A Problem Squared - 075 = Roman Recursion and Role-Play Immersion

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

In this episode… 🏺 What is the biggest roman numeral word? 🎲 How do I get my friends to play D&D?  🪵 A Christmas Stumpdate! 💼 And the business briefcase is OPEN. If you'd like some extra listening over the next few weeks, have a listen to Bec on Dan Schreiber’s podcast ‘We Can Be Weirdos’ you can find the link here: https://tinyurl.com/mrymvb29 And if you'd like to see the Aunty Donna sketch showing how not to explain a table top game to a new player, look no further: http://tinyurl.com/574m6m98 To watch campaigns played by Questing Time follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/c/questingtime For the Dragon Friends Podcast: https://thedragonfriends.com And for the Harmontown Podcast: https://www.harmontown.com/category/podcasts/ IF you’ve got any LA based problems, please do send them in to the Problem Solving Page: https://tinyurl.com/2s2x7az4 We'll be announcing the venue for a Podcast of Unnecessary Detailonce a venue has been found. And if you’d like to receive a belated, but signed Christmas card you can still sign up to Wizard Support on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/aproblemsquared/membership (You’ll get a digital version too!) As always, send us your general problems and solutions to the website: www.aproblemsquared.com If you want more from A Problem Squared, you can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and of course, on Patreon.

We're making a spreadsheet, what does it involve? Listen sending us problems to solve. Problem squared is coming to town. Your host are Matt Parker, who does maths on youtube and me by killer comedian but with maths i am a noob oh you better watch out you better not cry if someone shouts tales better than pie problem squared is coming to town wow wow hang on hang on your commitment amazing thanks man everyone knows my feelings about singing but i oh yeah went for it anyway

your feelings about singing are not as intense almost as intense but not as intense as your feelings about a joke well executed. Yes, exactly. Your commitment to the bit overrules everything else. That's right. Exactly. And that's probably everything you need to know about this show if you're a new listener. Yeah. On this episode.

I have found the biggest Roman numeral word. I'm going to be talking about D&D. Spoiler. There's going to be a stump date. Oh, and we'll explain what that is later oh we will as well as featuring some any other business i mean i was going to try and do a christmasy part you're gonna sing that no okay fine any other business to town if you change the lyrics but you run out of new lyrics you just revert to the

original lyrics mid-sentence matt how are you i'm good i'm in australia so you are and you're not in the cupboard i'm not in the cupboard i've rearranged my boffice, the old bedroom that's now the old boffice. So I've actually got a nice little setup to record and do many other things. You've got a boffcording studio. Yep. Sure. Just keep stacking users of the room into the portmanteau.

I like how you say portmanteau. How is Australia treating you, Matt? It's great. So obviously it's a season inversion. So I went from getting progressively colder England to heat wave Western Australia, which was an abrupt change. But refreshing. It snowed a couple of days ago. So I heard.

It wasn't magical. It was gross. I'm kind of happy with my life choices, but because I am now back in Perth, Western Australia, we can have yet another stump date. And oh my goodness, am I excited. I feel like we're going to have to do a very quick recap for everyone who's unfamiliar with the stump journey thus far. Yeah.

Also, I think we had someone write in, I think, to say that whenever you said stump date, it took them a really long time to realize it was a play on the word update. Oh. They were thinking it was like a date with a stump. It started that way. It started with my family having stump dates to remove a stump from the backyard of my parents' place. And for new listeners, this is what started the stump date, which is because I couldn't go. I could not go to my family because it was during the lockdowns. I was

trapped in a different hemisphere. And so I felt like I was missing out on this new Parker family tradition where they would get together routinely and try and burn a massive stump to get it down to a size at which it could be removed. And by the time I got back to gardening in my parents' garden. And I managed to unearth part of one of the roots from the original tree that had caused the stump. I then wanted to bring that back to the UK. And then we realized there are regulations against bringing untreated wood. And so we realized I'd have to get it turned into a product or an item or somehow be processed. Someone called James reached out and it's done. Do you want to see it? Oh my gosh. Yes. Yeah. I've got it here. So while, while I was away, my brother collected it.

