Two Hundred A Day - Episode 113: A Plus Expenses Special

Episode Date: March 5, 2023

In this Plus Expenses we talk about: We have Shirts! (https://ndpdesign.com/rockford) Plus, recordings and noise, sheep, deer, the Langley Bunnies (https://thisiswhidbey.com/2019/04/25/langley-bunnies-and-easter-eggs/), our public Plus Expenses, New Year's Fray 2022 (https://ndpdesign.com/fray), fun trading cards, Epimas, buying and selling PDFs, holiday theming, publishing calendars, hype cycles, jgarf.org (https://www.jgarf.org/), the Two Hundred a Day audience, reflections on the show, detective fiction in general, and criticism as opposed to being critical. We have another podcast: Plus Expenses. Covering our non-Rockford media, games and life chatter, Plus Expenses is available via our Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday) at ALL levels of support. Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files (http://tinyurl.com/200files)! We appreciate all of our listeners, but offer a special thanks to our patrons (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday). In particular, this episode is supported by the following Gumshoe and Detective-level patrons: * Richard Hatem (https://twitter.com/richardhatem) * Bill Anderson (https://twitter.com/billand88) * Brian Perrera (https://twitter.com/thermoware) * Eric Antener (https://twitter.com/antener) * Jordan Bockelman (https://twitter.com/jordanbockelman) * Michael Zalisco * Joe Greathead * Mitch Hampton's Journey of an Aesthete Podcast (https://www.jouneyofanaesthetepodcast.com) * Dael Norwood wrote a book! Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo123378154.html) * Chuck from whatchareading.com (http://whatchareading.com) * Paul Townend, who recommends the Fruit Loops podcast (https://fruitloopspod.com) * Shane Liebling's Roll For Your Party dieroller app (https://rollforyour.party/) * Jay Adan's Miniature Painting (http://jayadan.com) * Brian Bernsen's Facebook page of Rockford Files filming locations (https://www.facebook.com/brianrockfordfiles/) * Tom Clancy, Andre Appignani, Pumpkin Jabba Peach Pug, Dave P, Dave Otterson, Kip Holley and Dale Church! Thanks to: * Fireside.fm (https://fireside.fm) for hosting us * Audio Hijack (https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/) for helping us record and capture clips from the show * Spoileralerts.org (http://spoileralerts.org) for the adding machine audio clip * Freesound.org (https://www.freesound.org/) for other audio clips

Now that we've decided to get me a new mic, I think I figured out one of the weird things that was happening with my mic, which I don't think was coming through on your end, but was affecting my end. I was running the mic through a USB hub. Right. And I think that was... That's always a problem for USB peripherals. Yeah. I think it was like dropping a little bit here and there. And it mainly was happening like weird audio things were happening in my ears,

not like, not like, and then throw a banana in my mouth before I finish my sentence. Right as I muted because there's a plane flying overhead. Yay, we're off to a good start. We are off to a good start. We, yeah, I traded, if you'll remember, we'd have the planes when we recorded. In Chicago, I lived under one of the multi, multifarious? I don't know. O'Hare and all airports have various approach lanes, right?

And they change, you know, which ones they're using. I think there's a pattern um based on i don't know what but basically every sunday there would be some planes that flew directly over my house going landing at o'hare um and then if we recorded on a different day sometimes we wouldn't they wouldn't be there but then they'd suddenly be there and i'd be surprised i'm like ah oh there's a plane today uh anyway where i uh live now on the island we're near a uh we're near a naval base there's a naval airfield and there's also like a like a local airfield um on opposite sides of our town so we do get flyovers of like navy planes doing maneuvers.

That's exciting. I mean, it's exciting to a degree, I guess if you like planes, I mean, I don't know. I like planes fine. Um, but they're,

they fly super, super low. So it's like really loud. You'll get like Kenny Loggins every so often. Yeah. Danger zone starts playing. And right. And there's a,

like a, like a formation of like five, like fighter jets that are you know clearly visible because they're so low those are that's pretty loud I guess there was some there were planned maneuvers recently where they were flying at night a lot

and then also separately we've been as a country we've been shooting UFOs out of the sky and some of that stuff I think I think there's been some response that has increased air activity in this area

you know, defending us from balloons and such. Gotta get them UFOs Right them hobbyist radio balloons and the whatnot. Yep, yep So I will occasionally try to mute when there Obvious radio balloons in the whatnot. Yep. Yep. So I will occasionally try to mute when there is plane, but sometimes I forget.

And usually I try to filter it out in the edit, but sometimes I can't get it off. I live next to a gas station. So sometimes if we record it back when I lived in New York, we would hear the R line go right underneath my apartment. So that would have been a. I mean, my first apartment in Chicago was right under the R line go right underneath my apartment. So that would have been a... I mean, my first apartment in Chicago was right under the blue line L. So we did the thing where you had to pause a movie to wait for the train to go by because it was so loud you couldn't hear movie dialogue. We'd have to like pause your conversation. So you just like have an awkward like, we just sit here for about 20 30 seconds wait for the

train to finish going by resume where we left off if we recorded in that two-year window when i lived in a barn i guess the sheep would have been we just had somebody in the background doing that the thing about sheep is that they sound like a human mimicking a sheep like they're very disturbing that way yeah it's like cows don't really sound like how we say like moo yeah it's more of like a yeah but sheep do sound like they're going yeah they got they got the uh i'm trying to think of the the voice the the venture brothers one of the one of the henchmen for uh the monarch has a very just sounds like you could hear him in the sheep all the time they're like hey hey anyways that's my sheep impression uh my full sheep impression

includes dropping like pellets of poop while I'm doing that. Because that's the other thing. Sheep are terrifying animals. I don't know if you've ever seen one up close. But anyways, we won't get into it. I did have a sheep encounter just, like, at a petting zoo. I think when I was in college. And it stands out to me because it was the first time I'd ever physically been, you know, in proximity to a sheep.

