Transcript
Speaker: This requires a steady hand and you're that hand, my friend.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know what else is a steady hand?
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back to Pixelate.
Speaker: My name is Kevin.
Speaker: With me as always is Phil.
Speaker: And on today's show, oh boy, here it is.
Speaker: Here we go.
Speaker: We're reviewing Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kervitz.
Speaker: Nice timing on the pop there.
Speaker: It's the time.
Speaker: What are you drinking?
Speaker: I'm going to reach out to these guys to see if they'll sponsor us.
Speaker: This is my favorite alcoholic seltzer of all time.
Speaker: Happy Dad.
Speaker: Happy Dad.
Speaker: I adore it.
Speaker: It's really good and it has ruined me for other hard seltzers.
Speaker: Which one would think wouldn't be that difficult.
Speaker: But I really like them.
Speaker: They're delicious.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: It looks like just looking at it from here, it kind of has like 1980s Budweiser vibes to the can.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: One of their big things is they say no more skinny cans.
Speaker: They don't want to do the skinny can thing anymore.
Speaker: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker: Skinny cans are played out.
Speaker: Come on, guys.
Speaker: Give us something...
Speaker: Give it something.
Speaker: I want to give it some oomph, some oomph.
Speaker: And it's very good.
Speaker: I got my spin drift.
Speaker: Maybe my camera will focus on that.
Speaker: Spin drift is one of my wife's favorites.
Speaker: She is a big fan of that stuff.
Speaker: It's good.
Speaker: It's good stuff.
Speaker: I mean, the difference between zero calories and four calories is wild.
Speaker: Wild.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: In terms of flavor.
Speaker: And in terms of actual juice in it as opposed to whatever else they use in these damn things.
Speaker: Real squeezed fruit.
Speaker: But yeah, it's sacred and terrible air.
Speaker: So this book, for those of you who don't know, is the...
Speaker: A book that was written by author Robert Kervitz before Disco Elysium.
Speaker: He wrote it in 2013, and it was based on a tabletop role-playing game setting that he had made with his friends in the mid-2000s, so like 2005 time period.
Speaker: Did you ever find out, is there any note of like what game they would play in this universe?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: There was a note on Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is not the best source for it, but it's just that it was based on Dungeons & Dragons, so I guess they just overhauled D&D.
Speaker: But to me, it feels like this setting would work better in a...
Speaker: There's a number of other systems that would probably have played this setting.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Really well.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Even, even cyberpunk or you could, you could overhaul shadow run some, you know, things like that I think would probably even, even,
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: It's very talky, so I would say Vampire the Masquerade.
Speaker: Yeah, a World of Darkness game would probably fit in this pretty well.
Speaker: A World of Darkness game, just take the vampires out and just make them regular people.
Speaker: Just make them pee.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: Yeah, you're good.
Speaker: You're good.
Speaker: And who knows, they might have just been making it up as they went along, which is what me and my friends did.
Speaker: That's the real joy of TTRPGs, is just making shit up as you go along.
Speaker: It's awesome.
Speaker: Get a bag of Doritos.
Speaker: Hell yeah.
Speaker: A bunch of Fanta.
Speaker: And just let your imaginations run wild.
Speaker: Imagination.
Speaker: With depression and Soviet block style aesthetics.
Speaker: Depression, drugs.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So just overall content warning for this series.
Speaker: Oh, boy.
Speaker: We'll mention it before every episode.
Speaker: heavy.
Speaker: There's a lot of... Okay, so let's just call it sexual assault.
Speaker: There's that.
Speaker: There is mentions of pedophilia.
Speaker: There is going to be mentions of...
Speaker: just gore and violence, whether real or imagined, it's there.
Speaker: Overall on we depression, nihilism.
Speaker: If any of these things are things you don't want to don't want to, you know, hang out with, I'm fine, you know, with you skipping this this series because it's a bleak one.
Speaker: It's a bleak one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's the content warning for the series.
Speaker: And I'll mention it in front of every episode just to keep you guys out there listening.
Speaker: You know, that you are up for what you signed up for.
Speaker: So continue just talking about Robert Kerwitz a little bit more.
Speaker: He writes this book.
Speaker: He only ever sells a thousand copies of it.
Speaker: And then he falls into a depression and alcoholism for three years.
Speaker: And him, he gets out of depression and him and his friend call Kender.
Speaker: Kender is the one who gives him the idea of like, hey, maybe this world that came from a TTRPG might be better suited for a video game instead of
Speaker: a book.
Speaker: And so they begin work on what is then called No Truths with the Furies eventually becomes retitled to Disco Elysium.
Speaker: Elysium being the name of the world, the name of the setting.
Speaker: And then three years later, the game's released to critical acclaim, uh, 20 in 2019 and 2020, the final cut version of the game is released, which, uh, basically takes the game and voice, voice lines are added to every, every line in the game.
Speaker: It's like the definitive version of the game.
Speaker: And then beyond that, everything for the collective, the artist collective and company known as Zaum completely
Speaker: falls apart.
Speaker: Capitalism is going to capitalism.
Speaker: All the creators end up unceremoniously.
Speaker: That's Robert Kervitz, Martin Rostov.
Speaker: I should have written all their names down.
Speaker: and several others are unceremoniously booted from the company.
Speaker: There's a lot of back and forth.
Speaker: There's been ongoing court cases.
Speaker: A lot of the court cases were settled, were thrown, either settled or thrown out last year, but I think Kervitz has said he's
Speaker: going to keep continuing to push because it's his IP.
Speaker: The company didn't own it.
Speaker: And also there was some weird stuff with the sale of the company to the to the holding company that eventually owns it.
Speaker: There is some shenanigans.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: And it's just, you know, the blistering irony that a game, well, the game itself has a lot of nihilism in it, but it has a lot of optimism.
Speaker: But the setting itself is very nihilistic.
Speaker: Oh, God, yes.
Speaker: And very communist or socialist, you know, anarchist.
Speaker: And it all falls apart because the company that they founded got too capitalist.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: Got two capital.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that's just the beauty of just literally just just delightful.
Speaker: Of course, this is a lot of set levels.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: This is rain on your wedding day right here.
Speaker: Big time, big time, big time.
Speaker: Blackfly Chardonnay, death row pardon.
Speaker: Two minutes too late.
Speaker: Etc.
Speaker: Etc.
Speaker: And dating Dave Coulier.
Speaker: And dating Dave Coulier.
Speaker: It's all very ironic.
Speaker: I mean, honestly, that is no truce with the Furies right there.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: That's it, baby.
Speaker: Dave Coulier.
Speaker: Cut.
Speaker: Cut it out.
Speaker: Something about him always struck me as weird.
Speaker: I'm not going to get too far into it, but, you know, Dave Coulier.
Speaker: He's an odd guy, but I will say I saw an interview with him not long ago where they asked him, like, have you ever talked to Alanis Morissette since then?
Speaker: If he goes, yeah, like we had dinner and she was really nice to me and
Speaker: I, you know, apologized and she apologized and I think we're good.
Speaker: Like it's apparently she's just like forgiven, forgotten with him, which I don't know if you follow her musical track since then, that's not too huge of a surprise.
Speaker: She didn't.
Speaker: She only had so much fury in her.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All that.
Speaker: All that cool.
Speaker: Yay juice kind of evaporated.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's just she needed that.
Speaker: She just needed a.
Speaker: it out that one time and then she's good.
Speaker: Then she's good.
Speaker: No need to hold that grudge.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So one of the things I want to talk about before we get into the book is that there's going to be references to something called the Pale, which is a very fascinating, in a TTRPG video game setting is fascinating.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's a so the world of Elysium is all of these all of these land masses.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And some of the land masses, a few of the land masses are archipelagos and some of them are just big continents, but they're all land masses and they're connected by this.
Speaker: tissue, connective tissue called the pale.
Speaker: And what is the pale, you might ask?
Speaker: Well, I know I asked that.
Speaker: That's tough to really explain.
Speaker: It's basically entropy.
Speaker: It's like
Speaker: But that's almost too simple of an answer.
Speaker: It's like entropy, things, once the pale is in an area, that area is basically functionally does not exist anymore.
Speaker: It is, how do you measure nothingness?
Speaker: Well, you can only measure nothingness by what is around it.
Speaker: And that is basically what the pale is.
