2025.08.28: Long Term To Do

No, no!

Hey! We're recording the podcast! Gut up!

Good morning

wherever you are because it is morning sunwhere for August 28th, 2025. My name is Bernie Burns sitting right over there.
She's so disappointed she didn't give me any shouts. Wait, it's Ashley Burns.

Say hi to Ashley, everybody. Look, all I have to do is send in my shout, and then one day I might get lucky.
Although, I will say, those shouts, done properly, they do ruin your voice box.

They get you like a little tear in the fabric. They pull at the thread.

That was Sakeb Khan who sent that to me. I want to give a shout out to Mr.
Khan because we had mentioned we were going to start doing these again. And apparently...

He went through and said, I'm going to go find the old email address that they published and send it in. Which is, that takes some sleuthing because we didn't find it.

So going forward, if you want to send it to shouts at roosterteeth.com, you can send your morning somewhere yell. It's cool to say that domain.
It's good to see that domain.

Shouts at roosterteeth.com. You can send it in there.
And let me tell you that what he did, which was great, make my life easy. I'll make y'all's life easy.

It'll be more likely that your shout will end up in the rotation. He sent me just the shout as its own file.
So it's super easy for me to drop it in.

And then he said a separate file, which this was really cool. He told me how to pronounce his name.
Oh, that's nice.

And also in that, in that little bit there, if you can say, like, you have my permission to use this shout and all that stuff, whatever. Right.
It's good. Good to have.

And then it's fun that we've got that going.

Also, on the topic of usernames, Bernie, and like having guidance on how to pronounce them, that's really helpful because we spent what?

10 minutes this morning trying to figure out how to pronounce my new best friend a Reddit username because after our conversation yesterday where you were trying to figure out what was that puck-based messaging device that was in like the late aughts or like early 10s.

Like, what was that thing? Someone says, I know exactly what you're talking about. It was the Microsoft Kin.
And then we spent 10 minutes going,

How do you say that name?

Is it

like, is it ones? Is that L's? Is it like, is it I's? What how is it? And then I think we eventually settled on Loris is how we pronounce.

So shout out to Loris or Illoris or Lyoris or any combination of the

ones or the L's or the I's that that can be. We end up putting it in notepad because like, let's see what Courier font makes of this.
We ended up literally cutting and pasting it into

other documents to tell. Like, when we forced capitalization,

and then we even had the whole discussion. You said, I think it's ones, it's L-L-O-R-H-Y-S.
And you said, I think it's two ones.

You said, Is it 11 O'Reis? And I said, Is it ones or is it ones because he couldn't get L's in the username? So we had to unpack so much of internet culture in order to pronounce your name.

So Loris, that's how we're pronouncing your name. You're my new best friend, though, because you found this thing.
Actually, you said I mentioned it yesterday.

I feel like I've mentioned that like 80 times and I've never been able to find this thing. Well, so I was reading it after they posted it that this is this device that Microsoft put out in 2010.

They spent like a billion dollars on it. It lasted something like six weeks and sold 10,000 units.
So the fact that you even know about it is kind of miraculous, but I should have known about it.

I was working at Microsoft at the time. Yes, you were.
I should have known. I should have known about this thing.

And once I read that there was a Microsoft Kin1 and Kin2, and I was like, oh, you know what? The Kin1 Kin2 does actually like scratch like a little memory itch, but I still can't go in my head.

Oh, yes, of course, the Microsoft Kin.

And I want to be surprised by that because I was there at the time, but I'm really not. Also, how did you not know about this?

Because when I met you, you had in your apartment in Sydney a thousand Windows phones like in boxes, like you were running a pawn shop or a fencing operation or something. I did.
Well, because

at the time we were getting ready to put out like Microsoft like Windows Windows Mobile like 6.5. It was before they did their big Windows Phone 7 push.

And so they re-skinned old operating systems to look like the new operating systems, which I'm not sure that was the best idea strategically in hindsight. But so then we had all these sample phones.

And I was doing the keynote at these, at all these like conferences for businesses around the country about like what this phone was and how it worked. And so I had billions of these phones.

It did look like if you were to encounter me in an alleyway at night and I pulled a bunch of phones out of my trench coat, you'd go, ah, yes, of course, this all makes sense.

