Transcript
Speaker: There should be more.
Speaker: There's more, right?
Speaker: There should be more.
Speaker: There should always be more.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, my God.
Speaker: It's fascinating.
Speaker: It's my new favorite show.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: New favorite show.
Speaker: You know what else is my new favorite show?
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back to Pixel It.
Speaker: And if it sounds like we're extra excited, it's because we are.
Speaker: We actually have not recorded in a month and a half.
Speaker: Yes, we went on a little break.
Speaker: We went on a little break because Phil Dunn got hitched and we wanted to, oh, look at that ring.
Speaker: Look at that ring.
Speaker: And we wanted to, we built up a bank of episodes.
Speaker: If you couldn't tell by how out of date the What Are We Playing segments were.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because we noticed.
Speaker: We noticed.
Speaker: So I'm sure plenty of people noticed.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, I'm playing a game that at the time it would have been new.
Speaker: And then it was like six months ago or something like that.
Speaker: So, yeah, we banked up.
Speaker: We banked up a lot.
Speaker: Yeah, Cult of the Lamb.
Speaker: Everybody moved on from Cult of the Lamb.
Speaker: Yeah, no, we had banked up a ton of episodes over the summer just so Phil could we could take a little break.
Speaker: Phil took a break.
Speaker: He got his matrimony on.
Speaker: It was a lovely wedding.
Speaker: Phil cried.
Speaker: I cried.
Speaker: It was all good.
Speaker: It was a very cryy wedding.
Speaker: Very cryy.
Speaker: Dan was a good time.
Speaker: It was a good wedding.
Speaker: And while Phil was getting married and basking in the glow of that, I recorded another podcast with our friend of the show, Hot Cider.
Speaker: It's called Bullet Time.
Speaker: Go ahead and check that out.
Speaker: That's out now.
Speaker: You recorded like a dozen episodes, too, didn't you?
Speaker: We recorded.
Speaker: So there are I recorded personally.
Speaker: I want to say about a dozen episodes and I'm not the only co-host.
Speaker: There's two other co-hosts on the show.
Speaker: There's a fucking machine over there.
Speaker: And they're going to be getting their stuff recorded very shortly.
Speaker: So yeah, if you're looking for a podcast with...
Speaker: You know, people like Evelyn from I Am Error, Aranach, or Willow from Questing Refuge, or Jacob Geller from the YouTube channel.
Speaker: Jacob fucking Geller.
Speaker: Jacob Geller is going to be on there.
Speaker: Tesneckerer is one of the other co-hosts.
Speaker: Raz Razbutin was on there it's a good show a lot of great people on that show and Jesse Grasha who has also been on the show twice our show twice so yeah go check out Bullet Time
Speaker: But yeah, on the show today, we're starting a brand new series.
Speaker: Brand new series.
Speaker: Brand new book.
Speaker: Brand new book.
Speaker: Like literally brand new.
Speaker: As of when this episode comes out, it will still have only been out for a couple of weeks.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like, I don't know what's going on with us.
Speaker: Usually we're reading books that were written in like 1986 or something.
Speaker: And now we did Halo, the Rubicon Protocol, which just came out.
Speaker: Yeah, we did two new books, two brand new books towards the end of the year here.
Speaker: And the book that we're talking about today, the series we're starting is Dark Souls Mask of Vindication.
Speaker: Written by Michael A. Stackpole, who is a tried and true pulp sci fi and fantasy author.
Speaker: He's done a whole bunch of stuff.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: But yeah, so Dark Souls, in case you guys don't know what Dark Souls is, is
Speaker: That I don't know how that happens.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know how that's not sure how you can miss that because Dark Souls became the most the most common comparative game for a spell there in the 2010s.
Speaker: Oh, like it's the Dark Souls of such and such.
Speaker: So Dark Souls game made by From Software.
Speaker: It was the follow up to a game called Demon's Souls.
Speaker: From Software has is an old, old Japanese video game company.
Speaker: You know, they've been known for things like Armored Core, King's Quest, Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls series is kind of like a spiritual continuation of the King's Quest games.
Speaker: They're most notable for their...
Speaker: Not King's Quest.
Speaker: King's Field.
Speaker: King's Field.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: They're not King's Quests.
Speaker: King Graham in the land of From Software.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: King's Field.
Speaker: It's been a few months.
Speaker: I'm going to have to shake off some of the rust.
Speaker: But yeah, we're WD-40ing it.
Speaker: A little WD-40 on that.
Speaker: Kingsfield was a first-person action RPG, and Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are third-person action RPGs, and they're known for their punishing difficulty.
Speaker: and the common refrain from gamers everywhere to just get good.
Speaker: My personal take, I don't I don't find those the games that difficult.
Speaker: They are there's their game that you have.
Speaker: It's just something that you have to kind of learn how to play like the way that the game wants you to play.
Speaker: There's I mean, yeah.
Speaker: Anyway, that's a whole nother discussion about.
Speaker: To remind everyone at home, I couldn't get past the first level of Bloodborne.
Speaker: So that's true.
Speaker: But I think Bloodborne is harder than Dark Souls in some regards.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: So, yeah, Dark Souls, it's been everywhere for over a decade now.
Speaker: The most recent game in the FromSoft Soulsborne series just came out earlier this year called Elden Ring, a massive open world game, but with all the Dark Souls goodies that we have come to know and love.
Speaker: So that's basically Dark Souls.
Speaker: I mean, it's it's there.
Speaker: It's out there.
Speaker: And this is its first ever novelization.
Speaker: Yeah, this is the first ever novelization.
Speaker: There was a graphic novel that came out in 2016 with the release of Dark Souls three.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: By Titan, who are the same people who did the Bloodborne graphic novels and also the Assassin's Creed graphic novels.
Speaker: This is a company right there.
Speaker: God damn.
Speaker: So, yeah, Phil, why don't you tell us a little bit about who Michael A. Stackpole is?
Speaker: Oh, Michael A. Stackpole.
Speaker: We got it.
Speaker: Here's another OG in the geek pantheon.
Speaker: Michael Stackpole is a game designer.
Speaker: He is a writer.
Speaker: And he was actually a very important figure in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.
Speaker: He got a name for himself among many geeks as being a guy who was writing on the regular against organizations like Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons bad, which sounds like kind of a walking punchline.
Speaker: And nowadays it kind of is.
Speaker: But in those days, people were taking it very seriously, thinking that people playing Dungeons and Dragons was they were going to kill themselves and get lost in the steam tunnels beneath their school and all that stuff.
Speaker: People like me who wanted very badly to play D&D, but my mother wouldn't let me because of all of the urban legends she'd heard surrounding it.
Speaker: Stackpole became very well known for writing on a pretty regular basis about why D&D wasn't just not a bad thing, but it was a good thing.
Speaker: And it was good for you and it was fun and encouraged adventure and play and stuff that growing kids need.
Speaker: In the meantime, he wrote a few books.
Speaker: You may have heard of a couple of them.
Speaker: He wrote, he was the founder of the X-Wing Rogue Squadron series.
Speaker: He wrote X-Wing Rogue Squadron in 1996, which led to a huge spinoff.
Speaker: of Star Wars stories, novels mostly.
Speaker: And he wrote a lot of really important battle tech books.
Speaker: He wrote the Dragon Crown War series, a lot
Speaker: of stuff, dark conspiracy, mech warrior stuff, and a lot of novelizations.
Speaker: One of the more recent ones, he wrote the novelization of the 2011 Conan the Barbarian movie that came out with Jason Momoa in it, which I saw in the theaters and was not very good.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: It was, it was, but I will say this for that movie.
Speaker: It knew what it was trying to make.
Speaker: It was, it was not trying to be, uh, as Lord of the Rings as it could have been.
Speaker: I thought they were going to be leaning hard into like, um,
Speaker: more of the Tolkien-esque kind of aspects of it, trying to grab those.
Speaker: No, they were like, no, we know who Robert E. Howard is.
Speaker: We're going to make a big, campy, dumb fantasy movie.
Speaker: And they did.
Speaker: I need to watch it again.
Speaker: I haven't seen it since.
Speaker: I take Conan very seriously.
Speaker: You are a Conan fan.
Speaker: I like myself a Sumerian.
Speaker: What can I say?
Speaker: Stackpole is still very active today.
Speaker: Obviously, as this project shows, it's kind of a very big deal to be asked to write the first novelization of such a huge and, dare I say it, important with a capital I franchise.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, you know, it makes sense that they'd want to entrust it with an old grognard of the old school fantasy world.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, so that's the game.
