CSB335: NONE OF YOU MATTER

Hey, dude, what's up?

What's going on with you this week?

Hi, man.

Hello.

Hello.

How are you doing?

Yo, what the fuck is sleep, bro?

Oh,

what the fuck?

Hey, you know what, dude?

Hey,

let me tell you, that first three months, just get through that first three months.

Just don't drop them, don't get divorced, and you're solid.

Yep, yep, yeah, yeah.

No, I think about I, what I have moments where I'm kind of just thinking, like,

of people,

I'm like, if you're not in the most rock

like, situation

in terms of...

Oh, okay, yeah, all right, let's do it.

Let's go into it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How?

Yeah, absolutely.

How does anyone on a crumbling foundation?

Oh, man.

Hey, you know what?

Hey, you know what?

We're having a kind of rocky thing.

We're fighting more.

You know what we should do?

Let's do something.

That will cause us to be at the highest level of stress we've ever been at our entire lives.

I can't fathom.

Together.

Together.

I can't even begin to fathom.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, boy.

So, yeah, I had to kick this

stream back a little bit there because,

you know, feeding.

Yeah.

Cluster feeding.

Yeah, dude.

You sore?

I mean,

we're doing all of it.

We're getting all kinds.

We're doing, doing, there's all kinds of milk getting in there.

Yeah, man.

Listen,

I'm literally sleep deprived, and I, like, my functions are not

going to function.

So, do you want to hear something awesome, dude?

Yes.

I'm also sleep deprived from the version of events that you'll experience in two years,

which is my little guy just at 5:30 in the morning just went ah,

for no reason.

Yeah.

And

like, it's just funny too, because like, um,

you know, trying to organize any, like, literally anything, anything at all is just complete, doesn't exist.

Like, it took like three, like, it, it took so long to get to a task.

Oh, yeah.

Because it's just every two hours, three up, go, screen.

Like, yeah.

Hey, man, so before

we engage in the back and forth, dad, oh, my God, it's shit so hard.

Parenting is tough.

And sound like massive pussies.

Congratulations.

And also, big shout-outs to your wonderful wife for doing a great job.

Going through all of that with Paige, and my wife was really a very eye-opening experience of like, wow,

this is hard over here, but like,

oh, this is right where I left it.

Punch Mom.

Punch Mom is what you call an original gangster.

This is like

bulletproof, incredible.

The level of

absolute untouchable resilience was ridiculous through the whole thing.

And,

I mean,

the process itself,

you know, was like, there was a lot of luck that things went smoothly in some case, in some ways, and or some ways where things didn't go as smoothly.

But, like,

yeah.

Watching that and participating in the like support role to the best of our ability, you're watching

some shit go down that's like

beyond Herculean.

It was insane.

Um,

holy shit.

Um,

that,

yeah, I don't even know.

I'm like, we're out of, I'm all over the place on thoughts, but thank you very much.

I uh, much appreciated.

Um, took home, took home uh, Punch Girl, and um,

and she is doing her job uh which is uh pissing and shitting uh with a d and farting and eating and crying and just doing it all at the same time how's your swaddling uh we are swaddling effectively we're swaddling well and uh let me tell you something right uh we there was a moment where uh some throw-up got into some little spit-up got into like the snoo and so we took it we so we took it off to go wash those

the top and

switched over to just the regular bassinet and watched as the rolling into danger zone started to occur because you're not supposed to let them pass out on the sides or on the warfront.

And then everything else about that.

And we're like, oh my god, the snoo is saving our lives.

Like, it's not even funny how much this thing with the swaddle that tightens and does this and has the noise going is like controlling the situation.

So like, here's the thing, man.

I'm thinking back to swaddling, and man, swaddling is like genuinely one of my favorite parts of little tiny baby time

because making a tightly packed, safe,

and unable to throw themselves to the floor baby burrito

is deeply satisfying.

Yes, it's nice to see when they cannot destroy themselves.

I appreciate that.

Don't want to, you know, oh, you're pulling your own hair or you're gouging your own eyes because you don't know what arms are.

And

yes, exactly.

Or waking yourself up by punching yourself because that's what your body spasms.

Oh, man.

The body spasms just keep you up

for an hour and then just bam, bam, no, bam.

Oh, no, they're back awake.

Oh, we missed the nap window.

Here we go.

And just and startling yourself awake in the middle of the night to see, like, did I hear a noise?

Or did I see it?

Like, what's happening over there?

You're just, you're, every little, every little sound is caused for a night alarm fire.

And I'm kind of looking over at the, at the, the, the, the fucking, looking over at the crib, expecting to see a Smash Brothers light shoot out of it.

You know, failure.

Like, it's, um,

and listen, I have no big, like, uh,

worded

speech or anything to give you because I'm still going through it.

It's still happening.

I have no thoughts processed.

I have no, like, every process thought is ongoing as we speak.

You will have so I don't know

in six months.

Yeah, I have nothing like profound or useful to say to anyone except

the only

thing you need to think about when you're not on this camera is

fed,

diaper,

sleepy.

Yeah, no, no, yes.

That's it.

Those four.

And that's it.

And, you know, even taking the time to be on this camera is like, this is, you know, how the lights are going to stay on, but it would be nice if we didn't have to.

That'd be cool.

But yeah, woolly,

those things would be nice, but at least you're not working in a fucking coal mine.

Of course,

of course.

Or in a, you know, any situation where you're like, I've got to.

I've got to tell you, man.

Like, you know, here's the thing.

Working from, we're very blessed.

Yes.

Very blessed.

Because dad comes home after being a million light years away.

Right.

We're very blessed.

Yeah.

But like, on top of that, like, you're going to really feel that blessing like very intensely over the next couple of months because you.

Much like me and unlike most other dads, will get a text message and go, I got to go.

And that's an option available to you instead of just like, well, deal with it, I guess.

Fucking figure it out.

I'm expecting potentially, you know, one or two of those at any moment because, yeah, there's a schedule to adhere to, but for the most part, you know, I don't think Punch Girl gives a fuck about the schedule.

But, you know,

baby has not read the manual.

You know, we did.

We read what to expect, but baby has not read what to expect, so baby gives no fucks.

Fourth trimester, man.

Yes, exactly.

That's just

a big fetus on the outside.

Horrible big fetus, but still.

I mean, tiny and perfect and just

sitting there making those noises.

It's the you got you got the you got those goo-goo gagas.

It's the it's the cartoony sound of like like doing during the like okay, like day one, day two, skin to skin, especially, was like super duper chill because the level of just like sleep recovery after being birthed required to get all your energy back means that you're gonna just pass the fuck out.

And so, she passed the fuck out, and you're hearing actual cartoon, like,

oh, absolutely.

You're just like, are you real?

Is this, is this a real living thing?

Let me ask you, man.

When you went home, did you have that feeling walking out where you're like, okay, so

who's going to come home with me to help me do this?

Did you have that feeling in your chest?

Oh, they just let me leave?

They just let us leave?

I mean, like,

not exactly that, but it was more just like, yo, holy shit, here we go.

It's going down.

And

I don't know how long, like, okay, there are going to be, I'm going to send you things that that are not for them, but I'm going to send it to you.

For, for, for,

yeah.

So,

uh, here is, as soon as we walked in the door, yeah.

Uh, here is

uh, basically

door closes behind us and uh punch mom turns around.

And this is what we get.

Yeah, yeah, I remember that.

Yeah, I remember remember that delivity.

Absolutely.

100%.

Yeah, how would you describe that, that face?

I don't know.

Oh, no.

I went ugly crying.

Just a 180 into boo.

We did

the book.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

No.

That was, that was, that was a lot of fun.

And it is interesting, too, because

I guess, yeah,

some of the

journey there was like...

That's a really cute photo, but it's fantastic.

I'm going to keep that around for teasing and blackmail purposes indefinitely

until

Punch Girl can use it as blackmail as well against me.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

No, no, no.

All

roasting goes downhill.

Oh, oh, there's no, there's no cross-tag team-ups here?

No, no, no.

They have to work on their own stuff.

This is yours to use.

No, I don't think it's going to go that way.

This is a different situation here, right?

Because, like, they've got the like girl connection to beat up on dad, but then dad and daughter have like the dark connection.

We got the black thing going where we can throw that her way.

And then you're going to be making fun of Punch Bomb being like, you're haunting this house with your whiteness.

You know, you know.

And I mean, look, we'll see how

we'll see how the tone goes over time.

But

there's at least a 50% middle ground over there that we could use as ammunition against her.

And then there's going to be, yeah,

we'll draw the lines for war wherever we'll take them.

So it was my experience growing up.

And I don't know if this was your experience, that my parents were never able to reliably count on me for any backup in any situation because it was a coin flip as to which one I would actually side with on any given situation.

Right.

Like, they would be like, oh, my mom would be like, oh, Patrick will absolutely have my backup.

Your father's being so ridiculous.

And I'd be like, mom, what the hell are you talking about?

Dad, totally right.

Or vice versa.

And like, dad, you sound insane.

You sound nuts, dad.

What are you talking about?

And they could never figure it out to the point where they stopped like going to me as like the third person to tiebreak shit because couldn't rely couldn't didn't know which way it would go we're gonna we're gonna have to see you know um

which way the winds which way the winds blow on this but uh

i want to i want to sweeten the the pot in my favor however possible so um

Yeah, now the one thing I do hear

that when I was just reading because I mean I've been obviously you know you you know you know that thing where you're holding like life and then you're like instantly googling like 15 things just going down.

You're going to get really,

really proficient with doing every single task in your life with one arm.

Like, like just like you're going to feel really cool in about a month because you won't believe how many dishes you can do with one hand.

So, no, that's that's the one of the one of the things I saw was there's a people people discussing the dad that goes and comes back after the time away or whatever.

And when you fast forward a few years in, when kid gets older,

parent that's out of the house that comes back becomes like the superhero that's here to visit temporarily because time is limited, you know?

Yeah, we don't have that situation.

Neither are you.

No, no.

So the benefits now and then later, there's that perception.

But then also that makes, you know, a parent at home be like, yo, what the fuck?

I'm here the whole time.

What do you mean?

The one that comes home and pops in, gets all the accolades.

You know what you're going to get to see?

And it's something that now that we're all part of the club.

I have been able to see the daily genesis

of something that I am 100% certain caused like literally tens of thousands of divorces and fights,

which is

walking back from the office right being able to look into the window of my living room seeing how the child is acting walk through the door child turns into a different child

right for dad turns into a completely different child yeah yeah yeah and i go oh it's like or like you know Mom has to go out.

It's dad time, right?

Oh, what are you talking about?

It's easy as pie.

They just played with their toys the whole time, no fuss, no must.

They ate whatever I gave them, not a problem.

So, look, after like

the thing is, with that, too, uh, after obviously just a this horrendous fucking sleep death cycle that we're in.

Um, hey, I have good news for you, by the way, about that.

Um,

there it is, the sleep thing is going to get better.

Um, you're not going to get more sleep, you're just going to get used to it.

Mm-hmm.

That, like, that.

So, here's the thing.

My sleep schedule was all already shit.

Oh, it was bad.

So

I'm the worst of any person I've known other than my dad's.

Yeah.

And thus I was kind of already ready for, you know, a version of this.

But it's just that anytime you delay it until you're like, okay, I have to go like be a coma.

That stage never comes.

The part where you're like, at the end of this insanely bad

stretch of sleep time, you're gonna stay awake, you're gonna eventually just pass the fuck out and then get your recharge, but that recharge never comes.

That's that's the problem here.

Is you just it just you kick the can down the road indefinitely.

But, um,

so this morning I was woken up because I had to speak to you know, one of my like financial people, uh, you know, uh, accountant things, and like we did a video call because, like, for her,

uh, she also had a newborn, but for her, it was her fourth.

Damn, so she knows what the fuck she's doing, and like, she's like,'Look, I'm really things are really nuts over here,' but just can we just video call?

And so, we jumped on the video call, and you just hear hell happening.

Like, action, like, Satan and his forces are

have dominion behind her.

And, like,

I mean, you can hear like two boys just fucking,

like, they're fighting to the death.

And then there is a young girl who is just literally just appears to be running in circles and screaming at the top of her lungs, but not like play screaming, but like,

you know, and it went like for an hour, right?

How old is that kid that you saw?

She must have been like

seven,

you know?

Okay, so, all right, because there's, there's the phase that we went through, which is I've discovered that screaming kicks ass

phase no

it's a good one no no no oh it's this was a super fun one this was not child child was haunted child was like this was not a this was not a this is not a whimsical we're having fun scream this was a fucking just letting it loose um

and and rage tantrum and like she was describing how so there was after school ended they had summer school but for some reason uh their hers got canceled or something.

Not summer school, summer camp.

So then she came home early, and ever since then has just been in a fit and has just been going

and screaming and freaking out.

And so, like, as much as I'm going through, I'm like, looking at this lady with four, and she's doing all

the fuck can you even say, right?

And I'm just going, okay, listen, all right, having a kid is hard, and having two kids is more than twice as hard

God.

And so on.

And so forth.

And so forth.

Yeah.

The interacting they have with each other, you know.

You get one down and the sound of another waken them up.

Anyway, anyway,

it was wild.

But

all that to say, you know, that,

yeah, I mean,

I feel what?

What do I feel?

I feel many things.

Here's how.

Are you having a lot of emotions?

You want to talk about emotions, Pat?

Wooly, there's never been a more appropriate time for me and you to have a genuine sit-down and talk about our feelings.

You could ask, you could ask Punch Mom, like, and she'll tell you, like, how many times over the course of our relationship that

she's seen me cry over something that I've cried, right?

I've known you for 20 years.

I've seen once.

Okay.

So for her, the answer is about three.

Right?

And

she gave two, and I reminded her of one, too, that

she missed.

Right.

And

within the last 48 hours.

Oh, yeah, dude.

Oh, yeah.

Like, we're just hitting all-time PR.

Oh, my God.

All-time

personal records.

I literally remember holding my little guy, and he had fallen asleep and Paige was taking a nap because, like, okay, we locked it down all time.

And I'm just looking at him.

And I was like, oh, you did a little baby.

Like, for no reason.

For, like, nothing.

Straight up, what is this salty discharge ass?

Like, what is happening right now?

Or, you know, and just, and like, when it's.

Like, when you're, yeah, when you're just, when you don't know how the winds are turning and you're trying to just like,

how do I make sure that everything I'm doing is perfect to make sure that you are perfect and that you just have like

all of that and and you know, um, not wanting to fall short of everything that needs doing in that regard is just

soul annihilating

is you go through the four things checklist: hungry, sleepy, dirty,

uh, hungry, sleepy, dirty, tired.

Yes.

Don't forget about farts.

Dirty

farts.

Whatever.

You go through the checklist and then you go,

did I do all the checklists?

Yes.

Okay, then sometimes babies just get fucking pissed.

Yes, yes.

And the reasons behind crying too that change over time are pretty incredible because it's not just like,

it's those things, the obvious, like, can you solve the problems?

Right.

And then sometimes it's like, hey, can you just be here?

Can you just like be around and just kind of comfort me?

Right.

And then a couple of versions of like, I don't want to, you know, lie down right now.

I want to be touched.

I want to be coddled.

I want to do something, whatever.

Sometimes it's just boredom.

Get off me.

Get off me.

Right.

Sometimes it's boredom.

Sometimes it's temperature.

Yes, exactly.

Right.

And then, yeah, sometimes it's get the fuck off me 100%.

I don't like this anymore.

Get the fuck off.

And

to put me on my stomach, you motherfucker.

And then, and then the one that I that was incredible that I learned was

sometimes it's the situation, sound, environment, visual, whatever is happening is distressing or just not what I want right now.

Me crying is going to change reality to just be me crying instead of me being here.

Like, if I'm like, oh, this room's too dark, or I don't see mommy, or I don't like what I'm hearing.

And the crying will cause mommy and daddy to have a brand new form of internalized anxiety response, which will put them into a scramble to change everything in the room at random to see if that's the thing.