Speaker: In the setting, the pale is where physics and mathematics goes to die.
Speaker: Nothing makes sense anymore once it is in the pale.
Speaker: This is a bit of a part.
Speaker: This is a part of Disco Elysium.
Speaker: Not to spoil too much of Disco Elysium.
Speaker: There's a part in toward, I would say, the middle act of the game, towards the end of the middle act of the game.
Speaker: where you're kind of split off onto a side investigation where you're trying to figure out something that is going on with the pale in a church across the river from where you start the game.
Speaker: So what is it?
Speaker: It's this mass
Speaker: of nothingness that ties all the continents of the world together.
Speaker: And it is expanding at an unknown rate.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like what I could take from it when I started to get my head around it was because the amount of space it takes up on the world is eerily similar to the amount of space that the oceans take up on our current planet.
Speaker: So it's this kind of strange...
Speaker: It's like a cross between the oceans and the warp.
Speaker: If I can bring in 40K one more time.
Speaker: You may bring in 40K.
Speaker: It is basically an oceanic warp.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's just nothing.
Speaker: And they had expeditions into it to like see what the fuck it was.
Speaker: And like, what was it like nine expeditions and only the last one came back alive and sane.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's it's just yeah, everything falls apart.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Everything falls apart in the pail.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And some of the times when they talk about like trains and mag labs, it's like, how do they get from continent to continent?
Speaker: Well, they just have to launch something in like over top of the pale.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it'll just keep going until it hits the air space above another plane.
Speaker: continent and then it just kind of like start like physics turns on again and it starts landing right hey my watch is working again sweet sweet all right we must be out of there okay well where the hell are we i have no idea no idea uh but here's where we're starting the story in chapter one
Speaker: We start in Charlotte's Y'all.
Speaker: And this is one of those chapters that feels... There's a lot of elements to this story that feels like... Stand By Me.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I was thinking It, but yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That nostalgic... It's almost like a Stephen King-ish...
Speaker: look back to the point at which everything changed.
Speaker: And that's kind of what chapter one is, right?
Speaker: So the first chapter sets the tone in the central mystery of the story, the disappearance of the four Lund girls at the vacation town of Charlotte's Y'all.
Speaker: And the way this captured the imagination of the country and the surrounding areas.
Speaker: And this is despite other places in the world having events like this weekly.
Speaker: The disappearance of the Lund Girls was considered the end of an era, basically an end to like this age of innocence and social progressivism.
Speaker: Um...
Speaker: The details of the case are as follows.
Speaker: The youngest girl is Madge, and she is four.
Speaker: The other three girls are Annie Ellen.
Speaker: She is 12.
Speaker: Malin is 13.
Speaker: And Charlotte is 14.
Speaker: They were seen at 9.30 in the morning getting on the tram in Lovisa.
Speaker: by the tram driver whose name is Roland, who even 20 years after the events of that day still talks about his part in it from the retirement home.
Speaker: Like his one little brush with greatness is being tangentially involved in the disappearance of these four girls in this mystery.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He's been telling this story over and over forever.
Speaker: For 20 years.
Speaker: They arrived at the beach at Charlottesville at 1025.
Speaker: I think it's Mullen.
Speaker: Mullen and Annie Ellen go to the ice cream parlor to buy some ice cream.
Speaker: The worker there, Agatha, later testifies that there was a man with them, but is never quite sure if that's the actual truth.
Speaker: And then we cut to a living room.
Speaker: where there's three boys anxiously discussing calling the Lund girls, even though it's, quote, too early to call.
Speaker: One of them, a chubby Ilmiron boy, who we will later know as Iniek Khan, one of our main characters, believes there's something wrong, though.
Speaker: They call and there's no answer and light fades from the windows.
Speaker: And that's chapter one.
Speaker: It's it's just real.
Speaker: It's a real quick hit tone setter.
Speaker: Like, here's what this book is about.
Speaker: It's it was it's such a funny introduction to this because I never finished Disco Elysium.
Speaker: I actually mentioned on the show I got about five or six hours into it.
Speaker: I really did enjoy it.
Speaker: And then something happened that, like, fried my save game.
Speaker: And I would have basically had to start over from the beginning.
Speaker: And I had this moment of.
Speaker: I can't.
Speaker: I can't.
Speaker: I just can't.
Speaker: It's too tense.
Speaker: I can't do it right now.
Speaker: I'll have to come back to you later.
Speaker: But what I do know of it, I was not expecting our intro to this world to, yeah, be this weird virgin suicide nostalgia, like, man, those are the girls.
Speaker: Those were the days, like kind of thing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's so funny.
Speaker: It's such a funny introduction to this whole thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, totally.
Speaker: I it's it's almost like a.
Speaker: It's like a Dateline special or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, a little bit.
Speaker: Or like the beginning of like a, it's like the first five minutes of the new season of Serial.
Speaker: Like, you know what I mean?
Speaker: It's like breaking down the mystery.
Speaker: And then they throw in a little hook at the end of that first chapter.
Speaker: But what if?
Speaker: But what if?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: So chapter two, titled Class Reunion.
Speaker: It's 20 years later, and Iniyat Khan is having a discussion with his mother about whether he should go to his class reunion.
Speaker: His mother tells him it would be great to see his friends, Therese and Jesper, while Khan is worried about the fact that his suit doesn't fit and he looks like a fat idiot.
Speaker: Khan daydreams of Malin Lund for a moment as he arrives to the reunion.
Speaker: Another former classmate of his, a woman wearing a pantsuit, arrives at the same time.
Speaker: And I love the description of her as something like, she's like, a woman in pantsuit is wearing a pantsuit or something like that.
Speaker: Right, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Con tries to break the awkwardness by showing her a pen with a disappearing photo in it.
Speaker: So it took me a little bit to figure out what he was doing.
Speaker: So it's like one of those pens where if you like... The nudie pen.
Speaker: It's like the nudie pen.
Speaker: But in this case, it's a photo of a guy.
Speaker: And there's a very real world reference to this.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So the picture of it is like one of these like communist leaders that...
Speaker: And in one way, he tilts the pen.
Speaker: You can see one of the commissars standing next to him.
Speaker: And if you tilt the pen the other way, the commissar disappears.
Speaker: So this is a reference to a photo of Stalin standing on.
Speaker: He's like standing on the bow of a ship.
Speaker: And there's like a couple people next to him.
Speaker: And there's like in the original photo, it's like four people.
Speaker: And then there's like an edited version where it's like three people.
Speaker: two people or something like that yeah like slowly one by one they were early old school photoshopped exactly existence yeah and so it's just fucking Stalin so so Khan who is just who is probably my favorite boy in this in this story I was just gonna say he's my favorite in the book he's just this he's just this chubby dude who just doesn't know how to interact with anybody really he's just awkward
Speaker: He's just standing there with this woman in pantsuit.
Speaker: And he's like, look, commissar.
Speaker: No, commissar.
Speaker: Commissar.
Speaker: No, commissar.
Speaker: That's his that's his version of breaking the ice.
Speaker: And it's it's kind of fucking adorable.
Speaker: It really is.
Speaker: So Khan looks sadly looks on at the gathering of his former classmates.
Speaker: Jesper and Therese are nowhere in sight.
Speaker: We get a scene introducing Jesper as an adult.
Speaker: He is a world famous designer.
Speaker: We get a scene introducing Jesper as an adult.
Speaker: So this is like a flashback now within within the series of events.
Speaker: He was a world famous designer in his 20s and he lived high off of nose candy and partying at the time.
Speaker: And now he's just a bit of a drunk and he calls a taxi.
Speaker: Everyone likes their speed in this world.
Speaker: Everyone loves their speed.
Speaker: They love their speed.
Speaker: Meanwhile, Therese is now a member of the International Collaboration of Police or ICP.
Speaker: How do magnets work anyway?
Speaker: Fucking who fucking knows.
Speaker: That's an insane clown posse reference for those of you keeping score at home.
Speaker: Enjoy that.
Speaker: That's the only one I'm really going to be able to make.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's the only one you need to make.
Speaker: I think that's good.
Speaker: I think we covered it.
Speaker: We can just go on pretending that juggalos don't exist.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we watch as the city goes by after he gets on a train and we get some lore dump about the surrounding area.
Speaker: This world uses some sort of magnetic levitation train system in conjunction with the pale in order for long distance travel.
