Podcast 185a Transcript

A transcript for 185a: V Rising and Severance (2022-06-14).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 placeholder themes aren't placeholder theme song placeholder theme song. Yeah.

Jessamyn 0:04 So let's talk about why we're talking in the middle of the month.

Cortex 0:08 Yeah, it's, uh, I guess they won't know until we post it. But like at the moment, it is June 14. Tuesday 4:09pm. Pacific time.

Jessamyn 0:18 7:09pm where I am? Yes. Oh, did you hear the train? It just said to

Cortex 0:23 chew, I did not hear the train. If I listened back to podcasts, I would turn it up and listen, but I'll leave it to readers to report back. Alright. Readers. Yeah, people read podcast share anyway. Yes. What the fuck are we? This is tentatively working title episode 185. A of the metal filter monthly podcast, the non monthly part of that podcast. Basically, we're gonna talk about video game and a TV show and maybe some more things if we get off track, not us, not us getting off track.

Jessamyn 0:59 Because we had meant to have these conversations in the last podcast and both forgot.

Cortex 1:04 Yeah. And there was one that was also we went for, like, you know, upwards of an hour and a half. And the last one partly because like Metafilter discussion stuff, ate up a bunch of it, which is great. That's seems like a good thing to use the monthly medical podcast for. But yeah, we did even less of our normal specific yammering about just things we're personally excited about. And we you have said a bunch of times, like I've gone off about a video game you said, you know this video, this should just be a podcast. Like, you know, Josh explains video games to me which,

Jessamyn 1:32 right, right? Because I don't play almost any video games. And so it's always, you know, I play some mantle and I think that's a video game. So like,

Cortex 1:41 it's definitely okay. Yeah, I mean, it's a very, it's a very, like, stripped down word for the okay, but I don't know it's a it's it's a digitally mediated game. I say that's a video game. inclusive. And what I will

Jessamyn 1:55 say is that there's anything to look at, though. Well, I guess there's a little bar and a little bar as I do. I'm getting better. Yeah, I appreciate my but yeah. My point being I like listening to you talk about video games, because it's just not a world that I inhabit. And not only do you inhabit it, but you're very enthusiastic and happy about it. And it's one of your Happy Places. And so

Cortex 2:17 it's a big lifelong source of joy and entertainment and interest in aesthetic enrichment. And yeah, video games. A lot of video games are real good. So so I'm going to talk about a video game today and we're gonna talk about a TV show today. And that's not like the format for this whatever the fuck this turns out to be but like that's the format today and and that's all we know is that we want to talk about a couple things. And we're gonna do it for a while. And here we are. And Won't that be delightful?

Jessamyn 2:46 Yeah, and there will be spoilers for both this video game and this television show so

Cortex 2:52 let's let's let's be clear about that upfront probably anytime we are going to discuss like a entertainment property in this context. We are just going to fucking dig in on it. So if you want to play

Jessamyn 3:01 I'm gonna cut straight to the ending in my horrified shrieking and you know Josh will probably talk about something Well, I guess maybe we should stop being quiet the video game

Cortex 3:13 is the video game is V rising. Oh, so

Jessamyn 3:17 you did didn't write it? I wrote it that way to save space, but it's really called vampire rising.

Cortex 3:24 No, no, no, it's just v rising. Which, you know, is kind of fun because like it's a little bit abstract even though

Jessamyn 3:30 the V stands for vampire it does for foxy

Cortex 3:34 but you know, I don't know there's a lot of other games with vampire in the title just using vi seems like it stands out a little bit. It Yeah, yeah. If you go search like vampire like

Jessamyn 3:45 the period rising or is it just v just capital

Cortex 3:49 V and on the title screens and I stylized weird sort of Gothic V.

Jessamyn 3:53 Probably looks cool. Yeah, no, that's and the TV show is severance. The one that if you'll remember from podcast pass, I was confusing with succession which I had no opt out of in five minutes. And I stand by that so don't tell me to watch it. And Josh was like, no really severance is good succession. Whatever. You should really tried.

Cortex 4:14 I've never watched succession The only thing I know about succession is that it is like grim chuckles and people who enjoy watching people sort of be terrible people have not always exceeded it. tend to enjoy it like it I think that looks a

Jessamyn 4:27 little koken kid isn't it who's no longer the little kid but that's that's how I even knew it existed because I saw him on SNL and was like he's good. What's he been up to lately? Oh session I should see Ah, no, I shouldn't. For me, my impression

Cortex 4:45 is is it's kind of cringe drama. It is what succession is like it's it's like dark comedy that is like Arrested Development level. Intentionally sort of weird and cheeky but also

Jessamyn 4:56 it also prestige television in that it's very high concept. Very well directed very lots of actors that you know about. And yeah,

Cortex 5:05 so yeah, but other than that I know nothing about it and I've not gotten around to it and it's not high on my list. So whatever but severance severance with Adam Scott and directly by Ben Stiller and directed by Ben Stiller and not Tony Shalhoub, but John tuturro. And other people who I'm forgetting, Patricia Arquette. Oh yeah, Patricia are candidates. And some people who I don't particularly know but are great.

Jessamyn 5:30 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The guy who played like his friend, I went look at him up on IMDb because he was so good. And I was like, Oh, I never seen that guy before. Like, he can play guitar. He is handsome. And he's clearly a great actor. What is going on with that guy? I

Cortex 5:45 don't know that guy at all. Which is interesting. Yeah, no, did

Jessamyn 5:47 the did I?

Cortex 5:49 Let's do this. Let's start with sevens. And

Jessamyn 5:52 because we should start with video games, because sevens we're both into video games, like Josh explains things to Jessamyn.

Cortex 5:59 Okay, so like, like, there'll be a payoff for you having to sit and listen to me is

Jessamyn 6:03 I like listening to you. But I might start staring out the window if I've already talked about everything I want. Exactly,

Cortex 6:10 exactly. Okay, well, then, here we go. I'm going to talk about a game called V rising that I've been playing and it is a game where you play as a vampire.

Jessamyn 6:20 And can you only play as a vampire? Are there other characters,

Cortex 6:23 you can only play as a vampire, you play as a sort of generic vampire, you can use a little character designer to create your particular version of sort of Nosferatu looking vampire

Jessamyn 6:32 or they're like boy vampires, girl vampires.

Cortex 6:35 You know what there is there's

Jessamyn 6:36 vampires,

Cortex 6:37 there's a couple body type selections, and they're entirely abstract. At no point does it say male or female, you can have sort of like a bulkier character or a slender character. And that's all and they don't care about it either way, and there's no restriction on what kind of like hairstyle and clothes etc. You can wear, you can definitely be sort of slender, femoris body shape, can

Jessamyn 7:01 you be a bust?

