Transcript
Speaker: That's the plan.
Speaker: That's the plan, man.
Speaker: That is the plan.
Speaker: You know what else is the plan?
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back to Mix Lit.
Speaker: My name is Kevin.
Speaker: With me as always is Phil.
Speaker: And on today's show, we are finishing Sacred and Terrible Air.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This book.
Speaker: This book.
Speaker: It really is like, it's like, it's like facing off against, I want to say, like a punch out.
Speaker: Uh-huh.
Speaker: Guy like, you know, like Great Tiger or Bald Bull or one of those really racist ones.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just like, and they're going around the ring and just punching you and you're just going, that's this book.
Speaker: I mean, that's actually incredibly astute, not just for that metaphor, but for the level of Cold War era nonsense that goes on to this thing as well.
Speaker: So it works on both levels.
Speaker: It works on multiple levels.
Speaker: I want to say that was my most astute literary analysis on the show is the punch out.
Speaker: Metaphor.
Speaker: You've peaked.
Speaker: You've peaked.
Speaker: I've really peaked.
Speaker: I'm a master of words.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You paint a picture with words.
Speaker: It's like one of those racist punch out guys punching you and then you go blue.
Speaker: Kevin Harris.
Speaker: This book king hippo'd me.
Speaker: This book king hippo'd me.
Speaker: God, I love that fucking game.
Speaker: Oh, God, that's great.
Speaker: King Hippo.
Speaker: You know who, I was just thinking about the, remember the Numa Numa kid?
Speaker: Oh, yeah, totally.
Speaker: He totally had the King Hippo mouth going.
Speaker: His mouth was like a Muppets.
Speaker: It was just kind of like flapping open.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker: Very much King Hippo mouth.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Apparently, he did a new version of the video as an adult.
Speaker: Oh, bless his heart.
Speaker: I thought he hated the fame he got.
Speaker: I guess he came back around on it.
Speaker: I mean, he probably hated it for a while.
Speaker: Oh, sure.
Speaker: I would have.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I would have.
Speaker: Sort of like the kid who did the Star Wars kid or...
Speaker: Any of these old school, early aughts, viral sensations, you know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Any of those are not going to, yeah, they're not going to be thrilled.
Speaker: If you were viral when I was in college, you probably were not happy about it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's because you had to work it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You, your shit had to get posted.
Speaker: Your video had to get posted on like the something awful forum.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: or FARC or E-bombsworlds.
Speaker: You got famous through none of the nice people on the internet.
Speaker: No, it was just the worst people were posting your shit somewhere.
Speaker: And there was no YouTube.
Speaker: It wasn't YouTube.
Speaker: We didn't have YouTube.
Speaker: We had random media players embedded on websites like E-bombsworld.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Something awful.
Speaker: You had to go and look for that.
Speaker: Newgrounds.
Speaker: I still go to FARC.
Speaker: I still go to FARC every now and then.
Speaker: Just to see what's up.
Speaker: Just to feel.
Speaker: That was my stomping grounds.
Speaker: Every now and then I still go in there and I go...
Speaker: Fuck, people are still here.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: They're still here.
Speaker: I mean, there's probably there's people on the message boards, like probably the something awful, awful message boards that have been there.
Speaker: I mean, since the whatever, the 90s.
Speaker: I remember I was on the view askew message boards.
Speaker: Oh, what?
Speaker: Kevin Smith's?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Holy shit.
Speaker: I have to call that in so long.
Speaker: Oh, my God.
Speaker: I remember, hold on.
Speaker: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
Speaker: When did that come out?
Speaker: The original one.
Speaker: So 2001.
Speaker: So I remember being.
Speaker: It was 2001.
Speaker: I remember being on the View Askew message boards.
Speaker: in 2000, just like I'm on the board.
Speaker: We're doing stuff.
Speaker: We're posting messages.
Speaker: Kevin Smith.
Speaker: He was he's on there.
Speaker: He's there.
Speaker: You're you're chatting.
Speaker: You're talking to him on the board because of course he's very fucking online.
Speaker: He's responsible for the worst tweet of all time.
Speaker: Which one is that?
Speaker: I'm not going to say what's in the word, what's in the tweet.
Speaker: You're going to have to Google that for yourself.
Speaker: I didn't know this.
Speaker: All right, hold on.
Speaker: Well, so I, I've been on the V I was on the view as skew message boards and Kevin would post like screenshots of like what they were working on for Jay and Silent Bob strike back.
Speaker: Funny enough,
Speaker: I remember on the View Askew message boards, that was where I saw this, I believe it was View Askew, where I saw this guy post something and it was to a short film called Guitargonauts.
Speaker: Guitargonauts.
Speaker: And it was, um...
Speaker: It was a Ohio State-based, like, little short production team or whatever.
Speaker: There was this one actor in it that was just really, really popped and stood out.
Speaker: And he played this mythical guitar teacher.
Speaker: And the actor's name, and this is in like 2002 or 2003, I think, was Cody Johnston.
Speaker: Cody.
Speaker: Now, here's the funny thing is that years later, Phil and I would become friends with a gentleman named Lee Keeler who was close with Cody Johnson at Ohio State when he went there.
Speaker: And then later, Cody Johnson becomes the Cody Johnson that we all know and love today.
Speaker: But my first experience with Cody Johnston was seeing a random, some random guy posting guitar-gonauts on, I think it was the View Askew forum or, had to be View Askew.
Speaker: I really wasn't on a whole lot of forums then.
Speaker: But.
Speaker: I just read the worst tweet ever.
Speaker: And yeah, I see why you.
Speaker: I'm not saying it.
Speaker: Are you saying it?
Speaker: No, man, this is awful.
Speaker: This is awful.
Speaker: If anybody's interested, just Google Kevin Smith worst tweet ever.
Speaker: It's nothing.
Speaker: Here's the thing.
Speaker: I was like, God, what did he do?
Speaker: Drop the N word or something like that?
Speaker: And it's like, oh, it's not that bad and yet somehow worse.
Speaker: Somehow worse.
Speaker: Not that bad and somehow worse.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: That's actually a pretty good review of our show.
Speaker: And you know where you could support that show that reviews like that?
Speaker: There's a website for that.
Speaker: Yes, there is.
Speaker: There is.
Speaker: It's patreon.com slash pixel at pod.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Now, Phil, what do you get if you go to patreon.com slash pixel at pod?
Speaker: If you head on over to patreon.com slash pixel at pod, you will be inundated with
Speaker: with malware.
Speaker: No, no, sorry.
Speaker: That's not it.
Speaker: You're going to go there and you're going to find a community, a breathtaking group of people who you can join for free, or you can join one of three tiers, $1, $5, $10.
Speaker: in order to get access to information and stuff.
Speaker: Stuff.
Speaker: Nobody else.
Speaker: Nobody else has.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like ad-free episodes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like ad-free episodes.
Speaker: Like reviews of Phil's favorite horror books.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I'm always reading them.
Speaker: He's always reading these goddamn books.
Speaker: Books that ruin my life and I want to kind of ruin your life with it.
Speaker: We have a podcast where we read books and Phil reads more books beyond what is needed for the podcast.
Speaker: Can you imagine that?
Speaker: It's too many books.
Speaker: It's too many books.
Speaker: His wife agrees.
Speaker: She's not the book.
Speaker: Hey, at the top tier, you get all that.
Speaker: You get all that at the top tier, at the Geek Scholar tier.
Speaker: Also, you get shouted out.
Speaker: So I would like to shout out our top tier is
Speaker: Ruth Smarter, Jesus Loves You, Kyle Seaman, and Friendly Friend.
Speaker: Looking at you, Friendly Friend.
Speaker: Looking at you, Friendly Friend.
Speaker: Thank you so much for being a friend.
Speaker: And that's backslash Patreon shill.
Speaker: Over.
Speaker: So, yeah, Phil, what do you say we put this goddamn book in the marsh?
Speaker: Let's let's sink it.
Speaker: Let's do it.
Speaker: Let's let's put the body in the pail.
Speaker: Oh, that's good.
Speaker: It's you know, it's topical because it's the book because it's the pail.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This ain't reality TV.
Speaker: This ain't reality TV.
Speaker: We begin with chapter 14 titled, List of Absentees.
Speaker: Therese and Khan are in a traffic jam trying to leave Vasa while Khan thinks about the last time he felt that the world had possibilities, 20 years ago.
