Triforce! - Triforce #314: Where do bugs come from!?

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Triforce! Episode 314! Lewis gets a bug infestation in his dank basement apartment, we take a look at some recent Hearts of Iron controversies and Flax takes a look back at his dead Golf hobby! Go to http://expressvpn.com/triforce today and get an extra 3 months free on a 1-year package! Support your favourite podcast on Patreon: https://bit.ly/2SMnzk6 Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hey, it's DJ First Dibs. I noticed you've been listening to a lot of summer vibes lately. I get it. operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Playlist screams I need a vacation. My algorithm suggests book before March 30th. Remember, Sunwing, save more, do more. Book with your local travel advisor or at sunwing.ca. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Great start. Hello everyone, welcome back to the trifles broadcast. Yes. What do you mean grace?

You said, you said, um, I wasn't ready. It threw him off. I'm having a little sip of tea. Jim Abes has been thrown off. Just sorry. It's not on. We're on at the moment. We're busy people.

We're busy dads, busy moms, busy, busy life. He's a busy mom. He's a busy mom. He's a busy mom. he's on mom's neck. He's a busy mom. He's got a read- He's reading all the mom tips and he's just got a lot of mom stuff to do. A lot of babies, baby boys, who need their lunch prepared for them. Lots of baby boys out there that need a lot of TLC, tender loving care. Hell yeah. You know, that's what I provide here. Yeah. That's my...

Oh. So anyway, help. what I provide here. Yeah. That's my... TLC means something different in the... The learning channel is what it also means. No, I'm going to say in the context of this podcast, it means tiny, tiny little cock. Tiny little cock. All our listeners have TLC. Yeah. Right.

Oh, I see. Tiny little croissant. I haven't heard that for a while, actually. I've got to say, I thought we'd forgotten about it. What? No, it's still going. So there's a lot of people out there greeting each other with the little penis thing. I have a tiny penis and stuff.

All the time. I have had it said to me in public by people. Same. They lean in. Not recently though. Yes. There's a little bit of a lean in. Nobody really just sort of declares it, you know.

Yeah, they lean in. Dramatically. Yeah. Or they hold their hand up and they speak it behind their way. Whatever they're leaning over. By the way, I mean, I told you the guy when we were flying out of Gatwick, one of the guys doing the bag check. Yeah. Said it very loudly, proudly. Yeah. I was like, I have a tiny penis while he's doing the bag.

I was going through security at at the airport in Las Vegas and I had the same thing. I said, hey, I've got a tiny penis, by the way. What? It's like a security guy at the airport. Yeah, it was good. It always makes me laugh, especially when people say it to me. And we're with people who have no idea about the stupid podcast that we do. Yeah. And they're like, sorry, you're going to have to explain to me why that young

man just came up and told you about his penis. Nice. Yeah. It's something. It's something. All right. We started something. We started a movement.

Yeah. Do you think like it's, I don't know. Let's move on. Let's move on. Well, I know you had a question. What was your question? I haven't got a question. I haven't got a question. I don't care.

Carry on. He doesn't care. He sees beyond it. I'm happy with it. I do. We have to just take what we got. Have you bought a house yet, Lewis? No.

Aw, man. I haven't even had any viewings. I think that whole, like... You've just lost all your steam with it. ...the whole situation with the viewing just blew it right out. You know, it's just, all it takes is for one thing to scupper the whole process, you know? I've given up. I'm just gonna carry on living in my basement flat forever.

Scupper is a good word. Your flat's nice though, your current one is nice. I wouldn't be too quick to move away from a place such as that. A nice place. It's not dungeon-y. Well, I didn't find it was overly dungeon-y. You haven't been there recently. It's got quite dank in there. You redecorated. I put some spikes up. Nice. Yeah. Nice. They're very on trend at the moment.

Got some wet walls. Where the boiler was leaking. Yeah, that's, ugh. This, um, had some little fungus gnats in my plants. Sorry. A green fly in my plants. What's a fungus gnat? It's like a little shitty little gnat that lives in the soil of your houseplants, and it can, it eats the roots, and then they just, they, they're just, they're shit.

They're really shit flies. They're very easy to squash. You see what I mean? They're like kind of, yeah, they're dopey. They're like mini mosquitoes. They're really easy to squish. There's an animal for everything, isn't there? Yeah.

Like there's a fucking gnat that eats the roots of the house plant. What the fuck? Nature, can you chill? There can be gaps. All right? You don't have to have an animal for everything. Honestly, it feels like, you know, I took some bananas home from the office and they had those little fruit flies on them.

I had like fruit flies, black flies, fungus gnats and green flies. And I've only got like three house plants. How the fuck is it that they're so infested? I mean, no wonder they used to think that insects just sprang from the earth. Because if you were in ancient Greece, what is it? Pathogenesis or something they call it. They honestly just thought that insects and small life just came out of the earth. Because that's how it feels like.

It looks like. You get a house plant and now there's fucking gnats. They live in weird fucking places, man. Like let me tell you, recently I was driving my car and all of a sudden a wasp crawled out of like in between the door and the window, you know, like where the window slides down into like the, the window holder in the door, he crawled out of the inside of that. So there's a wasp living in my, what my car door, he just crawled it.

He crawled out. Yeah, he's huge as well. He just crawled out. And then I was like, oh, shit, I'm going to try to let him out. So I rolled down the window and he just like crawled down the window into the door again. I haven't seen him since. So I guess I guess here's my question. Life finds a way. I've never seen a fruit fly out and about.

I've only ever seen them when I have a banana and I've eaten the banana and I put the peel down and suddenly there's fruit flies. Where are they coming from? Are they flying around out there sniffing the air for bananas and a bit of apple peel at all times? Because I've never seen one out and about. I had a banana peel in my garbage can in my garage one time that I forgot about and it was in there for quite some time. And I had a mini infestation of fruit flies. Yes, I had this the other day. For like a week.

Not the other day. This was last year. Towards the end of the year, it was still quite warm and I have a bin in my office and I had a couple of bananas and I put the banana's peels in the bin, stupidly, and I don't change it all the time because, you know, I don't put much rubbish in the bin in my office. No. So, this banana's obviously got to the point where the flies are like, well, this is this is the this is the best pretty rotten banana peel we've ever been near.

I open the bin and like 50 of the fuckers fly out. And now they're in my office. They're not anymore because I've got rid of the fruit. But the point is, how do they get there? So tell me, what are they doing out there? Well, they're small. They probably crawled under the door or like, you know, they came through the window or something. I had the window open like they're coming, they probably crawled under the door or like, you know, they came through a little crack or something. No, no, I have the window open.

They're coming in through the window. But I'm just saying, are they just flying about? Because they didn't leave my office? They're seeking out rotten banana peels. I don't think they are like... I could be completely wrong, I reckon they're not endemic to this country at all, they're probably from wherever they actually grow in the equator, and wherever bananas grow.

They're in a lot. They're in a lot. All the time. Really. Because I think at a slightly reduced temperature, I think they all die, right? I think a little bit of cold kills them all off real quick. They can only breed at a very specific room temperature. So, I think what happens is they just come in all the time on bananas.

So there's always eggs on them all the time. And so, it's just inevitable that the bananas, they get taken to a warehouse or whatever, which is probably full of them as well, and then that gets taken to... In the vans. So you get free eggs with every banana that you consume. I think so. I think so. It's pretty good considering the cost of eggs these days.