Cortex 7:03 They don't have mosquitoes controls. It's just like, Well, okay, here's, here's the thing, like, I like, I like the fact that they are just like, whatever pick a body type. We don't have a fuck you are who you are, you're a vampire. And also whether or not they're going to add more things to that in the long run. I don't know, this is a game that is in Early Access, which I've probably talked about, okay, before on the Metafilter podcast, but early access has become a term of art in video games. It's not just like, Okay, well, this is a game that like is sort of, there's a thing going on. But this is a whole like, way of launching a video game before it has been completed.

Jessamyn 7:42 So it's like it's in beta or no? Yeah,

Cortex 7:46 yeah, well, well, okay. So here's the thing you used to have basically, these were the, these were the ways you could get your hands on a video game, you could buy it, once it's out, you could maybe get into a beta or even an alpha test, if this specific company was deciding to do that,

Jessamyn 8:01 which usually is somebody a Bioshock, or something. Yeah. Or, or, you know, like,

Cortex 8:05 they would then generally do closed and open betas is, and this still happens to depending on the game, but basically the closed beta you probably right, and you know, put your email in a hat. And then eventually they start picking emails out of that. And they're like, use 10,000 people, they'll give closed beta access and tested for a while and then go from there. Or an open beta where like, it's basically Hey, yeah, you can play it. We're not promising anything, because it's

Jessamyn 8:29 might be broken. Your your status might, and sorry, who makes V rising?

Cortex 8:35 I don't know, some company,

Jessamyn 8:36 how do you get to it?

Cortex 8:39 I have it on steam,

Jessamyn 8:41 steam. So you could find it on Steam? Or use Google, if you're an early access? How did you get early access to it?

Cortex 8:49 So this is this is what I'm saying. So you've got closed betas, and open betas are a traditional sort of dichotomy there. And then also, like just a demo, which is a partial version of a game that you could like, download for free or get in a discount, you know, with your video game magazine, Early Access,

Jessamyn 9:05 is that still a thing?

Cortex 9:06 I have no idea of that 22 years, it certainly was a thing back in the day back when I ever used physical media for anything. But uh, but early access has become this thing that is like a formal way to just have beta testing, Early Access, you know exactly what it sounds like, just be a normalized thing that everybody can do. Because like normally doing a beta test was kind of an outlier thing you'd like, you sort of had to make an effort due there and, and communicating about it was like maybe a little bit of a one off complicated thing. Most games would not have a beta test. Doing a beta test was often sort of like the product of a larger company to like your resources to organize that sort of thing. And early access is just sort of like a proviso that steam includes or, you know, other platforms might too but the fact that steam explicitly supports things being in Early Access is like a big sort of shift in the positioning of this idea. In the games industry. The point where most indie games, you know, would benefit from explicitly having people playing it before it's out and by position is early access with the Hey, it's still in progress. We don't know. I'm

Jessamyn 10:18 sure he also has like forums and stuff so that people can, like it's got a method for capturing feedback so that a company doesn't necessarily have to have all that infrastructure, because you can just sit in the forums use them. I mean, I because I think Battle Royale was in early access or something probably. Yeah,

Cortex 10:36 I think. Yeah, I think it was when I when I tried it.

Jessamyn 10:39 They were definitely adjusting it as it went.

Cortex 10:42 Yeah. So yeah,

Jessamyn 10:44 I guess that's the thing about Steve to begin with, right, is that you're just connecting to a platform. And so theoretically, the people that put the stuff on the platform could be changing that as they go, right? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know much about that. I'm just saying,

Cortex 10:58 you can set up steam to automatically update or just manually update. But anyway, yeah, they can put up patches and you update your game, and then you play the new version, etc. And like, none of that is like crazy, unprecedented stuff. But the way that has been formalized over the last several years as early access as sort of both a general common concept and a feature of steam is just it's kind of an interesting thing. Are there other

Jessamyn 11:19 like big platforms, like Steam steam is the only one I know of, but that's just I as I've said, I'm really my, my space. Like, are there other bigger big platforms like that, that are web? It's not like one's like, I understand console systems. But

Cortex 11:34 yeah, yeah, no, steam steam is the big one. And the, the the young gun coming out swinging at this point is epic, which in the last couple years has launched its own game store. Oh, interesting. Okay. And Epic you may or may not know of, because it's prior to the last few years, they were just kind of a studio that put out games and some of them were good. And some of them were real good. And

Jessamyn 11:55 some of them were okay. And whatever. Like that's like one of their big name games.

Cortex 11:59 Well, their biggest name game is fortnight. Oh, I have heard of that one. Yeah. Which is why there is an epic game store and why they are coming out swinging as the young gun because they have been so fucking successful.

Jessamyn 12:10 With still super popular Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah,

Cortex 12:13 it's still still kicking along pretty well. Like, I don't track it. i It's not a game that I even play. But like, it is hugely out there. And it's a huge, it's big with the kids, a you know, like, but legitimately it's a it's a huge sort of, like phenomena and social space and a huge source of revenue and, and sort of like, wait to throw around on epics part. So they started the epic game store. And that's kind of trying to like catch up with steam in terms of features by spending a lot of money.

Jessamyn 12:41 And because the platforms themselves are free, right, it's just, yeah, it's just a way to access games from a number of different other companies.

Cortex 12:50 Exactly. They're trying to be sort of like a likable, usable platform. So like, you know, between sales and having your library organized in one place, and value added features, like forums and you know, whatnot, right, they're trying to be like, the most appealing place to like, lock yourself into, like, almost all of these games, almost all the games you can buy on Steam or on Epic, you can buy on both. And you can also just buy independently from the developer or you can get on you know, there's a site called gog.com, which used to at least stand for Good Old Games and really focused on like, retro games, and they've kind of

Jessamyn 13:26 come how is there like a three letter domain? That's like a big deal like that, that I've never heard?

Cortex 13:32 I don't know. I mean, like, it's a video game thing, like you would have a specific interest in, in video games. You know, humble, Humble Bundle.

Jessamyn 13:39 I'm familiar with them.

Cortex 13:40 They they they're they've sort of moved into doing more like direct, you know, first party sales and stuff, too.

Jessamyn 13:47 It's probably better that I don't know about this. I'm looking at it now. And I could just do this for the rest of my life.

Cortex 13:53 And yeah, like Microsoft has the X Xbox Game Pass, which works for the Xbox, but also for PC as a, you pay a monthly fee and you get access to a bunch of games instead of like buying the games.

Jessamyn 14:06 Does it not work for the Mac?

