Triforce #314: Where do bugs come from!?
Go to http://expressvpn.com/triforce today and get an extra 3 months free on a 1-year package!
Support your favourite podcast on Patreon: https://bit.ly/2SMnzk6
Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Listen and follow along
Transcript
Pickox.
This podcast is supported by Progressive, a leader in RV Insurance.
RVs are for sharing adventures with family, friends, and even your pets.
So if you bring your cats and dogs along for the ride, you'll want Progressive RV Insurance.
They protect your cats and dogs like family by offering up to $1,000 in optional coverage for vet bills in case of an RV accident, making it a great companion for the responsible pet owner who loves to travel.
See Progressive's other benefits and more when you quote RV Insurance at progressive.com today.
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, pet entries, and additional coverage and subject to policy terms.
Attention, all small biz owners.
At the UPS store, you can count on us to handle your packages with care.
With our certified packing experts, your packages are properly packed and protected.
And with our pack and ship guarantee, when we pack it and ship it, we guarantee it.
Because your items arrive safe or you'll be reimbursed.
Visit the ups store.com slash guarantee for full details.
Most locations are independently owned.
Product services, pricing, and hours of operation may vary.
See Center for Details.
The UPS store.
Be unstoppable.
Come into your local store today.
Great start.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to the Trifles Podcast.
Yes.
What do you mean, Grace?
You said you close the door.
He said, um, I wasn't ready.
Just threw him off.
I'm sort of having a little sip of tea.
Jim of Betty.
He's been thrown off.
Sorry, it's not on.
Not on at the moment.
We're busy people.
Busy dads.
Busy mums.
Busy life.
He's a busy mum.
He's a mum.
He's a busy mum.
He's a busy mum.
He's reading all the mum tips and he's just got a lot of mum stuff to do.
A lot of babies.
Baby boys who need their
baby boys out there for them.
Lots of baby boys out there that need a lot of TLC.
Tender loving
care.
You know, that's what I provide here.
Yeah.
You know, that's my...
See, TLC means something different in the
learning channel, is what it is.
No, I'm going to say, in the context of this podcast, it means tiny little cock.
Tiny little cock.
All our listeners have TLC.
Yeah.
Right.
Oh, I see.
Tiny little croissant.
I haven't heard that for a while, actually.
I've got to say.
I thought we'd forgotten about it.
No,
it's still going.
So there's a lot of people out there greeting each other with the little penis thing.
I have a tiny penis and stuff.
All the time.
I have had it said to me in public by people.
Same.
They lean in.
Not recently.
They lean in.
Yes.
There is a little bit of a lean in nobody really just sort of um declares it you know yeah dramatically yeah well they like hold their hand up and they speak it behind their head by the way
by the way
i mean i told you the guy at uh when we were flying out of gatwick one of the guys doing the bag check yeah said it very loudly proudly yeah i was like one of them i have a tiny penis while he's doing the bag check i was going through uh security at uh at the airport in las vegas and uh i had the same thing.
I said, hey, I've got a tiny penis, by the way.
What?
It's like a security guy
at the airport.
Yeah, it was good.
It always makes me laugh, especially when people say it to me and we're with people who
have no idea about the stupid podcast that we do.
And they're like, sorry, you're going to have to explain to me why that young man just came up and told you about his penis.
Nice.
Yep, it's something.
It's something.
All right.
We started something.
We started a movement.
Yeah.
Do you think, like, it's...
I don't know.
Let's move on.
Let's move on.
Well, I know.
You had a question.
What was your question?
I haven't got questions.
I haven't got a question.
I don't care.
Carry on.
He doesn't care.
She's beyond.
I'm happy with it.
You know what?
We have to just take what we got.
Have you bought a house yet, Lewis?
No.
Oh, man.
I haven't even had any viewings.
I think that whole like you've just lost all your situation with the viewing, like just
blew it right out.
You know, it's just all it takes is is for one thing to like scupper the whole process, you know?
Yeah.
I've given up.
It's just going to live in a, carry on living in my basement flat forever.
Scupper is a good
thing.
Your flat's nice, though.
Your current one is nice.
Like I wouldn't be too quick to move away from a place such as such as that.
A nice place.
It's not dungeony.
Well, I didn't find it was overly dungeony.
You haven't been in there right recently.
No.
It's got quite dank in there.
You redecorated.
I put some spikes up.
Nice.
Yeah.
Nice.
Nice.
They're very on trend at the moment.
Got some wet walls
where the boiler was leaking.
Yeah.
I had some little fungus gnats in my plants.
Green fly in my plants.
What's a fungus gnat?
It's like a little shitty little gnat.
that
lives in the soil of your house plants and it can it like eats the roots and then they they just they they're just, they're shit.
They're really shit flies.
They're very easy to squash.
You see what I mean?
They're like kind of.
Yeah, they're dopey.
They're like mini mosquito.
They're really easy to do.
There's an animal for everything, isn't there?
Yeah.
Tell me that there's a fucking gnat that eats the roots of the houseplant.
What the fuck?
Nature, could you chill?
There can be gaps.
All right.
You don't have to have an animal for everything.
I honestly, it feels like, you know, I took some bananas home from the office and they had those little fruit flies on them.
I had like fruit flies, black flies, fungus gnats and green flies.
And I've only got like three houseplants.
So how the fuck is it like so infested?
I mean no wonder they used to think that insects just sprang from the earth.
Because if you were in ancient Greece, what is it, pathogenesis or something they call it?
They honestly just thought that insects and small life just came out of the earth.
Because that's how it feels.
It looks like.
You get a houseplant and now there's fucking gnats.
They live in weird fucking places, man.
Like let me tell you, recently, I was driving my car and all of a sudden a wasp crawled out of like in between the door and the window, you know, like where the window slides down into like the window holder in the door?
He crawled out of the inside of that.
So there's a wasp living in my
car door.
He just crawled in.
He's living in a car door.
Yeah, he's huge as well.
He just crawled out and then I was like, oh, shit, I'm going to try to let him out.
So I rolled down the window and he just like crawled down the window into the door again.
I haven't seen him since.
So
I guess here's my question.
I've never seen a fruit fly out and about.
I've only ever seen them when I have a banana and I've eaten the banana and I put the peel down, and suddenly there's fruit flies.
Uh, where are they coming from?
Are they flying around out there sniffing the air for bananas and a bit of apple peel at all times?
Because I've never seen one out and about.
I had a banana peel in my garbage can in my garage one time that I forgot about, and it was in there for quite some time.
And I had a mini infestation of fruit and stuff.
Yes, I had this the other day.
the other day this was last year towards the end of the year it was still quite warm and i have a bin in my office and i had had a couple of bananas and i put the bananas peels in the bin stupidly and didn't i don't change it all the time because you know i i don't put much rubbish in the bin in my office so this bananas obviously got to the point where the flies were like well this is this is the this is the best
pretty rotten banana peel we've ever been near i open the bin and like 50 of the fuckers fly out and now they're in my office they're not anymore because i've got rid of the fruit but the point is, how do they get there?
Someone tell me.
What are they doing out there?
Well, they're small.
They probably crawled under the door or like, you know, they came out.
I have the window or something.
They have the window open.
Like, they're coming in through the window.
I'm just saying.
There's your own.
Are they just flying about?
Because
they didn't leave my office.
They're seeking out rotten banana peels.
I don't think they are like.
I could be completely wrong.
I reckon they're not like endemic to this country at all.