You should have been running one of those shops in like the city center where the the tourists go that's all just a bunch of glass cases with phones in it. That's what you're.

But so there was this, there's all these phones and all this focus, but I'm not surprised I didn't know about it because Microsoft can be so bad at talking about the stuff that they make.

Yeah, we talked about that with like the Xbox and the Xbox series and stuff like that.

Yeah, it's almost miraculous that the Xbox 360 did as well as it did because like just for once, everyone must have been like, I'm gonna talk. And everyone said, don't you dare.

The guy with the hoodie under his blazer, he's talking right now.

All right. Just zip it and let him talk.
And they did. And then everything was great.
Listen. But just that one beautiful moment.
You don't get to talk. You don't have a graphic team.

It's not your turn. Clearly, you haven't been approved to talk.
I'm just happy now that I have finally solved. The mental pathway.

You know, when you have those like things where things are disconnected, like they connect the dots, and you finally get to make the pathways. And like, that's where that comes from.

Kik

was an instant messaging text service called K-I-K-Kik. The Kin, K-I-N, was the puck-based mobile device by Microsoft at about the same time.
And Kik, K-I-C-K,

is the completely distinct and separate do crimes streaming service that exists out there. But it's so easy when they all sound that close to just mush them together a little bit.

Even people in the comments and the subreddit were saying, like, I thought kick was from Kik, the text messaging service. Like they said, oh, this isn't working for us, so we'll pivot.

Like musically turned into TikTok or something. Right.
Yeah. It's like, we'll just make a, or was it Trevor? Justin, Justin TV was like, well, now we're Twitch.
Now we're Twitch. Yeah.

Can you imagine if we were all streaming on Justin?

I'm a Justin streamer. Check out my channel on Justin.
Oh, I was also called a boomer in the comments. Like I had some boomer takes on IRL streaming.
I will absolutely die die on that hill.

I will take that insult. I do not understand IRL streaming.
People walking around in the real world streaming

live your life, people. If you have to boom about anything, I think that's a perfectly acceptable thing to boom about.
Like, what do you care? People can watch the IRL streamers.

We don't have to watch the IRL streamers. Dude, you're...
The world's big enough for all of us. I'm about to talk about something I don't want to talk about.
We're talking about boomer stuff.

We have managed, Ashley, we have managed to avoid the conversation about the goddamn Cracker Barrel logo. I read this headline yesterday, which is now Cracker Barrel is reverting from their new logo.

They're going back to their old logo due to pressure from the presidential administration. What are we doing?

Isn't the presidential administration busy like buying Intel or something?

Fading Greenland now is the new one. Aren't they busy? Why do they care about the Cracker Barrel? Aren't we all too busy to talk about this, Ashley?

How do people have the goddamn energy and time in their life to get upset?

Let me backtrack that. Infuriated about the change of the Cracker Barrel logo.
When was the last time you talked about Cracker Barrel before this, ever? That's just it, right?

Okay, conspiracy time, you ready? All right, put on the tinfoil hat. This, what if this was intended from the beginning? Because when's the last time you talked about Cracker Barrel?

I think that's giving him too much credit. You think? Yeah.
Because I, I mean, I don't know. I don't know.
We're talking about Cracker Barrel. I don't even know the last time I saw a Cracker Barrel.

Right.

The Google trends for Cracker Barrel, like the interest over time, must look like a cliff the size of Mount Everest.

Must be the flattest of flat lines and then a straight up arc of people talking about this restaurant. It reminds me of when, what was it, like 2018, 2019?

when IHOP changed its name to IHOB and everyone got upset.

And I used to talk about that as an indicator of, men, remember how life was back then when we had enough time and energy to get upset about fucking IHOPS rebranding?

And we're still doing it with everything going on in the world. We're talking about this.
No, we're talking about it. I'm looking at Google Chat and said, yeah, it's an upward cliff.
Look at that.

Look at that. We'll put this in the LinkedIn, but that is an upward cliff.

I remember the IHOP thing too, because it seemed at the time like it was like a little haha funny, like just letting you know we also do burgers. And people got legitimately really mad at me.

Really mad.

They did think that i hop was changing its name for real right yeah yeah but it was also one of the last times that uh anyone really talked about i hop like we we would go to an i hop we would take the boys to i hop uh this one in austin and it was always empty and it had like the old sort of vinyl seats that are that are splitting from age and you can see that like white fuzz kind of starting to come out and the flickering light the lights are flickering and there was never anybody there it was almost like in stranger things when they they go to the upside down like that.