Speaker: Back at the reunion, Khan is lying about what he does for a living to people, saying that he's a private investigator.
Speaker: And he basically created this lie as amalgamation of what he does, which is sit in his basement and work on his toy collection and what Therese does, which is an actual missing persons cop.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The woman in the pantsuit realizes that he's still looking for the Lund girls and says that it's kind of sad and goes on about how it's sad.
Speaker: Khan then tells her to go fuck herself and storms off.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because why not?
Speaker: You know, he gets our fat boy gets a little, you know, he's he's upset, you know, he gets a little pissed.
Speaker: I think he's entitled.
Speaker: I think that's fine.
Speaker: Yeah, you go off, Khan.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're sweet, chubby king.
Speaker: You're just pinching your cheeks.
Speaker: They... Listen, Robert Kervitz, there are some things about his writing that are kind of...
Speaker: not great.
Speaker: Uh, yeah.
Speaker: In terms of how, like, he's not very, he, he has some, some fat phobic tendencies with how he talks about, especially con.
Speaker: Um, so like, I don't want to lean into it too much.
Speaker: Uh, but con is our chubby King.
Speaker: So let's, let's, we, and we support him and we love him.
Speaker: That's what's important.
Speaker: And we love him.
Speaker: Um, yeah.
Speaker: Like after reading this, I was like, and, uh,
Speaker: this side note is like Robert Kervitz is kind of like, there's some reports out there that he's just, he's really a massive asshole.
Speaker: Like Zahoum is like, Oh, we fired him because he was harassing employees.
Speaker: And I'm like, well,
Speaker: Maybe he was an asshole, but also he was, you probably didn't have cause to fire him because he owns the IP.
Speaker: So there's like, there's like some balancing there that needs to be like reading this, just the way Kervitz writes about certain things.
Speaker: I could get the sense that
Speaker: You could kind of get some sense of of how he views certain things.
Speaker: Yeah, there's there's a level of I had I had I had a problem initially because I just didn't like him based on the first like chapter or two.
Speaker: I just because I was kind of torn.
Speaker: It was a Quentin Tarantino kind of thing.
Speaker: where it's like, I just, I got a feeling I wouldn't like you.
Speaker: I got a feeling we wouldn't get along.
Speaker: I wouldn't want to hang out with you.
Speaker: Despite the fact that we clearly agree on a lot of stuff.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: You just seem kind of up your own ass about it.
Speaker: On the other hand, he writes characters wrongly.
Speaker: really well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so I wouldn't be surprised if he's a pain in the ass or, you know, none of that would surprise me.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But that but it is it is.
Speaker: That's good writing.
Speaker: You can't can't can't distract from that.
Speaker: No, exactly.
Speaker: So Jesper arrives at the reunion while looking at the name badges.
Speaker: By the way, I don't know if I'm pronouncing these names specifically right.
Speaker: I know Khan and that's basically it.
Speaker: Khan!
Speaker: What choice do you have?
Speaker: So he's looking at the name badges and his stomach goes into a knot knowing that the Loon girls won't be there when he looks at the row of girls.
Speaker: And he thinks back to when he became famous eight years ago.
Speaker: And even then he was distracted by their disappearance and playing with a scrunchie that belonged to one of the girls.
Speaker: That he had taken from a pile of their stuff.
Speaker: He snaps back to the present and wonders where Khan and Teresa are.
Speaker: We flash back 20 years ago, and this is kind of the difficulty with reading the book is that it's changing timelines a lot.
Speaker: So we flashback 20 years ago to a playground fight between Khan and a boy named Sven von Fiersen, where von Fiersen is making fun of Khan for saying that he kissed Malen Lund before a full on brawl breaks out.
Speaker: But before a full on brawl breaks out, Jesper breaks it up.
Speaker: So Jesper and Khan finally see each other.
Speaker: Jesper apologizes to Khan as they shake hands for something that Jesper did eight years ago at the height of his fame.
Speaker: And we'll get more on that later.
Speaker: Khan and Jesper leave the class reunion together while Khan shows him the disappearing Commissar pen thing again.
Speaker: Again.
Speaker: He's like, Commissar, no Commissar.
Speaker: You rule, Khan.
Speaker: Never change.
Speaker: Love you, Khan.
Speaker: Don't do anything.
Speaker: Anything different.
Speaker: You're good.
Speaker: Therese meets them outside and he asks Jesper if he apologized.
Speaker: And Khan mentions that Jesper did.
Speaker: They decide not to return at the class reunion as it isn't cool.
Speaker: And they go to find a new place in the city.
Speaker: We flashback eight years ago.
Speaker: We get a flashback to a time when Jesper was partying up while listening to music from Vasa, which is another like it's another locale in the world by a person named Fackengaff, an Oranje's immigrant and music producer.
Speaker: In present day, they are in Vasa while in a taxi, while Therese thinks about the time gone by.
Speaker: Khan and Therese badger Jesper while they're driving about the hair tie and scrunchie.
Speaker: And Jesper is like, no, I don't have it.
Speaker: And then he's like, fine, here it is.
Speaker: And he takes out this black ring box and he shows it to them.
Speaker: We jump back to that same party eight years ago while Jesper is coming down from his high and he wants everybody to leave his place because and the music is too loud.
Speaker: So he can't get her and finally gets everybody out and he ends up having to search the trash for the scrunchie because somebody threw it out.
Speaker: Back in present day, Khan remarks that the scent of the scrunchie is gone and that there is something very wrong with that.
Speaker: And the scrunchie belonged to one of the Lund girls, as it were.
Speaker: Chapter three is so every once in a while we get a chapter that does not have anything to do with the story is literally just a historical piece about the.
Speaker: the world.
Speaker: And this chapter three is the first of them and it's called non entity.
Speaker: And it's about how the Roman Roman garage conference defines 10 different types of missing persons and missing person.
Speaker: Number nine is called a non entity and that their person is not only missing, but their existence is no longer recognized as having been in the first place.
Speaker: They are a non-entity.
Speaker: And they exist.
Speaker: And this is because a violent state has decided to wipe them from existence.
Speaker: The person's not missing.
Speaker: Their existence is no longer recognized.
Speaker: The chapter gives a quick lesson to the rise and disastrous fall of communism in the world of Elysium, which involved several people becoming non-entities.
Speaker: And this is the thing that is referred to in the edited photo of the commissar disappearing.
Speaker: The chapter details a bunch of Mazovian followers and Mazov is kind of like the Lenin.
Speaker: He's like a combination of the Lenin and Marx of the Elysium world.
Speaker: Mazovian followers meeting untimely ends and the attempts to cover up their existence.
Speaker: But part of the thematic element of the book that ties into this is that memories and the existence of people are
Speaker: are difficult to erase even with the intention to erase them.
Speaker: Like, yeah, like they, the, that they existed still bubbles up, uh, even with the weight of a entire government body trying to erase them from existence.
Speaker: Uh, chapter four,
Speaker: It's titled Vidkun Herd.
Speaker: Khan, Therese, and Jesper are sitting in Cafe Kino in a soundproof booth.
Speaker: The cafe was designed by a student of Jesper's.
Speaker: And it looks like basically there's all these booths in the cafe.
Speaker: And it's, you know, you can kind of like go in and have a private conversation.
Speaker: And there's a there's a projection screen.
Speaker: Jesper tells them what he has found.
Speaker: And a friend of a friend is a documentary filmmaker who is producing a film about a man named Vidken Hurd.
Speaker: And the other two are like, fuck, no, we already know not Vidken Hurd.
Speaker: So absolutely not.
Speaker: Absolutely not.
Speaker: Vidken Hurd is basically a known like rapist and pedophile.
Speaker: who has been arrested, who was active around the time that the Lund girls went missing, but he couldn't be the guy for the Lund girls because he was 600 miles away or something like that.
Speaker: There's no way.
Speaker: There is a convenient option, but probably not.
Speaker: He's convenient as the guy, but there's too much.
Speaker: He has too strong of an alibi.
Speaker: They know where he was at that time.
Speaker: Um, Jesper says that documentary filmmaker got some information out of him though, and puts on the reel.
Speaker: And we go into an interview with Vidkun Hurd, who talks mostly about the history of his people in a very racist way and how other races are degenerate to his.