Speaker: He has imagined that Malin has been with him all this time, walking beside him, listening to him and laughing at his jokes.
Speaker: He remembers that after that night, the girls returned to Vasa on the 15th of August.
Speaker: And never called the boys, despite what they had said that they said that they would.
Speaker: They even went to Charlotte's Y'all Beach three times without them during that period.
Speaker: Uncool.
Speaker: On the 28th, Therese, the 28th is the day that Therese called them and their mother said that they were at the beach.
Speaker: Jesper convinced the other two that to not go find them because because it wasn't cool.
Speaker: It wouldn't it wouldn't be cool to go like they have to come to us.
Speaker: We can't go to them.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: 15 minutes after that phone call, the woman at the ice cream parlor was the last person to see them alive.
Speaker: Therese and Jesper would get into a fight two days later over Jesper, holding them back from going to the beach to find them.
Speaker: Khan then thinks to the aftermath that two days later, while they were at the cabin, they could hear search parties calling out the girls' names as they walked through the woods.
Speaker: And at the time, Khan and Jesper were staying with Therese over the summer,
Speaker: at Therese's dad's cabin.
Speaker: After four days of searching, the volunteers were sent home.
Speaker: We cut over to Jesper, who internally, in his mind, admits that perhaps he is a pedophile.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Good for you, man.
Speaker: He returns.
Speaker: He came around to it.
Speaker: Yeah, he came around to it.
Speaker: He returns to the Havsanglar Hotel and the person at the front desk tells him he got a phone call about the ad, the ad that Khan had placed in the newspaper.
Speaker: We flash back to the aftermath 20 years ago.
Speaker: The boys disappear into the chaos of the investigation in the morning period.
Speaker: They end up telling a police officer their story of their time with the girls, which leads to the cops interrogating Ziggy, who they bought the drugs from.
Speaker: When they talk to the cops months later, the cop says we have to get used to the idea that they are dead.
Speaker: Ultimately, Vidkun Heard is tried for the disappearance, even though he had an alibi simply because he had committed a similar crime.
Speaker: The sex offender registry is introduced.
Speaker: The media eventually moves on and the boys started avoiding each other.
Speaker: Khan ends up dropping out of school and Therese moves back to Grodd.
Speaker: 15 years later, Jesper finds an underage model and begins dating her and pretends Khan doesn't exist at a restaurant.
Speaker: Therese is a cop taking random trips to Charlottesville, and Khan becomes obsessed with the idea of things disappearing.
Speaker: Khan is in the backseat of the car listening to the radio talk about the nuclear weapon that has been dropped on Revachol, and he says that there is one more thing to be done.
Speaker: We are introduced to Anne Margaret Lund and her personal history in all this and how she was a former model who had three kids and then became a politician.
Speaker: Then she had the fourth child, which, quote unquote, disfigured her.
Speaker: And despite her body at this point seemingly mostly contracted back from motherhood, she feels like a void, a shell of herself.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know what the like what the vibe is from the like, oh, the first three kids are fine.
Speaker: But the fourth one disfigured her.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like that's that's that's now remind me what the age differences with the girls are.
Speaker: So the three girls are born one right after each other.
Speaker: They're like 14, 13, 12.
Speaker: And then the next youngest one is four.
Speaker: Okay, so we know that some time has passed there, so maybe this last one really did a number on her because of her advanced age?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But yeah, that clearly, but it is funny to think of it like that, where it's like, everything else is fine, and then the very last one, that was the one that fucked me up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And like the idea of disfigured, it doesn't really go into much detail what that actually means.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: So I'm not I'm not maybe totally.
Speaker: Maybe it disfigured her mind.
Speaker: Who knows?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Who knows?
Speaker: Each of the boys had visited her independently to offer condolences, even though Jesper denied ever doing such a thing.
Speaker: And there's a quote, as far as Anne Margaret was concerned, the world had ended 20 years ago and had left her to do housework.
Speaker: And it's just there's a very gutting passage about her life with just grief, where her life just becomes she just putts around the house.
Speaker: She cleans it.
Speaker: She tidies things.
Speaker: She sometimes takes a nap.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: That's what her life becomes afterwards.
Speaker: The boys show up and interrupt her normal day of tidying and napping, and she invites them in.
Speaker: We jump backwards five hours to Cafe Kino.
Speaker: Jesper is meeting with a man named Ollie, who was a few years behind them in school.
Speaker: Ollie had called Jesper to admit to him that he was the one who sent the letters from Malin that said she was still alive.
Speaker: He forged her handwriting because Ziggy asked him to, and Ziggy sent the letters.
Speaker: Jesper calls him an idiot and leaves him with the check.
Speaker: at the cafe.
Speaker: We cut back to the present with the boys talking to Ann Margaret.
Speaker: They give her the news that the letters were forged, which she scoffs at saying, how is that good news?
Speaker: And then they follow up with what Olv found.
Speaker: The girls aren't dead.
Speaker: She doesn't really believe it and responds to them bitterly.
Speaker: Khan also mentions a second person he gave to Olv.
Speaker: Ziggy isn't dead either.
Speaker: Dun, dun, dun.
Speaker: Dun, dun, dun.
Speaker: After they leave Ann-Margaret, they realize she didn't seem to take the news as expected, as if she had forgotten about her own children and had moved on and didn't appreciate the news.
Speaker: Their next stop is to head to Grodd.
Speaker: We finally catch up to the earlier scene of Jesper leaving Anita and getting into the taxi.
Speaker: So it's like that whole we've circled back.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The boys get down to a maglev train platform for a flight, but it's too crowded and the station agent isn't letting them pass until Therese points, pulls a gun.
Speaker: And in the chaos, they slip onto the train.
Speaker: That'll do it.
Speaker: That'll do it.
Speaker: The train takes off and they're off to find Ziggy.
Speaker: I got to say the Anne Margaret section was definitely, you used the term gutting.
Speaker: I totally agree.
Speaker: My wife and I watched this documentary about the Alex Jones trial this past week.
Speaker: Oh, about the Sandy Hook.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: And we both completely underestimated it because we saw it and we're like, oh, hell yeah, let's watch
Speaker: fucking Alex Jones get his fucking lunch, you know, fed to him.
Speaker: Let's let's fucking do it.
Speaker: And, uh, and we're sitting there with our newborn son.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: When does newborn stop being newborn?
Speaker: He's an infant.
Speaker: He's an infant.
Speaker: He's not newborn anymore.
Speaker: I don't think he's a baby.
Speaker: Uh, our baby.
Speaker: We're sitting there with our baby watching these parents talk about this horrible shit that happened to them and everything.
Speaker: And it's,
Speaker: heart wrenching.
Speaker: It's so hard to watch and it's so painful.
Speaker: And you know, this section just like it, I thought it was really well handled in the sense of like,
Speaker: How do you know how you're going to react to something like that?
Speaker: You know, right.
Speaker: You know, she's they're like, well, that's not that's not the way we expected.
Speaker: Well, there's no right way to do this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the guys like fight like they get a little they fight amongst themselves a little bit about what.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like what is the right way to go about it?
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: Yeah, it's very telling on who they are.
Speaker: It's just like, I kind of lose some sympathy for them at this point a little bit because it's like, well, you guys have obsessed over these girls and you definitely have some insights there, but you didn't really know them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It really does kind of pull the curtain back a little bit on like how much how much how much obsession over these girls is OK, if you will.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like her.
Speaker: Like, yeah, it that's that's very true.
Speaker: And it's that it recalls that quote from like first or second chapter in the book of we loved them more than
Speaker: Like the people who become like the people who obsess over like the true crime stuff over the, the victims, like they, they have this parasocial, it's a parasocial relationship.
Speaker: That's exactly what it is.
Speaker: With the missing or the dead, where it's, we love them more.
Speaker: Like, how dare you give up or how dare you move on when we haven't.
Speaker: And you're like, who, who the fuck are you?
Speaker: Like you spent, you know,
Speaker: part of a summer hanging out with them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yet you're still trying to take ownership over their memory over, over them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You didn't knew, but you didn't know them.
Speaker: It, it, it kind of, it, it does draw the curtain back a little bit where at first you're like, wow, this is, this is kind of these, these boys and this, this, this,
Speaker: lovesick thing that never quite left them.
Speaker: And you get to this point and you're like, oh guys, we need you guys to get a hobby.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A different hobby.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I, um, I agree.