So,

this is where, like, again,

gangster punch bomb is like, hears it and is like, okay, what's wrong?

Let's let's go and is able to immediately go into the caretaker mode and just

diagnose, right?

And I am like, usually someone who's trying to diagnose and go about things on Dawn.bullet point list.

And that's not what this, that sound, that sound completely like, it shatters all ability to think, like, funk, to function rationally.

To, like, it's, it destroys me.

And in a way where I'm, like, freaking out, like, it's almost a panic attack inducing sound.

And, like, Punch Mom is, like, totally cool and under control.

And I'm like, how are you not?

like losing everything right now like how are you not freaking out like doesn't that sound

reach down inside and destroy everything within you and she's like no she just needs and i'm like i don't i it's doing you're hearing a different sound from me.

It's crazy, no, it's it's the same.

No, everybody's different.

Like, for for Paige and I, it was the reverse.

Like, her, her, she, the, like, the noise would hit her in a certain way, and she'd get, like,

like, less,

like, she'd become like more frantic, and they'd be like, nah, no, it's cool, it's cool.

And she'd be like, oh my god, doesn't this make you crazy?

I'm like, oh, it sucks, and I hate this.

I hate it.

And it's, and, oh,

but like, hold on.

Yeah.

Like, and part of it's patience.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, and then the thing, too, as well, is like already the difference between

like the first hours, the first day or so, and then a little bit after that.

Oh, yeah, huh?

Is crazy because, like, first little bit, I was like, yo, she's so chill.

This is crazy.

She was.

You, hey, you fool.

you absolute moron you buffoon I know how you feel about this sort of thing.

It is time to become actively superstitious a lot

Okay,

wow wow was really easy to get her down tonight shut up

Shut your fucking mouth

I mean okay,

so I mean I'm again, there's no chronology here.

We're all over the place, but like when,

like, literally when baby, when she, when Punch Girl came out, she went, ah, for like one and then went down onto mom and

was like, oh.

Oh, my God did the same thing.

He tried to go back to sleep and they had to be like, hey, hey, hey, come on.

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

And I was like, oh, oh, okay.

Oh.

You know?

And then

in general, the fussiness was there,

but there was like things where I I was like, oh, like when she would get fussy, like in especially initially, like after that first long kiss, skin to skin,

there's a point where it was like, oh,

I can just put her right here, and that fixes all problems.

A lot.

Yeah, it fixes a lot.

I was like, oh, that's awesome.

Oh, that's literally that is the best feeling on planet Earth, right?

Hey.

How's it feel to get like legitimately brand new emotions?

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

They're not variations of existence.

They weren't there.

They were not there.

It was not there.

And like that of just like,

I'm like, I am fixing the problem by just existing and holding you here is

that's heroin, right?

Yeah, and you're like, yeah, I'm, I'm dad.

I'm, oh, I'm doing it.

Yeah.

And then, and then, and then,

right?

And now

milk is involved.

Right.

And we're feeding.

And we're upset.

And we're really upset when

just because.

And life is sleep and breasts.

Right.

I had

a really hard time at that point.

Yeah.

And what happens is that thing I just described turns into,

oh, you're putting me on your chest.

Can you feed me?

no then get the fuck off me

i i had i'm like

i struggled a lot with

you

bro these are the wrong tits get out of my face i'm my attitude of the baby i'm currently having the worst time with that it's the roughest thing in the world and just a moment ago this right here, this was all you needed.

And this solved all problems.

And now, this is the last thing you want.

It does nothing for you.

Get off of me, you useless man.

Get the fuck off.

Right?

And then it's like, okay, what can I do?

I can stall for time until the breast is here.

Yeah.

So

let's do things.

Let's, you know, find positions.

Let's make noises.

Let's play a little, you know, a little, let's sing, let's talk, let's dance, let's do whatever.

And then, you know, eventually

you can get distracted for about a minute, maybe two.

And then you're like, wait a minute, you're distracting me.

I want the breasts, right?

What the fuck?

And then, why are you fucking wasting my time?

And she remembers, and then you're like, ah, try something new.

And it's horrible, right?

And she's like, eventually she's like, yo, you need to stop with this bullshit and get me the milk now.

And I'm like, ah,

right.

And it's like, and it's like, oh, mom was trying to catch half an hour sneak, like nap time before getting back up here, but I guess it's not going to work.

So shit, here we go.

And man, that feeling sucks.

I have curious questions, but if there's anything that you're like, oh, no, absolutely not.

Not here, especially, feel free to not answer.

But are you guys also doing like pumping so that you'll also be doing like feeds?

So, yes, there is pumping involved.

and um we're also uh you know we're doing we're pumping and um and feeding directly and and uh even like throwing in some extra right um there which there's ways you can do there's like things you can grab a little tube and get a little extra in there while while the while the feeding is occurring um

and

uh

the

yeah the thought is that like oh okay well if there's a you know a step or an or if there's a a feed that can just be all dad, for example, then that's a great opportunity to have a big nap, big recoup and everything.

Absolutely.

But there's downsides to that, which are the regular scheduled production needs to occur and all the benefits of the latch for this time and not missing a thing and also introducing a bottom.

Even though you want to nap.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You still have to pump on the same fucking schedule.

So there's a whole thing with that.

And then 3 a.m.

is the best time for that, is also when you might want to do that skip, but it's actually when you should pump the most.

And then also there's the part where it's like, and there's different methods.

You can go like, you know,

like, you can go spoon, you can go cup, you can do all these different things to get the actual milk into the baby.

But if you go with,

but if you give them the bottle with the nursing at the same time, the bottle has a nipple on it that's too easy compared to the actual nipple.

So then they get trained to suck at the wrong stroke force.

That can happen.

Hey, so but this is and this is what we're kind of going through right now is essentially you're like trying to figure that out, right?

Because if you yeah, if you train the wrong force of sucking and there's nipples that are that are have a size that's more forceful.

But depending on whether baby is like in a situation where you're like, yo, baby needs more milk right now versus like, oh yeah, she's good.

She can work on it a little bit.

You just don't, you're not sure about like, should.

Yeah, that's basically it.

It's just like, you know, if you if you have the baby that's like, oh, you know what, this nipple is great, in fact, on the bottle, I'm just going to do bottle, I'm just going to go with the bottle effort, then suddenly the real nipple starts being a bigger problem for baby.

You know, so you got to be careful with how you balance.

The kicker is that real nipple is attached to mom, yep, yep, which they like.

They, yes,

but it's the effort.

That's the easiest.

Here's the thing: here's the thing: you're completely right.

However, being completely right is not actually as important as it usually is.

Yep.

Because

you are dealing with a violently uncooperative subject.

Yes.

Yes.

No.

Being sane is more important than being right.

So, like, you're juggling, will this even work at all?

How hard is it going to be to get to work?

And also, babies need parents that are not ready to jump out windows.

And

that's the big one, right?

Like, of all the pros and on each column of like yes introducing the bottle and fucking up this potentially or getting the ideal amount of pumping going and having the right amount of suckle and you know and nursing time and and you know all the oxytocin in the world and so on.

And then there's am I about to just crash the fuck out, right?

Am I about to crash out forever?

And

if you are, then you know what?

It's time to just do the easier solution at that point.

Absolutely.

You guys are in this early period.

You guys are just all like working together as a team, which enables you the best tip you can possibly do for young children, which is,

hey, honey, I'm about to freak the fuck out.

Can you hold this, this kid for a second?

I need to go outside.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Fully, fully aware of that.

Lose my shit.

I need to leave the room.

Excuse me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I,

you know, as you just described, new emotions, right?

The new emotion that you get from,

you know, dad's making everything okay is immediately complemented with the dark flipped reverse arcana of itself, which is dad cannot make anything okay right now.

Dad is the worst and needs to stop existing.

Is dad actively useless?

Also,

I want him out of my face.

I

so i'm i'm that's where i that click hello we're live that's where i am right now the highest highs i've ever had in my life with the lowest lows 10 minutes later it's the most it's brutal it's so insanely brutal i i'm laughing but i want to die

and it's uh and that's that's currently it you know and um i'm like okay okay the

you know, tell yourself all the idioms you need to.

Keep it all in mind.

And, you know, it's like, hey, you know what?

We had those moments where it's like, yeah, this is going, this is pretty rough, but don't worry about it.

It'll change soon.

And then it's like, oh, hey, cool.

We're getting the hang of this.

This is going well.

Yeah.

Well, guess what?

It'll change soon.

So

just don't feel anything

or feel all the things.

I don't know.

There's a couple things going on there because I'm in the same place as you are, just a little bit ahead, just a tiny bit, right?

And we share the same profession.

So, like, we're as close as it can get in terms of like family proximities, all that shit.

The problem is, is that like, yeah, you get swaddling.

Dude, swaddling, unswaddling, diaper change back into the swaddle, rock, rock, rock.

You're going to get super good at that.

Okay.

And then the swaddle period will be over.

Like,

as soon as you get super,

super good at it, it's over.

Now you

learn the new skill.

Okay, you're back.

Oh, yeah, I'm back.

Okay.

Yes, the new skills will show up.

Now, now, here's the thing, too.

As somebody who has gotten

I'm going to pat myself on the back and say, I have now handled various volumes of mess,

right?

I have done the

big

black tar,

um,

uh, the, my, my, myconium, right?

Yeah, the myconium is not bad, right?

And then I've also gotten your, your, your, your yellow and, and brown, peppered, all the mess, all of it, right?

And you've, and I've seen the big fucking, and the small ones and the easy.

I've gotten pretty all right at changing, right?

And taking care of the changing situation.

So that's cool um

the then following that change and going into like like the first one was horrible by the way it was such a nightmare i was like oh my god it looks so much easier on the video i watched what the fuck what the fuck oh god oh please and a nurse kind of has stepped in and was like here's how you yeah this is a question are you are you the kind of guy who's like squeamish about like poop

I mean, I don't like it, but in this case, it doesn't matter.

As we recently discovered in the last couple of weeks, it doesn't matter.

You have to do it.

You're doing it.

How I feel about it doesn't matter.

But, like, for the context of the remainder of the conversation, because I'm the kind of person, I don't give a shit.

I don't give a fuck.

Okay.

Right.

I'm not.

That's poop.

Okay.

Well, okay.

So for me,

at no point so far have I, at one point, I've gotten some on my like hand a bit, but I've managed to be very good at not getting anything on anything except for the changing station itself and her.

In fact, and like once I got it on a new diaper, and then it was like, ah, fuck, there it goes.

Dude, that's gonna right.

That happened to me yesterday.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Man.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

Especially when you're putting it on and you're like, oh, here comes more.

And you're like, oh, my God, shield.

Like, you're fucking.

Protect me.

Yeah.

Please, please.

Grabbing the huggies and doing a faultless defense with it again.

You know what I mean?

Like, oh,

use all that tension to just shield it down.

And again, and I want to take a moment to

quadruple emphasize the success of the tech, which is

Diaper Genie.

Thank you very much.

Oh, man.

I don't know how it works, but it works.

Right.

And then with the seal, air seal.

So you put the diapers in the thing that keeps it closed as best as possible.

Two carbon filters that they, you know, the thing we have in taping them to the bottom and putting, putting, taping one to the top of the lid and taping one to the bottom or putting it underneath the bag.

And then using a doggy bag as well as a sealer.

That is all working out really well.

So that's great.

As somebody who's gotten pretty all right with that so far, I have

so many opinions about newborn

outfits now that it's crazy.

In putting on...

I have my one opinion.

Would you like to hear it?

Yeah.

Does this have buttons on it?

How about you go kill yourself and put it in the

slippers?

Oh my God, die.

Okay, if you put buttons on the baby's newborn outfit just end it just leave the leave this earth just get on get on a ship and leave forever okay next

um if you don't do the thing where one of the zips goes all the way down to the baby's ankle on one side leave off i don't want you on planet earth anymore i need you gone Okay, next, and I would say biggest, because we can work around those.

If you decide to make the sleeves really, really tight and elastick-y for the style of the thing, and make it impossible to pull the baby's hand out or see whether all fingers are protruding, because sometimes you're opening it up and you get like three of the fingers out, but the pinky's there, and you don't want to pull up and hurt baby.

What the fuck are you doing?

Quit your job and change professions.

It's crazy

is such like a trap of an experience because the first time they're all like goo gaga and they're like, they're just like blah, blah, blah, moving.

And you're like, oh man, this is going to be so much easier when they're older.

But then before they, before they, so my little guy, like when I put his shirt on, he put, I go push, push, push, and he puts his arms through.

Okay.

But before that,

right before that is, I fucking hate putting my shirt on.

Ah, get it off me.

Like that, that part sucks.

and like i got one at one point i thought i had a trick because like she's doing the thing where and it's awesome where like from literally seconds on earth you put put a finger right into the hand and then yeah right yeah they do the reflex yeah feel that reflex grip and you're like yeah let's go and so i would put my i'd open up the sleeve put my hand in and get the grip going and then pull the grip finger out right and i was like okay we got some tech going and then we switched to one of the onesies

where doing that, it was still too tight to pull out her hand.

There wasn't enough room for her newborn hand to come.

And I'm just like, I want to burn this thing.

It's crazy that you shipped this product.

Would you like a peach saliva

patented baby clothes tech?

Oh, was that what just went by there?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paige came up with this idea, and it saved us a lot of trouble.

You have to be willing to destroy your baby clothes though okay okay okay

every every single thing every single time you're like oh my god they don't like the feet yeah arms just get a pair of scissors and cut the fucking legs and arms off as long as the fabric doesn't bleed out right because sometimes i've because i've cut sleeves off my shirts and stuff and sometimes certain types of cotton or fabric will like have you know excess that doesn't cut clean so as long as it can be removed cleanly then yeah that that's a good solution.

My little guy, he, you know, those onesies that like end in like the onesie becomes a sock?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he hates that shit.

Oh, hates it.

So, we had like three or four of those that were just like, well, the feet, all the feet are gone.

Okay, just all the feet are gone because he wants his toes out.

Okay.

Well, because one of the ones that we put on yesterday, like, I didn't notice it, but like, the shoes, the, the, the little sock on it was actually like designed to be almost like little ballerina shoes.

I was like, oh, that looks cool.

So I was like, okay, well, that works for that one.

I will accept your subpar buttoning solution in exchange for these cute little boot shoes.

I want to go into something because it's one of these things, like we,

it's the nature for me anyway, but it feels like the nature of a lot of people, you included, where you have the baby and you just start like grousing and griping, right?

And you're commiserating over all the stuff that's like really hard.

And you get people that are either younger or they don't have kids or they chose not to have kids.

And they're like, I don't fucking get it.

These guys are miserable.

But it's also like the most personally fulfilled I've ever felt doing anything in my entire life by a massive order of magnitude.

And my relationship with my wife went from like great to like, oh my God, we're like, we're like gods on the earth.

So

we're, we're, oh my, and we're so like, we're like working together so well.

And we have this important thing that we're doing together.

And it's so important.

That's a pretty good reason.

Yeah.

But yeah, I could have gone for a little bit more sleep sleep today.

That would have been all right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tell you what, man.

You know, I'll let you know.

I'm, we're, we're, we're here.

We're going through it, you know.

I'm going to tell you right now, when you do go back to streaming, dude, your streams are going to be awesome.

Because you're going to just be a fucking stupid, rambling mess, and it's going to be great.

Use that energy.

Well, okay.

The thing I already feel as I'm doing this right now, the first professional thing that I've done since that's happened, is like, I knew that, hey, I took this break beforehand to get everything ready because you're making room for a new priority on top of all the other things in life.

And what I realize upon clicking fucking the stream button today is that that priority space is actually like 50 priority spaces.

And this is now priority 51.

This is not priority two, three, or five.

This is 51.

So I don't know.

It's crazy how big that power gap is.

But

for the first couple of months, I had another new emotion, which I'd never felt before in my life, which is, did you know that if you can't see your wife or child

right now, they're in danger.

They're in danger.

They're falling down the stairs into the furnace.

Did you know that?