Could be... Free eggs. Maybe they do, I don't think they're just flying around though, in England. No. Especially in winter. It's like three degrees out there. They probably do exist out in the woodland and stuff though. They're probably out there, realistically.

They must be. I just don't think they can... It's too cold, the cold snap probably kills them all off, you know, every year. That's why they're just not here. Well, there's lots of insects that are sort of killed off during cold weather and they always seem to come back. So there's got to be some way that they preserve themselves. But the lifespan of an insect is very short, generally, isn't it? What do you think the lifespan of the fruit fly from egg to death is?

How long do you think that is? A couple of days, maybe. Lewis? Hmm. Don't know. No idea. 50 days. Yeah, it's not. Most insects are like that. Like you like bees. No, no, 50 days is longer than I expected.

Yeah, but it's still not very long. Quite a long time. But that does lend itself to Lewis's idea. That's an upsettingly low amount of time if you kept one as a pet, for example. A fruit fly? Yeah. I mean, the thing is that does leave, like Lewis said, the eggs are probably already on the fruit.

Imagine if the banana comes over here. It's going to that that egg can exist on that banana. And then a few days later it hatches. You acquire a baby fruit fly as a pet, and you know the countdown started, you have 50 days left, what are you doing with that fly? You're doing like the Titanic thing with him, you're taking him to Thailand, like, you gotta get everything in there, 50 days is not very long. RILEY Yeah.

ALICE Yeah, I thought they were... RILEY You bury him in a tiny, tiny, tiny little box. ALICE I took it quicker than that. I've no idea how long... it's fascinating stuff really, but I guess they, I knew they used fruit flies as, because the fruit fly was the thing that had its DNA synthesized first, right, because it was a very simple organism, right, and it was the first thing to have its DNA completely mapped. And I think they've used it in labs because of its rapid generational growth. So you can see what would, imagine there's something that would affect something in multiple generations

down the line. They can see quite quickly with fruit flies how that takes effect, right? But I guess we, 50 days is still a long time to get the next results in. But I guess that means you can go through 10 generations in a year, which is, well, eight generations, which is quite a lot. Yeah. Fascinating stuff. The Wikipedia article on fruit flies is extremely long because although they are very little tiny fly that seems unimportant, there's an awful lot that we've done. Like Lewis said, in terms of like genetics and stuff, they've been absolutely vital really in the work of that. We share 50% of our DNA with those fruit flies. How crazy is that? It says literally one of the articles here is similarity to humans. Oh, sorry, it's 60% between us and fruit flies and 75% of known human disease genes have a recognizable match in the genome of fruit

flies. So they are extremely important little things and they're not're not even that's about they don't cause fruit to rot. They just are. No, they are a bit of a pestle when there's loads of them. I mean, it's your own fault. If you're leaving rotten around and they're there, you have no one to blame but yourself. But still, when you arrive at that situation, you do kind of think these things are a bit of a pest. There's a lot of them.

Just little busy things, but they don't make a sound. They don't get in your face. They don't really want anything to do with you. They just want to sit on a banana peel. It's not that bad. It could be worse. If all the things like it's weird that they pick that, though, like there's so many like they could find a chicken burger or something

somewhere, I'm sure. Or like, you know, maybe some like spilled coke on the ground. Like something something that maybe tastes better than a rotten banana spilled coke on the ground. Like something, something that maybe tastes better than a rotten banana. I don't know. Like it's... Oh my God. So I remember, so they're also known as the vinegar fly. I used to go to this pub in Bristol and have like regularly have lunch there and it had these bottles of vinegar on the tables, right? Open. And one day I was like holding one up and I like noticed there was like a sediment in the bottom of it. Oh no. And I realized it was hundreds

of dead fruit flies. Oh, that is gross. Yeah. It was like, you could, you could see like all their little wings and the little bodies and like, it was just like, what the fuck? And it obviously, cause it was open fruit flies would fly in there, get, get, die, drown, go to the bottom, fly just over and over again. I think it's like slugs like beer. If you put like a little container of beer in your backyard, it'll just be filled with dead slugs. Yeah, yeah. They fucking love it. It's like a watering hole that they just die in. They're like rugby fans. Yeah, it's crazy. We get slugs that come in the house and they love the dog bowl. Yeah. So when we go to feed the dog in the morning, there are always a couple of little slugs on there.

And I'm trying to figure out where the fuck are they coming from? And I've looked all around where the dog bowl is. There's obviously some absolutely tiny crack in some bit of the skirting board and they're all they're just coming in. It's impossible to stop. But just coming in. It's impossible to stop. But we've got this, it's a tape, it's a very fine tape, like sellotape, but I think it's copper and they don't like to crawl across it. So if you put the tape down, it stops them coming in. Because I mean, the only reason I was thinking, what could it be? They don't like the feel of it or whatever. Is it like tin foil to cats is to? Yeah, there's like two slugs.

I like chewing on aluminum foil. Something like that to them. They're like, oh, I mean, I thought was, is it like something to do with conductivity where because they're wet, they crawl across the copper and it causes like almost a staticky thing for them? I don't know. But it doesn't work. You see gardens with them all the time. Yeah. Like there'll be like a little film of copper surrounding a planter, and it works.

They just won't go over it. They hate it. It's weird, eh? Gardeners have to come up with such convoluted solutions to deal with stuff. Yeah, well there's lots of stuff to keep track of. There's lots of plant diseases and pests and stuff. Like carrots are notoriously quite prone to pests. No one wants to use...

Rose bushes. ...everything. Pesticides, right? No, of course not. And like anything kind of, anything that's not organic. And so, as a result, everyone comes up with all... you look for anything, like even looking for this thing about fungus gnats, like, it comes up with like 15 different solutions, and everyone in the comments is like, none of these work. I mean, you kind of stumble across something that works.

You have to go to a local coffee brewery and get the grounds, and put those in the soil. I'll try cinnamon. I'll try diatomaceous earth. I'll try like, oh fucking, like a mosquito dip. And guana eggshells. The shell of the guana egg is very good at repelling slugs. But only for cabbages. Will not work for cats. Will only work on a waxing moon, though. And it will only, it must be 3am when you do it. You need an ordained orthodox priest from the church to come.

The Greek orthodox has to come and anoint the eggshell of the iguana. And then the slugs will turn back. But the thing is, what you get is you get someone swearing blind that it worked for them. Because maybe it did. Maybe it was something that happened, maybe there was a cold snap, maybe something, maybe like, I don't know, something happened and it solved the problem for them. And then from that point on, that is then like, an urban myth.

Okay, but that's propagated around. They think it's that, but it's actually something else. But they're convinced it's that, And then it somehow sticks over the generation. Humans are so good at trying to make connections. They want to see a connection. And it's all incredibly superstitious. And we can't help ourselves, honestly. Just trying to figure out what's wrong, what's called these gnats is blowing my fucking

mind. We have, we have Guinea pigs in our house, in a cage obviously. But they have, we have dry food for them. You know, they, they eat like these little, you know, like Gertie Guinea pig or, and like Excel they're like these little pellet things that they eat. So they have, they, they got bowls for dry food and we keep the dry food close by in the house. But sometimes when the dry food is open, I don't know how this happens, or maybe again, there's eggs in there or something. You get these like little, they look like little meal worms or

something. They're like these tiny, tiny ass little worms, but they crawl like onto the ceiling. I don't know if they want to get to the light or something, but you see them though, they'll be on the wall and they'll be on the ceiling. And that's just, if we keep the dry food, like in a, in a plastic bag that we can't really seal shut, you get them, they, they, you get them everywhere. They're gross. Like just these little worms. But now we've got like these like cereal containers, like the, you know, plastic ones, like Tupperware ones that you can, you can seal closed and they're, so they're either stuck in there or they just don't like Tupperware ones, that you can seal closed and they're gone. So they're either stuck in there or they just don't like Tupperware. I don't know.