They're probably from wherever they actually grow in
the equator and, you know, in wherever bananas grow, not all the time right because i think at a
republic at a slightly reduced temperature i think they all die right like i think a little bit of cold kills them all off real quick i think they can only breed at a very specific like room temperature and so i think what happens is they come in on they just come in all the time on bananas right so there's always eggs on them all the time and so it's just inevitable that the the bananas they get taken to a warehouse or whatever which is probably full of them as well you know and then that gets taken to so you get free in the van you get free eggs with every banana that you i think so i think so it's pretty good considering the cost of eggs these days could be free eggs maybe they do just i don't think they're just flying around though in in the in in england like no indoors especially in like winter it's like three degrees out there they probably do exist like out in like the woodland and stuff though they're probably out there realistically they must be just i just don't think they can it's too cold like the cold snap probably kills them all off you know if That's why they're just not here.
Well, there's lots of insects
that are sort of killed off during cold weather and they always seem to come back.
So there's got to be some way that they preserve themselves.
But a lot, like the lifespan of an insect is very short, generally, isn't it?
What do you think the lifespan of the fruit fly from egg to death is?
How long do you think that is?
Like a couple of days, maybe?
Lewis?
Don't know.
50 days.
Yeah.
It's not, but most insects are like that.
Like you, like bees.
No, no, no.
50 days is longer than I expected.
Yeah, but it's still not very long.
It's quite a long time.
But that does lend itself to a lot of the same thing.
So it limits a low amount of time if you kept one as a pet, for example.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing is, that does leave, like Lewis said, the eggs are probably already on the fruit.
Occasionally a banana comes over here.
It's going to, that egg can exist on that banana.
And then a few days later, it hatches.
You acquire a baby fruit fly as a pet, and you know the countdown started.
You have 50 days left.
What are you doing with that fly?
You're doing like the Titanic thing with him.
You're
taking him to Thailand.
You've got to get everything in there.
50 days is not very long.
Yeah.
Yeah, I threw him in a tiny, tiny, tiny bit.
Quicker than that.
I've no idea how long.
This is fascinating stuff, really.
But like, I guess they, I knew they used fruit flies as, because the fruit fly was the thing that had its DNA synthesized first, right?
Because it was a very simple organism, right?
And it was the first thing to have its DNA completely mapped.
And I think they've used it in labs because of its rapid generational growth.
So you can see, you know, what would, you know, imagine there's something that would affect something in multiple generations down the line.
They can see quite quickly with fruit flies how that takes effect, right?
But I guess we 50 days is still a long time to like, you know, get the next results in.
But I guess that means you can go through 10 generations in a year, which is, well, eight generations a year, which is quite a lot, quite a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fascinating.
The Wikipedia article on fruit flies is extremely long because although they are very little tiny fly that seems unimportant, there's an awful lot that we've done, like Lewis said, in terms of like genetics and stuff.
They've been absolutely, you know, vital really in the work of that.
We share 50% of our DNA with those fruit flies.
How crazy is that?
It says literally one of the articles here is similarity to humans.
Oh, it's sorry, it's 60% between us and fruit flies.
And 75% of known human disease genes have a recognizable match in the genome of fruit flies.
So they are extremely important little
things.
And they're just
fruit to rot.
They just are in the river.
They are a bit of a pest, though, when there's loads of them.
I mean, it's your own fault.
If you're leaving rotten
around
and they're there, you have no one to blame but yourself.
But still, when you arrive at that situation, you do kind of think these things are a bit of a pest.
There's a lot of them.
They're just little buzzy things, but they don't make a sound.
They don't get in your face, they don't really want anything to do with you, they just want to sit on a banana peel.
It's not that bad, uh, it could be worse,
like it's weird that they pick that, though.
Like, yeah, there's so many, like, they could find a chicken burger or something somewhere, I'm sure, or like, you know, maybe
some like uh spilled coke on the ground, like something, something that maybe tastes better than a rotten banana.
I don't know, like, it's oh my god, so I remember, so they're also known as the vinegar fly.
Yeah, we used to go to this pub in Bristol and have like regularly have lunch there.
And it had these bottles of vinegar on the tables, right, open.
And one day I was like holding one up and I like noticed there was like a sediment in the bottom of it.
Oh, no.
And I realized it was hundreds of dead fruit flies.
Oh, that is gross.
Yeah, it was like you could, you could see like all their little wings and the little bodies.
And like, it was just like, what the fuck?
And it had obviously, because it was open, fruit flies would fly in there.
Yeah.
Get, get, die, drown, go to the bottom, fly just over and over again.
I think it's like slugs like beer.
If you put like a little container of beer in your backyard, it'll just be filled with dead slugs.
Yeah, they fucking love it.
It's like a watering hole that they just die in.
They're like rugby fans.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Do you know what?
We get slugs that come in the house and they love the dog bowl.
Yeah.
So when we go to feed the dog in the morning, there are always a couple of little slugs on there.
And now I'm trying to figure out where the fuck are they coming from?
And I've looked all around where the the dog bowl is.
There's obviously some absolutely tiny crack in some bit of the skirting border, and they're all they're just coming in.
It's impossible to stop.
But we've got this, it's a tape, it's a very fine tape, like seller tape, but it's, I think it's copper and they don't like to crawl across it.
Um, so if you put the tape down, it stops them coming in.
Because I, I mean, the only reason I was thinking, what could it be?
They don't like the feel of it, or whatever.
Is it like tin foil to cats is to
slugs?
It's like chewy copper to chewing on aluminium.
Something like that to them.
They're like, ugh.
I mean, my first thought was, is it like something to do with conductivity?
Where because they're wet, they crawl across the copper and it causes like almost a staticky
thing for them?
I don't know, but they're not.
It does work though.
You see gardens with them all the time.
There'll be like a
little like film of copper surrounding a planter and it works.
Like they just won't go over it.
Yeah,
it's weird, actually.
Gardeners have to come up with such convoluted solutions to deal with well there's lots of stuff to keep track of there's lots of like like plant diseases and and pests and stuff like
carrots are notoriously quite um prone to to pests um like no one wants to use like bushes like um everything pesticides no of course not like like anything kind of anything that's not organic and so as a result everyone comes up with all
you look for anything like even looking for this thing about fungus gnats like it comes up with like 15 different solutions.
And everyone is, everyone in the comments is like, none of these works.
Yeah, I mean,
you kind of stumble across.
You have to go to a local coffee brewery and get the grounds and put those in the soil.
I'll try cinnamon.
I'll try a diatomaceous earth.
I'll try like, oh, fucking like a mosquito dip.
Iguana egg shells.
The shell of the iguana egg is very good at repelling slugs, but only for cabbages.
Will not work for cabbages.
It's on a waxing moon, though.
It must be 3 a.m.
when you get to the bottom.
You need an ordained Orthodox priest from the Greek Orthodox
has to come and anoint the eggshell of the iguana.
And then
the slugs will turn back.
But the thing is, what you get is you get someone swearing blind that it worked for them because maybe it did.
Maybe it was something that happened.
Maybe there was a cold snap.
Maybe something, maybe, like, I don't know, like something happened and they, and it solved the problem for them.
And then from that point on, that is then, like, an urban myth.
So
that's propagated around.
They think it's that, but it's actually something else, but they're convinced it's that.
And then
it somehow steals
the general.
Humans are so good at like trying to make connections.
They want to see a connection.
And it's all incredibly kind of superstitious, you know?
Yeah.
And oh, we can't help ourselves, honestly.
No.
We have
God, just trying to figure out what's wrong, what's caught in these gnats is blowing my fucking mind.
We have guinea pigs in our house in a cage, obviously,
but they have, we, we have dry food for them.
You know, they, they eat like these little
like girdy guinea pig and like Excel.
They're like these little pellet things that they eat.
So they have, they, they got bowls for dry food and we keep the dry food close by in the house.