Can I just say that Matt just held up a paper bag and for a second I was like, no. I got turned into paper. They turned it into a notebook. Just mulched it. Wouldn't that be amazing? I get it back. It's just like a bean bag full of sawdust. Oh, thanks. Yeah, yeah.

They've actually made two things out of the stump. Oh, my gosh. That's so cool. Sorry, it was very loud just then. It's a tiny clock. That's incredible. Look at that. Let me give you a complete rotation.

So on the back is the original outside surface of the stump in all its stumpy glory. They've used resin because when I heat treated it, it cracked quite a bit. That's because I'm an amateur. Yeah, and by heat treating, you mean you chucked it in the oven. Okay, okay. Let's not dig into the exact way I do things. Let's just go with my professional phrasing of them. So they fixed what I did with some kind of resin and then they've mounted a little tiny clock on the front.

That's so cool. And I didn't realise how much the root of a Jarrah tree, when done nicely and finished and sanded and varnished, would look like proper Jarrah tree when like done nicely and finished and sanded and varnished would look like proper Jarrah wood. So I was very, very impressed with that. Yeah, it's really red from what I can see on the screen. Yeah. So the small one was a clock.

The big one. Bigger clock. Bigger clock. Oh my gosh, I was right. So this one's quite nice. Same deal, but bigger, better woods. Look at the back of that. That's all. And they've left. Oh, that's really pleasing. So these are's quite nice. Same deal, but bigger, better woods. Look at the back of that. That's all.

And they've left. Oh, that's really pleasing. So these are my axe marks. When I had to hack it out of the ground down there. Axe marks to the spot. And over here. Great pun, by the way. And then in the front, they've put a thermometer and a clock.

Oh, I love that. Well, I feel like I need to bring these back to the UK and have the stump in the studio. The only potential downside is the clock. Oh, yeah, I can hear that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's got quite the tick on it. It's a reminder of our own mortality.

Yeah. I appreciate yet another reminder that time is finite and unrelenting. So we'll do some tests. We'll get it in the studio. We'll set it up on the table. Producer Lauren can have opinions about how loud it is. And then we'll always know what time it is when we're recording in the Problem Squares studio.

That's a fantastic stuff, Dave. Yeah, so there you are. And then the little mini one. Yeah, love it. That's great. I did then find another bit of root, and that's currently in my dad's shed. So we still have an unfinished chunk of root that I pulled up when we removed the adjacent lemon tree. So there's still a stump left, but I feel like we've reached a major milestone with this.

So James's dad and james for everyone who made this possible thank you so much oh my goodness what a product thank you so much that's so incredible and how are you back uh i'm good speaking of time i've been guesting on a few other podcasts oh um not me yeah i did a dan schreiber from No Such Thing as a Fish. I did his solo podcast, We Can Be Weirdos. Oh. And the reason I was reminded about that is we ended up having a conversation about whether time exists and how about what my concept of time is and broke my brain. But I'm also very excited because, and I don't mind announcing this on this podcast because I don't feel like

it's going to steal any listeners because I think the Venn diagram of interests is so small. But for people who fit within this Venn diagram on December 20, which is two days from the time that this episode comes out, I will be releasing another podcast called Enemy in Paris. And it is. Yeah, you mentioned this. Yeah. So it's Sam Kiefer, who's the Airwolf sound engineer for Office Ladies and Comedy Bang Bang and Conan and a bunch of other stuff.

He and I both hate to watch Emily in Paris a lot. And we went to Paris and visited all of the shooting locations. So ridiculous. And complained the whole time about the show, about the characters and everything. And I was like, right, this definitely needs to happen. So, yeah, that's coming out. Like, right, this definitely needs to happen. So, yeah, that's coming out.