Speaker: That's the person.
Speaker: So we're going to jump right into the story and kind of work our way through it.
Speaker: So we read the first 13 chapters for this episode, and we're going to start off in chapter one.
Speaker: The game, the game, the book is told in a first person perspective.
Speaker: And our primary character is
Speaker: is waking up from death.
Speaker: And this is, this is going to sound like I'm dunking on the book.
Speaker: This is probably the most interesting part of the book.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And maybe that is a dunk.
Speaker: We'll reserve the, the,
Speaker: that for later but it's a very interesting segment where the the this undead and that's what they're called in the in the dark souls averse is the the undead um
Speaker: wakes up and he has to remember things like being able to touch things, being able to move his hand, being he remembers he he isn't able to see until he remembers the concept of sight.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We get a lot of cool inner monologue stuff.
Speaker: A lot of really cool inner monologue stuff.
Speaker: And he wakes up and discovers that he is basically in a chamber, in a mausoleum.
Speaker: And there appears to have been a thief at some point who broke in to rob the grave.
Speaker: But because of the height from which the ceiling that the thief fell down, the thief like landed and then ended up not being able to get back out of the mausoleum and dying.
Speaker: And then he basically, he continues his inner monologue.
Speaker: He questions the thief, the dead thief, who then wakes up.
Speaker: And he struggles with this thief and remembers his magic.
Speaker: And he casts a spell and blows the head off of this undead thief that attacks him.
Speaker: Um...
Speaker: It's a very generic sort of magic, isn't it?
Speaker: I wanted to ask you about that.
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: There is some spells that are basically like your very basic level spell.
Speaker: And I don't remember what they're called in Dark Souls.
Speaker: specifically, but it's like a specific names, don't they?
Speaker: They do have specific names.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The lowest, the lowest level, like caster spell, one of the lowest level caster spells, at least in Elden Ring.
Speaker: And I need to, I haven't played a caster in Dark Souls in a long time.
Speaker: It's basically like a magic missile type thing where it's just like you're shooting a little pew.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because he kind of, and you will see this, at least in this first third of the book, you see it a lot where he just kind of says, it's kind of like, I used magic to destroy the enemy.
Speaker: I used magic to blow his head off.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's not, I cast a fireball.
Speaker: No, and it's like a blue glowy that melts things kind of and does damage.
Speaker: Force damage, but also cooks things, as we find out later.
Speaker: Burns things.
Speaker: So not very specific on the magic.
Speaker: He basically, he's able to get out of the tomb.
Speaker: He looks at the, basically there is a seal on the tomb that is preventing him from leaving.
Speaker: There's like a magic in place that prevents him from leaving his tomb.
Speaker: So, but he realizes he can like,
Speaker: go down below it and get out through that.
Speaker: He like is able to sneak out through the, like an opening that prevents him from being caught in the magic field.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Goes up and around, goes up and around and he sees that there's a name on the outside and it's, he assumes that this is his name and it's Phara-nos.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And he's like, all right, I'm Phara-nos.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Moving on.
Speaker: Let's move on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Let's remember some new stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We get some really neat descriptions of the lands, the desert lands that he's in, which is very evocative in some points of Dark Souls where you have these.
Speaker: That's the thing about Dark Souls is the three games are set in a...
Speaker: It's like post-apocalyptic fantasy.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Things are not going well in any Dark Souls story.
Speaker: Things are going pretty bad.
Speaker: So he is continuing through this desert and he comes across a man sitting by a fire.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: You guessed it.
Speaker: This is a bonfire.
Speaker: This is the bonfire that that hollows and the undead are the aggregate around and they're they're attracted to just like sit down and doesn't necessarily give out warmth, but it kind of comforts them.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: So he talks to this man who's sitting at the bonfire and the guy has been sitting there so long with his legs crossed that his legs have kind of like fused together.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I thought that was a really cool detail.
Speaker: Like he'd been there for that long.
Speaker: And it was like, cause he says, cause he says, um,
Speaker: He talks a little bit about he had had the option of going out and, you know, going out and fighting and seeing the world and that sort of thing.
Speaker: But after a while, he just didn't think it was worth it anymore.
Speaker: So he decided to just have himself sit down and.
Speaker: He's been that way for like hundreds of years.
Speaker: He's in.
Speaker: It's a long sit down and he actually, Pharaonis notices that the guy has this instinctual urge to continue to feed the fire, but there's nothing.
Speaker: He's not feeding it anything.
Speaker: He's just like grabbing an invisible pile of sticks and throwing it in.
Speaker: And this guy's like on a looping animation.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: It absolutely you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: we've talked about this on several episodes in the past where you have to wonder, you're like, all right, how much of this was this person just playing through the game and like writing about things they saw.
Speaker: And that was one of the first ones that there was a part of that was like, did he just watch?
Speaker: It feels like watching an NPC.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Did he watch an NPC just kind of loop through an animation a bunch of times?
Speaker: Like that's a fun idea.
Speaker: Let's do that.
Speaker: That's a fun idea.
Speaker: So Farinos decides to go.
Speaker: He is he's being pulled in a direction.
Speaker: He is.
Speaker: There's a supernatural urge for him to just go.
Speaker: And he's going and he's going.
Speaker: And the guy's like, well, the door is right there.
Speaker: It's that Rick and Morty scene.
Speaker: You're like, well, I'm leaving.
Speaker: That was always allowed.
Speaker: That was always allowed.
Speaker: So Farronos leaves and he goes down a set of stairs and he's like in this underground, like, it's not like a cave system, it's like a buried fortress that he's walking through.
Speaker: And he gets killed and it becomes Groundhog Day at this point.
Speaker: So he dies and he wakes up next to the fire that he just rested at.
Speaker: And the guy's like, oh, you're back.
Speaker: Yeah, it is a pretty great moment where it's just like, hey, how'd that go?
Speaker: That sucked, huh?
Speaker: That was terrible, right?
Speaker: Now you see why I've been sitting here all this time.
Speaker: So he keeps doing it.
Speaker: And one of the things that keeps getting mentioned by Farinos is that he doesn't really notice the passage of time.
Speaker: So we don't actually know how long he is doing this, but he is...
Speaker: dying over and over again to traps.
Speaker: Is it whatever?
Speaker: It's a group of soldiers down there.
Speaker: He's dying over and over again.
Speaker: And eventually he gets kind of close.
Speaker: And finally, the guy at the fire is like, oh, yeah, well, this might help.
Speaker: And he gives him a flask.
Speaker: And it's never called the Estus flask, but that's what it is.
Speaker: It's the Estus flask, which is the thing that heals you in the games.
Speaker: The guy's like, and Ferdas is like, I could have used this earlier.
Speaker: And the guy at the fire is like, eh.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: It's like, it's such a like Calvin's dad moment from Calvin and Hobbes where he's like, suffering builds character, fucker.
Speaker: Building character.
Speaker: Pharaon is Calvin and the guy at the fire is Calvin's dad.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: If you guys take away nothing from this, know that that is the perfect analogy.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: So the.
Speaker: He goes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he goes and he kills.
Speaker: It's this group called the Lost Patrol.
Speaker: Doesn't really matter.
Speaker: They're just a group of dudes down there.
Speaker: And he gets down there.
Speaker: He's able to kill the Lost Patrol.
Speaker: And he continues on.
Speaker: And he gets into like this, this like...
Speaker: Valley area.
Speaker: And he he goes keeps going through.
Speaker: He runs into a town and the town looks like it's been, you know, demolished.
Speaker: There's graffiti or whatever.
Speaker: And he.
Speaker: Ends up, he kills a couple of hollows and he finds a coin, finds a few coins, but he finds one that looks older than all the rest.
Speaker: And on it is the word panier, which strikes back.
Speaker: It brings back like a memory to him.
Speaker: He knows something of what panier is.
Speaker: By the way, every time, don't worry, every time he kills a hollow, he is absorbing their soul essence.
Speaker: The soul's mechanic is built into the book.
Speaker: And I think he handles it well.
Speaker: I think Stackpole does a good job with like, you know, he gets a little trace memory from everybody that he kills.
Speaker: He sees like a brief moment in their life and absorbs it.
Speaker: And it's not really, it shouldn't mean anything to him necessarily, even though he doesn't remember his own past, but he's getting all of these memories from all these other creatures.
Speaker: It's kind of cool.
