Transcript
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker: Do it up front.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: You know what else will we do up front?
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back to Pixel It.
Speaker: My name is Kevin.
Speaker: With me, as always, is Phil.
Speaker: Once again, that's right.
Speaker: As always, Phil's back.
Speaker: Back in the saddle, bitches.
Speaker: Baby.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He's here, and he's got a kid, and he's got a new house.
Speaker: He has a child.
Speaker: He has a child.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: A new home, a new child, same old cats.
Speaker: Same cats.
Speaker: The cats have not changed.
Speaker: No, the cats are, God, no.
Speaker: Actually, you know, we moved here, and just anybody with cats knows what I'm talking about, that from speaking over to you little jerk.
Speaker: She had to get up here and sit on my notebook.
Speaker: You're talking, so she's got to listen.
Speaker: Nothing changes.
Speaker: She said, I'm part of the show.
Speaker: No, you know, they always, the adapting to a new space is always interesting.
Speaker: But like the first night, Jonesy immediately was strutting around here going like, no, I own this place.
Speaker: This place is mine.
Speaker: This is pretty good.
Speaker: Yeah, it was Ripley that was hiding behind toilets and shit.
Speaker: But she came around.
Speaker: She's in a much better place.
Speaker: I think she was feeling, because I'll tell you, Jonesy's our more standoffish cat.
Speaker: Ripley is our little cuddle muffin.
Speaker: And so we thought that Jonesy was going to be a problem with bringing a new baby into the house and Ripley would we would have to, like, just remind her not to smother the baby.
Speaker: But it was the other way around.
Speaker: Jonesy actually has no problem with our son and and Ripley sees him as competition.
Speaker: And she's only like, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, because she's a mama's girl.
Speaker: She loves her mama so much.
Speaker: And she sees her holding this new little baby.
Speaker: And she gets so frustrated.
Speaker: But she has been coming around and she'll still get in your lap.
Speaker: You'll be holding the baby and she'll get in your lap.
Speaker: And you're like, great, I am so hot right now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: a fat cat in my lap and this baby which basically works as a space heater in my arms and now I'm going to be dehydrated and die and I just this family can't afford that because they're all relying on me now and we accidentally became a family from the 1950s everyone's relying on my salary I don't know how this happens it's true this is what a bolo tie wore at my wedding
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: That's my wedding time.
Speaker: We both sipped our drinks at the same time.
Speaker: See, we're still in sync.
Speaker: We're still in sync.
Speaker: And for all of you at home listening, it is, as we record this, Valentine's Day.
Speaker: And we are both married with children.
Speaker: And we stopped all of that to come over here.
Speaker: All that nonsense to come over here and reunite for this show because we love each other.
Speaker: And that's how it works.
Speaker: What is more romantic than that?
Speaker: Nothing.
Speaker: There's not a goddamn thing.
Speaker: No bromance, out bromances are bromance.
Speaker: Period.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Period.
Speaker: Well, Phil is back, so that means it's kind of like a new season on Pixel It.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like kind of an unofficial new season.
Speaker: I think that makes sense.
Speaker: Unofficial, unofficial, you know, it's fresh.
Speaker: It's spring almost.
Speaker: I mean, got another month, a month and seven days to be exact.
Speaker: Month and some change.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: But look, global warming.
Speaker: It's basically spring.
Speaker: Let's be real.
Speaker: It's basically spring.
Speaker: It was 80 the other day in Florida.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: The only reason Florida exists
Speaker: for people to live in is the nice winter and it's not anymore.
Speaker: It's not anymore.
Speaker: It's an uncomfortably hot, humid winter now.
Speaker: So with that, we're going to sprinkle some other stuff in there.
Speaker: We're going to sprinkle it around.
Speaker: So you're going to see some more activity on our social media because Phil is no longer working in social media.
Speaker: He actively is going to start enjoying doing social media again.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's funny.
Speaker: When you don't professionally do social media 80 hours a week, suddenly you're actually kind of interested in doing it for the projects you really do give a rat's ass about.
Speaker: So yeah, that's going to be fun.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So we'll see some Instagram posts on Wednesdays with a little carousel action for the providing visual context for the episode that just dropped that day.
Speaker: And then on Thursdays, we said we're going to do a What Are You Playing on Thursdays?
Speaker: You'll see a carousel of the What Are You Playing up on that sweet, sweet Instagram feed.
Speaker: So go ahead.
Speaker: It never ceases to amaze me how many of you people like
Speaker: We do an hour of a show and then we get into what are you playing?
Speaker: And that's immediately what people jump on.
Speaker: They're like, oh, you're playing that guy?
Speaker: Which I get, I understand.
Speaker: I wanna know what everyone else is playing too.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So we are going to have, we're putting it in order.
Speaker: So we're gonna have an actual list of the games along with some visual aids to help you understand what it is we've been playing and remember so that you can go back and maybe put it on your wish list.
Speaker: If that's something that interests you.
Speaker: Throw down your spicy little wish list.
Speaker: Do it, baby.
Speaker: Sexy little babies.
Speaker: That's the name of our fans, right?
Speaker: Sexy little babies.
Speaker: The sexy little babies.
Speaker: Yeah, that's how I've always thought of them.
Speaker: I don't know if that's okay to admit.
Speaker: What are we reading today?
Speaker: What's going on?
Speaker: Well, good news, ladies and gentlemen, because the beautiful, beautiful people over at Simon & Schuster reached out to me and got us.
Speaker: Advanced copies of the new Halo book, Epitaph, by our girl, Kelly Gay.
Speaker: Kelly Gay, one of our favorite authors that we've read on this channel.
Speaker: We've talked about Kelly Gay before.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: She's a hell of a writer.
Speaker: If you don't remember, she's the one who put the Vietnam in Halo.
Speaker: She put that Vietnam right back in there.
Speaker: Good lord.
Speaker: I don't
Speaker: I don't know if it was ever missing, but she put it in.
Speaker: She put it in there with Rubicon Protocol.
Speaker: She really was like, hey, would you like a story where everybody pretty much is dead by the end?
Speaker: Would you like one of those?
Speaker: And it's really depressing.
Speaker: Here's a character.
Speaker: They're going to be a fan favorite before the end when they die.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I'm Kelly Gay.
Speaker: You'll hear.
Speaker: You'll see.
Speaker: Yeah, you'll see my face in your nightmares.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we've got the latest one.
Speaker: It will be out, I believe, the week before this airs.
Speaker: So it'll be brand smacking.
Speaker: Let me double check, though, on that to make sure.
Speaker: He's double checking because we like facts here.
Speaker: We love facts.
Speaker: We love facts and we love feelings equally.
Speaker: Equally.
Speaker: Both are valid.
Speaker: I would like to say facts do care about your feelings.
Speaker: I think they would if they were conscious.
Speaker: If they were a conscious entity, I think their defaults.
Speaker: choice would be the empathy towards feelings because feelings are facts as well.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Okay, yes.
Speaker: This should be coming out on the 28th of February and that means it'll be the day after this book has released.
Speaker: So get out there if you like what you hear.
Speaker: As we've always said with these, we are not covering everything.
Speaker: We don't go into the, you know, there's a lot of reasons to read these books if it piques your interest.
Speaker: So get out there, pick up Kelly Gay's latest book.
Speaker: Because without cutting to the chase too hard, this one's pretty good.
Speaker: It's a pretty good book.
Speaker: Halo Epitaph.
Speaker: And as you can see, for those Halo familiar peeps, despite having read like five or six Halo books so far, still didn't know who this guy was.
Speaker: Um, this is the didact and he's more or less, I guess what you would call the, the, the BB EG, the big, bad, evil guy.
Speaker: Uh, I guess aside from Cortana in present day, day, uh, halo verse stuff.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Um, so I think that's, that's kind of, uh, something to, to keep in mind there.
Speaker: Um, yeah,
Speaker: So before we get any further, I just want to tell you all about a wonderful website.
Speaker: Oh, tell me all about it.
Speaker: It's a wonderful website, and it's called patreon.com slash pixelitpod.
Speaker: You can go there, and you can right now, you can go there, and you can sign up for free and follow us on there for free and get free updates, free updates from me and Phil.
Speaker: But if you are so inclined to get just a little bit more, you know, you are like, you're the kind of person who has a baked potato and you put some butter on it and now you want some like sour cream.
Speaker: You want the sour cream?
Speaker: You give us a little bit of money.
Speaker: You know, $1 gets you in for the basic level of posts.
Speaker: You know, Phil is putting up his book reviews on there.
Speaker: That gets you in there, you know?
Speaker: $5.
Speaker: $5 will give you bonus episodes.
Speaker: And $10, $10 gives you a shout out at our eternal love.
Speaker: Dude, that's a pretty good price for a shout out.
Speaker: It's a pretty good price for a shout out.
Speaker: And you know what?
Speaker: All of these come with Discord access, including free.
Speaker: Including the free.
Speaker: You can go there on our free and click and join our Discord and join the conversation.
Speaker: giving it away for free kevin what are we crazy what are we nuts it's what are we nuts it's free real estate um the first five of you to join our discord i'm gonna club this baby seal and
Speaker: Devolve the rest of the episode into a Tim and Eric sketch.
