Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - QQ ep 2 - Quick Question with Soren and Daniel

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Quick Question the Podcast. The podcast where two friends get together to answer questions both pressing and not pressing, but we promise never de-pressing. We welcome fans who knew us as writer-performers on crack.com, fans who knew us as writers on American Dad and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and anyone who just randomly stumbled upon it and will surely leave just as soon. This is Quick Question. We are Quick Question. You guys, our fans, are quick question you guys are fans are quickola questlas no we'll we'll workshop it i feel like okay quick little quest was we're sticking with it that's uh who's that voice over there who's that voice what you're hearing probably is me soren buoy the other co-host of this podcast but you also might be hearing the chuckling hard body of our CFO Bacon.

Hello, Dan. Hi, Daniel. Bacon is looking pretty good, Dan. It sounds like I think maybe he's been doing some CrossFit. Oh, that's good. I did a HIIT class. I don't even know what that is. Oh, high-intensity interval training.

Yeah, Dan knows. All right. I'm the kind of guy who works out on his own. We're going to get into this show where Soren and I ask each other questions to learn about life, pop culture, the world, and so on. Before that, a very special announcement that we got our very first ever review on iTunes. I'm going to read it to you guys because it's fun. First review, baby. Dan and Soren were always spectacular back at Cracked and they're spectacular here. They're fantastic to

listen to, fantastic enough that listening to their aimless ramblings for an hour is absolutely dynamite. That's from user Farble. Thank you, Farble. You are our first reviewer ever and you gave us five stars. Ah, that's great. And I said your name on our program and that's important

to you. You have been acknowledged. I assume that's something you want. Soren, before we get into the show, how is everything going? What's up? I just got back from New Orleans. Oh, really? Yeah, a very reckless work trip to New Orleans.

And yeah, it was a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time in that. We stayed in the French Quarter. And I spent three days there. And by the end, and this is no knock on New Orleans. I was ready to go. It's really claustrophobic in there, in the French Quarter. Because it was built so many years ago and everyone was only two inches tall.

And there are no cars or anything like that. But it also, all the streets in the French Quarter, because it's right on Bourbon Street, everything kind of smells like a frat house. So there are a lot of strange liquids on the ground all over the place. And I walked out of a fast food restaurant called Cristal which is a it's like white castle in the south and oh man you gotta go when you're in new orleans uh i walked out of there and there was some amalgamous fluid on the ground that was sort of a greenish color and as i walked past it it smelled smelled so badly of hot, warm garbage that it was the first time in my life I did that sort of cartoon take

where I almost threw up immediately. A cartoon take. As soon as I smelled it, I retched and then got water in my eyes and the person that I was with was like, are you okay? Do you have food poisoning? Are we going to have to cancel the trip? I was like, no, no, it's fine. I just walked past something that was so hein no, it's, it's fine. I just,

I walked past something that was so heinous that it made me almost throw up. Did you get into any, would you do like a force or anything like that? Yeah, we did a swamp tour. That was the most amazing thing I've ever done. This guy couldn't have been more perfect. And so picture a quintessentially a swamp, swampy Louisiana guy that that was our tour guide which you're picturing now is exactly right and he he yeah but he had like kind of a neck beard he had galoshes on and uh and he wasn't missing any teeth but he uh he took us around through

the bayou and he was like okay we're we're going to go find my favorite alligator. And he had one in mind. Like they know each other. And there's this nine foot alligator out there. We saw a few smaller ones that he would throw marshmallows to, which I'm sure. You see wild boar in the swamp too? Yes. We saw one.

Yeah. Apparently those are more dangerous than the alligators. He said he watched one destroy a Jeep once. And it was my favorite part of the whole new orleans trip too on a fan boat right yeah yeah and just like the the back and forth that like yeah the wild boar they uh they eat the alligator babies and then the adult alligators eat the adult wild boar and it's just like this this endless war between these two things the circle of life the yeah it was really incredible he he played with the alligator like he would try and get it to come out of the water when he was holding chicken up and try and get to jump out of the

water a little bit seemed really reckless and crazy but he he knew what he was doing and he yeah he knew this one it came right up to him and they they he like patted it on the head and it opened its mouth. It was very strange to see a wild animal be like, oh yeah, no, it's cool. This guy and I are cool. Awesome. Well, I'm glad you had a good time. My time at New Orleans was, I was also done by the time it was over because it's such a drinking culture place. And you want to take advantage of like oh i'm on vacation and i'm