And then it was a petting zoo. So I pet the sheep and I went, oh, my God, sheep are made of wool. Because as a I don't know, I mean, as someone who has never been around sheep, I was like, yes, wool comes from sheep. But, you know, it must, there must be some kind of like you spin their fur and that's what turns into wool. I didn't realize that they literally just, that's just wool. That's just the same stuff.

Like, oh, now I know. All you knitters and crocheters out there can laugh at my ignorance, but yeah, it was a big revelation for me. It's a good one here. We just have, we just have the deer which are as we say adorably terrifying yeah um because we have fearless fearless deer that just coexist with in the built environment and just hang out um they have no fear of people no fear of cars no fear of dogs um just fear of cars, no fear of dogs. Um, just wander around,

eat grass off everyone's lawn, et cetera. They're very cute. They're very fluffy. They're, they're black tail deer. Um, but when you get close and you see their eyes,

there's a reason that like folk horror always, right. Deer imagery, right? Like there's something about their their eyes that's just completely terrifying and because they have no fear like i had a had a had an encounter uh just this last week where i was walking walking the dog in our neighborhood and he found his his pooping spot and he's doing his business and on that lawn there was like a a doe and a fawn um just cropping grass

and then once we stopped the doe started giving us a side eye and then started coming over just real slow just slowly walk walk walk daring staring me dead in the eye and i'm like well i can't stop the dog from what he's doing. He needs to finish. This deer is getting very close. The deer's like, that's my dinner, buddy. I mean, I expect it's kind of a, hey, back off my fawn. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, I was like, is this going to be the first time a deer has attacked a person that I've known of? I was like, is this going to be the first time a deer has attacked a person that I've known of? Because I felt like I was in the introduction to some kind of like, like rom-com or something where I'm like, a deer is approaching me and I'm going like, shoo! It's like, back off! I'm like yelling at this deer. Thankfully, no one was, no one was threatened. No one was harmed. That's good. as well but uh

yeah adorably adorably menaced is how we put it they say i was adorably menaced by a deer today where i live now i don't have any of the that we have possums that occasionally will go through our backyard but yeah uh i'm not in the big city but I am you're in the small city I'm in the small city I'm in the small city I mean we like I live in Massachusetts so I live within three blocks

of three donut stores which means there's rats like I don't know if people know that but donut shops mean that there are rats. Throw your trash out and then the animals eat. So there's that. So there's like a whole thing about like, don't put bird seed out or, you know, anything like that.

You don't want to like make your home appear as if it's a place where food can be got. But that's the wildlife report from Western Massachusetts. Yeah. So I'm in Washington. I'm on this island off the coast of Washington, which means we do have a kind of a limited wildlife spectrum. Like we don't have like bears, right? Right.

We have tons of deer. There's one elk. There's like a semi-famous local elk that swam to the island like at some point in the last 10 years or 15 years or something and it's some or is it an elk or is it a moose i can't remember it just hangs out uh locals call it bruiser i believe and every so often there's a sighting um and it just like lives here now uh but it's not like there are a bunch on the island um there's some coyotes and then like small stuff but tons of rabbits there's a whole thing okay we we we can we can stop talking about this soon

but there's a there's a town that has a uh on the southern end of the island that has like a i don't know if it's famous they have a lot of fancy bunnies they have like a lot of non-standard rabbits because they used to have this like rabbit festival or something and at some point a bunch of the show rabbits got free. And now they're just like, there's just a population of various crossbred show rabbit. Yeah. Just fancy rabbits. Fancy rabbits that just like live around this town. Bows in their hair.

Dogs go crazy. You like bring your dog there and they just go absolutely insane trying to figure out where all these rabbits are coming from. Anyway, that's the wildlife report. The bi-coastal 200 a day. Yes. Wildlife report. This is the kind of exciting content you can expect from Plus Expenses. Exactly. Yes. So this is our public Plus Expenses. This is our public. Try again. I'm just not going to make that. This is our public Plus Expenses. our public but try again i'm just not gonna make that this is our

public plus expenses that is very difficult to say um for me but uh yeah yeah we we do one of these you know every every so often um so plus expenses you know we talk about it in our little gumshoe thank you read but you know i don't expect all listeners to actually listen to the promotional stuff i i get it i skip past stuff too um but yeah if you are uh a subscriber to the 200 day patreon we release our plus expenses episodes there and so we record one of these before each of our main episodes. So that means, you know, usually either two weeks or a week before the main episode, depending on the cadence, the plus expenses episode goes out. It's a secondary bonus.

Thank you show for our supporters. And also it's where we kind of just, you know, talk about stuff that isn't the Rockford files. Yeah. It's our little catch-up time. It's our time to see what we've been up to because, as Nathan alluded to before, we live on two different coasts of one of the major continents.

One of them. I'll leave it to the listener to decide which of the continents are the non-major continents. Yeah. One of the seven major continents. Right. Somewhere in there.

Yeah. But part of the fun of doing the show, the main show, is that we get to talk regularly. And at some point it was like, well, we always spend time catching up before we record. But we are usually talking about, I mean, you know, animals, the weather. But we also, you know, are usually like talking about stuff going on in the publishing world, stuff going on in the game world, how our businesses are going as, you know, independent creators, all that kind of stuff. So hopefully some of that is interesting to our main feed listeners as well.

Yeah. Speaking of how businesses are going, I got my New Year's fray in the mail this week, which is exciting. This is, oh, we got a little visit. Speaking of local wildlife. We got O. Henry entered the chat. He's finding his spot. So, I mean, I feel like I got to do introductions for everything here.