They run out of oxygen. Do you think, the thing is, when I had the parrot, it didn't really matter if there was a few bugs and insects around, because they would eat them. But I think, I'm not sure guinea pigs want to eat worms. No, I don't think so. You got guinea pigs want to eat worms. No, I don't think so. You got guinea pigs? Terrier eat them. Yeah, we've got two. We've had them for, well, it'll be two years and like next month.

They make, funny, I like the noises they make. They're quite sweet. Yeah, they're sweet, but man, they are hungry all the time. And over time, they get to know the sounds of things. So like a rustling bag or just the fridge opening, like they're in the kitchen. Well, they're hungry all the time. Just go insane. Oh, I see. But in the same way that all animals, a lot of animals are just hungry all the time,

but if you actually feed them all the time, they will just get massively fat. Yes. Yeah. Well, cause they're in a little cage. They don't, in the summer they go outside so they get to exercise and stuff, but during the winter, really, they just sit around and get fat. Like there's not much for them to do. So it's just waiting for some nice weather. They can hibernate though, right? Like they can, they can, they can, I heard that doll mice, obviously hibernate for like something like four to six weeks, but they get like, when they eat, they get twice their normal size before they hibernate. And basically you can like poke a sleeping door, which you shouldn't do, but it will kind of, they're

almost like jelly and you can like, you can like deform them like they're a jelly. Like if you poke them, it will like, the fingerprint will stay in them where you poke them, but don't poke them. Tary was like the complete opposite of that when he was hibernating. He was just like a solid cold brick. He didn't move. Did you touch him while he was hibernating? You gotta weigh them every week because they can get, you know, like if they start losing

weight rapidly while they're hibernating, they could die. So you have to sort of keep an eye on them. Because there's all the diseases that they could get. They could have worms or something like that. Oh Christ. It's fucking out of control. Nate, thank you for saying that earlier, P-Flex, by the way. Nature, what are you doing? Just chill out. There's even animals that live on the fucking volcanic vents under the sea. What are you doing? What kind of life is that? They're not having fun down there. It's ridiculous.

Just maybe they're having a nice time like a wiggly worm on the bottom of a event. They need to calm down. They need to wacky waif and inflatable arm flailing wiggly worm. I mean, I'd say 99.9% of all life on earth just lives a miserable grinding existence of existing, existing, with no fucking purpose beyond maintaining their lives. Many people's lives right now. I'm referring to us. I'm referring to humans.

At least ants serve a purpose. What do I do? I played Football Manager on stream for ten hours yesterday. That's what I did. Oh, Christ. What did you do for ten hours? Sorry, I missed the- Football Manager. Oh, nice.

Didn't you get into that at one point? I was into it for a bit, yeah. I was playing it on my tablet. It's fun. I think that's when you became friends with some of the dads at school, right? Who were all into football. Talk about, no, I never got, I never went down... Didn't you have a fantasy football group with some of the dads at school?

I can't remember. Oh, that was a long long time ago. I'd just gotten past a bit of World Cup fever and. Oh, that was a long, long time ago. I'd just gotten past a bit of World Cup fever and I thought, you know what, I'd love to join a fantasy football thing. But I realized very quickly that people who regularly watch football are very knowledgeable about it and know who's good and stuff. And I had no idea.

And I just couldn't make any points. And it was kind of miserable. Like, it's probably fun if you follow it and you know what you're doing. ALICE I guess it's like a side effect of your hobby. Like, if you're really into football, then you just accidentally know who's good, and who's playing well, and you can see stuff. And so, your intuition is already there when it comes to that level. Yeah. Like if you watched a lot of Dota, if you watched a lot of regular season Dota or whatever, leading up to TI and there's a fantasy league where you could bet on teams and stuff like that,

it'd be fine. I'm more familiar with it, but football I am not at all. What are you knowledgeable about now? Right now I'm very knowledgeable about the game Hydra near. Have you ever heard of that? I've been playing that. That's fun. Yeah. It's been playing some Marvel rivals as well.

Fairly knowledgeable about that. Okay. Yeah. You know, just, just, just games, just a couple of games, just a couple of little games that tied me over. I don't know if you guys know this, but Football Manager 25, which was meant to come out last year, they postponed it till March and now they've cancelled it altogether. That's mad.

And I was discussing this the other day on stream, I was doing a lot of wondering, and I would love it if anybody out there knew, or if you guys know. I've got some theories about, obviously the problem is that the people that develop Football Manager have basically been making the same game for 30 years or so, because although there have been some changes, a lot of the changes are mostly cosmetic front end UI changes, or they very slightly adjusted the in game engine, which I think is so old and creaky at this point that this basically reached its limits So they decided to move to unity now The problem is although unity is extremely commonplace is used in so many games

No one at SI as far as I can tell knew what the fuck they were doing with unity Because apparently they put ads up saying if you're a unity dev We need you at SI games because they they bunch of old lads who've been fucking making FM You know fucking anything about Unity or graphics apparently because the game has looked like arse for a very long time. So they try to move over to Unity. It's obviously a massive problem for them. They're trying to develop this game and release it. And I just think you've got this culture surely at a company that basically changes the bare minimum season to season. Now it's like, right lads, we need to rebuild the game from scratch with a new engine.

Let's do it and we'll do it on the same timeframe we normally do FM. It's impossible. They cannot do it. They have to figure out how to code in the unit. Do they have to fucking move everything over? They've got all this God knows what spaghetti code. If Dota tried to move to Dota 3 and they were like, we're going to have to pour everything over. They would have to start again from scratch.

I feel like this is it. I feel like a lot of these so spaghettified. A lot of these games, though, like football manager. I feel like football manager because it spans such a big track of time. I don't know if you need a new game every year. It's a bit like farming, Sim. Why do you need a new game every one or two years? Make one really good game that you can just easily add stuff to if you want to

keep making money. So the paradox model is that we release Hearts of Iron and then for the next like 10 years we're going to release DLC for that. EU4 has been going for like 15 years and they're still pumping out DLC for it. And it's mostly good. By the way, can I just say, the latest DLC for Hot Swine is Iraq and Afghanistan. What's that? In World War Two.

Finally. It's about time. It's Iraq and Afghanistan. In relation to what? In relation to World War Two and Hot Swine. That's the DLC. Their involvement. You can play as those two countries.

Weird that they would put those two together. Well, they border each other. It's weird, but it is cool that they add trees and stuff for every country. Because it just makes the game more replayable, you know? If you've already done a big campaign as Germany, or you've already done a couple of big campaigns as the UK or whatever, you'll probably want to play some of these. Wait, what am I saying? They don't border each other. Iran borders Afghanistan.

Sorry, Iraqi and Iranians. I always get the which one is which mixed up. They're like the corridor to the west or whatever. Right, but so they've also changed the focus tree for India, and this has caused a lot of controversy. I don't know if you guys know about this. No. Okay, so they call Afghanistan and that sort of region the graveyard of empires, right?

