Transcript
Speaker: That looks like something I'm going to want to keep on top of.
Speaker: Yes, sir.
Speaker: You know what else is something we want to keep on top of?
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back to Pixel It.
Speaker: My name is Kevin.
Speaker: With me, as always, is Phil.
Speaker: And today we're finishing up this book.
Speaker: You know, Kevin, every now and then I say something that immediately I think to myself, if Kevin doesn't swing for this one as an opening line, then one of us fucked up on an unimaginable level.
Speaker: And today you did not disappoint me, my friend.
Speaker: We got three chapters left in XCOM UFO defense.
Speaker: My notes are sparse.
Speaker: And we all know what that means.
Speaker: You know, when I don't have a lot of notes, that means I'm not a happy Kevin.
Speaker: It's mostly the gaps will be filled in by rants.
Speaker: Yeah, by rage.
Speaker: By rage.
Speaker: Rage gaps.
Speaker: So, anyway, before we get started, Phil...
Speaker: Do you have any final words to prep the audience before we get into this last third?
Speaker: Or do you just want to...
Speaker: Oh, I thought you were about to assassinate me somehow.
Speaker: Yeah, well, I have also been playing a little bit of Hitman, World of Assassination.
Speaker: That'll put you in that mindset.
Speaker: That'll put you in the right headspace.
Speaker: You know, Kevin, before we get too deep into this, just to give the people something nice right up front, I thought maybe I'd take a second to talk about patreon.com slash pixelitpod.
Speaker: Oh, that sounds like a lovely website.
Speaker: It's a really neat website, Kevin.
Speaker: It is a place where you can go in and you can take your hard-earned money dollars and you can contribute as much or as little of it as you'd like on a monthly basis.
Speaker: You can do as little as $1.
Speaker: You can do as much as $15.
Speaker: Is it $15?
Speaker: No, it's $10.
Speaker: See, that's how reasonable it is.
Speaker: And it's good stuff.
Speaker: And we actually, and this is the fun thing.
Speaker: We've got a lot of exclusive stuff we're working on that's going to be getting released here shortly.
Speaker: I don't know if you saw, Kevin, but we recently put up a poll asking everyone what year they would like us to review in video games.
Speaker: And we threw up some from all over the place.
Speaker: And we have enough votes to pick a definite winner.
Speaker: And the winner is 1997.
Speaker: 1997.
Speaker: A very good year.
Speaker: We have to review the year in video games?
Speaker: Yes, we're going to pick our top 10 games of 1997.
Speaker: That sounds like a hell of a good bonus to get from a Patreon page.
Speaker: That's a primo bonus.
Speaker: Big time, big time bonus.
Speaker: Big time chef's kiss bonus.
Speaker: Beautiful, beautiful.
Speaker: And all you need to do is be on the $5 or more a month range to receive this in your hot little hand, you know, whenever we finish it.
Speaker: But it's coming.
Speaker: It's coming, people.
Speaker: It's me receiving it in my hot little hands.
Speaker: In the hot little hands.
Speaker: From heaven.
Speaker: From the Patreon heavens.
Speaker: Patreon gods.
Speaker: And that's just one of the things we're working on.
Speaker: Kevin and I actually had a wonderful visit recently where we got to sit down and work on some bonus episodes, which it's going to be a lot of fun releasing those.
Speaker: It's going to be fun.
Speaker: Yeah, you're going to enjoy them.
Speaker: So yeah, please check out patreon.com slash pixelitpod.
Speaker: The same name for everywhere you find us, whether that's Twitter or YouTube or anywhere else.
Speaker: PixelitPod.
Speaker: Do it today.
Speaker: Do it today.
Speaker: Don't disappoint your children.
Speaker: Don't do it.
Speaker: Don't do it.
Speaker: Don't do it.
Speaker: Don't traumatize your kids because you didn't help a couple of middle-aged geeks in their time of need.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Those kids didn't deserve that.
Speaker: And you know what else we need to do right now?
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: Even though we've stalled long enough, let's put the body in the marsh.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Don't laugh!
Speaker: This ain't reality TV!
Speaker: All right, so chapter five.
Speaker: Ari has woken up, but he's not ready for active duty yet, and he just needs to chill.
Speaker: And Janelle is mad at him for disobeying orders, but happy he's awake.
Speaker: That's like, there we go.
Speaker: I summarized half a chapter for you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: These are not short chapters, guys.
Speaker: I think we've emphasized that before.
Speaker: But yeah, that's pretty much, you pretty much nailed it.
Speaker: These moments are buried in like other shit of her walking around the base.
Speaker: And then, and after she's back in the Morocco base and, uh,
Speaker: She meets with a new character, Captain Arwi N'Gaj, who is working with Trenchard on interrogating the Ethereals.
Speaker: And then she's, N'Gaj is like, oh, Trenchard's really good at this.
Speaker: He's really good at interrogating Ethereals.
Speaker: Almost suspiciously good.
Speaker: Suspiciously good.
Speaker: And she goes in and talks to Trenchard.
Speaker: And this is probably the only neat part of the entire last three chapters is Janelle and Trenchard have a really deep discussion about...
Speaker: and how the ethereals have evolved.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like, and how they got to a point where they were smart enough to start making changes to their own biology in order to adapt to things such as, you know, a planet that is orbiting a star that is dying.
Speaker: You know, they don't need the heat.
Speaker: They don't need food.
Speaker: They don't need anything.
Speaker: Like, they're just...
Speaker: They're fully adapted to be immortal or whatever.
Speaker: They tapped into their own DNA.
Speaker: They tapped into the, into the DNA and it's a really neat discussion.
Speaker: Um, and it's the high point.
Speaker: It's all downhill from here.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: It really is.
Speaker: Um, um,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So she's done talking with Chentered and we get to chapter six where she meets with Uli, the president of the town.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And his cow, remember his award-winning cow?