But sometimes when the dry food is open, I don't know how this happens, or maybe again, there's eggs in there or something.
You get these like little, they look like little meal worms or something.
They're like these tiny, tiny ass little worms, but they crawl like onto the ceiling.
I don't know if they want to get to the light or something, but you see them.
They'll be on the wall and they'll be on the ceiling.
And that's just if we keep the dry food like in a, in a plastic bag that we can't really seal shut, you get them.
You get them everywhere.
They're gross.
Like just these little worms.
But now we've got like these cereal containers, like the, you know, plastic ones, like Tupperware ones that you can, you can seal closed.
And they're,
yeah, so they're either stuck in there or they just don't like Tupperware.
I don't know.
They run out of oxygen.
Do you think it's...
The thing is, when I had the parrot, it didn't really matter if there was a few bugs and insects around because, you know, they would eat them.
Yeah.
But like, I think for, I'm not sure guinea pigs want to eat worms.
No, I don't think so.
Terry.
Terry would eat them.
Yeah, we got two.
We've had them for, well, it'll be two years and like next month.
They make two funny.
I like the noises they make.
They're quite sweet.
Yeah, they are sweet, but man, they are hungry all the time.
And over time, they get to know the sounds of things.
So like a rustling bag or just the fridge opening, like they're in the kitchen.
Wow.
So every time the fridge opens,
it could just go insane.
Oh, I see.
But in the same way that all animals, a lot of animals are just hungry all the time.
But if you actually feed them all the time, they will just get massively massively fat.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, because they're in a little cage.
They don't.
In the summer, they go outside so they get to exercise and stuff.
But during the winter, really, they just sit around and get fat.
Like, there's not much for them to do.
So it's just waiting for some nice weather.
They hit hibernate, though, right?
Like, they can, they can, they can, I heard that door mice obviously hibernate for like something like four to six weeks, but they get like, and they get, like, when they eat, they get twice their normal size before they hibernate.
And basically, you can, like, poke a sleeping door, which you you shouldn't do but um it will kind of it they're they're almost like jelly and you can like um you can like deform them like they're a jelly by like poke like if you poke them it will like the fingerprint will stay in them where you poke them but it don't poke terry was like the complete opposite of that when he was hibernating he was just like a like a solid cold brick like he didn't move like if you did you touch him while he was hibernating you gotta weigh them every week because they can get uh
you know like if they start losing weight rapidly while they're hibernating, they could die.
So you have to sort of keep an eye on them because there's all diseases that they could get.
They could have like, you know, worms or something like Christ.
It's fucking out of control.
Nature, thank you for saying that earlier, P-Flex, by the way.
Nature, what are you doing?
Yeah, just chill out.
Like there's even animals that live on the fucking volcanic vents under the sea.
What are you doing?
What kind of life is that?
They're not having fun down there.
It's ridiculous.
Maybe they're having a nice time, like a wiggly worm on the bottom of a vent they need to they need to calm down they need to wacky wafer inflatable arm flailing wiggly worm i mean think i'd say 99.9 of all life on earth just lives a miserable grinding existence of existing
existing slave with no purpose beyond maintaining their lives many people's lives right i'm referring to us i'm referring to humans at least ants serve a purpose what do i do i play football manager on stream for 10 hours yesterday.
That's what I did.
Right.
What did you do for 10 hours?
Sorry?
I missed the football manager.
Oh, how did you get into that?
I was into it for a bit.
Yeah, I was playing it
on my tablet.
It's fun.
I think that's when you became friends with some of the dads at school, right?
Talking about football managers.
Talk about...
No, I never got never went down.
Did you have a fantasy football group with some of the dads at school?
Oh, that was a long, long time ago.
I'd just gotten past a bit of World Cup fever and I thought, you know what?
I'd love to join a football, fantasy football thing.
But I realized very quickly that people who regularly watch football are very knowledgeable about it and know who's good and stuff.
And I had no idea.
And I just couldn't make any points.
And
it was kind of miserable.
Like, it's probably
fun if you follow it and you know what you're doing.
I guess it's like a side effect of your hobby.
Like if you're really into
football, then you just accidentally know who's good and who's playing well and you can see stuff.
And so, your intuition is already there when it comes to that level of playing.
Like, if you watched a lot of Dota, if you watched a lot of regular season Dota or whatever, you know, leading up to TI, and there's like a fantasy league where you could bet on teams and stuff like that, it'd be fine, you know.
Like, I'm more familiar with league, but football.
What are you knowledgeable about now?
Um, right now, I'm very knowledgeable about uh, the game Hydra.
Have you ever heard of that?
Oh, yeah.
I've been playing that.
That's fun.
Yeah.
I've been playing some Marvel Rivals as well.
Fairly knowledgeable about that.
Okay.
Yeah.
You know, just
games.
Just a couple games.
Just a little couple of little games to tie me over.
I don't know if you guys know this, but Football Manager 25, which is meant to come out last year.
They postponed it till March, and now they've cancelled it altogether.
That's mad.
And I was discussing this the other day on stream.
I was was doing a lot of wondering.
And I would love it if anybody out there knew, or if you guys know, I've got some theories about, obviously, the problem is that the people that develop Football Manager have basically been making the same game for 30 years or so.
Because although there have been some changes, a lot of the changes are mostly cosmetic front-end UI changes, or they very slightly adjusted the in-game engine, which I think is so old and creaky at this point that this basically reached its limit.
So they decided to move to Unity.
Now, the problem is, although Unity is extremely commonplace, it's used in so many games, no one at SI, as far as I can tell, knew what the fuck they were doing with Unity because apparently they put ads up saying, if you're a Unity dev, we need you at SI games.
Because they bunch of old lads who've been fucking making FM don't know fucking anything about Unity or graphics, apparently, because the game has looked like arse for a very long time.
So they try to move over to Unity.
It's obviously a massive problem for them.
They're trying to develop this game and release it.
And I just think you've got this culture, surely, at a company that basically changes the bare minimum season to season.
Now it's like, right, lads, we need to rebuild the game from scratch with a new engine.
Let's do it.
And we'll do it on the same timeframe we normally do FM.
It's impossible.
They cannot do it.
They have to figure out how to code in Unity.
They have to fucking move everything over.
They've got all this God knows what spaghetti code.
If Dota tried to move to Dota 3 and they were like, we're going to have to pour everything over, they would have to start again from scratch.
I feel like
it's so spaghetti.
A lot of these games, though, like Football Manager, I feel like Football Manager, because it spans such a big track of time, I don't know if you need a new game every year.
It's a bit like farming sim.
Why do you need it?
I've been saying this.
Why do you need a new game every one or two years?
Make one really good game that you can just easily add stuff to if you want to keep making money.
So the paradox model is that we release Hearts of Iron, and then for the next like like 10 years, we're going to release DLC.
EU4 has been going for like 15 years at least
still going.
It's still pumping out DLC for it.
By the way, can I just say the latest DLC for Hearts of Iron is Iraq and Afghanistan
in World War II.
Finally.
What's about time?
It's Iraq and Afghanistan.
In relation to what?
In relation to World War II.
In World War II, that's the DLC.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Their involvement.
You can play as those two countries.
Weird that they would put those two together.
Well, they bought it.
It's weird, but it's kind of, it is, it is cool that they add trees and stuff for every country because it just makes the game more replayable.
You know, like if you've already done a big campaign as Germany or you've already done a couple of big campaigns as the UK or whatever, you'll probably wonder what they're doing.
What am I saying?
They don't border each other.
Iran borders Afghanistan.
Sorry, Iraqi and Iranians.
I always get that.
They're like the corridor to the west or whatever.