Because people go there and try and do shit and they lose. So we went there back in the day, of course, the Khyber pass and all that stuff got our asses kicked because you can't fight in Afghanistan. It's impossible. It's literally fighting in someone else's backyard where their backyard is just mountains. They know them and they know all of them. And there's no fucking way to move shit around. And all of these areas are just miserable to fight in as an invader,

as we discovered in multiple engagements. So they've added something called this sort of Silk Road system for India. If you play as India, you get cores, which is important in Hearts of Iron. A core territory means if you capture it, you get all the manpower and resources from it. You don't have to see it as like occupied territory. You're like, this was it. This was ours anyway. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like when America takes Canada, I'm sure they got cause on Canada. If they go down the Donald Trump focus tree in the state.

Yeah, exactly. So India got cause on along the old Silk Road path. And these cause it's very weird, but it does follow the Silk Road. And if you look, it's like this weird twisting line that follows the Silk Road path. And these cores, it's very weird, but it does follow the Silk Road. And if you look, it's like this weird twisting line that follows the Silk Road. The Chinese fans of Hearts of Iron are up in arms about this development. And consider the fact that you can get cores on China as India, but not vice versa, to be anti-Chinese propaganda. And they have taken against Paradox. they've been review bombing every Paradox game, they've been having a go at pretty much anyone from Sweden that they can find online.

It's like a big online hearts of iron, like trolling everything to do with Paradox games and Sweden. It's insane. Because they're so important. Yeah. But yeah, it's really weird. The nationalism that you get from... you have to be so careful. I don't even want to talk about it on this podcast because, you know, they might...

Hey, I am not... Review bomb... Just to be clear... Yolkscast games. I am not commenting on the who, where, what, why, and you know, should they, shouldn't they, whatever. For this exact reason. I'm just saying what is happening.

That is all... That is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. You're just informing us of a couple of factoids that you've picked up. Which is literally happening and you can go and look at these games and you'll see the reviews. You can see for yourself.

It's right there. It's been all over gaming news and red news. I haven't played Hearts of Iron in quite some time, actually. I do enjoy it, but it's one that I come back to every once in a while. I feel like it's a bit of a weird one to want to go and experience World War Two from a different angle. It's like, I'm going to roleplay as Afghanistan and kind of not do much for four years and then end the game. Like, do you know what I mean? It's not actually a game.

No, it's... It's kind of a alternate history simulator. A lot of the Grand Strategy games are a bit like that. Every time you play one, you kind of just make it, either make it up as you go, or you have like one, you just, you kind of just make it either make it up as you go or you have like a, you know, you're looking for an achievement or you have like a really specific goal in mind. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it's quite good that it's that replayable. You know, there's a lot of games that are just not, you know, you play them from start to finish and you're done.

You would never go back to them, but it's kind of, it is a bit of a sandbox really that you can enjoy again, especially with updates and stuff. We've actually never really had a huge problem with paradoxes model. I know it's, you know, it has been a thing that people have complained about or commented on in the past. I don't understand the hate for it. I really don't. Well, I understand the hate for it. I really don't. Well, I understand the hate for it when a DLC comes out and it's bad, because then it's just it feels like shit. Of course it does.

Maybe you don't buy it. Well, that's one thing. Because when an FM comes out and it's shit, you're stuck with a shit game, not just a bad DLC. So and also a lot of the time when a DLC comes out, they also release a patch for free along with it. Yeah. And I think the problem is it's FOMO, isn't it? It's like, wait, they're adding what?

And I have to pay how much for it. But if this is a game you're still playing and you want them to keep developing and adding new content, they're only going to do that if they can get the money to develop it, because it costs money to develop software and games. I think another important aspect of this whole thing, though, is that there is such a fine balance between releasing a good base game and a not good one. And then the discussion really comes into play.

Because if they release a base game and it's good and people are happy to play it until DLC starts coming out for it, then happy days. I don't think anybody's complaining about it. But when the base game comes out and it's missing loads of stuff, that's when everybody's like, oh, they didn't even fucking put in this really simple thing. And you know that it's just going to be in DLC and they're going to fleece you for it and stuff. And I mean, that I can understand. Yes, too, was very much that.

Yeah, it was unfortunate. But here was my idea for for FM is that they don't release FM 23, FM 24, FM 25 and so on. What they do is football manager like ultimate. And this version comes out and it's whatever they're building here with this unity stuff. And then they do DLC for basically what amounts to cosmetics. OK, and I'll give you an example. I would love it if the crowd sounds in South America were different to the crowd sounds when I'm playing Notts County versus Preston

North End. Because when you look at football from other countries, it sounds different. The crowd sounds are different. The noise that the fans make when someone goes close with a chance in Spain is different to the way it is in England is different to the way it is in Italy and Germany. And all of these countries are different. And there's no feeling of that. I want to see when it's the Argentinian league and you're in the Bombonero River play against Bocca Juniors. I want to see ticker tape raining down from the stands. I want to see all that kind of shit. Flares in the crowd. I want to see fucking pitch invasions at the end of the season. I will pay good money for that. And they don't do it because every year they're just like, we've

tweaked the training UI, I don't understand it. You could be making so much more money and making a so much better game by having DLC. Because people try to mob this shit into the game anyway. And every year you can sell, here's our database, update, all of this shit. Well look, you've got to understand that they're owned by Sega, they've put it out yearly for the last 20 years and have made huge, huge amounts of money on each one. It's just such a reliable revenue stream. And all they need to do is keep that going. And the problem is, it must be an absolute hell for the people who work there to get

this crunch every year of getting it out on time, right? And obviously, yeah, changing over to a new system. That's why they've missed the latest one. You know, it was supposed to come out last November or something, 2025, and they missed the deadline, am I right? Or something about that? They pushed it to March and then they cancelled it. Just when it cancelled, it's just not coming out now. Well, you know, that's because they're going to do 2026 in November, you know, next time.

Maybe. I mean, I'm not kidding. I don't know how much patience Sega are going to have with with SI. Like my question is, they could also say to them, you've got to put this game out like now in whatever state it is. That's what these big companies are like. But all of these companies are also looking for live service games. They want games to have an ongoing player base that pays money at a steady rate rather than game comes out, make money, make nothing off that game for the next six to eight months. And then a year down the line, no one's buying it.

Instead, you could have this game that continually makes money throughout the year and you can update it and improve it. DLC is the model for me that FM should have and has completely missed out on. And I don't understand it. I really don't. I'm not saying that you should have to buy leagues because the core game at its base is still the fucking same every year. You put that out. But instead of just saying, oh, you know, when wherever you're playing, it's basically going to feel the same.

I mean, I'm going and playing in South America and the area around the pitch still looks like the UK. Like it's got the same ambulances and the same little toilets and the same little food stand and he's like, this doesn't look like the Uruguayan league that I know. Put some fucking effort into that. Like there's, in a way it's very England centric as well. The style of football the way players play looks like the Premier League or the lower leagues. Like it doesn't look like football in Italy or Spain or Russia.