Speaker: And it's part of, it's something, and we have plenty of book to cover, but it's the, these things, these small moments of character and human interaction and understanding are
Speaker: or,
Speaker: to me, the best parts of Robert Kervitz's writing.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: Now, he does have the huge, big swings as well, and they're fine and dandy, and I know a lot of people love that stuff, but to me, for my money, the best parts are these little things, this moment, like this moment with Anne Margaret, which isn't, it's just about these three dudes showing up out of fucking nowhere,
Speaker: to tell them that, hey, your kids remember your kids.
Speaker: We remember your kids.
Speaker: They might not be dead.
Speaker: And not getting the warm welcome with that information that they were hoping for.
Speaker: You're not giving us, like, you're not giving me any other information.
Speaker: You'd be like, so they're missing for 20 years?
Speaker: Like, what's the, yeah.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we move on to chapter 15, which is, chapter 15 is, it's weird.
Speaker: It's almost like a false ending to the book because it wraps up a lot of, like, little things of what we're going to, like...
Speaker: Here's a here's kind of like all these characters.
Speaker: We're not going to hear from them anymore.
Speaker: They're not there.
Speaker: They're out.
Speaker: They're done.
Speaker: We're moving on to some weird shit after this.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's so chapter 15 is called mold.
Speaker: And we learn in chapter 15, Derek Trent Muller sits in a catatonic state for two more months after this and then dies.
Speaker: Ari Ackerlund, who is Jesper's colleague, creates an ad campaign for the Zam transportation giant called Escape.
Speaker: It's not too late.
Speaker: So like even at the end of the world, these like transportation companies are like,
Speaker: you know, capitalizing on it.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Conrad Gessel, the documentary filmmaker around that time, releases his documentary to little fanfare because people would want people want lighter fare at the cinema.
Speaker: Eventually, though, the film finds an audience, but it's Gessel's worst nightmare because the audience is the Nazi sympathizers that relate to Vidkin Heard.
Speaker: Uh, we get a wrap up on, wrap up on Sven von Fersen, the guy who bullied Khan, who comes out of the closet and begins writing a lot of articles.
Speaker: We get updates on the status of the war.
Speaker: Uh, the one Grodd started, but now is on the losing end of, uh, we cut to Leah Khan, um, who is, uh, Khan, Ineok Khan's mother.
Speaker: Uh, it's now four years later.
Speaker: So it's four years after this, this night, uh,
Speaker: where they leave and she hasn't heard from her son since the night he left.
Speaker: Um, Khan's mother stays in Vasa when the Pale arrives.
Speaker: Anita, Jesper's girlfriend, ends up working at a munitions factory and then becomes a leader amongst the refugees.
Speaker: There she meets Ari Ackerland, who arrives fleeing the Pale.
Speaker: The munitions factory is found by Mesk and destroyed, and Anita is killed.
Speaker: It's now six years since the boys drove into the night."
Speaker: And Margaret Lund sits in her house and lets the pale take her, not thinking of the past as it comes and she turns into a protein mass.
Speaker: That's horrible, horrible moment.
Speaker: It's just a real downer moment.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And this is a book full of downer moments, but that one, it's a book full of downer moments.
Speaker: Like the whole thing about like, there's like a book, there's an entire story about Anita going from abandoned fashion model to,
Speaker: to this leader of, you know, these, these refugees, like in that time period, like there's this, there's this micro story there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's not, it's just, and takes place in like a paragraph and it's like, she starts here, she gets here and then Mesk who kind of becomes the, the, the country of Mesk at the end becomes the,
Speaker: the villains of the story, so to speak.
Speaker: Um, and we'll get into that.
Speaker: Um, ah, there she is.
Speaker: There's the munchkin.
Speaker: Hey, munch.
Speaker: As you were.
Speaker: Sweet kid.
Speaker: Oh, she's the best.
Speaker: So yeah, as we kind of get into some of the more, the big broad picture stuff.
Speaker: Chapter 16 is called Entreprenant.
Speaker: And we go back six years before the pale arrives on a different isola in the year 72 to a man in a one-person tent.
Speaker: The man limps out of his tent and it's his birthday today.
Speaker: And his name is Ziggisman Berg and he's turning 39.
Speaker: It's Ziggy.
Speaker: He's alive and he's living inside the pale.
Speaker: He sees an Ibex near him and it walks past him.
Speaker: He begs it not to leave and then it just wanders deep off deeper into the pale.
Speaker: We cut to 21 years ago.
Speaker: Ziggy comes home from selling drugs to high schoolers in Vasa.
Speaker: He's drunk and he picks a fight with a trash can.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's right, Ziggy.
Speaker: He walks through the suburbs, casting anger glances at the wooden houses in the suburbs, thinking that coziness is bourgeois.
Speaker: It's just he is.
Speaker: It's the level of self-parody.
Speaker: He's like this weird guy.
Speaker: Like how the same way that William Shatner became a parody of himself.
Speaker: That's what we're dealing with here with this guy.
Speaker: He is.
Speaker: He is a parody of of like every tanky that you've ever really known.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Everything is bourgeois and it's an only violence will solve it.
Speaker: Ziggy picks the Lund house, coincidentally enough, to throw a brick through the window because he sees the dad sitting there just reading the paper.
Speaker: He's reading a paper that's just called like capitalism.
Speaker: Which is admittedly a little bourgeois.
Speaker: That's a bit bougie.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: That's a bit bougie.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Come on, Carl.
Speaker: That's a little bit too much.
Speaker: Fine.
Speaker: Fine.
Speaker: So he throws a brick through the window and shouts that he wants the world to end.
Speaker: And he starts to run, but his sneakers are not quite able to get traction.
Speaker: And he's drunk and he's kind of out of shape.
Speaker: So pitiful.
Speaker: Carl Lund, the paper entrepreneur, is in his 30s and in extremely good shape.
Speaker: He runs after him.
Speaker: They trace through the suburbs and the train platforms between before Ziggy hops up onto a roof, despite tearing up his leg muscles.
Speaker: We cut back to present day and Ziggy is talking to the ghost of Ignis Nilsson.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: There's ghosts now?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Strap in.
Speaker: Strap in, motherfuckers.
Speaker: We're in the last third and we're not done introducing shit.
Speaker: Get ready.
Speaker: We're not done introducing new concepts.
Speaker: Not even close.
Speaker: Ignis Nilsson was Kras Mazov.
Speaker: So Kras Mazov, as we discussed in a previous episode, was the father of communism in this world.
Speaker: He's kind of like a Marx.
Speaker: He's like Marx and Lenin in one, right?
Speaker: Like Marx wrote about it and then Lenin did it.
Speaker: It's like if Marx did it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Where's that book by O.J.
Speaker: Simpson?
Speaker: If Marx did it.
Speaker: If Marx did it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's just him blaming communism for the murder.
Speaker: We're not far from that.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: The equivalent of that is coming.
Speaker: And then Tim Curry says communism was just a red herring.
Speaker: Flames, flames on the sides of my face.
Speaker: I love that movie so much.
Speaker: Heaving.
Speaker: I love that movie so much.
Speaker: You should, you have a full week.
Speaker: You have a free, you should watch Clue.
Speaker: I do.
Speaker: I, I, I have a, I have a week without my wife and child, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker: And, and I am, I am, I'm kind of beside myself with the, with the need of finding things to do.
Speaker: And predator was what I did today while painting miniatures.
Speaker: And that was a grand old time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I think I'm going to, yeah, I think Clue definitely should be on the docket.
Speaker: I'm going to watch The Thing because I never get to watch that when she's around.
Speaker: Watch The Thing.
Speaker: You can't watch that when Emily is home.
Speaker: I'm going to watch any movie I like that has dead dogs in it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That normally I wouldn't get to watch because she's around.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: You're just going to put the, the end of I am legends on loop.
Speaker: Just, just on loop.
Speaker: Just, just that him singing three little birds over and over again.
Speaker: It's just going to be that for the whole day.
Speaker: God damn it.
Speaker: And then, and then at the very end, I'm going to cut to him slapping Chris rock just for fun.
Speaker: Just to keep things fresh.
Speaker: Just to keep it fresh.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Where were we?
Speaker: Oh, the ghosts.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: The ghosts.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: Ziggy is complaining to Ignis how he wants to evaporate.
Speaker: And Ignis talks to him about how he should have pulled the teeth out for the body he left in Grodd.
Speaker: So we've been putting two and two together.
Speaker: Ziggy burned a body in Grodd and he basically staged his own death.