Speaker: You remember his award-winning cow?
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: How could I forget?
Speaker: It's been cow-napped.
Speaker: Cow-napped?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And she says, and he's like, can't you do anything?
Speaker: You're the UN.
Speaker: And she's like, I'll find some people to look into it.
Speaker: Uh-huh.
Speaker: This is going to become, this is pretty much the story from here on out.
Speaker: It's the cows that really break the thing all wide open.
Speaker: So her and some other ex-commerce, oh, sorry.
Speaker: There's several pages in which she has to talk to her higher-ups and get approval for an uncovert mission.
Speaker: Uh-huh.
Speaker: She puts in all the requisite paperwork.
Speaker: She gets it notarized.
Speaker: She has it witnessed.
Speaker: She signs it.
Speaker: It's signed by a witness.
Speaker: It's signed by a notary.
Speaker: She has to give blood samples, stool samples.
Speaker: She doesn't really ask why.
Speaker: And then they're like, okay, you can go ahead and do an uncovert mission in this town to look into cow disappearances.
Speaker: Guys, I wish I could tell you that Kevin is exaggerating like a lot.
Speaker: He is exaggerating.
Speaker: He is.
Speaker: But not as much as you would hope if you were just sitting down on a lovely summer afternoon wanting to enjoy yourself in an XCOM adaptation.
Speaker: There's enough truth in what Kevin said to make you ready just to get fucking hammered and throw this book off the edge of a cliff.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: There's truth to this.
Speaker: From here on out, just consider me an unreliable narrator.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: So her and the other ex-commerce posing as UN folks begin to investigate.
Speaker: And they start doing that.
Speaker: And she's got a guy who's good at data with her.
Speaker: His name's Matt.
Speaker: And then she goes back to Earhill Magoon and talks to Ari.
Speaker: He's close to being released and he's complaining about the food.
Speaker: Because he's quirky.
Speaker: He's so funny.
Speaker: He's quirky.
Speaker: And then she racks up.
Speaker: Yeah, it's funny.
Speaker: She racks up those frequent flyer miles and goes back to the Andermatt base.
Speaker: And she gets a note from N'Gaj about the interrogation and that the aliens are making a push in the southern hemisphere.
Speaker: So they're doing that.
Speaker: And then back in town, Janelle and her team meet with Yuli and he's going to escort them to a woman who might have some answers.
Speaker: So during this whole conversation, Yuli's like, well, you know, people from Switzerland have always seen like strange things.
Speaker: Like if you ask them for information, they're going to start just telling you about cryptids.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We're a weird.
Speaker: You might see you might see like people talking about the cryptid who with it's like a flayed cow skin with eyes floating around.
Speaker: And I was like, yeah, like rolls down the mountain at you or something.
Speaker: And I was like, yeah, could I have a book about that?
Speaker: That sounds awesome.
Speaker: Can we stop doing what we're doing and just focus on... Can that be the final boss somehow?
Speaker: I'm in.
Speaker: I'll forgive you for everything if we could just have that.
Speaker: So part of it is Janelle starts piecing together like, well, maybe the aliens have been here in Switzerland for much longer than anywhere else.
Speaker: This might be their original base because the cow mutilations and cow-based cryptids have been around forever.
Speaker: And she says something like, you know, we made fun of people talking about little gray men abducting them until we realized that they were being abducted by sectoids.
Speaker: Abducted by.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: It's a good point, but they go over to the other side of the mountain and they meet with a woman who lives all by herself up the mountain in a 300-year-old house.
Speaker: Her name is Duona Mati.
Speaker: And she talks about the spaceship she has seen and they're like, well, how could you see that far over on that mountain?
Speaker: And then she busts out some military surplus, like really high-end binoculars.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like this, this woman killed Nazis.
Speaker: Like we can all accept that that's what she did.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: She was part of some like underground freedom.
Speaker: She did some anti-Nazi shit.
Speaker: And yeah, so much for the tolerant left.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, so, uh, she's like, here, I'm looking with these.
Speaker: And Janelle's like, oh no, she'd be able to read like the fucking, uh, serial number on the side of an alien ship.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: For the record, this is the part of this section that I liked the most.
Speaker: I liked getting to know this weird ass old lady and like her discussing like, uh,
Speaker: Cow abductions and seeing aliens in the sky.
Speaker: This is where we should have started.
Speaker: This is where the book should have started.
Speaker: So this is where the book should have started.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's every time we get a book that is a bit lame.
Speaker: It seems like that that's our refrain over and over again is that the book should have started a lot later.
Speaker: There are so few books that we've read on this show that truly had nothing to offer.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Honestly, if you go back, play back the tape, you'll see that there are a lot of the ones that we, a lot of the ones we complained about the most.
Speaker: We were angry because there was so much potential and there was so much there that could have been done.
Speaker: We started to see where they were going with it and, and it just kind of let us down.
Speaker: And there's something really extra disappointing about that.
Speaker: And this is a situation like that where it's like, there's so much you could have done here if you just started here.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, this is when it starts getting really interesting.
Speaker: You see the glimmer of the ideas that motivated the story to be written in the first place.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You see them buried underneath everything else.
Speaker: All the diamonds kind of just like.
Speaker: littered in there amongst the coal and um it's it's uh it's unfortunate you just had to light that coal on fire and collect the diamonds right it's and and and thing is all right look i'll get into this later it's we're not we're not even close to being done so uh yeah we're closer to being done than you think well i mean i'm fucking
Speaker: That's a good point.
Speaker: This is, this was, ladies and gentlemen, this, this was another short.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that's, that's true.
Speaker: But this was another one of those instances where Kevin over the course of the day texted me and he was like, I I've stopped taking notes.
Speaker: I've stopped taking.
Speaker: And it was like, Oh boy, it's going to be one of those episodes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: And I always appreciate when you do that.