If anyone either watches Emily in Paris or doesn't want to watch it but wants to hear two people tear apart each episode scene by scene, then, yeah, listen to Emily in Paris. Producer Lauren Armstrong Carter says she'll be listening. So it does make me feel like I'm cheating on this show. But I promise you it'll only make us stronger. Our first problem is from Florent, who sent this into the problem posing page, which is a problemsquared.com. And Florent said, hello, Beck and Matt. I was wondering how many words in the English language

can be written using only Roman numerals. For example, livid, mild, and then they've just put an ellipsis, dot, dot, dot. Dot, dot, dot. Bonus ding. What is the, as in, I guess, a bonus question for us to solve for an extra ding. What is the longest word you can write

with only Roman numerals? Bonus, bonus ding. What is the longest word you can write with only Roman numerals? Bonus, bonus ding. What is the largest resulting number? Now, first of all, and this is not an isolated case. We get a lot of people writing in with questions that have a very implied and unsaid statement, which is, oh, Matt, you've got that list of all the words and some terrible code that can analyze them. Have you tried looking for, or have you done whatever right so once again i saw this i'm like i was just i don't want to be like the list of words guy who writes terrible python code to analyze it and so so this came in i was like another one and then a little bit later i was like i wonder what it is

what is like what is the longest word made out of the seven letters used in Roman numerals? And so I wrote some terrible code to search all the words to find all the ones where the letters. So you've got M for a thousand. Yep. You've got D for 500. C for 100. L for 50. V for 5.

X for 10 I for 1 Not in exact descending order I apologize I skipped ahead to V So I just wrote some code It went through all the words Little reminder for anyone New around here

I have a text document with 370,105 Words In it You just download this that was Matt using quotation marks yeah I think I felt like that was like I pronounced the quotation marks yeah I think so it's it's any string of characters that someone might plausibly have used on a website or somewhere. Yeah. It often, like, it's good. It's good to overshoot. Like, you go too wide, get all the results,

and then you can kind of slim them down. So I ran all 370,000 words through a thing that just picked out all the ones that only had Roman letters, and there are 126. Ooh. That's more than I expected. Yeah, it's a lot. But then you realize, I looked at them, and some of them are just numbers in Roman numerals.

One of them is the word XVIII. And I'm pretty sure that's just a number in Roman numerals that someone's put in there. Because that code that you did to bring in all the words also brought up strings of letters, which happened to be Roman numerals. Exactly. Exactly. But then there's some that are on the cusp, like VC. Is that 95 or is that venture capital? You know, DL.

Is that 550? Not a word, I'd say. Abbreviations, yeah. What about 4Ms? Is that a word? I think that's a word. I is that a word i think that's a word i don't know so i went and took out and it's a bit of an arbitrary line i took out all the ones i thought were definitely not words and if i wasn't sure i left them in as words and there's 88 once you take out ones that are like obviously roman numerals or something ridiculous so so at most 126 realistically closer to 90 i would say 88 ish fewer than 100 yep i'm very confident to say

fewer than 100 but then their follow-on question was well actually they said what's the longest you know i haven't actually didn't check that let me just very quickly sort the data by the length of the string. The longest one, C-I-M-I-C-I-D. Chimichid? What is that? Oh, it's a bed bug. It's a single. So chimichids, I'm pronouncing that wrong,

are a specialized group of blood-sucking parasites that primarily feed on bats. C-I-M-I-C-I-D. Simicid. I'm going to say simicid. But I'm only seeing it in a plural fashion. Simicids. Because if you Google simicid, not a plural,

it's like, did you mean simicidae? Simicid A. Are you going to count that one or do you mean to give you the next longest one? I like simicid. It looks like I'm at least seeing simicid as a singular coming up elsewhere. So I'm going to accept simicid. Seven letters, yeah? Seven letters, yeah. There's a handful of six. I-M-I-D-I-C. Imidic. Imidic. Imidic.

Oh, it's a type of acid. Imidic acid. Yeah. There you go. I'm going to leave that one. Yeah, good. Now, the bonus bonus one, the third ding is which is the biggest value. It kind of hinges on do we count mmm as a word, 4ms, because that would be 4,000.