Speaker: Ziggy tells Ignis he wants to flee the world and Ignis says enough of this disappearance nonsense.
Speaker: We cut back to the past and Ignis is in Ziggy's head telling him how to further antagonize Carl Lund before vanishing into the shadows.
Speaker: And this scene is amazing where he's like, Ignis is like,
Speaker: say something like cut him down and he's like he's like you're I'm going to nationalize your property and Ignis is like no no not that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about he doesn't know he doesn't care it's a stupid shut up shut up say something better fuck it no one cares no one cares when you call people we get into that more later later it's one of my favorite parts in this whole book
Speaker: No one cares.
Speaker: No one cares.
Speaker: In present day-ish, because what is present day anymore in this book?
Speaker: Ziggy and Ignis are talking shop about the end of the communist revolution and Krasmazov's suicide while Ziggy is walking down the road.
Speaker: And they pass by a place where only two weeks prior there was processing happening for metals.
Speaker: Ignis goes on a rant about how all things were possible through communism and how everybody was happy.
Speaker: And he gets into this huge rant about like is about brothers trusting brothers and data.
Speaker: And while he's so he's getting so he's getting so excited.
Speaker: And this is actually a really important moment in the book.
Speaker: He's talking about people being happy and working together for a common goal.
Speaker: And as he's talking about it, the pale recedes.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: The pale recedes when he talks about happy, like the happiness of people working together for a common goal.
Speaker: And then Ziggy's like, shut the fuck up.
Speaker: And Ignis is like, ah, fine.
Speaker: And the pale comes back.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But while so then Ignis gets into some incel shit about how all girls are weapons of the bourgeois.
Speaker: He sure does.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He sure does.
Speaker: He sure does.
Speaker: Ziggy points out how much of a monster Ignis was like, you're just like, oh, Ignis.
Speaker: He was just so Ignis.
Speaker: It was Kras Mazov's.
Speaker: He was Kras Mazov's school teacher.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So you're just like, oh, he was just like, he was like a teacher, right?
Speaker: Like, no, he was also a vile man who sharpened, he would sharpen the branches on trees into spears, right?
Speaker: Like, just so the trees were all pointy and shit.
Speaker: And on each branch, he would impale an enemy soldier and leave them there.
Speaker: And there would be forests of just impaled people on trees.
Speaker: That's what Ignis would do.
Speaker: But Ignis calls Ziggy a monster, too.
Speaker: So, you know, who knows who's worse?
Speaker: Who's really the monster here?
Speaker: Who's really the monster here?
Speaker: Gotta get into my stash.
Speaker: Oh, there's there.
Speaker: He's reaching back.
Speaker: He's got the necessary mini fridge for podcasting purposes.
Speaker: You sure do, buddy.
Speaker: And you got yourself a cider right there.
Speaker: Yes, sir.
Speaker: Are you a real cider drinker now?
Speaker: I'm a seltzer drinker now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's just Happy Dad.
Speaker: This stuff is so fucking good.
Speaker: I swear.
Speaker: I really do.
Speaker: And I mean this sincerely.
Speaker: I'm going to need numbers from you so that I can actually approach them.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And try to get them to sponsor us because I'm basically always having a Happy Dad when we-
Speaker: Phil is sponsored by Happy Dad.
Speaker: Might as well get something out of it.
Speaker: Happy Dad's true in many ways.
Speaker: So they continue going back and forth.
Speaker: And Ziggy thinks about how he's been an entreprenat since the disappearance of the Lund Girls, which entreprenat.
Speaker: Great word.
Speaker: It is a great word.
Speaker: Entrepreneur is basically just like
Speaker: a person who goes out into the pale.
Speaker: That's all it is.
Speaker: He mentions that the world would have been better off had Ignis not existed.
Speaker: Ignis retorts that Ziggy has done plenty of rampaging himself.
Speaker: Ziggy continues on without Ignis.
Speaker: He kind of leaves him there.
Speaker: And then he comes across a herd of Ibex.
Speaker: He can tell the pale has destroyed the Ibex's mind.
Speaker: And Ziggy laughs because he has special powers.
Speaker: He then kills the Ibex with a knife.
Speaker: Slits its throat.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: And you know what else is cool?
Speaker: The products and services that might sponsor this podcast?
Speaker: One of these days, maybe.
Speaker: One of these days.
Speaker: Man, we're back.
Speaker: We're back.
Speaker: What was that sound?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: No one ever will.
Speaker: No one ever will.
Speaker: Because guess what?
Speaker: It's chapter 17 and we're talking about the Harnon Corps.
Speaker: Harnon Corps.
Speaker: We're 150 years in the past during its launch ceremony for the Harnon Corps, the airship named after the famous opera singer.
Speaker: Who's the opera singer?
Speaker: We talked about her in an earlier chapter.
Speaker: She, uh, people thought she had disappeared as well.
Speaker: Nope.
Speaker: She had just drowned in the river and then they found her body bloated.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So basically is, is,
Speaker: It's weird.
Speaker: This chapter is weird.
Speaker: It's not very long.
Speaker: It's just about how the Harnon Corps, the memory of the Harnon Corps has faded over time.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: To the point where people, the only people who really think that it exists are desperatists who are the people who are obsessed with disappearances like Khan.
Speaker: So that's like the only reason it's like, so Khan has this model of the Harnon Corps.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which is, it's just this chapter is just here.
Speaker: Don't worry about it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Don't worry about why the memories of the Harnon core have faded over time.
Speaker: Don't worry about it.
Speaker: Don't worry about it.
Speaker: It's just like the commissar thing, right?
Speaker: Where the commissar disappeared from the photo because you edited it out, right?
Speaker: It's just like that.
Speaker: That's the only reason.
Speaker: Same thing.
Speaker: Chapter 18 is called Three Meat Poroshkis.
Speaker: When I first read this, I read it as three meat pumpkins.
Speaker: And I'm going to have to.
Speaker: And now that I know that that's not what he wrote, I'm going to have to use that in something.
Speaker: I am a three meat popsicle.
Speaker: That is.
Speaker: Oh, that's another movie I don't watch this week.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, that's a good one.
Speaker: That would be a good one.
Speaker: You should like like make themed double features.
Speaker: Just yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That'll be.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: What do we do?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now I've got a project.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: We got to finish this episode so I can do my project.
Speaker: I'm tasting the Chinese food again.
Speaker: Sad.
Speaker: Two days of Chinese, baby.
Speaker: Two days of Chinese.
Speaker: You make one order of Chinese and then it lasts you two days.
Speaker: But after those two days, you're just the saddest boy in the world.
Speaker: It's so good in the moments leading up.
Speaker: In the moment.
Speaker: And that's really been my problem.
Speaker: with life in general is really focusing on those in the moment decisions and not thinking anything about what is 30 minutes from now Kevin going to be dealing with.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And he's going to be 30 minutes from now Kevin is going to be dealing with the bad feeling a lot longer than now Kevin is dealing with a good feeling.
Speaker: So let's just, you know, give yourself the gifts.
Speaker: Pay it forward.
Speaker: Do yourself a favor.
Speaker: Double it and give it to the next guy, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We're introduced to the character of Ambart Simjian, an oil billionaire with a propensity for collecting disappearance memorabilia.
Speaker: While observing the winter outside his high-rise window, his secretary patches through a long-distance call.
Speaker: We are now seeing the scene that we saw.
Speaker: It was earlier in the book.
Speaker: This is two years ago.
Speaker: It's the phone call from Khan.
Speaker: They talk about the Harnon Core model manual that and Khan was asking him if he had a copy from it.
Speaker: And Bartson John talks about how if it is an impossible object in the world, no longer supports it and how Khan needs to keep an eye on it at all times.
Speaker: And when he's not looking at it, he must think of it.
Speaker: We get an interstitial two years later in the pale and abandoned cap fire and not animal bones while wrecked crawler machines sleep in a ditch.
Speaker: Back at the phone conversation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Khan admits.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Khan admits to understanding what M. Bartsome John is talking about.
Speaker: The sensation of something disappearing.
Speaker: Lost and disappearing.
Speaker: And it all started with the girls.
Speaker: We get another interstitial where there is a broadcast being announced using some sort of alphabet.
Speaker: Footprints and something escaping from a padlock.
Speaker: We go back to the call.