Speaker: Cause it helps me brace myself.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Brace yourself with knowing that I'm going to be like, fuck.
Speaker: And that's the end.
Speaker: Uh, 10 minutes into the show, I'm going to be like, and that's the rest of the book.
Speaker: The end.
Speaker: It's amazing.
Speaker: Kevin is easily one of the more positive people I know.
Speaker: Uh, you know, he's always willing to err on the side of, of, you know, give you the, uh, what's the word?
Speaker: Um, benefit of the doubt.
Speaker: Benefit of the doubt.
Speaker: That's exactly it.
Speaker: He's always willing to do that.
Speaker: And when Kevin loses hope, it's simultaneously tragic and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker: It's like watching Galactus swallow a planet.
Speaker: You're like, oh, so many people died, but that's so cool.
Speaker: So it's... This is one of those times.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there's an alien base inside one of the nearby mountains that we figure out.
Speaker: And we're like, oh, my God.
Speaker: It just so happens to be like two mountains over from my secret, super secret base.
Speaker: How did that happen?
Speaker: Huh?
Speaker: No, but seriously, how did that happen?
Speaker: How did that happen?
Speaker: That's a really good question.
Speaker: How is this not figured out, just noticed by the patterns of where the ships were coming from and or going?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Janelle has... We're in the final chapter now.
Speaker: We're in the last chapter of the goddamn book.
Speaker: We have literally just found out, like...
Speaker: The cow thing and the alien base, we have spent, 140 pages were before this section.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You could have just had this section at the beginning and expanded it, and it would be a more compelling story.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And so anyway, there's a there's a pilot.
Speaker: He's like Janelle's like, hey, pilot, are you going out?
Speaker: And he's like, yeah, you need me to pick up some smokes.
Speaker: And she's like, nah, but can you do an infrared infrared?
Speaker: like flyby of this mountain and the pilot's like, okay.
Speaker: And then about a page later, the pilot comes back and he's like, here you go.
Speaker: I don't know what this is for.
Speaker: You said it was for the weather people.
Speaker: I don't know if this affects the weather at all.
Speaker: There's just a slightly warm spot at the base of the mountain.
Speaker: And she's like, good, I'll pass this along to our meteorologists.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And the pilot goes and he plays crud the game that came up once twice in the book.
Speaker: It's a little detail.
Speaker: I don't mind little details, but we spent a lot of time talking about crud for something that wasn't super.
Speaker: If in a 240 page book, like if it was, if it was the fucking stands, you could dedicate a chapter to crud and I wouldn't care.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Fine.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Literary writers have been doing that for centuries.
Speaker: It's about the percentage.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's the ratio, motherfucker.
Speaker: It's the ratio.
Speaker: It's the ratio.
Speaker: You can go off on tangents and they can be charming and interesting and still tell you something about the world, but not when you only have 240 pages.
Speaker: It could literally just be a world-building detail.
Speaker: I love world-building details, but...
Speaker: A book is like bread.
Speaker: It's like bread.
Speaker: And there's so many different types of bread and there's so many different types of books.
Speaker: There's so many different types of bread.
Speaker: There are so many different types of bread.
Speaker: You can have those ratios all mixed up in different ways.
Speaker: You can use yeast.
Speaker: You could not use yeast if you're using like a quick, like an Irish bread.
Speaker: You're making that quick rise bread with baking powder, baking soda, whatever.
Speaker: There's so many ways to make bread.
Speaker: So many different countries have different types of bread with different types of ratios, ingredients, but we all agree it's fucking bread.
Speaker: It's bread.
Speaker: And we all agree that books, or I am saying books are like bread, where you can have the different ingredients and all that stuff, and you can have the world building.
Speaker: You want a marble rye?
Speaker: You want a little world building in your book?
Speaker: Fine.
Speaker: But you can't fuck up the ratio so bad that it turns into not bread,
Speaker: And if you add too much of something that is, that if you miss up the ratio a little bit in your book, it's not a book anymore.
Speaker: It's just extended instruction manual for the game.
Speaker: I mean, kind of, kind of.
Speaker: Anyway, books are bread.
Speaker: Bread are books.
Speaker: That's my... Books are bread.
Speaker: That's the next sticker.
Speaker: Books are bread.
Speaker: That's the next sticker in the Discord.
Speaker: Books are bread.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: Kevin, books are bread, Earhart.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: She gets Coney on the phone to get some answers and fucking blows up at him.
Speaker: She's like, oh, yeah.
Speaker: Just ask him.
Speaker: You don't need to yell at him.
Speaker: And it's this weird stilted paragraph of a cuss out.
Speaker: I feel like our author may have watched a movie that had one of those like
Speaker: big, powerful, final go-fuck-yourself speeches.
Speaker: And she went, that's what my book needs.
Speaker: And it's such a tame and weirdly generic kind of thing.
Speaker: And it's like, if this is meant to be the thing that inspires us over what a badass our main character is, then we might need another 240 pages.
Speaker: And it comes out of nowhere.
Speaker: It comes out of nowhere.
Speaker: There's no point to it.
Speaker: It's basically like...
Speaker: Imagine you're at the end of A Few Good Men, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Jack Nicholson's character has been a perfectly reasonable witness for the entire time.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: And then gives his speech about how you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.
Speaker: That would be a little out of...
Speaker: Left field, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You'd say, what the fuck did that come from?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then he'd offer you bread.
Speaker: And then he'd offer you bread.
Speaker: But the bread's all fucked up.
Speaker: Bread's all fucked up.
Speaker: You'd offer your bread and go, this is XCOM UFO defense a novel.
Speaker: And you'd go, I don't think that's what this is.
Speaker: Open it up.
Speaker: And then you open up and the steam from the fresh baked bread rises.
Speaker: And inside is XCOM UFO defense novel.
Speaker: He snuck it in somehow with the bread.