allowed to drink in a car i'm allowed to drink down the street this is this is the dream i'm i'm i'm i'm living the sad dream and then you just realize that you're just drinking from morning to night and like almost every activity we did except the swamp tour was also a drinking theme like we're going to take a bike tour of new orleans and the the thrust of the tour is you're going from bar to bar to try out different unique new orleans cocktails even as a person who really likes drinking i was just like can i can i just a haunted library we can go to or something is it weird that i want to take a break yeah i felt that as well i was by the end i didn't the last day i was there until 5 30 but i didn't meet up with anybody else because i really just didn't want to go drink and eat a bunch of food which is what a problem to have but i i wanted to just

sort of wander around and see what the city was like through clear eyes right my friends all took an earlier flight home because we were going in different directions and they were like what are you going to get up to and you have like four hours alone here i'm like i'm gonna sit in the hotel and sort of sweat this out yeah uh well what's going on in your life dan um not too much well it's kind of a segue because water's involved too. My first quick question for you, Soren. Soren, quick question. Would it bother you if I told you that I am a deep sea fisherman now and I strongly identify as such and I'm going to be maneuvering a lot of things in my life around this? around this i'm i'm like zero percent surprised because this this is not the first time this has happened it is with deep sea fishing that's a little bit that's new to me but there was one point where you uh went to a lake for a day and you came back and you're like i'm lake people now and you you you not as well to me i don't even know that lake guy uh you you really felt in touch with the lake

for a while uh you talked about being on lake time even though that was it was nowhere we're still in the same time zone uh and uh i thought maybe you might start dressing as a lake person but it feels like these things sort of they take they happen for a little while maybe at two weeks and then you give up on them and you become a different kind of guy no no i think i'm deep sea fishermen now forever did you try deep sea fishing i did i just went to north carolina to visit my parents which is very perfect for me because i'm i'm they live in like a north carolina this particular part of north carolina is like where new jersey parents go to retire now instead of florida that's the new florida for aging jerseys and uh that's

very much my speed i'm at my heart a 66 year old man and so there's a lot of sitting around there's a lot of golfing there's a lot of relaxing And then we just did one 10 hour deep sea fishing trip because I, we used to fish a lot growing up and I've never been deep sea fishing, but it's just one of those things. Like it's when my parents asked me what I want to do in North Carolina, I'm not trying to be difficult, but it really is pulling teeth because I don't want to do too much of anything. And so the last few times, like, what do you, what do you want to do? I'm like, I don't want to, let's go see Aladdin. I don't know. I just want to relax. I don't want to do anything. And then finally I was like, I'd want to do i'm like i want to let's go see aladdin i don't know i just want to relax i don't want to do anything and then finally i was like i'd love to go fishing again

i never went fishing in los angeles i feel like i missed that part of my life it's been a while and my parents went all out like they knew a guy who had a boat so we just chartered this boat so it was my parents and i and the captain and the first mate and that was it we left at six in the morning and got back at like 4 30 in the afternoon and we're just fucking fishing all day and i i i caught this bug man in addition to all the fish we caught i also got the fishing bug i don't think you're supposed to catch bugs nope but i caught it okay and what kind of fish did you catch? What are we talking about here? We caught a total of 75, we kept 60. Were you like a professional? Are you bringing this food back to be to be then be distributed throughout the United States? We are. We're the suppliers for the

Northeast of America. Jesus, what are these? These marlins? Now here's where I feel like once i get into this list i think you're gonna like me less because about 15 impossible because i caught a couple of i caught one uh mahi there were two mahis caught and i caught one of them i caught my dad caught three groupers those are that's a good eating fish we got uh some fucking amberjacks they'll fight you buddy you don't want to mess with an amberjack you can't even get that that's that's not good eating you throw it well certainly now if they're fucking puts up a fight you're just struggling with this thing you think oh man i got

something big and you do got something big but but there's no reward you know nope nope i'm you have no idea i got an 18 inchinch black sea bass that we ate that night. It was pretty chill. Okay, so are these like two feet long? How big are these fish? The Mahis are probably about two feet. Those are big, and those are beautiful, and they're really fun to catch, and they put up a big fight. They're different from a lot of stuff that we're doing as bottom feeders.

and they're different from a lot of stuff that we're doing as bottom feeders. We're just like dropping the weight all the way to the bottom and you just sort of wait for something to bite at it and you reel it up and you can't wait to see what it's going to be. With the Mahi, you can actually see them. They go about 10 feet down beneath the surface and they've got these like brightly colored neon spots on their back so you can really see these aliens under the water and when they're 10 feet down you can see your your your bait too because you just want to put their bait in front of them so that feels more like

proper fishing to me because it's like i can i'm i'm intentionally moving the bait in your path because i want you to to get it and uh it was just very cool and felt very rewarding oh yeah so it's not just blind luck throwing something out of the water hoping something dumb enough eats it okay i will say lest anyone get any wrong ideas that i'm like a very good fisherman one of the things that i learned is uh fishing technology has gotten so sophisticated that like you're looking at these uh he's got these screens these gps things in his boat and the captain will just like navigate us to a spot and then say all right there's 19 fish down there wait that's not fair uh and just like i can like round out round out this mental image,

what are you listening to on the boat? What's pumping through the speakers? Anything, or is it too scary for the fish? A damn thing. We don't want to scare the fish away. That's verboten with these fishing people. Okay, are you allowed to talk? Yeah, we're talking.