Right, but so they've also changed the focus tree for India.
And this has caused a lot of controversy.
I don't know if you guys guys know about this.
No, okay, so they call Afghanistan and that sort of region the graveyard of empires, right?
Because people go there and try and do shit and they lose.
So we went there back in the day, of course, the Khyber Pass and all that stuff, got our asses kicked because you can't fight in Afghanistan, it's impossible.
It's literally fighting in someone else's backyard where their backyard is just mountains and they know them and
there's no fucking way to move shit around.
And all of these areas are just miserable to fight in as an invader, as we discovered in multiple engagements.
So, they've added something called this sort of Silk Road system for India.
If you play as India, you get cores, which is important in Hearts of Iron.
A core territory means if you capture it, you get all the manpower and resources from it.
You don't have to see it as like occupied territory.
You're like, this was it, this was ours anyway.
Yeah, do you know what I mean?
Like when America takes Canada, I'm sure they get cores on Canada if they go down the Donald Trump focus tree in Hearts of Iron.
It's just for a state, yeah, exactly.
So, India got cores along the old Silk Road path.
And these cores, it's very weird, but it does follow the Silk Road.
And if you look, it's like this weird twisting line that follows the Silk Road.
The Chinese fans of Hearts of Iron are up in arms about this development and consider the fact that you can get cores on China as India, but not vice versa, to be anti-Chinese propaganda.
And they have taken against Paradox.
They've been review bombing every Paradox game.
They've been having a go at pretty much anyone from Sweden that they can find online.
It's like a big online hearts of iron like trolling everything to do with Paradox games and Sweden because it's insane.
It's so important.
But yeah, it's really weird.
It's a good weird that you get from, you have to be so careful.
I don't even want to talk about it on this podcast because, you know,
I am not review bombscast games.
I am not.
commenting on the who, where, what, why, and, you know, should they, shouldn't they, whatever.
For this exact reason.
I'm just saying what is happening.
That is crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're just informing us of a couple of factoids that you've picked up.
Which is literally happening, and you can go and look at these games and you'll see the reviews.
You can see it for yourself.
It's right there.
It's been all over gaming news and reviews.
I haven't played Hearts of Iron in quite some time, actually.
I do enjoy it, but it's one that I come back to every once in a while.
I feel like it's a bit of a weird one to want to go and experience World War II from a different angle.
It's like, I'm going to role play as Afghanistan and kind of not do much for four years and then end the game.
Like, do you know what I mean?
It's not actually a game.
No, it's not really.
It's kind of a
lot of the grand strategy games are a bit like that.
You kind of,
every time you play one, you, you just, you kind of just make it either make it up as you go or you have like a, you know, you're looking for an achievement or you have like a really specific channel in mind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I mean, it's quite good that it's that replayable.
You know, there's a lot of games that are just not you know you play them from start to finish and you're done You would never go back to them, but it's kind of it is a bit of a
sandbox really that you can enjoy again
Especially with updates and stuff.
I've actually never really had a huge problem with paradox's model.
I know it's you know it has been a thing that people have complained about or commented on in the i'll be honest with you i i don't i don't understand the hate for it i really don't well i understand the hate for it when a dlc comes out and it's bad.
Because then it's just
like shit.
Of course it does.
Maybe you don't buy it.
Well, that's one thing.
Because when an FM comes out and it's shit, you're stuck with a shit game, not just a bad DLC.
And also a lot of the time when a DLC comes out, they also release a patch for free along with it.
Yeah.
The problem is, it's FOMO, isn't it?
It's like, wait, they're adding what?
And I have to pay how much for it?
But if this is a game you're still playing, and you want them to keep developing it and adding new content, they're only going to do that if they can get the money to develop it because it costs money to develop software and games.
I think another important aspect of this whole thing, though, is that there is such a fine balance between releasing a good base game and a not good one.
And then and then the discussion really comes into play because if they release a base game and it's good and people are happy to play it until DLC starts coming out for it, then happy days.
I don't think anybody's complaining about it.
But when the base game comes out and it's missing loads of stuff, that's when everybody's like, oh, they didn't even fucking put in this really simple thing.
And you know that it's just going to be in DLC and they're going to fleece you for it and stuff.
And that I mean, that's the Skylines 2 was very much that.
Yeah.
It was unfortunate.
So here was my idea for FM is that they don't release FM23, FM24, FM25, and so on.
What they do is Football Manager, like Ultimate, and this version comes out and it's whatever they're building here with this Unity stuff.
And then they do DLC for basically what amounts to cosmetics.
Okay.
And I'll give you an example.
I would love it if the crowd sounds in South America were different to the crowd sounds when I'm playing Knotts County versus Preston North End.
Because when you look at football from other countries, it sounds different.
The crowd sounds are different.
The noise that the fans make when someone goes close with a chance in Spain is different to the way it is in England.
It's different to the way it is in Italy and Germany.
And all of these countries are different.
And there's no feeling of that.
I want to see when it's the Argentinian league and you're in the Bombonera River play against Boca Jr., I want to see ticker tape raining down from the stands.
I want to see all that kind of shit, Floyers in the crowd.
I want to see fucking pitch invasions at the end of the season.
I will pay good money for that.
And they don't do it because every year they're just like,
we've tweaked the training UI.
I don't understand it.
You could be making so much more money and making a so much better game by having DLC because people try to mob this shit into the game anyway.
And every year you can sell, here's the, here's our database update, all of this.
Well, look, you've got to understand that they're owned by Sega.
They've put it out yearly for the last 20 years and have made huge, huge amounts of money on each one.
It's such a reliable revenue stream.
And all they need to do is keep that going.
And the problem is, it must be...
an absolute hell for the people who work there to get this crunch every year of getting it out on time right and obviously yeah changing over to a new system that's why they've missed the latest one.
You know, it was supposed to come out last November or something, 2025, and they missed the deadline.
Am I right, or something?
I don't know.
It's been cancelled.
It's just not coming out now.
Well, you know, that's because they're going to do 2026 in November, you know, maybe next time.
I mean, I'm not kidding.
It's got a year.
I don't know how much patience Sega are going to have with SI.
Like, my question is...
They own them, so it doesn't matter.
But so they could also say to them, you've got to put this game out like now, in whatever state it is.
That's what these big companies are like.
But all of these companies are also looking for live service games.
They want games to have an ongoing player base that pays money at a steady rate rather than game comes out, make money, make nothing off that game for the next six to eight months.
And then a year down the line, no one's buying it.
Instead, you could have this game that continually makes money throughout the year.
and you can update it and improve it.
DLC is the model for me that FM should have and is completely missed out on.
And I don't understand it.
I really don't.
I'm not saying that you should have to buy leagues leagues because the core game at its at its base is still the fucking same every year.
You put that out, but instead of just saying, oh, you know, when wherever you're playing, it's basically going to feel the same.
I mean, I'm going and playing in South America, and the area around the pitch still looks like the UK.
Like, it's got the same ambulances and the same little toilets and the same little food standards.
This doesn't look like the Uruguayan league that I know.
Put some fucking effort into that.
Like,
in a way, it's very England-centric as well.
The style of football, the way players play, looks like the Premier League or the lower leagues.
Like, it doesn't look like football in Italy or Spain or Russia.
It's made by it's you know, it's the hard change.
The thing is, they've got it's not like Civ 7 has completely reimagined the game from rebuilt it from the ground up to massive problems.
It's basically all built on the same platform, at least it has been up until now.
Anyway, I don't know if you saw Next Fest was going on on Steam.
Yeah, there's like tons and it's like 4,000 demos, and all of them are garbage.
I feel like I haven't found any good ones.