Speaker: Like, was that...
Speaker: Is that something that's baked into the mythology in Dark Souls at all, or is that new?
Speaker: The memories?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: No, it's just souls are a little bit different than...
Speaker: I feel like there is no... However Miyazaki considers the soul in Dark Souls, it's a little bit different than the essence of a person.
Speaker: I think there's a separation between... The soul is like an animus.
Speaker: It's like a thing that moves the flesh.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And in that, it's power.
Speaker: it's not necessarily memory also.
Speaker: It's just the power, the animus that actually moved this sack of meat that we call a body.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's not like he's becoming more like them, but it's kind of like the old folklore of eating an animal's heart to gain its courage or something.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And you're getting contact traces of like,
Speaker: In the game, I don't think this is ever really brought up, but it is a neat little wrinkle in the book that in the book, it's like, oh, you're getting some contact traces of who this person, the last person who touched this soul, you're getting some trace elements of who they were.
Speaker: It's a really interesting touch.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: So he continues on and there's only one way forward.
Speaker: He knows where he has to go and there's only one way forward.
Speaker: And that is down into an arena where there is a gigantic man with a with a is it a mace?
Speaker: I think it's a mace.
Speaker: It's a mace.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is the, I'm not, I'm sure people have picked up on it.
Speaker: I do not play Souls games.
Speaker: I'm not any good at them.
Speaker: They bring me no joy, but I am kind of fascinated by that.
Speaker: I was excited to read this because the creatures and the landscapes that are in these FromSoftware games are fascinating to me.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Even though I've never fully played one of these games through, I can say for certain that this upcoming moment is like the most stereotypical Souls moment in the book so far.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, because it's just a big boss guy who just sits there and waits for him.
Speaker: He's waiting for you.
Speaker: It feels very similar.
Speaker: There is a boss in Dark Souls 3 named Udex Gundyr, who is basically this gigantic armored man who is, he's kneeling down in the center of the arena.
Speaker: And the first thing you do is you go up to him and there's a, there's a sword that
Speaker: in his chest and you rip the sword out of his chest and that wakes him up.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, what else?
Speaker: Yeah, of course.
Speaker: That would wake anybody up.
Speaker: What else is he going to do?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And he fights you and he is, you fight him in the first like seven minutes of Dark Souls 3.
Speaker: I mean, that's probably what inspired this thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he dies a bunch to this dude.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He dies and he got, I love how he describes it where it's like the, he's like just standing there like a statue, hands on his weapons, waiting almost politely for him to show up and start the fight again.
Speaker: Like he's not pacing.
Speaker: He's not doing anything, but just waiting for the next guy to step in so he could kill him.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he gets back to the he gets back to the he did light up a new bonfire nearby.
Speaker: He gets back there.
Speaker: And this time after the last time he dies, he wakes up and there is a knight standing there.
Speaker: with his sword pointed at Faranos.
Speaker: He's like, you good?
Speaker: Do I have to kill you?
Speaker: And he, Faranos is like, no, no, no, I'm good.
Speaker: And Faranos remembers the guy's sigil.
Speaker: That he is a knight of the Knights of Virtue.
Speaker: His name is Crotha.
Speaker: Crotha Truth Teller.
Speaker: Good name.
Speaker: Another good D&D name.
Speaker: A good D&D name.
Speaker: Basically, the virtue that he abides is the truth in all things.
Speaker: He can never...
Speaker: He can never he doesn't lie.
Speaker: He hates lies.
Speaker: And in that he also hates rumors and gossip because they are not necessarily the truth.
Speaker: So he doesn't play in rumors and gossip.
Speaker: Just lawful, good paladin.
Speaker: He is a lawful, good paladin.
Speaker: That's him.
Speaker: Easy peasy.
Speaker: Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Speaker: Now with Krotha, who is also in the same spot where he's like, oh, I woke up and I have this vibe where I got to go that way.
Speaker: And Farinos is like, well, there's a dude in the way.
Speaker: And Krotha is like, bro, now there's two of us.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Fucking game grumps like playing Dark Souls.
Speaker: Just waiting for a second player to come in.
Speaker: And then they go and they fight and he basically Jolly Cooperation.
Speaker: That's what it was called in Dark Souls.
Speaker: There's a character called Solaire who calls it Jolly Cooperation when you work with somebody.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They fight and they take down this dude with the mace and they get a big old rush of soul energy.
Speaker: It blows their hair back, man.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, that's chapter four.
Speaker: And Kurtha is like, you know, he's a little bit, I don't know, I don't want to call him boring, but he's a little, a little boring for a character.
Speaker: He's a real square.
Speaker: He's a real square.
Speaker: He's got to, we got to get some darkness coming out of this dude because it's, so far he's like, eh.
Speaker: Well, it's like we've got two Nick Carraway characters, basically.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: We've got two very vanilla kind of sort of characters because neither of them know what's going on, really.
Speaker: They're both going.
Speaker: So he doesn't.
Speaker: So introducing him doesn't, at this point, at least bring too much to the table.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So chapter five, we're picking up now on chapter five and they're just walking and they have no idea how much time is passing.
Speaker: They're walking.
Speaker: There's there's lands they would find.
Speaker: They would they would kindle bonfires as they go.
Speaker: Sometimes they would find people, but humans, the actual living people are like staying way clear of the
Speaker: Because because they look even though they are not hollows, they are just like there's two levels.
Speaker: There's just undead and then there's hollows.
Speaker: Hollows are basically undead that have lost every every bit of humanity that they had.
Speaker: And are just mindless creatures doing, you know, whatever.
Speaker: They're undead are just are very much like regular people.
Speaker: They're just, you know, in a corpse.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, like Mitch McConnell.
Speaker: It's Mitch McConnell.
Speaker: You know, think of that.
Speaker: You got it.
Speaker: We're back, baby.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You guys fucking missed it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Fucking Mitch McConnell and all of his goddamn turtleneck piece of shit.
Speaker: Oh, it feels good to be back, bitch.
Speaker: Feels good.
Speaker: Feels good.
Speaker: So they go, they find a fortress, a tower, basically.
Speaker: They see some graffiti about a land called Trafarum, which they are putting together.
Speaker: Oh, it's a beautiful, faraway land, yada, yada, yada.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They don't remember yet, but Crotha is from Traforum.
Speaker: That's going to get revealed in a little bit.
Speaker: And they get jumped by some goons.
Speaker: While they're crossing a swamp area, they're fighting some hollows.
Speaker: They win.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's like the most interest don't have.
Speaker: They don't strike me as any.
Speaker: There's no stakes to the fights right now because.
Speaker: In something that is really good for a game, the coming back up out of the bonfire is
Speaker: there's like no stakes to any of these fights so far.
Speaker: It's like, cause you know, they're going to just going to be able to try it again.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: It's kind of where we run into our first roadblock in terms of this being an adaptation.
Speaker: Cause on one hand, like I said before, that's kind of cool.
Speaker: Like, like being able to work that into the book in such a way.
Speaker: I liked the idea of like,
Speaker: You know, working, it's like, okay, well, you die and you show back up and gaining these souls and learning memories.
Speaker: There's something really interesting about that that you could totally see.
Speaker: You're like, okay, as a book, that works.
Speaker: But yeah, it eliminates pretty much all the fear of death.
Speaker: So the fights lack.
Speaker: Yeah, so you gotta, you can't, that's the thing is I feel like if,
Speaker: you do not focus on the fights as a set piece.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's more of a matter of fact thing rather than just like the, the, the, the focus really needs to be on the,
Speaker: like the internal struggle of what this shit means right rather than an external struggle of like oh we died i'm back up again and i mean in this case they don't die um uh uh ferranos loses his foot though um he blows his own goddamn foot off um
Speaker: Because of a crocodile?
Speaker: Because a crocodile clamps onto it and he shoots, sticks his, it's kind of a cool moment, but still he, he sticks the staff, his staff down into the crocodile's throat and he blasts it with, with his magic.
Speaker: Magic.
Speaker: It's a, the, the Dark Souls, Florida DLC.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Florida DLC.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, so he, he kills the crocodile, but he loses his foot along with, with it.
Speaker: And, uh, uh, Krotha has to basically carry him the rest of the way that they're going.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, they, they get, um,
Speaker: They basically find a pyramid, this like temple structure.
Speaker: And we are in chapter six now.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And they find a sarcophagus inside.
Speaker: And this is kind of...