Mostly about fish. Then just pump some yacht rock. How is that any different than having a conversation? Because I'm at peace on the sea. We so far out you can't see land the water is 100 feet deep and it's just water on all sides and you're just catching fish with with your parents and some guy named mike soren okay i want to add a little color to this so that people have historical context for what you're doing right now do Do you remember when you were a golfer? Yeah.

Okay. How long do you think that period lasted? Was that like two or three months, right? Where you were serious. I still have a golf bag and some balls and proper gloves and everything. Well, I wouldn't expect those things to just go away. and everything well i wouldn't expect those things to just go away uh i've already booked my next i'm going out of uh going out of brooklyn on a headboat i'm gonna get some we're gonna see if we can finally fish all the fluke out of existence. Have you been online to price fishing poles yet?

No, I haven't. Okay, that's good. The head boats and the charter boats, they'll provide them for you. You know, next Christmas, it'll be on my Christmas list. Okay, well, that's really exciting. I'm really happy for you that you found this new thing. I really like it a whole lot. I won't get very serious about it, it's it's something that i feel like

getting dragged by animal twitter is in my future probably yeah i don't know where this lines up with hunting like the people who are against hunting they also against i don't like i don't like killing animals really and i don't even like weapons or violence but i've decided none of that applies to fishing. Well, I think it's fine for now. Are you also throwing some of them back? We're throwing ones back that we can't take because they're too small. Yeah.

Yeah. Listen, the day that humanity has to stop fishing because we've fished the ocean dry, then you can be dragged by twitter yeah yeah i think i was just nervous because my buddy ryan posted on instagram a picture of a fish that he caught that was like him holding a fish in front of this body of water and random people commenting like hey i really like you i think you're a good person i think you're a good dude i just wish you didn't have to kill this poor defenseless animal oh yeah everything you said is right but when i hear what i think your voice is in my head it's not flattering

when i talk to people who are in the environmental field and i'm like well what's what's the worst meat that i could be eating they're like fish stop eating fish right now though the amount of devastation that we've done to the oceans with fish. Fucking serious. Yeah. But it's commercial fishing that's really doing it.

I honestly, I think you're fine. But commercial fishing has like, has destroyed the ocean. Something else I was surprised by with the guys on the boat was that we caught, as I said, a bunch of ruminant snappers. Good eating, good in tacos. Are those bright red? Yeah. Okay. I think I know that fish. that we caught um as i said a bunch of ruminating snappers um which are good good eating good tacos

are those bright red yeah okay i think i know that fish um and they also brian who was the first mate caught two american red snappers which are big beautiful beautiful fish um but we threw them back because uh it's notpper season. There's in North Carolina three days a year where you are legally allowed to fish the American red snappers. And I don't think you can take home more than one of them per trip. It's like three days this weekend, three days next weekend, and that's it. So we threw them back. And I was really surprised and impressed by how seriously the captain and first mate take all the rules. Where it's like, nope, this one's too small.

We've got to throw it back. And the snappers, I know they're beautiful. It's the first person in North Carolina that caught it this season, and that's a big deal. But take a picture and throw it back. And they had equipment for if one of the snappers got injured when we were taking it in. if one of the snappers got injured when we were taking it in and before throwing it back, the guy just performed some mild fish lung surgery to make sure that it was going to be okay when he threw it back in the water. Oh, yeah. That's great.

I think so too. Dan, is it economical to go fishing? If you catch 75 fish, are those fish worth more than the price of the boat is it do you keep all the fish that's why i'm not a deep sea fishing guy we even we we kept a third of it my family kept a third of it and then third went to the captain and third went to the first mate and when you see all those fish in a cooler together looking like fish it's like man we've we've filled this entire pot this is great there's so much fish and then when you actually take it home in the form of fillets that you can cook and eat it's like oh shit there's not a lot not a ton of meat on these

fish yeah yeah you're not you're not using the whole thing you got to make moccasins out of the flippers and things like that. Yeah, that's what I'll probably do is I'll make some nice summer moccasins out of flippers. Oh, damn. God damn it. Do you have any quick questions for me, Soren? Yeah, I got a quick question for you. How would you feel about going and fucking yourself?