Um,
It's very frustrating.
I think we're in a funny time.
Maybe I just hate games, but I just haven't found any one that actually grabbed me at all.
Oh, have you guys tried played anything interesting and good lately?
No.
I haven't.
I did do single-player characteristics.
Old man yells at bad games.
I played a demo called Architect Life, which was
interesting.
It's like
you're imagine building a house in The Sims, but then when you're done building it, there's like a specification, like a budget and stuff.
It does this like time-lapse where the house is being built, but then there's events that pop up that can like delay the build or cost more money and stuff.
The demo is like pretty simple, but the campaign might be really simple.
There's a sinkhole has opened up.
Yeah, there'll just be stuff like that, you know, that'll just come up like as the sort of like, you know, the time-lapse of the house being built.
But, you know, they build it and it looks like the house that you designed.
And then you could do like a viewing of the house after it's built and everything.
It's it's you know, it's whatever people are doing instead of being able to have houses, but it's fun enough.
I think the campaign will be building their dream house on and another uh another game that uh I mentioned before, Blue Prince, I think is out next month, which is uh a kind of like a house house puzzly sort of game.
It's really fun, though.
I played it um a couple of months ago, Blue Prince, Blue Prince.
Yeah, you're a uh you inherit a mansion from your eccentric uncle, uh, but you can only have the wealth bestowed onto you if you like solve the puzzle of the mansion.
So it's like you have,
it's kind of like RNG, you know, like you walk into a room, you consume a step, and then you have three options of what room to build.
So you could build yourself into a dead end, or you could build a room that has like a key for a door that you need or whatever.
And you're trying to get to like the, you know, like the nerve center of the mansion.
Yeah.
And you have a certain amount of days to do this, but it resets every day so you have like a certain amount of moves each day it's got a plan ahead i think you mentioned this before this blueprint yeah yeah
it's fun i i i played like it was a demo that i played a couple of months ago but it's a pun it look it's yeah it's clever yeah it's it's definitely unique i've never really played anything like it you feel like you're you're playing like an old zelda game you know or like binding of isaac but without the uh needing any reflexes and and stuff you know it's just like a you got to think about what you're doing and there's there's little mini-game puzzles and stuff along the way.
It's good, it's really good.
I'm still working through my list of games from the best games of 2024.
I've been playing um the root trees are dead.
What?
Yeah, I saw you playing that with
which honestly is great.
Looks very dry.
It's like a murder mystery, not murder mystery, like a family tree researcher filler-up Oprah Din style.
You have to be like, oh, so this guy's with her, so she must be his wife or sister.
Yeah, and you sort of put them in and you work it out.
And it's, I don't know, it's just really fun, really good.
Nice.
I can recommend that one.
Chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life.
Botox, onobotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine.
It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month.
It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment.
Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor.
Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms.
Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.
Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.
Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck, and injection, side pain, fatigue, and headache.
Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness.
Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection.
Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
Why wait?
Ask your doctor, visit BotoxchronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-Botox to learn more.
Remember the good old days before Microsoft Word had auto-save?
You'd type out an important report and then your computer would freeze and you'd lose hours of work just because you forgot to hit save?
Ooh, well, that's what it's like going online without Express VPN.
Yes.
Every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes, hotels and airports, your online data is not secure.
Any hacker can gain access to and steal your personal data.
Passwords, bank logins, credit card details.
Doesn't take much technical know-how to do so, just on cheap hardware.
And a smart 12-year-old could do it.
Your data is valuable.
Hackers can make up to $1,000 per person selling it on the dark web.
But ExpressVPN stops this by creating a secure, encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.
How secure is it?
It's super secure.
It would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption.
Is it easy to use?
It is, yes.
Fire up the app and click one button to get protected.
Will it work on my device?
It will.
It could be used on phones, laptops, tablets, and more so you can stay secure on the go.
Great.
Well, secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash Triforce.
That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash Triforce to find out how you can get up to four extra months free.
Expressvpn.com/slash Triforce.
Thank you very much.
On with the show.
On with the show.
There seems to be like quite quite a bit out.
It just, it's weird.
There's so much choice that you just have to, it's not, it's not a case of finding a game.
It's just a case of finding the right game that you're in the mood for at the time.
I feel like a seasonal gamer, you know, like during like winter or leading up to winter, whatever, I just like playing grindy,
shitty, competitive games that, you know i just get angry at but then i don't know as like sounds like me and golf yeah it just when covet happened i was all about it i was doing the lessons i was getting into it then they double locked down you couldn't even go out and do golf they were like oh no tell me about tell tell me about would i like would me and sips like golf no people go out and do golf
i've done some golf i tell you what i don't like full golf i do like going to the driving range though it's really fun yeah there's something really nice about the driving range
hard it's too hard golf is too hard it's impossible dude like it's not like if you're playing five aside with other people who are and out of shape you can still have fun but playing golf the course is the same whether you are or whether you're a professional player and it's designed to be somewhere in the middle ground where a decent golfer will have a decent test of themselves get it over this bit and get it around that bit and get around this but if you're
you're just going to lose the ball every time you hit it you're going to swing and miss it a lot of times.
It's going to shoot off and hit a tree and you're going to have to spend 10 minutes looking for it.
And there's all this etiquette on course, golf courses.
Like you get a certain amount of time when you're permitted to look for your ball.
If you can't find it, you can't, you're wasting time.
People behind you want to play, fucking get on with it.
You've got to take a certain amount of time on at the tee and then it's like, you've got to get on with it.
Like it's like a cue system and you're holding everybody up.
So it's not like relaxing.
It's quite stressful.
And when you look down at the ball there and you look at how far they expect you to hit it and you hit it it and it goes nowhere near it, it's so fucking miserable.
And you practice and you practice and you're not getting anywhere.
And the guy's like, oh, yeah, what the problem?
Show me your swing.
And you do the swing and the ball goes fine over to the left.
He's like, right, turn this toe three degrees that way.
And then you hit it.
And you're like, how the fuck am I meant to remember that?
Because I've got to remember that toe there and that thumb there and then and then that bit there.
And then I have to put this shoulder here and I've got to swing from here, but I mustn't do that.
And if you come back too far, it's going to do this.
And it's a nightmare.
And unless you are just one of those people who's just good at things, like physically, you see people who are just able, like the athletes, so naturally sort of sports people who can just do things.
They get their body and they'll do something and they can do that exact movement over and over and over again, which is the key to really golf is that your swing is your swing.
And when they're like, I'm working on improving my swing.
I'm working on 50 things that need to improve about my swing and I can't remember all of them.
So I go to hit the ball, and one in a hundred times I hit it, and it's beautiful and it's perfect, but I won't remember how I did it or what I did differently.
So it's just too fucking, it is a nightmare.
And if you're off by a fraction, it's not like it just goes a little bit to the right, it goes fucking missile shooting to the right and hits a house and you never see the ball again.
That is golf.
So I call, so I quit.
You quit golf.
Do you think maybe you're just not the right age to fully appreciate it yet?
No.
Exactly.
Do you have to be honest?
No, no, no.
Do you think it's a case that
in 10 years you'll be like, hmm, maybe you should give golf another go?
No.
No?
No.
I tried it for several years.
I driving range, lessons.
I was into it.
Yeah.
I was into it and I was getting somewhere.
And then I had to take a break.
So I went and started from scratch again, the beginner course.
And I can hit the ball.
I can get it up and down.
It's okay.
But the inconsistency is so brutal, and the punishment is so great when you mishit it that it's just not fucking worth it.
It's just not worth it.
So I just decided, nope.
What have you done instead?
What do you mean?
What do you do?