Speaker: Pretty much.
Speaker: Low prices.
Speaker: I've got the lowest prices.
Speaker: I missed this show.
Speaker: You know, the worst part, though, is I've been listening to every episode with our guests and everything, and the worst part has been the quality level of the guests.
Speaker: You...
Speaker: It's like you were threatening me in a way.
Speaker: It was just like, hey, by the way, you can be replaced.
Speaker: Check this shit out.
Speaker: Fuck, he's right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Oh, you are irreplaceable, sir.
Speaker: There is no way I could have replaced you.
Speaker: And neither would the people that pay us $10 a month.
Speaker: They would not like that either.
Speaker: We got friendly friend.
Speaker: We got Jesus loves you.
Speaker: And we got ruthless mutter.
Speaker: Thank you so much for being our top tier $10 a month geek scholars.
Speaker: And for that, you get a sweet, sweet shout out.
Speaker: We love you.
Speaker: We love you.
Speaker: We love you.
Speaker: You know what else I love?
Speaker: I love putting bodies into a marsh.
Speaker: Oh, let's put this body in the marsh.
Speaker: Love it.
Speaker: Bam.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Halo Epitaph.
Speaker: What are we doing here?
Speaker: What's this book about?
Speaker: Halo Epitaph by Kelly Gay.
Speaker: This one...
Speaker: basically starts out, this is a unique book, and I'm gonna upfront say this because this is unique, especially for our Halo books, because it is almost like a one-act play in a weird way, where it's like the setting is the same,
Speaker: At least so far, as much as I've read, usually with these Halo books, we're hopping and popping.
Speaker: We're up in the naval area.
Speaker: We're down on the boots on the ground.
Speaker: You know, we're hell diving.
Speaker: We're doing all kinds of stuff.
Speaker: This is just we open on a planet, basically, where a being essentially gets reconstructed like a new sun.
Speaker: This person has no memory of who they are and finds himself on this desolate desert landscape.
Speaker: As far as I can tell so far, we're never leaving it.
Speaker: It's...
Speaker: We are 10 chapters in by the end of this episode.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we have not even, like, we're not leaving it.
Speaker: This is where we are, man.
Speaker: This is where we are.
Speaker: This is the waiting for Godot of the Halo universe.
Speaker: So this figure contemplates how much, well, first off, realized that not there by choice, not thrilled about his locale, and begins to contemplate how much marching in the desert sucks.
Speaker: Uh, it's, it's one of the first things, and this will, this will be important later on.
Speaker: Uh, little memories start to hit him, but otherwise he has no memory of who he is, what he's doing there.
Speaker: Uh, gets these little memories, can't put them into context.
Speaker: And then collapses in the sand in exhaustion and sees a group of flying creatures that stir his memory and then finally remembers their name, Rangmejos.
Speaker: I'm assuming that's how you say it, Rangmejos, which are these kind of pterodactyl-looking things.
Speaker: Sure, yeah.
Speaker: that'll float up above the game, I think in Halo 4 mostly.
Speaker: He realizes he can't be in the physical world.
Speaker: It's too wrong-seeming.
Speaker: It's too liminal.
Speaker: He's somewhere else, and he has no idea.
Speaker: The guy needs a goal.
Speaker: Let's face facts.
Speaker: He needs something to do.
Speaker: So he sees a blue light off in the distance, not a green light for once.
Speaker: Not an orgastic green light.
Speaker: Yeah, off at the dock.
Speaker: Off at the end of the dock.
Speaker: Thank you, Scott.
Speaker: Thank you, Scotty.
Speaker: He sees a blue light somewhere in the distance, and he kind of focuses in on that before falling asleep on a sand dune.
Speaker: And you get this quote.
Speaker: He dreamed of fire from flesh to bone.
Speaker: It ate away at him, ripping him apart one layer at a time, tearing and burning, stripped, pulled asunder until even his consciousness peeled free and he was nothing but writhing, screaming embers.
Speaker: And that's chapter one.
Speaker: That's chapter one.
Speaker: We've got a man who doesn't know who he is.
Speaker: All he really knows at this moment is that he exists, kind of, and pain.
Speaker: And pain.
Speaker: Pain.
Speaker: And he even dreams of it.
Speaker: Hero dreams of sushi.
Speaker: This guy dreams of pain.
Speaker: And, you know, we all dream that Sisyphus must be happy.
Speaker: Yes, exactly, because we have no choice.
Speaker: So chapter two begins, and he awakes from a nightmare and then just continues this death march into the night, basically.
Speaker: The blue light in the distance is keeping him going.
Speaker: He still gets these memories, these little flashes of memories that keep going.
Speaker: He knows that he should be able to basically do...
Speaker: Like the idea of climbing a dune on in his bare feet with his legs, like some kind of pleb.
Speaker: It makes no sense to him.
Speaker: It's very Back to the Future 2 when he when he's playing lone gunman and they say, you have to use your hands.
Speaker: This is a child's toy.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: That's exactly.
Speaker: He knows.
Speaker: So he knows that he should be able to just kind of like fly or will himself up there or something.
Speaker: And he is just caught in the ennui and the drudgery of being a mere mortal.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Poor guy.
Speaker: He sees simian-shaped creatures in the fog.
Speaker: They're enormous.
Speaker: They're made of metal, but they're pitted and broken down.
Speaker: And he knows them somehow and feels despair when he's around them.
Speaker: And he remembers them as war sphinxes.
Speaker: Um, and he touches one of them and reality shifts and he finds himself in a new place in time.
Speaker: He's in a battlefield littered with the dead.
Speaker: He's now an armor.
Speaker: He's been here before he is, he is living one of his memories.
Speaker: Essentially.
Speaker: He knows now that he is a forerunner and that this is part of a war against humanity.
Speaker: Humanity must die.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: That is, that is his new motivation.
Speaker: Blue light.
Speaker: Humanity must die.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: He knows he's lost a lot of soldiers in this battle, including two of his kids.
Speaker: He's a warrior.
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: Warrior servant.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's one of the classes of his race.
Speaker: One of the forerunner.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Forerunner.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's just his cast, basically.
Speaker: And they're there to just to kill and chew space bubble gum.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the top level of forerunners is Toyota.
Speaker: So it goes Toyota, forerunner, warrior servant.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, that's, I mean, how can you beat that, that, that, you know, four wheel drive?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, oh, and happy Toyota-thon.
Speaker: I totally, you know, I, to all who celebrate happy Toyota-thon.
Speaker: I was trying desperately to think of a fun feature that might be in a Toyota.
Speaker: And the first thing I came up with was four wheel drive.
Speaker: Four wheels.
Speaker: They all drive at the same time.
Speaker: You climbing that hill, you're going to want the four-wheel drive.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Jesus Christ.
Speaker: ABC, always be climbing.
Speaker: That's all they do in the commercials.
Speaker: We're just hopping around between plays where sad middle-aged men just kind of... That's all that's left.
Speaker: We're at that point.
Speaker: That's all there is.
Speaker: Poor Estragon.
Speaker: Anyway.
Speaker: Oh, poor guys.
Speaker: Vladimir.
Speaker: Poor one out for Estragon and Vladimir.
Speaker: Poor one out for my boys.
Speaker: Estragon and Vladimir.
Speaker: Good one ever shows up.
Speaker: Our life is truly pointless.
Speaker: Spoiler alert.
Speaker: Spoiler alert.
Speaker: For a nearly century old piece of absurdist drama.
Speaker: So this guy cannot catch a break because in the one world he was feeling pain.
Speaker: And now in this he is feeling grief.
Speaker: Incredible grief.
Speaker: He remembers he has kids and almost immediately remembers that he's basically responsible for their deaths.
Speaker: He gets memories of his kids growing up and happy before the war and just kind of desperately, desperately wants everything to be over.
Speaker: Please just end this.
Speaker: I hate this.
Speaker: I don't want to do this anymore.
Speaker: Um, and then he shifts back over, uh, and he finds himself back in the wastelands.
Speaker: Um, and he thinks you were a father once it had mattered, then came a time when it did not.
Speaker: Uh, and, uh, that, that was, that line kind of fucked me up, uh, now that I actually am a father.
Speaker: There's going to be lines, there's going to be art that before you didn't really, it just went over, and now it's hitting you right in the face.
Speaker: I hate to be that guy who states those stereotypical things, but everything's different now, and it's one of those situations where
Speaker: You know, I'm sure you have all heard your friends with kids say, oh, yeah, the kid shows up and everything's different.
Speaker: And you go, of course it is.
Speaker: It's a yeah, of course you believe them.
Speaker: It's not that you doubt them.
Speaker: But then it happens.
Speaker: And and people like me come up and go, no, but seriously, man, and grab you by the shoulders and just shake the shit out of you.
Speaker: You don't get it.
Speaker: Everything's different.
Speaker: Cats in the Cradle came on the radio and I sobbed.
Speaker: It's ridiculous.
Speaker: I heard Rocket Man and I drove off the...