Speaker: He snuck it in.
Speaker: That wasn't really necessary, but he did it anyway.
Speaker: I snuck this into a jail.
Speaker: I snuck XCOM UFO defense novel into a jail.
Speaker: It was baked in some bread.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And now I'm being arrested.
Speaker: Now I'm being arrested.
Speaker: And it's what I deserve.
Speaker: For contraband.
Speaker: So she yells at Coney, and then Coney's like, all right, well, let me look into it.
Speaker: And then he gets back to her like, nope, we, the base, like, we hollowed out that place, but there's been no Swiss military in there for like 30 years.
Speaker: She's like, she's like aliens.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And by the way, she's super calm about all of this.
Speaker: Like this whole time she's like, she's, she, she gets this information and it's like, this is the shit that should blow the lid off everything.
Speaker: And she's just like, well, I'm just going to very calmly go over here and have a sandwich.
Speaker: And, uh, and then I'll eventually, yeah, eventually I'll tell people, uh, who can do something about this, but, uh, there's no need to fly off the handle.
Speaker: and i already flew off the handle once at coney yeah and i did it for no good reason so yeah i did it for no good reason use that yeah so she has a sandwich and she meets up with ari and he hands her a letter uh that uh that concerns her she it was he's like this was given to me to give directly to you
Speaker: She reads it and she gets nervous and then she tells him to schedule some fuck time with her in the next 24 hours.
Speaker: It's really gross.
Speaker: It's just...
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: I'm not, I'm not easily shocked.
Speaker: I, I like sexy times.
Speaker: I think that stuff is fine in your, in your novel, but there's something so abrupt about like Kevin's not fucking around.
Speaker: She literally says, I need you to schedule a couple of something like a couple of hours where we can get really physical or something like that.
Speaker: And it's just, it, it felt,
Speaker: Gross, man.
Speaker: Like break up with your girlfriend.
Speaker: We did the next day schedule some time for us to get physical.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because we might be dead.
Speaker: It's like the lamest like eat hearty for tonight we dine in hell that has ever been written.
Speaker: It's really lame.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There was like...
Speaker: There's like an impulsive, like romantic moment that could have been here where she just like pushes him into her room.
Speaker: And that's when you have the body heat, like sex scene right there.
Speaker: It's like, boom.
Speaker: But no, we get, it's real.
Speaker: It's like, it's the way Jean-Luc Picard probably would.
Speaker: Very well.
Speaker: Find some time on my schedule.
Speaker: It's my outlook is up to date.
Speaker: No, but that's, you actually just nailed the problem with this whole book.
Speaker: This book is so bureaucratic in everything that it does that if I had an inkling, if I thought for a second that this was written well enough, that this was a satire, I actually would kind of love it, but it's not.
Speaker: It's just every, there are no moments of passion.
Speaker: there is scheduling in time for sex.
Speaker: Couple of hours, yes, of course.
Speaker: But still, it's on the blotter.
Speaker: And there's no, like, scary, out-of-nowhere attack scenes or ambushes or something.
Speaker: It's very, like, well, we're going to land here and then we're going to fight and then we win.
Speaker: The end.
Speaker: And it's so regulated and it's so dull.
Speaker: It's unbelievable.
Speaker: It's like...
Speaker: It's like in another universe with if you if the if the bread had been had been left to proof for a little bit longer, you would get like this would be like an XCOM flavored Starship Troopers.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This could have been something really lovely in that sense.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it's it's you know, it's not that it is not.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Janelle makes an announcement to all of XCOM about the plans to attack a nearby alien base.
Speaker: And in her announcement, she like says it's in a different area than where it actually is.
Speaker: She's like, we're going to attack in three weeks.
Speaker: And then in the next scene, after, after,
Speaker: running the train on Ari.
Speaker: She shows him the letter from N'Gaj to her about how Trenchard is the spy.
Speaker: Trenchard is the one, N'Gaj was the one who actually put it all together after listening to the way Trenchard was doing things.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, apparently Janelle had already, this is like the ocean's 11 heist sequence where Ari's like, well, what are you going to do about it?
Speaker: And she's like, oh, it's already been done.
Speaker: I, I'm not a cartoon villain.
Speaker: I set this up five hours ago.
Speaker: So it's like, she's like, yeah, the time and place for the attack is, she made a public announcement about one thing.
Speaker: The actual time and place is totally different.
Speaker: And she's like, we're going to give him the mushroom treatment.
Speaker: We're going to feed him shit and keep him in the dark, you know?
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: See what comes out on the other side.
Speaker: And then she's like, we're going to.
Speaker: You'd be thinking that there's a lot more book after this.
Speaker: There isn't.
Speaker: She's like, we're going to arrest him the day that we move in for the attack.
Speaker: Yeah, let's not do it too quick because we still want... Because reasons.
Speaker: Because reasons, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Fine.
Speaker: We still want something, I guess.
Speaker: On Sunday, they launch the attack and blow a hole in the mountain.
Speaker: They kill a bunch of aliens and they save the cows.
Speaker: Yay.
Speaker: Uh-huh.
Speaker: Trenchard got away.
Speaker: What a surprise.
Speaker: They have a cow parade to end the book.
Speaker: Woo-hoo.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: That's the end of the book.
Speaker: That's the book.
Speaker: I mean, there's...
Speaker: There's some, you know, I guess, oh, actually, no, there's really no good action sequence.
Speaker: I mean, it's an action sequence.
Speaker: I wouldn't call it a good action sequence at the end.
Speaker: They just kind of get in there and they overwhelm.
Speaker: You know that scene at the end of Dick Tracy when the cops surround the only way out of the club and the gangsters all think the only way out is to just, like, drive out the garage door, guns a-blazing?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And literally all of them die.