How would you feel about going and fucking yourself? So I'm on hiatus right now from my job. We're in between seasons. And this is really when I find these parts of my life that are sort of like little hobbies or things that I really I used to calm myself. And I'm assuming that that's maybe what deep sea fishing has become for you. But I'm wondering, like like what other things you pick up just that are like just for you that are very calming to you things that i do that are very calming to me well this will be useful um i was just gonna say while i give you time to think i i play a video game called red dead redemption but uh i don't think i i mean i don't

i know i don't play it right i don't play i don't follow the storyline or anything like that what i discovered in this game is that uh there's an area on the map of oh it's like 1890s um there's an area on the map up above this place called east grizzlies where it's just this meadow of flowers and i go up there with my horse and i tie my horse up kind of near the woods and then i walk out into the meadow and uh you can crouch in the game and i just crouch down and i watch storms roll in and i just hang out there uh it's so peaceful and wonderful and you can watch the sunrise and set uh you can watch the stars right on your tv you can right on my tv it's so real uh in every single way other than well i guess only

in the sense of it's visually real uh but it's really really calming to me and it's completely wrong and occasionally i get eaten by a grizzly bear or a mountain lion or something uh that just sneaks up on me but you do see a lot of other animals just sort of wandering through uh they're like big horn sheep up there and i absolutely love it i love it more than i love camping and i love camping that sounds nice i i i mean obviously my second, and third love is the sea. I'm not careful there. She's a cruel mistress, Dan, I've heard. I'm surprised at how into video games I've fallen in this late stage of life.

Because I played video games like a child, like every child does. And then just stopped probably around college, would screw around with like halo and tony hawk and i was like there's other things i would rather do and then just didn't have systems for a while and then got uh a ps4 on a whim like a year and a half ago and then um got a switch last december and i just... Uh-huh. I'm nuts about these video games for the same reason that you are with Red Dead Redemption. Like, I'm playing that Zelda game. I don't know what the plot of that game is or what I'm supposed to be doing, but it's a beautiful world, and it's open, and I get to run around and just, like, run through fields and climb hella steps

and occasionally kill a goblin if i feel like it but mostly it's like i'm gonna i need something that i can i need something for my hands to do and i need to focus on something that's not too important and won't stress me out and it's just being this little elf god boy yes that's how i feel i feel i'm I'm this cowboy, but I'm a very peaceful cowboy. And I just go and sit up in a field of flowers and hang out. It's like, it's, it feels so real that I check in on like research the game on what's actually okay. Is this, is the floral and fauna accurate for this particular area? Because it has like, it's a nagalist or there's an analog to the u.s of all of it like there are various places and i'm trying to figure out where i am and i think it's it's kind of like the dakotas as far as i can tell but uh occasionally i more often than i would like i get eaten by mountain lions up there and uh i was looking up online even like are mountain lions attacks really even that common like because i was so mad not

only about being eaten by them but occasionally i would see them and i would have to kill them if i could if i could because i want to i don't want to leave and uh i felt really bad about that they make a terrible noise when you kill them and so i looked up how common uh mountain lion attacks are and i just fell down this rabbit hole because mountain lions, they're very rare, by the way. It's not very common that people are attacked by mountain lions because they don't really like people.

Except in one particular area called the Otay Mountain. Otay Mountain is down near San Diego. It's like a little bit east of San Diego, but it's right near the border. And so there are a lot of people who are crossing the border right there, and it's desert otherwise. There's not a ton to eat for the mountain lions that live around that area.

There's not a lot of deer. There's not a lot of rabbits. What's been happening lately is that as people cross, when they get separated from a group, they just get eaten by a mountain lion. They become basically like that's their diet up there. There's a guy, Rocky Elmore, who wrote a book. He was a border patrol agent called Out on Foot. And he talks about how many bodies they would find just eaten by these man-eating mountain lions up there. Man, that's pretty devastating. I know.