Yeah, we can do that. Okay. So if listeners, you can decide. If you're happy with mmm, then that's 4,000. If you think, no, no, no, that's not, like it's mimicking Roman numeral, but it's not a real Roman numeral word, then the next biggest is the word mimic. M-I-M-I-C. Look at those M's. And I've only got I's to subtract and a C for a hundred. So mimic is 2098, which is if you discount mimic and that's that's like legitimate like that's uncontested roman numeral rules on mimic at 2098 well matt you did it well now here's the thing oh all i've done so far

is just looked up the words i already had and compare them to standard roman numerals but then i thought well hang on what if if the Romans had used different letters? Because they happened to use those seven letters to represent those different values. And potentially they could have picked different letters. So I thought, wouldn't it be kind of conclusive to search all 370,000 words for every possible combination of seven letters. or 370,000 words for every possible combination of seven letters and every possible arrangement of those seven letters for which values they represent to find the word which in that parallel universe version of Roman numerals

would give you the biggest value. Okay. So I wrote some terrible Python code and... Yep. And I estimated... Take it off your bingo cards if you're playing at home. It was going to... Yeah.

Well, it was going to take 10 years to run. So I had to sit down and make it less terrible. So... And I had to write my own Roman numeral converter because now I wasn't using like standard Roman numeral conversion. I was using it because I had to be able to put any word into it and turn it into a value, assuming they were Roman numeral conversion, I was using it because I had to be able to put any word into it and turn it into a value, assuming they were Roman numeral characters. And so you've got situations normally where if you put like a smaller value in before

a bigger one, so I and then X, that's nine. But then what if you have more things in front of it? Or you have like I, I and then X. And there is historical evidence that has was used for eight and so and so i was like oh now the sky's the limit because you could have a whole new roman numeral value inside a roman numeral number and because there's a bigger value after it it has to work as a subtraction from the bigger value later on. So I had to write a recursive Roman numeral little bit of code that would start at the end, work its way back.

And it's happy as long as each next one's bigger than the previous. It's very happy coming in from the right towards the left. If it ever finds there's a smaller value, it finds all the smaller value before there's a big enough value that matches the last one it saw on the way in. And it takes that whole internal bit and feeds it into the same program as if it's a whole new Roman numeral number. And so that way recursively, it can work to solve any combination of characters. It can work it out as a Roman numeral thing by chunking it up to be bits that are subtracted from other bits.

It was a lot of fun to write. If anyone's ever up for a challenge. It sounds real fun. Well, recursion was not the only way to do it. That was just the way my brain understood the problem. But I then had a general purpose Roman numeral converter. Then I just ran it against every possible arrangement of the problem. But I then had a general purpose Roman numeral converter. Then I just ran it against every possible arrangement of the letters. And so I can give you, do you want the word which gives you the biggest possible value in Roman numerals?

So you have to assume that the Romans used a U for a thousand. And how did you decide which one means what? I checked every possible combination of letters that could mean different things. I'm confused. So you've got 26 letters in the alphabet. Yes. You can then choose seven of them to be your seven characters. But how did you decide what values that each of the letters that you ended up with?

How did you decide what their values would be? I first of all did the 26 letters in the alphabet, choose the seven you're going to use, which then gives you 657,800 sets of seven letters. And then for each of those seven letters, I did every possible way to assign them values of which there are seven factorial, which is just over 5,000, I think.

Let me just make sure I got that right. And then you went with which one would have the highest. Yeah. And then I checked every single one of them. Yeah. And then pick the one that had the highest value. So you're looking at every way of choosing the letters and then you're looking at every way of arranging them to match the values. Yeah. So my first version of the code just did that the long way. And that's what was going to take over 10 years. So then what i ended up doing was first of all i removed all the words that had more than seven distinct letters in them because there was no way they could ever be a roman numeral for any system because they have too many characters i was i drew the line at having a

new character for like 5 000 or you know 10 000, 10,000 or anything. I was like, no way. That's ridiculous. So I took out all the ones that couldn't be a Roman numeral. And then I ranked them starting at the biggest one first. So if I ran out of time or the code was going to take too long, I'm at least doing the big ones first, which are the ones most likely to give a big value. And then for each one,

I just looked at how many letters it had, what they are, and then every possible way they could be assigned to a Roman numeral system, and then found the biggest value that could be produced, and then made a note of what the system was, made a note of the value, moved on to the next word. Did that for all the words. Wow. And then just sorted them by the biggest value they could produce.