Cortex 14:08 I have no idea what works for the Mac but like Microsoft has a real vested interest in Windows. Yeah, no, I get it. And more of the point it's easier to make their games work on both Xbox and Windows when they're both Microsoft products but but I don't I don't have a contemporary Xbox. I don't have a contemporary PS five, so I don't really know what's

Jessamyn 14:26 yes to so I basically sit and play Galaga on it. Yeah,

Cortex 14:32 you could play the bouncer the way it was early launch title for the PS two as the first game I played the heck out of on the PSU and the bouncer. Yeah, it was I beat him up. It's I'm not sure I'm interested enough to make an episode but it could be another episode. Anyway, that's a big fucking tangent. But basically what it comes down to is V rising is a game that came out into early access in the last month or two Maybe maybe just a month ago, literally. And it just sort of blew up like a lot of people were like, this is fun. And I agree with those people. It is fun.

Jessamyn 15:09 And what's so talk to me about like, what's fun about it? And what makes you be like, Yeah, I'm loving it.

Cortex 15:15 So this is this is a game that is in sort of that survival craft up like genre that there's a lot of stuff wandering around the territory. But basically, it's the kind of game where you chop down trees and break rocks and build yourself a little, like, wooden hovel, and then you're like, Yeah, but this could be better. And you unlock some technology, and then you known how to stone walls, you can actually have a roof on your on your castle, which is really good if you're a vampire, because of the sun.

Jessamyn 15:47 Yeah, no joke. Otherwise, you're just living in a hole covering yourself with dirt every night, right?

Cortex 15:51 Yeah, exactly. Sleeping in a shitty wooden coffin on the grass, you know, and hoping that you know, you don't get out of it until the sun's down. So you're like, you go out, and you find fancier ways to carve up wood and you find harder kinds of rock and or you collect those and those electric manufacturer, you know, more advanced workstations, and you sort of like slowly iteratively build up

Jessamyn 16:16 till you get to do the kinds of

Cortex 16:17 fancier production and make your castle bigger and, and you know, maybe you bring horses home and feed them water to keep them alive. And maybe you start building prisons to put humans inside of and really store them for blood. And maybe you conversely, humans with servant competence to like, go on errands for you. And that one of the things I love about this game, like in terms of its just attitude is it is a game where you're playing as a vampire, but you're just playing as a vampire. And that's it, you're just a vampire. And you're fine with that. And your whole thing is you want to like get back in the swing of things and you know, get back into dominion over these pesky humans. So many vampire games. And this is not a bad thing that these other games do. But so many vampire games take the concept of being a vampire from a narrative perspective as sort of like a journey from this perspective of a human player, where like, a lot of vampire games start with you having just very recently become a vampire. And then like you're learning about your powers, and you're learning about the various downsides of being a vampire. And you're struggling with the balance between embracing your new powers and your immortality and your strength and retaining a sense of your humanity and what it means to be a person and like, really sort of like navigating that and maybe having choices about how much you go one way or the other and think yeah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. V rising fuck you know, you're a vampire humans suck kill humans. Build a good big big castle there's no wrestling with it. You're just like Nope, this is who I am.

Jessamyn 17:47 Right? Are you this?

Cortex 17:50 The goal is to once again rise to power and subjugate humanity like you are the vampire rising not the vampire struggling with the moral question of the nature of being Can you are you can you can, you have to sort of like build up technology to build fancier outfits and all of the outfits are rad and vampire foppish?

Jessamyn 18:11 Yeah.

Cortex 18:13 This is not a super high polish collection of like, like, outfit graphics. Like it's, I would say like World of Warcraft level, sort of like kind of cartoony Yeah, aesthetic rather than like a like super polished triple A studio. Like photorealistic trenchcoat, blah, blah, blah. Sure. But it's good. Like, it's just like, you know, so yeah, you you go out and you you build your castle and you deal with the local humans and you sort of track down dangerous mini bosses who have special vampire blood or V blood or whatever it is. And by killing them, you learn new things. And there's like, vampire hunters out there and mean big human like logging mill bosses and trolls living in the mountains. And

Jessamyn 19:00 so it's not just vampires and humans, there's a whole bunch of different kinds of

Cortex 19:04 characters and humans and other shit out there. You know?

Jessamyn 19:08 Does it does it happen in any particular place? Are you on earth? Are you in Transylvania?

Cortex 19:12 You're gonna vague Gothic setting a vague pre industrial Gothic setting. Like there's not really any more to it than that, you know, like swords and axes and crossbows and mean mean Catholic ish. Humans seem to be the primary like ascending attack antagonists. There's a big map you can wander around, you can build castles in multiple places. And different parts of the map are more dangerous than others so that you have to sort of work your way up to dealing with the farmland area where people are smart enough to put up garlic that causes you problems. From there you have to work up to dealing with like the cursed forest which is like

Jessamyn 19:52 a doll. Is it all just normal vampire tropes or do they have like interesting new different vampire tropes?

Cortex 19:58 It's a mishmash of existing ones like they don't seem to be trying to like say actually, no, we've figured out what the real vampire situations were like, hey, you know, garlic is a problem for you Holy Water,

Jessamyn 20:08 steaks in the heart, that kind of thing.

Cortex 20:11 Yeah, it's interesting that is holy radiation is what you run into when you go into a monastery. So

Jessamyn 20:16 it's as if it's Wait a second what

Cortex 20:19 I know right? Like it maybe maybe there's a little bit of a science fiction thing going on there with not so much like the power of God as it is like, you know, the harnessed elemental nature of quote unquote, holiness. I don't know. I haven't spent that much time in in the monasteries because I don't have good resistance to Holy damage. I can't fucking I can't do this yet. Right. So it's like, if you like sort of the crafting and like building up a base, it's really good for that. I'm enjoying that a lot. You know, people have talked about

Jessamyn 20:47 crafting is like building a house and that kind of stuff. Yeah, like

Cortex 20:51 turn turn a bunch of logs into lumber. Use the lumber to build a workbench or walls for your, for your place. Use a stone grinder to grind stones into bricks that you use to build sturdy castle walls. Use that and some cloth and a little bit of sulfur you found to build a nice tile for for your alchemy tools in particular, and then you get a nice bonus to you know how efficiently they work. And I've got an excellent castle with a bunch of dedicated like workshop rooms, and I'm very happy with it. He I've got another fancy just like vanity castle that doesn't produce anything. But I've been collecting high ranking members of like the clergy military in the nearby town and abducting them and bringing back and converting them into vampire servants. So there's just like

Jessamyn 21:36 sandpaper servants that means you bite them they become vampires and then they work for you. Basically, you so they started out as humans you couldn't like a human without putting a human in a prison?