Speaker: Ambartsenjohn mentions he's sold his Harrencore model to Ziggy 10 years prior, but Ziggy never changed the registration with the auction house, which is why Khan called, because the number that he had for the prior owner was Ambartsenjohn and not Ziggy.
Speaker: And then Khan gets hyper-focused on this because we know Khan has ADHD.
Speaker: Because Ziggy had been said to be dead in 57, but in Bartson John's sold him the model in 59 or 60.
Speaker: The boys arrive on the other end of the train trip after a week.
Speaker: Khan gives them the full lowdown about the call, the girls, Ziggy, and how they might all be related.
Speaker: Therese, spirits are high.
Speaker: You know, the boys are, they're on a grand adventure.
Speaker: Therese is doing that old thing where he carries Khan on his back and pretends he's a robot.
Speaker: But suddenly...
Speaker: shit's going to just go downhill precipitously fast for all of them from this point forward.
Speaker: Because guess what?
Speaker: You know how Therese was pretending to be a cop and using fake IDs throughout the entire prior 200 pages of the book?
Speaker: Well, it catches up to him right now.
Speaker: Right now.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: When Internal Affairs meets him on the train platform.
Speaker: The perfect time for it, really.
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: The agent tells they all pull guns on Therese and the agent tells Therese there's nowhere to run.
Speaker: Therese shouts at him, friend to check the brave.
Speaker: And then Therese pulls out his gun and shoots at the agent.
Speaker: We flash back to New Year's Eve.
Speaker: Ziggy arrives at a party drunk and breaks a bottle over handsome Alexander's face.
Speaker: Handsome Alexander gets up and beats the shit out of Ziggy present day.
Speaker: But what is time anymore?
Speaker: Uh, the internal affair, the internal affairs agents shoot Therese three times.
Speaker: Uh, he seems to be dying.
Speaker: Uh, and they punch, they punch him and start beating him and the dragging him off.
Speaker: And while everybody is distracted, Jesper grabs Therese's gun in the confusion.
Speaker: Back in Ziggy Ziggy time, he's being physically thrown out of the party after the fight with Handsome Alexander.
Speaker: The communist cytoplasm tells him to get back on his feet and go kill the people in the party.
Speaker: At the very least, calls them the bourgeoisie, to which Ziggy retorts, they don't care.
Speaker: To them, it's not an insult.
Speaker: It's just an old word.
Speaker: I loved this.
Speaker: There's so much because our author has described himself in interviews as a Leninist, as a full blown communist.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I love that.
Speaker: I love that he's not one of those leftists who isn't afraid of completely lampooning those people.
Speaker: Like, we all know this guy.
Speaker: It's great.
Speaker: It's great.
Speaker: like, here's like, he's, he's a leftist.
Speaker: And then he's like, but I'm going to, I'm going to take the piss out of, out of a lot of leftist like behavior in this book.
Speaker: The only, the only person who hates leftists more, uh, than, uh, people in the far right are other leftists.
Speaker: Uh, so it makes sense.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Back to the future.
Speaker: Ziggy makes his way through the pail up and onto the roof of a hospital where he has an airship waiting for him.
Speaker: He climbs up into the airship and pulls all the stuff that he's gathered recently, and he takes off rocking out to his Ziggy's ride to the end of the world mixtape.
Speaker: And the eye in Ziggy has like a little heart over it.
Speaker: We cut to the past.
Speaker: A girl labeled the destruction in the darkness hands him his rad jacket, mentioning that he's the baddest boy in school.
Speaker: In the Ziggy timeline of the present, he opens the toolbox on his ship and he pulls the same rad jacket out.
Speaker: It doesn't fit right anymore, but it's his.
Speaker: Ziggy is self-chilling, one could say.
Speaker: Ignis is left on the platform of the hospital.
Speaker: Ziggy asks for his forgiveness as he leaves and Ignis gives more lore about a mathematician named Rodionov who is designing something to zero out the bourgeoisie and then the airship takes off in the direction of the Rodionov trench.
Speaker: So, okay, Rodionov was working on, it was called like a Nihilmat bomb.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because they the revolutionaries did not have access to radioactive materials to build a nuclear weapon.
Speaker: So they needed something else.
Speaker: So there's this guy Rodionov.
Speaker: It's like Ion Rodionov or something like that, who a mathematician who is working on this, this, this.
Speaker: It's like a zero and negation.
Speaker: And so Ziggy is going off and this is, this will kind of like, this is all part of it.
Speaker: It seems like it's weird.
Speaker: We're just getting this little, like, here's this thing.
Speaker: And Ziggy's like, yeah, fuck it.
Speaker: That's what I'm looking.
Speaker: I'm going there.
Speaker: I'm going to where the thing is that Rodinov built.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: I believe that's a wrap on Ziggy.
Speaker: Um, yes, I think that's it for him.
Speaker: We, we had a fun, fun extra adventure with Ziggy, but, uh,
Speaker: Therese is under arrest.
Speaker: His partner was the one to give him up to internal affairs.
Speaker: He tries to bargain with them using notes that he got from Derek Trent Muller.
Speaker: We cut to a nearby nearby in a high rise and Bartson John watches it play out from a distance while he looks at the jewel of his collection.
Speaker: An empty glass display case that has just arrived in the mail from the train that just arrived.
Speaker: Chapter 19 and the final chapter of the book titled, I am no joke.
Speaker: 48 hours later, Khan and Jesper arrive at the same high rise hotel.
Speaker: Khan uses a golden key to access an elevator.
Speaker: An intercom mistakes him for Ambartsamjian, but Khan tells the person on the other end that he was given the key for emergencies.
Speaker: The secretary says that Ambartsamjian has not spoken to anyone in two days since receiving Khan's shipment and is not taking any calls and asks them to check on him.
Speaker: When they arrive on the 60th floor, wind and snow are blowing in and the collection of memorabilia is slowly being buried.
Speaker: Uh, we cut to the hospital.
Speaker: The man from internal affairs is walking down the hallway and he comes to Teresa's room and he notices one of the police officers is falling asleep.
Speaker: And just the, he just lays into this fucking guy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He's like, I could have been a spy.
Speaker: I could have been in your sleep.
Speaker: And the guy stands up from his chair.
Speaker: He's like, I don't give a fuck if you're standing or sitting down.
Speaker: It's just that you were asleep.
Speaker: You could be asleep and standing up and asleep.
Speaker: And anyway, it's like not important.
Speaker: It's just kind of gives character to the internal affairs.
Speaker: The man from internal affairs, as he's called.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He goes into Therese's room and he asked Therese to call his friends back in from whatever they're doing.
Speaker: And Therese is like, wow, why the fuck would I do that?
Speaker: You're just a ghost, like a spook.
Speaker: You know, you're a spy.
Speaker: And he tells him he's not interested in helping.
Speaker: The internal affairs man says the cops are just a tool for perpetuating the status quo, which is a little on the nose, Robert.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like it's kind of hard.
Speaker: It's kind of hard to take people like Ziggy and certain other characters as like parodies of certain aspects when, when you yourself are kind of every now and then indulging in that.
Speaker: So that same behavior, just a note, see me after class.
Speaker: That's all I'm saying.
Speaker: Red pen.
Speaker: I want to talk about this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Therese says that all the status quo, government bodies suck.
Speaker: The ICP, the moral intern, et cetera.
Speaker: So Khan looks for Ambart Simjian, but he's not there and he begins to smash shit.
Speaker: He's pissed off and it seems like Ambart Simjian is backed out of their deal.
Speaker: He's smashing valuables left and right until he finds a police file and something about Rodionov's trench.
Speaker: We cut back to the man from Internal Affairs and he shows Therese a photo.
Speaker: The photo was the photo that Derek Trentmuller took of the kids at the beach 20 years ago.
Speaker: In the photo should be the boys and the four girls sitting underneath an umbrella.
Speaker: What the photo shows is just the four boys and no girls underneath the umbrella.
Speaker: And this is given to Therese to look at after the guy from Internal Affairs says, listen,
Speaker: We had a guy come in and check the photo.
Speaker: He says it's not been altered.
Speaker: We checked the negatives.
Speaker: They haven't been altered.
Speaker: We had another guy check the negatives.
Speaker: He said they hadn't been altered.
Speaker: We had another guy check the photo.
Speaker: He said it hadn't been altered.
Speaker: But the girls aren't in the photo anymore.
Speaker: Khan, uh, Khan, uh, looking around, notices that the window in the high rise is busted outward.