What have you done instead with that time that you would have, you know,
it's hours out on the golf course outside?
Have you been walking the dog?
What's like taking its place?
More games.
Okay, right.
I'm not saying it's good.
It'll just, you know, it is what it is.
Any golfing games in there?
No.
Oh,
That's always a thing that confuses me, how popular they are.
They're fun.
The dude hits the fucking ball.
Like, it's not like me.
Like, even if you're bad at golfing games, you can hit the ball hundreds of yards.
I've only done that once.
Have you ever seen Charles Berkeley golf before?
Yeah.
I swear.
So
what you're saying is if it was more like Elden Ring or something and really punishing and really hard and you had to keep...
failing really like loads um it would be better different fun worse good i don't know Like, is that what golf games should be like rather than easy?
Look, I play hard games.
I love hard games.
Dota's a hard game.
Tarkov is a hard game.
When I play any game, it's hard because I'm bad at games.
I don't mind that.
I enjoy the challenge.
I like that.
I played Eve Online, an example of a game that is punishing.
When you lose, you lose everything and it's brutal.
I don't mind punishing games.
But the thing is, when I lose a game of Dota or I die in Tarkov or something like that, it's only me that sees that failure and I'm not pissing anybody else off.
Well, no, but those games are games for gamers, right?
Whereas a golf game is not designed for gamers.
It's designed for golfers.
And as a result, they are not gamers.
They are shit at games.
And if they shit, if the game's hard, they're going to hate it.
The thing is, people
hate being bad at things and they get...
They get turned off of it real quick, like you did with golf, right?
Right, right.
No, no, no.
So
again, I don't mind necessarily how shit I am at it.
The problem is there is a real world cost to failure in golf, which is I have to spend money to be a member of a golf course and I get sick of going because I just can't fucking do it.
And I lose a lot of balls and they're not cheap.
It adds up.
And when you are, when you go out on the course with 12 balls and you come back with one, you fucked up.
You've lost 11 golf balls and you never get them back.
And they were, someone got me them for Christmas.
They're the easy to find golf ball.
couldn't find them all right special easy to find golf golf balls impossible to find i lost them so badly i think they vanished from the face of the earth that's how badly i lost my golf i don't think i don't think anyone could have found these golf balls so the other problem is the people you're playing with look at you sometimes like what the are you doing on this course you clearly need like a decade of practice because you are so bad so it's humiliating and you're there in real life and if you give up which i did i was doing golf with these two lads and they're like i was like i'm really new i'm totally And they were like, doesn't matter.
Come around and play with us.
I was like, okay, cool.
And as we start playing, I realized, oh, shit, these guys are good.
So I'm like hitting the ball and it's like scuffing along the ground or hitting a tree.
And after a while, I can see that they stopped talking to me.
They've got their back to me and they're sort of shunning me.
And I'm like,
I'm like, I'm being shunned.
I told you I was shit.
I told you this was going to be sane.
They're like, oh, this guy's fucking up our golf game.
So I was like, fuck you guys.
I'm going to.
So I said, all right, lads, I'll tell you what.
I can tell this isn't working out.
I'm going to go.
And they were like, oh, oh, no, oh, okay.
I was like, fucking pricks.
Why don't you invite?
I'm literally telling you, don't.
I'm bad.
And they're like, no, no, no, mate, it'll be fine.
So I went around with them.
I didn't quit halfway through.
Fucking bad.
Maybe there's different levels of bad, right?
Because I played play board games with lots of different people randomly at like charts and counts and stuff.
And one of my friends invited someone who we played a game we'd all played before, except this new guy came in.
And we were like, oh, don't worry, we'll catch up.
We'll teach you.
Normally the game takes like, I don't know, hour and a half.
It took like five fucking hours to play this game because he was like agonizing about every minute decision.
He was just like, oh, it was an absolute fucking nightmare.
You just went on and on and on.
And I was like, you know, he just could not, he was just completely paralyzed on every decision.
And, you know, for me, my turn is like, I don't care about winning.
Joey and I are just like, I'll do this fun thing, fun thing, fun thing.
And my turn is like 10 seconds every turn.
And it's like,
it's like, there's bad and there's new and then there's like just that, you know, and I can, I could totally see the frustrating, you getting frustrated with certain people, you know, but then again, I just vow never to play with that guy again, you know?
Um, I'll make an excuse for that.
I get that.
Something's come up.
I get that.
But it's like, I, I, yes, I could obviously just, uh, you know, not play with those guys or they were a bad example.
But I did get the impression that when you're playing at a golf course, you have to be around golfers.
And a lot of them are not fun people to be shit at golf around, if that makes sense they get pissed off and they they lack patience and this is their hobby and you're in the fucking way and a lot of people are just kind of dickheads and now you've got to be around those dickheads and uh i'll give you an example um we were we were doing the the training course like the beginners course we have to hit some balls then we go to collect them and there's these two guys obviously like business twats probably drive audis or bmws and they see this class we're all picking up the balls uh as our instructor's like right yeah let's go pick up up the balls and then we take them back and we hit them all again.
Okay.
They start playing into us and they're like hitting the ball at us because we're on the fairway.
And they're like, well, you're on our fairway.
That kind of dickhead attitude is something that you have to put up with.
And I'm sorry, a lot of the people that play golf are rich entitled cunts and they are not nice people to be around.
So that put me off too.
Right.
I think that is that is definitely a thing.
I think the other thing, I mean, you even see it like when you play mini golf, right?
Or like,
what's it?
Adventure golf, whatever that is, like, which I quite enjoy.
But sometimes I'm there with, like, I don't know, my brother or my parents, or whatever, there's four of us, and there's two people behind.
We are, of course, going to be slower than them, right?
And so, there's two things you do: one, you either try and start rushing your game to stay ahead of them because they're going twice as fast as you are.
Well, you let them all through.
You say to them, Oh, do you want to go through to the next one?
And then all the time they just say, No, we'll wait.
And it's like, Well, well, if you're waiting, don't be a fucking dick about it.
Do you know what I mean?
Don't start hitting your balls.
And twice,
Exactly.
It's like, and it, but you can't say that to people.
You just have to say, oh, do you want to play through?
And then if they say no, you say, like, if they ever do something annoying, you just say, oh, do you want to play through?
You just keep saying that until they get the hint.
Yeah.
I just say we're playing passively aggressively
and tell people what to do.
We're going backwards.
Yeah, we're going to do the old one again.
Yeah,
it's annoying.
So
I get frustrated when it's social embarrassment that is linked to my failure because I don't care about failing at golf.
I don't mind being bad at golf.
I don't like being humiliated by people I don't fucking know at a golf course.
That's a bridge too far for me.
And at that point, I'm like, well, this isn't even fun to be bad at.
And I'm not even enjoying this.
When I shit at video games online and people clip it, they're having fun.
I'm having fun.
It's enjoyable, right?
And we can sort of share in that badness together.
And I don't mind.
And people actually enjoy watching me fail at video games obviously i do not like failing in front of people in real life at something i'm at and for them not to be like laughing and enjoying that but instead to get pissed off you can go yourself so i quit uh and this was a friendly course like they were everyone there was really lovely but when they got on the course they became cunts and i don't really understand why it's just god is it is it's because it's a miserable game to play this happens with certain games right and certain things where they are weirdly competitive and people can't help themselves Like, like I remember every time we would do like the Minecraft race for the world or certain other Minecraft games, everyone became like sweaty tryhards immediately and stopped having fun.
And they couldn't help themselves.
It was just, and Dota does that for sure.
If you're messing around.
having trying to have fun and do a silly build there's going to be someone on your team who's mad as fuck with you yeah
and you have to be like a really kind of charismatic person to be to pull that shit off.