Speaker: So there's a puzzle that they solve here, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's, I guess it's fine, but also feels like a D&D campaign, like the DM was stressing for a puzzle and just needed to throw one in because it doesn't, it's not like a, it's not like a very,
Speaker: interesting puzzle to watch these characters solve, you know?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I wanted to ask you about that.
Speaker: Are puzzles really a thing in Dark Souls?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: No, not a big thing.
Speaker: Because it felt, it made me think, and maybe you'll agree, it made me think
Speaker: Of the Resident Evil adaptations.
Speaker: It was very, it's very much, it's closer to a Resident Evil puzzle than anything you would find in Dark Souls.
Speaker: Yeah, it's such an odd choice.
Speaker: But I guess, I guess it was a choice to vary up things.
Speaker: But yeah, puzzles, I know, I don't think of puzzles when I think of Dark Souls.
Speaker: And this won't be the only one.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: So they have to basically figure out that they have to, there are these dreams kind of swirling around the sarcophagus.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And they have to, Krotha ends up being the one to do it.
Speaker: He has to like step on certain squares while a dream is in a certain area.
Speaker: He has to like match his emotion.
Speaker: to the dream in order to proceed further into the magic field.
Speaker: Um, and if he does the wrong emotion on the wrong square, lady Dimitrescu pops out of nowhere and cuts his fucking head off.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's, that's basically it.
Speaker: That's basically it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Heisenberg shows up and says, you bolder punching moron.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I gotta play that game again.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The DLC is coming out.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: Or came out when this episode airs.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: I guess it'll be out by now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Anyway, let's cut this short and no.
Speaker: So he figures it out.
Speaker: There's like some stakes where there's a wolf and the only stakes are inconvenience at this point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because like, oh, well, if I die, I got to fight all the way back here, which is like...
Speaker: OK, which is the same as playing the game, which is the same as playing the game.
Speaker: But the game has actually additional stakes because if you don't get back to the point at which you died, you lose all the souls that you had not already like banked into your character yet.
Speaker: So you have to do a corpse run first.
Speaker: You have to actually get back to where you died.
Speaker: So they in the book, though, that's that's been completely stripped away.
Speaker: Now it's just you the you just have to get back to where you were.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So it's actually even lower stakes.
Speaker: It's even lower stakes than in the game.
Speaker: We've reduced the stakes.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: This is this is Dark Souls easy mode that you've been asking for.
Speaker: No wonder everyone was so pissed.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I'm sorry, toxic fanboys.
Speaker: You were right.
Speaker: You were right all along.
Speaker: I didn't know.
Speaker: I didn't know.
Speaker: So he solves it.
Speaker: He gets there and now he has to.
Speaker: But now that the fields, basically that this field was healing them and healing both Crotha and Farinos, that
Speaker: Now that it's dispelled, now that you solve the puzzle, the guy in the sarcophagus is now dying because there's no air in there.
Speaker: It was keeping him alive.
Speaker: So they're like, oh, shit.
Speaker: Hey, enter some stakes.
Speaker: Now they have to figure out how to open the sarcophagus.
Speaker: And I'm sure they come up with like a really elegant, thoughtful solution to doing that.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: He hits it with his sword.
Speaker: He hits it with his sword.
Speaker: He just hits it over and it's not even his idea.
Speaker: Fucking Thanos is going to be like, hit it, hit it a bunch.
Speaker: Bash the shit out of it.
Speaker: And he does.
Speaker: And it's just like, and it crumbles.
Speaker: And it works.
Speaker: And they're like, oh, well, now he's just like a little sleeping baby.
Speaker: So we're going to let him sit here.
Speaker: Barbarians his way through the puzzle.
Speaker: We're going to let this guy sit here.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's basically the start of chapter seven where they figure that out.
Speaker: And they're like, all right, well, we have a real human now that needs food.
Speaker: So we got to go get some food.
Speaker: So they're out there.
Speaker: They find the parts of the crocodile that he killed.
Speaker: I love this because it might be the most gamer moment in the entire book.
Speaker: We're just like, I killed a guy a few screens back.
Speaker: Let's go raid his corpse.
Speaker: Let's go raid his corpse.
Speaker: And he finds his old foot.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: It's such a fucking like... And he just discards it into the swamp.
Speaker: It's so meta.
Speaker: It's so weird.
Speaker: And they're like, well, do you think he'll like... Like, how do I cook this?
Speaker: He goes, I'm pretty sure I wasn't a chef in my former life.
Speaker: And he goes, well, do you think he'll eat it?
Speaker: And he's like, I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know what living people like.
Speaker: It's so bizarre.
Speaker: It's... Oh, it's so weird.
Speaker: It's so weird.
Speaker: And so they spill out some blood and it it pulls into some.
Speaker: Some it's like chiseled out stuff on the ground and it spells out a name as the blood pools.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And the name is Beleriand.
Speaker: And they're like.
Speaker: Maybe that's this kid's name.
Speaker: So they go in and just by.
Speaker: Speaking the name Belarion, it actually wakes the kid up.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And he's like, oh, yes, no, that is me.
Speaker: That is I, Belarion.
Speaker: And they they start kind of like deducing what they know.
Speaker: And at this point, like, OK, Balerion might be the son of the king, King Panir, who was from a real long time ago.
Speaker: eons ago from what we can tell because it was on the oldest of the coins that Farinos found, right?
Speaker: And also, Farinos also can tell that a long time has passed based on the stars or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, that is a cool detail that I forgot to mention, is that the memory of the stars that he gets from the thief
Speaker: is different from the position of the stars in the sky when he looks into the night sky.
Speaker: And he can tell that the stars are in different positions.
Speaker: He says degrees by degrees.
Speaker: And the things that he knew as planets at one time, some are no longer there.
Speaker: Some have changed colors, things like that.
Speaker: So I was like, that was a really neat detail.
Speaker: It's a really cool detail, and it could have gone into anything, really, but it's neat that it was used... It's used kind of to tell us a little bit about Pharaonos in the past, like who he is.
Speaker: Yeah, he's like...
Speaker: Because he says to himself, I clearly knew a lot about astronomy and astrology at one point.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: He's some kind of cool tower mage kind of character.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or he used to be.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's a clever way of getting to know him and it's a clever way of getting to know that a shit ton of time has passed.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They kind of figure out that Balerion, I wouldn't say figure out, but they're surmising that Balerion might be the bastard son.
Speaker: Actually, he says he's the bastard son.
Speaker: It's like kind of how he announces himself, by the way.
Speaker: He's like, hi, I am Balerion, the bastard son of King Pannir.
Speaker: It's a random detail.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Good, good to know.
Speaker: Hi, I'm Phil Keeling.
Speaker: I'm allergic to walnuts.
Speaker: You're like, what?
Speaker: We just met.
Speaker: Are you allergic to walnuts?
Speaker: I was like, I feel like I would have known that.
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: You look like a walnut eater.
Speaker: And if I was, I wouldn't give the internet that information.
Speaker: That's a good point.
Speaker: That's between us.
Speaker: Wait, did you just say I look like a walnut eater?
Speaker: I'm just saying, you look like a guy who enjoys a walnut occasionally.
Speaker: What kind of Dickensian insult is that?
Speaker: Look at over there, those walnut eaters.
Speaker: These walnut eaters over there.
Speaker: Scrooge with his pipe.
Speaker: It's like the week before Christmas.
Speaker: He's like walking up and down the street and like, those walnut eaters over there.
Speaker: I suppose you'll be wanting Christmas off, Cratchit, you walnut eater.
Speaker: You walnut eater.
Speaker: He says, now you can't call us that anymore.
Speaker: It's a different time.
Speaker: It's a different time.
Speaker: There's laws.
Speaker: There's laws.
Speaker: Like you, you, yeah.
Speaker: So he throws like a walnut at his head.
Speaker: It's like, it's, it's like racist against the Welsh or something like that.
Speaker: I just.
Speaker: Good old English racism right there.
Speaker: We are inventing.
Speaker: I will say the best.
Speaker: The best racism is the English racism.
Speaker: The 19th century English, like Londoner racism against just like somebody who's from like 10 miles up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just racism that is just covered in chimney soot.
Speaker: Just absolutely.
Speaker: Chimney soot walnut eater.
Speaker: Just the best.
Speaker: You chimney soot bespotted walnut eater.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: How dare you?
Speaker: Now I want walnuts.
Speaker: God damn.
Speaker: How did that happen?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: It's going in my profile, by the way.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Walnut eater.