Speaker: Uh, Hurd also talks about how his people came to the land they ultimately lived on by riding dog sleds through the pale and only the strongest made it through.
Speaker: And as he's talking, he's drawing something on a piece of paper.
Speaker: And then he says, a rare creature, the middle one of them, a unique treasure.
Speaker: We cut out of the interview and back into the cafe and Jesper shows the two what the paper is.
Speaker: And it looks like a constellation of dozens of dots.
Speaker: And Khan is horrified.
Speaker: And Therese makes a note in his notebooks.
Speaker: We cut, we go to a flashback of 20 years ago.
Speaker: The boys are walking through the woods towards the beach.
Speaker: Khan is talking about the differentiation between bodies of water, while Jesper and Therese compare cigarettes.
Speaker: They get to an overlook and begin using a pair of binoculars to look at people on the beach, specifically Annie Ellen Lund, as she sunbathes.
Speaker: On her back is a constellation of birthmarks that go from above her butt to her shoulder blade.
Speaker: And we cut to present day.
Speaker: The vibe is very cold now in the little booth.
Speaker: And Khan begins freaking out about how Vidkun Hurd knew about her birthmark pattern on her back.
Speaker: They talk about how it's called a control fact, something that is left out of official documentation so that only a few people would actually know about it.
Speaker: And Khan and Jesper are pressuring Therese to do something about this.
Speaker: Therese mentions that things are really bad right now in the ICP.
Speaker: It's not a good time to begin digging up old cases, but he's going to Kronstadt tomorrow, which is where Vink and Hurd is being held.
Speaker: And then Jesper daydreams about finding the girls and being thanked that they were all being looked for for all this time.
Speaker: And I have to say that this is where I started to kind of... At first, I was kind of rolling my eyes as I read this, because there are a lot of big ideas in this book, which is no great surprise to anyone who's played Disco Elysium for even a minute.
Speaker: A lot of big ideas.
Speaker: And to me, I told Kevin at one point, I was like, well, no wonder this...
Speaker: was a video game, you know, because it's just he's all over the place.
Speaker: It's so so many different ideas and that kind of thing.
Speaker: And the funny thing is, is this chapter right here when he talks about seeing the freckles on her back and everything like that, that was when it turned for me.
Speaker: And I was like, fuck, that's exactly how that feels.
Speaker: I remember that summer.
Speaker: I you had that summer.
Speaker: I had that summer.
Speaker: If you're lucky, most of you had that summer where there was some girl
Speaker: maybe a group of girls or something that were just totally out of your league and you doggedly pursued them anyway and tried to impress them.
Speaker: And it was just part of that.
Speaker: It just captured something very universal and good.
Speaker: Like you said, a very kind of stand by me sort of way.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: The flashbacks, the flashbacks are basically like the sandlot.
Speaker: Yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah, there's a lot of that.
Speaker: There's a lot of that.
Speaker: Good natured sexism.
Speaker: You know, it's yeah.
Speaker: And this and this is honestly where I started to turn where it's like,
Speaker: that's good writing.
Speaker: Like that's just, that's just, that's really very real.
Speaker: And I don't know how he is.
Speaker: What's most impressive.
Speaker: I think about this book in general is how he's able to balance that kind of weird childhood, nostalgia stuff with a speculative fiction detective novel.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's so weird that he's able to combine all those genres and it actually works.
Speaker: And what's the, and what's the, the other genre this would be is like fan fan.
Speaker: fantasy realism or something like that.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, like, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: What do you call it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I forget.
Speaker: Fantastic realism or something like that.
Speaker: Because it's like, it's ish present day ish.
Speaker: It's got fantastical elements sort of kind of,
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's yeah.
Speaker: That's I, when it comes to that, I just, I just throw speculative on it.
Speaker: It's all speculative.
Speaker: It's it's weird.
Speaker: It's fucking weird.
Speaker: They got void oceans.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But that's the thing.
Speaker: It could have just been a very effective, you know, tale of nostalgia.
Speaker: It could have been just a very effective detective story.
Speaker: It could have been just a very effective speculative world.
Speaker: And he managed to combine all three and it's,
Speaker: Kind of uncanny.
Speaker: It's bizarre.
Speaker: You don't, you don't see that a lot.
Speaker: So yeah, it doesn't always work, but when it works, fuck, it's really good.
Speaker: And that was the turning point for me.
Speaker: And you know, what's, what's amazing is you might think I've had a lot of story beats to read out so far.
Speaker: This is like 25 pages into the book.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's what I mean when I say this is dense shit.
Speaker: This is dense.
Speaker: I got about 15 minutes into reading this book and I was like, oh, I'm glad Kevin took the lead on this one.
Speaker: Oh, boy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A lot of work.
Speaker: A lot of work.
Speaker: So we start chapter five, which is titled Zaum.
Speaker: 20 years ago, the girls on the beach noticed the glint of the binoculars off in the distance and
Speaker: and can see the boys as Malin flashes an evil grin in their direction.
Speaker: The boys try to dive to the ground and be like, ah, they see us, and they try to hide, but it's too late.
Speaker: The girls already saw them.
Speaker: Khan gets off the ground and checks on them, and the girls now have a pair of binoculars.
Speaker: Like, this is such an amazing little moment where Khan peeks his head up, and one of the girls is now holding a pair of binoculars up to look at them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Therese decides to do something drastic.
Speaker: He stands up and waves to the girls shouting hello to them.
Speaker: And then he jumps off the cliff down to the sand from four stories in the air.
Speaker: This is this and they cut it here.
Speaker: Like they, we, isn't this, don't they like cut to another?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We cut to present day.
Speaker: It's like, it's like he's about to do a goddamn superhero fucking landing.
Speaker: And they're like, all right, but, but present day.
Speaker: It's like, no, did he die?
Speaker: How did that work?
Speaker: It's truly crazy.
Speaker: It's truly crazy.
Speaker: Present day, Therese is making his way into Vasa on his way to Kronstadt, where he is going to see Vidkenherd.
Speaker: He is on a ferry and the waves are tossing him about as he thinks about how, to most people, he could easily be mistaken as someone from Grodd.
Speaker: So Grodd is kind of like the big superpower of the world-ish.
Speaker: at this time.
Speaker: He is not from Grodd.
Speaker: He's from an area that Grodd took over and people refer to him as a Kyoko, which at one point was like a slur for his people and they just took on as a mantle of pride.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: We have no examples of that in our country, so let's move on.
Speaker: No, we'll move on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, Therese also reminisces about how he took a, he one time took a train trip, uh, through the pale just to hang out in Charlotte's y'all two years ago, but he didn't tell, uh, Jasper or Khan because they were still arguing over quote, the restaurant thing.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: The but the police psychologist banned him from more pale travel that year for taking that trip.
Speaker: We cut back to 20 years ago.
Speaker: Therese clearly landed safely because Khan also ends up jumping off the cliff.
Speaker: And but Jesper decides not to take the risk and takes the long way down, which takes the better part of a half hour.
Speaker: When he gets down, the girls are nowhere to be seen, but he tracks them by scent.
Speaker: Which.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: Well, there's the thing is you find out that his mother is a perfumer.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So he's like very he's he's very knowledgeable about perfume and things like that.
Speaker: And they have a lovely day together.
Speaker: Not going to get on until the beats of the day, but it's like it.
Speaker: But it is.
Speaker: It's such a it's it's a summer loving kind of like scene.
Speaker: It's fucking great.
Speaker: It's adorable.
Speaker: It's wistful.
Speaker: I really enjoyed it.
Speaker: It really has the vibes of any cute moments or, hey, these kids are having a good time.
Speaker: Look at those young love, all that shit.
Speaker: It's very cute.
Speaker: It's very cute.
Speaker: Meanwhile, someone only known as the linoleum salesman is watching them.
Speaker: Oh, fucking linoleum salesman.
Speaker: which God damn it.
Speaker: Linoleum salesman is like, it's, it's just the most unnerving title he could have chosen for a villain for, for who is probably the most unnerving character in this, maybe in the entire series of books we've ever read.
Speaker: I is a, what an upsetting fucking character, what an upsetting character, the linoleum salesman.
Speaker: Um, so, uh,
Speaker: Present day, Therese is arguing with the guard to let him talk to Vidkun.
Speaker: The guard leaves and Vidkun begins shouting his racist nonsense.
