Wonderful! - Wonderful! 315: Popcorn Plausible Deniability

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

Griffin's favorite grid-based logic game! Rachel's favorite 57% life-accurate poet! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya The Marsha P. Johnson Institute https://marshap.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

hi this is rachel mcelroy hi this is griffin mcelroy and this is wonderful it's a podcast where we talk about things we like that's good that we're into. Now let's break that down. What is podcast? Thank you for asking that. It's radio on demand. You get it on your iPod by plugging it into an Ethernet port. You know, our listeners come to us for definitions of words. And I appreciate that you're starting with one that is the thing they're listening to. A lot of the time, though, when I explain to a family what a podcast is, they don't know. And so... It's such an embarrassing word.

It really is. I'm so glad that you've finally broke the seal on this. I still refuse to say that I do it when i meet people that is true rachel is so clandestine about this endeavor and it's not that you're in you're embarrassed a little if i'm honest is it just the word if it was called something else online telecast tele tele broadcast oh i don't know i don't know i think creating anything original is a little embarrassing that's that's an incredible sentiment for me to share on this show i i i don't know i don't know if there's anything you could call it that would make me talk about it proudly here on wonderful we we are enthusiasts about lots of

different things but if you ask us to make anything that is so cringe i think for me it is the pod part of it because i think the etymology of that is from an ipod and i don't like clink clink what's that sound it's the brand cuffs that now i've got on. People say, so you're an Apple employee. And I say, yes, I am. Maybe a Zune cast. Can we get that going? Something a little bit more. An MP3 program.

I'm an MP3. I'm a comedy programmer. Yeah, there's no way to do it. There's just not a good way. I've been workshopping it for nigh on 14 years now. There will be times when you and I have performed together on a stage, but when I come home and people ask what I have done, I will say my husband did a show.

Yeah, that's something that you personally, I feel like, need to unpack. I know. I got to figure that out. Do you have any small wonders for the audience to hear now? I'm going to say chocolate covered raisins. Yeah. Again, you're not going to say raisinets because of the brand cuffs. I like raisins.

I mean, period. I used to get them in my lunch in the little boxes and I used to eat them happily. I like a raisin. Yeah. Put chocolate on it now all of a sudden it's okay for everybody and i can admit it yes the jammer we like to munch on when we are feeling particularly naughty is raisinets and some popcorn and you can get them both in your mouth at the same time every textural beat one could ask of food

is delivered in this crunchy, chewy, chocolatey treat. This is something you introduced to me. Do you remember how you found it? No. Accident? Was it a happy accident? Have you seen other people do this? No.

Oh, you're asking me? I thought you knew how I discovered this. No. No, I mean, it just makes sense, doesn't it? I probably did it. I mean, I did some stuff with popcorn while I was working at the movie theater in Huntington. That's true. That's true.

Because they would let you take it all home, whatever didn't get sold. Instead of just throwing it away, you could take home whatever you wanted, which me, I lived around the corner from the movie theater, so I'd just get a big, clean garbage bag, fill it with popcorn take it home sometimes we dump like a whole bottle of nutella in there shake it on up and then get pretty high that part that's so sloppy how would you eat it yeah you don't want to know isn't it better to have plausible deniability in your mind okay i'm gonna picture you with a bowl and a spoon like ice cream that's exactly okay right i definitely didn't eat it out of the garbage bag with my hands like a bear

having the best day of his fucking life um what's your small wonder i mean look i'm not proud of it i'm not proud of it but we have dipped into love is blind season six on netflix um i will say that show left me out in the cold last season did not enjoy it uh it was a clusterfuck for so many reasons i think by the time like the they got out of the like honeymoon phase there were only two couples remaining and that ain't And that ain't good. That ain't good TV, no matter what. Yeah, I feel like scientists should study this show. Because every season we start it,

I'm like, this show is weird. The premise is crazy. I don't like it. I don't understand it. And then I will have watched three episodes and I will be hungrily into the fourth. What happened in between me now and me then? It's such a rich vein. it and then i will have watched three episodes and i will be hungrily into the fourth like what happened in between me now and me then it's such a rich vein i feel this way about the circle which

i believe is coming back next month and i'm very much looking forward to of all the like netflix reality like shows that uh that they make i feel like the circle is the the sort of purest form of what i like it's a game which i which i do enjoy uh but there is something about uh talking to someone without being able to see them and the like tremendous amount of i don't know imagined social cues that come out of that that is like infinitely fascinating and and for the circle, like that's it. That's the whole kit and caboodle. Love is blind. Obviously, like you mix in the romance dating side of things into that.