Speaker: Known to eat walnuts.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Known to enjoy a walnut or two at the end of a long day.
Speaker: Now and then.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now and then.
Speaker: Strictly medicinal.
Speaker: Medicinal walnut card.
Speaker: So they continue on.
Speaker: They continue talking.
Speaker: Basically, Beleriand got there because a couple of the other Knights of Virtue put him there.
Speaker: Their names are drugging him.
Speaker: They slowly drugged him over the period of a month until he lost consciousness for over a thousand years.
Speaker: Uh huh.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I've heard that one before, too, Beleriand.
Speaker: Get a lawyer.
Speaker: Been there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: When I woke up, it was 11.15 when I fell asleep.
Speaker: The year.
Speaker: Call the police.
Speaker: Call the police.
Speaker: So, yeah, he gets he gets drugged for over a month and then he gets shoved into our sarcophagus and there he was.
Speaker: And to Balerion, it was basically a day.
Speaker: He had been asleep for one day to him from his perspective.
Speaker: He's like, oh, I had a good night, good night's rest.
Speaker: And
Speaker: uh, Farinos and Krotha are like, buddy, um, good, good, good slash bad news.
Speaker: Good slash bad news.
Speaker: Um, they take him outside and he's like, oh my God.
Speaker: Um, the lands that he once knew as like nice, you know, nice.
Speaker: They weren't bad.
Speaker: They were nice, you know, are now bad.
Speaker: These are bad lands.
Speaker: Things, things, uh, it really reminds me of, there's that tweet about, uh,
Speaker: or somebody wrote a fake opening monologue to Dark Souls where it's like, it's like things fucking suck and are real fucked up and only you, the fucked up little guy, the most fucked up little guy of them all can unfuck them.
Speaker: That's pretty much it.
Speaker: Like that's basically what we're dealing with here.
Speaker: It's just multiplayer now.
Speaker: That's all.
Speaker: Yeah, it's just multiplayer.
Speaker: So so they're they're thinking they believe him that he's probably the the the kid, the kid, Pannier's kid.
Speaker: And they continue on.
Speaker: Oh, I hear I hear a kitty cat.
Speaker: Yeah, they're demanding.
Speaker: Hold on.
Speaker: God damn it.
Speaker: Fucking cat.
Speaker: I swear to God.
Speaker: This is going to be a regular part of the show.
Speaker: I swear.
Speaker: Like, let the cat in.
Speaker: Let the cat in the office.
Speaker: All right, come on.
Speaker: Go on.
Speaker: Their cats are coming in.
Speaker: Here they come.
Speaker: Are they just standing at the door or are they just, are they coming in?
Speaker: We'll see.
Speaker: Oh, there's a kitty.
Speaker: Oh my gosh.
Speaker: There's a big old kitty.
Speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Lieutenant Ellen Ripley, Jennifer Garner, Stockton Keeling.
Speaker: Oh my gosh.
Speaker: She's, she, she does not want to be involved.
Speaker: No, I just said, open the door.
Speaker: That was all I wanted.
Speaker: She left.
Speaker: She's gone.
Speaker: She's gone now.
Speaker: She's gone.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So, yeah, they continue on and they they have, you know, they start getting some some more memories back.
Speaker: They kind of like basically infer based on who they found that like they're there to help his dad, like the king somehow.
Speaker: yeah like like belarian is feeling a similar pull eastward that they were feeling to go get belarian in the first place right um which is something dark soulsy where usually the undead have a quest but i'll get to that in a little bit um so yeah the uh pharados goes hunting he blows up a couple rabbits yeah he does go to
Speaker: I like they point out that he shoots one of them directly with his magic.
Speaker: And it points out he's like, now, while the pieces of meat that are left behind are very well cooked.
Speaker: It won't feed anyone.
Speaker: Yeah, no one's going to eat that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The other one, he hits the ground next to it, which causes it to fly into the air and then drain itself on a rock.
Speaker: Which is also hilarious on top of everything else.
Speaker: Not quite dead yet.
Speaker: So Faranos has to beat it against a rock until it does die.
Speaker: Dark Souls.
Speaker: Dark Souls.
Speaker: The Dark Souls of hunting.
Speaker: Of rabbit hunting.
Speaker: Of rabbit hunting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We get into some like stories that Balerion tells about how there were these wise men that always stopped by his village and Crotha's like, I kind of call bullshit on this as a thing that should have been normal.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like, wise men wouldn't have gone to just a random ass village.
Speaker: And also there's this old man who is like, would come and tell stories and he would go by the name of Parneas.
Speaker: Parneas, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: He would go by the name of Parneas and he would tell these stories about these three baby wolves who, he told one story about a wolf who fucks over a village of sheep.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And then he tells another story about a wolf with three kids.
Speaker: We get like two long-winded folk tales in a row.
Speaker: Yeah, very long.
Speaker: It's wild.
Speaker: We get to the first one.
Speaker: I was like, OK, well, don't trust a wolf.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: We knew that.
Speaker: And then the second one is like, you know, the wolf and his kids are real fucked up.
Speaker: They're real fucked up kids.
Speaker: And it's going to be another it's going to be another kid that's going to come in and save the day.
Speaker: And then he winked at Balerion and Balerion never understood why that was.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Gaborian goes like, the guy who went by Parneas and Croth is like, hmm, whenever the king would write poetry, he would always use the name Parneas.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: What a coinkydink.
Speaker: What a coinkydink.
Speaker: Which I didn't write notes for this section.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But if I did, I would have wrote dumb.
Speaker: It's a little dumb.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: This is super dumb, this whole section.
Speaker: It's like, oh, you guys, Michael Sweetheart, you're trying way too hard here to lay some track.
Speaker: We get, this is where I started to notice just how much of our Dark Souls book was dialogue.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like pages upon pages of dialogue.
Speaker: It's just them telling things to each other back and forth constantly.
Speaker: And that's how we're getting the bits and pieces of exposition.
Speaker: Whispering little sweet nothings to each other.
Speaker: Hey, hey, Krowth, maybe I was a servant when I was.
Speaker: And Krowth is like, that's cool.
Speaker: I was a knight.
Speaker: And Furness is like, yeah, I know.
Speaker: Yeah, I got it.
Speaker: You're wearing your armor that you died in.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's like, yeah.
Speaker: And I guess I respect, you know, not sitting down and just writing 50 pages of like all the lore and mythology in a row, like some fantasy authors like to do.
Speaker: But this really is where it starts.
Speaker: You start to see.
Speaker: fully fledged how kind of, it's getting a little clumsy.
Speaker: The writing is getting, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: In chapter 10, they continue on their merry way.
Speaker: They get fucked up by some, well, Pharaonus gets fucked up by some cacti.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, vicious cacti.
Speaker: Vicious cacti.
Speaker: They're like sentient cacti.
Speaker: They swing at you.
Speaker: And then they encounter a group of people called the Yatka who are very hostile.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: At some point, uh, uh, uh, Ferdos dies at some point and he gets, he gets booted back to the last bonfire.
Speaker: Um, and he sees, when he comes back, he sees like, oh, well, Crotha and Balerion have made some progress clearly.
Speaker: And they went into this cave area.
Speaker: And, um, now remember this, he like, he goes in through the cave and there's just hostile enemies and,
Speaker: Everywhere.
Speaker: And he just he's just like he does a lot of damage.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The it the best thing about the scene happens later.
Speaker: They so this is this is in chapter 11, by the way, they find themselves in a chamber at the back of this cave.
Speaker: And there's a woman kind of standing in the same glowing fields.
Speaker: that Balerion was in and at some point Pharaon says to Crotha I'd be like oh yeah you know maybe we can get some stuff from the people that were living in the cave and Crotha goes looks in the cave and is basically like what the fuck did you do yeah and Balerion because Balerion killed all of them and Balerion just responds they were hostile right
Speaker: Just like, I had to, they were jerks.
Speaker: There weren't these jerks I had to kill.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Farinos did the killing.
Speaker: Farinos did the killing.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Kroetha's like, what did you do?
Speaker: It's like, they were jerks.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Have you played one of these games?
Speaker: I have.
Speaker: You gotta kill.
Speaker: You just kill the people.
Speaker: You don't bother.
Speaker: I'm not making a lot of friends here.
Speaker: There's, it's like one in 10 that you have one in a hundred people that you can talk to.
Speaker: So swing first, ask questions later.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So the woman that they find is a Philazen, Philas, Philasena?