Speaker: Now that on, uh, in the movie, Dick Tracy is like one of my favorite single shootout moments in, in film history, but it's like the same thing happened, but in book form here, and it's somehow incredibly dull.
Speaker: Uh, they, they Dick Tracy, these aliens in the mountain, uh,
Speaker: And, you know, flat top gets out and he gets shot like a thousand times and then stumbles over and you should watch Dick Tracy again.
Speaker: I haven't seen that movie in a thousand years.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It has one of my favorite, like one of my favorite insults to use when I'm trying to be like insulting, but not specific in any way.
Speaker: Just go suck an egg.
Speaker: It's a good one, right?
Speaker: It sounds, it sounds rough, but you know, I don't remember who said it, but I remember someone saying something along the lines of he was as ugly as a Dick Tracy villain.
Speaker: And he was just like, Oh, damn.
Speaker: Oh, that is good.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So we're done with the book, Phil.
Speaker: How did you like UFO XCOM defense XCOM UFO defense, a novel?
Speaker: Well, I think the main problem that our authors seem to have with this book, the main problem, is that while the author was ignoring the source material, ignoring people who would have read this who may be unfamiliar with the source material,
Speaker: ignoring people who were familiar with the source material but still would like to have a little direction and description and, you know, an engaging world.
Speaker: While she was ignoring all of those things, she also completely forgot to put in a plot.
Speaker: There's no plot in this book.
Speaker: This is like some weird slice of life, a month in the life of the commander thing.
Speaker: But it isn't, which, look, I'm saying that, and that actually sounds kind of like a literary genius kind of move.
Speaker: No, this is, it's just a rambling, tumbling mess.
Speaker: And it's so frustrating, because as we just pointed out, near the end, we get to a point where
Speaker: I don't know, something clicks and it starts to actually have interesting characters and interesting moments.
Speaker: And I think the big telling point is the fact that this franchise...
Speaker: actively talks about cow abduction, which is also one of the main plot points for Redneck Rampage.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: It is a silly, ridiculous, over-the-top thing.
Speaker: And as intense as XCOM the game can be, it is also aware of the fact that it is working in...
Speaker: archetypes and tropes from a fifties level kind of UFO mania.
Speaker: And it's almost at times you get to a point where Diane seems to know that.
Speaker: And it's amusing.
Speaker: We talk about the cow races and stuff like that, but yeah,
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: She goes off on these.
Speaker: The moment she starts to touch in on that, we go off and start going into shit that doesn't matter.
Speaker: We're literally talking about tax reports and and paperwork and all of this other stuff.
Speaker: And it's so dull.
Speaker: It's so dull.
Speaker: And it doesn't even reflect the tedium that you might get into in a game of XCOM.
Speaker: Because at least XCOM has several fights that will break out in a single session that will keep the action going along.
Speaker: And then you go, okay, let's research that.
Speaker: Okay, let's develop this.
Speaker: And it doesn't have any of it.
Speaker: It's just the inner monologue of this woman who seems to be bored with the fact that she's trying to save the world.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's the, and there's like, it edges away from ever saying anything that could be interesting.
Speaker: Like it, there's moments earlier on where it's like, it's ridiculous that we, you know, we have to maintain financial solvency when we're trying to save the world.
Speaker: But yeah,
Speaker: That's cat.
Speaker: That's a capitalism, but it never really even goes that hard at it.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: There's, there's moments where it's like, oh yeah, you know, another alien race.
Speaker: There's a real, there's a good line in the last third where it, it's like, you know, a thousand years from now, if these guys, if these guys win, another alien race will come down and be like, oh, well, who did had the people that you took the planet from lose.
Speaker: And it's like, well, they couldn't maintain, uh,
Speaker: like fiscal solvency.
Speaker: And I was like, that's a great line.
Speaker: The entire book should go harder in that direction, you know, that it's ridiculous that you have to figure that shit out as like,
Speaker: You know, it's, it's, you know, in a universe where we throw like basically unlimited budgets at militaries, the fact that the one thing standing in between, you know, aliens and the annihilation of earth is, it has to be the most tightly budgeted military in the world.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: There's something so silly about that.
Speaker: And you're right.
Speaker: She, she gets right up to the edge of saying something and
Speaker: And then just dives over a cliff that's just filled with details about Swiss tourism.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Stuff that doesn't come back into play.
Speaker: The cow thing was the only thing that came into play eventually.
Speaker: I was like, I've said this before and I'll say it again.
Speaker: Every time we start one of these books and I go, I'm still, I'm going to write it out.
Speaker: We don't know how this is all going to tie up because who knows, maybe all that shit was going to tie up into something that would be clever and at least halfway interesting.
Speaker: And no, it's just filler.
Speaker: It's just,
Speaker: I want to take a vacation to Switzerland, please.
Speaker: And, and look, we all do, but that's not what I, why I bought the book.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's, that's, it's a little rough.
Speaker: I feel like there's some interesting characters introduced in the last third.
Speaker: There's the captain, uh, uh, and Godge, um, is a, is a, is a neat dude.
Speaker: Um, it's like the crazy lady in the mountains.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The lady up there where Uli is like, yeah, I mean, there's, it's all, it's very likely that she'll just shoot at us.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And she's like, and, and Janelle's like, oh, and he's like, oh, don't worry.
Speaker: It would be with a crossbow.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like where the fuck was, that's great.
Speaker: That's fun.
Speaker: Those are cool details.
Speaker: Like the book should have been all of that, all of that stuff.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: The combat scenes are, you know, nothing special.
Speaker: You know what it is?
Speaker: It's like a play session of somebody who is in mid-late game doldrums with XCOM and isn't really sure what to do next.
Speaker: Right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: You know, like, well, everything seems to be, like, running smoothly.
Speaker: I'm shooting everything down, and I...
Speaker: I've got my Illyrium coming in and out, and everybody's got their rifles, and all my people are colonels.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: It's like... Yeah.