It's wild i mean that's that seems too sad for a podcast but it it does lead me to a quick question about this because you were you were playing a video game and you wanted to see how accurate it was so you did a bunch of independent research into it and my quick question is uh is that fairly common practice for you because it is for me as well like there's nothing that i can sort of idly consume i don't think without researching either how realistic something is or if it's something like a different game i'm playing this game i'll talk about in a second gorgoa where um i just want to read about how it was made and the person who made it and what else they're doing and what inspired them kind of thing yeah i think that's the curse of crack probably

where like yeah i can't turn off for anything i can't turn off for a movie or for a video game like i get i get invested in it in a way where i if something seems off or weird i'm like well let's find out why why that's actually better for the game or let's let's let's figure out why this plot hole works or like i can't i can't just sit down and enjoy something yeah the most recent example of that for me and i i'm sorry to go off on a tangent i know our audience that the quick questless of the world, I know they really like us for how on topic we always stay, but

I'm going to deviate from that for a second for my most recent deep dive which is I was listening to the theme from Space Jam, the movie, just idly listening to that on my walk tour because I have it's on a playlist of songs that I have that are just songs the movie, just idly listening to that on my walk to work because I

have, it's on a playlist of songs that I have that are just songs that go, just songs that like get me amped in the morning. So I make sure I'm always smiling when I show up to work. And it was a song that used, if you're familiar with the song, it's one like a bunch of rap songs where at one point the rapper says, so here I go. Like just using so in a rap song is very, very funny to me. It's two letters and it always makes me laugh, especially in that song. And my first thought was,

I want to know what part of speech that counts as. So if I'm ever talking about this in any kind of educated way, I can say I like the use of so when it is serving the function of what I learned was coordinating conjunction. That's what purpose it's serving in that literary context.

And if not for this podcast, this will never come up. No one's ever going to ask me for it. But from that, I started reading more and more about the word so, because it's a very fascinating word with a number of different definitions, which then in turn led me down a crazy rabbit hole about the various translations that have been made of Beowulf. And this is a thing that I thought very little about, and now I have really strong opinions. It's Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf from 2001.

That's the fucking goat translation. And if you don't like that, there's plenty of room in hell for you, because this is the only translation we read in my house, and it's the one that starts with so. Okay. Are you also a beowulf guy now are you like our old english guy okay you know i i'm with you on that like there i am i'm a uh huge fan of greek greek epics and uh uh there are there's a certain translation of ever that i recently came

across i guess like within the last 10 years so so I guess not that recent, but that I think is like he does the best job of anybody. His name is Robert Fagles. And if there's a translation, he does the Iliad, he does the Odyssey, he does the Aeneid, and like there's nobody better. Everybody for a long time was Richard Latimore. That was the guy. He's familiar. Robert Fagles knocked him off his block. It's crazy.

I don't know exactly what it is about my brain. I'm very happy for it. But I also, at the same time, just turned around one night and was like, man, I genuinely have strong feelings about the different translations of Beowulf. What happened? Because of the word so. Which is, it's still like, it's the reason that he comes up with so is because it's a very fascinating instance because the the the very first word of beowulf

is a word that we don't have anymore and have no direct translation for it's wet it's uh hw and then that that thing where like the a and the e are kissing each other and they're they become one yeah yeah and it sounds like. It shows up in fairies sometimes when people are trying to be old Englishy. Yeah. And we don't really have an immediate translation for it. And it's the start of the fucking thing.

And a lot of people have done low or like, hey. And Seamus is a guy who shares worlds of uh Ireland and England which is particularly helpful if you're going to be translating something written at this time in this language and he just made the decision uh to to open with so as uh a way to try to conjure up this idea of uh this started out as like oral tradition this is somebody at a party who is telling a story and so is the perfect word for ignore everything you heard previously we're going to talk about this new thing because you're just

like yeah so we've all heard about these great kings these these these danish kings these danish masters and these monsters and here is another story about that and i just think it's a fascinating choice and also he's good because different translations have struggled with like we tried to capture the the poetry of it so it sounds nice but it doesn't make quite as much sense and other people who were like we tried to make it a literal translation so we're we're getting the spirit of the thing but it but it it rolls off the tongue poorly it just sounds ugly and it's not fun and he bridged those two worlds with his translation i like that i like yeah it does feel like the beginning of a somebody's like oh tell that one tell that one right that person then cracks their knuckles and

sits back and goes so like i'm setting the scene here for you that fits another thing i do that's for me that's just soothing is just like like as much as i get annoyed by myself it's like hey dan what did you push out of your brain what niece's birthday did you forget so you can remember that you like seamus haney more than george walton fucking translations of fucking beowulf have you actually read beowulf yeah okay not in a very long time i just i just wanted to make sure that you just didn't have opinions about each of these men you're just like but i mean i don't i don't know what the story is is it a wolf i assume lives on the ocean?