Speaker: Philasena, yeah.
Speaker: Let's go with Philasena.
Speaker: Philasena makes sense.
Speaker: She's one of the knights and her virtue is fidelity, which is, so if Crotha is truth,
Speaker: She is fidelity and fidelity in this case means she is she honors the bond with people above all else as opposed to Krotha, who honors the truth above all else.
Speaker: And they come into conflict.
Speaker: They're like they kind of used to butt heads a lot because her virtue and his virtue don't always align necessarily.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, so they figure out how to wake her up by touching her with one of the stones that came from Balerion's tomb.
Speaker: They touch her on the back of the neck.
Speaker: Another super resident evil-y kind of puzzle.
Speaker: Yeah, and she wakes up, and she's there, and her only job is to watch over Balerion.
Speaker: She's almost like, oh, you two can go now.
Speaker: I got this.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I relieve you of your duties.
Speaker: And they're like, no, we're going to stay.
Speaker: So so Beleriand and Phyllisina are humans.
Speaker: They are alive.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And Faranos and Krotha are undead.
Speaker: So now we got kind of a mixed party going on.
Speaker: Yeah, you got a mixed bag.
Speaker: So yeah, they continue on their merry way.
Speaker: Balerion gives Pharaonus a ring.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: Which Pharaonus kind of like, it feels familiar to him.
Speaker: He's like, yeah, this seems like something I'd wear.
Speaker: This seems right.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: This is so me.
Speaker: This is my aesthetic.
Speaker: I don't know if you saw my Pinterest boards.
Speaker: But there's Jonesy.
Speaker: He jumped away.
Speaker: Yeah, he's pacing.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, rings and cowboy boots.
Speaker: That's how I imagined Verdos.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: I like him already.
Speaker: He's a nearly skeletal man with a top hat and a staff and cowboy boots and rings, and he's ready to go.
Speaker: It's not a reference to anything.
Speaker: I'm just making up an image.
Speaker: I was about to say, I'm like, did I miss something?
Speaker: Where is that from?
Speaker: You're just making your own mythology here.
Speaker: I'm making my own mythology now.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: They continue heading east because that is the direction where they feel like they need to go.
Speaker: And basically, Crotha and not Beleriand, Pharaonus are like, hey, are those two fucking?
Speaker: And.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Is that a thing?
Speaker: Is that what's happening?
Speaker: Was I imagining that?
Speaker: And Kroth is like, oh, no, they're fucking.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: That's happening.
Speaker: That's happening.
Speaker: We better we better go, like, make ourselves scarce, like, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So they do.
Speaker: They go and they try to get some food while they're down there taking care of their business.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, uh, Faradose tries to feed a Beleriand and she's like, no, that's peasant food.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And Beleriand to his credit is like, no, I'll, I'll eat that.
Speaker: I've eaten that before.
Speaker: I like that.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: Oh, you know, it's beneath you.
Speaker: It's fine.
Speaker: And she's like, you know, it isn't beneath you to eat though, Beleriand what I've got in my pants.
Speaker: Damn straight.
Speaker: And then it got, and then the souls got very dark and wet, if you know what I mean.
Speaker: We went from Dark Souls to Wet Souls.
Speaker: Wet Souls.
Speaker: Which is the porn parody of Dark Souls.
Speaker: Moist Souls.
Speaker: Moist.
Speaker: Damp Souls.
Speaker: Oh, there it is.
Speaker: There it is.
Speaker: It was right there.
Speaker: It was right there.
Speaker: Where's my fucking thesaurus?
Speaker: God damn it.
Speaker: Damp Souls.
Speaker: Damp Souls.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So and all this time they're like being real touchy with each other.
Speaker: But yeah, she she it's like she's putting her hand on him.
Speaker: He's putting her hand on her.
Speaker: It's a thing.
Speaker: It's a thing.
Speaker: You know, it's dark.
Speaker: It's Dark Souls, baby.
Speaker: Forget about it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But people.
Speaker: There's only who would they're literally like nearly the last people on Earth at this point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: At this point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They may they we they may not have working circulatory with working working circulatory systems.
Speaker: I might.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They they might they might know each other.
Speaker: They might not.
Speaker: It's just it's just at this point they're like, this might be our only chance.
Speaker: Let's just enjoy this.
Speaker: Yeah, so they get to a town with a bunch of people who are pretty worn out and weathered, and there's a big statue in the center of town.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And... Made out of solid gold.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's made out of solid gold.
Speaker: There's a statue of a man named Selerik.
Speaker: He is King Selerik, and he is one of Beleriand's brothers from what we can tell.
Speaker: One of the children of the original king.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And now we are in like the first of the three kingdoms, I assume, that got created from...
Speaker: After like what I'm guessing is Panir died.
Speaker: It got passed to his three kids.
Speaker: The three kids kind of split up the land in their own way.
Speaker: And Selerik is the first one that they get to or the land, his lands rather.
Speaker: In it, it is a fucked up.
Speaker: Little town where these people are like brainwashed to give everything that they make.
Speaker: And like that's that's the thing about the town is like they're not hurting for anything.
Speaker: No, they produce so much food and they give it all away to the king because they love him so much.
Speaker: Yeah, like the guy comes by, like the tax collector for all intents and purposes, comes by and they like bring out all the grain and all the leather work they've been doing, all this shit.
Speaker: And he says, well, I'll be taking 60% of this.
Speaker: And they're horrified.
Speaker: And at first you're like, oh, cool.
Speaker: You know, they need more than- Yeah, he's taking too much.
Speaker: And they're like, no, take all of it.
Speaker: Take all of it because we don't want the king to think that we don't love him 100%.
Speaker: We don't deserve it.
Speaker: He does.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the auditor is like, I'm going to leave you with some because it's a law now.
Speaker: We got to we got to actually.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He literally says that he's like, I would actually.
Speaker: But it's against the law.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, basically, and nobody has names and you don't get a name unless you earn a name in this country.
Speaker: The town also doesn't have a name.
Speaker: It has a number and towns don't get names unless they earn it.
Speaker: So even the auditor is that's just as title.
Speaker: The auditor does not have a name.
Speaker: And we find out that the people in that are allowed or the only people allowed in the capital are people with names because you have if you have a name means you have status.
Speaker: And because they introduced themselves as having names, everybody assumed that they were higher status than them.
Speaker: Like the auditor from the auditor on down, everybody's like, well, clearly these are these are the main characters.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We're just NPCs and we're just NPCs.
Speaker: But remember, guys, fantasy doesn't have metaphors.
Speaker: No, no, does not have metaphors.
Speaker: None.
Speaker: So they they they figure out that the you know, this is they need to get to the capital.
Speaker: They need to talk to the king.
Speaker: That one point, the capital's name was like the name of the capital has been changed since last time Krotha was alive.
Speaker: It was like Dresa and now it's Draxon or something like that.
Speaker: It was just like a subtle change in the spelling of it.
Speaker: But yeah, they hitch a ride with the auditor and the auditor's like, well, I'll take you in that direction, but I am not allowed in the capital because I do not have a name.
Speaker: And they're like, okay, well, let's get going.
Speaker: And that's pretty much the end of the first third of the book.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And that last chapter or two, that's actually...
Speaker: We'll get into this here, but that was actually the first bit of lore that I thought was really intriguing and interesting.
Speaker: Like this whole city dedicated to this king in this way.
Speaker: We're starting to get into some interesting stuff here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it's taking a minute.
Speaker: It's taking quite a long time.
Speaker: So, so far, this book is kind of boring.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In terms of what it is.
Speaker: I mean, the writing is fine.
Speaker: You know, it's Michael Stackpole and he's gonna write yourself a little, you know, some really good descriptions in there.
Speaker: But it doesn't feel like, here's what it feels like.
Speaker: Not Dark Souls.
Speaker: It feels like- No.
Speaker: Here's what it feels.
Speaker: It feels like Michael Stackpole had a fantasy story already written and then grafted some Dark Souls elements onto it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There were a couple of moments that made me think a little bit of Shadowkeep in that kind of generic fantasy.
Speaker: Yeah, totally.
Speaker: The generic fantasy setting.
Speaker: And we're gathering – and here's the thing, and correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the things that always fascinated me about the Dark Souls world and what you saw in it was that it was a very lonely place.
Speaker: Very lonely.
Speaker: It was a very, very lonely place filled with hostels and the friendlies, so to speak, were few and far between.