Cortex 21:47 Well, you don't need the prison part that's actually just its own useful thing. But you do need to, it's funny, you have to like damage a human down to like 30% and then use an in thrall power to sort of like make Whoo, I will control you sort of like eyes at them. But you have to do that just standing there. And if there's any other humans around, they aren't being enthralled. The person you're enthralling isn't enthralled yet. And all those people keep trying to kill you. So it becomes a process like Okay, sounds complicated. There's those five guys over there. One of them I really want to come work for me, the other four gotta kill but gotta kill those without killing that guy because I don't want him to die. So I'm going to kill those four carefully widdle him down, but not too much so that he's like, weak but not dead. And then I'm gonna enthrall him. And then once he's enthralled, I can't use my other spells until I'm done with that. So then I need to take him back to my house. Not let anybody else get angry at us in the meantime, because they'll attack him too. And he's barely got hit points left, because I beat him up so I could enthrall him. And then get him back to the castle and then put them into a serving coffin and let him bake for an hour and a half and then he'll turn it twice. Wait, wait, what? Yeah, let instead of like biting their neck and having a dramatic scene like that. You put them in a servant coffin, which is a smoky

Jessamyn 22:57 so there is a little bit of different vampire who'd like yeah, okay. A serpent coffin.

Cortex 23:04 Yeah, that's just what they call it.

Jessamyn 23:05 Well, I wasn't sure if I was hearing you right or serving coffin. Yes. servant.

Cortex 23:09 Servant, coffin. servant. Servant. Go. Yes.

Jessamyn 23:14 So yeah, I'm in a special coffin for a certain amount of time.

Cortex 23:17 Yeah, put them in the oven for you know, 350 on on for an hour and a half. And then then they're ready to be your servant. And you can give them stuff and say, Hey, go to this village and collect the wool. They make their and you know, and they'll go off and do that. And they'll be back in like, you know, four hours or eight hours or whatever you set it for. And so yeah, it's nice. It does a lot of things well, like it's, it's not necessarily do anything in a super revolutionary way, like everything it does is sort of slick, as far as like survival and crafting and building stuff like other games do as well. And there's a game that does each one of those things better to like, basically, none of those are doing as a vampire. So that's one big plus. But it's collection of those things. It's all really good. Right now, it's already got a really solid, fun game to play in that sort of general vibe. And, like, in my opinion, all of the best of the games in this sort of survival craft genre. It supports cooperative play with other people

Jessamyn 24:12 that was gonna be actually my next question, whether you're just kind of doing this on your own in the wilderness, or whether there's other people, potentially, Yeah,

Cortex 24:19 you totally can play solo, and I have some and enjoyed it. A lot of the mini boss fights that you need to do unlock technology are a lot harder solo than with friends. So there's a real strong mechanical incentive there to play with other people. But you don't have to, like you could, in theory, totally play the whole thing solo. And if you like, sort of like a solo survival craft grind, I would say, yeah, check it out, because I think it's good enough by itself. But you can play with other people. And you can do that by playing on random servers you find on the internet. Or you can do that by organizing a private server with friends or just hosting a game from your own computer if you don't want to, like bother with a like dedicated server.

Jessamyn 24:57 But how does that work considering the game is early Access, and it's on a platform like,

Cortex 25:03 so the, the fact that it's on Steam doesn't matter. They're like Steam steam actually provides some nice features for like organizing, like online play. But any game that has, like, servers that multiple people can play on together just has to figure that out themselves. Like, that's just something you have to build as the maker of the game. Like, that's just a thing you implement. And the Early Access part kind of doesn't matter one way or the other. It's it's always a challenge for a game that wants to do cooperative play or online play, if they're still in the development process. Because if you change something about how the game works, it could be more complicated to fix that for online play than just for a single player game. Yeah, there's nothing inherently problematic there. Like you know, if you have a decent plan and you're doing a good job of it like that, just that's just part of the process. You update the server stuff at the same time that you update the the core game it so

Jessamyn 25:56 you could share your castle with other vampires. Yes, Friend, friend vampires. Yeah.

Cortex 26:02 And that's exactly what I've been doing for the most of the playing I'm doing is like me and some friends on the east coast have a dedicated server up. And you know, five or six of us all have our own different castles on the map. And we're we put each other, we're all in the same clan, so you can have like full access to each other stuff, because like we're not playing competitively, we just want to like, build cool stuff and have rad outfits. So my castle, in fact, has become sort of like the local work castle for our whole crew because it's just in a convenient sort of middle of the map spot. So like, everybody just sort of brings everything there at this point, like everybody else has their own castle that they do whatever they want with but like, if you're going to like find a new recipe or bring back a pile of ore from a local miner, something a lot of people just go into my castle and dumping it there and we've got a big pile of work machinery in there. My brother built an elaborate prison for several prisoners so we could do experiments on how exactly the hole is the most is the most absolutely outright evil vampires are better than humans sort of like mechanic in the game is like, you can literally build a prison feed them rats withdraw their blood. You know, it's, it's grim.

Jessamyn 27:19 I'm not sure how comfortable I am with that. But okay, talk about your cool outfit.

Cortex 27:26 The the outfits are cool, the outfits are mostly kind of like stepping up the technology level. So like, as you learn more technology, you can build fancier outfits that provide you with better stats. So it's right now it's fairly straightforward thing this is one of the things that I hope they get more fancy with as they continue to development of the game because I want a lot of outfits I want to be able to like yeah, really play vampire dress up in a like just for its own sake way. Whereas right now check you're doing it for the sake of being able to take on harder bosses because you've got better armor now on this new set of hollow Fang leather armor instead of the original like default leather armor that surpassed the whatever was before that. There's just there's not as much yet. But that is one of the things it feels like would be a natural thing for them to build out. But yeah, it's a good it's a good vampire re survivor craft time. Like it's just, it's it's nice. And it's like 20 bucks, I think.

Jessamyn 28:20 Which seems reasonable. I don't know how much these things cost. But that seems reasonable

Cortex 28:25 retail triple A games right now or like $60. Maybe it's going to be more like 70 at this point. Because that just creeps up every few years. Because yeah, money. So yeah, like retail has for a long time been like 60 bucks, you know, if it's a triple A game, it's going to be 60 bucks. And then additional downloadable content after that might be like 10 or 15 bucks, and they'll put out a few of those. And maybe if you want to buy like the special edition at launch, you pay like 90 bucks, and you get like some bonus assets and maybe something physical in the mail. So 20 bucks is like, that's, that's cheap. It's not as cheap as something that's like three bucks, which I also like,

Jessamyn 29:05 well, and with early access, does that mean when they're done with the Early Access, you lose access to it? No, no, no, no, no matter how many bucks you can play the Early Access game forever.