Okay. And so the system for the biggest word, I won't read this out every time, but in descending order, so going 1,500, 100 all the way down, is U-A-P-K-M-N-H. And if you use that system for Roman numerals on the Hawaiian word for a type of fish, which is huma, huma, nuka, nuka, u, paoa. I've obviously got that very wrong. You get a Roman numeral value of 9,268. Whoa.

Yeah. That's quite the Scrabble score. It's pretty impressive. Now, some people are going to say that doesn't work because the Romans didn't have the letter U. They didn't have U or W. They had fewer letters. I then did it again without U's or W's. And it's possessionlessness.

And again, you've got to have S for a thousand, L for 500, I, O, P, and E. And that gives you 7,607. I-O-P-N-E, and that gives you 7,607. So if you go with the conceit that it must be Roman original letters, possessionlessness, if you're happy with the Hawaiian word for type of fish, then it's the much longer one. It's interesting that in possessionlessness, there's only one L, but that's made the cut. Yeah. there's only one L, but that's made the cut. Yeah.

It's because you use S as a thousand, and there's a lot of S's. And then it's always, it's interesting with the words. There's always a bit of a balance because you want big ones to happen a lot, but then you need the ones that come before them to be as small as possible. So E is only worth one because you get a lot of E's before the S's. And so that way you're only subtracting one off the total. So it's a bit of a balancing act. All right. The third ranked one is.

I am thoroughly impressed. The third ranked one is stresslessness. And then fourth is successlessness. So actually the S's, S is overwhelmingly, for the very big ones, used for a thousand, because the list of words I was using, I guess the sample of English and English adjacent words, S, lots of S's, and they double up nicely. So, success. Yay. Matt, not only did you provide three answers for three problems that were posed from our listener, but you went above and beyond and gave us answers to problems that weren't posed at all. So I'm going to give you a dingle all the way. Hey.

Our next problem was also sent in via the problem posting page at problemsquare.com from Kuno De Luft, who would like to know, what is the best way to get your friends to start playing Dungeons & Dragons? So, Bec, you've tackled, you've descended into this one. I have, I have, because at one stage I was one of those people That needed to be convinced to play Dungeons & Dragons Oh, you had to be convinced? Yeah Matt, have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons?

I'm going to go with that's heavily implied by just my whole thing Yes Well, do you know what? I don't think we've ever really talked about it That's a good point No, you know what? I have played less Dungeons and Dragons than people would probably assume. And that's more a victim of my amount of free time. So I played a bunch with my mates when I was mid-teens, like, you know, high school age. And then I played a bunch when I was like, just after university with some friends when I was probably like, you know,

mid to early twenties. And I've not, you know, played it with earnest sense. So my knowledge is probably a little out of date in terms of the current monster manual or things like that but you know it still has a uh a special place yeah yep i think um my dad was a big fan of like first generation dungeons and dragons fan he was very good at like telling stories and stuff he's he makes a good dungeon master good dm he taught my brother and i to play when we were quite young and i remember there was one stage where there was like a big flash of lightning and he pulled out disposable camera and like took a photo with the flash on my brother and I were like oh my gosh the theatrics we were so excited but I didn't really play much after that until I was a lot older in fact until I moved over here I it was some Irish friends that I played with and then some friends over here. So Kuno, if you don't mind me calling you just Kuno, it depends on what your

friends are into and what they're like. I mean, the fact that you're asking how to get them to play Dungeons and Dragons, they're not naturally inclined to play it because they would sort of already be playing otherwise. It implies they've already exhausted the technique of saying hey you want to play dungeons and dragons like they've tried that no success asked us yeah yeah so i would say there are there are two good ways to sort of go about it one of them is to find a stream or a podcast where people are playing dungeons and dragons in an entertaining way. Because in the same way that there's a lot of video games I don't play, but I will happily watch people play those video games. And watching people play those video games, I'm more inclined to go, now I want to have a go at that.