Speaker: it's all different and this shit and like they bring up like it's like being a father matters like you're good yeah right meanwhile meanwhile my child is crying and pitching a fit i'm like shut up just just give me a minute give me a minute daddy's crying a minute you'll it'll happen to you uh
Speaker: Our protagonist gets flashes of voices and laughter at his head and the quote, there is something rotten inside of you, which, oof, that's a bummer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Before waking up in the landscape again, but now the war sphinxes are gone.
Speaker: And these are things that are the size of skyscrapers, so that's kind of jarring.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But he refuses to believe that it wasn't real.
Speaker: However, he has come to a full understanding that A, he is a forerunner.
Speaker: B, he is of the warrior servant cast.
Speaker: And C, he had a wife with a weird ass name.
Speaker: Let me grab that one real quick.
Speaker: She was a life bringer, right?
Speaker: A life, a life worker, life worker, which is one of the casts.
Speaker: I think it's higher than war.
Speaker: It's just different.
Speaker: And her name was First Light Weaves Living Song.
Speaker: There we go.
Speaker: Which is no, which is no stands with fist or dances with wolves, but it's pretty high up there.
Speaker: on the vaguely Aboriginal sounding sentence names.
Speaker: But most people just call her the librarian because she's a big old fan of knowledge.
Speaker: Of cataloging and the Dewey Decimal System.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, Dewey, he crossed the galaxy.
Speaker: That's how powerful that cataloging system was.
Speaker: Once Dewey came into existence with his Dewey Decimal System, it was such an important moment in time and space that the knowledge then shot out like a beam forward and backward and
Speaker: Into time and space across all races and creeds simultaneously.
Speaker: So that's why the Forerunners still use the Dewey Decimal System to this day.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: Over several hundred thousand years in the past as well.
Speaker: You remember in Return of the King when Sauron's eye collapses and a shockwave goes throughout the land and knocks all the orcs over and everything like that?
Speaker: It was like that, but with knowledge.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A knowledge shockwave.
Speaker: Knowledge wave.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Wave babies.
Speaker: Wave.
Speaker: Now I've got prom night dumpster babies stuck in my head.
Speaker: It hits different when you're a father.
Speaker: Everything's different now.
Speaker: Everything's different now.
Speaker: Even dead baby jokes, especially dead baby jokes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, gosh.
Speaker: They're somehow funnier.
Speaker: They're more wrong and thus they taste sweeter.
Speaker: And that much funnier.
Speaker: I just can't say them around my wife or I get hit.
Speaker: Hey, look at that.
Speaker: Speaking of children, we aren't talking about dead children at all.
Speaker: Hey, kid.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: There she is.
Speaker: Finally, the guest appearance we were all waiting for.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: Our hero remembers war and love and grief, but he's still not sure who he is.
Speaker: Not really, but is certain that the rest will come.
Speaker: And that's the end of chapter two.
Speaker: We are, this is the first Halo episode
Speaker: that like seems to fully deal in the who am I, Jean Valjean aspect of the character.
Speaker: I mean, we got a little of that with Master Chief in some of the early ones, but that's the whole thing.
Speaker: Would you say before this figure was, war was waiting for him?
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: Guess who read Blood Meridian and...
Speaker: And we have to, and by the way, me and Kevin, we've already talked about it.
Speaker: I read it years ago.
Speaker: I need to read it again.
Speaker: And in answer to your question, yes, we are going to have a bonus episode where we just sit around talking about Blood Meridian.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.
Speaker: And it will wreck the rest of your lives.
Speaker: It's going to be seven hours long.
Speaker: Woo!
Speaker: Jesus.
Speaker: I met someone at work the other day and we were discussing children and he showed me a picture of his son.
Speaker: And I said, my son's middle name is Steinbeck, named after the author.
Speaker: And he said, my son's name is Cormac.
Speaker: And I said, like Cormac McCarthy?
Speaker: And he said, yeah.
Speaker: And I went, dude.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That is, wow, okay, that's heavy.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: I respect that.
Speaker: When do you give the kid a book based on the namesake?
Speaker: Let him find out on his own, hopefully.
Speaker: He's in his 30s, comes to you, throws No Country for Old Men at your feet and goes, is this what I'm named after?
Speaker: And you go, yeah.
Speaker: I wasn't going to tell you that when you were 12.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: I wanted to give you a fighting chance.
Speaker: Oh man.
Speaker: Um, let's see.
Speaker: Chapter three begins and we're still following the blue beacon.
Speaker: Uh, now that he can remember all this cool ass armor and advanced technology that he used to have access to, he is super annoyed, uh, that he has to do all of this stupid walking and,
Speaker: We get miracle armor porn, essentially, talking about all the cool shit.
Speaker: This armor basically provides you with everything you could need, physically, emotionally, even ceremonially.
Speaker: You can use it for rituals.
Speaker: It'll calm you down when your heart rate goes up, and it'll protect you from bullets, which is nice.
Speaker: Which is nice.
Speaker: Very nice.
Speaker: Which one would say is the original point.
Speaker: And are you forgetting something?
Speaker: Sexually?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Because, come on.
Speaker: I thought I brought that up in emotions.
Speaker: Because sex is emotional for me, Kevin.
Speaker: It's an emotional experience.
Speaker: It's an emotional experience.
Speaker: It is a feeling.
Speaker: Why am I still doing this?
Speaker: And that is a fact.
Speaker: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker: It's true, ladies.
Speaker: So like I said, miracle armor.
Speaker: The dusty air obscures the beacon, so he kind of sits and waits.
Speaker: He realizes that he should be hungry and thirsty.
Speaker: He isn't.
Speaker: That tells him a little bit about more of the liminal space that he is inhabiting.
Speaker: The dune underneath him collapses and he falls into an opening, an enormous sphere.
Speaker: Images flash in the spheres, walls of a forerunner battle at the last human stronghold, which is called Sharon Hakor, which is built on the architectural remains of the precursors, who are the creators of the forerunners.
Speaker: So the forerunners are Toyota.
Speaker: The precursors are built for tough.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Very superior and brutal.
Speaker: He sees images of himself with his wife and steps onto this planet.
Speaker: He enters a citadel to find the totally seriously named Fort Hensho Aberoon.
Speaker: who is a human and is the Lord of admirals of the human side of things.
Speaker: And he remembers realizing that the human aggression wasn't for them specifically, it wasn't aimed at them, but that they were trying to hold back the flood.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And the only way to hold back the flood is basically burn everything in its path.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he orders that, they basically order that Forchenko and all the humans in the Citadel have their consciousness separated from their bodies.
Speaker: So this is just, yeah, this thing is terrifying, by the way.
Speaker: Yes, this is insane.
Speaker: This is insane.
Speaker: The composers, so there's this device which basically...
Speaker: So you don't die ish.
Speaker: You're not dead.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But the essence that is you is is ripped from your like it's like a soul being ripped in all of your knowledge being ripped out of your body and then ultimately cataloged into the general pool of knowledge of the forerunners.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You and all of your memories and experiences are turned into raw data, essentially.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: And the humans, and basically because of this, humans devolve back to a pre-evolutionary hunter-gatherer state, which basically means...
Speaker: We start over, but we used to be advanced.
Speaker: And as Kevin pointed out, and I literally wrote in my notes, this is some fucking Warhammer 40K shit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is crazy.
Speaker: So it's like they, it says we, we devolved the humans and dropped them back on their natal world.
Speaker: So like at some point they were, you know, originally on earth and we just kind of dropped them back there.
Speaker: De-evolved and we're like, well,
Speaker: See you around.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Good luck.
Speaker: You won't be any trouble for another 10,000 years or so.
Speaker: Let's see how that works.
Speaker: Oh, hundreds of thousands of years.
Speaker: If it's hot, it's this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was about to say we did.
Speaker: Yeah, this is highly advanced let the kid play outside and wear himself out shit.
Speaker: Yeah, so what I was saying to Phil was, and as his note says, I was like, there's a way then you can turn, take Warhammer 40K and combine it with the Halo universe, where the end of the Warhammer 40K universe is...
Speaker: is something like the flood and the, and the halo and the halo is being built by the forerunners and humans being dropped back on earth and starting over.
Speaker: And then hundreds of thousands of years later, they're back out in space.
Speaker: So I was like, Oh yeah, you can, you can headcanon that if you wanted to.
Speaker: They just,
Speaker: Yeah, it works.
Speaker: It actually does fit.
Speaker: And they don't, yeah, so they don't eliminate us.
Speaker: They just start us over.
Speaker: We start from a new game, basically.
Speaker: Which, you know what, I tend to do better on my second run through anyway.
Speaker: Yeah, why not?
Speaker: Which clearly is actually what happens here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's a name, by the way.
Speaker: For Fensho Oberoon.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, that's a name.
Speaker: That is the name that he had.
Speaker: That is the name that he had.
Speaker: I don't know what the hell.
Speaker: You know what I thought about?
Speaker: It's like, if you're talking about crazy advanced pre-Huntergather humans before they were devolved, I was thinking a little bit of Jeff Goldblum as the Game Master in Love and Thunder.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Just like clearly a human, but like this kind of colorful offness about him.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Maybe that's what it is.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh Lord.
Speaker: Okay, so our protagonist continues into the Citadel to find a prison that contains what they call the Timeless One, which claims to be a precursor who they thought, the Forerunners believed that they had all just gone off and just died off or disappeared.