Because we're the public plus expenses. But if you're not aware, Nathan and I met as independent tabletop role-playing game designers way back in the early teens. Mumble, mumble. Mumble, mumble. Late teens. Oh, literally aughts. Early aughts. Late aughts.

Because the Design Matters booth was 2008, 2009, 2010. So it was before that. Before that, yeah. I think we went through this once. I think we narrowed it down to sometime either late 2004, early 2005, I think is when we narrowed down when we actually met. And yeah, somewhere in there. And, yeah, somewhere in there. And fast forward to December of 2022, Nathan did a Kickstarter for a game that uses his worldwide wrestling to create a holiday-themed battle royale called, oh, wow, I just blanked out. I just said it.

I just said it a moment ago. I'm waiting. New Year's fray. New Year's fray. And mine came in the mail with a lovely trading card. I got a nice football. Oh, God. I should have ran and grabbed it so I could say which player I got because I cannot remember even the team that they're on.

That shows you how sportsy I am. Well, also there's a sticker over one side of it. So there's that. Yeah. how sportsy I am. Well, also there's a sticker over one side of it. So yeah, there's that. Yeah. I, you know, I do a little like mail. Uh,

I, I put a little stuffers in, in my mail surprises, little surprises. Also accounts. Like I do a sticker over a car over like a trading card. And that counts as my business card. Cause I got tired of printing business cards.

I was like, yeah. So I print stickers instead and put them on these cards. Anyway, so I usually get, I try to, so I always try to have wrestling trading cards for, and those go in my wrestling books when they get, when they go out. And then I also, you know, get like,

usually like from thrift stores and stuff, like just random vaguely related cards. So I have, these these are there's a this is a set of football trading cards from the super bowl like the 1991 or 1992 super bowl or something like that so it's like all the players on both teams oh yeah and there's some cards about the super bowl so i have those i have uh some of the old Marvel TCG. Oh. Which I forget what it's called now.

I could go grab a card, but it's on the other side of the room. I have a set from the Olympics from like 94, I think, that are actually pretty cool because a lot of them have lots of foil details and stuff, and they're really thick, so they're kind of fun. And then I have a bunch of nascar ones i got this big set of like like a complete i don't know what you would call it it was a big box and it was like every card they made for their like 92 season or something like that and so it's like cars drivers staff owners oh wow stats like that stuff so i've been going through i've had those those have been keeping me for years. I still have a bunch of those. Um, so anyway, when I sell stuff,

I do a card in there as kind of like a little, I don't know, you can use it as a bookmark or you can just throw it away or whatever. Um, but it's a little, you know, just a little fun thing. I like, I like for there to be a little fun thing when you open your package. A little surprise, little, little, little prize inside like a Cracker Jack box or a cereal i don't know if they still do prizes in cereals anymore i don't feel like crackerjack boxes have a tiny little thing that has a qr code on it now which is like not not fun i mean they never were great like i mean i gotta be honest when i was a kid i don't i can't think of a single most of the time they were like temporary tattoos is what i remember getting from uh but cracker jacks are even before my era so i don't know yeah as someone who buys cheerios on a regular basis now um there's nothing in cheerio boxes but

i feel like i don't see prizes like things advertised on cereal boxes i think that's a thing of the past yeah i mean i just get grape nuts so that's me corn boxes. I think that's a thing of the past. Yeah. I mean, I just get great nuts. So that's me. Corn nuts and great nuts. That's the way to go. All the greatest nuts. Yes. Well,

thank you for, you know, picking up the game. So, and I want to talk about how intertwined our stuff is. So, so this is New Year's fray 2022, which is a revision of the original new year's

fray which was technically in 2015 and then i i revised it for 2016 and then it sat there until i did this revision but that was done so that i would have something new to add into one of your epimus promotions right listeners with plus expenses we talked about this in detail a couple episodes ago uh if i remember right about you know what epimus is and stuff but basically there was a period of time where epi would run a gift of game thing around the holidays where you could buy a set of game pdfs as a gift for someone that would be delivered Epimus morning. Epimus, of course, is the traditional day of celebration, December 25th. 24th. December 24th, when our good friend Epidio Ravishal was born.

So downloads of those would go to your gift recipient on that day, and then you would receive them for yourself as well. So it was kind of a little, you know, as you say, give the gift of game. Yeah. I wanted to be part of it and so i made this little holiday themed wrestling thing for that and then i decided that it deserved to have it's a little more i don't know have a have a re-debut uh in the wake of the second edition of worldwide wrestling which came out a couple years ago and you know

etc etc and here we are i should take, not now, obviously not on the air, but take the time to figure out what games exist because of Epimus. Cause there's not, there's not a lot of them, but there's like Meg's, Meg Baker's playing nature's year, which was, I think, I think she did that via patreon but that started i think as an epimus one i know there's a handful of people that we know they're all friends of ours they were like i need something new this year let me just make something it was a good excuse to make something right like it was a uh i always think about doing it but also like the problem

with running a promotion like that on your birthday is that you just create a lot of work for yourself on your birthday. Like a fool. Like a fool would. And, yeah, it just never materialized in that way for me. But, yeah. Well, and now the novelty of getting game PDFs. Yeah. That has shifted to no longer being a novelty it's just a way things are that was our original thing was that we were we were trying to normalize pdfs uh to some extent because that was uh we as indie tabletop role-playing game publishers

we're kind of on the cutting edge of people buying electronic books right buying downloads yeah and uh still feels well we were on the cutting edge and then the cutting edge blew past us and then uh nobody ever designed things to make our job easier they just kept going further on um but that's a whole other story. Not for this podcast. A lot of our Plus Expenses time is spent talking about the changes in publishing over the years and the struggles that we're having. Yes. But I guess I would say that perhaps that part of the mission to normalize the game PDF, one you could say, has

been successful because it is now very normal. Yeah. Like, I don't know about our particular contribution to it, but it has happened. Right, right. The underlying cause is no longer there. Yeah, you get to take a victory lap on that one. I'll allow it.

Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. Well, I'm glad that you got your game, and I hope others who picked it up i hope they enjoy it the timing of it was like i wanted to get it done for the holidays but because of how kickstarter works and the lag time i mean i did do it so the part of the the deal was that i want to do something really like short and compact and not something that was going to take forever to do. So I think I only ran the campaign for a week or like eight days or something like that. And like, by the time the

campaign was done, the game was written, had gone through editing and was in layout. And then I was able to send it off to a, to a printer. I wanted to do it before, before new years. And it turned out it took a little longer. So I did it like the first week in, in 2023 or something. And then, you know, got the proof and had to look at that and then submit the full order. And then that takes a couple of weeks and then, you know, I get the books and then I have to pack them and send them out. So I wanted to get them out in January. I ended up getting them out in February, which is fine, but it means that kind of the like holiday theming, I'm kind of hoping that next year people will play it. I just picked up a anthology of Christmas themed sci-fi stories from, I think the eighties might

be the seventies. Nice. Em and I have decided that we're, uh're going to just make a stack of things that are the holiday-themed thing that we got just past the holidays. And then just, like, have that ready to pull out, like, December 1st of next year or something like that. So, yes, that is going to happen in our household. Excellent. Because it's right there in that stack of, like – because, yeah, like, a lot of times you'll, for instance, this might be a good segue too. For my birthday, my, I think, I'm going to say my brother. I can't remember who got this for me. No, actually, I think it was my mom because she keeps going on about it.

I got a holiday sweater, right? But it was a Black Sabbath holiday sweater. Of course. Yes. But it was a black Sabbath holiday sweater. Of course. Yes. And it says across the front of it, it says holiday, bloody holiday, like the Sabbath, bloody Sabbath album. Anyways, it's a great sweater.

I love it. But my mom just keeps going on and on about like you have to find other holidays to wear it. But it's a sweater. So there's only a certain number of holidays. I'm like, like oh it'll come out again next year right but that goes in that pile right like you just tend to get holiday themed things and then like and then it's like january yeah and you're like i'm kind of done with holiday stuff yeah so uh yeah so just this pile of things that get stored away and then come

out at the beginning i am realizing i do have an opportunity to maybe do it as a promotional thing to do like Christmas in July. Ah, yes. It is incumbent upon us to think of things like, when can I get people to buy my stuff? Yes. And you start thinking like a car dealership. You're like, what promotion can I attach to this nominal holiday? What is my President's Day sale going to be?

I feel like this is a thing we do hit on quite a bit, which is that back when we first started, there was a time of year when games came out, and that was Gen Con. That was early August. early August, you put a game out at Gen Con, so much so that there's this four months before Gen Con time period where indie game designers are a little raw with each other because we're all trying to work out all the logistics to get our games finished and ready for Gen Con. That's not the case anymore. Kickstarter, to some extent, just killed that.

Kickstarter allows us to release whenever. Not just people who use Kickstarter allows us to release whenever. Not just people who use Kickstarter. It just broke the pattern. And that was it. It didn't have to. But COVID changed how I approach conventions, which is that I don't approach conventions. And that was a significant chunk of sales, right?

You would go to a convention. You would bring a bunch of product. You would go home a lot lighter, but not too light because you would have purchased a bunch of things from other people and ate out a lot and paid for hotels and whatnot. But still, like, that was the, this is where a good chunk of sales goes. And then if it were a big convention, if it was Gen Con, if it was, PAX was pretty influential like that, you would see people playing your games, hopefully, and talking about them online

just a few months after that. And then, like, a few months after that was when the, the, the wave of word of mouth kind of led to like other people who weren't there picking it up. And there'd be, yeah,

there'd be like a, like even for a new thing, like a, like I have my new thing. And so, you know, you sell it at a convention, you could kind of expect like a eight month to two year.

Yeah. Lapse between when people would be by it and be really excited and then actually play it and talk about it just because people have lots of games they want to play they prioritize you know whatever and they get around to it eventually and sometimes eventually is like a year and a half after they bought it yeah so you had the lag of like how long it took people to actually get it to the table and play and then you also had the the lag of how long it took people who wrote about games influencers if you will for lack of a better term it's actually a really good term for that i should just use it influencers uh you know reviewers and whatnot to like read through it and say something about it or, um,

things like the, um, uh, any like awards stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Like awards are, I think like I, I got my own personal thing where I don't want to engage with awards anymore because of how that affects me psychologically, but they're good for, even if you don don't win like making everyone look at like here are all the nominees and you're like oh well that's interesting like what is this they create they create short lists for when people are looking for something new yeah yeah exactly i think that's a very good feature of them and uh also like one that's uh yeah i'm like that's a good feature and i would love to see if we could extricate it from it. But that's not possible. And also, you need the drama of the award to draw people to the list.

That's the whole thing. It's a package deal. It's a unit. Yeah. Well, speaking of package deals, do we have a deal for you? of package deals do we have a deal for you i was i was going to use the the sabbath sweater as the segue and then like completely forgot anyways yes yes go on so one of the one of the reasons we're doing this plus expenses on our main feed um is uh you know both to expose people to our other show but also because we we have a short-term fun

little project that we're doing where we want to sell some shirts. Some 200-a-day themed Rockford bootleg shirts. Your torso is a little chilly. Not too chilly, because these are t-shirts.