It was like that.

There's nobody around. Everything's kind of dusty.
Debbie Gorgon's on kitchen duty. You got a funny face pancake.

You know, but anyway, no, you know, nobody cared, right? Outside of, I guess, getting upset about branding. But nobody had engaged with IHOP in decades, right? On a brand level.

And then suddenly everyone was invested. Apparently, Cracker Barrel, it is, it is integral to the fabric of our society in America that the Cracker Barrel logo remains the same.

It's just a typical thing of people, you know,

they're not going to support the thing, but they're going to get mad when the thing tries to change, right? Right. But now that it's changed back, are you going to go to Cracker Barrel?

Who's going to go to Cracker Barrel? Maybe they'll show up. Although this, you know, they show the parking lots.

I don't know what the parking lot for Cracker Barrel looked like a month ago, but they're showing like now it's empty and they are changing their logo back. So

there's been a run of boycotts working lately. So, you know, maybe, maybe take that to heart.
That's true.

Although, you know, one thing that I would recommend doing now is if you can find merch mugs, whatever, right, of the

new, old, old, new, the

now can the temporary logo, um, those are going to be collector's items. It will be.
It will be. Like, if you had a can of new Coke, you know, from the 80s, that would be a collectible item.

But when the Coke rebrand, that lasted six months. This one was like six minutes.

So things happen fast on the internet. And apparently, they spent a ton of money on this, which makes me think that's why it's not a conspiracy.
Either way, though, it worked.

Like, you look at that Google Trends spike.

It's a bigger spike than they've had in like five years by magnitudes, right? That people are actually like looking up going, what's going on with Cracker Barrel?

That's the first time that that's happened in so, so long. I just wonder, like, it just shows how ingrained consumerism is that people can get this mad about a logo for a company.

They get furious about a fucking logo, man. People can get really furious about just about anything if they have enough time.
I guess so. I guess so.

Yeah, if it doesn't change your functionality or whatever, who gives a shit? Here's the thing, though, Bernie.

We're not going to have all that much time coming up because there's a lot of things that are coming up that are going to take up a lot of our time.

One of them is, so the long walk is coming out, right? That's what, September 12th?

Oddly, we haven't really talked about most of the stuff, but September is fucking loaded.

We're going to have no time to get upset about anything at all because we're going to be busy just keeping our heads above water, being entertained, because there's something else coming out.

And I believe it's on September 12th. So we're going to have a real dilemma on our hands.
Bernie, the final Downton Abbey movie is hitting theaters. Oh,

Ashley, let me assure you, that's not a dilemma.

That's not a problem.

Are we going to do like our undate where we go to the movie theater, you go in one theater and I go in a different theater? Maybe we should. We'll drive together.

We'll go, we'll get in line and we'll get popcorn and stuff. And we'll be like, love you, babes.
See you in a couple hours. And we'll just go into our separate theaters.

I wonder, I don't think you would like Long Walk, honestly. I don't know.
I don't know.

I have a really complicated relationship with the sort of people in peril for entertainment genre of stuff, which is weird to say because I'm such a huge fan of like Dungeon Crawler Carl, which is entirely people in mortal peril for entertainment.

You know, and you get like, there's, you know, like the Hunger Games and all that, that entire genre of stuff, right?

That's people, mortal peril, uh, for the entertainment of others, because it seems like part of the commentary there is like, hey, you person can join this. You're part of the problem.

Well, they market Long Walk as having some kind of connection to the team behind Hunger Games. But it could be one of those things from the associate producer of Hunger Games.

From someone who worked at the same studio at the same time. Clearly, they think there's a lot of crossover.
There's also in September, Bernie,

is

the game that we've been keeping an eye on for you specifically because it's the FTL crossed with Left 4 Dead crossed with Sea of Thieves game, Jump Space, formerly known as Jump Ship.

I guess they decided to change the name, Parchua Through Development. That's coming out the 19th.

Yeah, so I was just talking with Xander, and because of our upload speed now being great, I've been listening to like networking tear.

Yeah, every time I walk in a room, I feel like you're just in the room, huddled over, splicing a cable.