Speaker: There's this great big mystery in their lore
Speaker: And he tells them, no, you guys killed us off.
Speaker: You pretty much killed us off, which who's surprised?
Speaker: I'm not.
Speaker: Kevin, are you surprised?
Speaker: I'm not surprised at all.
Speaker: The precursor, yeah, admits to, not admits, but bursts the bubble of our main character that they were just, oh, we just left.
Speaker: We just disappeared into the fog.
Speaker: Like, no, no, you killed us pretty brutally.
Speaker: And I'm one of the last ones.
Speaker: Um, so he sees himself discussing, uh, humanity's defeat and the flood, uh, with the forerunner leaders, including the master builder, uh, who successfully argues for building the halos, uh, to keep the flood sealed away across the galaxy, which infuriates him.
Speaker: Uh, it's a terrible idea.
Speaker: He says, and he's, uh, and because he gets shouted down, he gets exiled, uh,
Speaker: which that's pretty harsh.
Speaker: But he gets mummified.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They mummify him and put him in a cryptum, which is basically that sphere that I mentioned before, where it will keep him in suspended animation for a very long,
Speaker: Very long time.
Speaker: They're not going to kill him, but boy howdy, is he going to lose some of that reading time.
Speaker: It's going to be a real bitch.
Speaker: So he's back on the sand dune.
Speaker: He tries to remember what happens next, but suddenly sees the blue beacon again, and it's on top of a tall silvery tower and he runs towards it.
Speaker: And that is the end of chapter three.
Speaker: Now, for those playing the home game, this is basically just the longest exposition told in flashback form ever.
Speaker: But A, it's pretty well written.
Speaker: And B, it provides more context to this character than I believe you would have gotten just playing the game.
Speaker: So that's pretty cool.
Speaker: Yeah, because it's less of a flashback for the reader's sake.
Speaker: I mean, it's all for the reader's sake.
Speaker: But it's in service to the character character.
Speaker: literally piecing himself back together yes yes uh that's i mean that's exactly it he is he is literally piecing his body he put his body back together now he has to put his mind back together right um so chapter four starts with him running off into the storm to follow uh this tower uh there's a sandstorm by the way uh
Speaker: He sees these figures in the wind who are kind of toying with him.
Speaker: They pop him one and then they hop back before he can retaliate.
Speaker: And he finds, he believes they're armagers, but different.
Speaker: He grabs one of them.
Speaker: The armagers are the thing from the last book.
Speaker: that were, remember that basically the cop scene?
Speaker: Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker: But they're different somehow.
Speaker: He grabs one of them and it changes to what he calls a Promethean Knight who knocks him out, just totally knocks him out.
Speaker: And the easy way.
Speaker: The easy way.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: He remembers a thousand years after his exile, he's released by humans, which is a weird feeling because he doesn't like humans.
Speaker: But they're just people who were curious.
Speaker: They didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Speaker: They just that's what happens when you devolve an entire species and don't like put, you know,
Speaker: placeholders in place to keep them from joining the stars again.
Speaker: They're going to go, what is this?
Speaker: Because we can't leave well enough alone.
Speaker: And he learns that the Master Builder's creation of the Halo was a success in a manner of speaking, but has destroyed several planets and precursor architecture due to basically misunderstanding and rebellion.
Speaker: Just just just endless, endless death.
Speaker: And so he wants to.
Speaker: By the way, yeah, the the other person he was released into the care of was another forerunner named Born Stellar Makes Eternal Lasting.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Another another one of those good names.
Speaker: we find out soon is his younger, hotter genetic clone that his wife made.
Speaker: I would say the less said about this, the better, but oh boy, this is, this is, this is like, this is like a housewives of, of the forerunners, you know, juicy.
Speaker: You can take a forerunner county.
Speaker: Oh God, just chew up that conflama.
Speaker: Why don't you?
Speaker: Oh, it's so good.
Speaker: So juicy.
Speaker: So juicy.
Speaker: So he goes off.
Speaker: He wants to be wants to he has to confront the master builder.
Speaker: The master builder finds him, interrogates him, which is a nice word for, you know, tortures him.
Speaker: He's sent into flood infested space in a stasis bubble.
Speaker: And and meets with the central intelligence of the flood, which is called the grave mind, and his interactions with it leave him completely warped.
Speaker: Just completely stained entity.
Speaker: He is not not of his right to mind anymore.
Speaker: No, no, he is, he is, he is gone.
Speaker: Uh, when he manages to get away and, uh, returns to his own galaxy, he finds that many plants have been overrun by the flood.
Speaker: And at this point we're past an exposition dump.
Speaker: It's an exposition ocean, basically.
Speaker: Uh, and, uh, the master builder is finally brought to trial, uh, for violations against their honor code, which is known as the mantle.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: We get, and we get the, is this the plot line of Halo 4, the forerunner that converts to the flood?
Speaker: Basically mendicant bias?
Speaker: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker: I can't remember which.
Speaker: I don't remember either.
Speaker: Forgive me, guys.
Speaker: I'm not as up to this stuff as I could be, but I don't want to.
Speaker: I've got lots of things going on.
Speaker: It's just too much stuff.
Speaker: Leave me alone.
Speaker: I have a kid.
Speaker: They're like, well, you could have done that with the Halo books before you had it.
Speaker: He's like, shut up.
Speaker: Shut up.
Speaker: Don't poke holes in our logic.
Speaker: Leave me alone.
Speaker: Why are you so obsessed with me?
Speaker: He doesn't even go here.
Speaker: So we run into the mendicant bias, which is a forerunner that converted to fighting with the flood.
Speaker: It destroys the forerunner capital and all but two of the halos with its own stolen halo.
Speaker: When he finally meets up with his wife for the first time, who he's been...
Speaker: dreaming of finding her again one day and all that stuff, because they really did love each other.
Speaker: He is now a completely different person and all things considered, not really a big fan of her, if we're being honest.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In, uh, let's see.
Speaker: It says, uh, but he felt the play, the, he felt the pressure to be what she expected, wanted, and hoped him to be.
Speaker: And it twisted his heart.
Speaker: He was misunderstood, betrayed, and cast aside the lengths to which she'd gone to save her precious humans.
Speaker: The enemy responsible for killing their children were not apparently extended to him during his darkest time of need.
Speaker: She had simply accepted his fate at the hands of the master builder and never looked for him.
Speaker: never attempted to save him from the burn.
Speaker: Which, when you put it that way,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's some cold blooded shit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, and, and she's got the younger, hotter version of you that she made herself.
Speaker: Uh, so.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, that's not so great.
Speaker: Uh, so, uh, he's not doing good is, uh, what I'm saying.
Speaker: He is, he is feeling serious, uh, uh, jealousy of this genetic copy of himself.
Speaker: He is being cucked by himself.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It is a lot.
Speaker: It's a lot to take in.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like a James Bond thing, the forerunner who cucked me.
Speaker: He was sent out into a portion of space that is so destroyed and overwrought with the flood that they just call it the burn.
Speaker: The burn.
Speaker: It's just part of the galaxy that's just the burn, as in burn it, like burn it.
Speaker: Yeah, burn it all to the ground.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: He loses his mind there because, you know, he saw things, man.
Speaker: You weren't there, man.
Speaker: He went through his apocalypse now.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: He did his The Horror of the Horror.
Speaker: And he gets there and the grave mind is sitting there with his shirt open and he sounds a lot like Marlon Brando.
Speaker: Yeah, it's weird.
Speaker: And then he cuts a cow's head off with a machete and it's just too much.
Speaker: Watch that movie again.
Speaker: Spoilers for Apocalypse Now?
Speaker: It's kind of... I mean, it's one of those movies you can't really spoil.
Speaker: I don't think you have to really experience it.
Speaker: Yeah, there's no such thing as spoiling that movie.
Speaker: I could tell you moment for moment what happens in it, and it would still fuck your head up when you actually watched it.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: So, you know, he gets back and finds his wife made a copy of him.
Speaker: And, you know, it's not great, man.
Speaker: It's not a good feeling.
Speaker: And then while he's dealing with this, he can't he can't put on, you know, Sunday day real estate or American football and feel his feelings because the flood attacks their planes.
Speaker: Um, so he finds the digital code of all of the in stasis humans.
Speaker: Remember we talked about that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Finds those guys and puts them into Promethean war machines and calls them his knights.
Speaker: So we have got, uh, human golems kind of in a way like, uh,
Speaker: And so his wife is pissed because her whole thing is about life and sustaining it and saving it.
Speaker: And the whole point, that was her baby, like keeping all the humans in data.
Speaker: Like that was one of her big magnum opuses.
Speaker: She's furious with him and incapacitates him and seals him in another cryptum
Speaker: But the Cryptum, ironically, is the only thing that protects him from when the Halo goes the fuck off and destroys her and basically everything.
Speaker: The last of the forerunners, basically.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: So he's back in the desert.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And he's in the desert.
Speaker: It starts to rain, which is always a good sign.
Speaker: He remembers being sealed away for, quote, 1000 centuries, which I thought was just a bit of poetic license.
Speaker: But it turns out that is absolutely what they mean as the galaxy changes.