Well, suitable for Malibu. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we have ongoing support through Patreon. not too chilly because these are t-shirts well suitable for malibu for the malibu yeah exactly um yeah so we you know we have ongoing support through patreon and you know our patrons are fantastic and we are so appreciative of their ongoing support but you know obviously that's not for everyone and so we're doing a about a month-long pre-order for two shirts. And so this is a great way for, you know, if you like the show, you've,

you've been digging it. Patreon isn't a good fit for you, uh, but you want to, uh, throw a little, a little, a little cash our way.

Um, picking up a shirt would be a great way to do it. And you look good doing it. I certainly hope so. Yes. So first of all, you can see these for yourself, uh, at NDP design.com slash Rockford.

That's the portal through which we're doing the pre-orders. There will also be a link on our 200aday.fireside.fm show website. That'll have a link to the shirts. And if you're a patron, we'll send all the information out through Patreon as well. We have two shirt designs. One is a interpretation of the Rockford Agency Yellow Pages ad. It is a yellow shirt with a black design on it. Where's the 200 a day Yellow Pages ad featuring Epi and my faces.

You know, we'll get to it when we get to it. A podcast about the Rockford Files. Listen and enjoy. Anywhere you get your podcasts. Fan supported. All goons appreciated. You can see all the text in the image previews on that pre-order site. Yeah, it's a classic.

I mean, it's the Rockford Files ad, but you take out Jim Gardner's face and add ours. Right. You know, maybe not an upgrade but yeah we think it's fun yeah um and then we also have a more contemporary design uh where it's a black shirt with um it'll be like off-white text where it's the helvetica and format so you've seen it on shirts for the last you you know, 15 years, but Jim and Beth and Dennis and Rocky, and then in parentheses and angel. Yes. So that's the cast shirt. Uh, that's a black shirt. People like black shirts want to make sure there's an option for that. And those are, those are the shirts. I like that. So the, and angel is in parentheses in italics, in a thinner font. And it just like I can't not hear it in Angel's plaintive voice.

Like don't forget Angel. Yeah, absolutely. So that's our it's celebrating our core cast. You know, we talk about them all the time. Obviously, Jim, Beth, Dennis, Rocky and Angel. And Angel, your buddy Angel. You're good. Well, your good friend, Dennis Be Rocky and Angel. Your buddy Angel. Your good friend Dennis Becker and then your buddy Angel. Yes. They are $25

plus shipping. We are doing a pre-order so that we can order them from a screen printer that I've used in the past that is a good outfit. We can do an order fitting demand. We have absolutely no idea how much interest

there will be in these shirts so we don't want to print too many and have a bunch of inventory and we don't want to not print enough and not be able to send people a shirt so uh hence the pre-order and then um you know we'll get them out as soon as possible after that so the timing right now looks like we're going to be if you're hearing this now, and then through the month of March 2023, we'll have it open. And then we'll close the preorder sometime in early April and then hopefully have shirts sending out by the end of April. That's kind of the general timeline. Perfect for your summer wear collection. Exactly.

These are kind of summer. Well, the yellow one is certainly a summer appropriate yeah uh the black one is your all all weather of course yeah and i guess uh there is a little wrinkle where there is a minimum it's not high but there is a minimum to print these so if one of them does not get enough interest we will see if those the people who want that one would be happy with the other one and we'll just change your order uh if we end up not printing one of them because there just isn't enough interest to hit the minimum and you ordered it we will of course refund your money yeah we came up with the two designs and then i kind of like i don't know we liked both of them right yeah we couldn't decide it would be simpler just to do one but you know maybe we'll have a little more well well you get

to vote with your wallet and uh tell us which one you think is better is really what it comes down to they're both very like if you know you know kind of t-shirts yeah yeah yeah for sure they're not super deep cut but they're yeah slightly deep cut just just the lightest the lightest of the deep cut i feel like i had a a thing at one point where someone pointed out my Rockford files t-shirt. Cause you have, you're wearing it right now. The Rockford agency shirt you can get from like many websites. I think.

I can't remember the, no, no. They're the other ones. The, the one that goes through, um, Garf. Yeah.

Yeah. You can get them from, yeah. J J Garf.org. Yeah. J Garf. Gigi Garner's animal rescue fund. They sell a shirt um and

mugs and stuff yeah that's the what would jimbo do yes that was the what would jimbo do one mm-hmm it might have been that way anyways i just remember like it was a fun time when a total stranger is like the rock for files remember that that was a good show and like yeah

still is one reason we're doing you know we're doing, you know, we're doing the shirts, um, is, uh, honestly, we are continuing to get new listeners,

um, which is kind of cool. So I think to turn this back to a more plus expenses kind of conversation, tell me if you have this kind of sense, but I feel like for most of the things I do, it goes out into the world there's kind of an initial spike of interest and then that goes down and then there might be a second wave and then once that second wave goes down it's that's whatever level that settles to that's just

that's where it is yeah the level for the rest of its lifetime so that's most of you know we both print books and put out you know games in the form of books so like you sell a bunch of books uh through a kickstarter or three or pre-order or initial release and then again in that six month to two year lag there's another little bump where it's gone out into a new audience or people start talking about it again or whatever and then it trends down and then you just sell a couple a month or whatever it's going to be. The podcast is a line go up. Yeah.