Listen, I slept like a baby last night, and you pointed out it's probably because you're like getting so much stuff done. on your long-term to-do list.
Right. Let's you relax a little bit.

But we have been knocking a lot of that stuff out.

So biometrics appointment done um that bird has flown the coop and now we just wait uh and so we've got uh you've got a bunch of this network stuff solved so you're just like one by one ticking all these tasks off and i feel like it's got to be um releasing some of the like energy that you have to put in background processing in your brain uh and so it's just taking like these teeny tiny not even calling them stressors almost seems like too much but you're you're like internet of things right you you get enough of them and and it's taking up 25% of your energy just to maintain the thoughts in the background.

You're ticking those off. You're getting rid of them.
It's the big long-term things that end up on your to-do list. Like, oh, I've got a, there's that water heater.

I know I have to replace the laundry heater, or I've got to get that car inspected or the tires rotated. I need to book an oil change.
Right.

Just all the like little teeny, tiny, like annoying grown-up stuff that you've got to have. How am I going to invade Greenland slowly over time

and claim authority? How do I do that?

But it's nice when you start to like pull those things off of the big long-term list. Man, you're right.
It's a complete relief. So I've been doing a lot of that stuff.

And I was talking with Xander about

going and playing Sea of Thieves again. But then it kind of came up, I never played Helldivers.
And apparently Helldivers now is doing a thing with Xbox.

And there's some kind of ODST crossover that he was telling me about. Okay, that sounds fun.
Some kind of jump space is right around the corner. Maybe we'll just wait until that.

And then there's an Apple event between these two, which is bringing up Xander. It's like there's a whole new iPhone everything event coming up.

Yeah, that's what they announced that for September 9th, which means it is now officially Apple leak season. Yeah, if you want to find out what the iPhone is going to be, you can go look at that.

I learned something when I was actually looking up some of these leaks. You could probably guess what they're going to be changing.
Let's see. I'm going to guess.

Let's see.

Five cameras instead of three cameras.

The camera bezel.

Let's see. It's going to have a longer battery life than ever.
I hope so. I hope so.

They're going to announce the new emojis, but those won't come out until emoji day. Yeah, that's right.

Important stuff.

And then if I were to make a guess, they're going to focus a lot on AI because everyone's focusing a lot on AI, even though the first thing I'm going to do is see where I can go turn that off.

Well, Apple was criticized last year for being revealing that they were a little bit behind the curve of everyone else, you know, which if you're a little bit behind the curve in AI, you're exponentially behind the curve, essentially.

So probably right. They probably will be doing things to, you know,

they'll probably announce like some kind of

some portion of the company was nationalized by the U.S. government as well.
That'll be a huge announcement.

But

the big rumor is that it's going to be much thinner as well, which I don't care about, and that the back of it, they might be going back to like more metal on the back and less like full glass.

I didn't know this, but the reason why it's glass on the back is what enables it to have wireless charging with like the MagSafe stuff. Okay.
Perfect. I like the MagSafe.
Do you?

I don't care about that at all. Well, it works.
I've got a charger on the, next to the bed, and I like that my charger sort of has everything. I can put the phone on MagSafe.

And if you turn it to the side, it just turns itself into a clock for the night. And then I've got it.
It's got a nice stand on the top for the watch. I just lay that on there.

And then I can put my AirPods. They slip in the back.
And they do a really fun thing where when they start charging, they go.

And then I guess they stop charging when they hit 100%. And then they must, like, I don't know, go down to 99%.
And then they want to charge out that last percent. And so they go dingy.

But the best part is because they started charging right before I went to bed and went to sleep, I don't hear it.

You hear it because then you're coming to bed after me going, can you please turn that damn thing on the bed? Ding, ding, ding. Like it feels like it's every three minutes

dings or whatever. Yeah, and it's also, I would be more excited about MagSafe if I could use it for my watch, if it was the same.
Like, I don't know why there has to be a little divot.

That thing may be a little bit different. Yeah, I guess so.
It would be nice to have all that stuff unified.

Maybe we're looking at unification of like charging in a different way since we've got USB-C for so much stuff now. We're like, hmm, you know what? Having it unified is nice.

Or it would be nice if it wasn't all stuff that looked like the same plug, but they're clearly not the same. Well, when I get a micro USB device now, I like get mad at it.
Me too.