Speaker: I'm not... It's kind of like a stalemate of XCOM.
Speaker: It's like Long War XCOM, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mailed it because that's just it.
Speaker: At no point, at any point in this novel, did I feel like, what are they going to do?
Speaker: Yeah, there's no stakes at any point.
Speaker: No stakes.
Speaker: No stakes.
Speaker: At no point were things out of control.
Speaker: We find out there's a spy.
Speaker: I got it.
Speaker: Don't worry about it.
Speaker: I've reported him and we'll take care of it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And even, even him disappearing that you, you could use that to be like, well, he could come back and fuck us up.
Speaker: No, no, he's probably dead or, or, or like the aliens took him away and God knows what they're doing to him.
Speaker: So don't worry about it.
Speaker: It's, it's, it has no stakes there.
Speaker: At no point do you go, how are they going to get out of this?
Speaker: Cause it's going to be fine and they will handle it within a half a page of introducing the problem.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that is XCOM UFO defense, a novel.
Speaker: That one was bad, man.
Speaker: This is disappointing, too.
Speaker: Like, it's bad, but I'm very disappointed that this was bad.
Speaker: I was hoping for, like, some... I had strange hopes and be like, oh, maybe we found some badass, like, fucking...
Speaker: book, you know, mid nineties video game adaptation book.
Speaker: And yeah,
Speaker: Um, yeah, I have a certain level.
Speaker: I think we both do have a level of respect for these classic, you know, genre writers, uh, who were cranking it out in the seventies and the eighties and the nineties.
Speaker: So there is a serious level of respect we both got for these people.
Speaker: And so when, when the ball gets fumbled, uh, this badly, you, you can't help.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Disappointment's the name of the game.
Speaker: Damn.
Speaker: The name of the game.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So that's enough talking about that.
Speaker: I feel like I have one question to ask you.
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: What are you playing?
Speaker: Oh, well, I am actually, for only the second time in my entire life, indulging in a Pokemon game.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: A Pokemon?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I was never a Pokemon kid.
Speaker: I was kind of just, I was just a little too old for it, or at least too old for me to have been caught up in the fervor of when it really hit the States.
Speaker: So that one kind of missed me.
Speaker: But I remember I was working in the gaming industry.
Speaker: I don't remember which...
Speaker: uh, Pokemon came out and, but everyone at work had their 3ds and they were all playing it during lunch and all that shit.
Speaker: And I went, I'd better, I'd better pick this up and be part of the group and played it.
Speaker: And I was like, Oh, okay.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: This is, this is charming.
Speaker: I get it.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But last year, Pokemon Legends, I think Arceus is what it's called, Arceus or something like that, came out.
Speaker: And I heard a lot of people talking about how it was very different from the standard Pokemon fare.
Speaker: It goes in a different direction, and it might be a really good jumping off point for people who are relatively new because it has its...
Speaker: very much its own thing going and so i picked that up and uh that has been my uh sit around with a wife watching a movie and uh playing on my switch game um and i and having played one of the classic style uh pokemon i can say it is very different it's got more of like an open world action rpg kind of feel to it
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I'm not terribly far into it, but I'm just kind of grinding away.
Speaker: And I love the way that you have to do things.
Speaker: You have to, you know, you have tasks and it's very open world, very quest, sub quest kind of shit.
Speaker: And I'm having a lot of fun with it.
Speaker: So that one, it's probably going to take me a good damn long time to play because it's just an hour here and an hour there.
Speaker: And it's a pretty long game, I think.
Speaker: But the other one that has been taking up a bunch of my time has been Alien Dark Descent.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which what was I supposed to do?
Speaker: What choice did I have?
Speaker: It is a choice.
Speaker: Yeah, you have.
Speaker: It's an aliens game.
Speaker: It's an aliens game.
Speaker: A. It's like it's like it could have been.
Speaker: It's like almost a Warhammer game, you know?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It's not quite a Warhammer game, but it's almost a Warhammer game for me.
Speaker: You see you see Warhammer.
Speaker: You see aliens.
Speaker: I just see that mouse of yours going over to my button on Steam.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: there's only so much that I can do.
Speaker: I'm only one man.
Speaker: And then you add into the fact that basically everyone was talking about this is like Aliens XCOM.
Speaker: And I just started hitting myself over the head with a T-ball bat so that I could receive some relief in the days leading up to it being released because I couldn't play it yet.
Speaker: And I am playing it.
Speaker: And I have to say, and I'm not the first person to point out this
Speaker: comparison, but it is absolutely an Aliens XCOM game down to the loadout screen, which we were talking about before the show gets started, that it absolutely just flagrant ripping off.
Speaker: Flagrant XCOM.
Speaker: Flagrant.
Speaker: And it's very indie, so it's janky.
Speaker: But the other game that it has a huge debt to is Darkest Dungeon.
Speaker: because your characters have stress meters.
Speaker: It is very much recommended that you take this very slow.
Speaker: Don't fight if you don't have to.
Speaker: You know, really, really creep around, and it's not a run-in, guns-a-blazing kind of game.
Speaker: And I love that in theory right now.
Speaker: I haven't played a couple of hours of it.
Speaker: I haven't played quite enough of it to...
Speaker: feel one way or the other, but if it keeps going the way it's going, it's very rough around the edges, but shit, it's a good combination of game styles and the perfect franchise for that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I'm really enjoying it.
Speaker: I'm keeping my fingers crossed, cautiously optimistic that it keeps going down this road.
Speaker: It is very janky, though.
Speaker: I'm not a graphics guy, but the level of popping in and out of... Oh, man.
Speaker: I noticed it right away where it was like, yeah, these voices are not synced with these lips.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And like something about the audio mix, it feels like the voices are somehow on top of the game and not in the game.
Speaker: It's that, the visuals are that way.