It's such a demonstration of like projection. Yeah. This idea that you can talk to somebody for a little bit and you can envision this perfect match for yourself. Right. Based on these conversations. Like it's unreal i'm not feeling confident about the hit rate of this season so far we're about three or four episodes in not sure that i've seen sparks fly that could be a testament to a long-lasting beautiful love

a little headline come up when i was scrolling that suggested there is a contestant on there that actually is in a relationship already uh-oh prior to visiting yeah oh i don't know if it's true or not um but yeah we've been enjoying that survivor comes back this week our cup is about to run a thower in a way that i yeah i'm very much looking forward to i go first this week okay i got mind sweeper i'm gonna do mind sweeper i'd love to talk to you about this yeah rachel caught me playing minesweeper on my phone over the weekend it was a big board y'all okay i mean not that big i guess it's all like a matter of perspective but you know it's like a 12 by 24 i play you know um portrait mode and so i like to have a tall a tall board something like 48 50 mines in there or something like that yeah that's for me like i don't i maybe there's like a secret or like tips and tricks that you were

going to reveal to me and i'm going to understand how people do it better do mine super better because i just i feel like there is a certain point in every game usually pretty early on for me where i'm just guessing. Just like, fuck it, and click around. When you take out one of them big chunks with one click, that feels really, really good. Sometimes I'll just quick restart until I can get a big nasty chunk that I can then build off of. If you kind of grew up in the era that we did where there was sort of like the proliferation of like personal computers, certainly that had like started by the time I was born. But you didn't get like Windows in every home until, you know, I was a child already.

And I'm not sure if you sort of had the same thing. I know your grandma was very, very much into computers. But you guys had a PC at home growing up, right? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like folks of our era have a certain fondness for all of the freeware games that were included with certain versions of Windows. I could go on and on about 3D Pinball for Windows Space Cadet. That's one. Yeah.

That's the title of one game. Or Jez Ball or Ski Free. And in fact, I may still do those as individual segments. But today I'm going to talk about Minesweeper, which is very much in the sort of like OG set of Microsoft games. Minesweeper, if you've never played it it is a numerical puzzle game where you're presented with a large grid of blank tiles, some of which are secretly mines that if you click on them, you get a game

over instantly. If you click on a safe tile, one of a couple things can happen either it will show you a number, and that number illustrates how many of the eight adjacent tiles surrounding that tile contain mines. Or if it isn't touching any mines, it'll show up as empty and then it will automatically

open up the nearest tiles until it reaches numbers. That's pretty much it. That's pretty much the whole game. You click around, you check the numbers, and you try to deduce which of the adjacent tiles to that number contain mines. once you've revealed like every safe tile the game is one i used to play it when i was a child very much in the like click oh one this must be a good spot for me to just explore and settle down and i'm gonna click all around that or click five no fucking way i'm getting out of here man i don't want to be anywhere near the five zone uh and that was i don't think i ever won minesweeper like once even in my life unless you like set the board huge and

you make it so that there's only five tiles of five mines in it and then you click it and it just like instantly wins the game because it automatically opens it all up. My algorithm recently fed me a video about Minesweeper speed running, which should come as no surprise to you or anyone who listens to the show that that is the kind of, that's how my algorithms got me. It's weird. I've never gotten pushed that. Yeah. It's so strange that our algorithms are so distinct. I saw that video. I thought, hey, I wonder if I can beat Minesweeper now. And the answer is yes, I can. The game, when you play it like properly, when you meet Minesweeper on its terms, it really reminds me of Sudoku, where things sort of lock into place and chain together

in a way that is very methodical and very, very, very satisfying. So, like, you open up a few tiles until you figure out where the first mine is and you plant a flag on it. And you go, okay, well, that mine is touching a one tile, which means that that one tile's, like, one mine is spoken for. All the other tiles touching that one are safe. So you click through to that until you can go, okay, ooh, that opened up another one tile that's touching that mine, so let's clear around that. Oh, that opened up a two tile. Well, this is the only other free tile, so there must be a mine there. And then you just keep on going and going and going and going until the whole board is clear.