Speaker: And he tells Ishmael, the secretary, that Ambart Samjian jumped to his death and give him, uh, and to give him 10 minutes, uh, before he calls the cops.
Speaker: Khan looks out the window, uh, that the man jumped out of and thinks about how he's not afraid of anything anymore.
Speaker: He then goes down to the hotel room that Jesper booked and he sees Therese's gun laying out.
Speaker: He calls his mother long distance to tell her that he won't be coming home anymore.
Speaker: We cut to two months later.
Speaker: Out on a frozen plane, Jesper burns all the stuff that he had for the girls inside of a car, just lights the car on fire.
Speaker: He's just walking out into the wilderness.
Speaker: Another month later, Khan continues his adventures through Grodd.
Speaker: Things are getting bad and Mesk is now invading the Grodd Isola.
Speaker: Khan arrives at a wooden shack owned by Ziggy's father.
Speaker: Khan pays him in vodka and 100 rial for a chance to look through Ziggy's room and he finds a bunch of notebooks about the girls.
Speaker: As Khan continues riding trains through Grodd, he begins looking through Ziggy's notebooks, but suddenly pages are slowly becoming empty.
Speaker: Khan's memory begins distorting.
Speaker: He leaves on the floor of a bathroom in the train station saying to himself, I am the end of the world.
Speaker: I am the end of the world.
Speaker: I am at the end of the world.
Speaker: I am at the end of the world.
Speaker: We cut back to 21 years ago to Malin Lund looking at the broken window with her sisters.
Speaker: The last words of the book are, it's going wrong.
Speaker: Fiend.
Speaker: There's an epilogue.
Speaker: I'm not going to get into the epilogue because I don't know if it was pointless.
Speaker: It doesn't really add a whole lot.
Speaker: And it was published.
Speaker: They openly admitted that.
Speaker: Robert writes that with a note and is like, doesn't add or take away anything from the book.
Speaker: It's just another scene set in the world.
Speaker: And the writing teacher in me went, then why did you have it there?
Speaker: Well, apparently it was just, he just wrote it.
Speaker: He just posted it on his blog.
Speaker: um yeah that's just another scene uh so it wasn't i don't think it was in any it wasn't even in one of the publication like when the book was published it was not part of it no it was years later so all right before i get into it what do you think happens at the end like what is your interpretation of events i
Speaker: I think what is happening here is the pale isn't just devouring people and things.
Speaker: It's devouring all memory of them.
Speaker: It's devouring their existence.
Speaker: Which is a very, very beautiful metaphor and very interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't think this book was finished, but I'll get into that later.
Speaker: But that was what I took from it, that it was that memories are being destroyed through this, that it's not enough that they are gone now.
Speaker: It's as if they never existed in the first place, which is a very interesting idea.
Speaker: Yeah, that's the, and that's part of it is, so from, and I did a little like digging onto other people's theories and stuff like that.
Speaker: So there's a couple things happening at the end.
Speaker: One, there's the invasion of Mask into Grodd.
Speaker: Now Mask is, there's this concept of the innocents.
Speaker: which are these leaders in the Elysium world that are, they kind of become appointed because they were representative of an era.
Speaker: And then one of the most famous ones in the Elysium world is someone named Dolores Day, which there's like a religion founded after her.
Speaker: And she's the one who convinced one of the leaders of the continents to do the journeys into the Pale, which eventually finds the isola that Ravishol is on and all that stuff.
Speaker: I might be getting some of the details wrong.
Speaker: Forgive me if I am.
Speaker: There's a lot of details in it.
Speaker: There's a lot of details.
Speaker: But so Mesk is basically under the leadership of an innocence named Ambrosius St.
Speaker: Miro, whose philosophy is nihilism.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That nothing mattered, like the world must end, basically.
Speaker: Nothing matters.
Speaker: So let's end it.
Speaker: So basically, Mesk becomes this like fascist, nihilist, fascist state that as the war rages, it's just...
Speaker: destroying everything that it can.
Speaker: And that's why the pale begins to accelerate, because as their destruction kind of rains down on the world, the thought that nothing matters accelerates.
Speaker: So
Speaker: And I think it's important to note that when Ignis, the ghost of Ignis, was talking about things, people working together for a common good, the pale receded.
Speaker: It's like the book is a bummer.
Speaker: But at the same time, it's not that it's saying that there is no hope.
Speaker: It's saying that the only way to fight something like the pale is
Speaker: or climate change or whatever is to work together for the common good and hope, just hope above hope and just keep fighting for that good.
Speaker: That's when the pale recedes.
Speaker: It's a very bleak book, but it's not a bleak message.
Speaker: It's not a bleak message, but it is a bleak book because clearly at the end, the chapter in chapter 15, we find out that it wasn't successful.
Speaker: Everybody died.
Speaker: Like the pale came and took over.
Speaker: But the message underpinning that was it didn't have to be that way necessarily.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that's one part of it.
Speaker: The part about the girls disappearing, Khan's memory fading.
Speaker: There's theories that, remember when it was said that Malin thought she was pregnant?
Speaker: So there's two things about that.
Speaker: Where's one theory is that she was pregnant with Ziggy's child.
Speaker: Um, and because it's so, because the Malin is the girl is the destruction in the darkness in that one scene.
Speaker: Um, the other thing is that there Malin was pregnant with a baby pale.
Speaker: So something that gets established later in the game, Disco Elysium is there's, there is a two millimeter hole in the world that,
Speaker: that you find in Disco Elysium that distorts memories and it destroys data that travels through it.
Speaker: The idea is that Malin was a, was the, they just disappeared.
Speaker: Like the girls, nothing happened to the girls.
Speaker: They just vanished because Malin was carrying the pail within her.
Speaker: And part of the reason why they never called the boys is because their own memories were starting to fade by that point.
Speaker: because of the pail that they were carrying with them.
Speaker: That's like one interpretation of the event.
Speaker: I don't think there's any real specific reading you can take from what happened other than like maybe the girls exist somewhere at Rodionov Trench and that's where Ziggy is going.
Speaker: Ziggy, by the way, has their ages, the ages at which they disappeared, tattooed onto his knuckles.
Speaker: He has five, 13, uh, is like a 15, 14, 13, 12, five or something like that, uh, written across his knuckles.
Speaker: Um, so that's kind of it.
Speaker: Uh, it's interesting.
Speaker: Uh, the guys, it seems like the guys are riding high and then it all falls apart so quickly.
Speaker: Oh, and this all kind of like ties into the idea of the Harnan core, right?
Speaker: So that's why Ambartsmjian was like, you have to keep thinking of the Harnan core or else the world cannot support it.
Speaker: The Harnan core goes missing.
Speaker: So Khan ships the Harnan core model back to Ambartsmjian.
Speaker: And when it gets to him, it's missing because Therese has been shot.
Speaker: Khan is no longer thinking about the Harnon Corps, and therefore the Harnon Corps ceases to exist.
Speaker: And in that call, Mbarts and John said he had another model of it and it disappeared on him.
Speaker: And the reason why the memory of the Harnon Corps is fading is because it's not that people were covering it up.
Speaker: It literally was being deleted from people's memories because there was a photo of Anita.
Speaker: Was it Anita Harnon Corps?
Speaker: The opera singer standing on the platform.
Speaker: waving to the ship, but there's no ship in the photo.
Speaker: She's just sitting there waving.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, the whole idea is that the pail not only dissolves you into a protein mush, eventually it actually wipes your very existence out from time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It redacts you.
Speaker: It redacts you.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: There is, if you go on, there are so many other theories about the functionality and why and wherefore of the pale, but, um,
Speaker: And I mean, I wouldn't, they're not like, I wouldn't say they're all equally weighted.
Speaker: I would say some of them are more based on what happens in the text than others.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: And I'm glad you put it that way because I think that,
Speaker: is I I'm a, I I'm of two minds with this book on one hand, God damn, this guy can write.
Speaker: This is the, this guy is a very, very good writer.
Speaker: Uh, that he's dealing with very big ideas.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But I also think of it in terms of, first off, he's very, very lucky Disco Elysium was made because honestly, as a supplementary text to Disco Elysium, this book works very, very well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's great for that kind of thing.
Speaker: However, I can see why this book wasn't a hit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: All by itself that he's trying to do too much in too short of an amount of space.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And on that, this book was supposed to be the first book in a series.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But it's still not enough for an introductory book.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think the proof in that comes in how fucking much time travel we do.