Speaker: There's no spatial mix, that's the thing.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: You see a character that's far away, further away from the camera, and you expect them to sound a little bit further away from the camera.
Speaker: And they do not.
Speaker: They sound right here.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: And it's that way with the visuals.
Speaker: It's that way with the audio.
Speaker: It's very janky.
Speaker: It needs a lot of work in terms of just the quality, like the artistic quality of it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: game feels pretty goddamn good.
Speaker: I'm enjoying the differences from XCOM and Darkest Dungeon, for example, and I'm enjoying the similarities.
Speaker: And I'm kind of impressed.
Speaker: The moment I found out that you could rest if you found a room and welded all the doors shut, you could turn that into a safe room and rest and de-stress and all that shit.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, that's...
Speaker: Cool as shit.
Speaker: Like, that's really neat.
Speaker: Like, it's very hardcore.
Speaker: And I like the fact that it isn't that it's a I'm just on the first level and it's huge and there's so much to do within it.
Speaker: And you can leave and you can come back and there's no.
Speaker: fail necessarily uh just because you're like beat to shit you can you can leave and come back and and finish up what you didn't get and i like that it's it's very layered there it feels like you can really take your time and sink your teeth into it um so yeah really enjoying that one what about you kevin what do you what do you
Speaker: I have also, I started playing Aliens Dark Descent as well.
Speaker: A lot of, I echo a lot of the same thoughts and I'm not nearly as far into it as you are.
Speaker: I just finished the prologue.
Speaker: But you know, liking it so far, we'll see where it goes.
Speaker: Other things I've been playing, I started playing Dave the Diver.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I want to hear about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A friend of the show, uh, VZ has been talking about it in the discord.
Speaker: So much.
Speaker: Um, and I figured, you know, why not?
Speaker: Uh, let's, uh, hold on.
Speaker: Daughters.
Speaker: Oh, she asked you for cake better again.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, she's asking for a password.
Speaker: So yes, Dave the Diver.
Speaker: So far, I've only played a little bit.
Speaker: I've been looking for something to play on the Steam Deck.
Speaker: VZ's like, yeah, it probably works on this.
Speaker: And I just noticed that another friend, Chipmunk, has been playing it as well.
Speaker: So it has kind of a two, the loop is thus.
Speaker: You...
Speaker: You dive underneath the water and then you capture, kill whatever fish.
Speaker: You get your blue tangs, you get your clownfish, so you can kill both Dory and Nemo.
Speaker: Love it.
Speaker: You bring them back up and then you bring them to your sushi restaurant.
Speaker: And then there's like a sushi mini game where you're not cooking it, but you're serving it.
Speaker: So there's somebody else cooking it and you have to grab the plate, run it out to the person.
Speaker: You have to pour green tea for people into their cups and all that stuff.
Speaker: And then you get the money, and then I assume there's going to be, like, upgrade trees.
Speaker: And then also there's, when you're diving, there's, like, side quests you can go on.
Speaker: So on the second loop through, somebody from a university is like, hey, I need you to collect some of these two starfish and these two urchins for me.
Speaker: And if you do it, they give you something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, I'm interested to see where this gameplay loop goes.
Speaker: Not very far into it.
Speaker: Early days still.
Speaker: Let's see what else.
Speaker: Oh, I beat the System Shock remake.
Speaker: Oh, okay, cool.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Yeah, totally wrapped up.
Speaker: The end, it's, I mean, I love it.
Speaker: It's going to be on my game of the year list.
Speaker: The final boss is lame.
Speaker: Real lame sauce.
Speaker: Getting to the final boss is like a...
Speaker: It's like a bit of a boss rush though.
Speaker: So it's like, here's all of the big, big enemies that you typically would not have had to fight all at once.
Speaker: You're going to fight them all at once now.
Speaker: So by the time you get to the boss, he's a push, he's like a pushover, but you're like, okay, that's fine.
Speaker: No, the boss fight, the boss fight is just a completely different style of fight than anything you've done so far in the game.
Speaker: It's a little weird.
Speaker: I don't want to spoil too much of it.
Speaker: But yeah, I love the game overall.
Speaker: It's just the ending is just like, oh, OK, I guess that's it.
Speaker: Let's see what else I've been I've been I've been playing Octopath Traveler to still playing that here and there on my Switch.
Speaker: I have somehow put five hours into it already and I did not even realize that.
Speaker: I knew it.
Speaker: I knew it.
Speaker: I was like, this is it.
Speaker: This is the one.
Speaker: That's what those RPGs do to you, man.
Speaker: Yeah, man.
Speaker: You're just sitting there.
Speaker: So I forget when this episode is going to be coming out.
Speaker: It'll be before then.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Baldur's Gate 3 is supposed to come out in the beginning of August.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And it's like the first part of the game alone has like three dozen hours or something like that.
Speaker: That's ridiculous.
Speaker: And the director of the game is like, yeah, on average, we expect most people to finish the game with only having seen 30% of the game.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: God damn it.
Speaker: And he's talking about in this article, we're like, yeah, we have this whole like Jurassic Park type area that like we only think like 0.1% of the people will ever find.
Speaker: It's like just a whole separate like dinosaur area or something.
Speaker: CRPGs, man.
Speaker: CRPGs, man.
Speaker: And it's only a level 12 cap for the game.
Speaker: Wait, what?
Speaker: Are you serious?
Speaker: It's a level 12 cap?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a level 12 cap, which makes me wonder if that means they're like leaving room for character growth because it's D&D.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: For expansions.
Speaker: It's like we have like, okay, there's an expansion quests that takes place after the main quest that and now you can get up to 20.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: That's got to be it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is this fifth edition?
Speaker: Is it fifth edition?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Probably.
Speaker: I would imagine Baldur's Gate 3 is going to be fifth edition because I would say what?
Speaker: Baldur's Gate, the first two came out when 3.5 was still a thing.
