E, and that gives you 7,607.

So if you go with the conceit that it must be Roman original letters, possessionlessness,

if you're happy with the Hawaiian word for type of fish, then it's the much longer one.

It's interesting that in possessionlessness, there's only one L, but that's made the cut.

Yeah.

It's because you use S as a thousand, and there's a lot of S's.

And then it's always, it's interesting with the words.

There's always a bit of a balance because you want big ones to happen a lot, but then you need the ones that come before them to be as small as possible.

So E is only worth one because you get a lot of E's before the S's.

And so that way you're only subtracting one off the total.

So it's a bit of a balancing act all right the third ranked one is thoroughly impressed the third ranked one is stresslessness and then the fourth is successlessness so actually the s's s is overwhelmingly for the very big ones used for a thousand because the the list of words i was using i guess the sample of english and english adjacent words s lots of s's and they double up nicely so

success yay well Matt, not only did you provide three answers for three problems that were posed from our listener, but you went above and beyond and gave us answers to problems that weren't posed at all.

So I'm going to give you a dingle all the way.

Hey.

Our next problem was also sent in via the problem posing page out of problemsquare.com from Kuno de Luft, who would like to know what is the best way to get your friends to start playing Dungeons and Dragons.

So, back.

You've tackled, you've descended into this one.

I have, I have, because at one stage, I was one of those people that needed to be convinced to play Dungeons and Dragons.

Oh, you had to be convinced.

Wow.

Matt, have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?

I'm going to go with that's heavily implied by just my whole thing.

Yes.

Well, do you know what?

I don't think we've ever really talked about it.

That's a good point.

No, I have, you know what?

I have played less Dungeons and Dragons than people would probably assume.

And that's more a victim of my amount of free time.

So I played a bunch with my mates when I was mid-teens, like, you know, high school age.

And then I played a bunch when I was like,

just after university with some friends when I was probably like, you know, mid to early 20s.

And I've not, you know, played it with Ernest since.

So my knowledge is probably a little out of date in terms of the current monster manual or things like that.

But, you know, it still has a

special place.

Yeah.

Yep.

I think my dad was a big fan of like first generation Dungeons and Dragons fan.

He was very good at like telling stories and stuff.

He makes a good dungeon master, good DM.

He taught my brother and I to play when we were quite young.

And I remember there was one stage where there was like a big flash of lightning and he pulled out disposable camera and like took a photo with the flash on.

And my brother and I were like, oh my gosh, the theatrics.

We were so excited.

But I didn't really play much after that until I was a lot older.

In fact, until I moved over here, I think it was some Irish friends that I played with.

and then some friends over here.

So, Kuno, if you don't mind me calling you just Kuno, it depends on what your friends are into and what they're like.

I mean, the fact that you're asking how to get them to play Dungeons and Dragons, they're not naturally inclined to play it because they would sort of already be playing otherwise.

It implies they've already exhausted the technique of saying, hey, do you want to play Dungeons and Dragons?

Like, they've tried that, no success, asked us.

Yeah.

So I would say

there are two good ways to sort of go about it.

One of them is to find a stream or a podcast where people are playing Dungeons and Dragons in an entertaining way.

Because

in the same way that there's a lot of video games I don't play, but I will happily watch people play those video games.

And watching people play those video games, I'm more inclined to go, now I want to have a go at that.

You know, it's like asking someone if they want to play football and they've never seen football before.

They're going to be like, well, what's that?

But if they've watched football and been like, oh, this is entertaining to me, then they might be more inclined to want to have a go at it.

So

I think sometimes watching people do that, I'm a big fan of Questing Time, which is hosted by Paul Foxcroft.

I don't know if they've got any live streams happening.

They'll definitely have a bunch of archived ones on Twitch, but they also do live shows and stuff like that.

Dan Harmon from behind Community and Rick and Morty and all that.

I know that with Harmontown podcasts, they do a lot of D and D.

There's Dragon Friends, which is an Australian podcast.

I'm pretty sure I did Questing Time at the Edinburgh Fringe.

They had a fringe.

