2025.10.21: Hating The Game

Get your thoughts on the game.

I hate this team.

I was born into this and I'm not gonna ever... I'm always a Jets fan, but like...

I just... I hate this team.

We're recording the podcast. Get up!

Good morning to you! Where are we?

Morning Somewhere! For October 21st, 2025. My name is Bernie Burns sitting right there.
She's getting ready for her World Series performance. It's Ashley Burns.
Say hi to Ashley, everybody.

Literally me, the Blue Jays. Yeah, so they did.
So the Toronto Blue Jays advanced to the World Series last night in dramatic fashion, beating the Seattle Mariners in game seven.

It's kind of interesting this year having a...

A World Series that's actually a World Series because now the Toronto Blue Jays will be facing off against the American L.A. Dodgers.
Great job, Canada, Toronto, holding it down for the whole country.

What other teams from Canada? No. That's it.

Just the Blue Jays.

They were the only option for making this like an international venture. Yeah, to having the World Series earn its moniker.
Yeah. No, there used to be the Montreal Expos as well,

but they are gone. They're long gone.
Well, let me ask you this, because baseball is very popular in Japan as well. Do they ever play the West?

No, they'll play like exhibition games for Major Major League Baseball in Japan, but no, the World Series is one of the most ridiculous names for a championship. Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous.
Yeah.

And so this is

the Mariners lost in the

ALCS, the American League Championship Series.

The distinction here is, don't want to take anything away from the Blue Jays.

Seattle Mariner fans, you know what I'm about to say. You can go ahead and just shut off the podcast right now.
You can just enjoy your day. You're already having a bit of a day.

if that's even possible like that poor kid this kid in the drop he's like a 15 year old kid i feel this kid in my soul of like i was born into this i gotta root for this team i hate this right he's probably like born in a jets like onesie or whatever and like he's been dragged to every game every game you know throughout his entire childhood he has no choice but to support this team right but he is over it yeah you know what you can you can feel that Do you ever watch a Silver Linings playbook?

I believe I've seen it once a wee long time. i really like that movie man i really did i didn't read the book but man i really like that movie a lot is that about baseball

i feel like i must have missed a lot of that movie the eagles the philadelphia eagles play heavily into the lore of the family and like the mental health of the family in general but um yeah so the uh the mariners have the distinction

Pause for Seattle fans to just go about their day. They have the distinction of being the only team out of 30 clubs in Major League Baseball.

They are the only one who has never made it to the World Series. Oh, and now

they were so close, right? And they almost made it until Canada came. They were up three games to two on the Blue Jays, best of four.

So they had to win one of their last two games to go to the World Series, and they won neither. Oh,

okay. So they, so is that worse?

Is that worse somehow than just being behind from the get-go to be ahead and then like whiff it the last two games. Yes, that's very bad, Ashley.
That's very bad. And listen,

I don't want to make light of it because I know some people take sports really seriously. I don't.
I think sports are a great low-stakes way to get emotional about something.

But I want to let people know, you can have permission to be a fair weather fan. That is totally acceptable.

These people make tens of millions of dollars playing an athletic sport for fun, a game that most people like to play in their spare time.

Don't get emotionally wrapped up in them. It's not worth it.
I, as like the Seattle Mariners thing,

it might not feel like it, but it's an interesting story.

It's interesting that your team is the one that's never been to the World Series, and you'll get to talk about that forever.

So, what if your team didn't play another week and your multi-millionaires didn't lift up their cheap-ass looking like $150 trophy or whatever? You know what I mean?

Filled with Gatorade or wait, is that NFL? Do they do Gatorade in baseball? Yeah, wearing their goggles in the locker room now.

These tough guys wearing goggles while they spray each other with champagne. It's like,

well, I want to spray the champagne, but I don't want to get it in my eyes. Don't worry about it.
You know what?

The thing I like about sports is that it seems like such a low-stakes way for you to argue with people where everyone can kind of agree not to take it seriously.

Except when you occasionally get that guy who takes it really fucking seriously and then suddenly all the fun is gone. Right, right.