Which is like very, very different. And, you know, we're very fortunate to continue having people finding the show. But we get, you know, it's not crazy. I don't think it's an unmanageable growth or anything. And we're not like we are not a popular enough show to where anyone has come to us and been like, Hey, we want you to advertise our product. Right. Yeah. We have a mattress and we want you to tell your listeners that Jim Rockford would use

our mattress. Right. Um, so we are not, you know, advertisers are not seeking us out, which is just to say that's, you know, we continue to be listener supported because that's what we want. We also do not seek out advertisers. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you know, that's how we like to be, but you know, we continue to be listener supported because that's what we want. We also do not seek out advertisers. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you know, that's how we like to be, but you know, we look at our metrics and like

there's been steady growth in the number of downloads of the show over time. And we get, uh, really nice, um, emails and, uh, occasional reviews and stuff. It usually starts out. I just found the show and blah, blah, blah. Right. And those are always great because it's like cool there's there are new people who found the show uh six years oh seven seven i'm looking the shirt says uh since 2016 which i mean like i don't remember when in 2016 i think it was

pretty early though right we started recording in 2016 and i think the very first episode dropped like at the end of 2016 yeah so that's where it where we peg it but the show of regular episodes and regular recording like i kind of benchmark it to like christmas like december 2016 yeah so yeah about six years then we've been doing it in a little over six years. Whew. Yeah. I mean, like what you were saying about the long tail, I guess, is the term that we use. And yeah, it is interesting to see that more people are more interested. When we started, it's thinking about where we started. Again, just tabletop role-playing game designers who both happened to really enjoy this Rockford Files show

and think that it had things to say about how to craft a story, like how to work with narrative. So our early episodes, we dedicated a whole part of the episode to what can we learn from this? How can we use this if we're going to write our own stories or if we're going to play role playing games or however we create narratives, what can we learn? That DNA is still in our like, we still bring it up as we do the show, but we don't like separate it to the

end and do a big long section. As we learned, while there's plenty to learn, the things that we can say, and here is what we learned from this episode, we kind of started repeating ourselves, you know, after 15, 12, 15 episodes. It was kind of like, there were strong themes that are throughout each episode

and it turns out they're in each episode. Yeah, yeah. They knew what they were doing yeah they knew how to write tv so here we go throughout i think for both of us throughout this whole time we were just kind of like we'll just keep doing this until until it fizzles out right and now i'm i think we're both like well we'll just keep doing this until we're done with rockford right right we're over we're well over the tipping point where it's like, it would be a shame for us not to just at least get like do the entire show.

Yeah, why not? And there are definitely episodes I still look forward to. I'm still surprised by episodes. Like the one that we're going to record, the episode that we're going to talk about for our next main episode, I came away being like, I, that was great. And I did not remember this episode and i am so

impressed i think i had maybe finished watching them all and then told you you should watch the rockford files right i just have like a really bad memory for uh my consumption of media so like i will forget entire episodes and then we start watching it and be like, something's very familiar about what's happening here. And it's only like a decade ago when I saw it, but it has been at least a decade since I saw it. So I guess there's lots of changed over that time.

Yeah, and once we started doing the show, I stopped watching the show for fun. Right. Because I wanted to be fresh. Yeah, exactly. For talking about the episodes, which, you know, I guess sounds a little bad. Like I stopped watching it for fun, but like the value add of waiting and watching the episode to do for our show and then talking about it with you.

Yeah. That is more fun than just sitting down and watching an episode just by itself. TV can be fairly passively consumed if you if you want like we talked a little bit about how like sometimes you have like a uh repetitive piece of work to do so it's time to turn on you know something comfortable yeah in the background and just have that running so you can distract yourself a little bit while you're doing this it's like uh when i was packing so we did this move out to washington in the last year and all my my packing show was all the star trek movies i just started from the beginning and just you know star trek

the motion picture get it going and i can have that on while i pack boxes i i almost use star trek as my example of uh just just a background comfort thing it's a great yeah it's great but yeah so uh i don't know if i had like a point to any of this other than to say like it's it's fun that like the other day i was um with a group of people uh in the context of role-playing playing a role-playing game uh oh, yes, it's with a friend of the show, Sam. He and I were in a role-playing game. I was fairly new to some of the people in the group, not everyone, but we were doing introductions. And I just introduced myself as a Rockford Files podcaster.

And I guess it's a thing where I don't – I did it as a joke. But, I mean, I am, I'm a rocker. Right, right. Like I've been doing this not as long as I've been writing role-playing games, but like six years. Longer than I've done a lot of other things. Yeah, exactly. So it's been really cool to see that the show, you know, has those legs and finds the new people. When people are like, oh, I found the show.

I'm starting from the beginning. I do do the, the podcaster cringe where it's like, Ooh, those first few episodes are a little rough. Um, Oh boy. If you make it through those,

that's then, then it starts getting better. People have to know that like they, yeah. Yeah. And that's one reason I think we do try to be like, if you're a new listener and we'll fill in some background because we don't want to assume everyone's been listening not not not even for like the you know

the entire run of the show but even like there's stuff that comes up and i'm like i remember we talked about this 50 episodes ago we probably should give some context before we do a callback make make sure people are up on the meta plot that we have going in the background with our battle with the the sinister no i don't know the sinister forces yeah no i don't think we're i don't think we have the the bandwidth to like do a subtle fictional meta plot through our episodes we have found kind of areas of interest like there's stuff that we call out kind of that at least to me i'm like oh this isn't this is just an interesting thing to me now where it's like yeah uh like a lot of the david chase stuff where it's like oh here are roots of david chase's later

career as a as a showrunner and as a creator um which is i think you know if you're a if you're a soprano's head you know this is probably stuff that maybe you would know because you've gone back to see where that stuff started but it's interesting to me to see like oh all the stuff that he's kind of known for now here are seeds yes in this earlier work because he you know once he became a real force on the show um so there's you know some of that production stuff that i find interesting i i've also found that like i approach detective fiction more uh critically in a good way not like more critically in a like way um i don't know if that's gonna come through my little

but um so like it's it's it's caused me to enjoy other shows more because I think of like if I watch a show with like a mystery involved, it's always easy to enjoy a Columbo. It's always easy to enjoy. Just earlier, I was talking about the Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett, that sort of thing. But like just thinking about like, oh, this detective, what is it that this detective brings to the table? Right, right. Because I think about like how Jim is like he's an ex-con, was also a con man at some point, which like plays deeply into a lot of how he uh he's not it's not solving mysteries every time it's often you just need a person who's going to he's often solving problems yeah not necessarily a mystery yeah and sometimes the mystery is why is this a

problem right there's like a couple different threads there but i i like i just recently made this post on uh mastodon and i revised it right away uh where i was i made this joke about colombo where i said like uh every successful batman adventure is a unsuccessful colombo mystery uh and then i revised it to james bond every successful james bond mission is a because uh because bond villains tend to be these upper class they're the same class colombo villains are and then bond's solution to it is to kill a lot of people and colombo's solution is to just wear this person down and shame them into surrendering right and like i want to see colombo v Blofield because they like both sets of villains treat the hero of the story the same way.