You know, it's like asking someone if they want to play football and they've never seen football before, they're going to be like, well, what's that? But if they've watched football and been like oh this is entertaining to me then they might be more inclined to want to have a go at it so i think sometimes watching people do that i'm a big fan of questing time which is hosted by paul foxcroft i don't know if they've got any live streams happening they'll definitely have a bunch of archived ones on twitch but they also do live shows and stuff like that um dan harman from behind community and rick and morty and all that i know that with harmontown podcast they do a lot of dnd there's um dragon friends which is an australian podcast i did i'm pretty sure i did questing time at the edinburgh fringe they had

a friend yes you did yes i did yeah so we've yeah in fact i think we played together i think you were on the same night yeah i had a lot of fun yeah and that actually leads nicely into my other suggestion which is what got me back into playing johnson and dragons is people who are willing to let me learn as i play so right yep i'm one of those people where if you say let's play a game and you start reading out the instructions i I will not understand what is happening. But if we start playing, I will pick it up. And it was the same with Dungeons and Dragons is that it's very overwhelming for someone who hasn't played before and you come to it and suddenly you've got these sheets with

all these numbers on there and the equivalents. Suddenly you've got these sheets with all these numbers on there and the equivalents. So I would say that the other way to get your friends into playing it is to do a really simplified version with them. That's what Questing Time does really well is that it'll simplify it so that it's easier for the people playing to follow and for the people watching to follow as well. And it becomes almost a bit like a mix between improv and choose your own adventure. So you might have your rough plot for your campaign and instead of being like okay check your sheet for stealth or armor or magic or whatever rather than do that just be loose with it and be like okay what do you want to do and if someone says um can i try and put the fire out with my axe you can be like yeah sure roll a dice yeah and then then you can just make it up have fun

with it is what i'm saying and i think that makes it a lot less overwhelming i'd like to say in general teaching someone a new board game and i'm generalizing including things like dnd is a skill and i have sat through people teaching me games, and I'm like, people don't appreciate you can do that so badly, and you can do that so well, that showing someone a new game takes thought and planning on how you introduce the rules, when you let people start having a practice game,

do you do a simplified version, all these things. And I've almost been put off very good games that have been poorly explained. And I will say, there's the fantastic Auntie Donna sketch about learning a new board game, which perfectly captures the sense of what it's like to have a board game explained to you by someone who's very enthusiastic and loves the game, like to have a board game explained to you by someone who's very enthusiastic and loves the game but is not doing a good job of conveying the information in a nice fun enjoyable way to get people into the game yes yeah yeah and i think if your friends aren't sure about playing dungeons and dragons just bear in mind that it can be very overwhelming so it's a lot it's a lot those are my

suggestions find find some fun streams that don't lean too heavily on all the rules and all the statistics. Get a really stripped down version. Offer to play a version of that with them. And as they start to enjoy that, you can start adding in all the other elements. I will also say to kind of know your audience because you can dial up and dial down how, theatrical is not the word I'm after, but how role play you make the game. And for me, I've come across times where it's, like for me, it's a whole thing.

I'm like, I just want to play a game. I don't want to get, I don't want to do a voice for my character. So I will say know your audience and what level of enthusiasm they want to throw into that aspect of the game. And look if they're still not interested make it about something they are interested in you know if your friends are into um all i can think of is football i'm sorry everyone you know make a version of dungeons and dragons where you play you know football players

and they roll a dice to work out who they pass to and whether they're successful and you know football players and they roll a dice to work out who they pass to and whether they're successful and you know play out a game like that use the basic building blocks of dungeons and dragons as a gateway a gateway to fun and friendship yeah fnf that's what i call it fungions and frag Yeah, there you go. So, yeah, I hope that helped. I mean, if not, let me know. I am more than sure that everyone in the Problem Squared Reddit or Discord will have some other things to add, whether it's hints, suggestions, or indeed streams or podcasts or anything that they enjoy.

Or recommending a nice simple campaign for like a first-time group. Yeah, if there's any Dungeon Masters out there who have something that they're like, hey, you can use this, or even if you're willing to accommodate that, to facilitate that over Zoom or something, then please do that. So, yeah. The most important thing is, of course, that you buy a lot of dice. More dice means you're more likely to convince people to play. I'm not sure if that's true, Matt.