Cortex 29:15 Yeah, yeah. Like it's, it's pretty much the opposite. It's more like kickstarting like, it's, it's like, you are oftentimes gonna get a slightly better deal for early access. Like, if it's 20 bucks when it

Jessamyn 29:26 hits, you may have to play something that changes or right,

Cortex 29:31 right, like you're accepting that it's going to be like a work in progress that it's not done yet. But you're getting access sooner and usually for cheaper too. And you're sort of like speculatively putting your dollars down there. And this is one of the things with early access is like what it means for any given game to be in Early Access really depends on the game like it is a broad concept. And I have friends who basically have strict no early access rules look for themselves. Like I'm not going to buy a game in early access like I did a few times. I'd print I'm not going to do it. And I know people who like just well don't even think twice about it. And I'm a little bit in between, like, you can usually tell like one of the nice things is like the fact that things are in early access a lot has been so normalized that people talk about the state of games. With that in mind, right? To the point where like, Okay, I know when V risin came out, it had this stuff in place, it has this stuff that it hasn't done yet. It has these kinds of bugs, it runs about this. Well, people are saying, right,

Jessamyn 30:31 the level of expectation for Early Access is a thing that is beyond a normal, normal,

Cortex 30:36 sort of, do you do your own like, like little bit of research by reading reviews, or whatever to figure out like, whether it's far enough along for you? Because there's, there's really two things are with with early access one is, is the game in rough shape, because it's still in progress? Sure. Which is legitimate problem, sometimes, V rising seems

Jessamyn 30:55 probably mind more than others to write I assume,

Cortex 30:58 will end depending on like, that's, that's one of the subjective things is like how much you love, it is going to make a big difference to whether or not you care if it's janky. If I if I love a game, it can be janky as hell and I have no problem with it, I'll complain when it crashes. But then I'll like just restart it and get back to playing it because I'm fucking loving, whatever that is. Whereas if I'm just like, so So on something, things like rough edges and bugs are gonna have like, really get in the way. So yeah, like, you kind of have to just decide how much of a risk you want to take and how much you care. But yeah, so you have that, like, that's one downside to playing early access is bugs and roughness and things are just janky. And

Jessamyn 31:36 but it presumably, eventually, it just gets polished up to being a final game, right?

Cortex 31:41 Sure. Yeah. And eventually, eventually, it will probably get finished. Like, you know, there's always the possibility that they'll just like, decide this isn't working, or I got hit by a bus or whatever, yeah, contractual obligation that they finished the game, but probably will, and maybe the game will get a lot better over the course of that. Or maybe it'll be about as good as it was when it hit early access, you know, like, you never know, it's going to depend on whoever's making it. Right. But aside from like, dealing with it being sort of janky early on the other kind of risk with early access is and this really depends on the kind of game like maybe you'll have kind of already gotten most of what you're gonna get out of it by the time it comes out. And that's like, Okay, now the Polish version comes out that's like the ideal playing experience

Jessamyn 32:21 and I already kind of know how to play through it or

Cortex 32:24 when African tired of this Oh, yeah, I did this. I'm you know, I don't need to I don't need to play this all again. You know, I think that's more probably the games are like really heavy, heavily narrative check if you're really going to

Jessamyn 32:33 invest in the story, like I know all these stories. Yeah, yeah, I

Cortex 32:36 know, all of this narrative beats here already. I've read most of this dialogue, and I know they added some stuff, but you know, whereas if it's a game that you just like playing you like doing the stuff in it, then doing it again later is usually not a problem. And I think be rising is more like that. Like, I like chopping down trees and building a castle. You know, like, honestly chopping down trees. I like chopping down trees and video games. It's a very good thing like Minecraft like the first thing you ever did in Minecraft when you start a game is you go up to a tree and you punch it to get some wood out of it. And I have ever since then thought of these games as like tree punching games. Hey, yeah, because like that's the thing like yeah, no, let me let me chop down trees let me like quarry. A mine let me let me dig out resources I can really chill out and bliss out to just doing you know, some some resource gathering for a while and it's just like I'm doing fake labor in a universe that doesn't exist. It doesn't make sense as a like pastime necessarily, but I enjoy it. Like, I have mined so much or in so many video games. I've chopped down so many whose I have strong opinions about which survivor craft games have the best tree chopping. The answer at the moment, by the way is Icarus again, I could totally talk about again, okay. It's just got a great like every step of chopping down the tree, the swinging your axe feels good. The way it breaks the trunk, the way you break apart the individual pieces of the resulting fallen tree knocking off the branches and getting the primo just the best tree chopping I've ever had. The tree chopping and V rising is totally fine, but it's not really as much

Jessamyn 34:12 of a not as good. That is good. It's not it's not a focus, but he'll hop into the Early Access forums and talk about how they should treat shopping game. You're not that guy actually.

Cortex 34:23 Like, I don't do that almost ever with anything. Because people on the internet are annoying is a big part of it. Really? Really? Yeah. No. Yeah, yeah, believe it or not, you know, gamers in particular, sometimes mixbag there's a lot of 13 year olds out there and a lot of just asshole 20 Somethings. And that's not to say that like you can't have a positive experience doing that sort of thing that I rarely feel the motivation to like, find out. Like I don't really want to dig into steam forums that we talked about. They have discussion boards built in his team. Yep, they're great because you can usually find like an answer if there's like a bug in a game like If there's no right or

Jessamyn 35:01 how do I do this if it's a game without a whole bunch of

Cortex 35:03 Yeah, or some issue? Yeah, exactly. And early access games often have fairly poor tutorials and fairly poor documentation, because that's the kind of thing you tend to polish up towards the end once all the features are settled, right. So yeah, like being able to go on to the steam discussion board and say, Okay, I'm having this thing. I can't figure out where to find x, or there's this bug. I can probably find a post if anyone else is experiencing that, like, on the first page or two of the Steam forums, along with so much dumb fucking bullshit. Yep. It's really bad. It's really Yep. The most entitled like, why didn't you make the game perfect stuff. And you know, that's when you're lucky. And it's not like people being weirdly racist about some shit or whatever,

Jessamyn 35:43 right? sexist, racist, whatever the stuff is. Yeah, there are fucking

Cortex 35:47 forums on the internet for people who are not necessarily motivated by anything more in common than liking the same video game. Right. So it's. Yeah, so not me. No, not not. Not me, particularly. Okay. That's not to say that doesn't happen and isn't very useful. Like, that's part of the thing with early access is when it works well, especially, it's because developers are getting a ton of good feedback from players and incorporating that into the changes they make and how they push forward on development. So excuse me? Yeah, I don't know, that's V rising, I could see potentially the idea of playing V rising with a bunch of other meta filter people, because we could set up like a meta filter server. And just like, everybody has a castle, I would not want to moderate it. It's not my job to be in charge of the server.

Jessamyn 36:36 But theoretically, like the fight could could spin one up, right?

Cortex 36:39 Yeah. Yeah. Or Yeah. Or it could be like a fanfare, video game clubs special or, or something. That'd be neat. I like it. I think it's great. And I think it is very worth playing, if the kind of things I'm talking about are things you like, and that's been rising. That's that's one of the things I've really been enjoying in the last month.