Yes, you did.

Yes, I did.

Yeah, in fact, I think we played together.

I think you were on the same night.

Yeah, I had a lot of fun.

Yeah, and that actually leads nicely into my other suggestion, which is

what got me back into playing Dungeons and Dragons is people who are willing to let me learn as I play.

So

I'm one of those people where if you say, let's play a game and you start reading out the instructions, I will not understand what is happening.

But if we start playing, I will pick it up.

And it was the same with Dungeons and Dragons, is that it's very overwhelming for someone who hasn't played before.

And you come to it and suddenly you've got these sheets with all these numbers on there and the equivalents.

And so I would say that the other way to get your friends into playing it is to do a really simplified version with them.

That's what Questing Time does really well, is that it'll simplify it so that it's easier for the people playing to follow and for the people watching to follow as well.

And it becomes almost a bit like a mix between improv and choose your own adventure.

So you might have your rough plot for your campaign.

And instead of being like, okay, check your sheet for stealth or armor or magic or whatever, rather than do that, just be loose with it and be like, okay, what do you want to do?

And if someone says, can I try and put the fire out with my axe?

You can be like, yeah, sure, roll a dice.

And then you can just make it up.

Have fun with it, is what I'm saying.

And I think that makes it a lot less overwhelming.

I'd like to say, in general, teaching someone a new board game, and I'm generalizing, including things like DD, is a skill.

And

I have sat through people teaching me games, and I'm like,

People don't appreciate you can do that so badly, and you can do that so well that showing someone a new game takes thought and planning on how you introduce the rules when you let people start having a practice game, do you do a simplified version?

All these things.

And I've almost been put off very good games that have been poorly, poorly explained.

And I will say,

there's the fantastic Auntie Donna sketch about learning a new board game, which perfectly captures the sense of what it's like to have a board game explained to you by someone who's very enthusiastic and loves the game,

but is not doing a good job of conveying the information in a nice, fun, enjoyable way to get people into the game.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

And I think if your friends aren't sure about playing Dungeons and Dragons, just bear in mind that it can be very overwhelming.

It's a lot, it's a lot.

Those are my suggestions.

Find some fun streams that don't lean too heavily on all the rules and all the statistics.

Get a really stripped-down version, offer to play a version of that with them.

And as they start to enjoy that, you can start adding in all the other elements.

I will also say to kind of know your audience, because you can dial up and dial down

how

not theatrical is not the word I'm after, but how roleplay you make the game.

And for me,

I've come across times where it's, it's like for me, it's a whole thing.

I'm like, I just want to play a game.

I don't want to get, I don't want to do a voice for my character.

So

I will say know your audience and what level of enthusiasm they want to throw into that aspect of the game.

And hey, look, if they're still not interested, make it about something they are interested in.

You know, know, if your friends are into

all I can think of is football.

I'm sorry, everyone.

You know, make a version of Dungeons and Dragons where you play, you know, football

players

and they roll a dice to work out who they pass to and whether they're successful.

And, you know, play out a game like that.

Use the basic building blocks of Dungeons and Dragons as a gateway.

A gateway to fun.

And friendship.

Yeah.

F and F, F, that's what I call it.

Fungeons and fragons.

Yeah, there you go.

So, yeah,

I hope that helped.

I mean, if not, let me know.

I am more than sure that everyone in the A Problem Squared, Reddit, or Discord will have some other things to add, whether it's hints, suggestions, or indeed streams or podcasts or anything that they enjoy.

Or recommending a nice, simple campaign for like a first-time group.

Yeah, if there's any dungeon masters out there who have something that they're like, hey, you can use this, or even if you're willing to accommodate that, to facilitate that over Zoom or something, then please do that.

So, yeah.

The most important thing is, of course, that you buy a lot of dice.

More dice

means you're more likely to convince people to play.

I'm not sure if that's true, Matt.

I'm pretty sure that is.

I rolled for initiative, and I feel like

that's that's a natural 20 kind of move.

Yeah, agree to disagree.

But if you get your friends to try and guess the amount of dice you own,

now that's a game people would come back for time and time again.