It's made by, you know, it's the or the lower leagues. Like, it doesn't look like football in Italy or Spain or Russia or China. It's made by, you know, the hard check, the thing is they've got, it's not like Civ 7 has completely reimagined the game from, rebuilt it from the ground up to massive problems. It's basically all built on the same platform, at least it has been up until now. Anyway, I don't know if you saw Next Fest was going on on Steam. It's like tons and, it's like 4,000 demos and all of them are garbage. I feel like I haven't found any good Steam. It's like four thousand demos and all of them are garbage. I feel like I haven't found any good ones. It's very frustrating. I think we're in a funny time. Maybe I just hate games, but I just haven't found any one that actually grabbed me at

all. Have you guys tried playing anything interesting and good lately? No. I did do single player talkoff which was fun. Old man yells at bad games. I played a demo called Architect Life, which was interesting. Imagine building a house in The Sims, but then when you're done building it, there's a specification, like a budget and stuff. It does this time lapse where the house is being built, but then there's events that pop up that can delay the build or cost more money and stuff. The demo is pretty simple, but the campaign might be really fun.

Subsidence. There's a sinkhole that's opened up. Yeah, there'll just be stuff like that, that'll just come up as the time lapse of the house being built. But they build it and it looks like the house that you designed, and then you could do a viewing of the house after it's built and everything. Uh, it's, it's, you know, it's whatever, but doing instead of being able to have houses, but it's fun enough.

I think the campaign will be building their dream house on. And another, uh, another game that, uh, I mentioned before blueprints, I think is out next month, which is a kind of like a house house puzzle. Lee sort of game is really fun though. I played it a couple of months ago. Blue Prince, Blue Prince. Yeah. You're a you inherit a mansion from your eccentric uncle, but you can only have the wealth bestowed

onto you if you like solve the puzzle of the mansion. So it's like you have it it's kind of like, uh, RNG, you know, like you, you walk into a room, you consume a step and then you have three options of what room to build. So you could build yourself into a dead end or you could build a room that has like a key for a door that you need or whatever. And you're trying to get to like the, you know, like the nerve center of the mansion and you have a certain amount of days to do this, but it resets every day. So you have like a certain amount of moves each day.

It's got to plan ahead. I think you mentioned this before, this blueprints. It's fun. I played like, it was a demo that I played a couple of months ago, but it's a pun. It's clever. Yeah, it's definitely unique. I've never really played anything like it. You feel like you're playing like an old Zelda game an old Zelda game, or Binding of Isaac, but without needing

any reflexes and stuff. It's just like, you gotta think about what you're doing, and there's little mini-game puzzles and stuff along the way. It's good. It's really good. I'm still working through my list of games from the best games of 2024, I've been playing The Root Trees Are Dead. What?

Yeah, I saw you playing that with Lids. On stream. Which honestly is great. It's a great game. It's like a murder mystery... not murder mystery, like a family tree researcher, fill her up, Oprah Dins style. You have to be like, oh, so this guy's with her, so she must be his wife or sister. And you sort of put them in and you work it out and it's, I don't know, it's just really fun, really good.

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There's so much choice that you just have to. It's not it's not a case of finding a game. It's the case of finding the right game that you're in the mood for at the time. I come I feel like I like a seasonal gamer, you know, like during like winter or leading up to winter or whatever. I just like playing grindy or an egg. She like competitive games that, you whatever, I just like playing grindy, shitty, competitive games that, you know, I just get angry at. But then, I don't know, as like-

That sounds like me and golf. Yeah, it just- When COVID happened, I was all about it, I was doing the lessons, I was getting into it, then they double locked down, you couldn't even go out and do golf. They were like, oh no, golf! Tell me about, tell me about, would I like, would me and Sips like golf? No! Did we all go out and do golf together? No! I've done some golfing. We would have golf. They're like, Oh no, tell me about, tell me about what I like. What's me and Sips like golf. Go out and do golf. I've done some golf. I'll tell you what, I don't like full golf. I do like going to the driving range though.

It's really fun. Yeah, but something really nice about the fucking hard. It's too hard. Golf is too hard. It's impossible, dude. It's not like if you're playing five aside with other people who are shit and out of shape, you can still have fun. But playing golf, the course is the same, whether you are shit or whether you are a professional player. And it's designed to be somewhere in the middle ground where a decent golfer will have a decent test of themselves, get it over this bit and get it around that bit and get around this. But if you're shit, you're just going to lose the ball every time you hit it. You're going to swing and miss it a lot of times. It's going to shoot off and hit a tree

and you're going to have to spend 10 minutes looking for it. And there's all this etiquette on golf courses. You get a certain amount of time when you're permitted to look for your ball. If you can't find it, you're wasting time. People behind you want to play, fucking get on with it. You've got to take a certain amount of time at the tee and then it's like, you've got to get on with it. It's like a cue system and you're holding everybody up. So it's not relaxing. It's quite stressful. And when you look down at the ball there and you look at how far they expect you to hit it and you hit it and it goes nowhere near it, it's so fucking miserable. And you practice and you practice and you're not getting anywhere. And the guy's like, oh yeah, what the problem is. Show me your swing. And you do and you practice and you're not getting anywhere and the guys like, Oh, yeah, what the problems?

Show me your swing and you do the swing and the ball goes flying over to the left He's like right turn this toe three degrees that way and then you hit it and you're like How the fuck am I meant to remember that because I've got to remember that that toe there and and that that thumb there And then and then that bit there and then I have to put this shoulder here And I've got a swing from here But I mustn't't do that. And if you come back too far, it's going to do this. And it's a nightmare. And unless you were just one of those people who just good at things, like physically, you see people who are just able like the athletes and naturally sort of sports people who can just do things. They get their body and they'll do something and they can do

that exact movement over and over and over again, Which the key to really golf is that your swing is your swing. And when they're like, I'm working on improving my swing, I'm working on 50 things that need to improve about my swing. And I can't remember all of them. So I go to hit the ball and one in 100 times I hit it and it's beautiful and it's perfect. But I won't remember how I did it or what I did differently. So it's just too fucking, it is a nightmare. And if you're off by a fraction, it's not like it just goes a little bit to the right. It goes fucking missile shooting to the right and hits a house and you never see the ball again.

That is golf. So I quit. You quit golf. Do you think maybe you're just not the right age to fully appreciate it yet? No. Exactly. Do you have to be all of them? No, no, no.

Getting older will be even harder. Do you think it's a case that in 10 years you'll be like, hmm, maybe I should give golf another go? No. No? No. I tried it for several years. I driving range lessons.

I was into it, I was into it, and I was getting somewhere, and then I had to take a break, so I went and started from scratch again the beginner course, and I can hit the ball, I can get it up and down, it's okay. But the inconsistency is so brutal, and the punishment is so great when you miss hit it, that it's just not fucking worth it. It's just not worth it. So I just decided, nope. What have you done instead? What do you mean?

What do you do? What have you done instead with that time that you would have, you know, it's hours out on the golf course outside. Have you been walking the dog? What's like taking its place? More games. Okay. Right. I'm not saying it's good. Just know it is what it is. Any golfing games in there? No. Oh, that's always the thing that confuses me how popular they are. I'm not saying it's good, I'm just saying how it is when it is. Any golfing games in there? No.

Oh. That's always the thing that confuses me, how popular they are. They're fun. The dude hits the fucking ball. Like it's not like me. Like, even if you're bad at golfing games, you can hit the ball hundreds of yards. I've only done that once. Have you ever seen Charles Barkley golf before?

Yeah, his swing is so bad. So what you're saying is, if it was more like Elden Ring or something, really punishing and really hard, and you had to keep failing really loads, it would be better? Different? Fun? Worse? Good? I don't know.