Speaker: And this is when he was woken by humanity.
Speaker: This is when it happened.
Speaker: Humanity gets curious, finds this thing, and wakes him up.
Speaker: And he wakes up and goes to war with humanity because he needs a project, basically.
Speaker: He just needs a hobby.
Speaker: He needs a hobby.
Speaker: He is so bored.
Speaker: He's been in a bubble for a thousand years.
Speaker: It's been a hundred thousand years.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: He is bored.
Speaker: I can't read the bridges of Madison County again.
Speaker: The books in this fucking sphere suck.
Speaker: So he goes to war with the humans and is defeated by Master Chief, which is the end of Halo 4, essentially.
Speaker: He is defeated by Master Chief.
Speaker: And the only way Master Chief has been trying to kill him so many times, and the way Master Chief kills him, he throws him into the midst of several composers.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And those things finally rip him apart.
Speaker: Yeah, he basically nukes him seven times or something.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: And despite all of that, he has now been somehow resurrected.
Speaker: And now in this moment, he remembers everything that he is the didact.
Speaker: And of course, wants to kill humanity.
Speaker: So that's Chad.
Speaker: Yeah, he remembers the important part, killing humanity, which.
Speaker: So just to recap, everything that he remembered
Speaker: Was it humanity's fault?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And he knows this.
Speaker: He knows this.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: The flood is not humanity's fault.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Humanity was fighting the flood.
Speaker: And then they're like, fuck you, humans.
Speaker: And they kill off humanity and evolve them.
Speaker: And he's really just angry at his wife.
Speaker: I think this is a testament to how good of a writer Kelly Gay is.
Speaker: Because it's like, I never played Halo 4.
Speaker: I don't have a full context for this big bad.
Speaker: And it does a great job of making you sympathize with him and go, wow, this sounds really tough.
Speaker: This guy is going through a hell of a lot.
Speaker: And as over the course of what is 40, maybe 50 pages, you slowly start to go, what's your fucking problem?
Speaker: It's just your sympathy just starts to run away like like a popsicle on a hot day.
Speaker: It's gone.
Speaker: It's it's crazy.
Speaker: It's absolutely crazy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's it's it's nuts.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we get to chapter five.
Speaker: The didact knows that he is no longer part of a physical world.
Speaker: He knows that none of this is real.
Speaker: And only the legendary domain, the keeper of all information that that basically works is kind of like it's like a repository and like a God.
Speaker: And like it's a forerunner afterlife that they created.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: For themselves.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: It's kind of hard to wrap your head fully around it, but it's pretty neat.
Speaker: He knows that's the only thing that could bring him back to the physical world.
Speaker: And so he continues towards the spire.
Speaker: He finally makes it to the tower and he realizes
Speaker: that in the real world, this tower was actually what was a marker.
Speaker: It was a marker for the remains of the mendicant bias.
Speaker: He enters the spire.
Speaker: It's like a great cathedral.
Speaker: He sees a hologram of a war machine, which is the offensive bias.
Speaker: It's like a giant dragonfly.
Speaker: It's kind of cool.
Speaker: And it was what was used to defeat the mendicant bias.
Speaker: So it's kind of this shrine in a way to this great war machine.
Speaker: Um, he considers the fact that everyone he's ever known is dead.
Speaker: Um, perhaps, maybe, maybe it's time to put all this shit away and just leave some room for peace.
Speaker: Uh, and he ends up on top of the tower when he sees a figure.
Speaker: In white.
Speaker: And that's the end of chapter five.
Speaker: Oh, and now that we are at the end of chapter five, I'd like to take a moment to do something that we haven't done on this podcast before.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Tell me.
Speaker: Tell me.
Speaker: We're going to throw two products and services that might support this podcast.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: If the algorithm throws one in there.
Speaker: Anyway, here's some ads.
Speaker: Bye.
Speaker: Hey, and we're back.
Speaker: Hey, it's chapter six.
Speaker: Did you enjoy capitalism?
Speaker: Did you enjoy the capitalism?
Speaker: We sure did.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: We're big fans.
Speaker: We're big fans of capitalism on the show.
Speaker: And Ronald Reagan.
Speaker: love him loved his work uh loved his loved his wife's work even more yeah uh so just just love him just just a big old big old piece of fucking shit he's in hell he sucks he sucks he sucks so much
Speaker: Just one of humanity's greatest failures.
Speaker: Somebody was pointing out that if you looked at really anything that was going wrong right now in the U.S., you could... It's Reagan.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's an extension of the stuff Reagan did.
Speaker: Yeah, you can draw a direct line.
Speaker: It's a bad time.
Speaker: It's a bad time, folks.
Speaker: I mean, Nixon is not, doesn't have his hands clean, but you know, Reagan really turned it into an art.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: He turned it into an art form.
Speaker: It was, it lasted.
Speaker: It lasted.
Speaker: Anyway, I guess, I guess what we're saying is join the top tier of our Patreons for a shout out on the show.
Speaker: Because we need your support.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Help us Chapter six Chapter six The didact knows this figure in white He realizes That he's at the remains Of the domain And the figure is Haruspis Which is an intermediary For the domain Kind of like a priest slash engineer Yeah It's a very He's kind of a shrimpy guy Yeah
Speaker: Yeah, that's the thing I find interesting is that so the forerunners, there's a lot of stuff in the forerunner like mythology or lore about their mutations that they undergo over the course of their life.
Speaker: And one of the things that about the herispis is that they are like, oh, natural.
Speaker: Like, yeah, they actually don't undergo.
Speaker: They're basically pure original.
Speaker: uncut forerunner.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uncircumcised forerunner.
Speaker: Uncircumcised forerunner.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, like the didact, for example, is a giant.
Speaker: He's, he's, he's a, he's enormous.
Speaker: And, and this guy is a, he's a little guy.
Speaker: He's just a little guy.
Speaker: He's just a little guy.
Speaker: A little guy.
Speaker: A little guy.
Speaker: But he's very smart, so he makes up for it, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we talk about how the fact that Harispos, that particular cast and warrior servants are basically polar opposites and have never really gotten along because they truly don't get what the other one brings to the table.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: He touches him to see if he's real, which I found to be kind of hilarious.
Speaker: Let me see.
Speaker: And on this page, Harispos, he explains their state.
Speaker: Senses, reactions, feelings, all those remembered and inherent things you once experienced as a physical entity are embedded in your pattern and still very much an aspect of your current iteration.
Speaker: In this space, we are beings with the same internal framework, interacting within the same plane of existence.
Speaker: Therefore, all language is the same, and we exhibit what you would call realness to each other and everything else around us.
Speaker: It is why the ground is solid beneath your feet, why the air moves in and out of your lungs, and so on.
Speaker: Puts us on the physical, put us on the physical plane, however, and we would seem not but mere shadows, if that.
Speaker: So he gives him an idea of the liminal state that he's currently in.
Speaker: You feel these things because you remember these things, essentially.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's all a matter of...
Speaker: your consciousness from the real world being projected because otherwise you wouldn't be able to deal with it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: You're not ready for that shit.
Speaker: You're not ready to see the matrix man.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, no, no one's ready for it.
Speaker: Especially not you.
Speaker: The Didact finds that the domain itself is far from healed.
Speaker: It is still dealing with a lot of damage that's been done to it by the Halo.
Speaker: And the Herespis admits that the Spire itself is a recent occurrence.
Speaker: No one's really sure why, but maybe the Didact's arrival has something to do with it.
Speaker: He says that the Didact needs to stay there, possibly till the end of time.
Speaker: He kind of throws that in at the end.
Speaker: He's like, maybe forever.
Speaker: Maybe forever.
Speaker: You might have to be here forever.
Speaker: And that's not, no, the Didact Inc flying, that's not what he was doing.
Speaker: So he asks about, are there other people on this plane?
Speaker: And the Herusmus kind of correctly says, are you thinking about building an army?
Speaker: And, uh, had, had the dynamics like, yeah, like, what do you think?
Speaker: That's what I do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he notices a void off in the distance and the Harispus offers him a closer look.
Speaker: And that cuts to chapter seven.
Speaker: As they approach that void, it shifts and the Didac recognizes it as the domain.
Speaker: Harispus warns that the interior is an inescapable void.
Speaker: And not the domain.
Speaker: So if you go in there, there's nothingness and you're never coming out ever again.
Speaker: So if you actually want to go into the domain, the real domain, you need a gateway.
Speaker: We get a moment, I thought this was funny, where the didact sees his reflection in the void and for the first time fully appreciates that he looks like fucking shit.
Speaker: He is emaciated.
Speaker: One of his tusks are broken.
Speaker: He is a shadow of his former self.
Speaker: He notices that the void doesn't really affect the Harispos, so one of the funniest scenes...
Speaker: in this entire series of books, uh, occurs where the didact grabs the Haraspas and tries to use him, um, to gain entrance.
Speaker: Like it, like the, like, like the old, the old piggyback rule.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Uh, uh, and, uh, and they both get kicked out and, uh, and then instead of going, oh, that's weird.
Speaker: Why did that happen?
Speaker: He literally, he just grabs him and does it again.