A-O-B, A-O-B,

any other business?

Matt, do you have any other business for this bit?

Hey, yes.

Hey, hey.

So, speaking of Christmas, the Christmas cards have gone out.

Now, if anyone gets a card and they look at it and they're like, it feels like someone spilt Guinness on this.

Oh, yeah.

I may have spilt Guinness.

I don't want to say that's specifically one of ours' fault, but

if it's got, if you can detect the presence of pale ale, I will take the blame when we sat down in a pub and frantically signed all the cards and addressed them, hand-addressed them to all our wizard-level supporters.

That's not true.

We didn't hand address them.

We hand wrote everyone's name.

Like, it's a dread to so-and-so.

Merry Christmas.

Like, everyone's name was written in by one of us.

And you drew a little dinosaur.

Did you do a dinosaur for all of them?

Yeah.

Wow.

Your commitment is impressive.

I barely see it.

Every time I'm like, why did I put this in my signature?

And then I'll.

I almost didn't.

I said to you at one point, I'm not going to do the dinosaur.

And you're like, yeah, you you don't need to.

And then I was like, oh, but then people will be like, I didn't get a dinosaur.

I will add, if you want your own dinosaur and you sign up to our Patreon at the wizard level or higher before the end of December, we will still post you a card.

You're just not going to get it by Christmas.

But you'll get it.

It'll be a nice

surprise in 2024 at some point.

You'll be like, oh,

who sent me a card?

This long after Christmas?

And it will be from us and it will have a dinosaur and it probably won't have beer this time.

And our signatures.

And actually, if you sign up at any level, we will email you a copy of the card.

So, if you want to see Beck's defacing of Beck's paper, you want to know what the card looks like before you receive it.

Co-host.

Yes.

Then we email it to everyone.

So, you've still got time to sign up if you want the digital version.

That's easy.

Also, thank you for your support.

Yes, thank you very much to everyone who signed up for those.

In other,

any other business, I'm going to show you something

on the cameras, guys.

Oh,

yep.

Is that like a utility belt?

Yes, it is.

Wow.

Did you make that or were you sent it?

I bought this.

I ordered it online.

It is a bright yellow belt with faux leather pockets hanging off of it.

I've yet to have my phone stolen.

I also bought a case that has a retractable cord on it.

Oh, my God.

So when I have it.

So

you can't even put your phone down.

So even if they manage to get into my pocket, there's a retractable cord.

The belt pockets have little flaps on them, which means that, you know, you won't lose your phone or your change or anything if you're at the angle of emptying.

But if I do have like just normal pockets and I'm putting my phone in there, then this little retractable cable means that even if my phone slips out of my pocket at the angle of emptying, It's still going to come with me.

Yep.

That's amazing.

I can just hook it onto my belt loop.

i have been told by people on instagram that it's a real boomer dad vibe and i don't care i don't care i know you i let's i don't listen

you're gonna look like the coolest middle manager in the whole

company

we did also get some other people uh writing to us with their own solutions for this some people suggesting different types of uh bags that are sort of a bit like bum bags i again i think it just depends on what you need it for i wanted something that was easily accessible quickly accessible with your hand someone suggested turning the pockets rotating them so that when you sit down they're facing up

and they said the plus side of that is if you're if you're up you will see if something falls out of them but i do think

that things to fall out you is that you might end up first of all it's hard to get your hand into if uh if the entrance is at a different angle When you're walking, I think that could be quite, quite bad.

I think if you're not getting a zipper, you know those sort of pockets where it's almost like there's another little pocket over the top facing the opposite direction.

Almost like the way that the front, all right, think about how why fronts work, like men's boxer shorts or whatever.

Not why fronts.

I don't know much about men's underpants, to be honest.

But in the front of underpants for access to

Willie's,

there's like

there's like a little double flap thing going going on.

Like you've got,

you go in one, like a little, you're on one side and then go back the other way.

Yeah.