I'm pretty sure that is. I rolled for initiative, and I feel like that's a natural 20 kind of move. Yeah, agree to disagree. But if you get your friends to try and guess the amount of dice you own. Now that's a game people would come back for time and time again. AOB, AOB, any other business? Matt, do you have any other business for this bit? Hey. Yes. Hey, hey. Matt do you have any other business for this bit Hey

Yes Hey hey So speaking of Christmas The Christmas cards have gone out Now if anyone gets a card and they look at it And they're like It feels like someone spilt Guinness on this Oh yeah

I may have spilt Guinness on it I don't want to I don't want to say that's specifically one of ours fault but if it's got if you can detect the presence of pale ale

I will take the blame when we sat down in a pub and frantically signed all the cards and addressed them hand addressed them to all our

wizard level supporters that's not true we didn't hand address them we hand wrote everyone's name. Everyone got like, it's a dread to so-and-so. Merry Christmas. Like everyone's name was written in by one of us.

And you drew a little dinosaur. Did you do a dinosaur for all of them? Yeah. Wow. Your commitment is, is impressive. I barely spell my name right. Why did I put this in my signature?

And then I almost didn't. I said to you at one point, I'm not going to do the dinosaur. And you're like, yeah, you don't need to. And then I was like, oh, but then people will be like, I didn't get a dinosaur. I will add if you want your own dinosaur and you sign up to our Patreon at the Wizard Level Ohio before the end of December,

we will still post you a card. You're just not going to get it by Christmas. But you'll get it. It'll be a nice little surprise in 2024 at some point. Who sent me a card this long after Christmas? And it will be from us and it will have a dinosaur

and it probably won't have beer this time. And our signatures. And actually if you sign up at any level, we will email you a copy of the card. So if you want to see Beck's defacing of Beck's painting. If you want to know what the card looks like before you receive it. Beck's co-host. Yes. Then we email it to everyone

so you've still got time to sign up if you want the digital version. That's easy. Also thank you for your support. Yes, thank you very much to everyone who signed up for those. In other, any other business, I'm going to show you something on the cameras, guys. Oh, yep.

Is that like a utility belt? Yes, it is. Wow. Did you make that or you sent it? I bought this. I ordered it online. It is a bright yellow belt with faux leather pockets hanging off of it. I've yet to have my phone stolen.

I also bought a case that has a retractable cord on it. Oh my goodness. So when I have it. You can't even put your phone down. So even if they manage to get into my pocket, there's a retractable cord. The belt pockets have little flaps on them, which means that, you know, you won't lose your phone or your change or anything if you're at the angle of emptying.

But if I do have like just normal pockets and I'm putting my phone in there, then this little retractable cable means that even if my phone slips out of my pocket at the angle of emptying, it's still going to come with me. Yep. That's amazing.

I can just hook it onto my belt loop. I have been told by people on Instagram that it's a real boomer dad vibe, and I don't care. I don't care. No, you don't listen to them. I make it look awesome. You're going to look like the coolest middle manager in the whole company. We did also get some other people writing to us with their own solutions for this.

Some people suggesting different types of bags that are sort of a bit like bum bags. Again, I think it just depends on what you need it for. I wanted something that was easily accessible, quickly accessible with your hand. on what you need it for. I wanted something that was easily accessible, quickly accessible with your hand. Someone suggested turning the pockets, rotating them so that when you sit down, they're facing up. They're facing up.

And the plus side of that is if you're up, you will see if something falls out of them. But I do think the problem with that is that you might end up, first of all, it's hard to get your hand into if the entrance is at a different angle when you're walking, I think that could be quite bad. I think if you're not getting a zipper, you know those sort of pockets where it's almost like there's another little pocket over the top facing the opposite direction? Almost like the way that the front... Think about how Y-fronts work, like men's boxer shorts or whatever.