That if you're not actually looking at them right now yeah they've both wandered out into the street in heavy traffic fortunately as you've seen our place this is open concept so they're they're right fucking there oh yeah you'd hear you know you'd be you'd be you'd hear ah hell yeah you'd be like oh yeah

and that'd be an awkward uh live stream fails moment um

as you hear me tumbling down the stairs you know but yes absolutely there is that feeling there's also all the baby monitor tech you can get and set up and, you know, all the different settings on that to make sure that you see and hear every sound and log it and get as paranoid as you need to be.

Just embrace it.

There's a product for everyone's level of paranoia.

I don't want to hear.

No matter how unhealthy.

I want to hear the rattle on the exhale.

Right.

Oh, yeah.

I can hear them breathing.

No, no, no.

I want to hear the.

It's kind of interesting, too, to watch as like the camera, the crib, the light thing next to it all have their white noise machines built in.

And at some points, like a cry goes off and all the machines are simultaneously going,

and you're like, oh,

okay, okay, everyone's setting needs to shut the fuck up.

All of these apps on my phone need to shut the fuck up, of which there are now many because everyone knows the grift is, oh, you got a newborn.

You don't have time to make decisions.

Pay me that 70 bucks to track all the things you need tracked.

it is so wild.

The crypt is insane.

You're like, okay, we have you in the robot bassinet that sues you.

We have the cameras and the microphones set up.

You're trapped.

Completely empty sleeping area where you've been swaddled into a custom swaddle that hooks into the wall.

Meanwhile, I was in a hand-me-town crib in the hallway of my parents' apartment.

Exactly.

Like 25 fucking stuffed animals in there trying not to choke on my smoke asthma.

Exactly.

And it's like, wow, yeah.

No, there is a part of this.

There is a part of a lot of this where I go, I just think back and I go, hold on a minute, man.

Like,

I have,

like,

we came from situations where I guess they figured it out and we're here, but like, in terms of where we slept and the size and what they had resource-wise, it was so much worse off.

So you're like, yeah, it's fine.

It's fine.

Baby will adapt, you know.

In which my mother told me, oh, yeah, babies are fine.

Don't worry too much about them.

But they die all the time and no one knows why.

That was the actual, it's like, oh, babies are easy to take care of, but sometimes they die and you just never know why.

And like, this seems like a very awful

juxtaposition, mom.

Okay.

It's really bad.

Okay, so these conversations, these conversations are kind of fucked because there happened.

We used to have them like once a year or so.

And now the speed at which it's like, okay, so grandma comes over and we're talking and she's like, okay, so, um, you know, or like, like, like, what someone, a family

gifts us like a baby blanket, you know, and it's like, oh, yeah, like, you can put that in the crib to keep them warm.

And it's just like, you're like, ah, actually, right.

Right.

And it's very, but it's beautiful.

It's very, very, very cute.

Very beautiful.

But that's not.

And put this on them when they're swaddled and they will you know cute as a button exactly and then so you get the you get the things about like your like little things coming up where it's like oh um it's like oh yeah so uh how is she sleeping are you sleeping with her like on her stomach or you know whatever and and stuff and then sleeping at the one week yeah and then and then and we're like uh actually that's a terrible idea and that's a huge link to sids and we don't do that because we know better now and she's like oh well no i mean we we were doing that, and things were found out.

Take this as an attack on my parenting skills because we did it and it was fine.

And that was, and I'm like, and that was 40 years ago.

Like, the low, yeah, no, the, and then the constant amount of like, actually, there's science and tech, and here's studies.

I can show you the studies if you'd like to see them.

And there's always a response that's either, oh, well, no, we figured it out and it was fine.

Or the one I'm liking now, because it's happened so often is wow, boy, y'all have everything these days.

We didn't have any of that, you know, we just figured it out.

Do you want to?

I don't know if you're going to encounter this, but I encountered it, and it's a trip.

It's, it's like, it's part.

So, part by the way, you probably feel much more like an adult now.

I noticed about a year in that I felt like a genuinely more mature, put-together man,

like a man.

Okay.

And you're starting that process, and good for you, and part of that process

is the final leap away from your parents because I experienced talking to my mom about this kind of thing, and she's like, Wow, you know, well, we did our best, you know, that's the you know, we just tried to do the best with what we knew then.

And my brain went,

Is that true?

And on a couple of things, I looked it up and I was like, like,

it's not.

It's not true.

You actually did know better in 1986.

But hold on.

Was the fact hidden behind a book in a library down the street?

Or was it accessible?

Okay, okay.

Because there's a part of that too, where it's like the information was out there if you wanted to go look for it, but why do that?

Because the people at church are kind of going to just give you their anecdotes and those

that'll go back to like well we didn't know smoking was bad for for people that weren't smoking back then and right

really

yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's a lot do you even believe that right now

you know and like you know or even just when it comes to things because again as the grift begins you're like okay so the goal here is to you know uh do all the breast milk we can and to supplement and hey look colostrum we pumped we got some frozen that's great um but you never know when you'll need some formula something might come up we might be in a situation

he showed up really early yeah exactly

way too early like the milk hadn't come in so i'm just like

so i'm going so i'm going to get some formula to just be you know to have it there and it's like okay well here we go let's begin the process of getting into i'm sure this is a grift too as i look at the aisle and checking the back of everything um and then i got something and i was like you know what no this is fine this is okay.

This seems all right.

And then thankfully a nurse confirmed.

She's like, yeah, they're fine.

It's not, you don't have to worry about that.

No, the grift is that formula fucking stinks.

Oh, does it?

That's the grift.

Oh.

It reeks.

Okay.

Well, no wonder it's like, hey, after you open it, throw it out 24 hours later, no matter what happens.

You know, there's a timer on that shit the moment you crack it.

But

as I got it and I was looking and it's like, okay, so what's good for a kid?

And it's like, oh, well, the ones based on milk, like cow milk is are shown to have these benefits and these are good things.

So like overall, you can go with different kinds, but the cow milk basis is pretty all well accepted as pretty dope formula that you're going to get for your kid.

Okay, cool.

And then now cut to me explaining that.

And my mom's like, cow milk.

And I'm like, we're not doing this.

We're not doing this.

I don't know what soybean health-based woo-woo shit you got going on here with what you think is going to apply, but we're not doing this right now.

Not when we have the numbers.

When I have the numbers and I show you the numbers, you have to stop.

Like for Paige and I, if we had to fall back on formula, we went for, it was Emphymile A plus NeuroPro formula.

That's exactly what I got.

The reason why is really simple.

It's the formula a nurse handed to me in the fucking hospital when the boy was born.

Well, there you go.

Use this one.

It's good for babies.

There you go.

That's not what I was handed, but it's the one I got regardless.

And it was like, hey, great.

Little container.

If you don't use all of it, toss that.

Perfect.

Ideal.

Yeah, man.

That level of just like, like,

I already had, I, I already had a woo-woo detector.

And like, now it is sharpened to a, it has been folded a thousand times.

Okay.

You have to understand.

Just the other day, we were discussing as um we were meeting different professionals and doctors and nurses and stuff right and for the most part especially when you're going off through multiple shifts you're meeting different people and like some of them that are like there for the long haul are going to be off their shifts people in a really short amount of time and some of them are great and some of them are not and that's just going to be the way it goes because this is the profession and a lot of people are uh really want to help take care of a lot of other people but they've also got a lot of shit going on in their lives and some people are like natural-born, natural incredible caretakers, and other people are like, uh, they've seen too much, and they're just kind of turning, they're just turning it all off inside a little bit.

Dude, we ran into a lactation lady, like a lactation specialist.

Yeah.

And after she left, I was like, Paige, was that lady a bitch?

She's like, I think she was like a massive bitch.

And then we asked one of the nurses, and they're like, oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Okay.

She's, yeah, she's mean.

So we had one or two of those, right?

We had one lady where it's like that one receptionist at the OBG clinic that we are going to.

It's like, oh, God, if we end up with her, fuck it.

Hang up and call back, right?

Like, just don't even, don't even proceed.

Do not pass go.

Just hang up and try the numbers again, right?

And don't give it, and hopefully she doesn't know it was you that called a minute ago.

But

and then now sharpening that woo detector, as I was saying, right?

The, you know, because

I've got a sharp ear to listen to the sound of crunch.

If I hear a leaf being crunched in the forest a mile away, I'm going to fucking perk up and go like, hold on a minute, lady.

Hold on a minute.

Are you crunchy?

Are you a little crunchy?

Because

we had one who was super nice, awesome, really great person, and like very familiar.

And everything's going really, really well.

And deep into the conversation about like how things are going and what's going on, there's a moment of like oh you know one thing I'd consider is like a really there's little little hints of like oh yeah like um consider like an osteopathy have you looked into that you know that's something that's really cool and we're like oh okay cool and I'm like hmm I've I've heard a thing about that before

and she's like yeah and she's talking about how great it is and everything I'm like okay cool and then we get out of there and then I'm just like yo punch mom did you did you catch it and she's like she's like

right and it's like this is,

there are things that it's proven to work for, but it is a pseudoscience.

It is not a fully developed thing that is 100% locked down certain, right?

Hey, Wooly.

Wooly,

I know you guys probably have everything planned out,

but just in case, have you heard of this complete bullshit about to tell you?

Yeah.

And here is based off nothing.

Oh, my God.

Listen, just just i'm just trying to do what's best for you guys and offer you options and here's what i've i feel like i've learned to as well right i have a theory it's the it's the the crunch pipeline because

the crunch pipeline not in terms of working in video games mind you but in terms of woo woo woo woo parental shit right crunchy moms is the saying if anyone's unfamiliar what this means is people who think that holding your baby up to the crystals and the earth and the sunlight will heal them instead of taking them to a doctor.

Did we show you the crystals when you were here?

No, but

we have crystals in the house.

Okay, all right.

Gifted to us.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

We were having burgers.

And a sweet old lady came over and went, oh, what a sweet baby.

Here, this will protect him.

And just handed Paige like a big fat piece of quartz.

Okay, incredible.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Exactly Exactly that.

And as I previously discussed earlier in a previous episode, when it comes to the process of pregnancy, if mom is somebody who,

for whatever fucking reason, gets calm by holding the crystal, then give mom the crystal then, right?

Because the damage is already done.

Good vibes, mom.

You can't stop now.

What is reality going to do for you at that point, right?

This was a conversation.

We oxytocin 25 minutes ago.

Yeah.

That ship has sailed, sir.

Okay, but what I've realized about the treadmill, right?

About this path we go down, right?

The pipeline, is that the person that leads you there is always like 80%

solid.

20% crunch.

Just a little hint of it, right?

Like said person who was great, fun, great advice, everything was awesome.

And then you get a little hint of like, that's not proven and I know it, but but we're going to move past that point of this conversation.

It's all good, right?

And then a little bit of, like, as we're closing it out, a little bit of a, like,

you know, there's a lot of stuff with the medicalization of things that has just kind of lost, lost touch with nature.

And you're like, yeah, no, no, I know what you mean.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Back when, you know, babies were born in dirty pits and mom and baby had a 50%

of them didn't make it.

You know, and when we had to just decide which one are we cutting open and which one are we saving you know bullying yeah you know

yeah i need you to i need you to consider what i'm about to tell you are you ready

but what about

the toxins oh boy right well the person i'm the first the first layer is never going to talk about the toxins because they're coming at you extremely reasonable and they've got that little hint of it it might be 90 10 it might be 80 20 but i'm gonna i'm gonna cut it off at 80 20 max right?

Little hints of crunch in what they're saying, nothing too much.

And for the most part, everyone's different.

So you might have somebody who came from a situation where they're like, yeah, look, I don't know.

No one's ever going to perfectly align with anybody.

Right.

You have to be aware of that.

And believe it or not, right?

You can go back and look at your pen and tell her bullshit episodes.

But it's like, there's stuff out there where you're like, you know, when it comes to acupuncture, we're not even really sure.

It kind of does work sometimes.

It's weird.

That's a

lot and conclusively proven.

It was a statistical error in the original reading of those studies from the 90s.

So, wait, hold on.

The meta-analysis that showed that there was some like

some weird, inconclusive,

but beneficial results.

Yeah, you're saying

we went back on that?

Data again.

Let's go.

Yeah, and no, acupunctures, nah.

Yeah!

Science.

Let's fucking go.

I'm getting hyped.

That's awesome.

I love that that's bullshit.

That's super cool.

Fuck that shit.

Okay.

Placebo can be so strong and screw up your experimental controls.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

Wow.

That's great.

That's great.

Every time one of them, anyways, because that was one of those ones where they're like, it was in the category of, oh, there's a whole lot of bullshit here.

And then now they're like, yeah, I don't know.

We saw some stuff that seemed to, right?

And like, oh, like, you know, placebo, power of prayer, et cetera.

Yeah, da-da-da-da-da.

That's not the point.

The point is, is that the person then will refer you to a person.

And let's say you go see, I don't know, that osteopath who's like, hey, I know some, I'm a specialist in this.

And they,

you talk to them and they're going to be like, 60-40, right?

And the 60-40 person is a bit more brazen about what they're talking about.

But let's say you're somebody who's like, I'm trying to fix a particular condition and I want to try things because I'm also going, the referral to the second person is I'm going to go to that second person because the filter is if I don't need to go any further, I'm fine.

I'm not going to go see them.

But somebody who does show up to that second 60-40 person is probably more desperate, right?

Probably needs it a little bit more.

And so the 60-40 person is going to start bringing a little bit more of that woo into the situation, you know?

And depending on what they then refer you to, if your needs continue to increase or demands, if you're in a situation that calls for it, that third person is 50-50 at best.

Yeah.

So and now we're just going downhill.

So here's into the crunch zone.

All right.

Here's where I'm at because I live in BC and BC is different.

Right.

I'm at the part where where I'll just lean over and be like,

we're cool with fluoride, right?

And the person will go, yeah.

And you go, okay.

Yeah.

And that

just like, that just kind of just solves that shit

right away.

Sure.

You know, I mean,

there's things here, there's parts of

town where it's like, oh, if you live in certain areas, you need to check out the lead numbers in the water because some places are like still on old pipes.

and it's not everywhere but if you live in one of those areas check to go go look into it right and then you go all right here we got the numbers it says here this is no good therefore yeah get your fucking brewer filter right do what you got to do um

but just coming at it from the the what I was just described of like we're gonna send you we're gonna refer you like getting a referral for a specialist or a doctor but you're getting referred to a slightly more crunchy person and before you know it you're walking into a shaman's hut

you know what I mean?

Like, there's

who knows?

Who knows how quickly we end up there?

But it's not, it is at least two referrals away from the shaman's hut.

And we're trying to do as much as we can to stay out of the shaman's hut.

Well, just don't go.

Yeah.

Just don't go see the shaman.

But we need, but we need, we need the shaman's special blessings and incenses, though.

You know, mom needs them right now more than anything.

Okay.

What else happened?

The entire process was one

where,

so, yeah,

I'm not sure if I mentioned it before or not, but like, you know, again, Punch Bomb was super incredible with it.

One of the things that happened was she got gestational diabetes.

And so that was.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

Gestational diabetes, brothers.

Yeah.

It's our fault.

Yeah.

Yeah, not proven.

No, no, that's a little crunchy too.

Blaming.

It is.

I looked at how much the dad is to blame for the placenta, and it's like, maybe, but maybe not.

But give me that doubt.

Give me that wiggle room.

How about you close that fucking Google window, you piece of shit?

You know what?

You can see that?

You don't think I can see the light shine on your face as the

as the cat as it gets a little bit brighter as you open up a fucking Google, you close that shit.

Fuck off.

No, there's

no.

There's certainly a decent chance.

Mr.

Woolley the Sugars Madden could never have given his wife.

Oh, no, no, not at all.

Me, who just got the diabetes a year prior, that couldn't be me.

What?

Couldn't be me.

Fuck out of here.

That's all you.

What you doing eating that chocolate, girl?

That's your fault.

Get your goddamn diet in order, bitch.