Sometimes you'll lock yourself into a situation where there's like two blank tiles left and you have no clue as to which one is going to be the mine and which one is safe. And you just kind of have to flip a coin and guess, which is always frustrating to lose a game to that. But it works in a manner that is very much logical and very, very satisfying to kind of creep through and complete. And I don't know, I have found that it fits into, you know, a few minutes of my day

where I don't have much else to do. I just got Minesweeper on my phone. I can crack it open, see if I can do, you know, a board that's a little bit bigger or a board with a few more bombs in it. And I've been really kind of enjoying it. It is scratching a real itch for me in a way that is not like, I don don't know not the most challenging game in the world because you're just kind of like working off of numbers uh but it's very very rewarding when you get a big a big board clear um so minesweeper first gained acclaim after it was released as part of the microsoft entertainment pack one in 1990 when windows first came out,

it didn't have like a bunch of bundled games. You had to buy these entertainment packs, each of which would contain like seven or eight games. And later they would sort of pick the best ones from those and include them in future editions. Like Minesweeper from Windows 3.1 on was just included with each Windows install. Like Ski Free was in these entertainment packs,

Jez Ball, a lot of the stuff that i've already mentioned um and so like if you sat down at a computer that had windows on it at a certain point you knew at the very least this computer can do minesweeper and it can do free sell and it can do all of these different sorts of of games that were just sort of like bog standard included with Windows. Yeah. Which was always very exciting. Like my mom was a secretary at the church that we grew up going to. And there were days where I would just kind of be stuck at the church with her until she was like done doing whatever she was doing.

And we could go home. And I could just sit at one of the computers in one of the offices. the computers in one of the offices you know i could sit at the uh the minister of music's computer if he wasn't working sit down bust open some some ski free and just go for it play some play some mind sweeper and that was always really uh i don't know nice to have that kind of consistency in my life uh mind sweeper was preceded by a game called mind Out, which came out in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum, which was a very, very proto sort of PC machine. Kurt Johnson was the creator of Microsoft Minesweeper, and he admitted that Minesweeper was inspired by another very similar title, but that it wasn't Mind Out for the ZX Spectrum

and that he didn't remember the name of the game that inspired it. So the history of minesweeper is a bit mysterious you would think you would remember that if you developed an entire fucking game yeah yeah yeah based on another game you would remember the name of that game um a lot of versions of minesweeper that have been released like this century have substituted mines for like flowers due to the fact that landmines are pretty horrific uh and responsible for some uh some atrocities to this day in fact when you google minesweeper it generates like a playable version in google uh that is much more floral uh in nature um i'm glad that i

returned to mine too because it is it is genuinely a fun and surprisingly sort of chill game that I can kind of slot into my day. But it is also nice going back to this like, you know, unconquerable beast from my childhood and kind of realizing like, oh, there is actually – there is a path through this. There are rules to this that can be understood and sort of, you know, mastered. can be understood and sort of mastered. And I don't know, that is cool to be able to have something from my childhood like that that I'm able to sort of revisit and enjoy. I think you would be good at Minesweeper. I think if you took a swing at it.

I can see, and in the same way that I like to do Sudoku on a plane, I could see myself choosing it if I am- If you have nothing else. yeah yeah if you are stuck at your mom's church computer if i have like no books i can't watch anything right i can't listen to anything yeah then maybe yeah sweeper yeah that's the that's and that's the tagline if there's nothing else maybe mine sweeper can i steal you away yes i'm emily fleming and i'm jordan morris we're real comedy writers and real friends and real fucking cheapskates we say why subscribe to expensive streaming services when you can stream tons of insane movies online for free?