Maybe like in a little, off of a little peninsula? Bay wolf? But as much as it can be frustrating that I will spend so much time, that's also one of my favorite, most soothing things to do is to just, if I'm excited about a thing and it's a thread that I can tug on, then I'm just going to do that. Yes. My other one, back to video games, is a game uh called goragoa that's on your phone it's just a beautiful puzzle game and there's no there's no instructions on it whatsoever it's a

very difficult game to explain over the phone you're just solving a series of uh puzzles that escalate in difficulty and it's all hand-drawn art it's just this this the the creator was like I I like puzzles and also I like these these monsters and these weird visuals that I'm coming up with and I kind of want this game to feel like a strange dream where you don't know anything like a thought bubble will appear but there's the words are not written in English or any language so you can't like you can sort of make up the story if you want or you can like me just sort of let the visuals wash over you it's a

game that i uh beat the day i got it on a on a train ride and i've played it maybe 30 times the exact same game it's not going to change it's just a soothing thing that I do, which is like, I'm going to move these tiles around and solve these puzzles. And, uh, it's going to, it makes my brain feel good. Yeah. You know, it's, it's that, I don't know what to call it other than like practiced work. It's something that you, your body knows how to do so well that your brain is like, okay, great. Now I can think about something. And so it's, it's basically like being in a deprivation chamber, but for your brain's activity, like what your brain would ordinarily be focusing on, uh, in your life, there's no stimuli, stimuli anymore because it knows how to handle this one situation. And it's free to just do its own thing in the background. Uh, I feel like that's why all the best, my best ideas come in

the shower or when I'm driving or You know generally not paying attention Love driving you could just sort of tune everything out zone out man, and if you need to close your eyes for a little bit and think You do that. It's mesmerizing. There's something hypnotic about closing your eyes and just feeling the road beneath you. Not thinking. Well, there's also, I think that only times that my sense of like, I do this one thing that's just for me and it calms me. That at that time, that bleeds into the real world where other people can actually see me do it is on Twitter. that bleeds into the real world where other people can actually see me do it is on Twitter. There are certain accounts that I follow that are like, man, this, I don't know why this scratches that itch in my brain, but I need it and I love it.

And there's one that I follow that's called Palatra. Are you familiar with this one? I have seen you follow this on Twitter, but... It's called Palatra underscore color. This isn't quite as accessible as the various translations of Beowulf throughout 300 years so please explain to our audience if they're unfamiliar. Okay maybe other people will want to follow this so I'll tell them it's palatra underscore color it's just randomly generated color palettes

and it gives you like a full spectrum of a color palette and it produces maybe like 50 a day and i'm a day it produces a lot i see a lot show i don't know how often they're posting but like i can see sometimes there's two or three an hour um and i absolutely love it i love it so much. And I've started trying to communicate with it. And it does, I think it's also set to just like tweets as well. So that feels very gratifying. But I will shout at it different things about, different affirmations about each one that it does.

And occasionally if it does one that isn't so pleasing to me, I let it know as well. I say not a good one. You're not, I mean, this isn't the end of us, but this isn't a good one. You can do better. Here's a genuine quick question. Yeah. Because I see you doing this and you don't have to answer if this spoils the magic, but do you have a list of responses to this color palette twitter feed that would be funny to have like no because the idea of you having strong opinions is inherently funny or are you when you're mad are you genuinely mad like like are these real real feelings that you have oh well no it's neither it's not like a generated list but it's also it's whatever i whatever that particular palette makes me feel

in the individual moment i will occasionally amplify that yeah for the sake of hyperbole and and be genuinely well not genuinely i will be angry at them but but not in a way where like i'm i'm actually angry. It's ruining the rest of my day. I look at it and I go, oh, I don't like that one. Hey, hey, you can do better. Come on. We've gotten this far together. But occasionally they do one and I'll be like, hey, that looks like my childhood. And so I'll tell them'll tell them we're like yeah this one's a blast from the past and none of it has to make sense because nobody's actually reading it on the other side it's just a very it feels very good to be able to shout things at this and assume that's

the end of it i do that with the the twitter account hourly fox it's every hour they post a different very well shot photograph of a fox that this account has somewhere found online. It's got 72.3 thousand other followers. I don't think it's following any accounts and it just every hour will post a picture of a fox. Sometimes snow foxes, sometimes they're being playful and silly. Sometimes it's just like this is just a majestic fox in the woods and it happens every hour on the hour and i just it's i just find it incredibly soothing uh i didn't have strong opinions about foxes before that like i didn't seek it out it was just a couple of my co-workers were following it and so i followed it based on their example and it's so nice they're just

beautiful to look at and it's like like, man, this fox is handsome. And man, this photographer is good. What a little thing they captured. And the only time that I got, like, I don't interact with it that much. I'll retweet it every once in a while. And I'm very serious about my retweets. I'll look at all the foxes. I'll like a bunch of them.

But some of them, I'm just like, no, yeah, this one needs to be shared with other people. Everyone should see. History will want to know what happened here. Yeah. A few days ago, they posted the same fox two hours in a row. Whoa. So mad. And I reached out to them and they didn't respond.