Speaker: Therese begins pressuring him about the drawing and Vidkun is like not back.
Speaker: He's not going to give him anything.
Speaker: Um, so he's making a lot of noise and the guard begins rattling the door to try to come back into the room.
Speaker: Um, and Therese at this point, like jams the lock and is like, listen, you know, I have a right to be in here.
Speaker: Uh, and, and he, Therese opens the, the, his briefcase to reveal the Za'um, um,
Speaker: which is, you know, there's some descriptions here and there.
Speaker: It's kind of tough to like, it was kind of tough to visualize, but it, this is basically, it's like a truth serum machine, but also what's the thing from Blade Runner?
Speaker: Oh, oh, oh fuck.
Speaker: What is that called?
Speaker: I have to find that out now.
Speaker: The test from Blade Runner.
Speaker: Voight-Kampff test mixed with a truth serum machine mixed with like, I don't know, some other types of horrifying fucking steampunk drug stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's just nasty business.
Speaker: The guard continues to rattle at the door and Therese shouts at the guard.
Speaker: He has a right to be there and he better stop fucking with the door.
Speaker: What follows seems to be an acid trip, and I'm not sure what's real.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But basically, Therese injects... He puts a cuff on himself, and he puts a cuff on Vidkun and injects him with stuff, like yellow, this sickly yellow fluid, and eventually it...
Speaker: breaks his blood brain barrier and to raise this where he's like shouting about he's fucking him or something like that or i i i'm not sure he might be he might be chatting that yeah he also yeah he's saying some horrible shit to him he's saying some horrible shit and he also i and this is the thing i don't know if this actually happens
Speaker: It says he cracks Vidkun's head open.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Vidkun is trying to catch parts of his brain as they fall down to the floor with his hands, but they're too slippery.
Speaker: Now, I don't know if that actually happened or if that is just what Vidkin is seeing.
Speaker: Like, is he scarecrowing him?
Speaker: Is this the Batman villain scarecrow doing this?
Speaker: That's what I assumed.
Speaker: That's what I assumed based on the machine that they talk about.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But in the following chapter, we'll find out.
Speaker: Yeah, I'll just so basically he gets into Vidkun's head to find out what's going on.
Speaker: And then we cut basically from that to later Therese being standing on the ship of a police boat with handcuffed.
Speaker: And he's saying to himself that he solved the mystery of the Lund girls disappearance.
Speaker: How'd you do that?
Speaker: Nevermind.
Speaker: Nevermind.
Speaker: Chapter six.
Speaker: Chapter six is called Frantichek the brave, which is another one.
Speaker: It's like kind of like chapter three.
Speaker: It begins with a hit, a lesson on how progress is built on the history of failure.
Speaker: And it talks about an opera singer, like how some things are better to not know.
Speaker: Like, yeah,
Speaker: this story about and how an opera singer sings the concert of her life.
Speaker: She goes out and she disappears and how probably a bit better if people had just never found her, but instead they find her bloated corpse, uh, dashed on some rocks and her rip, her dress was all torn up.
Speaker: And she's just like the lasting image of her is this like bloated dead being rather than just mysteriously disappearing.
Speaker: Um, yeah.
Speaker: And it talks about how Mazov, the Lenin Marx of this world, killed himself.
Speaker: Now, things that he wanted for the world ultimately fell apart at the feet of Grodd, a country that has expanded like a tumor.
Speaker: And
Speaker: we hear about the story of a Koiko's revolutionary named Frantichek the Brave, who was someone who scared Grodd militiamen because he seemingly seemed like he could be anywhere.
Speaker: He was like the boogeyman, right?
Speaker: And this kind of like loops back around to the sometimes things are better left unknown.
Speaker: He was a hero that couldn't be stopped.
Speaker: And then one day it's discovered he had just been shot and killed behind a waste facility.
Speaker: Like the idea of his...
Speaker: even if he disappeared, his legend as a man and as a hero would be stronger than if they're like, oh, there he is.
Speaker: He's dead in a 7-Eleven parking lot.
Speaker: Those final moments can mar the legend.
Speaker: Yeah, it's... Real Batman level stuff.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Chapter seven is titled, The World is Going Wrong, Time is Out of Joint.
Speaker: And we start with Khan getting ready for his day.
Speaker: He lives in the basement of his mother's house and he's surrounded by toys, trinkets, doodads, models that all come alive in the morning while Khan sings and dances to a song and he looks over all of his stuff.
Speaker: And amongst the piles of stuff includes letters from Malin, which are sent after she was kidnapped and had a 95% match for her handwriting.
Speaker: But he's always like held on to them as they seem something seemed weird about them.
Speaker: Khan's mom calls downstairs to tell him that his friend is here and to brush his teeth.
Speaker: I love the little detail.
Speaker: Like his mom, his mom is amazing.
Speaker: She gets like only a few pages in this entire book, but she's hysterical.
Speaker: Well, that's what I mean.
Speaker: He writes characters so well.
Speaker: Even this mom character who we barely see is just she's memorable and funny and good.
Speaker: I I'm impressed by this guy's chops.
Speaker: It sees he's a good damn writer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We got to two years ago.
Speaker: We see Khan on a date at a restaurant and he's having trouble focusing because he believes everybody is talking shit about how he looks while he's sitting there.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Been there, buddy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Date comments on the restaurant and Khan mentions how it was his friend who actually designed it.
Speaker: And he talks, he's like, oh, yeah, my friend Jesper, he's the best, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: And the girl is like, oh, I've heard of him.
Speaker: And she like looks over behind Khan and he like turns around and there's Jesper and he's meeting with his friend, Conrad Gessel.
Speaker: And Conrad Gessel is the guy, I forgot to mention it.
Speaker: He's the documentary filmmaker that was interviewing Vidkun Hurd in the earlier scene.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Khan makes a big scene of it being like, Yes, for it's your buddy, Khan.
Speaker: Hey, you got me the reservation.
Speaker: And yes, for is like, I don't know this guy.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: So, yeah, I don't know her.
Speaker: And now we know what the restaurant thing was about.
Speaker: Finally.
Speaker: Finally.
Speaker: Why they were fighting.
Speaker: We jump back to 20 years ago with the girls and the boys, the Lund girls and the boys are hanging out on the cliff that they had been at earlier.
Speaker: Jesper is obsessed with Ani in a somewhat...
Speaker: not great way, uh, the book seemingly hints at, um, we continue this scene of them hanging out in deep descriptions of how the, of how the, of the girls, uh, like there's,
Speaker: It could be a little uncomfortable to read.
Speaker: There's a lot of like descriptions of like how they look.
Speaker: And remember, these are like 13 year old girls, right?
Speaker: Yeah, I was of two minds about it.
Speaker: On one hand, it was like this is through the eyes of these boys who are smitten and all that shit.
Speaker: So a lot of it makes sense.
Speaker: But and they are age appropriate for.
Speaker: it, but I am 41 and uncomfortable now.
Speaker: So yeah, it was tough.
Speaker: It's tough.
Speaker: But still, you know, it's more of the, hey, things were good.
Speaker: Weren't they back then?
Speaker: So Khan is also doing his thing where he talks.
Speaker: He's like basically a walking encyclopedia and he's talking about a bunch of stuff.
Speaker: And he starts telling the story of an emperor who sent his fleet off into the world to find peaches that would make anyone that ate them immortal.
Speaker: We cut to present Therese is released from jail and given his clothes back.
Speaker: And his memories are all kind of jumbled up as a result of using the Zaum on Vidkenherd.
Speaker: He's also, and this is the thing that leads me to believe maybe not all of it was fake because he's covered in Vidkenherd's blood.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's the thing.
Speaker: That's just it.
Speaker: There's enough of it that like, well, how maybe he wasn't literally grabbing pieces of his brain, but some shit went down.
Speaker: Some shit went down in there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then meanwhile, we cut to the aftermath of the restaurant scene from two years ago.
Speaker: Khan comes home from his date and he makes a call to someone and he's looking for the instruction manual to his Harnan Kaur model airship.
Speaker: Present day, Khan is showing Jesper his collection of model things that have disappeared.
Speaker: So basically all of his models are of things that famously disappeared.
Speaker: Like they just vanished off the face of the earth.
Speaker: Like the story of the fleet that disappeared looking for the peaches or this airship called the Harnan Corps that disappeared.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so he shows Jesper the Harnon core and he's like, look at this thing.