Speaker: We're going back and forth and back and forth, and there's so much to cover.
Speaker: And he does a lot of it very effectively, but he kind of hamstrings himself because this is what, a 300-page novel?
Speaker: Yeah, thereabouts.
Speaker: It should be much longer.
Speaker: It actually put me – did you ever read Perdido Street Station?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: China Mieville is this kind of –
Speaker: fantastic writer.
Speaker: And I mean, fantastic in both senses of the word.
Speaker: He writes these large fantasies that are very grandiose and deal with a lot of big ideas and deal with a lot of big emotions.
Speaker: And Perdido Street Station is kind of his masterpiece.
Speaker: And it's a huge book.
Speaker: It is a long book.
Speaker: And it has to be because it deals with
Speaker: love and loss and those big emotions, but it also deals with this great big strange world.
Speaker: It is anything but, uh, your standard gnomes and dwarves and elves fantasy world.
Speaker: Um, and, uh,
Speaker: So he takes a lot of time to really get all of that in there and, and it all works in the end and it ends up being this epic novel.
Speaker: Uh, and it has to be, if you're going to get all those things in.
Speaker: And I think that, uh,
Speaker: There is a chance for our author.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: I forget his name.
Speaker: Kervitz.
Speaker: Robert Kervitz.
Speaker: There's no doubt in my mind that Robert Kervitz can write a piece that blends with
Speaker: These fantasy elements, these mystery elements, these nostalgic elements.
Speaker: There's no question in my mind that he can do that.
Speaker: But it's not enough.
Speaker: There's nothing better in this book than the than the nostalgia.
Speaker: than the feeling of the girls.
Speaker: I think that was worth the price of admission.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Free, to be fair.
Speaker: But he wrote about it so beautifully.
Speaker: It moved me.
Speaker: It made me think of my own childhood.
Speaker: I thought that was excellent.
Speaker: And I don't see...
Speaker: any reason why the political messaging and the strange sci-fi fantasy world and the metaphor and everything else shouldn't all have that same shake because he is a talented writer.
Speaker: He just, it wasn't finished.
Speaker: And I don't think that would have been solved with a second book in the series.
Speaker: There was still stuff we needed established.
Speaker: This book needed more information.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It is it is worth reading.
Speaker: Yes, it is.
Speaker: You are going to have thoughts and feelings tickled in kind of a way that I don't I'm not sure I've had in with any other author.
Speaker: But if we're talking the meta story, the the whole text.
Speaker: Altogether, it seemed like, especially for a first novel in a series, it was too short to be setting up too many grand ideas.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: There's a lot of grand, amazing ideas, but I didn't think they got the shrift that they totally deserved.
Speaker: Agreed.
Speaker: Because it felt like
Speaker: It feels like, okay, the second book is what, Ziggy and the Pale?
Speaker: Is that what it is?
Speaker: Because our main characters are dead-ish.
Speaker: Yeah, ish.
Speaker: I assume that it would be something like that.
Speaker: Or just new.
Speaker: Who knows?
Speaker: He's gone back and forth.
Speaker: Or go back 200 years in the past.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Who knows?
Speaker: But I think he nailed it.
Speaker: I think he nailed it.
Speaker: I think that by...
Speaker: He hasn't done any of it justice.
Speaker: And the difference between Robert Kervitz and many of the other authors that we've read is that I believe 100% that he could do it.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: He's not a hack.
Speaker: He's not a shitty writer.
Speaker: He's a very good writer.
Speaker: And maybe that's why I'm so harsh on it, you know, because it's this thing of like, it's a very good writer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He, I think, of all the books we've written, Robert Kervitz has shown possibly the most...
Speaker: he might be one of the most talented writers we're going to read on this show.
Speaker: Full stop, end of sentence.
Speaker: Like he is, he is, he, the, his character work, some of these interactions.
Speaker: His character work is hands down the best of any writer we have read.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Without question.
Speaker: His character work is his, is his, the jewel in his crown.
Speaker: I adore his characters.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Really, really do.
Speaker: even small characters.
Speaker: You got like the oil billionaire who literally shows up in the last chapter.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You only know him a little bit from a phone call in the last two chapters.
Speaker: And then he oofs himself out a window.
Speaker: He Roblox, Roblox, oofs that MP3 himself out of a window.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it works.
Speaker: You know, you got the man from Internal Affairs who is just this looming sense of foreboding.
Speaker: It all works.
Speaker: You even have the fucking ghost.
Speaker: You have a ghost who shows up.
Speaker: Love him.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: Great character.
Speaker: And I think that's why this all works in Disco Elysium, which is so character driven.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It makes perfect sense.
Speaker: And I'm very glad that he was able to continue his vision with that because that game is, is a masterpiece.
Speaker: There's no question about it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's the thing.
Speaker: I think I'm harder on him with this book because we've never read anything this literary in our show.
Speaker: Big L literary.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that's what he was going for.
Speaker: And I don't think that's a bad thing.
Speaker: And I don't think that's a problem.
Speaker: But he missed the mark, if I'm going to be honest with him.
Speaker: And it would be one thing if I was to say he missed the mark.
Speaker: And no wonder he missed the mark because he's a shitty, pretentious writer.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: He is a very good writer.
Speaker: He is an incredibly talented writer, and that's why it's so frustrating.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that makes sense when you go back and look at the history of Disco Elysium, how Carl Kender is like, maybe this would work better as a video game.
Speaker: And, you know, you have –
Speaker: In Disco Elysium, a lot of these ideas suddenly have time to breathe and be explored and have space to move through in a, you know, a 20 to 30 hour playthrough of Disco Elysium.
Speaker: And then each each playthrough can be like you can your your protagonist, Harry, is able to be anything you want him to be.
Speaker: He can be he can be a communist.
Speaker: He can be a liberal.
Speaker: He can be a centrist.
Speaker: You can make Harry be a fascist too, if you wanted to, but it won't feel good.
Speaker: I, I, I hope that Kervitz takes the time now that his studio is fucked and there's no going back to that world.
Speaker: Cause it,
Speaker: Is that what the problem is?
Speaker: That's pretty much where... Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Zaum's... The studio still exists.
Speaker: He's not involved or... And also doesn't own it at all.
Speaker: There's a lot of legal stuff happening.
Speaker: So he's... He's off on his own.
Speaker: That's hard.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I hope...
Speaker: I hope that he, I would love for him to write another book.
Speaker: I, I, I hope he has a little nest egg that this game brought him.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He can just sit and write another.
Speaker: I would love to read another book by him.
Speaker: Cause this is, this is fascinating.
Speaker: It's really, this is, this is the most, one of the more literary games, one of the most easily, the most literary books we've read.
Speaker: I would like to see more from him in that, in that direction.
Speaker: Yeah, me too.
Speaker: Fascinating book.
Speaker: Me too.
Speaker: With all that being said, Phil, I only have one question left to ask you.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: What are you playing?
Speaker: Oh, um, oh, it's...
Speaker: Pacific drive.
Speaker: Still in.
Speaker: Still in, baby.
Speaker: It's me and Mae West.
Speaker: That's what I've named my car.
Speaker: Me and Mae West.
Speaker: You do get very particular about your car.
Speaker: Like I find myself really looking forward to
Speaker: to the crafting in the garage moments, just playing some music and like putting together and seeing what I can research and just, I like, I really do enjoy going out into the world and completing the missions and finding more scraps and stuff, but there's nothing quite so therapeutic as sitting there and buffing out the dings in the car and everything like that.
Speaker: I really, it's funny, my summer car, I just never really got into and I feel like I'm getting out of
Speaker: this game what they were aiming for.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: There's something so so it's just me and Mae West listening to some Radiohead and trying out a new racing stripe.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: I get I can tell that I can tell that I love this game because there is nothing
Speaker: I have never been so frustrated as when I really polish her up and get her looking good and everything like that and go out to try.
Speaker: I'm like, all right, I'm ready for this next mission, for the next mainline mission.
Speaker: And I go out and I just get fucking wrecked.
Speaker: And I come back and I have to just, oh, I have to...
Speaker: I had to put crude pieces on her.
Speaker: God, baby, you don't deserve that.
Speaker: Like, you know, but what can I do?
Speaker: And I get so frustrated.
Speaker: It made me think of Catherine, if you've ever played that game.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: That level of frustration.
Speaker: And I still...
Speaker: And still I run back out into the into the into the waste and try and to find more for your baby car for baby Mae West for Mae West.