And so I think if you made your pockets like that, if the pockets on your clothes

had a sort of like, you just got to

hook your hand up and then down, that means that if you're at the angle of emptying, there's going to be like a lip that will catch

stuff.

Yeah.

For things to come out, you needs to be a change of direction.

Yes.

And so they can't slide out in a single direction is insufficient to escape the pocket.

Yeah, I mean, it might still mean that it comes out, and then when you stand up, it then falls out the top bit, but you're more likely to notice when that happens.

But for now, I feel like I don't know about you guys, I feel like I've got a ding, but maybe we'll wait till we hear back specifically from that person who may have done by the time this episode goes out.

We've also got some Any Other Business

from

Stephen, whose problem we helped solve in episode 040.

Oh, way, way back.

Which was, yeah, which was anniversary crazes and any cursory praises.

Because Stephen was after a negative one-year anniversary gift, and they've contacted us to say they just celebrated the zeroth wedding anniversary.

Isn't they just got married?

Yep.

So they knew more than a year in advance what the wedding date was going to be, thus having a negative one anniversary.

Yes.

And it's finally hit zero.

Wow.

What a moment.

Yep.

Stephen said that they're spending their honeymoon in London.

They said they'll bring their favourite calculator in case they bump into us.

Unfortunately,

you are in Australia.

I am.

And they did send a photo of the wedding.

Everyone looks very happy.

Looking like they're having a great time.

Yeah.

Looks like a great wedding.

They look great.

Yeah.

So well done.

Congratulations.

Yeah.

Thanks for updating us.

Happy zeroth wedding anniversary.

Final bit of any other business is a heads up about future business.

Once again, Becca and I are both going to accidentally be in the same city at the same time, which is not one of our regular cities.

We're both going to be in Los Angeles early in January, which is pretty exciting.

While we're out there, we figure we'll record an episode of A Problem Squared.

Why not do a West Coast of the US themed recording?

So we may regret this, but if anyone has any West Coast of the States problems or even LA-specific problems that you wish to send in, No promises, but

if you've got anything that we can try and do or solve or fix while we're over there, please do let us know.

And we might be doing an evening unnecessary detail show.

Is that right, Matt?

Yeah,

it's still up in the air.

We're hoping to find a venue that means we can do an evening show because obviously we record a podcast that's not public facing.

It would be nice to put some kind of show on if people want to come along and see us live on stage and say hi and all that jazz.

It'd be great to say hi.

Excellent.

As we draw to the boxing day of this Christmas episode, not that it came out on Christmas.

I was just trying to think of something that thematically worked.

We're going to do

some thank yous because this show wouldn't exist without our amazing supportive Patreon supporters who ensure that everyone can listen regardless of financial encouragement.

That's what the kids call it now.

So what we do is we choose three of our Patreon supporters at random and thank them.

And in this episode, those Patreon supporters whose names we will deliberately mispronounce are

Kevin Dubish.

Or dobish?

Dobbish.

A little bit dob.

A little bit doish.

Dobbish.

Bradley

Nimitz.

It's like Jay-Z.

It's Nimitzi.

Yeah.

Oh, right.

Sorry.

Namitzi.

Yeah, you're right.

Zed.

Namit Zed.

Namit Zed.

Sam

Bla.

I mean, Sam Spendler.

Spendler?

Sam Spendler, a lot of money on the Patreon.

Thank you, and thanks to everyone else.

And especially big thanks to my co-host, Matt Parker.

All the way in Perth.

I've been Beck Hill.

And a massive thank you.

And cookies by the fire and warm milk for producer Lauren Armstrong Carter.

Ho, ho, ho.

Okay, Beck.

I'm in the different hemisphere.

You've not got the dice in front of you.

Are you still going to go for a guess?

Yeah, I mean, you did offer for me to take it home

or away

on a real kind of very heavy jar.

I was like, I mean, I could have done that, and then I could have just counted them and been like, got it, the guess perfect.

And you would have been like, wow.

How'd you do it?

I would have been real suspicious.

Hey, the listeners can't see the jar, so I don't think I should be able to see the jar either.

So I'm going to go

for 404 dice not found

higher.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.