Is that what golf games should be like, rather than easy to hit the ball? I play hard games. I love hard games. Dota's a hard game. Tarkov is a hard game. When I play any game it's hard because I'm bad hard games. I love hard games. Dota's a hard game. Tarkov is a hard game. When I play any game it's hard because I'm bad at games. I don't mind that. I enjoy the challenge. I like that. I played Eve Online, an example of a game that is punishing. When you lose you lose everything and it's brutal. I don't mind punishing games. But the thing is, when

I lose a game of Dota, or I die in Tarkov, or something like that, it's only me that sees that failure and I'm not pissing anybody else off. Well, no, but those games are games for gamers, right? Whereas a golf game is not designed for gamers, it's designed for golfers. And as a result, they are not gamers. They are shit at games. And if they shit, if the game's hard, they're gonna hate it. The thing is, ordinary people hate being bad at things and they get turned off of it real quick, like you did with golf, right? Right, right. No, no, no. So, again, I don't mind necessarily how shit I am at it. The problem is, there is a real world cost to failure in golf. Which is, I have to spend money to be a member of a golf course

and I get sick of going because I just can't fucking do it and I lose a lot of balls and they're not cheap. It adds up. And when you when you go out on the course with 12 balls and you come back with one, you fucked up. You've lost 11 golf balls and you never get them back. And they were, someone got me them for Christmas. They're the easy to find golf ball. Couldn't find them. Right? Special easy to find golf balls. Impossible to find.

I lost them so badly, I think they vanished from the face of the earth. That's how badly I lost my golf ball. I don't think anyone could have found these golf balls. So the other problem is the people you're playing with look at you sometimes like, what the fuck are you doing on this course? You clearly need like a decade of practice because you are so bad. So it's humiliating and you're there in real life. And if you give up, which I did, I was doing golf with these two lads.

And they're like, I was like, I'm really new. I'm totally shit. And they're like, doesn't matter. Come around, play with us. I was like, OK, cool. And as we start playing, I realized, oh, shit, these guys are good. So I'm like hitting the ball and it's like scuffing along the ground or hitting a tree. And after a while I can see that they'd stopped talking to me. They got their back to me and they're sort of shunning me. And I'm like, I'm being shunned.

I told you I was shit. I told you this was going to be bad. They invited you. They invited you. They're like, oh, this guy's fucking up our golf game. Ugh. So I was like, fuck you guys, I'm going. So I said, all right, lads, I'll tell you what, I can tell this isn't working out.

I'm going to go. And they were like, oh, oh, oh, oh, okay. I was like, fuck you guys, I'm going. So I said, all right, lads, I'll tell you what, I can tell this isn't working out. I'm going to go. And they were like, oh, oh, oh, okay. I was like, fucking pricks. Why would you invite... I'm literally telling you don't, I'm bad. And they're like, no, no, no, mate, we'll be fine. So I went and did around with them and I quit halfway through. Fuck you. Maybe there's different levels of bad, right? Because I play board games with lots of different people randomly at like, charts and counts and stuff. And one of my friends invited someone who we played a game we'd all played before except this new guy came in and we were like, Oh, don't worry. We'll catch up. We'll teach you. Normally the game takes like, I don't know, an hour and a half. It took like five fucking hours

to play this game because he was like agonizing about every minute decision. He was just like, Oh, it was an absolute fucking nightmare. He just went on and on and on and I was like, you know, he just could not, he was just completely paralysed on every decision. And you know, for me, my turn is like, I don't care about winning, Jeremy and I are just like, I'll do this fun thing, fun thing, fun thing. And my turn is like ten seconds every turn. And it's like, it's like, there's bad and there's new

and then there's like, just that, you know? And I can, I can totally see the frustration, you're getting frustrated with certain people. You know, but then again, I just vowed never to play with that guy again, you know? I'll make an excuse every now. I get that. I get that. But it's like, I, I guess I could obviously just, you know, not play with those guys or they were a bad example. But I did get the impression that when you're playing at a golf course, you have to be around golfers. And a lot of them are not fun people to be shit at golf around, if that makes sense. They get pissed off and they lack patience. And

this is their hobby. And you're in the fucking way. And a lot of people are just kind of dickheads. And now you've got to be around those dickheads. And I'll give an example. We were we were doing the training course, the beginners course. We have to hit some balls, then we go to collect them. And there's these two guys, obviously like business twats, probably drive Audis or BMWs.

And they see this class, we're all picking up the balls as our instructors like, right, yeah, let're all picking up the balls as our instructors like, right, yeah, let's go pick up the balls and then we take them back and we hit them all again, okay? They start playing into us and they're like hitting the ball at us because we're on the fairway and they're like, well, you're on our fairway. That kind of dickhead attitude is something that you have to put up with. And I'm sorry, a lot of the people that play golf are rich entitled cunts and they are not nice people to be around. So that put me off too.

Right. I think that is definitely a thing. I think the other thing, I mean, you even see it like when you play mini golf, right? Or like, what's it, adventure golf, whatever that is like, which I quite enjoy. But sometimes I'm there with like, I don't know, my brother or my parents or whatever, there's four of us and there's two people behind. We are of course going to be slower than them, right? And so, there's two things you do. One, you either try and start rushing your game to stay ahead of them, because they're going twice as fast as you are. Or, you say to them, oh, do you want to go through

to the next one? And then all the time they just say, no, we'll wait. And it's like, well, well, if you're waiting, don't be a fucking dick about it. Do you know what I mean? Don't fucking sigh and twat around. Exactly. And it, but you can't say that to people. You just have to say, oh, do you want to play through? And then if they say no, you say, like, if they ever do something annoying, you just say, oh, do you want to play through? You just keep saying that until they get the hint.

Yeah. I just say we're playing passively aggressively. So you go ahead. Tell people what to do. We're going backwards. Yeah. We'll go, we're going to do the old, the hint. Yeah. I just say we're playing backwards actually. So you go ahead. We're going backwards. Yeah. We're going to do the other one again. Yeah. It's annoying. So I get frustrated when it's social embarrassment that is linked to my failure because I don't care about failing at golf. I don't mind being bad at golf. I don't like being humiliated by people I don't fucking know at a golf course.

That's a bridge too far for me. And at that point, I'm like, well, this isn't even fun to be bad at. And I'm not even enjoying this. When I shit at video games online and people clip it, they're having fun. I'm having fun. It's enjoyable. Right. And we can sort of share in that badness together.

And I don't mind. And people actually enjoy watching me fail at video games. Obviously. I do not like failing in front of people in real life at something I'm shit at and for them not to be like laughing and enjoying that. But instead to get pissed off, you can go fuck yourself. So I quit. And this was a friendly course. Like they were, everyone there was really lovely. But when they got on the course, they became cunts. And I don't really understand why. It's just god. It's because it's a miserable game to play. Mason. This happens with certain games, right? And certain things where they are weirdly competitive and people can't fucking help themselves. I remember every time we would

do the Minecraft race for the world, or certain other Minecraft games, everyone became sweaty try-hards immediately and stopped having fun. And they couldn't help themselves. It was just... And Dota does that, for sure. If you're messing around, trying to have fun, and do a silly build, there's gonna be someone on your team who's mad as fuck with you. Do you know what I mean? And you have to be, like, a really charismatic person to pull that shit off. Do you know what I mean? And you have to be like a really kind of charismatic person to be able to pull that shit off. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? You have to be like, I mean, I don't know, joke, Joe.