Not Y-fronts. I don't know much about men's underpants to be honest but in the front of underpants for access to to willies there's like there's like a little double flap thing going on like you've got yeah you go in one like a little you're on on one side and then go back the other way. Yeah. And so I think if you made your pockets like that, if the pockets on your clothes had a sort of like, you just got to hook your hand up and then down, that means that if you're at the angle of emptying, it's going to be like a lip that will catch stuff. Yeah. For things to come out, you need to be a change of direction. Yes. And so they can't slide out in a single direction

is insufficient to escape the pocket. Yeah. I mean, it might still mean that it comes out and then when you stand up, it then falls out the top bit, but you're more likely to notice when that happens. But for now, I feel like, I don't know about you guys,

I feel like I've got a ding, but maybe we'll wait till we hear back specifically from that person who may have done by the time this episode goes out we've also got some any other business from stephen whose problem uh we helped solve in episode 040 oh way way back, way back. Which was, yeah, which was anniversary crazes and any cursory praises because Stephen was after a negative

one year anniversary gift and they've contacted us to say they just celebrated their zeroth wedding anniversary. As in they just got married. Yep. So they knew more than a year in advance what the wedding date

was going to be, thus having a negative one anniversary. Yes. And it's finally hit zero. Wow. What a moment. Yep. Stephen said that they're spending their honeymoon in London.

They said they'll bring their favorite calculator in case they bump into us. Unfortunately. Sadly. You are in Australia. I am. And they did send a photo of the wedding. Everyone looks very happy. Looking like they're having a great time. Yeah. Looks like a great wedding. They. Sadly. You are in Australia. I am. And they did send a photo of the wedding. Everyone looks very happy.

Looking like having a great time. Yeah. Looks like a great wedding. They look great. Yeah. So well done. Congratulations. Yeah.

Thanks for updating us. Happy zeroth wedding anniversary. Final bit of any other business is a heads up about future business. Once again, Beck and I are both going to accidentally be in the same city at the same time, which is not one of our regular cities. We're going to be in Los Angeles early in January, which is pretty exciting. While we're out there, we figure we'll record an episode of A Problem Squared. Why not do a West Coast of the U.S. themed recording? So we may regret this, but if anyone has any West Coast of the States problems or even

LA specific problems that you wish to send in, no promises, but if you've got anything that we can try and do or solve or fix while we're over there, please do let us know. And we might be doing an evening unnecessary detail show. Is that right, Matt? Yeah. It's still up in the air. We're hoping to find a venue that means we can do an evening show because obviously we record a podcast that's not public facing. It would be nice to put some kind of show on if people want to come along and see us live on stage and say hi and all that jazz. It'd be great to say hi. Excellent. As we draw to the boxing day of this Christmas episode, not that it came out on Christmas,

I was just trying to think of something that thematically worked. We're going to do some thank yous because this show wouldn't exist without our amazing supportive Patreon supporters who ensure that everyone can listen, regardless of financial encouragement. That's what the kids call it now. So what we do is we choose three of our Patreon supporters at random and thank them. And in this episode, those Patreon supporters whose names we will deliberately mispronounce are... Kev in doobish.

Or doobish? Dobish. A little bit dob. A little bitubish. Or dobish? Dobbish. A little bit dob. A little bit dobbish. Bradley Nemitz. It's like Jay-Z. Nemitz. It's Nemitzy.

Yeah. Oh, right. Sorry. Nemitzy. Yeah, you're right. Zed. Nemitzed. Nemitzed.

Sam B. Ndla. I mean, Sam Spendler. Spendler? Sam Spendler. A lot of money on the Patreon. Ayo. Yeah.

Thank you. And thanks to everyone else. And especially big thanks to my co-host, Matt Parker, all the way in Perth. I've been Beck Hill. And a massive thank you and cookies by the fire and warm milk for producer Lauren Armstrong Carter. Ho, ho, ho. Ho, ho, ho.

Okay, Beck. I'm in a different hemisphere. You have not got the dice in front of you. Are you still going to go for a guess? Yeah. I mean, you did offer for me to take it home. I did. While you were away.

On a real kind of trust basis. But it's a very heavy jar. I was like, I mean, I could have done that and then i could just counted them and been like got it the guess perfect and you would be like wow how'd you do it i would have been real suspicious hey the listeners can't see the jar so i don't think i should be able to see the jar either so i'm gonna go i'm gonna go for 404 dice not found higher oh okay yeah I'm going to go for 404, Dice Not Found. Higher. Ooh, okay. Yeah.