Yeah.
Do you know what I mean?
You have to be like, I mean, I don't know, Joe could Joe.
You have to be like Joe, basically.
You have to be the best person on the team doing something stupid that everyone's laughing along with.
Right.
Right.
And
if anyone else was, if I was doing it, everyone would be like, you are shit already.
You're dragging down the team already.
And now you're trying to do something stupid.
Like, fucking get out of our team.
Jeremy, you like that?
I mean, that's certainly the case if you played that like in a public game.
like you're playing with four strangers and you came to around they want to win because it is fun to win games with doter and especially if there's mmr at stake people take that very seriously yeah um whereas if you're playing with mates like when we play uh me joe and his lads and we play dotra in the evenings we will come up with really dumb drafts and and ideas and and ways of playing uh like we had one a couple of months ago we did it where we got all the heroes that could move enemy heroes and we had like there's one hero called tusk who can kick enemy heroes quite far like he can boot oh this is different though this is like actually playing as a group of friends yeah no exactly together so i'm sure if i went around a golf course with a bunch of equally shit mates and we had a laugh i would have a whale of a time and i think what you're what you're saying is that everyone has to be on the same page yes exactly you almost have to like but you need some patience and you need to understand like when i didn't say to them um i'm actually quite good at golf and misled them i said this will be my second ever round of golf it's going to be really bad they're like don't worry about it.
Don't worry about it.
And then get all shitty.
It's like, well, fuck you.
I mean, what are you doing?
That is that is kind of like why did they invite you in the first place?
Yeah.
I mean, at least I'd be the on the positive side, at least somebody invited you somewhere.
But, you know,
oh, yeah, you know what?
That silver line.
You're trying to turn around and make you look like an asshole.
You know, yes.
That's that's you know, that's that's really true, Sips.
Yeah, you know, at least someone invited you somewhere, P.
Flights.
That's yeah.
oh i'm just sitting like i don't get invited anywhere
well sorry i'm just uh it's nice to be invited it is nice to be to be invited somewhere not not by unpleasant people
can't be choosers you know
exactly
oh
yeah no it's uh i i i've i i think everybody has been in a situation similar to that it's like uh you know like you go if you go to to like paintballing at work and everybody's like, how many people have you ever gone paintballing before?
And everybody's like, oh, never.
This is my first time.
I can't wait.
And you get there and everybody is like, you know, some sweaty 20-year-old veteran, you know,
ex-military commando.
You're just like, okay, dude.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like, it always happens.
It happens in everything.
It's true.
I do think that the idea of having uh a hobby like golf i i really liked the idea of it um but it just didn't work out so in but in terms of like filling a void or whatever uh in what i do with my spare time i would say the thing that i've started doing more this like last maybe four or five months is trying to be a better cook like at home right um so i i watch a lot of cooking stuff on youtube i always did but i realized that and this is easy to get into a rut of basically doing the same shop more or less every week uh And, you know, you'll varied up a bit, but there are a lot of sort of staple dishes you fall into a habit of cooking.
And I was like, I don't know if I want to cook that again.
Do you know what I mean?
Like I've done that dish so many times now that it's good and we all enjoy it, but I want to try something else.
So I'm just trying to cook slightly more unusual things.
Like, for example, not unusual things, but things that maybe I hadn't cooked before.
So I hadn't cooked a mousaka before.
Mrs.
F always did the moussaka.
It was just a thing that she did.
So she was like, I'd love it if if you did a moussaka.
I was like, can do.
So made what I'd never done one before, made one from scratch, did the whole thing.
It's quite a faff, but it was well worth it.
And it was amazing.
Like, it was genuinely amazing.
I was like, wow, this is, this is great.
And I find that when I'm cooking, when I'm even just chopping vegetables or cleaning pants and preparing them to be used, getting the kitchen ready, looking up the recipe, following it, doing everything, measuring stuff, I am at absolute peace.
Yeah.
I am thinking about nothing else.
I'm very relaxed.
I really enjoy it.
And I find that is my Zen moment every day: cooking dinner.
Nice.
And I think for some people, it would be going to the driving range and hitting some balls.
And we all look for something.
And there is pressure when you're cooking.
You don't want to fuck up your family's dinner and you want them to be happy, but the payoff is way better.
Because I feel like if I hit a good golf shot, I'm the only one who saw that.
But if I cook a meal that my whole family enjoys and says, oh, that was so good, I feel so happy.
So I think that's what I've replaced as a sort of not on not online hobby is cooking.
That's really wholesome, dude.
That's really good.
Yeah, that is good.
I wish
my cooking and I wish I could enjoy cooking.
I hate it.
Why can't you cook?
Well, I mean, I can cook.
I just find it not my Zen place, you know?
Oh.
Like, I just, I need, I need something different than that.
I think your kitchen is a little bit cramped, a little bit crazy.
There's always something going on in it.
There's like, there's stuff, you know, kids, kids, kids' stuff, dirty bottles, dirty, you know,
I don't think you have, it's not a very Zen space, is it?
It's always, I get the impression that the kitchen is a noisy.
My whole house is not a Zen space at the moment because of all this crap going on.
But soon, soon it will return back to its
place of Zen-ness, hopefully.
We'll see.
Yeah.
Lately, I've been using the pressure cooker quite a lot and I've been doing different grains.
I did like some buckwheats the other day.
Nice.
I'll do different vegetables.
I'll usually every afternoon, I'll come in from the office, put something in the press cooker, and then a couple of hours, one hour later, when it's done, make something out of it.
Um, but yeah, I, I, I'm the same.
I, I thought, like, God, it's just the same.
If I'm not careful, it's the same routine of fajitas, green Thai curry, regular curry, pressed, sweet sauce.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, it's just that, those same four things, like, over and over.
Yeah.
Um, I mean, I'm not saying that, like, I'm cooking.
Oh, he's, he's doing an unbelievable range of never-before-seen dishes.
I'm just finding recipes like Jacques Pepin has been a real inspiration for me.
Jacques Pepin.
Jacques Pepin.
Yeah, you talked about it.
Yeah.
And watching him cook and seeing the little techniques that he does, I find that if you try and teach me something, I am so stupid and my memory is so bad that it's gone instantly.
But for some reason, when I watch people cooking and I can learn the technique and retain it, I think it's because it's something I really like.
So, you know, I just want to, I want, he does some recipes and I'm like, man, I could totally do that.
And I watch it once and then I've got it in my head and I know what to do.
And as the more you cook, the more you can adapt to things.
Like you can look at ingredients and see how to assemble them.
It's really not, most recipes are really not that difficult.
And they're pretty similar.
If it's French, it probably involves butter and probably cream.
If it's Spanish, probably involves rice, probably peppers, and some chilies.
If it's Indian food, it's going to basically have garam masala, curry powder, onions, and ghee.
Like it's you, you can assemble things a lot more easily once you've cooked a few things.
But it's fun, it's really enjoyable.
But I will still say the air fryer is my favorite thing to cook with.
Is it still up there?
We don't use it every day, but when we do use it, it started to drop off.
Well, no, it's just it's not exciting anymore.
Yeah, to see it.
But now it's become mundane.
Yeah, but equally, if you get a croissant from the store, you bosh it in the air fryer for a couple of minutes, suddenly it's crispy in the outside, it's warm all the way through.
That's way better.
And you couldn't microwave that.
You want to reheat some pizza?
Bosh it in the air fryer.
All of these things.
The thing is,
I had a big clean.
I put my air fryer away when I was cleaning the kitchen, and I haven't got in and out since because I've forgotten that it was in the cupboard.