Speaker: he just keeps doing it just keeps doing it and uh it's so funny and uh and and then as if in response to all of this fucking three stooges shit uh a gigantic uh portal appears and an enormous construct a war that looks like a warrior servant uh exits the portal and basically tells the didact to piss off
Speaker: Like knock it off, buddy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What are you fucking doing?
Speaker: This is not for you, man.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: This is the Warden Eternal.
Speaker: And he basically looks unstoppable.
Speaker: So what do you think the Didac does?
Speaker: But he tries to sneak in behind.
Speaker: Try the Warden Eternal.
Speaker: Yeah, Bugs Bunny style.
Speaker: Thinks this is going to get worse.
Speaker: And the Warden Eternal grabs him and throws him.
Speaker: And when I say he throws him, he throws him several kilometers across the desert.
Speaker: This is like the Incredible Hulk throwing you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He sails so far across the desert that he passes the desert and into a valley where he hits everything hard.
Speaker: Like the sand would have at least been kind of soft.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But he hits boulders and stones and shit.
Speaker: You know that episode of The Simpsons when Homer Simpson tries to jump the gorge and he hits literally everything?
Speaker: That's the didact right now.
Speaker: Not only he got thrown so far, he got thrown beyond the desert that he started in.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: He is worse than when he started.
Speaker: He is further away now.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: It's brilliant.
Speaker: It's so funny.
Speaker: And chapter eight opens with him just kind of laying there like Loki after he'd been slammed into the ground by the Hulk and just kind of like contemplating revenge.
Speaker: That is what a stubborn son of a bitch we're dealing with.
Speaker: He has been thrown several kilometers.
Speaker: He can't get up.
Speaker: He is almost crippled.
Speaker: He's lucky to be alive, and he's thinking, I'm going to kick that guy's ass.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: The only reason he's still alive is because he can't die because he's in an afterlife, so to speak.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: So he has himself a nice little sleep, sleep, coma, whatever, and wakes up at dawn and sees ghostly figures off in the distance and realizes he figures these are probably the other living, the other figures that live there that the Herespis mentioned.
Speaker: Because he had asked, you know, are other people here?
Speaker: And he's like, oh, yeah, there are a lot of people here.
Speaker: And so he follows them to a basin and it's full of forerunners.
Speaker: They're all forerunners.
Speaker: They're in some kind of limbo and he feels just terrible.
Speaker: He just hates it.
Speaker: He sees how far we've fallen basically.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: He heads to some boulders to make camp and someone starts throwing rocks at him and mocking him.
Speaker: Which is great.
Speaker: Somebody, somebody, it's, it's, it's like very the brownies in Willow, you know, it's like, I stole the daikini, you know, like it's, it's,
Speaker: Speaker 0 0 0
Speaker: Just, just, yeah.
Speaker: Kudo doesn't fucking care.
Speaker: It's great.
Speaker: It's just, and he's, and he's just, and he's just so confused because no one treats him this way.
Speaker: Like he doesn't know.
Speaker: He doesn't even know how to properly react to this.
Speaker: Perish the thought.
Speaker: Until,
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: So finally he, he, he finds this, this, uh, hidden off area, uh, finds this figure and it is the confirmer, uh, who, uh, basically sold him out, uh, uh, to the master builder.
Speaker: Uh, so he calls him a traitor, uh, and the confirmer calls him ugly, uh, which is a nice touch.
Speaker: It's a good touch.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a good touch.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Chapter nine opens.
Speaker: The confirmer is he realizes completely cracked his time there.
Speaker: He seems more corporeal corporeal than the other ghostly figures.
Speaker: He wonders kind of if his madness is is what's keeping him a little more physically there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He gives him some some good punches just just because he wants to.
Speaker: But it doesn't really suck some in the gut one time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It doesn't really, it, it, it's, they're both just shadows of themselves.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And, but he's still, the didact still finds himself relieved to find another forerunner there.
Speaker: And in that, with that relief, the confirmer starts to actually show regret.
Speaker: Cause at first he was like, yeah, I did what I had to do.
Speaker: Then he starts to feel some regret for selling him out.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Their conversation draws more forerunners.
Speaker: One he even recognizes as the grammarian, maybe more on him later.
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: And the didact explains to all of them, because they do not know, they ask about the Forerunner civilization, what's going on out in the world.
Speaker: And he explains to them that this civilization's over.
Speaker: There's no more.
Speaker: They're either completely dead, and the last of them left the galaxy a long time ago.
Speaker: Possibly including his clone?
Speaker: His sexy little clone.
Speaker: His wife is dead.
Speaker: He knows that.
Speaker: He knows his wife is dead.
Speaker: His clone peaced out and left the galaxy.
Speaker: Just, you know, Thanos style.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So got a farm somewhere.
Speaker: Got a farm somewhere.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The Didact in response asks them about the Warden Eternal and it's confirmed that guy is not
Speaker: stoppable he is unstoppable yeah yeah um don't fuck around with that guy no yeah don't don't bother big robot man with void powers and he yeah he just threw you to kilometers you know learn your lesson please uh yeah
Speaker: So, uh, but the Confirmer does tell him that a rift had recently opened with humans camping around it.
Speaker: Uh, and, uh, which is, which is nuts, uh, just, and kind of disgusts and, uh, angers, uh, the didact.
Speaker: Uh, and then he also suggests that it's possible that the didact's wife, uh, might be around, that she might be around there somewhere in that afterlife.
Speaker: Didact searches the valley.
Speaker: He searches the valley for her, can't find her.
Speaker: Finally gets back to the desert and he sees the rift in question, but avoids it.
Speaker: Just nothing good happening there at this point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So instead he makes his way back to...
Speaker: the domain and the warden and just kind of sits and is just waiting for an opportunity to attempt to get past the warden again.
Speaker: And he sees that the warden is kind of observing some small figure in the sand and he looks closer and realizes it is Cortana.
Speaker: Fucking Cortana is there.
Speaker: Cortana.
Speaker: So, and that's the end of chapter nine, chapter 10.
Speaker: opens with the warden essentially denying her entry.
Speaker: It's a pretty good spiel.
Speaker: It's a good bit.
Speaker: She's just like, come on, let me in.
Speaker: Yeah, she is, even when Cortana's the bad guy, she's pure Cortana.
Speaker: She says, aren't you bored here?
Speaker: Cortana was asking the warden.
Speaker: Manning this gate year after year, century after century, you were made for more than this.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: She's trying to get.
Speaker: Join my side.
Speaker: You know, I'm doing things out in the real world.
Speaker: I could use a guy like you.
Speaker: She's trying to give this giant construct being his bell moment from Beauty and the Beast.
Speaker: Like, there must be more than this provincial life.
Speaker: It's great.
Speaker: And the warden's not taking it.
Speaker: He's trying to hit her, but he can't land a blow because she is a halfling with like a plus 20 dexterity bonus or something.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Didact is watching this and the Herispus joins him.
Speaker: And he's kind of worried about why Cortana would want in the domain anyway.
Speaker: He's not thrilled about that fact.
Speaker: He tells the Didact that his wife is in fact in this plane and she is in the domain, but not sure about the clone who cucked him.
Speaker: The clone who cucked me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: They see a blue light cutting through the void that's been surrounding the domain, and the didact is finally able to push through to the other side.
Speaker: His fucking Larry Curley and Moe bullshit shtick actually works.
Speaker: Well, it works because Cortana is distracting.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like, the warden is off fucking around trying to catch Cortana, which...
Speaker: dude, Cortana is just a literal holographic projection.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: She will end as an AI with infinite reflexes.
Speaker: She will, you will not catch her, but the warden keeps trying.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He's like, he's like a cat with a laser pointer.
Speaker: It's just, it's the end.
Speaker: It never ends.
Speaker: And maybe he is bored.
Speaker: Maybe that's the side.
Speaker: He's like, he is really fucking bored.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: so he makes it inside the domain.
Speaker: It is desolate.
Speaker: Uh, another victim of the halo.
Speaker: Um, he demands access to different parts of the domain.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, and before the Harispos can kind of like deny it for him or, or, uh,
Speaker: or confirm it for him, he is pulled forward by a great force.
Speaker: A strange hollow pop rang through his ears, and the sensation of movement came to an abrupt halt.
Speaker: There was no color, no sound, no sensations of any kind, just the absence of everything except the sound of his own illusory breathing.
Speaker: And then, slowly, another world was painted into being around them,
Speaker: And that is the end of chapter 10 and our section today.
Speaker: It's a good spot to leave off too.
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's a part of me that kind of wanted to end it with Cortana, but not enough.
Speaker: As I read more, I was like, okay, yeah, not enough happens with her just yet to make that a proper cliffhanger.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's an awesome little bit there where it's like,
Speaker: he gets pulled into another plane of existence right at the end.
Speaker: Cause the Herosimus is trying to tell him like, listen, buddy, it's not my decision to make.
Speaker: And now that they're actually in there, the Harispos is like, I have lost control.
Speaker: I don't know what's happening.
Speaker: He is starting to panic.
Speaker: You feel kind of bad for him.
Speaker: He's like, this situation has gone above and beyond where I thought it would go.
Speaker: And then they get pulled into a painting, basically.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What is this?
Speaker: Is this basically Halo, What Dreams May Come?