Like, one thing I worry about, that kid in the drop is like, you don't know what, look, the dad's walking around mad all day because he's so tied to the team.

I know people like that who get really tied and wrapped up in this stuff. And God forbid, no, I'm just gambling on every goddamn podcast advertisement that I see.
It's like, you know,

that's not going to help the situation at all for a lot of people.

I'm just like, like, once you tie like your own financial incentives to the outcomes of the game, yeah, I can see how you would take it seriously. It'd be hard not to.

If you just have fun with it and you don't give a shit, it's a a lot more enjoyable. I found that.
I sat there. I have experience with this.

I said the other day on the podcast and people called me out for it. I said, my teams suck.
And occasionally I have a good player on my team. I root for the Dodgers and you know about that.

I don't root for any teams in the NFL because as a kid, I followed the Oilers. They went to the playoffs six years in a row, six years in a row, and never made it to the conference championship.

Not even the Super Bowl, actually. The conference championship.
I watched every down

of the Buffalo Bills coming back.

Oilers were up 35 to three at halftime. That's a big gap.
And the Buffalo Bills came back and won the game. I watched every single down of that nightmare.
It lives in my head.

But over time, I don't know. It's like, to me, that's a more interesting distinction.
You know, you learn that the bad stuff isn't really that bad, first of all, to begin with.

It sticks around just like the good stuff does. Like, eventually it all just becomes part of the lore.
Right, right.

It's just opposite ends of the spectrum of watching Vince Young in the Rose Bowl, but then watching the Oilers. I don't know which one is more important to me as a sports fan.
You know what I mean?

Sure. So yeah, today it sucks to be a Seattle Mariners fan, just like it sucked, you know, since the beginning of the franchise.
We're back at a point in history.

You know, it does suck, but it's like, just enjoy it. Like, kind of lean into it if you can.
I don't know what other advice to give to somebody. Yeah.
It doesn't matter.

I feel a little bit of sympathy, though, when you get like, when you're doing well and then suddenly you're not doing well, it's like so close. Yeah, you're

getting close. It's too close.
Is sometimes, you know, you flew too close to the sun. It's like, uh, you ever hear about that condition? Um,

it's almost like a boogeyman in sports. They did an episode of the music.
What do you mean?

Like, the uh, like, with the like, this is why, like, I don't wash my socks, is my team will lose if I wash my socks? No, there's something called the yips in sport.

We watched that last episode, they did a whole episode. Who was it, Danny? That was, uh, yeah, it was, uh, yeah, Danny got the

yips because it was a dog or something. Yeah, he said, killed the mascot.
And so they, they did like a whole ceremony to like clear the bad luck. It is a fascinating condition.

It's more of a mental condition than anything else that happens where sometimes an athlete will just forget how to do what they do. Like and they or they get in their own head.

Probably the most famous example of it is there was a catcher who got to the point in his career where all of a sudden he couldn't throw the ball back to the pitcher from on the plate.

Like after he would catch the pitch. That's like such a specific thing.
He would go to throw it, but then he he couldn't.

Like, and then it would take him a couple seconds, almost like a tick, and then he would finally throw it back. And it would drive fans nuts.
And it was,

if you watch the videos of him, it's actually kind of difficult to get through watching him go through this process.

By the way, the autocomplete for Catcher Who is Catcher Who couldn't throw back to Pitcher. Right.
Yep. Yeah.
And that is Mackie Sasser. To be fair.

It's not in the job description. It's just catcher.
Nothing about thrower in there. Excuse me.

I was told I would be catching. No one told me throwing was involved.
But yeah, I was. So this seems like a much bigger thing.
You just, God, it's got to be annoying.

To be like the top of your game, you're like so good at this thing. You could do it in your sleep.
And then your brain, your brain, it's supposed to be your best friend.

It's just supposed to get you through life. It's supposed to do all these things for you.
And it just goes, hey, you, fuck you about this one thing.