Speaker: And in the first part of the book – And most of them were nuts.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like they had lost their minds from being so alone, you know?
Speaker: So you felt like you were one of the only sane people in this world.
Speaker: And now, so we've got four characters, none of which are really all that interesting.
Speaker: There is not a single one of the main characters is interesting.
Speaker: Maybe what's her name?
Speaker: Phila, whatever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: She might have some teeth to her, but otherwise I'm not –
Speaker: I'm not interested in any of the main characters.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Verna's might have something interesting.
Speaker: I like maybe it'll come back around that he was never supposed to get out because for like a very specific reason, like he was the bad guy all along, whatever.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: But I don't, that also, that was like a single breadcrumb in the first chapter that really hasn't been touched back on in the 12 chapters.
Speaker: We haven't revisited that.
Speaker: I think there is something to be said about, yeah, the it's not there's not enough loneliness in it.
Speaker: And there is one of the things that I like best.
Speaker: I'm a big Dark Souls two defender.
Speaker: A lot of people don't like it.
Speaker: I love Dark Souls two.
Speaker: I especially love the opening cinematic of Dark Souls two.
Speaker: Whereas Dark Souls 1 and 3 are more about the world and the state of the world and these powerful forces, these lords and all that that are fighting to bend what remains of this world to their whim.
Speaker: Dark Souls 2 opening cinematic is about your character and about how everything will fade.
Speaker: You're going to die over and over again and everything you know, everything you love is going to fade.
Speaker: And it's like, it has this, like, the guy, your character is standing in a room with his wife and his child.
Speaker: And as they say this, like, their faces start to, like, melt away into, like, this, like, ethereal, like, mist.
Speaker: Like, the idea, the concept of...
Speaker: that the undeath is the primary motivating factor in the Dark Souls games is that this undead, it's a curse.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so far it doesn't feel like it's a curse.
Speaker: It's a curse that because the more you die, the closer you become to losing everything, to becoming the hollow that has lost every bit of memory.
Speaker: to go back to your touch points in your life, they're all faded away.
Speaker: And that's the thing that's missing from this book is that it's less about the fear of losing yourself.
Speaker: It isn't there.
Speaker: That fear of losing yourself is not, that's the stakes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is losing yourself.
Speaker: You die and you wake up as an undead.
Speaker: And now, instead of just the sweet embrace of death, you might be punished with cruelly decaying over hundreds of years and losing every bit of memory of every person that you ever loved.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That is the, that is the, and that is the, the curse of the dark soul.
Speaker: That is, that is, that is the, the curse of the first sin.
Speaker: That's that it's all this stuff and it's super heavy and it's just not here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I didn't, I didn't get any of that.
Speaker: Like, yeah, no, that's the thing.
Speaker: That feels like another fantasy.
Speaker: And that's a through line that can carries you through the main three games.
Speaker: And I'm not saying you can't,
Speaker: Just tell another story set in the Dark Souls world, which that's a lot of a lot of time as you're going through Dark Souls.
Speaker: You have a whole bunch of subplots that are not necessarily about kindling the flame or whatever you have in Dark Souls 2.
Speaker: You have a character who is traveled from a faraway land and she is just there to try to find her brother.
Speaker: before she forgets who her brother is.
Speaker: Wow, okay.
Speaker: And it's like, it is this really heavy story.
Speaker: It's one of the most beautiful stories in the Dark Souls trilogy.
Speaker: And that's the kind of stuff, that's the good stuff in Dark Souls.
Speaker: And you can really get away with telling a story of introspection into the,
Speaker: who you are and why you are and your place in the grand scheme of things, but then take it and make it super personal.
Speaker: You can, you could do that.
Speaker: You can make this big cursed world into a very personal thing.
Speaker: And right now what we're getting in the book, as you said, is for, you know, a, a, a D and D party filled with some people who, you know, aren't that into role-playing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Human elf, dwarf, undead.
Speaker: They like the combat.
Speaker: They like the combat part of D&D.
Speaker: They don't really role play that much.
Speaker: They don't get into their characters.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that's kind of the vibe I'm getting right now in the book.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't, again, I don't know a lot of, I've watched a few, what was the, who's the YouTuber?
Speaker: Vati Vidya?
Speaker: Vati Vidya, who does a lot of the story summaries.
Speaker: I've seen some of those.
Speaker: I know how deep this stuff goes.
Speaker: And I think so far, if people are hoping that this is a novel that's going to be connecting elements of that already established mythology and that sort of thing, it's not feeling yet like that's what this book is.
Speaker: Yeah, and honestly, I mean, that's the thing is like, and as I was, as I might have said, you don't have to even get into the mythology, but you do have to get into the themes.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And the themes are...
Speaker: are very, they're not here.
Speaker: They felt like they could have been in chapter one.
Speaker: Like chapter one gets off to a really strong start with him trying to remember what it is to be alive.
Speaker: I was like, oh, this is the good shit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's some really wonderful introspection in that first chapter.
Speaker: It's really interesting.
Speaker: And then it just starts kind of slowly meandering to, like, there's a lot of talk, like walking and talking.
Speaker: It's like, come on, this isn't Aaron Sorkin's Dark Souls.
Speaker: That's exactly.
Speaker: Exactly what it feels like.
Speaker: And the other thing that I wanted more of was like, I was hoping more of the exploration aspect of it because it's such a huge series of worlds and all kinds of like, you know, different landscapes and places and stuff.
Speaker: And there's like that Indiana Jones vibe of like, we're going to this exotic locale.
Speaker: And go into that one.
Speaker: And we do get some that you briefly talked about them going away and finding food for the humans and they find and they find some he finds some grain and he's not sure if this is going to be edible, but he kind of describes it and takes it back.
Speaker: to see if anyone can recognize it.
Speaker: And I was like, that was a moment I wrote a note.
Speaker: I was like, I'd like more of this, like more of building up.
Speaker: We get like, there are mountains over here and there's this over there, but it, I don't know.
Speaker: It didn't, it doesn't thrill me on the same level that, I feel like, um,
Speaker: I almost feel like we need Urban Waite to come in and punch up.
Speaker: Punch up some of this, like the landscape description.
Speaker: Yeah, like the world.
Speaker: I mean, Michael Stackpole is a very, very good writer.
Speaker: He's written a lot of great things.
Speaker: But this is not, I don't know, it doesn't feel like his bailiwick necessarily.
Speaker: No, I feel like actually this might be Stackpole out of his depths.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which is kind of insane to say, because I have a lot of respect for that man.
Speaker: He's a great writer.
Speaker: He's a very important writer.
Speaker: But you don't get the impression that he knows a whole lot about this mythology.
Speaker: Yeah, he might not be grasping the themes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As we've always found out in the past, that might be a function of the client.
Speaker: You know, that could be, you know, the I forget from software is owned by a conglomerate, like a magazine conglomerate or something like that.
Speaker: And it might just be something like.
Speaker: They wanted a book.
Speaker: They hired something generic and easy for people to- It's like, let's get one of the biggest fantasy writers, like English fantasy writers that we can get that'll work for hire.
Speaker: They got Michael Stackpole and they're like, here, this is it.
Speaker: And that could easily be what happens.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: From what we found out with how these books kind of come to be sometimes.
Speaker: That could easily be what happened where it was just a higher up from the, I think it's Katakawa Corporation, which is the one there.
Speaker: That's the company that owns from software.
Speaker: It's like, what property do we have that could be turned into a media tie-in?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's guaranteed to get us a little bit of cash, you know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: No, I don't want you to go into deep, heavy literary themes here.
Speaker: I want you to make me a fantasy novel that 16-year-olds can read.
Speaker: Make me a 300-page fantasy novel that's called Dark Souls.
Speaker: Pretty much.
Speaker: Pretty much.
Speaker: And it's disappointing, but Lord, we, you know, that is how this works most of the time.
Speaker: And we'll see.
Speaker: We're obviously going to finish the book and we're going to carry, we'll tarry forth into the, and that's the other thing is like all the Dark Souls NPCs that you meet are fucking weird and have their own little quirks.
Speaker: And it's like, give me a, just give me something weird.
Speaker: And they laugh a lot.
Speaker: They do a lot of weird laughing.
Speaker: It's a way less weird book than I expected it to be.
Speaker: I really expected some weirdness.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: That's really it.
Speaker: The book needed to crank its weirdness up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: To 11, you know?
Speaker: It's a shame.
Speaker: I really was expecting a far more bizarre kind of journey than the one we're getting so far.