Speaker: Because she deserves because just like the real Mae West, she deserved nothing but the best.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I also downloaded a demo for an unreleased game that I keep seeing on my Twitter feed.
Speaker: A lot of game designers and journos that I follow.
Speaker: It's called The Settlings.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And this is a kind of a cross between a city builder and lemmings.
Speaker: Uh, you literally have your little guys walking back and forth and what they do and what they build depends entirely on how you plan it out.
Speaker: And in a lot of ways, it's like a lot of those games where
Speaker: You know, you build houses to bring more people in, you build this place to supply you with axes to cut down the trees and dah, dah, dah, dah.
Speaker: And they describe it as a relaxing city builder.
Speaker: Like the idea is this is meant to be a very relaxing game.
Speaker: I do not know if I agree with that assessment.
Speaker: I found it very frustrating at times and not in a bad way, necessarily.
Speaker: I sat down.
Speaker: I was like, well, let's test this thing out.
Speaker: Three hours later, I finally finished the first level, which is the crux of the demo.
Speaker: And the whole thing is you're on this little landmass and there's this big kraken like creature off to the side.
Speaker: And the end game for each level is not only being able to build up this city or this little civilization in the area, but to defeat the monster off to the sides.
Speaker: A cute little kind of end game sort of thing.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I don't know if I'm going, I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I'm going to have to think on it.
Speaker: It's one of those things that I enjoyed the time I put into it.
Speaker: And when I completed it, I was like, I have a very hard time imagining this just being level one of the game.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: This feels like the game.
Speaker: And unless they pull out some real stops to make things very different or something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I have a hard time imagining this being one that I do level after level after level of.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's interesting.
Speaker: It's pretty.
Speaker: I'm looking forward to it and I hope it I hope it does well because that's a very cute idea.
Speaker: I'm already thinking about sitting down and playing it again.
Speaker: So maybe I'm complete.
Speaker: This is how this is how this is how aliens dark descent happened.
Speaker: Like, man, this game's a disappointment.
Speaker: It's sex.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Game of the year.
Speaker: It's my game of the year.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Ever since that, I never say never now.
Speaker: Never say never, man.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Everything's different now.
Speaker: Everything's different now.
Speaker: My eyes are changed.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I'm going to do that.
Speaker: Poker game is going to be my game of the year.
Speaker: Poker game is probably this rate.
Speaker: Jesus Christ.
Speaker: That one's if we're going.
Speaker: Here's the thing.
Speaker: If we're going based on hours, Bellatro and Pacific Drive are both neck and neck.
Speaker: Or neck and neck.
Speaker: I have been putting so much time because they're both very hour sucking kind of games.
Speaker: Yeah, it's easy to lose time.
Speaker: It's like Fox Mulder would be all conspiratorial about the lost time.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Time is a flat circle and this game proves it.
Speaker: And it's yeah.
Speaker: So those are my two.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm still on my bullshit of like these games that just waste time and let me.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I got it.
Speaker: A big chunk here and a big chunk there.
Speaker: So what about you, Kevin?
Speaker: What are you playing?
Speaker: I finished my playthrough of Disco Elysium.
Speaker: Right on.
Speaker: I did a pretty, I think a pretty thorough playthrough.
Speaker: There's some plot lines that I did not get to engage with, but yeah, it was good.
Speaker: It was a good reminder of like what is amazing about the game and the way it ends.
Speaker: It's like,
Speaker: The way the book ends and the way Disco Elysium ends, they are... Disco Elysium almost feels like an echo of the way the book ends, but is also a lot more satisfying.
Speaker: It kind of pulls a similar move, but it feels more earned in Disco Elysium than it does in the book, where in the book it kind of just feels like it's a...
Speaker: It's like a rushed write off of the characters, you know?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's very much, well, maybe we'll talk about them in the next book.
Speaker: And then they all died.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So I finished my playthrough of Disco Elysium.
Speaker: I was a sorry cop again.
Speaker: No, no, I was not a sorry cop.
Speaker: I actually opted out of being a sorry cop, but I still was called one of the sorriest cops in the world because of how often I apologized.
Speaker: And but I was I was a communist cop.
Speaker: Oh, good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We need more of those.
Speaker: We need more of those.
Speaker: And then I also I started playing Alone in the Dark.
Speaker: Oh, oh, oh.
Speaker: I definitely want to get into that.
Speaker: How are you enjoying that so far?
Speaker: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker: If you're looking for a Resident Evil like to.
Speaker: I always am.
Speaker: Hi, Ripley.
Speaker: Came up to start biting on the microphone.
Speaker: I got something to say.
Speaker: Here comes the tale.
Speaker: What if cats had podcasts?
Speaker: That would be.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: The most self-indulgent things ever.
Speaker: Good Lord.
Speaker: The only thing worse than white men having a podcast or be a cat.
Speaker: Yeah, that would be that would be the only thing to be thrown us, my friend.
Speaker: My God.
Speaker: So I knocked over a vase today and that's the whole episode.
Speaker: They will talk about that for an hour and a half long episode today.
Speaker: Oh, it's a vase.
Speaker: I thought it was pretty short.
Speaker: So, uh, yeah, I, uh, alone in the dark, it's a, it's very resident evil or, you know, resident evil is very alone in the dark ish.
Speaker: Um, so, you know, what, what, what can you say alone in the dark is going to, it's going to feel like one of the, like the resident evil remakes.
Speaker: Um, it's best specifically going to give you our resident evil two vibes.
Speaker: Um, because it has, uh, there's two campaigns, um,
Speaker: to play through.
Speaker: One is as the detective and one is as the niece of the guy, Jeremy, that you're trying to find.
Speaker: And it's, I really like it.
Speaker: It's a lot of fun so far.
Speaker: It feels good to play.
Speaker: The puzzles, I really like the puzzles.
Speaker: The puzzles are...
Speaker: they're not moon logic-y and you're kind of, you're able to solve them with the clues that you receive.
Speaker: Like it's good, but you have to think about it a little bit.
Speaker: You have to like observe the clues and look at the puzzle and be like, I got it.
Speaker: So yeah, Alone in the Dark.
Speaker: That's the other thing I've been playing.
Speaker: Good deal.
Speaker: Yeah, that's definitely what I'm going to want to pick up.
Speaker: That looks like my cup of tea.
Speaker: And Balotro, as Northern Lion would say.
Speaker: I'm playing Balotro.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: And lock it in.
Speaker: You know, it's game of the year.
Speaker: Game of the year.
Speaker: I'm stuck on the black deck where you lose, you gain a Joker but lose.
Speaker: Yeah, black deck is tough.
Speaker: That's a tough one.
Speaker: It's tough to get out.
Speaker: If you can get out of the early game with the black deck, you're better.
Speaker: That's the thing.
Speaker: Black deck is tough to get through the early game.
Speaker: I've never been smacked around with the early game so hard.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: But there is a balance patch coming for Blotro soon.
Speaker: Yeah, some of the RNG for the early antis on higher stakes are being tweaked.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Because, like, LocalThunk was like, yeah, he realized that at some of the really hard difficulties, it's just like...
Speaker: or some of the early stakes are just not fun because it's just constantly restarting until you get a decent start, a decent draw from the store.
Speaker: So he's tweaking that, tweaking some stakes and tweaking some of the cards.
Speaker: Like the eight ball card is getting completely changed because- I love the eight ball card.
Speaker: You love the eight ball card?
Speaker: Is that the one where you, which one?
Speaker: Is that the one?
Speaker: If you have two or more eights, you get a planet.
Speaker: Yeah, I love it because I'm such a planet whore.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: I never win with it.
Speaker: It fucks me over every time.
Speaker: That's the thing.
Speaker: That's the thing.
Speaker: Certain jokers pop up and I get so excited and I love their gimmick and I want to do the gimmick and it fucks me in the end.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Maybe I shouldn't complain.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's Ballotro for you.
Speaker: Or Ballotro.
Speaker: Whatever.
Speaker: That'll do it for tonight's episode.
Speaker: Follow us on Patreon, Twitter, Blue Sky, Instagram.
Speaker: PixelitPod is the way to get there.
Speaker: Otherwise, on all the podcast platforms, give us a five stars or a thumbs up or share us with your friends and family.
Speaker: It would be greatly appreciated.
Speaker: That'll be it for tonight's episode.
Speaker: Have a good night, everybody.
Speaker: Good night.