Speaker: They're marveling at the model.
Speaker: And it's something that could it was something that could pass through the pale.
Speaker: And they sit.
Speaker: So they sit down and they're just looking at it, talking about whatever Therese must be doing now.
Speaker: And they wonder what Vidkun might have told them.
Speaker: Jesper gives Khan a present, but hides his charity under the cover of one of his, oh yeah, one of my female friends gave it to me and they totally forgot what size I am.
Speaker: Here you go, buddy.
Speaker: Because Khan only owns one shirt.
Speaker: It's such a it's such a guy thing of like how I took it as both hiding the charity like of like like I don't want to make him feel bad, but also it's such a bro thing.
Speaker: That's like it's like I didn't get you a present.
Speaker: I'm not gay.
Speaker: Like I just I just thought, you know, sure.
Speaker: She she she got me the wrong size.
Speaker: Oh, that's cool.
Speaker: No homo.
Speaker: Like it's it's right.
Speaker: I took it as both of those way.
Speaker: It's right.
Speaker: So meanwhile, Therese goes to a little convenience store.
Speaker: He asks for cigarettes.
Speaker: They don't have them.
Speaker: So he takes hard candy instead.
Speaker: And he calls Khan's house.
Speaker: There's a funny bit with Khan's house.
Speaker: Khan's mother answers and she's like, oh, Therese, you always used to listen to me.
Speaker: You should stop looking into this.
Speaker: I saw the girl's mother at the doctor the other day and you need to she can move on.
Speaker: You guys can move.
Speaker: It's just like this.
Speaker: And he's like, yes, Mrs. Khan, can you tell is any out there?
Speaker: And she's like, OK, then and any yacht is like, who is that mom?
Speaker: And she's like, OK.
Speaker: I forget the name.
Speaker: She says it's like some soup.
Speaker: It's your secret admirer.
Speaker: And it's some like supermodel name or whatever.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so then, yes, Therese.
Speaker: And Khan get on the phone with Therese.
Speaker: And he's like, all right, you guys got to meet me in a town in a town called Lovisa by an old folks home named Skyming, which houses a man named Derek Trent Mueller, who also references something called the Kexholm Circle, which the other two thought was an old wives tale.
Speaker: We then have an interlude about how people obsessed with the stories of the girls' disappearance believe that they love the girls more than their own mother did because she moved past it, which is like a biting commentary to like this like...
Speaker: this culture of like, you know, it's almost like, it's almost like perfect commentary for like true crime stuff, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's like almost a parasocial kind of commentary.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's like the family moved past it.
Speaker: So we clearly love the girls more and be like, no, they just wanted to get on with their lives.
Speaker: Well, that that ownership that people have of somebody that at least these guys knew the girls, you know, at least they actually met them, you know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, there's there's definitely a true crime vibe to it.
Speaker: They had their one summer with the girls.
Speaker: And then they were taken away, you know, like I understand it.
Speaker: I get it.
Speaker: There's just like, yeah, they have this, this, this sense of closure.
Speaker: It's not, not saying it's healthy.
Speaker: It's definitely unhealthy.
Speaker: Guys will open up a 20 year old cold case instead of going to therapy, you know?
Speaker: That's the subtitle for this book.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: What these boys really need is therapy.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Without a doubt.
Speaker: So that we have an interlude while they travel about how.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, I said that we move back to the past where Khan is finishing the story to the girls of the crew that went off to find the immortal peaches and things get flirty between the group.
Speaker: And then the girls ask what the boys are doing on Saturday.
Speaker: And the and be like, oh, we got nothing going on.
Speaker: So the girls are like, all right, well, you know, we'll find a place and we need you guys to get some cherry speed, which is some sort of amphetamine.
Speaker: They also point out that by Madge, their youngest sister, who's only four, will not be joining them.
Speaker: on this.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm all for kids, you know, enjoying drugs together, but leave the four year old at home.
Speaker: This is where it gets really it.
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This this kind of stuff.
Speaker: Madeline gives Khan the number for a kid named Ziggy who they can get the drugs from.
Speaker: Chapter eight and the last chapter we'll cover for today is titled Linoleum Salesman.
Speaker: Oh, Jesus Christ.
Speaker: This fucking guy.
Speaker: The opening of the chapter.
Speaker: And whenever he's introduced, he is it is linoleum salesman, linoleum salesman.
Speaker: The linoleum salesman is what is is the first few sentences is the first like three words.
Speaker: It's over and over again, over again.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like like Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That kind of shit.
Speaker: That kind of shit.
Speaker: The opening of the of the chapter is a bit creepy and talks about a man called the linoleum salesman who is clearly some sort of pedophile who stalks children.
Speaker: He ends up in Keck's home and meets a bunch of other quote unquote professionals that only go by names like Gardner, podiatrist, et cetera.
Speaker: We cut to the guys and they are power walking towards the old folks home while Khan struggles to keep up.
Speaker: They tell him he needs to get his heart checked out.
Speaker: Therese talks about how Derek Trentmuller was part of the Kecksholm ring and knew a lot about what certain members did.
Speaker: And he imparted that stuff to Vidkun Heard.
Speaker: Therese shares that the picture of the constellation that is Ali on her back,
Speaker: was given to her by Derek, who had been given it by the leader of the Kexholm ring.
Speaker: And the Kexholm ring is literally just this ring of vile, pedophile guys, basically, that lived in Kexholm.
Speaker: So it's likely Derek knows who took the girls.
Speaker: But the problem is, Derek is going senile.
Speaker: We cut back to the linoleum salesman's point of view.
Speaker: He was there the day that Sven von Fursten beat up Khan and then and he walks away.
Speaker: He was like watching through the fence or something like that.
Speaker: He's obsessed with the Lund girls and he realizes as he walks away, he decides that before he kills himself, he is going to have them.
Speaker: Therese, Khan, and Jesper find Derek.
Speaker: Therese begins questioning him about the drawing, and Derek claims he doesn't remember because of his memory disease.
Speaker: Things get heated.
Speaker: Therese is like, ah, fuck you up, old man.
Speaker: And then he threatens Derek with his own machine.
Speaker: He's going to like, I will scoop your memories out like ice cream.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Therese is not doing well.
Speaker: Gets real Nick Cage on him.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Face off.
Speaker: Therese.
Speaker: So then Khan intervenes and is like, let me let me try.
Speaker: Derek admits to Khan by with the softer thing that his boyfriend went by the name, the linoleum salesman.
Speaker: And the only way the Kexo and that was the only way the Kexo guys refer to themselves by their profession.
Speaker: Derek then reveals that the linoleum salesman used to watch the girls from the hotel window and have sangular.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We flashback 18 years to Derek and Vidkun in a jail cell together.
Speaker: Derek talks about how the linoleum salesman stitched the girls together to join them together.
Speaker: The smallest died, but the others lived.
Speaker: Ugh.
Speaker: We get another interstitial scene of the linoleum salesman walking around Charlotte's Y'all thinking about how much he loves this beach town and how much he loves the girls.
Speaker: The guys walk out of the old folks' home to a cab, and Jesper says they can go to Telefunken and make all the calls they need, which I assume later, it seems like it's like a restaurant or something like that.
Speaker: Khan tells Therese that he is not happy that he used the Zaum on herd because he could get himself let go from the police department because it's like...
Speaker: kind of a war crime.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's used as a machine.
Speaker: It's frowned upon.
Speaker: It's frowned upon generally.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Therese tells them not to worry about it because he has it all under control.
Speaker: Spoiler alert.
Speaker: Therese does not have anything under control.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: As per his Nick Cage-ness earlier.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We cut back to 20 years ago from the liminoleum salesman's point of view.
Speaker: We are seeing the girls on the beach.
Speaker: We're seeing the scene on the beach when the boys first talked to the girls from his point of view through the spyglass.
Speaker: He had been he remembers how he had been following them around for days, inventing stories about them.
Speaker: And then he he wanks it thinking about them.
Speaker: And in his post nut clarity forgets about his persona as the linoleum salesman.
Speaker: And the way he describes this is so like it literally says that the linoleum salesman leaves him through his penis, basically with the nut.
Speaker: And and and he's a new person now, essentially, which.
Speaker: I think anyone who has understands that feeling on a certain level, but maybe not on the psychopathic level.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe not on this level.