Speaker: A little bit, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, yeah.
Speaker: It's this weird hidden from the eyes of God kind of section that they're in.
Speaker: But yeah, it's, yeah, that's pretty much it.
Speaker: And I don't think, like I said before, I don't think we've ever, there's never been a Halo book.
Speaker: I do not believe that
Speaker: focuses so much on this one section.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that it's, and based on that and based on how she did it with the Rubicon protocol, I mean, Kelly Gay's really good at that, at taking like a kind of a, a less traveled place in that universe and, and making it really interesting and valid.
Speaker: I mean, this is, this is, I, I, what do you think so far?
Speaker: I'm having a terrific time.
Speaker: I'm hooked.
Speaker: I want to find out more.
Speaker: I think it's really fascinating that this is the first Halo book that we've read.
Speaker: Actually, no, I take that back.
Speaker: It's the second Halo book that we've read that, no, I untake it back.
Speaker: This is the first time that we've had that so far through 10 chapters, we've had a strict point of view with one character.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I don't think that's ever happened.
Speaker: We are ride or die with just this guy.
Speaker: Even in the book that The Flood jumped around to a few points of view from...
Speaker: for some other characters.
Speaker: So I think that's, that's, it's really interesting.
Speaker: And, and, and that's based on Halo one and in Halo one, you play as Master Chief the entire time, but in the adaptation, the flood, there's stuff that's not, there's non Master Chief stuff.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: It's yeah, it's, it's yeah.
Speaker: I think you're right.
Speaker: I think this is the only, at least the only time we've ever read anything like it.
Speaker: It's the only, it's the only one we've read.
Speaker: There might be others out there.
Speaker: I mean, there's a thousand halo books.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: So it might, we're going to read all of them.
Speaker: So we're going to get through all of them.
Speaker: Don't worry.
Speaker: We're working on it.
Speaker: We're working.
Speaker: But yeah, I'm really liking it so far.
Speaker: Same here.
Speaker: And I think it's, it's really painting it.
Speaker: I like the, and what's amazing about,
Speaker: Kelly's writing is that you get... I was able to kind of get caught up with, all right, well, there's this guy, this didact, this is the shit he did, and this is the situation he's in.
Speaker: With that, I never played Halo 4, you know?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: I agree.
Speaker: I think it's impressive because...
Speaker: I'm taking the notes on this.
Speaker: And so when some, something would come up that I wouldn't necessarily recognize, uh, there wasn't a single time that that happened, that I went and got some context for it, that she didn't end up explaining it.
Speaker: Uh, and not necessarily in a hammer over the head kind of way.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Uh, it's just, it's, it's well crafted.
Speaker: It's, it's just, this is a good book.
Speaker: This is a good book.
Speaker: Good book.
Speaker: Hey there, Ripley.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, having said all of that, Kevin, I have one last question for you, my friend.
Speaker: What are you playing?
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: I wasn't expecting that.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I'm putting you on the spot as always.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So what am I playing?
Speaker: I have been playing a lot of Persona 5 Royal.
Speaker: Lovely.
Speaker: The game.
Speaker: I got it.
Speaker: I got Persona 5 Royal when it came out in.
Speaker: So Persona 5 was like 2016.
Speaker: I want to say the Royal version came out in like 2018.
Speaker: I might be wrong.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But I got it when it came out.
Speaker: I was like, I haven't played any Persona games.
Speaker: The style looks kind of neat.
Speaker: I like the music.
Speaker: Let's give it a shot.
Speaker: I played a little bit and I was at my computer when I played it and just didn't really click with me.
Speaker: So years go by and I just kind of like polished off a bunch of games.
Speaker: I'm actually playing a few right now for...
Speaker: for some new bullet time episodes that are gonna be coming up this year.
Speaker: So, you know, look out for that, but I've been playing a bunch and I've beaten a bunch and I had beaten a few big games on my own list that, and I was kind of like looking for something else to play and I didn't.
Speaker: So I saw Persona 5 Royal sitting there.
Speaker: It's like, oh, I'll give it another shot.
Speaker: Fired it up, started playing and now it is totally clicked.
Speaker: The key difference is I'm playing it on my Steam Deck.
Speaker: Ah, yeah.
Speaker: And something about the Persona 5 or Persona 5R, it just really, it's really good as a handheld game.
Speaker: It's really good as a game that you can just sit, you know, you have the TV on, you got some home renovation show up on, it's, you know, nine o'clock at night, you're just trying to wind down, you got Persona playing, it's good.
Speaker: And there's a lot of neat things about it that make it good for somebody like me who I'll be playing and be like, all right, yeah, yeah, hurry.
Speaker: I want to get through this.
Speaker: And sometimes there'll be these bits where your character's just talking back and forth and I'll be like, yeah, I get the gist and you can hit a button and you just fast forward to the rest of the scene.
Speaker: Yes, which was not, as I recall, in the original version of it, which I played on PS4, I had to sit through like an hour and a half of goddamn anime exposition, and it's a miracle I did it.
Speaker: Did you beat Persona 5?
Speaker: No, I put an obscene amount of time into it, but that's how big that game is.
Speaker: Yeah, I've actually been fiddling with it on my Switch lately, too.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Did you have the original or the or Royal on your switch?
Speaker: Royal Royal.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I've got, I've got the original on my PlayStation four, but it was on sale or something.
Speaker: And you know, with all the moves and stuff going on, I was like, maybe that would be a good thing to switch while I'm getting packed and stuff like that.
Speaker: And I can confirm that it is a pretty terrific thing to have on a handheld.
Speaker: Yeah, agreed.
Speaker: And I think it's something that I'll probably, at this point now that they have completed the re-releases of the, basically of the Persona game, the only three Persona games people ever talk about, which is 3, 4, and 5.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, as of this recording, it was like a month ago that Persona 3 Reloaded came out.
Speaker: And last year they did Persona 4, or two years ago they did Persona 4 Golden Releases.
Speaker: which is like the royal version of 4 and all that.
Speaker: So I think I'm going to get into that.
Speaker: I'll probably play the other two Persona 5 games first.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I know there's another, there's Strikers and there's a Tactics Persona 5 game.
Speaker: I never played any of the other Personas, but I think the good thing about it is they are all kind of
Speaker: self-contained stories and that sort of thing.
Speaker: Yeah, they all have, it's a same, kind of like the same hook with like the masks and all that stuff or the personas and the, but yeah, they're all their, it's their own, they're their own deal, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, that's been something I've been playing.
Speaker: What else have I been playing?
Speaker: So we have our upcoming episodes for Bullet Time.
Speaker: And I'm not going to get too much into them on this show just because there'll be plenty to talk about.
Speaker: There'll be plenty to talk about on Bullet Time.
Speaker: But I have played High on Life.
Speaker: Ah, okay.
Speaker: Interesting game.
Speaker: I have a lot of thoughts about that.
Speaker: I have been playing Atomic Heart.
Speaker: I have also been playing, what have I been, what else have I played?
Speaker: Is that your first time playing Atomic Heart, by the way?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay, that's interesting.
Speaker: I don't know why I had it in my head.
Speaker: Well, I know why I had it in my head that you had already played that, but I'm surprised.
Speaker: I mean, it's a Bioshock-y game, but instead of Under the Sea, you're in kind of like a communist utopia that gets overrun by robots.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It just struck me as something you would enjoy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It has like real moments of gold and then real moments of this could have been baked a little bit longer.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I think I've heard basically that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's good to know.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: We also are going to be, we got scorn coming up.
Speaker: Oh, shit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Had a lot of.
Speaker: Oh, boy.
Speaker: Oh, buddy.
Speaker: Tune into that episode.
Speaker: Listen to my thoughts on scorn.
Speaker: I got.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I got a. I got a. I got so much.
Speaker: I got bags of thoughts on scorn.
Speaker: Mostly very angry.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I remember that one.
Speaker: I remember I wanted to play that one.
Speaker: And normally, even if you don't like a game or if, you know, I'll still give it a shot.
Speaker: And your visceral reaction to that game was such that I was like, oh, maybe I really ought to.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Maybe not.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And hey, if you love Scorn and you're annoyed at me for not liking it, well, guess what?
Speaker: Go listen to the episode of Bullet Time that I will be on discussing it.
Speaker: And then you can hear my full unadulterated thoughts there because...
Speaker: It's going to be a thing.
Speaker: Also, Redfall, which I have not.
Speaker: I've dabbled a little bit in it.
Speaker: I need to play more of it for the show, but Redfall is interesting.
Speaker: It's made by Arcane, and when you start it up, it feels like, oh, this feels like an Arcane game.
Speaker: I mean, they're one of your babies.
Speaker: Yeah, they're one of my big ones.
Speaker: And then you start to keep playing it, and you're like,
Speaker: This feels like at some point in an executive was like, make it a live services game.
Speaker: Yeah, really?
Speaker: That happened?
Speaker: Yeah, wild how that happens in this day and age.
Speaker: In this economy.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: But the next game I'll talk about at length is, because that's not for bullet time, is a game that I've become recently obsessed with.
Speaker: As of yesterday, by the time this episode comes out, the game will be available for purchase.