You have already been through an incredible filtering process under an enormous amount of stress your entire life and then to hit something like this must be really bizarre and then well like what do you do about it go hey brain just start working again yeah yeah the problem is if the more you think about it the more you manifest it right and it's like how do you not think about something right so i guess that's where you know maybe that's how a lot of people deal with it is the weird superstitions like it'll be fine brain is gonna work as long as i wear goggles while i spray champagne right right if only there was a way besides the goggles to keep champagne out of my eyes in the locker room.

Man, it's just one of those things you have to deal with where champagne flies around the room. I can't think of anything.
Maybe just kill that tradition.

The goggles, honestly, the goggles ruin the tradition already. You know what?

It feels like that's following the letter of the law, but absolutely violating the spirit. And I know people are going to say, well, just they need to protect their eyes.

It's like, they don't need to throw the champagne. That's my point.
You know, I agree with you. They do need to protect their eyes.
There's a great way to protect your eyes. Don't throw champagne

at each other. Just celebrate like you've been there before, fuckers.
Well, you know who else has got the yips right now, Bernie?

Yeah, I guess we've got a theme for today because Amazon got the yips yesterday. Yes, they did.
Where

the internet just kind of stopped working. And I didn't, here's the thing.

I guess I must have encountered it towards the beginning of this huge Amazon web services outage, which I'll get to in a minute. Lucky you.

What happened is I encountered it on a very personal level where I got victim blamed.

Victim blamed, Bernie. Oh, I know what you're talking about.
Yeah.

Who victim blamed you? Reddit. Same.
I got the same thing. They gave me an error message.
It was, I'm trying to load up Reddit, just browsing as I do.

And I start getting this error message, like, you've been rate limited. Wait a while and then try again.
Like, I'd been refreshing like some kind of, I don't know, refreshing freak.

And I needed to like, hey. Slow down, walk away, touch grass, and come back in a little while and stop refreshing so much, you asshole.
And I'm like, I refreshed.

How dare you? How dare you imply that I did something wrong? They probably saw your heisty heisty type flare.

Thought you were up to no good. Addiction gaslighting refers to when someone manipulates you into questioning.
That's absolutely it.

Reddit gaslit me like I, by making the error seem like it was something that I was doing.

Well, I mean, we know about this just from when we moved out rural and weren't like in a constant 5G connection. We learned how addicted

all these apps are. Addicted is the only word I can use.
They're addicted to having a data connection and they just assume it's there all the time.

And it's infuriating too, because we made accommodations to sort of how we used our connection and technology when we moved out here because we knew that our internet access, like our cellular access, was a little bit ass

and we weren't going to get it. So you would say spotty, but ass works.

So you do things like, you know, downloading the music to the phone so that you've got it accessible on like Spotify or whatever.

Or, you know, you download your Audible books way ahead of time, like all these things. And you would still, you get on the road immediately, no service.

And it would go, hold on, let me just check things because maybe,

maybe we need to change the book cover over to like now a hit series on Netflix, like with just in case. Right? Just in case.

And I mean, why not check the data connection? You're an app on a smartphone.

The assumption, the baseline is that it's there, right? But then we see yesterday, like Reddit doesn't even have an error message for when the back end is not working.

It's like, you must be doing something weird. Or I guess it assumed, like, it's almost like a nuclear thing.

It assumed there was an attack, I guess, and it was trying to slow down and crowd control users. Saying, hey, you're making too many requests is what I saw.

You're making too many requests too quickly. Slow down.
And I was like, I just tried to load my goddamn profile, Reddit. What are you up for? Yeah, like, like, wow, rude much.
I know, right?

You know, so, and the thing is, it wasn't like just that. Like, Audible went down.
Hold on, there's a whole list

that went down. Uh, and it was a lot.
It was. Also, by the way, I couldn't, this is a great example, right?

I was trying to listen to, I'm re-listening to book five, Gate of the Feral Gods, Dungeon Crawler Carl. Yep.

But then I get in the car, go into the airport to pick up JD and Jenna, who are here this week.

And I go to play it. I know I have it downloaded.
It was on my phone. I couldn't play it.
It's on my goddamn phone.

So something was taking place with AWS that even though it's in my library and downloaded, because I don't have a data connection, I can't listen to it. It shouldn't work that way.