What the fuck?

oh you're feeling real brave right now on the podcast though as i'm chowing down on cheesecakes you know

um

so so no no it is it's it's it's part of it's part of what happened and uh the results of which were um pretty tremendous because it's like okay well now especially if we're at a place where um they're measuring in a more sharp uh way

we are going to implement, like, hey, keep track of,

they have a whole thing in place where, like, yeah, keep track of your blood sugar multiple times a day.

And if you feel spikes, go for a walk, da, da, da, da, all these little things, you know.

And she fucking was amazing with that and just crushed it and did all those things.

And of course, plus, having the benefit of like, I'm like, oh, hey, look, we've got a whole bunch of spare metamucil from my episode last year.

We gotta.

I can tell you, man, like you giving us that advice of like, yeah, just have a metamucil, like dropped Paige's blood sugar like so effectively.

It's incredible.

It was the best piece of advice we got for the whole pregnancy.

That's awesome.

I'm really happy.

I'm really happy that happened because it's great, right?

Amongst all the other little tricks I learned, you know,

getting through my own diabetic episode that were just like, oh, we're ready for this.

We've already got the

blood, you know, monitor and all the little things, the cuffs ready to go, et cetera.

So handling that and then ultimately getting to the part where, oh,

Jesus Christ, Paige.

Wow.

Thank you.

I'm super happy that that was incredibly effective.

That's fucking awesome.

That might be a little strong, but you definitely helped their health.

Yeah.

That is pretty extreme.

I'll take the dubs I can take right now, man.

I got another couple weeks of no sleep coming up.

I told told you this on the phone a little while ago, and I told you this over a text, but I'll tell you here now, you're doing a good job.

I can tell just by listening to you that you are doing a good job.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thanks.

It is.

It's rough when it's rough.

Just don't fucking drop them and you're good.

That's like, seriously, like, just don't, just don't drop them.

Yeah, I just, I just want, I want to get back that power to make the crying stop.

Oh,

I had it.

Stupid fucking

bitch.

I had it.

I don't know how long that's going to be.

I had it for two days.

Oh, dude, I barely have it back now.

It was so good.

I tasted Elysium, Pat.

I tasted the highs.

It was so good.

It's the greatest thing ever.

And then it was gone.

It's crazy.

Do you understand how crazy it is to take away

the highest high?

Oh, man.

That?

The ambrosia.

The ambrosia.

Surely, exclusively mom's domain.

No!

No, but it's right there.

Where are you going?

Okay, Paige and I had

a discussion.

It's the hands reaching out for the redstone of Asia in the fucking, in the fucking part two intro, you know?

I think that Paige and I had this conversation maybe 25 to 30 times where I would just get emotional and be like, my baby hates me.

And she was like, no, you just don't have tits.

Yeah.

Right.

And like, that's all he's about.

And she was like, your time will come in the toddler years.

And that is starting to

happen.

Sorry, what's like the other day?

He got super mad, like super upset, and just started going dead, dead, dead, dead, over and over.

And I, I had to, I had to cut a stream short.

I had to run over because he just

wanted dead dead all of a sudden.

It's like, that was the only solution.

I realize that.

I realize that.

And

I think that

if it takes years to get that feeling again, then so be it.

Okay.

Now you've dangled it in front of me and you've shown it to me.

And then into the distance it goes.

And now I'm chasing it forever, right?

Oh, yeah.

No.

Continue to chase it.

They tricked you.

They manipulated you on this.

Oh, baby did its job.

Baby came, came out and did its job immediately and gave me that.

You know what's the craziest thing?

You know how like the most narcissistic thing you could ever hear from a parent is like, this baby manipulated me.

How could they make me what I, write?

Uh, and then you have the baby, and you're like, This baby is fucking with me, dude.

This baby's totally messing with me on purpose.

Is the baby, is the baby gaslighting me when you hear you hear him a cry, and you're like, Hold on, was that the pitch that goes into the really high pitch that you shouldn't be hearing?

Was that one of those really, really bad pitches?

Hold on a minute, get the fuck over here.

Hey, you, what's going on?

Baby's like,

what's up?

Yeah, they're like,

you did the pitch.

You can't use that pitch.

World right now is not even

to be dad.

Your purpose right now is to be mom's all-purpose roadie.

Right, right.

There's some tricks

that are surprisingly effective for random reasons.

And I'm like, okay, this is where...

Yes, dear.

Yeah, okay.

Not against

the good one.

Not against the big baby.

I mean, against the smaller one.

No, there's a couple of different burping positions, you know, and

I've kind of learned about like, I'm like, oh, she hates this one.

She hates the pickup, you know, for example.

And I'm like, oh, uppies is going to be a problem for you, huh?

For me, okay, the

dude, like, a little bit on my shoulder was the one that he liked.

Okay.

So what she likes is it's so weirdly aggressive looking, but it's when you grab right here, you support like the jaw, and then you lean them forward and then you have while sitting and you do the pat.

But from the front, their face is all like

and she's talking about the football.

And it's not, no, it's not football position.

It's not football position.

It's it's they're seated.

God, let me just do it with this.

So you put your hand, your fingers around the bottom of the jaw or around the jawline like this, and then you seat them and lean them forward, and then you do this, right?

And the gravity of leaning them forward works out.

And for some reason,

that makes whatever's going down, no matter how upset she is, she chills.

She loves just doing that.

Yeah, you're going to figure out all the cool tricks, man.

And I'm like, okay, we got, we got one.

We got one.

All right, let's put that in the pocket.

But okay, I got off topic.

What I was saying is that, like, with the gestational,

so that was one of those things where,

and it can go a lot, it can go a lot worse in a lot of different ways, but in Punch Mom's case, yeah, a lot of stars aligned and things went out, and she was awesome at sticking with it.

And so we fortunately were like, okay, cool, we're looking at a percentile size, which is good.

And we're heading into a range where

one of the things that, you know, of all the possibilities that come from having gestational, so it's like your placenta gets affected.

And then, of course, you might get a big baby.

And if you get a big baby, you might have to do an induction or you might have to do a C-section and stuff like that.

You know, so who knows?

And so we kind of got to a point where the doctor was like, okay, cool.

Well, you're good to go up to, you know, sort of like that, that, more or less that 40 limit or so.

And then at which point,

yeah, we're going to induce because we don't want to push it past that because this is just the smart thing to do with this type of thing.

Don't want to get too big, baby.

Exactly.

And then, so we're like, okay, cool.

That's good.

Overall, you know, not partic, not like super anti-intervention or anything.

Let's go science.

But in general, you're like, but let's, but the things that hurt more, let's try to avoid those if we can, right?

That's overall reasonable.

And

so with the induction stuff, we're like, oh, we hope we can get something spontaneous kicking.

But the

part where

Doc Hospital was just like, okay, so we're just going to need you to come in early,

not because of anything going on, but simply because we don't have the slots.

Yeah, we're busy.

We're just busy, guys.

So life will have to start earlier because of bureaucracy, actually.

Well, you're like, I remember you telling me the dates, and then I remember you reaching out afterwards.

I'm like,

the timing seems to have gone smooth from what I can tell.

Yeah, it's all good.

It's all good, but it was just quite a shock because we were going into that going, like, okay, well, we have this much time and we have this much prep and idea, while keeping in mind that there's a possibility we might have to jump in that car and get going any minute now.

There was an idea of like, all right, well, either we'll start feeling it on our own and have that slow buildup of, you know, feelings contraction start, or we'll have a date that we know we're walking in there.

And what we ended up getting was,

you know,

calls and systems and Rolodexes and like, yeah, okay, we'll schedule you in.

Can you come in tomorrow?

No, no, okay, well, how about maybe the day after?

Like, it was just, just like, hey, slots are full, sorry.

And like, it's just a wild thing to imagine that like, you know, it wasn't any sort of miraculous, spontaneous moment of, oh, she was just ready.

It was just like, nah, man, that's when, that's when they had the slots and the free room for it to go down, you know.

And, and so, yeah, I went in and did that.

And, and, um,

uh, you know, I guess some of the

only other thing I'll say is over the course of, you know, going in and, yeah, beginning this, this induction process and stuff was how,

you know, we prepped for the long haul and see how that's going to to go.

And

everything was going, went pretty much, you know, as we were told it would go.

But there's one part of this chain where you're like, okay,

here's the person of all these people coming in and out who

this is probably our weak link.

And here's the person that's responsible for administering the epidural.

And that epidural is supposed to be doing way more than it's doing right now.

And it ain't doing much.

And then you're like, wait, wait, wait.

Can we, can we see what's wrong here?

Because, oh boy, it's coming on strong.

That pain is shooting up.

Are we in the category of the worst you've ever felt in your life?

Yes.

Okay, we're there.

We're there.

We're at the worst you've ever felt in your life.

Can we get that?

Can we get that epidural juice going?

Can we get it going?

It's going.

Oh, is it?

Then why is it not going?

I don't know.

Oh, let's check it out.

Maybe we do something else back here.

Oh, this should be it.

I think there's a problem back here.

Let's fix that.

All right.

Now it should be going.

It's not going.

And you're just like,

can we get a professional in here, please?

Can we?

We had a significantly more stressful birth story.

Yeah, yeah.

But

not that part.

That part's the sickest part of the birth story for us because Paige was fucking sky

flying with the dragon on fentanyl.

Nah.

She a great time once that shit went in.

Nah, man.

It took like a third application for it to go.

And you're like, what?

Are you the student?

Are you the professor?

Like, what is happening with that?

You know?

Yeah.

You know?

And we're there.

And like, It's one of those bits where it's just like, oh, what she's feeling right now.

It's like, no, no, this shouldn't be happening.

This should be way, way, way much more muted, and we should be able to get a little break before the pushing begins.

And it was just like, nah, you know.

So that was shitty.

That sucked.

Like, you don't want anyone to be a weak link, but that's a

important weak link, man.

Yeah.

And

hold on a second.

Oh, yeah.

And then the one other bit was like, while we're in there in the beginning, and one of the

early nurses is coming in and reading the file out and stuff and is like, okay, cool.

And so you took care of this and you took care of that and all these little bits.

And

the one person

we had up front was kind of like,

okay, so we're looking at your medical file, and we have all these things here.

And you had, you know, any of these prescriptions and these things,

whatever.

And then she's like, okay, cool.

And

yeah,

and so Miss Punch Mom, and so you also, or you earlier, you had the herpes treatment, right?

And she's like,

what?

And I'm sitting there like

huh?

And she's like, hello?

No.

And she, and he's he's like, no,

sir.

On your on your file here, you know, we prescribed you the Valtrex and that was a thing.

And I was like,

okay, I'm just going to chill here and we'll just see what's going on.

There's no, you know, we, I, but that,

and she's like, no, I don't think that's really a thing.

I'm pretty sure that would have been.

And there's that kind of that moment of like, like,

uh-huh.

And you're like, okay, is he now?

He's like confused, but he's going, uh, okay, no, I think that was.

I'm he's like, I'm pretty sure that's what it was.

And then it's like, she's like, no, and then I'm like, oh, okay.

And you're like, is this a thing that you guys are supposed to have confidentiality about?

And I'm here.

Was I supposed to leave the phone?

Was I supposed to leave the room before you did that?

And that you did that?

And is she now having a weird, is this a life-changing moment of like, oh dear God, like, what is going on?

And are you looking at the right file?

No, he was looking at the wrong file.

Oh, my god, you can't do that shit!

You can't do that!

He was looking, he mixed up the files, the room next to us.

He just took the file from the room next to us, and he started going down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they're like, okay, cool.

And he left.

And we're just like,

right, right?

And it's like, oh, and I'm like, okay, so now you have, and I'm like, hey, look, look, hey, you see that?

You see how I responded?

You see how, you see how I responded there, right?

I did, like, could you imagine?

What if I just went, you fuck, like, what if I blew up?

Could you imagine?

What if I just

right?

Right?

But you saw.

I totally lost it.

But you saw I was chill and I waited for the facts and then to discuss what the fuck just happened there, right?

Very, very, very much so.

So, what you're saying, what so what you're saying is that during the single most stressful time in your wife's life while she's giving birth to the new life for you, you were like,

hey, how about we all sit around and pat me on the back?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Did you notice?

Did you notice how chill, right?

Because, because, yeah, that's the watch

podcast.

And this was well before anything started.

This was just the beginning of the day.

We got in, sat down.

They went over the file, and that came up, and we're just like,

what has been happening?

You know?

Yeah, what secret life has been going on?

Oh, you just literally grabbed the wrong piece of paper.

And then, and then all of a sudden.

Now you've got that shit in your head for the people next door.

And well, you've got that.

You've got the fact that there's C-section twins going down not too far from us as well, right?

And you're like, ooh, damn, okay, that's going down.

But the fact that that happened, right?

And I'm then like,

oh, this is why they have that thing where they're like, you can say, I want my baby to never leave my site until we leave the hospital.

Oh, he never left our site.

You can check a box or whatever for any reason to be like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

There's no point at which there's ever going to be anyone.

Yeah, you can lock on and stay locked on the entire time.

And that is a.

Yeah.

That is an included part of what

is a part of the service there type of thing.

And so I did not close my eyes after the boy was out until Paige had slept,

like gotten out off her epidural and was alert and awake

because there was going to be direct eye-to-baby contact

time between the both of us.

You know?

No, no, no.

Now, granted, I had a tiny little red-headed baby that looked just like me, so it was going to be pretty easy.

Yeah.

You know?

And you got the arm thing and the leg thing, but it doesn't matter.

When fuck-ups like that happen, you go, this is why we keep locked on the entire time.

Z-target all the way through till we're home, you know?

She popped out with a humongous head of hair.

Cool.

Like, huge head of hair.

She's fully just,

it's all there.

There's very little else to do.

It's kind of crazy.

And it turns out, for some unknown reason,

when kids have, like, the more hair they're born with, the more heartburn the mother experiences.

Absolutely.

100%.

And we don't know why, but it's just a correlated thing.

Yeah, that's an old wives' tale that is rock solid.

It's crazy.

Right?

Like, I don't, it's crazy that it's real, but, but they don't know why yet.

Um, But apparently so.

And

she did have,

you know, she did.

Like, it's just weird.

Anyway.

Chemicals, man.

So,

yeah, like acid reflux stuff.

Anyway, so

there was that part of it.

That's crazy.

And it's also like, it is interesting how, I mean, effectively, what the entire process of baby learning to exist is baby just doing random things until they work, right?

Yeah.

And then, like, to the point where

gotta learn how to poop.

Then the body goes, oh, this is what we're doing.

And then in sleep, you can

see, like, you had feel the system warming up, right?

The intestines and the lore and like the stomach and all of it figuring out how to process a thing and go like, ah, get out of there.

And all of it is just like, I'm flailing and doing random things.

And like, hopefully, one of these things is going to be successful and work.

And, um, and that, that is pretty much how, like, you know, life and things evolved in general, right?

You do random shit until it works, and then you're like, oh, keep doing that thing.

That seems to be going well.

Um,

and like, like, dude, tummy time is like

kids hate tummy time, but like, you want to get them so mad that they're like, I want this tummy shit to stop, right?

Right, right.

And then they, then they that's it, the whole idea of my

and then they hulk out and like and like do lifts, yeah, and then they push up, right?

Exactly.

Um,

the and that whole thing is like to the point where you know it's like i'm crying because i want the the boob and the boob is in my mouth and the milk is already in my mouth and all i have to do is swallow but i'm so upset that i can't get past that part and you're like everything you want is right there

just

we've all been there you're all like we've brought you all the way to the finish line You're past it now, actually.

You don't even have to like cross the finish line.

You're already past it.

Just lift your hand up.

Dude, I literally dealt with that like two, three days ago where my little man was like, want fries.

And I look over at him and like, he's got his plate and his ketchup and his fries.

And I'm like, you have fries.

Want fries.

Brother.

I literally said, brother, you have fries.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah.

You have them, yeah, no give, only throw, right?