They invite them into their home. They're like, yes, let me show off to you how good I am at what I do. And it will be very polite to each other in the beginning. And then, you know, I'm getting one over on you and you never do but it's bond you never do because bond's gonna kill you and in uh colombo you never do because eventually colombo's like he's always got that one more thing yeah no there's i think there's there's definitely something there with like what does this character bring to the table that i think has really been elevated my appreciation of it has really been elevated by doing the show there's like a couple elements there's the writing of the mystery or the writing

of the you know the script or whatever but in terms of a detective thing the plotting of it or whatever yeah yeah um like there's a lot of like structural like how does this work narratively that i have really internalized i think for a lot of stuff one of my games is a detect a two-player detective game that is modeled on colombo um primarily called one more thing uh done with my pal steven winchell and that was more inspired obviously by colombo but a lot of the writing in that game for the scenario writing of like how do these you know what is the story that leads to this being a mystery right a lot of that is definitely informed by like the plotting and the structural stuff from from rockford files um and i'm thinking about con games because

rockford files has a couple really great episodes that really walk you through how a con game works yes in a way that i find really really helpful but yeah but the other piece is like what is the personality of this detective and how does that flavor this story when they engage with that structured plot that you've you know that you're seeing unfold before you we respond to character we love characters so you know i think it's no it's no big insight to be like jessica fletcher is a great character and watching her do stuff is really fun colombo's a great character you know but those stories um kind of there's kind of a thing in the background of

like huh how would this go if like this was j instead? And that's kind of a fun thought experiment because you can see how it would go differently because of his personality and his skillset. The Rockford files have this advantage where they're not trapped in a murder mystery each time. Right, right, yeah. So what you get is you get like, how do people get themselves into a situation where they're going to need Rockford?

Right, yeah. Like those are thought out whereas like like an agatha christie mystery it's just like whatever everyone's motivated to kill everyone like like you the point of the whodunit agatha christie is that like we're just going to assume that the whoever the corpse is everyone else is not only interested in killing them, but emotionally capable of doing it. And we just have to figure out like, you know, kind of I've been watching a little bit more or rewatching some Midsommar murders recently, which is very much a play on the Agatha Christie model. on the Agatha Christie model. Yeah.

It's kind of a combo where it's the, you know, it's a CID detective, Tom and his sidekick going into the countryside to solve these horrible murders. And the joy of it is it's kind of a blend of all these things, right? Cause it's like, you see the murder,

but you don't see who did it. So it has like the Columbo intro, but it's not, the joy is not seeing him seeing the murderer give up right finally at the end it's it's the combo if we see the murder so we know what happened and then we discover why all these different people in the village would have wanted to kill him and that's that get the christy like parlor mystery element and then there's usually a sudden turn to action to go and stop them before they kill again or something like that.

Yes. And that actually is a little more Rockfordy where there's like speeding cars and running upstairs and, you know, trying to stop someone before it's too late. In this, in, in this household,

when we watch a murder mystery, we, we kind of classify them. We're like, we're like, is this, is this a series with a second body because there's some series where they'll have like the the murder and they'll

get really close and then somebody else will die and then you'll be like oh that changes everything but uh a revelation i had uh recently was that part of the and the way you said this like the joy of it uh made me think of it like part of the joy of these mystery shows. They're not murder mysteries. Murder mysteries are part of the larger Venn diagram that includes the Rockford Files and mysteries in general, but also just mysteries and problem solving, detective shows, let's just call it that, whatever. mysteries and problem solving detective shows let's just call it whatever part of the joy is that you get to at the end you get to witness the the protagonists punish the people that made their job difficult all along in some ways that plays out problematically because you're just like like especially if it's like a more cop-centric one where it's like uh here are people who did

some bad things because of their circumstances and now we're going to like whatever but like in in the rockford files sometimes the people that they make his job difficult are literally beating him up you know right or breaking through the front door of his trailer or whatever but like often like throughout there's just somebody who's trying to foil him or trying to, like, throw him off the case or whatever. And it makes his life a little bit more difficult. And then the end, he gets one up on him. The Rockford one up is often pretty close to a Pyrrhic victory. Like, he gets the thing, but he doesn't get any bonus reward for it.