As soon as they sent the second one, I was like, excuse me, sir. That's posted this already. New fox, please. It's funny you say that because there when i was looking at color palettes the other day uh i found one that i thought i swore i saw two days before and i was like what the fuck uh and so i went searching for it and because they post so regularly it was really hard to find but i just dug through their account for a very long time until i found it uh and i knew it

because it had reminded me of an eclair and i told them that and uh dug it up and it was just like it was a little bit different but then i started like comparing different colors in it and they have on like each palette they've got an actual number for each color and there was a duplicate in the numbers and i was like no it's not enough it's not enough to write to them about i'm sure they have to double up on a color every once in a while i'm looking at this hourly foxes dan these are really beautiful i know they've since deleted the may 27th double up okay oh because of you i don't know if it's because of me or or or enough other people jump down their throats about this fucking gaff

fucking gaff city over here i hope someone was fired for that that's unacceptable the other part of this and and this is gonna this will lose me some some friends surely because i i don't mean it to be mean-spirited but i know that it inherently is i will retweet these foxes occasionally and if anyone tries to interact with me on any level i block them and like i'm not i don't block a lot of people on twitter because they know when you block them and and it might make them feel sad and i'm not here for that and it's just so much easier if i mute you then i never have to see anything you do. And you don't know that I did that. So we could both just pretend that life is perfect and we're happy. Specifically mute people and like they're harmless. I'll post, I'll retweet a picture of a fox and then someone, a normal person with a job somewhere will reply to me.

This is the only kind of fox news I want to see. will reply to me this is the only kind of fox news i want to see the meta idea of a person who would block someone from making for like harmlessly participating this is so funny to me the idea of me specifically would like a brand of general kindness that i've built on the internet the fact that this is the thing that would set me off in this fictional version of myself is very funny to me and like I can't do anything with it I'm not going to turn this into content

for anyone else to enjoy it's just me enjoying it and then like someone else being sad about it like oh whoa what did I do um I I'm trying to decide whether or not to ruin your day. I just found a duplicate in here.

I assume at a certain point. I mean, how many Fox pictures can there realistically be? And they're posting so frequently. Every hour, sorry. No one knows for sure how long, how often they're posting uh it could be could be anything but uh yeah there's i'm looking at one where he's got his little pop on a stump from a day ago and then it showed up again four hours ago there's there's one i know they use twice that i'm trying to track down right now because it's it's it's very familiar to me because

it's such a haunting picture there's like a fox going off into the woods and he's being, he's following a way fish woman with red hair in a thin white farm dress with an ax slung over her shoulder. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. I'm digging for that one. Dan, what's his account again? It's called Hourly Fox.

Okay. They post like, I don't know, like every like 20 minutes. That's a great one. I love that one. Thanks, Dan. I never would have predicted if someone was like, damn, what's your favorite? It's 2019.

What's your favorite show? Oh, Pictures of Foxes Every Hour. That sometimes I'm mad about. The only thing that I do that is new to my life that suits me, that I highly recommend, is the New York Times crossword puzzle. Every morning, it's a huge part of my day. It's the first thing I do after I take out my dog for a walk is I go and I have my coffee and I sit in the garden of my apartment building and I start the daily crossword puzzle. I actually, well, there's, there's a couple

parts to it. So if you subscribe to the, the New York Times crossword app, you get the main puzzle, the serious puzzle every day, and also the daily mini, which is I complete in about 47 seconds on average. It's a very simple grid and there's like 11 words total and it's very easy. And they play a little jazzy tune. And I use that to build my confidence to tackle the the real crossword puzzle which is phase two of my relaxing morning and phase three when you finish the crossword puzzle there's this guy um rex parker who uh has dubbed himself the king of crossword and he reviews every single crossword puzzle every day, and he fucking hates them. Someone talked so seriously and so angrily about,

and genuinely about crossword puzzles. He has strong opinions on like grid shape. He was like, I just saw the grid shape and I was disgusted. I thought it was going to throw up. All those three letter words. What a good bit that is oh man if that's that's your fox that's your hourly fox man like that to have such then the color pal to it it's just like having such strong opinions about something so trivial is the my favorite thing in the entire world it's like somebody hating astronauts or something like it's like what are you talking about

yes he doesn't like when they use uh proper nouns because i don't think he he knows a lot about modern pop culture so it really aggravates it and he's like yeah you all must have known as soon as gosling was a clue that i was gonna fucking hate this one. You're right, Rex. We did know that. I have done those crossword puzzles. I've even done the easier ones that occasionally show up in planes in the back of like Sky Magazine and stuff. And I'll say crosswords in general