That's it, you know, but this entire, this entire process of just, you just flail and then something works, and then they kind of clue in, and then they start doing it again.

What is life if not for a giant lab?

And, and what is becoming a person if not just labbing everything until it works and then locking in the tech?

So

I'm torn, Wooly, because on the one hand, I'm like, that's really sweet.

And on the other hand, I'm like, you have a brain disease

that

you are warped in a way I could not have anticipated.

Hey, man,

I saw a target.

I shot for it.

Yeah, you know, we have that on lock.

And, you know,

at a point too, like

heading back over to,

you know, see a nurse at the hospital and stuff and

pulling up to the parking being

as we get through the gates being like, Yeah, we're here to return a baby.

And I'm like, okay, I'm working on my

working on working on my working on my dad bits.

And, you know, tough crowd.

Tough crowd.

But he doesn't play.

I enjoy my laughs.

No, no, she laughs.

Yeah, yeah.

She laughs.

No, it doesn't.

It doesn't.

It's like, listen, those people hear that for real, which, like, you have to, you have to take that into account.

Yeah.

And, you know,

I mean,

that was it.

And, you know,

the entire thing, too, of like, what's funny, too, about, I guess, some of that, that whole, you know, like, like labor process and everything was the.

Yeah, it was pretty funny, huh?

It was.

It was.

There was funny.

There was funny, right?

Did they give you like an ice bed to sleep on?

actually so i had they gave they had a couch that folds out to a flatbed which was dope but i didn't know how the back head part worked so it was kind of worthless in the end dude that's that's really hard that must have been tough well the pro the problem the pro there was a problem

now hold on there was a problem where i was sitting on it and i was holding newborn and then i leaned back to do some of the you know the the skin to skin and then the part that separates has a big hole gap.

And so I'm going

into nothing.

I'm sitting and leaning my back over air and fall with baby here.

And that sucks.

And I'm like, fuck this chair forever then.

Right?

And I'm sure you actually discovered that your reflexes in vital situations are actually way better than

they were.

Oh, oh, oh, we are.

Yo, visual calculus just went to nine, bro.

It's like, like, you bust out a couple of the dad moves, and you're like, wow, this is some extra, extra juice got rooted to this as soon as the baby showed up because I was not this quick before.

Burp towels and things falling off of things, and I'm currently using feet and such to catch those.

No, no baby saves yet, but I'm preparing for the potential.

Um, because especially there's some of those, there's predictable thrashing, predictable pushing, and then every once in a while, a just yeet,

right?

Every once in a while, newborn is like, what happens if I throw myself as hard as I can back this way?

And my center of gravity is actually in my head, not my body.

So even though you're securing my body, my head is really where it's all going to go.

So what if I did that, though?

The baby is neck-oriented.

For maybe eight, nine months, I had that dude in like a back-facing chokehold.

Like nearly every like just the whole hand around the entire back of the head.

Yeah.

And then the other arm just like this.

But then you get really good at like the tuck.

Just jam the baby in the crook of the arm and then just lock it in.

As long, well, what I want as long as head is in a safe direction, right?

Oh, yeah, that's what your shoulder's for, bud.

Oh, okay, you mean face down, like head turned, and then body on you this way.

Face up, neck on your shoulder, yes, back of the head over the

yes, okay, okay, that, that, that, okay, right.

Um, yeah, so no, I'm not, I'm not uh ultra instinct yet, but like the first spot, the first shine is starting to show, you you know a little bit uh we'll see when when a when a clutch save comes through um

yeah

uh

i don't know

that's that's baby man

um

are you ready to talk about one thing to everyone in your physical vicinity ad nauseum for like the rest of your life.

So not only has am I super ready, but I've it's already begun because the process of talking to people about the pregnancy, even yeah, has elicited that.

And I said before, you can tell which friends are like, Oh, yeah, okay, I've been through it too.

Here's my thing, or which friends are like, Oh, wow, I haven't been through it, but I care about you, and so we're going to be talking about this.

And wow, that's nuts.

And which ones are just like a personal favorite, which is, whoa, that's crazy.

Did you see that Kamen Ryder's skull is going to be in Super Robot Wars?

I did see that.

And like, I had a, I had a turning point on that where I was just like, am I talking about the baby too much?

And this is like on stream as well.

And then I just was like, well, it's only the single most interesting thing that's ever happened to me by

multiple orders of magnitude.

But hey, man, no big deal.

Of course.

Of course.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know,

that's that.

And the process is going to continue.

And, you know, I guess

eventually,

I don't know.

Like, there's all this stuff about, like, hey, it's, you smell, did you smell that?

That new baby smell?

That, that, you know what they talk about?

It's fucking cookies.

And you know why?

Because that's that, it's the Vernex.

It's the cream cheese that they, that they're cooking.

No, it's not.

That, no, it's not.

Okay.

Like, yes, the Vernex, yeah.

But, like, that new baby smell

our guy still has some of that new baby smell on him.

Oh, okay.

Like, like, you give him a big hug, you're like, oh, yeah, that's, that's my legacy right there.

Oh, cutest guy in the world.

Smells like legacy.

Jesus Christ.

Um, I don't know.

Your kid will either stink or smell like crack.

So I don't think in our case, that's what's going on because the hat that they gave her right away, like from with all that verdicts and shit, that hat still has that cookie smell way more than she does.

Yeah.

Right.

So

there is a difference for sure, you know?

And yeah, you know, I mean, there's all the, whatever, all the little things you look up and read about and you're,

you know, cut the umbilical cord, et cetera.

And then it's like, okay, and that's going to hang there.

And then eventually it's going to fuck off.

It's a little gross.

a little gross, you know, but just it's there it is.

And you're just like, oh man, that thing is kind of weird looking and it's crusting up.

And then there's points where I'm just like, God fucking damn it, can't I just pour the milk in here instead?

Can I just, can I just, if you're, can I just pour it in here and it'll be easier.

It'll be easier to just get it in here.

You know?

Yeah.

Um,

anyways, anyways, that's that's you know, that's what's up.

That's what's up.

It's cool, though, to have the little like

another thing was like, oh, you can, you can do the finger in the mouth and like elicit like this trigger, like, sucking response.

And then, you know, kind of like you soothe a little bit.

And that's good for giving them like a vitamin D drop or something.

And then you can pull it out slowly.

And then that'll increase their like force for like, okay, they're going to suck harder.

And then that's good for, you know, their ability to feed and stuff.

And then,

but if you're dad doing that and you don't immediately follow it up with again the real milk, you're just making the problem worse, actually, because that because then you're just reminding them how useless you are,

you know.

Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you had some milk right now?

I don't have any.

What use are you to me?

What good are you?

Fucking delete yourself, father, away with you.

So I'm

interested

in seeing

you just

crumble to the whims of a little girl.

Man.

See, big, tough, smart, woolly.

Oh, just absolutely disgusting.

It's over.

It's done.

I have never been more cooked.

There's no surviving.

Again, just

you're like, yeah, okay.

All right.

What the fuck?

Destroy everything.

Burn it all down.

Who do you need me to kill?

Like, what are we doing here?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And here's the, and the thing is, too, is that like, now imagine trying to resist like those charms while sleep deprived and not in your right mind.

It's like while you're extra, extra not thinking straight, you know?

Well,

luckily enough, you don't have to.

Right now, yeah, give them everything they want.

Only once they gain the ability to, you know, have brain thoughts,

do you have to actually deal with, nah, man.

Yeah.

Like, and here's the thing, depending on your personality, like,

our little dude will like, you know, hey, you can have a piece of a cookie.

It'll eat the cookie.

It'll go, more, more, please.

I'm like, no,

here come the tears.

Here it comes.

But, like, it's really adorable because because you get to see the...

You're like, no, I'm not giving you a cookie.

And

then he'll turn to the other one.

Okay.

And point at me.

And go, dad,

and like, he's clearly talking shit.

Okay, so, so, so, can I get real?

Can I get real, real?

Can I get super real?

Can I get as real as it gets?

Okay, because, okay.

So, you know, when you're doing your ultrasounds and you're not sure how things are going to go, right?

And

everything's coming up and you're just like, listen, um,

nobody likes to talk about it, but sometimes in life there are ugo fucking babies.

Let's just be real.

There are some babies that are ugly, and you're kind of like, and they're just as deserving as love, of love, beautiful little princes and princesses, all of them, right?

But you're like, but you're kind of like, but sometimes you're just like, oh boy, right?

And I'm like, okay, so we talk and we're just like, listen, there's a chance you never know what kind of what's going to happen here, right?

We just need to be prepared for what's going to happen.

Babies are squishy when they are.

Sometimes they get a little football hat.

And look, and you look, it might even be one of these things where it's like, and if that goes on to be like, you know, a go baby into a go person or whatever, okay, well, then, hey, they'll have a great sense of humor and then we'll just work on every other thing in life and it'll be fine, right?

No problems there or whatever.

It'll be good.

And you know what?

Quite frankly, if you're too attractive, life gets too easy anyways.

And then people start manipulating you and it's a whole other slew of problems.

So, who knows, right?

Let's just, let's just preemptively just

be like, Yeah, who knows?

We don't know what we'll get, but let that just, we know that's a possibility.

Um, she's fucking gorgeous, she's perfection, she's the cutest shit ever, and it's gonna, it's a problem.

Like, she's so like the features are like like the cheek and the everything, and you're like, uh,

yeah,

um,

fuck those Uggo babies, that ain't my problem.

Okay,

We are way past that point.

Okay, so she is, she is cruising.

Okay, so here's, here's the danger.

A mixed goddess approaches.

Here's the danger, right?

Okay.

You and I earlier are under duress from an onslaught, like the most amount of chemicals your body will ever throw at you in your life.

You're the most diminished in capacity ever.

However, what you will do over the next two years, three years, four years, is what Paige and I have done, is we keep all the photos and go.

No, no, no, we were right.

No,

dead on, dead on.

Cutest baby ever.

No, I'm not looking back on these.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, no, rock solid, cutest baby ever seen.

Yeah.

When our little dude came out via C-section, the operating room went, aw.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, and then I'm sure, and then that's, that's gonna, that's it, right?

And then eventually at some point, they join, you know, the class and all the others, and you just kind of look around and you're like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah, yeah, all right, no, just, just making sure you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

I didn't know if your personality was like this because everybody's different, right?

Because when you become a parent, you are about to embark on a two-pronged journey.

Journey one is judging other parents like you wouldn't fucking believe.

like the self-righteousness

and the like the oh my god, can you believe?

And with your wife, like, because you're such a team, you're on the United Front, but can you believe the Johnsons?

Holy shit, but that's like, that's like the little tiny version.

No, the real version is judgment of other people's shitty children who aren't shit compared to your perfect angel.

Those other kids, oh my god, nah, no, I was preemptively pathetic, loser children, really.

I was preemptively huffing some copium that I did not need to because we're fucking, it's done and done.

She's untouchable.

That's the end of that.

Nah, punch kid forever.

Punch girl forever.

The

on that, speaking of huffing copium, actually, it's kind of funny because I was wondering, I was like, oh, like, what are the different levels of escalation for pain management we're going to get to here?

Because, you know, if we're getting to that good shit, right, if we need to, I know that's on the table.

And what they actually went to once, especially when fucking,

you know,

our epidural master was crushing it, the greatest anesthesiologist in the world.

They were like, hey, do you want to get some of that laughing gas?

And I was like, fucking whatever, man.

Yeah.

And out comes the laughing gas.

And it's like, oh, whatever works.

You know, look at that.

Have you had the nitrous?

No, I haven't, but wow, what a device.

And Paige is also, I don't think it was, I don't know if it was for the pregnancy.

I think it might have been for a different check, but they gave her the gas.

Gas is all right.

Yeah?

The gas is okay.

Okay, okay.

Yeah, no, I've never.

You know,

I know that, like, you know, she's kind of saying.

It's a really strange form of pain management because none of the pain goes away.

You just cease giving a shit.

Right, okay.

It like I think it was a little too dizzying, though, and that's the part that I think she didn't like.

But like, overall, yeah, apparently it just does work as an amazing distraction.

Um,

among and you just have the thing

and it makes a noise and all of that stuff, you know?

Um, hey, I need to be right back.

CRB.

There you go.

There you go.

There you go.

Exactly.

Being a parent is fun.

Yeah.

Sometimes you're doing a podcast and you look at Discord and you just see lowercase help.

Yep.

Yep.

Fucking to just like right before starting, it's like, oh shit, we got a feed going.

Need to take care of that.

Pod later.

Pod later.

Who cares?

You know?

We had.

You do what yogurt sticks to?

Everything.

Ah,

there we go.

There we go.

Yeah.

No,

I know that like

it's been a long time, and you know, I always when I used to remind everybody listening that like we used to do this offline and we would just record when life suited, and then it would, it would show up when it was ready, and that was it.

You didn't have to worry about the live part of it.

And now that it's been long enough, folks are spoiled on the concept of the schedule.

The schedule has never met less

in this moment right here,

even if if not for the coronavirus and me moving all the way out here, etc.,

as of today,

this show would have been fully remote for the foreseeable future forever.

Because we both need to be here and also the ability to sprint away if need be.

But yeah, and just alongside that, the feeling of, oh no, my scheduled thing that was supposed to, yeah, go fuck off.

No,

it, you know, it's out when it's out.

That's going to be that.

What,

yeah, so

the checklist from earlier, diaper, food, temperature, burping, position, or other.

That can we,

yeah,

that wraps up around

how many months?

Three.

It's the fourth trimester.

Okay.

You are dealing with essentially a sleeping

food-demanding poop machine.

Yep.

Yep.

For about three months.

And at the two, three-month mark is when the personality is going to start to come in.

So yeah, that first three months is maintain

and keep yourself sane.

And the thing is, too, as well, that was something that, like, again, you want to talk about old school versus new school, right?

Some of the more old school folks

in life being like, oh, sometimes just let them cry it out.

You know, they're going to need to learn to like that not everything is, not every need is going to be attended to in some cases.

Do I not believe in that?

I don't know how anyone could manage it.

So the one, yeah, right?

The noise.

Horrible.

The noise is soul-searing to begin with.

But that aside,

that aside, the whole like cry it out thing,

they specifically, like, we are are like the current

textbooks are like that's a hard line in the sand from now into 20 years ago.

You cannot spoil a newborn, they have no, they have no concept of time.

Can't do it, can't spoil them.

They don't know that things take long or short, or that you're ignoring them and letting them get tired, or that you're coming right away.

They have no idea, it does not make any sense.

As Paige says, they don't even know abcs

yeah

no so you know that's that's one of those ones where like shit okay right that makes that checks out that makes a ton of fucking sense um

the uh uh uh the the thing i was gonna bring up to is after the the laughing gas bit was just um some of those like uh contraction pain um management things involve some of them involve literally just grabbing a comb and squeezing it to hurt yourself so that it distracts from what else the pain elsewhere, or pinching them and pressing pressure points and doing fist of the north star shit.

Oh, yeah, 100%

to create more pain elsewhere, and it's not going to make it stop.

It's just going to distract you.

And it's like, oh, that actually helped.

And it's like, yeah, it super did.

Crazy, you know?

Anyway, anyway.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think we'll be talking about this for at least a week or two more.

Maybe even a month.

Oh, man.

And I was kind of wondering, I was like, are we going to, is she going to, you know, be a guest?

But I think she's chilling.

So, you know, she's probably busy, Woolly.

I think so, but

she's busy learning how to exist and recouping all energies.

Did you you know that if you feed for too long, they spend so much energy feeding that then

they go down and need more energy because they spent too much on the feed that you got to feed them again?

Yeah, I got to tell you, man, babies, they kind of don't got a lot going on.

The recursive feed loop is a serious danger that if you take too long, they spend too much battery and then you have to recharge that same battery you were just recharging.

Fuck,

Fuck, man.

God damn it, dude.

All right.

They're doing their best.

What else is going on?

Who cares?

I've been waiting to do that.

I've been waiting to.

Yeah, all right.

He's right.

He's right, you know.

But here's what's going on.