You have to be like Joe, basically. You have to be the best person on the team doing something stupid that everyone's laughing along with, right? And if anyone else was, if I was doing it, everyone would be like, you are shit already, you're dragging down the team already, and now you're trying to do something stupid? Like fucking get out of our team. Do you know what I mean? I cannot pull that off.

I mean, that's certainly the case if you played that, like, in a public game. Like you're playing with four strangers and you came to fuck around. They want to win, because it is fun to win games with those two, and especially if there's MMR at stake, people take that very seriously. Whereas if you're playing with mates, like when we play me, Joe and his lads and we play Dota in the evenings, we will come up with really dumb drafts and ideas and ways of playing. Like we had one a couple of months ago, we did it where we got all the heroes that could move enemy heroes. And we had like, there's one hero called Tusk

who can kick enemy heroes quite far. Like he can boot them. Oh, this is different though. This is like actually playing as a group of friends. Yeah, exactly. So I'm sure if I went around a golf course with a bunch of equally shit mates and we had a laugh, I would have a whale of a time. I think what you're saying is that everyone has to be on the same page. Yes, exactly. We almost have to like... But you need some patience and you need to understand. When I didn't say to them, I'm actually quite good at golf and misled them,

I said, this will be my second ever round of golf. It's going to be really bad. They're like, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. And then get all shitty. It's like, well, fuck you. I mean, what do you do? That is kind of annoying. Why did they invite you in the first place? Yeah. I mean, at least it I mean, on the positive side, at least somebody invited you somewhere. Oh yeah. Do you know what? That silver lining. Just to turn around and make you look like an asshole. You know what? That's really true, Sips.

At least someone invited you somewhere. P-flags. That's yeah. Oh, I'm just sitting my guy. I don't get invited anywhere. So sorry. I'm just, uh, it's nice to be invited to be, to be invited somewhere. Not by unpleasant people.

Can't be choosers. Yeah. No, it's, I think everybody has been in a situation similar to that. It's like, you know, like you go, if you go to like paintballing at work and everybody's like, how many people have gone paintballing before? And everybody's like, oh, never, this is my first time. I can't wait. And you get there and everybody is like, you know, some sweaty 20 year old veteran, you know, ex ex military commando. Just like, okay, dude. Yeah, exactly. It's like it, it always happens. It happens in everything.

It's true. I do. Um, I do think that the idea of having a hobby like golf, I really liked the idea of it, but it just didn't work out. So, but in terms of like filling a void or whatever, in what I do with my spare time, I would say the thing that I've started doing more this like last maybe four or five months is trying to be a better cook, like at home. Right. So I watch a lot of cooking stuff on YouTube. I always did. But I realized that, and this is easy to get into a rut of basically doing the same shop,

more or less, every week. And you know, you're varied up a bit, but there are a lot of sort of staple dishes you fall into a habit of cooking. And I was like, I don't know if I want to cook that again. Do you want to mean like, I've done that dish so many times now that it's good and we all enjoy it. But I want to try something else. So I'm just trying to cook slightly more unusual things like, for example, not unusual things, but things that maybe I hadn't cooked before. So I hadn't cooked a moosaka before. Mrs. F always did the moosaka. It

was just a thing that she did. So she was like, I'd love it if you did a musaka. I was like, can do. So made was I'd never done one before made one from scratch, did the whole thing. It's quite a faff, but it was well worth it. And it was amazing. Like it was genuinely amazing. I was like, wow, this is this is great. And I find that when I'm cooking, when I'm even just chopping vegetables or cleaning pans and preparing them to be used, getting the kitchen ready, looking up the recipe, following it, doing everything, measuring stuff. I am at absolute peace. I am thinking about nothing else. I'm very relaxed. I really enjoy it. And I find that is my

Zen moment every day is cooking dinner. And I think for some people it would be going to the driving range and hitting some balls. And we all look for something. And there is pressure when you're cooking, you don't want to fuck up your family's dinner and you want them to be happy, but the payoff is way better. Because I feel like if I hit a good golf shot, I'm the only one who saw that. But if I cook a meal that my whole family enjoys and says, oh, that was so good, I feel so happy. So I think that's what I've replaced as a sort of not online hobby is cooking.

That's really wholesome, dude. Thank you. That's really good of not online hobby is cooking. That's really wholesome, dude. Thank you. Yeah, it is good. My cooking in the process is... I wish I could enjoy cooking. I hate it. Why can't you cook? Well, I mean, I can cook, I just find it not my zen place, you know?

Like, I just, I need something different than that. I think your kitchen is a little bit cramped, a little bit crazy. There's always something going on in it. There's like, there's stuff, you know, kids stuff, dirty bottles, dirty, you know, I don't think you have, it's not a very zen space, is it? It's always, I get the impression that the kitchen is a noisy, busy place. My whole house is not a zen space at the moment because of all this crap going on. But soon, soon it will return back to its place of zen-ness.

Hopefully. We'll see. Yeah. Lately I've been using the pressure cooker quite a lot and I've been doing different grains. I did like some buckwheat the other day. Nice. I'll do different vegetables. Like I'll usually like

every afternoon I'll come in from the office, put something in the pressure cooker and then a couple of hours, one hour later when it's done, make something out of it. But yeah, I'm the same. I thought like, God, it's just the same, if I'm not careful, it's the same routine of fajitas, green tie curry, regular curry, pasta with sauce. It's just those same four things like over and over. I'm not saying that I'm cooking, oh, he's doing an unbelievable range of never-before-seen dishes. I'm just finding recipes. Jacques Pepin has been a real inspiration for me. Jacques Pepin.

Jacques Pepin. Yeah, you talked about him. Yeah. And watching him cook and seeing the little techniques that he does, I find that for me. Jacques Pepin. Jacques Pepin. Yeah, you talked about him. And watching him cook and seeing the little techniques that he does, I find that if you try and teach me something, I am so stupid and my memory is so bad that it's gone instantly. For some reason, when I watch people cooking, I can learn the technique and retain it. I think it's because it's something I really like. So I just want to, he does some recipes and I'm like, man, I could totally do that. And I watch it once and then

I've got it in my head and I know what to do. And as the more you cook, the more you can adapt to things. Like you can look at ingredients and see how to assemble them. It's really not, most recipes really not that difficult and they're pretty similar. If it's French, it probably involves butter and probably cream. If it's Spanish, probably involves rice, probably peppers and some chillies. If it's Indian food, it's going to basically have garam masala, curry powder, onions and ghee. You can assemble things a lot more easily once you've cooked a few things. But it's fun, it's really enjoyable. But I will still say the air fryer is my favourite thing to cook with. Is it still up there?

We don't use it every day, but when we do use it... Oh, it's started to drop off. Well no, it's just, it's not exciting anymore. To see it. But now it's like... It's become mundane. Yeah, but equally, if you get a croissant from the store, you bosh it in the air fryer for a couple of minutes, suddenly it's crispy on the outside, it's warm all the way through,

that's way better. You couldn't microwave that. You want to reheat some pizza? Bosh it in the air frer. All of these things. The thing is, I had to be clean. I put my airfryer away when I was cleaning the kitchen and I haven't got an air out since. Cause I've forgotten that it was in the cupboard, you know what I mean? When it was out there on the surface I was like, oh, let's use this for a thing. Let's use this for a thing. And since I put it away, I've never used it again.