Speaker: But, you know, we've seen things get turned around in the past.
Speaker: Fingers crossed.
Speaker: Fingers crossed it'll turn around.
Speaker: I mean, normally we get a lot of strong start, weak endings.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Maybe this will be the reverse where it's a- As always, we'd love to be proven wrong.
Speaker: We would love to be proven wrong.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So, and this has gotten more relevant, the voice I do for this segment.
Speaker: Oh, yes it has.
Speaker: Because it's gonna be a remake, even though they changed the guy's voice.
Speaker: It's a different voice actor.
Speaker: But Phil, what do you play in?
Speaker: Oh, well, I'm so glad you asked.
Speaker: I played two.
Speaker: I've been playing two games in particular in the past couple of weeks.
Speaker: I recently beat Strange Horticulture.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Really interesting little indie game, very witchy game, kind of a strategy.
Speaker: Basically, you inherit this, you know, horticulturalist kind of store, very, very witch store, and you're meeting all the people in the town and you've got plants and you can go all over the map to discover new plants and
Speaker: and identify them based on descriptions.
Speaker: You've got a book that you have to actually flip through to read.
Speaker: Sometimes people identify it by the Latin name, so you've got to flip through and find it in its Latin name.
Speaker: Sometimes they'll say what it's meant to do, and you have to find the plants that do this or cure that.
Speaker: And then you have to label them.
Speaker: It's very labor-intensive in a fun kind of a way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's really neat.
Speaker: It took me about six hours or so to beat.
Speaker: If you like those kinds of strategies, little puzzle kind of logic puzzle sorts of games, I highly recommend it.
Speaker: It was really interesting.
Speaker: Again, didn't take me very long.
Speaker: And they're like...
Speaker: eight or nine endings or something.
Speaker: So I'm probably going to come back to it at some point and try it again.
Speaker: So I really enjoyed that.
Speaker: On the other hand, I've also been playing Warhammer 40k.
Speaker: What do you fucking call it?
Speaker: It's got like the longest of Chaos Gate Demon Hunters, which is basically Warhammer XCOM.
Speaker: Um, and I heard a lot of mixed reviews about it and I was flabbergasted because I was like, Jesus, it's like, I'm not a huge gray Knights fan, but, uh, it's Warhammer 40 K XCOM.
Speaker: How do you miss that?
Speaker: How do you drop the ball on that?
Speaker: And, and the short answer is you don't make it very interesting.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: It's just, there isn't a ton of variety in it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it doesn't, it doesn't give you the level of variety and, and shifts that XCOM gives you.
Speaker: For example, most missions are basically the same.
Speaker: The bad guys are basically the same.
Speaker: Um, the, the good guys are basically the same and it doesn't do a great job of explaining, um,
Speaker: certain customizable aspects of it and even when you do customize the shit out of it which you can do your guys all kind of look the same and it lacks a lot of the charm uh that uh pharaxis's xcom and xcom 2 has uh right i've put about nine or ten hours into it and i'm sure i'm going to play it a little more but i think i've reached the point where it's just like okay i i know what this is doing and it's
Speaker: It's a shame.
Speaker: I would love to see some DLC where they kind of tighten it up and give us a little more.
Speaker: Something more to chew on.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I would like that because it's not a cheap game for an indie game.
Speaker: It's like 45 bucks.
Speaker: Oh, Jesus.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I got it because, you know me, I'm going to play every 40K game there is.
Speaker: It's a 40K game and...
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: What was I supposed to do?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I cannot in good faith recommend it based on that price.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Like if you can get it for like 20 bucks or something like that, then yeah, I'd say it's worth a whirl just to see if it's because I've read some people say they really loved it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But at 45 bucks, that's a little much.
Speaker: So what are you playing, Kevin?
Speaker: Oh, boy.
Speaker: Well, I mean, I have been playing a whole mess of mid-tier first-person shooters, but we're not going to get into those on this podcast.
Speaker: You'll have to listen to those on Bullet Time.
Speaker: But something that wasn't mid-tier that I finished recently was Titanfall 2.
Speaker: Oh, I liked that game.
Speaker: The campaign for Titanfall 2, so good.
Speaker: Such a good game.
Speaker: It'll make you cry by the end.
Speaker: There will be tears.
Speaker: What else?
Speaker: I started trying to play Pathologic 2.
Speaker: Oh, OK.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: I put about four hours into that bad boy.
Speaker: God, that's a tough game to do.
Speaker: It's a to just play.
Speaker: It's it's it's tough on.
Speaker: So once you get into the groove of it, you're like, all right, well, it's it's just the first person has like some survival aspects to it where you got to you got to eat, you got to drink, you got to keep your health up and all that stuff.
Speaker: And you just do missions for people.
Speaker: But it's caked in this very thick layer of folklore that feels almost impenetrable because you're coming into it and there's no touchstone for the folklore in Pathologic 2.
Speaker: It's just there and it's dense.
Speaker: Jonesy, are you going to knock something over back there?
Speaker: You look...
Speaker: He is on the thinnest of ice.
Speaker: Jonesy.
Speaker: He's just like, I'm going to climb on these stacks and I think they're going to hold me.
Speaker: It's probably going to work out.
Speaker: Or he's going to die under 40 tons of RPG books.
Speaker: Those are all hardcover, you idiot.
Speaker: They will kill you.
Speaker: Come on, cat.
Speaker: He's his father's son.
Speaker: He is his father's son.
Speaker: So yeah, Pathologic 2, I've been playing a little bit of that.
Speaker: I beat Faith.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: Tell me about that.
Speaker: The Unholy Trilogy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I played beginning to end.
Speaker: I played chapter one, chapter two, and then went into chapter three.
Speaker: Really good.
Speaker: I mean, as a single experience, it'll take you about like six hours or so to get through all three chapters.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that's just me like kind of going through and rolling credits on each.
Speaker: I didn't I didn't do it wasn't super completionist about getting all the notes or all the endings or what have you.
Speaker: And in Faith Chapter 3, I found out I missed like there's a whole it's like the game is actually probably twice the length that I thought it was because there's a whole bunch of stuff, more stuff in each location that you go to that you can do that I didn't even realize necessarily.
Speaker: So, but yeah, it's, it's good time.
Speaker: And I, I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed how it wraps up because I think it's supposed to be the last of the, the faith games.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He's gotta be moving on to new projects at this point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think he wants to, he probably wants to just be wrapped up on it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Yeah, and that's pretty much what I've been playing.
Speaker: And oh, and then I just decided to install Red Dead Redemption 2 on my Steam Deck.
Speaker: I saw that.
Speaker: How does that play on the Steam Deck?
Speaker: Beautifully.
Speaker: Smooth as butter.
Speaker: freaking wild.
Speaker: And it feels good to play and everything feels good to play too.
Speaker: So I can just sit there in my bed and, and, you know, I can, I can walk around and the, the, the great wilderness of, of the grizzly mountains.
Speaker: Oh, that game is so stupidly beautiful.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: If they did a Red Dead Redemption to, or first one, novelization, urban weight.
Speaker: Oh, without question.
Speaker: Without question.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: He'd be the guy.
Speaker: He'd be a, I mean, yeah.
Speaker: After the Far Cry Absolution.
Speaker: I just like, I can like feel it.
Speaker: I can feel his descriptions of like the landscape already.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He would take it.
Speaker: It would have to be like 1,200 pages long, but God damn.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: John Marston walked out of the small house, looking out over the plains as tumbleweeds blew down from the northern mountains.
Speaker: It'd be so good.
Speaker: I'd read that thing.
Speaker: Oh, my God.
Speaker: That'd be great.
Speaker: But, yeah, that's it.
Speaker: And that'll do it for tonight's episode.
Speaker: If you want to follow us on social media, I don't know how much longer I'm going to be on Twitter.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: given its new owner.
Speaker: But yeah, follow us on social media at Pixlet Pod on both Twitter and Instagram and go to our website, PixletPod.com, where we post every episode with a transcript of the episode.
Speaker: So go ahead and check that out.
Speaker: If you can do us a sell and rate us five stars on the podcast platform that you listen to us on, that'll be Apple Podcasts or Spotify or even GoodPods.
Speaker: It would do a world of good for our ratings on those websites.
Speaker: So that'll do it for tonight's episode.
Speaker: Have a good evening, everyone.
Speaker: Bye.
Speaker: Say bye, Jonesy.
Speaker: Little bastard.