I'm at the phase right now where I hand the little man some milk, and you remember doot do, right?

Thank you.

So now I hand him his milk.

I go, and what do you say?

And he responds with,

please, and I say doot do.

So

fully able to say thank you.

Aware, aware is literally

out loud saying, and then I say doot do.

Yeah.

I understand the exchange.

I see your offer.

offer and i choose to reject it actually

i give you what you want to hear but also i choose to add this

adorable my terms

my terms

so what else did you do with your week wolves i don't see any good animes fucking

We played an episode of Severance while we were in there.

Brought the Steam Deck, and that was a good distraction for a minute.

Played unpacking, you know.

Hey, let me ask you, how hard did it hit you that like everything in your life is totally pointless

how hard did that like slam in you

dude

we can't have this discussion on mic we're supposed to have a podcast about video games to continue getting money if we have if we tell everybody on our podcast about video games how much none of this matters then we're not going to get the money pat so shut the fuck up and keep it moving

bro i'll walk away right i don't give a shit hey that sounds like a great time to to thank our sponsors

oh boy you know what matters i gotta get the dog you keep you keep going

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what's up

okay so i watched superman yeah

uh really liked it paige also really liked it takeaway this is the lex luthor i always wanted yeah the absolute most spiteful motherfucking piss baby shit flinging fucking tantrum throwing bitch Lex Luther.

Yeah,

but but but Pat, how did you deal with the fucking woke

the wokeness of the Superman

just disgustingly fucking political

is this this about the squirrel?

You know what?

You know what?

Yeah,

actually, I can make this bit work.

The saving of the squirrel shows empathy, a thing that a whole lot of people apparently just don't fucking have.

And

your ability to empathize with the other person that's not you is a huge problem that kind of defines the reason why our entire world state is the way it is.

Because some people have empathy and some people don't, and it's a huge problem with planet Earth.

And the fact that he has empathy and he's saving that squirrel is fucking gross, man.

That's disgusting.

What the fuck?

That's not what I wanted.

I don't want that in my Superman.

Don't preach it, me.

Man, you got to be a fucking massive piss baby to get your fucking dick twisted about a Superman movie.

Yeah, or super down for dead kids.

I don't know, whichever.

Take your pick, you know.

So I like Superman.

Okay.

Superman's pretty good.

Yeah, no, not that one.

All right.

Also watched the first episode of Peacemaker, which was it's all right.

Hey, yo, why?

Hold on.

Somebody asked to talk about Jimmy Olson.

Yo, what's going on with Jimmy Olson's Riz Mastery?

Yo.

You each had to look that up afterwards.

You mean sex god Jimmy?

The unstoppable?

We thought it was being played for goofs for a bit, and then we were like, no, no, wait, it's not being played for goofs.

And then I pulled up some old comic books on that internet and was like, wait, what?

He who beds those across a spanning fucking galaxy of worlds?

Yeah.

What's up with that?

Yeah.

Hey, guess what?

Olson fucks, bro.

Oh, my God.

End of story.

What else?

Me and Paige did a sponsor stream of a game called Abyssus that came out relatively recently.

Oh, yeah.

How'd that go?

Extremely well.

It's excellent.

It's the easiest sponsored stream to do.

A game that actually just rules and is really good and fun to play.

It is.

It's basically Hades, but under the ocean.

Eldritch, like Cthulhu, Mayan shit.

Nice.

But instead of playing like a third-person action game with melee combat, it is...

it plays like Borderlands.

Like I could go around and compare it to a bunch of things.

No, it plays just like Borderlands.

Oh, first person.

Yeah.

Okay.

And it is go through your set of rooms, shoot some golems or some fish people, get to the end of the room, get your upgrade that gives you chain lightning or defensive bonuses or a weapon upgrade that changes how your gun shoots.

And it feels really good to shoot.

After the stream, I went and I've been playing it for a couple days and I've beat it six or seven times.

It's excellent.

It has one problem that will likely be solved over time with patches.

And the problem is, is that

the

permanent upgrade tree, like, you know, the mirror of darkness equivalent from Hades,

it's actually super easy to max out.

Okay.

I maxed it out in about nine hours, like completely maxed out every single upgrade.

And then at hour 12, I unlocked every gun and every ability and every sub weapon.

Okay, so.

And then at hour 14, I was like, wow, there's literally nothing to do.

Then you're going to difficulty and chase achievements.

Yeah, okay.

You're unstoppable.

Like, I like you can, they have a heat equivalent, but it's depth because it's under the ocean.

But there's no progression tied to the increased difficulty.

It's just achievements.

Okay, the increased depth is just making it go longer, but it's not getting harder.

No, it's just to make it harder, just to see what you can do.

Okay.

And it's like,

I need a little bit more of a carrot.

Yeah, in a roguelike map, what's that?

No, I was going to say, in a roguelike or like Hades-like game, 15 hours to Godhood is pretty quick.

I think that Hades has kind of the perfect formula where it gives you very small incremental upgrades as you increase the difficulty.

And when you increase the heat or the fear in Hades 1 and 2, the difficulty shoots up.

Like it really dramatically increases.

But here it just doesn't.

feel the same.

Like once you're broken, boy, you're broken in this game.

They do have a roadmap.

They are going to be adding more content over the next couple of months slash years.

But for right now,

I got like pretty much everything I wanted out of it after about 14 and a half hours.

But I really enjoyed it quite a bit.

Okay.

But it's just, it's the only one of these roguelikes that I like.

I actually feel like I definitively finished it within

three nights.

Is the FPSing like, are we on an ultra-kill style like fucking?

No, it's Borderlands.

Borderlands.

Okay.

Like it is, it is like explicitly borderlands.

The way you shoot, the way you move, the acceleration, the way the arc on your grenade, the way turrets work, like it is Borderlands

coded, like 100%.

And I really like the way Borderlands shoots.

So that was a very happiness to me.

I also got some codes for

nothing.

Close call.

Nice save.

Yeah.

Nothing?

All right.

I started playing.

I want one of those.

I started playing Trails in the Sky, Legend of Heroes, the first game, the PSP game from

2004.

Okay, okay.

Yeah, this is one of those things where the name is a title that is in my brain, but I'm like, what actually is it?

It's the one that has Discount Asuka on the cover.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No,

I know the artwork and I know the logo.

And I and I Trails in the Sky, Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky first chapter okay not to be confused with the first chapter remake coming out in two weeks no the old one

isometric view not 3d third person camera like old timey like 3d model Sega Saturn looking chibis

okay

yeah

um this is also one of those games that uh I believe we made fun of of because of its really forgettable name.

Yeah, quite terrible.

So there's like 17, 18 of these now,

and they're all quite good.

But I never went into them because they represented the most disastrous attack on my obsessive-compulsive

sensibilities.

So in the Trail series, every single quest chain, main event, quest thing

has a full-blown worldwide dialogue shift for every available character.

So, hey, we got to go save the people at the mine.

Getting the mission to go to the mine is a time of day where every single NPC in the game has their own dialogue.

Then going into the mine, but then coming back out, everybody in town has a different line of dialogue.

Oh, wow.

Leaving the mine at halfway through the quest stage, everyone has a new line of dialogue.

Finishing the mine, but not turning it in, everybody, like, et etc., etc., etc., etc.

So, I was pitched this game by somebody who was obsessed with that shit and was like, oh my god, it's so crazy.

They take so long to localize these because they have every character has so much dialogue and it's like a living world.

And

you could just

learn about all the NPCs every day and you just talk to them.

So, what did Pat back in 2010 try and do?

I tried to talk to every single NPC at every single stage of the quest.

Yep.

And burn the fuck out.

Is this the new B-line?

As a result of Xenoblade, by the way, I'm on track to beat Xenoblade 1 in 34 hours.

Okay.

Which is like 25 below how long to beat main.

As a result, I just started playing it like a normal human, and I've been really enjoying it, though it is quite old.

Okay.

So

hold on a second.

I think that dog needs to go out.

Yeah, BRB.

Anyway,

it feels like,

I don't know what this, Trails in the Sky feels like a Sega Saturn RPG that I just completely missed out on.

Like, it feels like someone walked up to me and went, have you ever heard of a game series called Final Fantasy?

And I went, no.

Okay.

Tell me about it.

And you would have gotten in hard if you played it differently back then.

Oh, yeah, it's great.

Okay.

It's great.

It's a little tropey,

but it's like, it's of its time.

It's from 2004.

It's a Falcom game.

It's nostalgic, which is weird because I didn't experience it at the time.

Hmm.

So

is this one of those things where the remake is already like a problem?

So yeah, here's what happened, right?

Because it always is.

Timeline is getting excited for the remake.

And I went, oh, cool, maybe I'll try that.

And someone reached out to me and said, hey, just to let you know,

that game ends on a vicious cliffhanger.

And

that it'll take at least a couple of years for them to remake the second game and then the third game.

But those games already exist.

So what's going to happen

is you're going to play through the remake and go, oh my God, I need to find out what happens first.

And then I'll go from the 2025

next-gen remake of the first game to the 2005 PSP game.

And I went,

I'm not only not doing that,

I'm just going to go back and play them in the order of release.

And one day in 15 years, I'll get to the remake coming out next week.

I mean, look, as somebody who watched an FF7 remake into original FF7 run happen, I'm like, it's not the worst thing in the world, but you just have to obviously prepare yourself for the mechanical

regression.

Here's what would happen.

I would play through the brand new remake with Estelle and Josh, and then I would go, wow, this game's really old for Trails in the Sky, second chapter, Trails in the Sky, third chapter, Trails into Zero, Trails into Azure, Trails into Sky, Cold Steel, one, two, three,

four.

And then,

when I get to Trails from Daybreak,

I'll be like, oh, this is starting to feel close to where I was at with that first one that I played.

It's Yakuza.

It's Yakuza.

It's like, yeah, no, it's Yakuza times 100.

Oh, I missed an entire series.

Got it.

Yeah.

So it would be be like playing fucking Yakuza Infinite Wealth and going back to Yakuza 1 on PS2 and then having six games of that.

Like Yakuza 1 on PS2.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

So, nah, I'm just going to play the old one and I'm liking it.

It's good.

It's very chill.

It's also extremely low stimulus because it's old and slow.

Ah, there you go.

There you go.

Yeah.

Yeah, man.

Only Japan hits with those

just iterative releases, huh?

They just don't do it like that here.

No.

Well, aside from Madden

Call of Duty.

Aside from the EA sports and EA.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

And

for Pat,

I think that's it.

Other than a couple pieces of news that I'm very interested in this week.

Okay.

Yeah.

Did you, by the way, as a side note, did you have that moment when you looked at like your closet and just grabbed all of your fun t-shirts and threw them in the garbage and just got the zipper things only?

Because everything has to be able to open from the front?

My t-shirts?

Why?

For baby.

Why?

I actually don't understand what you're talking about.

For baby, skin to skin.

I feel like I went through all my clothes and just went, this is all worthless because I have to be able to put baby

on chest.

Just take your shirt off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But just take my shirt off.

Yeah, that's doable, too.

I put my shirt on to come over here.

Okay, fair enough.

It's also...

I'm just walking around with my moobs out nearly all the time.

Okay.

Baby also likes it pretty cold, which is

you're supposed to do that.

That's why my moobs are out, so they get cold.

Okay.

That's what I want for them.

Okay.

Well, I went for the shirts that open up from the front so that I can do that.

That's all I was asking.

All right.

Yeah, I just barely, dude, unless I'm going out, like, as I'm getting older, I'm just wearing like

less and less casual clothing in my house.

Okay.

Like the delivery guy who brought, like, we got, like, we got a, what the hell we get?

We, uh, We got

swim diapers in the mail.

And I'm pretty sure the delivery guy saw my tits.

Okay.

And good for him.

Well,

like, good for him.

He gets a show.

Let me just let the perplexed chat know that my house is pretty cold, so it's more comfortable.

Your house is not pretty cold.

It's pretty comfortable for me to wear a sleeveless zip forward.

I want if you're going to put that information out there, I would like to challenge you on it.

Your house is not pretty cold.

My house.

It is pretty cold to you, not to a regular human.

My house, okay, up in the studio is where all the heat rises, but where the baby is is very cold right now because you're supposed to keep that shit pretty cold.

Dude, I can't believe the temperatures that my son wanted to go to sleep in.

They tell you 62 degrees, and he'd be like, if you put a blanket on me, I'll freak out.

Yeah, they tell you, they tell you to, they tell you 20, 21 degrees is where you'll want to keep it for baby.

Yeah, well, that's going to depend on your baby's temperament and desires.

I guess so, you know, but like at 20, 21, locked in, it's like, yeah, it's more comfortable to do a zip shirt than it is to go full shirt off.

I'll take a full shirt off and just

point the glass cutters away from baby.

oh they don't they don't do that but yeah anyways okay i asked a question nobody understood never mind moving on

what's up just take your tits out dad

nah come on i mean i do i did but

if we're in the cold room where baby is like it's it's much more comfortable to have at least a fucking half layer on yeah so uh what else uh what else oh yeah hey if you want to see me beat Xenoblade this week, play some Sagat and Street Fighter,

and also check out both the old Shinobi and the new Shinobi this week.

Go down to twitch.tv slash Patstairs at.

Oh, you know what?

I played Strider last week and fucking

Concha Hardcore.

Man, Strider aged like shit like you wouldn't fucking.

Nah, Strider's great.

Nah.

I played fucking Strider for a second.

Ah, a million years ago.

It's dumb and terrible.

Okay, no, no, no, no, no, okay, okay.

First of all, I'm playing the arcade one each time, and it's

no Genesis port.

No, no, no, I don't care about no Genesis port.

I'm playing Arcade Strider.

That's all I know and fucking give a shit about.

And it's terribly awesome.

It's perfect.

Busted, dumb bullshit.

I love it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nah.

That's it for me, I think.

Cool.

All right.

Sorry, excuse me, one second, BRB.

Okay, all good.

Apparently, earlier

at some point, Punch Bomb started laughing

at us, and that startled her.

That startled baby.

So

here we go.

Yeah.

Stop being so funny and charming.

Right.

Also got a...

It's already in place, but like mental defenses for like for saying names has just gotta be like, gotta make sure you gotta got that on lock, you know?

The

what was I gonna say?

Yeah, no, as I said on Twitter, like, um,

she'll check in in a decade or two.

Or not.

Or not.

Depends on what she feels like.

Dad, your shit's so cringe.

Oh, hold on.

I need to jack into the shittier matrix.

Boom.

Oh, it's going to be terrible.

So luckily, there was no news this week.

Not even one news.

End of podcast.

Bye.

No, there was at least.

There was at least a couple news.

Okay, well, how about this one?

Let's just start real quick.

As we have been talking,

hey, guess what?

Blitzkrank got leaked.

Yeah.

You remember me talking about, like, I bet they're going to put fucking Blitzcrank in because he's the most normalist freak they could put in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so he looks a lot better than his usual design.

Yeah, so they updated the design.

The funny part is that it was actually just on the support page for 2xKO.

Somebody fucked it.

But it's almost like in a way where they're like not even taking it in like a big deal.

They're like, yeah, there he is.

It's like it's supposed to get unveiled in literally a week.

So

that's the thing.

It could be a like he was going to come out with the release of

the beta.

But you go to the support uh page, offer to XKO, and there's an updated design for Blitzcrank uh

right there.

And they pretty much went like, hey, y'all, is that, is that a thing?

And they're like, Yeah,

lol.

So, hey, Blitzcrank confirmed.

Um, what's goofy about this is uh Rufflemonger already has a video up going, yeah.

So, I played Blitzcrank two years ago.

Okay, well, there you go.

He's a, he's a big body, grappler with tons of command grabs.

And did they turn all his clicks into

S buttons, basically?

So I don't know.

I didn't have time to actually watch all of Rufflemonger's video.

Okay.

The thing that I need to know is because he's a hook character.

Right.

Okay, you described before.

He's a Roadhog.

I throw my hand and I hook people like Roadhog, like stitches, et cetera.