Jessamyn 36:58 Fantastic. Wow. Pivoting to part two of this podcast, you suggested that I watch severance. And once I cleared up that you were not talking about succession. I watched it all real fast. And I asked you specifically after I watched the first maybe episode and a half, like, is this just kind of constant weirdy? We never figure out what the fuck is going on? And you were like that really? No, actually, there's more. There's more to it than that. And so I stuck with it. Because that was kind of my problem with last where, like, I read, Peg me, I read some stuff, where it became fairly clear that there wasn't actually a narrative arc. They were just throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck kind of thing. And I decided I wasn't investing if they weren't investing, you know? And you were like, no, no, no, there's there's some there there. And so I stuck with it. And I was so happy that I did. But now, I kind of wasn't expecting the whole season to end on a ridiculous, ridiculous cliffhanger. I was not expecting that. I thought. I mean, and I'm not don't get me wrong. Like I'm not mad. Like there is a second season. Right? Or there will be there will be Yeah, there isn't one now but there will be. Yeah, because it was like, you know, I was watching our flag means death a month or two ago. And part of that is it ends a little bit on a cliffhanger. Not the same kind of cliffhanger. But definitely. We

Cortex 38:40 just finished watching that. Oh, last night. And yeah, when I had assumed it was going to wrap it up with more of a bow and

Jessamyn 38:47 I thought it was gonna wrap it up. And instead, everybody is miserable. So

Cortex 38:51 definitely leave it open. But I guess like a couple days ago, they

Jessamyn 38:56 announced the second season. Yeah, so that's great. Yeah. And oh my god, it was so much fun being on social media, with just all the happy people that there's going to be a second season of our frog means that and I hadn't been like, in the same place in terms of severance, you know, because I just I just by the time I was done watching it, I already knew there was going to be a second season. Yeah, so the fact that it was a ridiculous cliffhanger

Cortex 39:24 was what let's back up and show other than like, as we said earlier, we're gonna spoil this. If you want no Severan spoilers. Stop blessing. Oh, stop now. But also, like for the sake of people who aren't as worried about that, but don't know anything about the show. Let's talk a little bit about like, what basically the show is,

Jessamyn 39:46 yeah, I mean, it's it's one of those shows where like, you're kind of dropped right into it. And, you know, there's a guy it's Adam Scott, he's got a job in a weird office. That's what we know at first. First, and there appears to be like a very, he's crying on his way to work. You don't know why he gets to work and he kind of straightens his shit out. He changes all his clothes. You're very confused. He gets to his office, which is a very like, oh, wait, or does it start with Halle? Actually it

Cortex 40:21 starts it starts with Holly. But

Jessamyn 40:23 you you, you introduce it to the holly Holly part and then my part comes in.

Cortex 40:30 Yeah, no, it actually opens with a woman like, seemingly unconscious on like a conference room table. And then she wakes up to the sound of someone saying basically, hello.

Jessamyn 40:39 All right. She's not injured. She just who knows why she wasn't awake.

Cortex 40:44 Yeah, she's absolutely disoriented and doesn't know why she's there and barely knows her name, who is like, friendly, you know, asking her to answer some seemingly inane questions without explaining things. And

Jessamyn 40:57 like, what's the first state name you could remember? Or think of? Kind of, like weird questions.

Cortex 41:02 Yeah. And this is like the cold open of the show. It's like that. Like, why is Who is this woman? Why is she on this day? Yeah.

Jessamyn 41:09 And it's a generic conference room. There's nothing in it. She's kind of dressed in kind of generic office clothes. The speaker that she's getting spoken to through is a very, like, 70s. Era. 60s era. Weird. Speaker like so. So you're not sure like even what? What space and time you're in like, you're clearly probably in America. But other than that, you have no idea what's going on?

Cortex 41:39 Yeah. So she has a little confusing adventure there. And then, you know, and then we've got Adam Scott character, crying in his car, and then going into work and being chill and turns out, he's the one who's talking to her. And yeah,

Jessamyn 41:52 he goes up the elevator and like, something weird happens to his face. Like, like, that's the weird thing that I'm actually I was interested that, like, so you know, when when they go up in the elevator. There's a weird visual effect. And I don't exactly know what it is.

Cortex 42:10 It's a dolly zoom. I love a dolly zoom.

Jessamyn 42:12 What's a dolly zoom?

Cortex 42:13 A dolly zoom is this great thing where, Okay. Well, you

Jessamyn 42:19 know what both parts are, I know what a dolly is, and I know what zooming

Cortex 42:23 dolly is just like you know, a cart that they put it on wheels and you can, you know, move a camera around on it to get a smooth shot when shooting something. And as that Zoom obviously, is like getting closer or farther from the thing, usually using a zoom lens that you can twist to change the zoom. A dolly zoom is when you use the dolly to move towards something and use the zoom lens to zoom away from some Thank you Okay, or vice versa and you get like that great, weird fucking perspective. Especially if like you've got a good camera operator and a good dolly operations. I kind of sync up

Jessamyn 42:57 what I was watching. Yeah. Like there's clearly something going on. But I was like, Is this like a? Yeah, good. Thank you.

Cortex 43:07 It's a classic classic cinema drag like like that. I think the classic American pop cinema. dolly zoom is Roy Scheider in Jaws having a like, holy fuck moment. And there's a zoom in on him on the beach with a dolly zoom on him in the beach where everything goes, walk around him while he's going. Oh,

Jessamyn 43:26 right. Right. Well, you're just looking at him. But yeah,

Cortex 43:29 it gets used a lot in horror, like the horror horror movies love. Horror directors love camera tricks, and a dolly zoom is a great one. And it's yeah, it's just unsettling. It's unsettling and weird. And it's not something that you have to deal with weird CGI thing.

Jessamyn 43:43 Like one of the things that's really interesting about Adam Scott and I think he's really used to his full potential in this show is he's a weird looking dude. Like his head is a little too big. His chin is funny. Like his nose is sideways his eyes are too far apart like like he's not conventionally your your usual actor and I think the fact that he's a little off looking and and also kind of conventionally attractive sort of

Cortex 44:11 yet I mean, he's not he's not like Tom Cruise like he's he would be a weird off model Tom Cruise. In terms of like that sort of like star it factor on how some of this fucking face looks, I guess?

Jessamyn 44:24 Yeah. As a result, he people's looks more like what I would perceive as like a normal person. But also he's also clearly like an actor person, you know, his clothes fit well, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. And he's supposed to be a little bit of a, I feel like a little bit of an ingenue in this whole thing. Right? Because like, he clearly bought into Oh, and I mean, I guess if we're going to kind of move forward.

Cortex 44:49 Yeah, let's. Yeah, let's get explicit about like, what's going on there because I think this is an interesting aspect of what he does so well in the show.