Yeah, I don't think I would put it away. I don't think I would put it away. We keep it out. We've just about got room. The thing is it takes up so much fucking space on the top. Like you've got your toaster, your kettle, your fucking microwave, your hair fryer and your pressure cooker. And that basically is the entire kitchen. There's no space to cut stuff. So I have to actually put multiple things away in order to, um, order to have anywhere to use. Yeah. I get you.

I get you. Do you need to get an additional... I never use the oven. You never use the oven? Never use the oven. What does that mean? I could get rid of it. What does that mean?

I never put anything in there. I never use it for anything. I don't use it. Do you guys know what I really love? One of my favourite things ever. Titties. Lose news. Hit me very hard.

Let's go. Okay. I don't have any lose news because Sam is on holiday and he hasn't prepared anything. And neither is Tom. This is unacceptable. Hold on though. We did a PP and there were some leftover news from that that we didn't use. We did a Simon's PP.

I mean, here's one from the 25th of Feb. A couple forced to sit next to a dead woman on a long haul flight. I saw that. I saw that. For four hours apparently. Dead body. They're travelling to Melbourne. From Melbourne to Doha en route to Italy.

A woman walked out of the toilet and collapsed ten hours into the journey. So she died and they just, they tried to wheel her up towards business class, but she was quite a large lady and they couldn't get her through the aisle. So then they stuck her in a seat and were like, you're going to have to sit next to her. Sit next to this woman who's died. That is awful. Oh my god.

Okay, how about this? I saw this news in February. So this is this month. Banana mystery deepens as more spotted in street. Tell me more! Okay, so basically there's this place called Beeston, right? Right. Wait, wait, wait. Is this in the UK? In the UK.

Beeston. That's spelled it? Beeston. B-E-E-S-T-O-N. Beaston, right? Right. And wait, wait, wait. Is this in the UK? In the UK. Beaston. That's spelled it? Beaston. B-E-E-S-T-O-N. I think it was popularized by Huey Lewis, the heart of rock and roll in Beaston. You know, a plate of 16 to 20. I guarantee you it's pronounced Biston.

Biston, fuck off. It's definitely got to be Beaston. They say the heart of rock and rolls in Beaston. So in... And from what I've seen I believe them. Between 16 and 20 peeled bananas has been appearing on this street corner, reliably, once a month. And residents have noticed it, it's been a constant in their lives for more than a year,

they appear early in the morning on the second of the month, they see them on my way to work and no one's sure what's going on. Because they just slowly go mouldy and some people think it's gross. But it's become like a kind of, or it became like a bit of a viral sensation. And people started travelling to see it. Luke Roberts traveled three hours from Slough to see the plate of bananas. Interesting. But it apparently had gone missing. We came up at seven o'clock last night and the plate of bananas was gone missing. It's ridiculous.

So yeah, people have been saying, you know, we delayed going to the shops until today because this route takes us past the bananas. It's sad. Where are these people from? India. They're from Beeston. Beeston.

Beeston. Beeston. I was the accent through me there. I thought we changed countries. Mary Smith, an 80 year old resident, has lived in the area for 48 years and has never known anything like it. I've never known anything like it. We saw him last year.

We had to come back. It makes me laugh. I've never seen anything like it. My granddaughter who was in Lanzarote heard about it and asked me what was going on with the bananas. I've never seen anything like it. So someone's leaving bananas on the street. So that's news in it. Like that one. Incredible. How about this one? I found this one as well. These are two I found for, um, time is peepee, but we didn't use them. Uh, Sydney people

living in Sydney. Um, if you look on Google maps, you will start seeing like a landmarks, but the landmarks are cats. Like friendly neighbourhood cats. And so you can go to Google Maps and point you to like a friendly orange cat. Sometimes they've got the names on them. But yeah, you can, people are reviewing them and like rating them and talking about how friendly they are and whether you can cuddle them. So you can kind of, I think it's a fucking brilliant idea that you can have Google maps. You can walk around Sydney and just find cats as little landmarks and

you know, give them a little cuddle. I do. I like that. I like that a lot. I'm not even a fan of cats, but luckily our cat is not a fan of me either. So, so yeah, some of them are like, some of them got hundreds of reviews. But luckily our cat is not a fan of me either. So, so yeah, some of them are like, some of them have got hundreds of... I swear he can spare you kicks the cat and he's cats. He's an evil cat. So God, no, I think this is, this is the, there's, I've noticed that there's, um, there's some cities and some countries with feral cats and there's some cities with feral dogs. And the ones with feral cats are always so much better. Really? No, you're right.

I'm just saying, if you live somewhere and there's feral dogs, you need to fucking shit. It's really bad. If you live somewhere and there's feral cats, it's great. Uh, usually. Like the worst you're going to get from a feral cat is you might get fleas, but feral dogs fucking attack people and shit. Like it's, it's not great. Oh, um, right. What else have I got? That's all. We're gonna have to end. That's all he's got.

That's all I got. Sorry about this. Enjoy, enjoy. Yeah, sorry if that's an embarrassing end to the podcast, but that's it. That's all we got. I mean, that's all we got. That's all it is for this week. We've been making too many podcasts lately, guys. This has been out of control. We've run out of steam. This is what happens when we start putting out extra podcasts. We don't have enough gas.

Yep. I didn't even get to tell you guys about my trip. I went to London last week. Did you? On half term, yeah, we went for a couple of days. We were in London to see Disney on Ice. Oh, Christ. How was that?

Eh. You know. Yeah. Yeah, it's dog shit. Well, you've told us about it now. Anything interesting happen? My kids really enjoyed it. They loved it.

Um, anything else happen? Not really, no, but it was, it was, it was just a nice, it was a nice break. We went to lots of like museums and we did a lot of shopping and stuff and the weather was surprisingly pretty decent. It was, it was all right. It was it was a good one. Short, but we went to Disney on Ice. We won tickets to Disney on Ice with a backstage pass.

So we got to meet some of the cast. So we went to that with the other people who'd won the competition. We were chatting and hanging out and we got some nibbles and chatted to a couple of people. And some people came in dressed as the things that were gonna be the stuff whatever Yeah, and the kids were excited and then the show started it was dogshit me and this is a Board at two tiers they have a halftime break and we say to the kids right? That's it kids time to go They're finished. No, yeah, and we left and they were like, why is everyone else staying? I was like, they're just slow ignore them. We leave We leave them. And we got the fuck out of there.

And it was the half-ass. You did the full half-time leave. Wow. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Dude. I wanted to kill someone. It was so bad.

If I have to hear, it's a small world. Ever again, I'm turning violent. On cue. I can't help it. I fucking hate Disney shit. Like that. Oh man. Wow, what a glowing review for Disney on Ice. Yeah. Fuck me.

I, on the other hand, made it through both halves. That's impressive. I think I just switched myself off, you know? As you often do as a parent, you just kind of have to find that inner place, you know? Where you just don't really exist anymore and hope that everybody leaves you alone. Yeah. So I did that for like two hours. It was good. You zone out and play football manager in your mind. Yeah. You're getting ready, getting ready for the next sesh, you know? Yeah. Well, there you go. I told you guys anyway, we're all up to date. Yeah, we're up to date.

All right. I guess that's this week. We'll see you guys next time. See you later, bye!