So if he's going to be a big body command grab character, is he going to have a long-range

grab

like i hope so

so

big body

get over here instead of big body shield

you know type thing a proper big man grappler grappler like hook get over here into command grab or hook get over here and then like people would have to watch uh ruffle's video or wait okay

does does is he a robot robot with

guns or anything like that too as well?

He's got his hands.

Just big old swings.

Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.

Full screen command grab, what was someone saying there?

I mean, that's his proper kit from League, is that he's a rip-off of Stitches.

He's essentially Roadhog.

It's probably the closest you would understand it.

Okay, so

the get over here would be unblockable.

Yeah, potentially.

In League, there's no blocking.

Right, right, right.

It's a punch and a knock-up.

Okay.

Okay, cool, cool, cool.

So I said back on July 27th, I said, hey, listen, 2XKO's roster sucks shit, but if I can play Teemo and BlitzCrank as a team on launch, it's a good game, and I take back everything I ever said.

Halfway there.

So today, I literally quote, retweeted myself.

It's okay, you're halfway there.

Halfway there.

The final character is going to be somebody

cool but lame.

I think it's going to be like a collie, and I'm going to be like, whatever.

Someone that...

Well, yeah, I mean, which, like, okay, of all the different stand camps, you know, some are more on fire than others.

And some of them demand meat.

And I feel like you want to offer the meat up to the ones who are in cannibal form, who are the most bloodied, you know?

You got to put Timo in there then.

Okay.

You got to put Temo.

All right.

So that's the first little confirm there.

There you go.

That's nice.

Second confirm, how about that skong?

September 4th.

Nice.

Well,

more

importantly.

Like, there's two things that are really interesting about this.

One is every indie game getting skonged in air quotes as everybody is running the fuck away to the fourth's release date.

Okay,

take a week and reassess the situation.

You have exactly one

to run away.

Like, there are about a dozen games that are just like, no, we're moving two weeks, we're moving a month, we're moving two months, we are getting the fuck away from Silk Song.

More interestingly is that

same email we got last week about the monkey's paw, you know, of do you accept never playing it to get a behind the scenes on what happened?

No need.

Because,

here's the article.

Why Silk Song took so long to make.

And so

I went over this article at like 7.30 in the morning, which was not a great mindset to do so.

I think

that these guys are totally fine.

And I tried to make this distinction because it was a little grumpy because I had to wake up early.

I think that article makes them look like out-of-touch assholes.

I don't think they're out-of-touch assholes, but I think the the specific like phrasing and then lack of emotive text in the article actually makes them look insanely, insanely out of touch, more so than they very much are.

I feel like

the way it sounded is exactly my response to that email we got, which is, I don't know if that's a good deal to make, because what if the answer is simply, We just wanted to, we just, there's nothing special.

There's nothing crazy.

There's no insane twists or turns to the story.

story we just took our time making it slow and that's what we wanted to do right i think which is exactly what happened really fun bits in that article where they describe we definitely didn't mismanage anything there was no like disaster and then they go into like exhaustive detail how they like horribly mismanaged all of their deadlines

like

so but but but but i guess the idea is like what do you perceive a deadline to be is the energy right where they're like well we never really set one, therefore it's not like we're blowing past anything if we don't hold ourselves to that, right?

So this is what I mean by like the context and the writing of the article kind of makes them look like jerks because from your context, you can understand that when they say there's no mismanagement, what they mean is there wasn't a computer that died with no backups.

There wasn't somebody who wasn't doing something for six months.

There wasn't like a year's worth of work they had to throw away because it was written on the wrong version of an engine.

They actually just got like cataclysmically involved in feature creep.

Yeah.

And that's we're like, oh, let's work on it more.

But that is their preferred method of development, it turns out.

And then you read things like,

what is Jira?

And if you come from the world of QA, you bug out and go, you don't know what a bug database is.

Yeah, I don't even know.

Because we're just freeballing it out here.

And, you know, I mean, as someone, I ran a project with Trello for a bit there, and it was like, yeah, that was a thing where you basically replace

sticking up, sticky

stick up notes on the wall with a digital version of that.

But Jira or Test Track Pro or any of these things, database trackers are pretty much a quintessential service or thing you need running on a complicated game.

Or you could just give it to one person and go, like, that one person will QA the whole thing.

It'll take a bajillion years, but sure.

The aura coming off of it is like almost to the degree of an Australian language barrier because I understand what they mean by there was no mismanagement.

However, when they describe that every single idea they ever had for the game, they got distracted to implement, and then they really genuinely planned to have it release in 2022 and it just got away from them.

That would be under my definition of mismanagement.

Mismanagement.

In that, like, how, what do you mean you really thought it was going to come out in 2022 and you just missed it by three years?

So, if you had a producer, if you had a deadline, if you had a goal, if you had something where they're like, you have to get to, you have to hit this milestone or whatever the case is, and there's external pressures or even internal pressures, then there would be a point at which they would say, you have missed that, thus, this is falling behind.

But they just kind of went vibes-based the whole way through.

The standout answers were just, hey, what took seven?

Why did Silk Song take seven years to make?

We've been having fun.

This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway.

It's nice to make fun things.

There wasn't any developmental challenges or obstacles.

They just needed the years to ensure that Silk Song was exactly what they wanted to make.

It was never stuck or anything, always progressing.

It was just a case that we're a small team and the game takes a lot of time.

No big controversial moment behind it.

Also, terminal workaholics.

Like their description of the way they interact with that game, like they are, they they they are like addicted to working on their games.

They love it.

So I think it's pretty important as you know, as people who have, I feel like, reported on the winds of Skong over the last seven years, every time they've shifted and blown, and the fever pitch

on the outside of Team Sherry Studios as people have been waiting on it, has just been like, there is nothing.

I kind of maintain this too, is that anyone creating anything can create the thing they want to create in the way they want to, especially if they're doing it pretty much as a exercise for themselves that, you know, has an overall like

it's scratching an itch, which is I like making a thing.

And if you happen to enjoy it, then that's cool too, right?

You can approach things like that.

The thing we've talked about here is the wrinkle where you're like, one, there's a Kickstarter with people's backing involved with it, right?

That kind of goes all the way back to that part of it.

And then two, in general, people are going to have expectations about a thing.

And if something ends up taking longer, close to two presidential administrations, they're going to have feelings about that.

And I think that's going to be understandably,

there's a threshold somewhere between four to seven years where the impatience becomes warranted.

It becomes understood.

I mean,

we survived the global pandemic, got married, and had kids.

Sure.

Yeah.

So, so that's the thing is, like, you know, you could, any creative project is allowed to handle things the the way they want to.

And

the public is also allowed to feel the way they feel about things taking long.

Yeah, so there's part of that that really stood out to me.

And it's the only part that I'm like,

I don't believe you.

Like, I actually don't believe the response they gave, which is, well, why not update people more often?

Which is their response was, oh, they felt that it would just rile people up and make them more disappointed that it was taking too long to come out.

And, like, I don't believe you.

You guys ran a lot of updates on the Hollow Knight Kickstarter when the Hollow Knight was coming along.

I believe what is probably, this is coming from my ass.

This is a gut feeling.

I'm under the impression that they have a shit bajillion dollars from Hollow Knight selling 15 million copies.

And they're like, well, we don't need to do that anymore because everyone's excited for Silk Song.

There's always that.

Yep, like, like, they seem like the type of workaholics that actually running the social media seems like an annoyance.

Um, I just, you know, projects run differently.

We talk about how Hades was an experimental developmental style for

Supergiant, where they went, Let's start with a team of one person and then add to them, add to it slowly as other teams get less busy and ramp up in scale.

And the goal was to get people on an early access build that was playable early on.

So that was one way where the years of development did not feel like years of development because I guess people were hands-on it right off the bat.

Right.

The,

you know, I think Baldur's Gate had its early access as well with Act One for a long time.

And then, you know, these, they're like early access approaches definitely help things feel a little bit more like, yes, it's going to take a while, but at least there's a hands-on with something there that

would have been reasonable to address people that are especially looking at a Kickstarter backing expectation to be fulfilled.

In this case, I think that would have been appropriate.

And knowing that Hollow Knight is so insanely massive, it probably would have done

no harm, but all good to have a early chunk of that just potentially hit early access at some point while the rest of the game developed over time.

It's super strange because they say they didn't want to spoil anybody by putting out screenshots, but like the fucking trailer they put out for the release date has like a photo of the game's map in it.

Well,

like area names on it and shit.

Okay.

I mean, okay, that's I

super don't believe you at all.

Did it, did they Pokemon gold and silver?

It?

I don't know.

Probably.

No, no, no, no, no, it had Silk Song's map.

Like you can see the area names.

Okay, okay, okay.

Yeah.

There's part of the only part of that that I

know in my heart that I'm like oh

you guys oh, I hate this I hate this a lot is they're like and we have some really ambitious things planned for silk song in the future that we're working on that might take a while to come out and I'm like I remember hearing that back in the the tens about hollow night about how the the hornet campaign was going to be something really special and they're doing it again.

They're literally obsessed with just just working on it forever and not putting it out.

They made it in the same way that like

a random indie dev works on

like a kind of illegal IP project like A2MR, you know, like another Metroid 2 remake or some sort of fan game.

Like a game where you've just been hearing about one person developing it over the course of a decade, Sonic Robo Blasts to, you know, just one of those background things.

They basically that's their that's the style of development they took

chipping away at it for

a chunk of your life

silk song to show up with a fucking owl cat logo on it that means that the game will come out but it will only be done in four years

annoyed annoyed by this owl cat are the people who make uh the wrath of the righteous and pathfinder kingmaker oh right right right right right rogue trader where where they keep announcing multiple years of season pass DLCs and patches.

And you're like, can you please just tell me the game is over so I can start it?

Yeah.

So, no,

that's the story: there is no story.

It's just, no, we were just making it.

It's an anti-story.

You know?

So, I don't believe that it's an anti-story.

I just think that

maybe, maybe they are a little too big for their bridges.

Apparently, there is an Australia-to-non-Australia cultural divide happening

in this interview.

Okay.

I was informed by Paige and other people who are more familiar with Australians

where, no, no, that's just how Australians talk.

Oh, okay.

They kind of sound like

out of touch.

Like, no, that's what just Australians who have good jobs sound like.

I naive.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Well,

I'm, I, I, through this, through 2xko, through

fucking Bayonettas and every remake and everything that has been around as we've been doing this show,

um,

I say

most projects have about

three years leeway before people start getting a little little lancey

and around year four, they get ornery.

I think we did the same song and dance for Elden Ring.

And I remember being like, man,

the way they've not shown us anything and blah, blah, blah, this game better really just blow my socks off.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Okay, my socks.

There's that.

There's that.

What I would also say to another invisible metric, and this is trickier now than it was in the past, is did the generation change?

Have we moved in a new entry?

Have we entered a new range of consoles

that are

entered a second new range of consoles?

The song was supposed to come out on the Wii U.

Yeah.

Development had to restart on a different dev kit is a nice what the fuck is going on metric that we used to have in the past.

And again, it's slowed down now and PC changes things and Unreal changes things as well.

The ability to, you know, migrate is, is not as big of a thing as it used to be.

But, but that was one.

We watched two human jump across four generations,

you know, in development or whatever, right?

So yeah,

that's the other bit.

People get a little antsy about three in, three years in, and

that three years counts from the moment your studio is acquired, not from the moment your project is announced.

I think the all-time winner of dumbest idiots announcing your shit too early was CD Project with two uh with um

cyberpunk 2077 because they were like, I read an interview where they're like, so when we put out the trailer, like we didn't even start working on the game for like another two years after.

Oh man,

and I'm like, wow, you guys are absolute buffoons.

Like, you started the clock multiple years early for no reason.

They got the rights, I guess, at some point.

And yeah, that's.

And their games always are built and take forever, anyways, even once.

Yeah, people are pointing out Elder Scroll VI.

It has been longer from now to the Elder Scroll VI announcement than it was between Skyrim and the Elder Scroll VI announcement.

So what's going to happen?

They're going to make that game in three, maybe four years, and Elder Scroll VI is going to come out after an 11-year wait, and people are going to go, I waited fucking 11 years for this, and I don't care if that's not how development works.

You told us

X amount of years ago.

The clock starts on announcement.

The clock starts.

We know that Expedition 33 was

Guillaume's fucking baby for

almost a decade or whatever the case it's been.

Do you know when it got announced?

A year and a half ago.

Last summer.

Two years ago.

Last summer.

Yeah, last summer.

Yeah.

It's been

12 months.

So here's the thing.

And the Kickstarter aspect of the Silk Song thing really fucks them because.

Also, no one paid attention because they didn't know what it was.

So it got announced and everyone went, I don't know, okay.

Here's like if Silk Song was not a Kickstarter backer reward,

and they had not, they would have totally still started working on Silk Song.

and what would have happened is last week after years and years of man hollow night was great i wonder if they're ever gonna make new hollow night came next

yep yep without being owed without that bit yep totally totally and it would have been the craziest thing ever

or or in alternate reality that dlc three was was smaller and it just was added on top of the final update to the game as a you know i remember when they put out

the master for Hollow Knight.

I remember being like, wait, what?

Why'd you do this instead of the other thing that you still have to make?

I could definitely have seen a point where they're like, no, here's Playable Hornet, and she just drops over the existing game.

End of story, you know?

That's what everyone thought it was going to be at the beginning.

And that would have been very reasonable because, guess what?

Playing a zero is fun too.

You know?

Yeah.

anyway.

Um, so there you go, that's that story.

Um,

I do feel bad for them.

The tone of that article and the happy positivity in it, and they're just like, dude, we just love working on it.

Every cool idea we did, we just had to flesh it out.

I'm like, man, they are building that castle high.

Well, like, I, I, I mean, I, I, um,

I, I, the, what I got from what I, what I read, which I admittedly was not top the bottom on the whole thing,

but I feel like the impression of some of the

takeaways here has been to the screaming, like skong derangement syndrome-like person, there's an energy of just like, yeah, there's an energy of kind of being like, Yeah, I don't know, we're just having fun, man, whatever, you know, like, like

scream into the abyss, that's okay, we're just doing our thing.

Um,

and

there's a definitely acceptable amount of that that you can

of that energy that you can have because, yeah, like you make whatever you want to make, how you want to make it.

But just, I also think it's important to have an understanding of how things will be received over time.

I mean, you could have put out a single screenshot a year.

You could have done that.

There's no reason you couldn't have done that.

Or you could have

an entire fucking Nintendo Direct dedicated to the thing that we barely knew existed, like Kirby Air Riders.

Oh, I didn't even watch that shit.

Hey, guess what?

Don't bother.

It's awesome.

Everything rules.

They took Kirby Airride and they made more and they gave you more things to do.

And of all the crazy new features and awesome things you're going to have in it, and it's a pure Sakurai game, like over-tuned because Sakurai can't stop.

Here's what you need to know: one, there's a star with a cape on it that's Star Man, and he's cute and he's great and he's awesome.

And second,

there is

the most disappointed you will ever see Sakurai is when he had to announce that this game, unfortunately, has had to add a second button.

He was very much dismayed that they had to add now a turbo boost button or a special button in addition to the one button designed from before.

He hated it.

I didn't know it was one button.

Kirby Air Ride was one button, right?

It was A, was break, but also charge.

And it was also like drop your, right, your machine to the ground so the friction would apply instead of floating.

You know, you'd corner, you'd break, and you'd charge up all with the same button.

And now it's like, sorry, we got to add a second button so that you can use your specials.

And he was like, fuck this bullshit.

And he flipped the table and cleared everything.

There was more buttons.

I don't care.

He was so mad about two buttons.

Just use a different button.

Incredible.

It was cool.

That's it.

Something else.

I mean, look, I grabbed what I could in the midst of all this.

And, you know, I saw a couple stories here.

If anything crucial slipped by, then I don't know.

Oh, I've got one.

It's not crucial, but I do want to mention it.

Oh, yeah.