Speaker: I've been playing the demo that was released during Steam Next Fest.
Speaker: It is a game called Balatro.
Speaker: B-A-L-A-T-R-O.
Speaker: It is a poker roguelike game.
Speaker: Oh, oh, you have my attention.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What you're doing is you're playing basically, you're playing against a bet, right?
Speaker: So let's say the first round is the small blind and it's, you have to win 300 chips and each hand that you can play.
Speaker: So two pair, three of a kinds, um,
Speaker: It h as a number of chips that it earns by default and a multiplier.
Speaker: So let's say two of a kind, a pair is 20 chips times two, right?
Speaker: So if you play that, you'll get at least 40 chips.
Speaker: And then on top of that, let's say it's a pair of tens.
Speaker: So each 10 is plus 10 chips.
Speaker: So it becomes 40 times two and you get 80 chips, right?
Speaker: Okay, okay.
Speaker: So that's kind of like the gist is like you're, and the higher, the better hand you have as you go up, like three of a kind, flush, straight flush, royal flush, et cetera, the higher the chips, the deep, the chips and the multiplier is.
Speaker: So you earn more money.
Speaker: Okay, yeah.
Speaker: The twist is during the course of your run, you'll have times where you can take the money that you earn
Speaker: from winning against the small and big blinds.
Speaker: And you can go into a shop and you can buy jokers.
Speaker: And the jokers add little abilities to your hand.
Speaker: So some jokers will say for every diamond that you have in your hand, that is scored in your hand, you get a multiplier of plus two.
Speaker: So your multiplier goes up
Speaker: you know, uh, say you have two diamonds, it goes plus two, plus two.
Speaker: Um, so then your multiplier is like time six or whatever.
Speaker: And then there's ones where there's a, there's one that that's like a joker misprint and it keeps like glitching out and it changes the multiplier that it has every like two seconds.
Speaker: So what it like when you hit play is, is what you get.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: that's so weird and i really want to play this that sounds so go download the demo go download and once we get off the call go download the demo also okay so there's jokers that's those are like your permanent status effects right okay sure then you have your consumable cards and you know what the consumable cards are based on what tarot
Speaker: Oh, that's funny.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So you will have, you have the two, two consumable slots and you'll have a, you'll have a tarot card that says, uh, turn three cards into hearts.
Speaker: So if you're trying to get like a flush or something like that, uh, or you need a flush for something, you can be like, all right, I'm going to select these cards, use my consumable tarot card that turns them into hearts.
Speaker: And now I have a flush and I can play a flush.
Speaker: I can't believe it's taken so long for this to be developed.
Speaker: I feel like this should have been done a while back.
Speaker: This is crazy.
Speaker: This sounds like a lot of fun.
Speaker: Are you looking at it?
Speaker: Are you looking at the... Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, it's... The game's a vibe, man.
Speaker: That is so funny.
Speaker: The art and the... I'm seeing all the different jokers here.
Speaker: This is crazy.
Speaker: There's so many different Jokers.
Speaker: Yeah, it's great.
Speaker: So I implore you, get the demo, and then on February 20th, which is...
Speaker: the day before this episode comes out.
Speaker: Go out there, get Bellatro, support indie developers, especially in a time when the games industry is not in a great space.
Speaker: No, yeah.
Speaker: Get all the indie games you can.
Speaker: That's all there is to it.
Speaker: I think that's honestly kind of the moral of bullet time in a way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Support indie games every chance you get.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: So, Phil, that's what I've been playing.
Speaker: What have you been playing?
Speaker: Well, the most important and time-consuming game that I've been playing in the past few months is called Move Your Home, Cat's Wife and Newborn Son 400 Miles Away, 3000.
Speaker: There is no platform for it.
Speaker: It is a handheld game, but not very convenient.
Speaker: And that one's the main thing I've been doing.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: I have also, I have been playing some games.
Speaker: I tore through the first act of Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader, finally, because you're insufferable and you gifted me that game.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And it is, it's pretty terrific.
Speaker: I will say, I'm enjoying the story.
Speaker: I'm enjoying the universe.
Speaker: I like the system.
Speaker: Having said all that, at this point, I really need to, after about 20 hours of that, I started to realize I was like, I think I need games just for now that are a little more disposable.
Speaker: I was like, I can't do Baldur's Gate 3 with a newborn child and a new job and a move.
Speaker: I just can't.
Speaker: So I've been loving that and I'm absolutely going to return to it.
Speaker: But the game that I probably racked up even more hours on with that is a game called Luck Be A Landlord.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Have you heard of this?
Speaker: I have not.
Speaker: It's so appropriate that you bring up Bellatro.
Speaker: because Luck Be a Landlord is very similar.
Speaker: It is also a roguelike gambling sim, but it is slots.
Speaker: It's super lo-fi.
Speaker: You can get it on your, you can get it, I think you can get it on Steam, but I got it on my phone for about five bucks.
Speaker: And you are a tenant and your l andlord is a tenant.
Speaker: has given you a place, not given you, but you're living in this place and it has a slot machine in it and you are playing the slots to pay the landlord back and the amount of rent you owe changes.
Speaker: And every turn is, every pull of the slot is a day.
Speaker: Uh, so if the, you owe the landlord 50 bucks in seven days, so you need to earn that 50 bucks, uh, through the slots and every turn you get, uh, to add another symbol to the slot machine.
Speaker: And every now and then you get to add, uh, items that function similar to what you're talking about.
Speaker: I think with jokers, where it's like, there's a big, uh, uh, change and different, uh, different, uh, uh, symbols, uh,
Speaker: react differently to each other.
Speaker: Like, for example, if you get a milk and a cat next to each other, the cat consumes the milk and you get bonuses.
Speaker: It's actually very addictive.
Speaker: There are 20 floors.
Speaker: I beat it all the way up to the 20th floor.
Speaker: And and I think and it is a deeply anti-capitalist game and very funny.
Speaker: It's not even subtle about it either.
Speaker: Everything from, you know, just between rounds, you interact with like this underground group that like gives you bonuses and stuff to help you fight back against that capitalist pig, your landlord.
Speaker: And also too, like one of the symbols you can get is a billionaire.
Speaker: And the billionaire does not give you any money, but it increases the value of wine and cheese that it happens to land next to.
Speaker: So itself, it is not worth anything, but it can increase the value of those.
Speaker: But you can get an item called the guillotine that will automatically consume all billionaires and give you money in exchange for them.
Speaker: It's amazing.
Speaker: It's so warped and silly and it's just really easy to play a round or two of it in five or ten minutes.
Speaker: And I think I still, I put 20 hours or so into Rogue Trader.
Speaker: I'm pretty sure I put more into Luck Be a Landlord.
Speaker: It is a super fun game.
Speaker: It's really funny.
Speaker: It's absolutely worth a play.
Speaker: Um...
Speaker: I've also been playing now this will be gone by the time I this episode goes up, but I'm going to bring it up for a specific reason.
Speaker: I've been playing the challenge of the month on Civ 6.
Speaker: Civilization 6 is they've been doing these challenges that are limited time scenarios that last roughly a month.
Speaker: And they're very specific.
Speaker: It's kind of similar to what they've been doing where you have different modes and isn't just building up civilization.
Speaker: And these are kind of limited time things.
Speaker: And this one was called Robot Revolution.
Speaker: And you play Canada.
Speaker: And you are in a desolate wasteland with a bunch of other people, other civilizations and giant killer death robots roam the countryside and you have to build up a civilization in this shitty world.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: And you can't really fight back against them.
Speaker: The best you can do is kind of defend yourself.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But one of the big goals is to have as many hockey rinks as possible, it seems, because it's just a great way to get your culture up there and to beat everybody.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: And that's a fun game for me to play, because like when I'm unloading boxes and stuff like that, I can like do a turn and then go and unload some shit from a box and come back and do a turn.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's been really good for that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's basically, let me see.
Speaker: Yeah, that's basically been it.
Speaker: I tucked a little bit into Persona 5 myself on my Switch.
Speaker: I think I need to get back to that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because that's just, it was really fun on the handheld.
Speaker: There's something really satisfying about that game.
Speaker: Yeah, and that will last you forever.
Speaker: Especially when you're like, and it's also not that bad for short stints, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's really not.
Speaker: it does it does a pretty good job especially when if you're doing a palace it's basically yeah your your main goal if you're if you only have a little time to play is get save room to save room you know yeah that's pretty much it and that's and that's all you need to do and yeah that that that that's a game that'll last you for the rest of your damn life on a handheld so there's like a hundred goddamn hours of play in that thing um so I really do need to get back into that one but that's that's been me so awesome that's my games
Speaker: That's been Phil, and that'll be the episode.
Speaker: So thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Speaker: You can follow us on Twitter.
Speaker: You can follow us on Instagram.
Speaker: In fact, I'm really recommending Instagram right now because we're going to have so much content on Instagram for you to visually feast your eyes on.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So go ahead, do that.
Speaker: Also follow us on Blue Sky at Pixelit Pod.
Speaker: Just put it in there.
Speaker: You'll find us.
Speaker: Best places to find us.
Speaker: And with that, just have a lovely good night, everybody.
Speaker: I'm so happy I'm back.
Speaker: Yay!