Speaker: This is.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Much present day.
Speaker: We got to somewhere completely different.
Speaker: There's a research vessel that tracks the progression of the pale, a formless entity of entropy as it approaches.
Speaker: The research vessel basically goes into a panic mode because it's noticing the pale is starting to move at a certain clip that is uncomfortable for everybody.
Speaker: They send out an SOS and parts of Gharad are now to be labeled as zones of intimate, intimate,
Speaker: entroponetic catastrophe.
Speaker: And the book says the class reunion was two nights ago.
Speaker: Now it's the end of the world.
Speaker: The guys are at a restaurant while Therese is on the phone talking with the secretary of the Hav Sanglar Hotel and making her read out the entire guest list from June and July in the 52nd year.
Speaker: The secretary hangs up several times, but once Therese sends a note to management that the lives of four little girls are on your hands, they begin to comply again.
Speaker: Meanwhile, Jesper is volunteering to figure out Kexholm.
Speaker: He's like, I know some people in Kexholm.
Speaker: Maybe I can go down there and figure some stuff out.
Speaker: And while he's talking, he's talking about this.
Speaker: Therese is like, wait, wait, shut the fuck up.
Speaker: Say that again.
Speaker: The secretary has mentioned Derek Trent Miller's name.
Speaker: He was there in June in the 52nd year.
Speaker: His, the reason he was there was for vacation.
Speaker: His occupation listed linoleum salesman.
Speaker: Ah.
Speaker: And when I, the first time I saw that, I was like, ah, like the little chills on my back.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They break into Derek's room at night and Therese uses the Zaum machine on him.
Speaker: He comes through all of Derek's memories, but the actual act is not there.
Speaker: The girls, he does find a memory of the girls going missing, like Derek Trump-Miller seeing a news article that the girls have gone missing.
Speaker: And he was upset that the girls have gone missing because he didn't get to take them.
Speaker: The Zaul machine takes a lot of Therese and the other two drag him away to sleep it off.
Speaker: And that's where we'll leave off for tonight's episode.
Speaker: Woof.
Speaker: Jesus Christ.
Speaker: chapter eight is a fucking ride chapter eight is is is um yeah that is a turning point it's it's it really twists the knife at that point right when you said that you were going to make sure to get through chapter and i was like i thank god we gotta end on that note that has to you can't we can't start a new episode with chapter eight we've
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: Chapter eight is, it feels, felt like, okay, well, this is the end of, you know, an act basically in the story.
Speaker: Pretty much.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because Therese is saying, I'm sorry, guys, it's a dead end.
Speaker: There's nothing else we can do.
Speaker: It's a dead end.
Speaker: And Khan is like, I might know a guy that can help.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's like there Therese as a cop has has exhausted all of his options, basically.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So what do you think so far?
Speaker: Oh, this is, this is the kind of writing that, um, this is, by the way, is the closest we're going to get to covering something like something hardcore lit wise, like blood Meridian.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: This is, this is lit lit.
Speaker: Like, uh, despite the fact that it didn't do well, you can't deny there's a level of, uh, of lit quality there that we don't, that might be absent in a lot of the, uh, Sonic hedgehog adaptations we cover.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: I think this is a valuable kind of book for people to read, especially if you're an American or someone who was on the West side of the Cold War, for example.
Speaker: The Estonian people were part of the Soviet bloc until 91, and just like any American
Speaker: part of the any tentacle of the Soviet empire, if you will, that shit did not go away lightly.
Speaker: It did not go away easily.
Speaker: And what you get from this is all, as you pointed out, Kevin, all these parallels to your Leninist character, your Stalin character.
Speaker: You've got there are some undeniable parallels to a history that and this guy's own.
Speaker: He's your age.
Speaker: I think he was born in 84.
Speaker: You're born in 84, yeah?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so that's, you know, it's not a huge amount of time to have lived under those conditions, but to have lived in it and the immediate aftermath of its dissolution, you can see how that shit doesn't really go anywhere.
Speaker: And it's...
Speaker: there's a fascinating take here.
Speaker: Uh, yeah, this is, this is, it's a very interesting world because on one hand it's super individual and super unique and interesting.
Speaker: And on the other hand, you're like, this is Soviet shit.
Speaker: Like this is, this is post post Soviet cold war fantasy, uh, kind of, kind of stuff.
Speaker: Really neat because a lot of times, I mean, there's other, uh, I feel like, what is it?
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: uh stalker i think is something uh in that vein as well um stalkers yeah roadside roadside picnic is the name is the name of the book and then there's the movie tarkovsky movie stalker but yes metro i think is also yeah um
Speaker: Metro Exodus and all those games.
Speaker: All those, yeah.
Speaker: They're all like based on it's good to experience this stuff because it kind of broadens your point of view on the way, like just the way stories are.
Speaker: Because there is a lot of, there's a heaviness to everything in this.
Speaker: Oh, pathologic.
Speaker: Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Jesus.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's that's Eastern European as fuck.
Speaker: My, my dad always told me about this.
Speaker: My dad always got a kick out of, um, when I, when I started reading animal farm in high school, my dad got really excited because he loves that shit.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And, uh, and, and he always told me he always enjoyed the bleak,
Speaker: cold sense of humor that you get from that Eastern kind of atmosphere.
Speaker: And he said, I wish I knew what story this is from.
Speaker: But the thing he always references, this story of some guy standing on a bridge, puking his guts out over the side of the bridge.
Speaker: And this other guy walks up to him and nods at him, goes, I know exactly how you feel.
Speaker: And it's just, he said, that summarizes that kind of,
Speaker: Dark, nihilistic sense.
Speaker: And I get a lot of that from this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's a lot of really interesting stuff here.
Speaker: It's bleak.
Speaker: It's dark.
Speaker: But it also has a sense of humor, which might seem odd to somebody who isn't familiar with this kind of aesthetic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it's done really well.
Speaker: I'm enjoying it.
Speaker: I really am.
Speaker: Yeah, it's and Estonia, by the way, which I didn't realize that Estonian, the language is actually Finnish.
Speaker: Yeah, that's not Finnish.
Speaker: It's Finnick as in it's not it's it's in the Finnish zone, you know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But it's not like Slavic, you know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because if you look at it, I mean, look at Estonia on the map.
Speaker: It's like, oh, yeah, it's almost touching.
Speaker: I'm actually on Visit Estonia's website and they've got a Soviet era tour.
Speaker: Ooh, that seems like something that you would you would nom up.
Speaker: I would love it.
Speaker: Four days, 22 sites, all by tour bus.
Speaker: You start at the KGB museum, make your way to, oh my God, a submarine base.
Speaker: This is bonkers.
Speaker: And you end up at the, uh, the Bamu museum of occupations and freedom.
Speaker: Uh, I need, uh, I need someone who speaks Estonian to, to, uh, take me on this trip.
Speaker: This sounds amazing.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I'm sure if you could find like a Rick Steves type of thing, uh,
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: This sounds fun.
Speaker: Yeah, I would love this kind of thing.
Speaker: So yeah, this is very different from anything we've read so far on a lot of levels.
Speaker: And I'm really glad we're finally getting to it because this is pretty outstanding stuff.
Speaker: The current president of Estonia is a molecular geneticist.
Speaker: Sick.
Speaker: It's so fucking cool.
Speaker: I don't know what I don't know what his politics are, but yeah, they elected a scientist, though.
Speaker: That's kind of amazing.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Political party.
Speaker: Independent.
Speaker: Doesn't really that's wild.
Speaker: The Wikipedia on him is like really not much there.
Speaker: That's interesting.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: With all that being said, Phil, I have a question for you.
Speaker: Yeah, hit me.
Speaker: What are you playing?
Speaker: Oh, I'm glad you asked that because I'm actually playing some interesting stuff.
Speaker: I'm of course playing the card game that shall not be named because it's a game of the year.
Speaker: It's going to be there.
Speaker: It's always going to be there.
Speaker: It is this year's.
Speaker: You put it very well last episode, I believe.
Speaker: It is this year's Vampire Survivors for us.
Speaker: It's just always going to be running in the background.
Speaker: I have been playing more of I've been actually playing a ton of on my switch lately because, you know, I've got I got the kid and we spent, you know, I don't I don't get to spend as much time with the family as much as I as I might have in the past.