The Battlefield 6 devs put a debriefing out for, hey, here's the takeaway from the beta.

And some people, particularly Call of Duty streamers and players, figured out how to do some bunny hopping, slide canceling shit in Battlefield.

And we're like, check out this movement tech.

And as a result,

the Battlefield 6 devs are like, yeah, we put tons of shit into the game that you can't fucking do that anymore.

And if you jump, your momentum will just crash to almost fucking nothing.

And you you can't slide cancel anymore and stop bunny hopping.

Okay.

Fucking stop.

This is DMC5 inertia being killed.

No, no, it's not.

No.

So, oh, so

you're not like, you haven't been playing a ton of multiplayer shooters, and that's never been like your jam.

I know you're not.

No, but you dabbled in Apex.

I dabbled in Apex, but I played Titanfall and Titanfall 2 enough.

And I remember Skull God kind of broke down how, you know, skiing and tribes and all that movement tech used to work and how fast and insane those things would go if you learned absolutely how to bust the system open.

You're completely right.

And you had Quake, Unreal Tournament, Tribes, Titanfall, etc.

And the thing about Battlefield and Counter-Strike and shit like that is fucking stop it.

I don't want to do that shit.

I'm not playing Battlefield so I can bunny hop around a fucking corner like an asshole.

I fucking hate it.

Okay.

And a lot of the people who play Battlefield fucking hate it.

Okay.

So you're like, yo, I learned how to do triangle drumps, want to see a fucking infinite, and I'm like, bro, we're playing Samurai Showdown.

Exactly.

Could you fucking chill?

Okay, gotcha.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

Like, it, it, like, Battlefield is about using vehicles and your squad and checking corners and getting good positions and flanking and seeing people like bunny hopping through fucking windows and off of roofs is just like this shit fucking sucks and it makes me not want to play it oh man okay and like the last couple of games have had like more expansive like zippy movement and they have been panned by their general audience because of it like i cannot ex like i don't think they went far enough in bad company 2 the best battlefield game they ever put out you weren't even allowed to fucking lie down on the the ground.

There was standing and there was crouch, and that was it.

Shouldn't even let people go fucking prone.

Is it one of those things where if you're doing it, you're on a tier of player that is just never going to be stopped by people who are not doing it?

Like two games are taking place within the same game.

So for Battlefield, the way that it works is that if you are doing your cool-ass, fancy, zippy shit movement, what you're doing is not capturing the point

so you're you're ending the match with like 50 kills to two deaths and zero points and your team loses okay yeah yeah yeah all right because i'm reminded of again guns the duel name route name drop where people who were doing all the tech were playing a different video game against each other compared to the people in the same room not doing the tech and uh that was just it.

You're right.

And like, you could be, you would be like a grunt in Titanfall 2, there for the picking, but they were pretty much only, the gods were interested in fighting up here in the sky, and the plebs below would shoot their guns and do their matrix wall runs.

But if your goal is to get to the fucking point and capture it or whatever,

you're being fancy, and it's at detriment of the team.

Like,

and it's one of those things, like, oh, why are you lowering the skill ceiling?

It's like, no, it's not about lowering the skill ceiling.

It's about like, this is what we want the game to be about, right?

If you want to play Apex Legends, go play Apex Legends.

Okay, okay, okay.

Right?

So, like, when I think about Battlefield and I think about, oh, what's a cool Battlefield moment?

I think about the guy in the helicopter or the plane who jumps out to shoot a different helicopter with a rocket and then get back in the helicopter as it is falling and fly away.

I think about one of my games in the beta where I caught, me and a guy ended up like catching each other like, you know, dead on, like we both turned a corner simultaneously and he hit me a couple of times.

So I threw a smoke grenade down and then he laid down, put his bipod on and just shot into the smoke for like 10 seconds as I went for a super long flank to his side and then shot him easily because he wasn't moving and he was lying down and then helped me get the point.

It's not about zip, zoop, bopping,

fucking pop, bouncing off the fucking walls.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's about putting five packs of C4 on a Jeep and suicide bombing the point.

Look at my 360 no scope.

We're playing Splatoon.

Shoot the ground, idiot.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Battlefield, when you're sniping, the bullets have like very extreme drop because you're going at extreme distances.

So, like, the spinning no-scope shit is fucking stupid.

It's like, no, just get your nice spot, be hidden.

And when a guy stops moving for half a second, tilt the fucking scope way up to compensate for bullet drop.

Okay.

So, anyway, it's really good news that they're like, no, stop it.

Cool.

Take wave dashing out.

That's like, in spirit, it hurts me to hear that is the correct way to take this game a little bit, but I understand.

I understand.

What if fucking

what if Samurai Showdown had like infinites in the corner?

Sure, sure, or something.

Wouldn't that be over fun?

Yeah, no, no.

Like, there should not be a wave dash in Sam's show.

Like, same thing, 100%.

Like, yeah, like, actually, you, you comparing it to Sam's show is actually a really good example.

Um,

okay, so uh,

this was kind of just a loose one, but

it is interesting.

I'm curious to see how they play it.

Marvel Rivals,

so Net East had an interview, and they confirmed that they have been given the green light to create original characters.

Who cares?

And they're saying, no, stay tuned, who knows, right?

Yeah, who cares?

Who gives a single shit?

Well, I'm like,

the idea of like, even after all this time, do you go for it and risk the ire of you're wasting a fucking slot?

How dare you?

Oh, dude,

I totally agree with that sentiment in advance.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So I've been thinking about this, right?

And we're talking with, look, remember, we talked about it with 2xKO and stuff as well, right?

I think...

There's a way to do this, and it's very, very,

very delicate.

But the people who understand it best are Arc System Works.

You can, in a highly anticipated IP, create your own original character, but only as part of the base roster.

You cannot make it DLC.

I'm going to be super blunt.

You mentioning 2xKO in this conversation like fucking triggered my shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, yeah, if I see a fucking brand new character on the 2xKO roster, yeah, I'm going to fucking lose my mind.

So

Labras,

Show Minizuki, Android 21, right?

You have to have the original character that joins that roster be there on the base game.

You cannot sell it later.

That's a slot.

You're fucking crazy if you do.

That's the only way to go about it.

I think you using the persona cast is really telling.

And the reason it works there is because those games got every character in them that you would have expected.

That you wanted to be there right off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I didn't have this feeling of like, oh, fuck.

Well, I could have played as Yosuke if Labras wasn't here.

But admittedly, between Arena and Ultimax, a bunch more characters everybody wanted showed up, right?

Not everybody was there in Arena.

You know?

Yeah, you know what?

2XKO can have original characters once they get through the 170-plus regular champions.

Sure.

But

in P4A's case,

one could have argued, where's my,

you know,

whatever, any of the

Yukiko.

That thing was for multiverses.

Where's my, you know, Ken, I want

instead of Labras and Shadow Labras, right?

So, yeah, you don't, people, I don't think anybody's going to think about an original character being on the base roster, especially, especially if they're the final boss, right?

If the final boss is a brand new original character, you get away with it on the base game.

But don't you fucking dare drop it as a DLC character later for development for the moment.

For Marvel rivals, this is like the absolute stupidest fucking idea conceivable.

There are literally thousands of Marvel characters they could pick to fulfill any role ever.

It's too late.

It's too late.

It should have been there, right?

To make it as a drop in a season that takes away anticipation from another one of characters.

Isn't Luna Snow the original character?

but wasn't she

am I crazy?

Wasn't she from a different thing?

Let's find out.

I thought she was from a different thing that was like a single mobile game or something like that.

Where did she show up?

She is from the comics.

No, okay, okay, there you go.

No, no, no, she's massive OC energy.

Yeah, she's a big, obscure pull, but she's more recently,

yeah, she's a more recent character.

And

obscure from the comics and I feel like there was a mobile game or something that gave her a big push that like put her in in the spotlight a little bit um but anyway yeah it would there was no there was no full-on original character dropped there

um

anyway

the

other bit

was

just following up on all that, you know, the great decisions happening over at Microsoft and

the King

firings as well.

So, you know, as AI has been coming in and becoming more of a like, you're going to be shadowed by it, you got to use it more, et cetera, setting all their goals, they just kind of updated that to say that

it's basically everyone, like employees are now mandated to use AI on a daily basis.

And

nothing says incredible technology, like fuck you, use it, bitch.

Yeah, and in light of this story, other like CEOs and companies, things have been popping up where they're just as companies where they're like, you're going to start using it every day or you're fired.

And that's that.

And people who didn't are.

Also, last week, the MIT released a comprehensive meta-analysis study that says, by the way, AI is losing everyone tons of money.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

No, no, no.

The fact that the grift is coming through is that's pretty incredible timing right there.

But in the meantime, we're going to sacrifice every human that hasn't ran away yet to their replacement and uh enforce it more brutally than uh uh the day before.

So, uh, because it's gonna be us that shows everybody else how to make money using this thing that doesn't make any money.

And when people do think about you know the most useful uh AI uh day-to-day um

models, they think of

co-pilot,

they don't, Oh,

no,

what?

Oh,

no.

You mean the thing you disable as soon as your computer turns on?

The thing that you can't run away from fast enough,

unless you're defeated into using it through sheer just like by your spirit being crushed, which, to be fair, is how Microsoft has been using,

has been abusing their audience, you know, is basically like, we have tech, you don't want to use it, but we're going to hope that you just give up and you stop resisting.

And using our tech is like accepting cookies.

Sure, you can go say reject all except the essentials, but people eventually get tired of bothering to click through time.

I actually got confused and thought you were talking about like cookies, cookies, and was like, I could go for some cookies.

No, no, no, no.

I mean, like, like website cookies.

Because, I mean, I know it's three or four extra clicks, but I go reject all cookies except essential every time.

But the thought process is, you're going to get annoyed of doing this eventually.

Just take them.

um

okay what else sucks um

oh well here not hugging your baby uh it does right so here how about this just uh speaking of ai um

because

uh there was a uh

there was an artist contest for search fighter 6 submission um

submissions that went through the other day and kimberly the winning choice was people spotted, it was AI generated, and there was

a bunch of Telltale Clues.

They apologized, and they released a new Challenger art that's basically just leaning on full goon button.

So good for Capcom.

So they're like

our bad here, have a goon.

And have a goon on us.

Have a goon on us.

Problem solved.

There you go.

Done and done.

There you go.

And apparently the original submission, the original account that submitted the AI one has deleted their account.

So, you know, that's how that goes.

Yeah.

All right.

We got any emails this week?

Because I got to be honest, I'm falling asleep.

All right.

Yeah.

I'm sure you're eager to get back as well.

I am.

The last thing I just wanted to briefly touch on is just

the sale of Evo,

Sony's co-ownership in it.

They've now sold or their share of Evo to an esports company, Nodwin,

which is an Indian esports company, but they also own Nodwin.

It's one of, it's a

thing.

Nodwin is a company under Sony, so it's almost like a changing of hands thing.

So that's not much of a shake-up or a change or so.

But RTS, which is the Pokémon company, is

continues to hold their share of it, but they're getting a larger investment from Kadia.

So

just take that Saudi slice of the pie and increase it overall.

Which awesome.

Love that.

Hey, guess what?

It's happening at every single company that is making the games that you play.

Cool.

So just want just so you know.

Not Silk Song.

Not Team Cherry.

No.

But just about everywhere else.

And

yeah, let's see over here.

What is

Yeah, you know what's actually nuts about that too?

What's that?

Um

the

where was it

In terms of that like creeping up investment with like everything else that the that Saudi's been in buying up and stuff like the percentages that they've been pushing on to like Nexon EA Koei Nintendo all that shit.

I kind of was looking at this.

I saw like there's a tracker of all of that and um

the part where they own like uh whatever what was the percentage of of SNK?

Uh, 96, because they bought it from that Korean company, um, was on the, was like that 96% equals $600 million,

which is the lowest of their actual number investments in all of those companies.

So, for example, like Capcom, they put way more than that.

Nintendo, they put billions in, and it's just owning a smaller percentage.

It's a weird thing where basically I mean, considering it's Evo and it's not Nintendo, that makes perfect sense.

Yeah, so they put billions into Take Two, Evo, sorry, Take-Two, Activision, Nintendo, Nexon, Capcom, etc., NC Soft, and so on.

But it's one of those things where because SNK is a tiny ass fucking rinky-dink fighting game company, you throw a couple coins at it and you get 96% for that versus 10 or so.

SNK is no fucking Nintendo.

Sorry,

SNK isn't even SNK.

Sorry, I didn't hear what you said.

Oh, I said, of course not.

SNK isn't fucking.

No, no, absolutely not.

SNK isn't even SNK.

It's SNK Playmore after Rebirth from Death, exactly.

Yeah.

So you can invest a billion

in Capcom and get like a 6% share or whatever, but you can invest half of that and grab the whole thing.

Let's see what we got over here.

If you have an email, you can send it.

Send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

All right, we got one over here.

No name given.

Dear Castle Super Beasts, question: How much aim assist is too much?

Listening to Pat reflect on his time with Battlefield 6 beta reminded me of my relationship with Halo, a multiplayer shooter I used to really be into, and recent releases haven't just hit for me.

Something that bothered me was

Infinite having a lack of bullet magnetism.

Swapping between MCC and Infinite, you could feel the loss of Aim Assist strength, which made the game feel less Halo.

Made me worse at it, and I won't deny, it distracted from my enjoyment.

Detracted, excuse me.

I was surprised to see how in-depth,

how despised Aim Assist was in spaces where keyboard and mouse players could fight pad players, though.

Conflict was bound to occur since Halo games started on both platforms.

Started to launch on both platforms, excuse me.

So you're both pad players.

How do you like aiming on a controller?

Should players be segregated into input,

should be segregated by input in competitive settings?

We should turn it up until the numbers even out

against from pad to mouse and keyboard.

So my only metric, my only comparison point for this is Titanfall 2.

And

while there's an aggressive auto aim on that, it feels like mouse and keyboard players still rule the day.

And as a pad player, I still feel like I can do well and learn to

get better at

compensating for that lack of turning ability and awareness and such.

So it feels okay to me, but I don't know, right?

I can't say for other games where you can't grapple off the wall, do backflips, and jump into a robot.

I have a deeply unhelpful answer.

Battlefield six has the perfect amount of auto aim because when i played on on pc against people with mouse and keyboard with a controller i did pretty well and that means it's got good auto aim did you have fun and it felt good to win okay so then it's good if i'm playing the game and i don't do well because the auto aim isn't strong then it's bad it's not enough that's it and if i'm playing the game and i feel like the controller is being removed from my hands so destiny has an auto aim that's too strong because enemies that walk past you will actually drag your camera camera.

Like, it's way too strong.

But if I'm playing the game and I'm doing well against mouse and keyboard players with a pad, that means the odd they named they nailed the auto aim and that means it's good because I'm having a good time.

But it's Destiny's PVE, so it doesn't matter that much, right?

Well, yeah.

No,

that's kind of it.

And I think more so to the point, like, if you do like what Titanfall did by having all these profiles of like, you know,

how much the camera moves as you move the stick from the middle all the way out to the edge and allow for this a ton of fine-tuning

Then I don't imagine it's an issue.

It doesn't seem like it

What and of course you can always balance auto-aim like aggressiveness with patches over time as you see the results and whether or not you think things are balanced in properly, you know

There is always a problem with the fact that if you're on a controller and you are not bumper jumping, you're going to have to release one of your sticks to press a button or to do a thing.

and that's an inherent disadvantage.

You can't get over, uh, well, unless you bumper jump and design for that, so yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, if I win the match, they did a really good job.

All right, fair enough.

I think, I think that's how I feel about it.

Uh, everyone, I want to thank you for listening to the podcast.

Take care.

I thank you for your continued

patronage.

Uh, none of you matter.

Isn't it crazy?

Is how like you're so insane.

Like, I'm thankful that you're here and you're hearing the words come out of my mouth.

I cannot emphasize how little you matter.

See you next week.

I would drown all of you in a river for like a couple cookies to give my baby.

That would do it.

Just fucking die.