Speaker: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker: Or at least three.
Speaker: This looks like it could be.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, and, you know, it's the same studio that did Divinity Original Sin 2.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Anyway, that's, I haven't been playing it.
Speaker: It's just, you know, just an aside.
Speaker: Uh-huh.
Speaker: Nope.
Speaker: What else?
Speaker: Oh, so for the game that I've been playing at my computer, I went back in time, and I'm finally playing Deus Ex Human Revolution.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: So this is the 2013 Deus Ex game that kind of rebooted the series.
Speaker: My only Deus Ex experience was...
Speaker: the original game in 2000, the Warren Spector game.
Speaker: And it's been, you know, 23 years since I've played it.
Speaker: So yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I don't even remember that much of it, but yeah, it's Deus Ex and it's, I really like it so far.
Speaker: It's, it's a lot of fun and it, it's, it's, uh,
Speaker: I love a good M-Sim, you know, give me a game that is your thing that that lets me problem solve multiple ways.
Speaker: Like I was just in a police station and it was like, oh, you got to get some information and be like, all right, well, I'm going to go crawl around the vents.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Obviously.
Speaker: Yeah, of course.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's the thing about those kind of games.
Speaker: It's like, yeah, you can do it in any which way, but we all know I'm maxing out and hacking and stealth.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm maxing out hacking and stealth.
Speaker: There was a side quest where it's like, well, you got to get rid of these two drug dealers.
Speaker: that are threatening one of the employees at the company you work with.
Speaker: And it was like, if you go up on the drug dealers, and that's the thing that's funny about DeuSax is like, you can't really take that many hits.
Speaker: Like if you get shot a couple of times, you're dead.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I was like, all right, well, I have this silent sniper rifle.
Speaker: So I was just like, what if I JFK it, you know?
Speaker: What if I go to the seventh floor of the book depository and shoot them?
Speaker: You mean go to the moon, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sorry, I meant Lee Harvey Oswald it.
Speaker: Oh, fair enough.
Speaker: Okay, got it, got it.
Speaker: Get killed by the government.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: Get killed by the government.
Speaker: I meant Jack Ruby.
Speaker: Ah, Jesus.
Speaker: Back and to the left.
Speaker: So Camilla locked her phone for 60 minutes.
Speaker: Too many wrong password entries.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that'll do it.
Speaker: Just going to wait, kid.
Speaker: So, yeah, that's that's what I've been playing recently.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: That's what I've been playing.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: And Hitman World of Assassination.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Which is just hitting that three.
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: OK, I was I was asking how you're finding it.
Speaker: Oh, it's great.
Speaker: It's basically they released Hitman 3 and was like, hey, do you want to just have Hitman 1 and 2 in your game?
Speaker: And everybody's like, yeah.
Speaker: So they're like, here's one.
Speaker: Here's all the Hitman games is just in one game now.
Speaker: So yeah, I mean, it's like an M-Sim in that it's more or less puzzle solving.
Speaker: You don't have to like...
Speaker: be a good shooter or anything.
Speaker: It's not like an action or true action game.
Speaker: You're trying to avoid civilian casualties.
Speaker: You're trying to like, it's like listening in to people and be like, oh, this person is like allergic to this or whatever.
Speaker: And then you put that in their drink, stuff like that, you know, as you drink your drink.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: Huh?
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: But yeah, it's fun.
Speaker: I enjoy it.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: That was always a franchise that I enjoyed.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I have to check that one out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That'll do it for tonight's episode.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: for listening to us talk about this book.
Speaker: Next book on the schedule is Alan Wake.
Speaker: Alan Wake.
Speaker: Alan Wake.
Speaker: Alan Wake, Stephen King, The Game, The Book.
Speaker: Stephen King, The Game, The Book.
Speaker: The Game.
Speaker: It's a game I played for the first time last year too.
Speaker: So I'm all caught up.
Speaker: It's like, yeah, I feel like I need to play.
Speaker: I also need to play Control.
Speaker: The Control, the AWE, the Alan Wake expansion for Control.
Speaker: Because there's like a whole DLC dealing with Alan Wake in Control.
Speaker: That's pretty cool.
Speaker: Because they're set in the same universe.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: The typewriter that Alan Wake writes on is a, is like a thing that the Bureau of Control has to keep an eye on.
Speaker: So anyway, yeah, next book, Alan Wake.
Speaker: If you enjoyed this, please rate us five stars or thumbs up or wherever, whatever, leave a comment on whatever podcast platform you choose to engage us on.
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Speaker: Over 50 of you sickos have rated us on Spotify for an average of 4.8.
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Speaker: We're over 25 on Apple iTunes.
Speaker: That's all good.
Speaker: It's all good stuff.
Speaker: Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at PixelitPod.
Speaker: Go to our website, PixelitPod.com.
Speaker: Check out our Patreon, Patreon.com slash PixelitPod.
Speaker: From our website, by the way, you can sign up for our mailing list, get episodes early.
Speaker: Or if you go to our Patreon, if you don't feel like giving us money, just go ahead and at least follow our Patreon page.
Speaker: And you'll get episodes early.
Speaker: Either way, you can use the mailing list or the Patreon page.
Speaker: Either way, you'll find a link to get some early episodes.
Speaker: And otherwise, join our Discord.
Speaker: You can find it through our website.
Speaker: Come on in, chat with us.
Speaker: We promise we don't bite.
Speaker: You'll meet some of our friends.
Speaker: You'll meet some of the people that we refer to a lot.
Speaker: VZ is there, and he's always dropping the fresh hot podcast recommendations.
Speaker: So if you are a podcast fanatic, come into our Discord.
Speaker: Talk with VZ.
Speaker: Hang out with us.
Speaker: He'll put you in the right direction.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that'll do it for tonight.
Speaker: Have a good day, everybody.
Speaker: Bye.
Speaker: Bye.