It shouldn't work that way. Right.
It's like I have it here downloaded for a reason so that I can access it as I need to.

But it was a ton of stuff too, like things that you wouldn't even expect that got affected.

Snapchat, Fortnite, Ring, Roblox, Coinbase, Signal. Okay, so there you go.

So that's the other thing that's taking place here is that when AWS went down, there was a kind of like this pulling back of the curtain, this reveal of suddenly all these other things don't work.

And it kind of tips the hand of who's using AWS, Amazon Web Services, everybody. And who's not.
It actually, there was an outage a while ago, and that one was worse.

And it showed just how that wasn't, and that wasn't that long ago. Yeah, it showed how centralized everything was.
And like we were all kind of like single-threaded for the entire internet.

The interesting thing on this one is like services like Coinbase and Signal, which Signal is an open source, fully encrypted messaging client, but it shows it's like

decentralized.

Look where it's all stored. It's like Coinbase going down because of AWS.

Here they are touting this whole decentralized currency, but your currency can't be traded because the exchange that you would use to exchange those things, it's based on Amazon web services. Right.

So you could theoretically, but realistically, you're not doing anything. Yeah.

And it was, we, we very quickly were like, okay, let's look at our website, you know, and, you know, see what's affected, what modules we use that got affected by this.

And then also like making sure people had a place to go to discuss the episodes and things like that.

By the time I think most of America woke up, most of it has had resolved, but it kept like pinging in over the course of the day where there'd be like these mini like aftershocks. Yeah.
Yeah.

And apparently the whole thing was a DNS related outage. Uh, where like I always wonder how that happens, too.
Did someone change something?

Like, was some like poor engineer, was Dave over there, like accidentally working in a production environment, like fucking around and like pushed an update and it went out?

You know, like with just straight there, just raw dog in the internet. Just want to say, Amazon is based in Seattle.

It's a weird coincidence for outages.

Not to be a conspiracy theorist. Interesting.
AWS went down and the Mariners. So So you're saying that all of Seattle got the yips.
I won't use the word choke,

but right in there. Yeah.
So

it does show how even though we talk a lot about decentralization, it's just we're still a ways away from that. And this kind of thing combined with the whole dead internet theory, you know, it's,

it, it just shows it's like you should have alternative methods in place or be thinking about those for what your life looks like when you can't depend on your internet connection.

There's this quote that lives rent-free in my head. It's from the Stephen King book, The Stand.
It's probably my favorite Stephen King, The Unabridged Stand. You're just saying a lot.

I read a lot of Stephen King. A lot of Stephen King.

It's the one I definitely, when I read it, I've gone back to it the most amount of times. But there's a line in that when the power goes out.

It's about a pandemic that kills like 99.9% of the population. And

the power goes out, and the character says, you don't realize

how much of your life comes out of those two little holes in the wall until it's gone. And it's right.
And now the one hole for the internet, that's everything.

It's like the fire modes of our life, basically.

You know, and the weird thing too is like if something happens to the internet at large, aside from getting absolutely gaslit by Reddit, you're not going to know why. Right.
Right.

Like, what happens if you can't get to your Tumblr account and you can't

post your ship of your favorite fictional characters? What are you going to do? Would we count that as an attack, though? I don't know if we would or not.

You know, there's good and bad

to the post-data world. But yeah, I just, you know, it's interesting.
It's like, it does give you a moment to kind of reflect.

It's like that moment I had that we talked about in the podcast where I handed over my phone at the Apple Store.

And then I was like, I had a moment where I was like, I don't know what to do with myself. Like, how do I pass time? Oh, I'll just check my.
No, wait, I won't. Yeah, it's weird.

It just, it's weird how quickly you can. I'm going to stand with my hands directly to my sides.

We can make fun of the apps and the app developers for being addicted to this, but we're all in that same boat. Oh, yeah.
And try, the thing is,

we live in such a futuristic world that try explaining to the kids the internet, they'll be like, well, Netflix isn't working right now. That's fine.
I'll watch Disney.