are humiliating to me because they're so humbling. I noticed you very clearly said that you start them when you go into that little garden. Do you also finish them? Sometimes. Like, I feel like when I was in North Carolina, when not at sea, I was, that was a huge part

of the morning routine was sitting in the, like, Carolina room and just doing the crossword puzzle. Because when I'm home, I'm also kind of thinking about taking out Jackson the second time, getting ready for work, getting my head right for for work stuff. So when I was purely on vacation, I'm just like, I'm sitting here and between 48 minutes and an hour and 15 minutes, I'm going to spend on this crossword puzzle and then it will be done. That's sort of the. My standard amount of time on these cross republics is upwards of an hour you weren't kidding when you said you were a 60 old man at heart that's but now that i'm home and now that i'm not on vacation i will start it there and like take some breaks from the computer screen at work to work on it uh it's great for uh being on the toilet and uh very rarely it'll be the the last thing i do

at night before i go to bed but i try to finish before then okay yeah you don't want a screen time before you go to bed gives you the bad dream yeah plus nighttime that's for when i watch uh dvr episodes of jeopardy about this this fucking James character, this professional Nevada gambler who thinks he's all hot shit because he's making Ken Jennings look like a fool. Ken Jennings is a fucking treasure, James. I'll just say quickly that I,

with crossword puzzles, I'm humiliated by them only because I think that I'm really good at words and I know a lot of words. And also I've lived sort of this Ferris Bueller type life where things have sort of worked out for me. So when I come across one of the puzzles, not a question, what are they? What are they called? Yes. One of the clues.

This is why I'm terrible at these. When I come across one of the clues, I'll look at it and I'll be like, oh, I know that. And there could be, you know, there's lots of synonyms for everything. I think I know automatically what it is. I'm like, you know what? I'm feeling lucky. I'm just going to put it in. And I'm always wrong and always wrong in these. And that's very humbling for me. I think it's the part that gets more humbling for me than than being wrong is right at the start when i'm going through clue after clue that i just don't know and i'm just looking at a completely white grid and feeling like a failure and then the first one i get will

be something that that kind of embarrasses me because i'm just like, because they're like, oh, this is the name of a 17th century marauder. This is what we call a knight who has shown great chivalry. I'm like, nope, nope. Okay. Blank Bullock, actress from Speed, Sandra. I don't know the Spanish word for this, but I got Sandra. All right. I love that.

I love picturing you in the courtyard puzzling over this and being very concerned and then a little devastated and then feeling very proud of yourself. I got it, guys. It was Road Dogg Jesse James. He was part of D-Generation X Tag Team Championship. I'm good at crossword, guys. Well, that's great. We we're gonna wrap this up now i need a second to track down all of the social media accounts to plug at the end of the show but while i'm doing that soren you said you wanted some uninterrupted time at

the end of the podcast to show off the japanese accent you've been working on soren the floor is yours yeah okay so uh this is just like a little something I've been working on. I don't bring it out that often because it tends to turn people off a little bit, but I think it's a lot of fun and I think it's pretty accurate. You'll see. Okay, here we go.

Oh, excuse me, sir. Would you like some sushi? I've got all kinds. Here's a vermilion snapper. Can you turn that into sushi? I've got all kinds. Here's a vermillion snapper. Can you turn that into sushi? I don't even know. Oh, I don't really think it matters. You can follow me at

dob underscore inc on Twitter. You can follow Soren on Twitter at Soren underscore ltd. That's S-O-R-E-N underscore ltd. You can find our CFO or whatever the frig he is bacon at make me bacon please on twitter that's make me bacon and then please is spelled p-l-s you can follow our super producer engineer editor vincent on his website where you

should hire him and you can find him at silicon beach podcasts.casts.com. You can email this show. I don't know. I don't think anyone is checking his email address, but you can email QQWithSorinAndDaniel at gmail.com. Good fucking luck sending a message in a bottle into the goddamn void. You can follow the show on Twitter at QQ underscore Sorin and Dan. You can follow us on Instagram. This is a good one at QQ underscore with underscore Soren underscore and underscore Daniel. Did Bacon make these? Yeah, I'm in. Come on, Bacon.

I mean, I don't like to micromanage, but anytime words are getting written down, run it by one of us. Agreed. Thanks by one of us. Agreed. Thanks again for joining us. We will be back next week, I believe, with another episode that is exactly like this one. Crosswords and Beowulf and fishing and foxes and color palettes and... Rate and review, Dan. Rate and review. Oh, yeah. Rate and review. Oh, yeah. Rate and review. Give it five stars.

Maybe I'll say your name on the show and that matters to you. Is that everything? That's everything. Okay, bye.