Speaker: And so we'll just be sitting there watching TV or something.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because you're on my switch.
Speaker: You're working now.
Speaker: You're you're working.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I'm working, man.
Speaker: I don't work from home anymore.
Speaker: And so it's it's it makes everything different.
Speaker: And I've been playing Darkest Dungeon still, and it actually might lead to my first ever finish of that game.
Speaker: I've never finished that game because I tended to play it in like larger chunks than maybe I should have.
Speaker: And I would get frustrated and take too many chances and fuck everything up.
Speaker: And when you're doing it like
Speaker: two, maybe three dungeons, uh, in a set and then putting the switch down.
Speaker: Uh, it actually, there's a level of patience built into that, that I think is necessary for a game like this.
Speaker: So that's been enjoyable.
Speaker: And I played a couple of, uh, demos actually.
Speaker: I played, um, super Mario versus donkey Kong.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Uh, the demo for that, which is kind of just, it's, it's, it's just a, it's a puzzle game.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: It's fine.
Speaker: It's okay.
Speaker: But I also played a demo for, this surprised the fuck out of me how much I enjoyed this, Princess Peach Showtime.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Have you seen this?
Speaker: I heard about it.
Speaker: I haven't watched anything about it, though.
Speaker: It's just it's a side scrolling.
Speaker: As far as I can tell, two button Mario style game.
Speaker: You play Princess Peach.
Speaker: You go for a night at the theater.
Speaker: And this theater is like a multiplex.
Speaker: It's got a billion different stages and stuff going on.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: A witch casts a spell on the place.
Speaker: You gotta kick some ass and each, you gotta go into these different plays and in each, and so everything, you're on a stage and has a big theatrical cardboard set up and every one of them has a different costume you can take.
Speaker: Like you become a swashbuckler and the different powers that come from it.
Speaker: And it's very simple.
Speaker: very straightforward, is not a challenging game.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But that's exactly what I need right now.
Speaker: And it's fun.
Speaker: It's really cute.
Speaker: The soundtrack is nice.
Speaker: And I haven't played like a modern Mario game in a very, very long time.
Speaker: Yeah, honestly, same here.
Speaker: The first Mario game I had played in like eons was I played a little bit of Odyssey.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And then stopped playing it because I was like, it was cute.
Speaker: And then, but it wasn't like, I need to come back and play more of it, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which is, it's fair.
Speaker: I think that's just me.
Speaker: The mascot platformer, so to speak, type of game, the 3D platformer.
Speaker: I honestly haven't played them since 1996.
Speaker: Exactly, same, absolutely.
Speaker: No, that's exactly how I feel.
Speaker: The last time I played a game like this, we were measuring systems in bits still.
Speaker: And so I'm behind.
Speaker: And so people who have been following, it might be unimpressive for other people maybe, because it is very simple.
Speaker: It brings to mind the idea that people have talked about with Nintendo, that they're not really a video game developer as much as a toy maker.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: It's simple.
Speaker: It has it has your challenges and your little collect-a-thon thingies like they do.
Speaker: And I just there's something about it that really charms the shit out of me.
Speaker: And I'm really enjoying it.
Speaker: I described it to my wife and she was like, I'm going to play this.
Speaker: This sounds really fun.
Speaker: And it is.
Speaker: It's really simple.
Speaker: It's very straightforward.
Speaker: It's cute.
Speaker: It's adorable.
Speaker: That's what I need right now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's, it's something straightforward and cute.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Aside from, aside from, you know, uh, jokers, um, right.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Jokers and, and, and, and five of a kind flushes and all that shit.
Speaker: Um, I, uh, and I, and I did start playing, um, oh man, I'm so pissed that I can never get this name right.
Speaker: Uh, Pacific, I can't, I want to say Pacific Rim and I'm wrong.
Speaker: Pacific Drive.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Pacific Drive.
Speaker: I have not played enough of it to make a strong opinion on it yet, but the very, very little amount I've played, I can already tell I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it just because of the way it feels.
Speaker: It feels so good.
Speaker: The aesthetic is really nice.
Speaker: There's something that makes me think about Firewatch a little bit.
Speaker: A little cartoony, but still very beautiful.
Speaker: No, I could see that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I have barely gotten into that, but I can tell that that one is going to be something I'm going to want to really sink my teeth into.
Speaker: So that's that's what I've been doing.
Speaker: Kevin, what have you been playing?
Speaker: Well, in concert with the book that we're reading, I have decided to really lean into a replay of Disco Elysium.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: And so I'm playing a character, a version of the character that is very high on emotional and actual intelligence and very low on physical fitness and reflexes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: He's got a lot going on up here.
Speaker: But, you know, don't push him because he will fall down.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: So, yeah, and that's the thing I love.
Speaker: I like about this go Elysium is because it's it really takes me back to like, oh, you can solve this among the you can you can solve the puzzles in the game a number of ways.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Depending on your build.
Speaker: So like because you have a you have a way you can have your detective be like,
Speaker: all brawn where he might be dumb as a rock, but sure can punch the shit out of somebody if he needs to.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Or lift things or whatever.
Speaker: Or you can have him be like really emotionally intelligent, but not very intelligent otherwise.
Speaker: Or you could have him be super intelligent, but terrible at emotional intelligence.
Speaker: So everyone will kind of hate some a little bit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Either way, the dialogue is going to be interesting.
Speaker: The dialogue is going to be interesting and you're going to have a lot of fun.
Speaker: So yeah, back into Disco Elysium, the final cut, which, you know, I always have mixed feelings about playing it because...
Speaker: I'm like, ah, but Zahoum is like, you know, ah, but at the same time, I mean, I've had the game in my Steam library since it came out.
Speaker: So it's done.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The transaction is done.
Speaker: I'm not going to worry too much about it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think that's it.
Speaker: You know what we forgot to do is we forgot to talk about our favorite website.
Speaker: We did forget to talk about our favorite website.
Speaker: Oh my gosh.
Speaker: I can't believe it.
Speaker: What's our favorite website?
Speaker: That would be patreon.com slash pixelitpod.
Speaker: Obviously.
Speaker: Obviously.
Speaker: If you want to hear more from us or want to read more or whatever, go to patreon.com slash pixelitpod where you can, A, follow us for free.
Speaker: It costs you nothing.
Speaker: You can just hit that follow button as long as you have a Patreon account.
Speaker: Boom.
Speaker: You'll get all of our free updates.
Speaker: Might as well do that.
Speaker: It's just like being on Twitter.
Speaker: So I recommend it.
Speaker: I recommend it.
Speaker: I do too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or you can throw us a little bit of money.
Speaker: We got three tiers.
Speaker: $1, $5, $10.
Speaker: donate or pledge however much you would like and join one of those tiers.
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Speaker: We are happy that you are here.
Speaker: $5 gives you access to the ad-free feed slash bonus feed for our stuff.
Speaker: And $10 gets your name shouted out
Speaker: In the episode.
Speaker: So to that end, we got a new person to shout out.
Speaker: We got, we got, well, we got friendly friend.
Speaker: I'm always going to shout out friendly friend first because I'm on friendly friend.
Speaker: Come on, friendly friend.
Speaker: We got Jesus loves you.
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Speaker: Thank you so much for your patronage.
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Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Patreon.com slash Pixelipod.
Speaker: Do it.
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Speaker: What am I doing?
Speaker: Another Patreon ad read?
Speaker: No, I'm not.
Speaker: I'm kidding.
Speaker: I'm kidding.
Speaker: Don't.
Speaker: It's covered.
Speaker: Although I have made I've set it up.
Speaker: I'm going to be I'm going to continue with the book reviews.
Speaker: We're going to be getting them on Mondays now.
Speaker: I have actually it's it's going to be once a week.
Speaker: I've actually dug into old reviews for books that I read in years gone by just to make sure we've always got something in there.
Speaker: And some of these are really funny and it's it's nice to get back to it.
Speaker: So we've got we've got book reviews come your way as well.
Speaker: And that's your way.
Speaker: Any tier, any tier, any paid tier, any paid tier, get a book, a dollar gets you a book review.
Speaker: Let's put it that way.
Speaker: Let's put it that way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That'll do it for tonight's episode.
Speaker: Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker: If you have a moment, please rate us five stars on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: And I hope you have a good evening.
Speaker: Bye.
Speaker: Bye.