I see it and I go, oh, really? Yeah, come on. What are you doing? Like at this day and age.
Well, I've got this thing I've got going on now.

I've been splicing a lot of cables because when I'm in the zone, I'm in the zone now. I can like put an RJ45 on in like 45 seconds, I feel like.

But now I'm making all my network cables as exactly as long as they need to be, which a cool thing about the UK is I used to make fun of the gigantic plug that exists in the UK.

You can actually do the same thing with your electrical cords as well because

you can just unscrew the cover on the plug and then rewire it very easily. It'll take you like 30 minutes to learn how to do it.

And if you want to, you can just, instead of like tying up your electrical cords, if you know this lamp's going to live here forever, you can say, I'm just going to make that cord like three feet shorter.

Wow, I mean, that is a commitment, right? You have to be like, no one is ever moving this lamp, right? Well, it is easier to make it shorter than it is to make it longer, for sure.

But you, I mean, go look up on your YouTube this UK plug. Yeah, you just unscrew it, pull the cover off, and then it's basically three wires that you have to like route through the plug.

Yeah, I do like the UK plug. I wasn't a big fan of it in the beginning because they are very large plugs.

And I have an issue with some of them where the outlet is close enough to the ground that the plug, the cable is always pointing down, right?

So the cable comes out of the plug, pointing down towards the ground.

And if the outlet is close enough to the ground, then the whole cable is trying to like bend really hard in order to avoid like the carpet, whatever. And that's not good for the cable either.

No, and it's kind of hard to explain because in the U.S.,

you just have the two little prongs, right, on it. And it doesn't, the orientation of it doesn't really matter unless you have the grounded plug as well.
But it's a much bigger deal here.

They actually have sell on a regular basis an adapter that just changes the orientation of the plug. Right.
Like make this upside down.

I suppose that could be a thing in the U.S., but that'd be a really specific cord that has like a 90-degree bend coming out of it.

I guess it's also a little bit, because in the U.S., a lot of plugs, you plug them into the wall and the plug comes straight out.

As opposed to up or down. Yeah, it's just it doesn't have the 90-degree bend.
Like that would be a very specific cord that does that. Let me ask you this.
Okay. You have the two prongs in the U.S.

Yeah. I have a son who's an electrician now.
I should ask him, or I should just look this up. It'd take me 10 seconds to learn.
Ask me instead. I'm sure it'll go great.

Most of the time, it's two prongs that are coming out of the back. Sometimes, Ashley, sometimes,

sometimes. Okay.
One of the prongs is bigger than the other.

One has like a barb on the end of it, for lack of a better term. Yeah, I'm familiar with that.
Yeah, like it's to make sure that you can't plug it in upside down. Right.

I guess I've always assumed as an expert in the field that it's the polarity. Oh, it's polarities.
Right. And that it's a polarity.

And that for maybe like lower powered stuff, the polarity of the plug is not as important. But if you have it on like heat tools, like your hair iron or hair dryer or whatever,

then maybe that matters more. And so they don't want you reversing the polarity, right? It's like it's like crossing the streams.
You don't do it until you do it. But yeah, so that's been fun.

I've been working on that. And now that I've got that upload speed, I got to figure out what am I going to play? Am I going to play Sea of Thieves? Am I going to play Helldivers?

Because I've never played before. Am I going to play Wait and play some jump ship.

Maybe you can practice all of them because now you're not going to have an excuse to be bad at games because of the upload speeds causing like

latency and lag. How dare you.
That's why I play multiplayer games so I can blame it on the other people in the party. That's what I do.
All right.

Well, I want to say a big thank you to our party members for today, Justin Pearson and Brandon Alley.

Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere.

All right, send those shouts to shouts at roosterteeth.com if you want to have a morning somewhere shout. We will be very selective in the ones that we put up.

We do have a bunch that we didn't use from last time, so apologies, but it's open again if you want to give it another shot.

If you send me just a file of the morning somewhere section all by itself, it's more likely to end up in the reputation. So thanks to Lo Reese and Sock Ab Khan for contributing to today's podcast.

All right, that does it for us today. August 28th, 2025.
We will be back to talk to you tomorrow with a special guest, maybe. We hope you will be here as well.
Bye, everybody.