You know what I mean?
Because when it was out there on the surface, I was like, oh, let's use this for a thing.
Let's use this for a thing.
And since I put it away, I've never used it again.
I completely don't.
I think I wouldn't put it away.
I don't think I would put it away.
We keep it out.
We've just
takes up so much fucking space on the top.
You've got your toaster, your kettle, your fucking microwave,
your air fryer, and your pressure cooker.
And that basically is the entire kitchen.
There's no space to cut stuff.
So I have to have a bit of a footprint, hasn't it?
Multiple things away in order to
have anywhere to use.
Yeah, I get you.
I get you.
I need to get an additional.
I never use the oven.
You never use the oven?
I never use the oven.
What does that mean?
I could get rid of it.
What does that mean?
I'd never put anything in there.
I never use it for anything.
I don't even use it.
Do you guys know what I really love?
One of my favorite things ever.
Titties?
Lose news.
Hit me, baby.
Let's go.
Okay.
I don't have any lose news because Sam is on holiday.
Excuse me.
He hasn't prepared anything.
Excuse me.
And neither is Tom.
This is unacceptable.
Hold on, though.
We did a pee-pee, and there was some leftover news from that that we did.
We did a Simon's PP.
I mean, here's one from the 25th of Feb.
Couple forced to sit next to dead woman on long haul flight.
I saw that.
I saw that.
For four hours, apparently.
Dead body.
They're traveling to Melbourne from Melbourne to Doha on route to Italy.
A woman walked out of the toilet and collapsed 10 hours into the journey.
So she died, and they just tried to wheel her up towards business class, but she was quite a large lady and they couldn't get her through the aisle.
So then they stuck her in a seat.
We're like, you're going to have to sit next to her.
Sit next to this woman who's died.
That is awful.
Oh, my God.
Okay, how about this?
I saw this news in February.
So this is this month.
Banana mystery deepens as more spotted in street.
Tell me more.
Okay, so basically there's this place called Beeston, right?
Right.
Wait, wait, wait.
Is this in the UK?
In the UK.
Beeston.
Spell it?
Beeston.
B-E-E-S-T-O-H.
I think that was popularized by Huey Lewis.
The heart of rock and rolls in Beeston.
You know, this plate of 1620.
It's pronounced Biston.
Fuck off.
It's definitely got to be.
They say the heart of rock and rolls in Beeston.
So
from what I've seen, I believe them.
Between 16 and 20 peeled bananas has been appearing on this street corner reliably once a month.
Okay.
And residents have noticed it.
It's been a constant in their lives for more than a year.
They appear early in the morning on the second of the month.
I see them on my way to work and no one's sure what's going on because they just slowly gold moldy and
some people think it's gross, but it's become like a kind of, or it became like a bit of a viral sensation.
And people started traveling to see it.
Luke Roberts traveled three hours from Slough to see the plate of bananas.
Interesting.
But it apparently had gone missing.
We came up at seven o'clock last night and the plate of bananas was gone missing.
It's ridiculous.
So, yeah,
people have been saying, you know,
we delayed going to the shops until today because this route takes us past the bananas.
It's sad.
Where are these people from?
India.
They're from Beeston.
Beeston.
Beston.
Beston.
Beeston.
It was the accent threw me there.
I thought we'd changed the country's name.
Mary Smith, an 80-year-old resident, has lived in the area for 48 years and has never known anything like it.
I've never known anything like it.
We saw him last year and we had to come back.
It makes me laugh.
I've never seen anything like it.
My granddaughter, who was in Lanzarote,
heard about it and asked me what was going on with the bananas.
I've never seen anything like it.
So someone's leaving bananas on the street.
That's news, isn't it?
Like that one?
Incredible.
How about this one?
I found this one as well.
These are two I found for Simon's Pepe, but we didn't use them.
sydney people living in sydney yeah um if you look on google maps you will start seeing like a land landmarks but the landmarks are cats like friendly neighborhood cats
and so you can go to google maps and point you to like a friendly orange cat but they've sometimes they've got the names on them um but yeah you can that people are reviewing them and like rating them um and and talk talking about how friendly they are and whether you can cuddle them and you could kind of, I think it's a fucking brilliant idea that you can have Google Maps.
You can walk around Sydney and just find cats as little landmarks and, you know, give them a little bit of a.
I do.
I like that.
I like that a lot.
I'm not even a fan of cats.
But luckily, our cat is not a fan of me either.
So, so yeah, some of them are like, some of them have got hundreds of cats.
Because period kicks the cat and these cats did
with the cat.
So, God, no, I think this is this is the there's I've noticed that there's um there's some cities and some countries with feral cats and there's some cities with feral dogs and the ones with feral cats are always so much better.
I'm just saying if you live somewhere and there's feral dogs, it's a fucking shit.
It's really if you live somewhere and it's feral cats, it's great.
Uh, usually like the worst you're gonna get from a feral cat is you might get fleas, but feral dogs fucking attack people and shit.
Like, it's it's not great.
Um, right.
What else have I got?
That's that's all we're gonna have to end.
That's all he's got, that's all I've got.
Sorry about this, enjoy, enjoy.
Um, yeah, sorry, that's an embarrassing end to the podcast, but that's it.
That's all that's all we got.
I mean, that's all we got.
That's all it was for this week.
Yeah, we've been making too many podcasts lately, guys.
It's been out of control.
We've run out of steam.
This is what happens when we start putting out extra podcasts.
We don't have enough gas.
Yep.
You know, I didn't even get to tell you guys about my trip.
I went to London last week.
Did you?
On half term.
Yeah, we went for a couple of days.
We were in London London to see Disney on Ice.
Oh, Christ.
How was that?
You know,
it's dog shit.
Well, you've told us about it now.
Yeah.
Anything interesting happened?
My kids really enjoyed it.
They loved it.
Anything else happened?
Not really.
No, we, but
it was just a nice, it was a nice break.
We went to lots of like museums and we did a lot of shopping and stuff.
And the weather was surprisingly pretty decent.
It was, it was all right.
It was, it was a good one.
Short, but
we went to Disney on Ice.
We won tickets to Disney on Ice with a backstage pass.
So we got to meet some of the cars.
So we went to that with the other people who'd won the competition.
And we were chatting and hanging out.
And we got some nibbles and chatted to a couple of people.
And some people came in dressed as the things that were going to be the stuff, whatever.
And the kids were excited.
And then the show started.
It was dog shit.
Me and Mrs.
F are bored to tears.
They have a halftime break.
And we say to the kids, right, that's it, kids.
Time to go, they're finished,
yeah, and we left, and they were like, Why is everyone else staying?
I was like, They're just slow, ignore them, we're leaving, and we got the fuck out of them.
You did was the half-ass, you did the full halftime leave.
Yeah, oh my gosh, dude, I wanted, I wanted to kill someone, it was so bad.
If I have to hear it's a small world ever again, I'm turning violent on you.
I can't help it.
I fucking hate Disney shit like that.
Oh, man, wow, what a glow review for Disney on Ice.
Yeah.
Fuck me.
I, on the other hand, made it through both halves.
It was impressive.
I think I just switched myself off, you know, like as you often do as a parent.
You just kind of have to, you just kind of have to find that inner place, you know, where you just don't really exist anymore and hope that everybody leaves you alone.
So I did that for like two hours.
It was good.
You zone out and play football manager.
In your mind, yeah, you're getting ready.
Getting ready for the next sesh, you know?
Yeah,
well, there you go.
I told you guys, anyway.
There we go, we're all up to date.
Yeah, we're up to date.
All right, I guess this week, we'll see you guys next time.
See you later, bye-bye.
Bye-bye.