No, I don't think you understand. They're all internet.
Yeah, yeah.

All this stuff that you like and want to do, it used to come over the airwaves, but we fixed that and put it all through one cord. And now that cord got cut.
Oops, sorry about that.

Right, because of Dave. Yeah, we used to just pluck it out of the air with radios and television.

Yeah, but now it depends on some guy who's standing with his hands on his top of his head in a server room somewhere to fix it. Right, like in complete silence as no one dares talk to him.

Dude, continuing the baseball metaphors, have you ever been part of like a really big outage? Oh, I mean, just like, so I've seen them.

It is like, it is like when a pitcher's like pitching a no-hitter and nobody wants to talk to them.

And, you know, the superstition thing, and everyone's just like cleared the bench and they're all there down there by themselves. Those are the I.T.
guys. When there's an outage, there is a

quiet

tension. Oh, you can see that feeling.
Yeah, and it's palpable. The tension when there's an outage.
If you're in a business, I'm talking about that depends on this thing coming back up.

And it's just like, yeah, you don't want to talk to the guys. You go to the server room.
You also don't want to be the guy who asks, so what's the ETA?

You know, when's the internet coming back up or whatever?

Hey, guys, how much longer are we going to be? Yeah.

Jesus. It's like, so what's the problem with this?

That's the other reveal, too. Is like, you know, there's a lot of people probably that work in the IT world.

You know, a lot of it can seem like black magic to a lot of people, the data side of a business, especially if they're not a tech-centric business.

There's a lot of people probably that got revealed yesterday of like, just like, hey, our whole back end is down. What's going on? Like, our shopping carts are down.

They don't work, you know, or they can't get to our website.

The IT guys can you put it back up and they're just like uh we we could hope can't control that remember we outsourced all of that right so we don't know we can't we don't do that i what i'll do is i'll keep hitting f5 on this page until it works like there's nothing i can do about this right so there's some people probably got revealed yesterday as being like you know their job is like outsource completely to amazon right and you don't want to be that guy Don't want to be that guy.

Otherwise, you're going to have to go on the, what is it, the overemployed sub, get some more J.

Right. Yeah.
You get to explain to your eight jobs on the overemployed

sub, right? So we all, everything seems to be okay. Amazon web services.
Uh, if you're keeping score at home, they came back up uh 21 days before the American federal government came back online. So

they're at 21 days of going. You know what? We were talking about this.
What was the longest streak ever for the federal government?

Let me look that up.

According to Time,

the longest government shutdowns in the U.S.

there was one in December 2018, the ran for 34 days. Where are we at now? We're at 21.
Okay, depending on how you're doing. 21 days, 17 days, 16 days, 12 days.

Um, I read one that where that was a really long one. I think there was one that was like a year long in the 70s or something.
The 1977 shutdown, which held the record for the longest in U.S.

history, for 12 months. That's insane.
Wow. That's insane.
You think that would be like a major thing we teach in history books, right? But we're in the middle one right now.

And I'll be honest, I don't really remember the one from 2019. Do you?

I do. I think that one was a disagreement over funding the border wall.
Okay. Fair play.
Yeah. And that one was, that one was about a month.
So, you know, headed towards that now.

Well, a takeaway from all of this is I think all of this will have to come to a head and have to have some resolution because

it starts in November, about a month from now. a little less actually we start the open enrollment period for the affordable care act obamacare whatever you want to call it.
That period starts.

That's the only window in which you can sign up for this. So it'll be a critical time for them to resolve these issues before that happens.
And it runs from November 15th to January 15th.

But if you want coverage that starts at the first of the year, you have to enroll by December 15th. So

big asterisk. We don't know where all this is going to go, but if that's important to you, be sure to check that out.

Get like valid information, as valid as you can get these days, but mark your calendar nonetheless.

And I want to say a big thank you to today's sponsors, Nate Simmons and Nomi. Thank you both so much for sponsoring our show at patreon.com slash morning summer and roosterteeth.com.

All right, well, that does it for us today, October 21st, 2025. We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.
We hope you will be here as well. Bye, everybody.