Jessamyn 44:58 Yeah, that the reason the show is called sufferance is, you know, there's this spooky creepy workplace that we learn more about as the show goes. But the general conceit is, you get something done to your head when you get a job at this place, so that your home life is your home life. And then when you come to work, and you go up in that elevator, something switches and your work life is your work life. And those two people, those two states of being in your mind, are as if they are two separate people. Neither one has access to the other one's thoughts, memories, understanding, like it's all very

Cortex 45:39 Yeah, we're separate consciousnesses. And the ones who go to work

Jessamyn 45:43 at this place. Their whole life is just their work. Yeah,

Cortex 45:47 their first day of work is their first day of their life, essentially. Yeah, you know, it's and it's, you know, they don't really get into why that doesn't make them a functionally newborn baby. Clearly, there's some degree of like, it's walling off memory, rather than walling off the entirety of your acquired human experience, you

Jessamyn 46:04 still know how to Yeah,

Cortex 46:07 but either way, functionally, yeah, the people at work just exist at work.

Jessamyn 46:10 And they only know the people that work, they don't know anybody that exists outside the job. And you know, as you kind of get to know, characters, you kind of get to know why people might have chosen this, you know, the Adam Scott's character had a wife that he thought died in a car accident, and he was bereft and just didn't, you know, had a kind of a teaching job, couldn't deal with it, and

Cortex 46:35 have like, eight, nine hours a day where I just didn't have to think about this because I it's too painful. Yeah,

Jessamyn 46:41 yeah. And then as the season goes, we have questions about that. And, you know, it all it all gets very weird, but it's all like, you know, stuff is gradually revealed to you, the viewer. So this isn't all just kind of fed to you, you have to kind of watch what's happening and be like, wait a second, and like the bosses do not have this? We don't think

Cortex 47:07 yeah, like, that's a real interesting thing. They sort of they play with a lot of things really well in the show. Like I really liked the way they handled like various reveals in bits and pieces throughout this season. Because like, it's very satisfying to kind of be wondering, like, I keep wanting to call Adam Scott Ben, because

Jessamyn 47:24 I keep thinking Right, right. Now, so do I. But But

Cortex 47:27 But But Adam Scott, like his character, his like, real world character lives next door next to a lady played by Patricia Arquette, who's

Jessamyn 47:37 very good at this show, too. Yeah, she's

Cortex 47:39 great. And then at work, his boss is also Patricia Arquette with a completely different name and entirely different personality. And you

Jessamyn 47:47 don't know if she was severs employee or not? Because she's weird. Both. Both characters are weird in different kinds of ways

Cortex 47:57 in starkly different ways. And yeah, and so you're left wondering, are they severed? Or are? Is she just playing a role or playing two roles? I suppose? Or, Yes, it's gonna turn out there's fucking like twins or like, right? It's a weird enough set of mysteries going on situation with a show that you really have a chance of, like, come up with some harebrained stuff, if you really want to come up with theories.

Jessamyn 48:18 Yeah, and everything in the office. There's not that many other people around. There's very, there's no other characters in this show. Other than the actors who have the lines and stuff, but there's no random B roll people walking down hallways, there's no cafeteria, like the whole workplace is incredibly Stark. And do you know where it actually takes place? Like that's a real campus somewhere in what color? I have no idea. Yeah, so like, it's a it's an actual kind of weird building in its own in its own right. But

Cortex 48:50 it's a very, it's a very strange white walled lab, right. There's

Jessamyn 48:53 too much space in everywhere. You know, the four of them work in an office in a room that could hold like 10 times as many people all the technology is old, in a weird

Cortex 49:05 like weirdly dated, like not not not even consistently and whatnot, but it's definitely not

Jessamyn 49:09 CRT screens, ancient trackballs you know, they use a film camera. When when pictures are being taken when they play music, it's on a record player. And these are all like deliberate directorial choices that are unremarked upon by you know, everybody's clothes are no particular style very generic,

Cortex 49:32 you know, office clothes

Jessamyn 49:35 Yeah, but office clothes that could have been anytime in the last 40 years 50 years and and so there's there's a sense of unease introduced just by a lot of these choices, right? There's no ambient noises, all the all the there's too much space that the building is weird. You don't meet other ancillary characters. There are none. There are only the main characters Um, I mean, I guess, when you're on the outside, there's a little bit more kind of generic people around. And he's he's got a sister, the Adam Scott character. He's got a sister, who he's very close to who's pregnant. And she has, oh my god, can I just say her husband, Rick, and I fell in love with this actor while I was watching the Patriot because he's like the dunderhead brother, in that show. And he plays it to perfection. And he's a completely different character here. But like, kind of the New Age ish, vaguely,

Cortex 50:37 yeah, he's a self help guru ish guy. And it's, oh, it's so good kind of

Jessamyn 50:43 guts, but his sister seems like a really nice person. And they have a very close relationship. In fact, it's probably one of the only legit close relationships in the entire because everybody else I mean, she gets along with her husband, obviously, but everybody else is weird in some way. Yeah, that seems to affect their way to be introduced out there.

Cortex 51:03 It is such a it's a wonderful, fascinating parallel, that everyone in the office is like, clearly weirdly sort of under socialized, you know, like, like, they have personalities, but they are also like, they don't have enough people to test those personalities against and so just everybody's like, the way they are. And Adam Scott is like, weirdly strangely optimistic, and, you know,

Jessamyn 51:30 kind of buys into the fact that he's there. And that's okay. The John tuturro character is like a very company, man. You know, he's very into the mythology of the company and the rules of the company, the, like, the

Cortex 51:46 whole company founder, like there's, like the company founder and on up through the generations of members of this family running this company. It has, it all has sort of, like, sort of like more money,

Jessamyn 51:57 definitely a Mormon vibe to it. Yeah. And there's like halls of, you know, statues of the founders and their offspring that you're supposed to kind of look up to in these weird ways that like, the people there think is a little creepy, but the viewer thinks is exceptionally creepy.

Cortex 52:17 It reminds me to an extent of Portal two, and the Cave Johnson character played by JK Simmons was the voice actor for it. JK Sam wonderful. Yeah, he was great. And it was a very funny game. And it was like great writing. But it had this whole thing of like, he had started as like a carpet salesman or something, and then found his way into, like, you know, bizarre applied physics, material science. And so you get like, decades of him sort of talking about stuff in weird JK Simmons like inspirational speeches and musings into dictaphones and whatnot. But remind me a little bit of that in a way that would make sense to people who I guess both watch the show and have played Portal to Yeah, yeah, it's slow and

Jessamyn 53:02 it's not that many episodes. The music is creepy and weird and welt on the other character, I don't know his I don't know the real name of the actor, but he is also really good kind of a weird foil, like kind of a awkward, Lumpy guy who has kind of a vaguely bad attitude, but he's also a high performer, kind of and so he's interesting.

Cortex 53:30 And so self conscious, bro dude, kind of Yeah, and

Jessamyn 53:33 the whole reason that you know, this woman is kind of brought into this kind of work group before is because PD who was kind of the Adam Scott characters work buddy. isn't there anymore? And we're not sure

Cortex 53:46 why. Yes.