Rarely does he even get paid for it like so many of the shows we watch it's not clear that he's he's just helping a friend out or something like that um but uh like colombo right like you watch a colombo thing and you're like here's somebody who's well colombo doesn't get frustrated with the person so you don't quite get that except when he does which is kind of like yeah wow you really yeah yeah you're really a bad a bad guy you you see him just turn all of the all of the murderers like traits against them well yeah with with with jim you you kind of see him like figure out how to get the drop and sometimes it's like a physical like he can surprise them in the

end before they do the final dirty deed but sometimes it's a he you know he makes himself vulnerable in order to turn the tables on the person who's coming after him he constructs his his way of getting getting one up is often a con a con game style yeah or the swell spoon where he like stirs things up a little bit so that uh like i don't i can't remember which one there's that one episode where he just he's like okay it's any one of these two or three people yeah yeah i'm just gonna call each of them up and blackmail them and whoever comes to murder me is clearly the murderer right it's just like i think that's the baseball one the one with um that introduces um um uh gabby wait i think no gabby is introduced oh yes yes yes yeah or it's like the baseball commissioner is yeah gets murdered because there's some oh no basketball

it's a basketball um yeah team that i don't know i don't remember the details but yes uh i i do remember that resolution where he's like yeah yeah there's like these three different people one's mobbed up one's like like like a rich person who has some financial interest and may have no morals and then i think the other one was also mobbed up but they're like two rival mobsters or something yeah yeah so he just like calls all three of them yeah and gives them the same time and place and just waits to see who shows up the uh one thing i really enjoy uh i guess both colombo and rockford do this but they do it in two different ways uh it like the shows show you the reason why your protagonist is the detective that they are like you can see that both of them like solving these puzzles colombo has an appreciation for

a well-crafted murder because it makes it uh and same thing with Rockford. It's not the same thing, right? Because it doesn't play out the same way. But with Rockford, you just occasionally get these glimpses of it. I think one of our favorites is where they faked Angel's death. And Rockford's like, oh, no, no. Okay, we're going to do this con. And he's super excited about it. And everyone else involved is like, wait, how do we end up winning with this?

It's just like. In the hands of a master, it's a thing of beauty. Yes, exactly. Or it's a beauty to watch, something like that. Yeah. So he appreciates the artistry, the craft that goes into his job. And it's not that that's absent from other fictions, but you could definitely have detectives that are just dead to it,

that, that are just, this is the only job that they have. And that's an interesting character as well. But like, I like how that stands out for Rockford. Yeah. I guess I would contrast that.

I think with, with, with Tom Barnaby from, from Midsommar Murders, where he, he's always going from like motive. So watching him work is him talking to people, deciding who he thinks is lying and who he thinks is telling the truth,

you know, looking at evidence, but usually in the name of discovering some element from the past that is, you know, being brought forward into, into the now. And that's, you know,

why the murder happened or whatever, but yeah, nothing. Those murders are usually not intricate they're usually very straightforward like this person was killed with a rake yeah yeah and just figuring out you know who so that's a whole element that's not in that show but what is in that show is this like prying delving into the past and analyzing people's um personality yeah in a way that you don't really get in you know definitely not in colombo and and it's different in the rockford files because jim is a keen observer of of human behavior yeah and sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't but to bring it back to the episode we're about to talk about we get to see a great moment of him bringing in his con background yes and also the whole dynamic with um with the co-star of the

with megan their whole dynamic really centers around like and she's a psychologist right so right they have a lot of sparring around like who knows more about people right yes yes and um i'm reminded of our previous episode which she's in we did the movie that she's in from the 90s uh the title of which punishment and crime uh punishment and crime that's right um the uh the scene where he goes i think it's this one where he he lays into someone no no i'm sorry i'm thinking of the episode that we're about to do where he goes he's trying to figure out if someone was responsible and just kind of like starts accusing them left and right just to see how they respond oh right right yeah yeah and that's another like part of like he's like okay if i if i go here and

i just start pushing yeah something something will happen if they respond this way then they're probably innocent that's fine then i can ignore them and then that's you know go on but like yeah um i don't know if i mean like i i can't turn off the analytical brain right narrative yeah but uh that that's our that's our problem that's our problem yeah that's why we do a podcast about it but i think this show and this podcast in particular has definitely honed that in in certain ways that um that goes far out into other other fictions uh like when i'm watching my sunday morning conan the adventurer cartoon or yeah yeah i think we we do you know talk about this from time to time in the context of an individual episode but i think part of part

of the proof to me that this show is worth talking about is the fact that we have been talking about it for this long. Yeah. And yet I still find something interesting or intriguing or new to talk about in most episodes. And I gain a richer appreciation of most episodes from talking about it. Yeah. And I think that's like the real function of like made the real function i think that's the like useful function of criticism right like we are kind of critics here we don't really frame ourselves like that but what we're doing is tv criticism analysis of

some sort yeah talking about it getting into how it works how it doesn't work that kind of stuff but the output of that is you know hopefully an entertaining show for you, the listener. But also I feel like I understand these stories better because we talk about them in a rigorous way. And so that's why it all keeps working for me, I guess. Perhaps on that note, we should move on to our main episode. Sure. Yeah.

At the risk of this being long, as long as one of our main episodes. But yeah, on our way out, I will just reiterate, if you want to check out a shirt and design.com slash Rockford. And if you want to check out the Patreon, that's patreon.com slash 200 a day.

Patrons will also get some discounts on the shirts, so you could, you know, potentially double dip on our promotional stuff if you want to check out the Patreon in the next month. Yeah, it starts at $1 an episode. You have this second show

that you get in your feed with the main show and also episode previews every month um edit access to the 200 a day files files where you can add your own notes and thoughts to the episodes in a spreadsheet i do check it not as much as i should and but when i do there's usually something interesting that i can be like oh this is the car that we're talking about because we're not car guys but people who edit our spreadsheet are car guys or car people. Somebody's a car person out there.

And then we also, at higher levels, we include you in the Gumshoe Read. We do a shout-out to your project or your social media. And, yeah, just really appreciate all the support. And you know what? We also appreciate just listening and enjoying the show. You don't need to buy anything we get it it's fine um but if you want to that's what we got for you i believe as you said we only need what eight shirts a day to get our 200 yeah we just need to sell eight

shirts a day so let's let's get on it as is tradition for plus expenses we don't have any way to end it so we just kind of say let's yeah i guess we're done now