Jessamyn 53:49 And he's the actor that I was talking to you about earlier. Like God what a great actor

Cortex 53:52 that guy is. Yeah, I do not recall same and other stuff.

Jessamyn 53:56 No, I looked at kind of his his IMDb and I didn't recognize him from anything, but he's just clearly he's got a really great presence. Yeah.

Cortex 54:05 Yeah, it's it's fantastic. It's just really good because they do such a good job with the tone of it. And with the pacing of reveals, and yeah, that finale is Oh, my fucking God. Like everything in the finale is amazing. And all of it like drops off the moment before you want to find out like, like, you know, having a cliffhanger in a finale makes sense. Sure, but having like seven of them that are all like, I've genuinely invest simultaneously

Jessamyn 54:31 nested so that they know. Yeah,

Cortex 54:35 like, like, any one of those would have been, like, sufficient to like, leave the season on and instead they're like, Okay, there's this. There's this, there's this, there's this, there's this. It's fantastic. It's so good.

Jessamyn 54:47 Yeah, I just I just found that I was really appreciating, you know, the attention to kind of stylistic detail because again, a lot of times when you watch that kind of like prestige TV it's a plot line that I do not care for, you know what I mean? Like, it's cops and robbers, or it's, you know, Game of Thrones or, like, you know, something like that. And this seemed like it was kind of an interesting set of plots that was interesting to someone like me, while at the same time, you know, also being high concept television, which I'm not used to. Yeah, I

Cortex 55:21 can't. It's very well polished. And also, I really care about both the characters in the story, like, genuinely I'm, like, invested in a way that like, I don't even need to be to enjoy a show. Like there can be a show where I'm like, Yeah, well, okay, the plots a little bit Tropi you know, I kind of think I know where this is going and check okay with certain but but also like, it's, it's really well done, and the cast was great. And so like, you know, watch the show, but like, it's everyone's on like, everything, every fucking thing. I'm like, yes. Well, and

Jessamyn 55:48 like I just watch Christopher Walken in this UK comedy series, which was called like, the outlaws or something like that. And it's definitely comedy Stephen Merchant kind of vehicle. But Christopher Walken isn't it's like UK. But like Christopher Walken, for some reason, inexplicably, isn't it? And so it was really interesting. And I just finished that right before I started watching severance if not know

Cortex 56:13 about this. And oh, I

Jessamyn 56:14 think I think you'd like it. It's funny. It's a little bit more predictable, kind of, and it is a little bit more, it ends on kind of a normal cliffhanger.

Cortex 56:24 So it has Christopher walking in it. So I'm like, so he's really lousy stuff. Because we're walking at it.

Jessamyn 56:29 He's great in it. And so it was interesting for me to compare and contrast Christopher Walken in that show, which was a little bit more what you would expect from Christopher Walken and Christopher Walken in this show, which was a little bit more like I mean, he's clearly Christopher Walken because he could kind of play one thing but like, but like also, you know, I mean, you had told me like wow, this you know, tiny office romance level thing happening and it was not the one I expected you know, and I appreciated that about Yeah, right.

Cortex 57:05 Yeah, no, it speaks it speaks to how good the show is that like I have said almost nothing about CRISPR walking big in it. Despite that being like, like instant sale for me in general.

Jessamyn 57:16 To Terrell also, right? Yeah, he's

Cortex 57:18 great to look you know, we watched several and then we watched the new Batman which he has a role in as like the big mob boss. Oh, interesting. Okay, and he's got the same sort of like older John to tour kind of salt and pepper thing although he's like, you know, a streetwise mob boss rather than a you know, sort of weird company man sad sack character that tuturro is but like, it was hard not to like, it's hard not to think about his seventh character while watching him be a conniving. Modbus right. Versus Robert Pattinson. So that was, that was an odd sir. Well, and especially

Jessamyn 57:51 like it's much later in the whole scheme of things that you learn more about anybody but the Adam Scott characters home life. And two turtles home life is wild and not what you're expecting. You know, like, you think you know him from how he is in the office. And then you find out you know, he's at home listening to Motorhead and bla bla, bla, bla bla, and that's kind of its own weird thing.

Cortex 58:15 He's a painter, and yeah, maybe like a grizzled ex Marine. Yeah. Yeah, no one that ends up being kind of thing with other characters. Like, there's this big disconnect. And this is like, this is one of the things I really liked about the show, and I hope they can sort of continue to do good things with because it's one of the things that could be hard to keep up. Sure. But like, you know, it is I saw someone on on Twitter Metafilter someone somewhere said something about like, severance is the good place but for theory of mind instead of ethics, right? Which feels like a good way to put it generally like like this is a show that is actively playing around with complex ideas that would normally just be background in a story if it's there at all. And like you know, the good players did a great job of saying okay, let's think about how people are and what like morality and ethics and the concept of living a good life our and, and like did stuff with that beyond just like, you know, making a joke now and then about the concept of like ethics. Like it wasn't just saying who died it may you know, what's gonna fuck up the line, but like, Eleanor at some point in the good places like Who died and made Socrates you know, king of philosophy and tedious like, Plato just told you I probably have those backwards but anyway, you know, it's smart about it and smart and it seems invested in it. And severance feels very invested in this idea of not just say, Oh, what if it turned out you had a second person in your brain who had a day job that you didn't know about? Well, I would say was like, No, it was I

Jessamyn 1:00:01 had thought about this. It was just saying he, you know, kind of snarky things about jobs. You know what I mean? Like for the first part of the, for the first part of the first show? I was like, Oh, well, sure. But like, we know, that kind of and at but then yeah, it gets a lot more complex. It gets a lot more into the nature of kind of, yeah, what we remember versus who we are. And yeah, I appreciated kind of going on that journey. And normally, I'm not that kind of person about a show, you know?

Cortex 1:00:34 Yeah. Yeah, there's Yeah, it's, yeah.

Jessamyn 1:00:39 So what I'm saying Josh, is, thank you for suggesting that. I continue to watch this.

Cortex 1:00:43 I am so glad. I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Because it's, it's a darn good show. And I think a lot of people would enjoy it. But here's two of us who did. So there we go. Yeah, I know that we've we've hit about an hour, this feels like a good sort of like, hey, we talked about a couple of things.

Jessamyn 1:00:59 I'm gonna go have some dinner and kind of wrap up my day, because it's getting a little late here. And but this was the conversation I was hoping to have with you and hope we didn't have to push out a bunch of Metafilter stuff in order to have it which is probably good. People will listen to it. Great, if not great.

Cortex 1:01:15 That's also cool. All right, well, cool. We did it. We'll do the thing and I'll post this at some point.

Jessamyn 1:01:21 And I'll talk to you in a couple weeks after this.

Cortex 1:01:24 So okay, awesome.