As long as you're fine with 25 randomly inserted super loud car insurance commercials. On our new podcast, Free With Ads, we review streaming movies from the darkest corner of the internet's bargain bin. From the good to the weird to the holy shit, look at Jean-Claude Van Damme's big old butt. Free with ads. A free podcast about free movies that's worth the price of admission. Every Tuesday on MaximumFun.org or your favorite pod spot. Hello, everyone out there. Thank you for coming to our service.

Yes. We are coming to our service. Yes. We are ready to heal you. We are Ross and Carrie. We are faith healers. Yes, you there. Yes, sir. You have a spirit of... Not listening to enough podcasts.

We have the solution for that. Oh, we can cure you. You should listen to Oh No Ross and Carrie. Hallelujah. It's on Maximum Fun. I couldn't have said it better myself. Yes, ma'am. Yes, you there.

Gladys. A spirit of boredom? Oh my goodness. We have the solution for you. It is to listen to the podcast. Oh No Ross and Carrie. What do you got? I have a trip to the poetry corner.

I was so hoping. Uh-huh. He kind of went away. He was running down a tunnel as he was singing the song he's got places to be he's busy yeah and you know to be fair i didn't warn him that the poetry corner was coming that's true he's gotta warm up the instrument it's like i have a pre-existing appointment right i'll give you five seconds and then i literally have to run out the door uh the poet i am going to talk about this week is David Hernandez.

If you Google David Hernandez poet, you will realize there are multiple poets named David Hernandez. That's amazing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as it is a very common name next to a very common name. Right. But the David Hernandez I am talking about this week was born in 1971 and lives in California. That should hopefully narrow it down. Google 1971 California David Hernandez poet and you're going to get where you need to go. State University, Long Beach. He is married to a writer, Lisa Glatt, and he has several collections of poetry as well as young adult fiction.

Oh, cool. Which looks really good, but I am here to talk about- This isn't the young adult fiction corner. You got plenty of other choices for shows to go to. This is the poems one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He has a bunch of collections of poetry.

The most recent one just came out in March 2022 called Hello, I Must Be Going, colon poems. Did you get that reference? Yes, but I don't know from what. I don't know if this is the reference. I haven't read an interview, but it's a Groucho Marx song from a Marsh Brothers movie. Then that's probably why I get it, through osmosis. It might be genetic from my dad that I understand that reference.

And I wanted to read one of his poems. This poem is called All American. It is from his poetry book, Dear Sincerely, which came out in 2016. I'm this tiny, this statuesque, and everywhere in between, and everywhere in between bony and overweight. My shadow cannot hold one shape in Omaha and Tuscaloosa and Aberdeen. My skin is mocha brown, two shades darker than taupe. Your question is racist, nutmeg, beige. I'm not offended by your question at all. Penis or vagina? Yes and yes. Gay or straight? Both boxes. Buy, not buy. Who cares? Stop fixating on my sex life. Jesus never leveled his eye to a bedroom's keyhole. I go to church in Tempe in Waco, the one with the exquisite stained glass,

the one with a white spire like the tip of a clansman's hood. Churches creep me out, I never step inside one, never utter hymns. Sundays I hide my flesh with camouflage and hunt. I don't hunt, but wish every deer wore a bulletproof vest and fired back. It's cinnamon, my skin. It's more sandstone than any color I know. I voted for Obama, McCain, Nader. I was too apathetic to vote, too lazy to walk one block, two blocks to the voting booth.

For or against a woman's right to choose? Yes, for and against. For waterboarding, for strapping detainees with snorkels and diving masks, against burning fossil fuels, let's punish all those smokestacks for eating the ozone, bring the wrecking balls, but build more smokestacks. We need jobs here in Harrisburg, here in Kalamazoo. Against gun control for cotton bullets, for constructing a better fence along the border. Let's raise concrete towards the sky. Why does it need all that space to begin with? For creating holes in the fence, adding ladders. They're not here to steal work from us. No one dreams of crab walking for hours across a lettuce

field so someone could order the Caesar salad. No one dreams of sliding a squeegee down the cloud mirrored windows of a high rise, but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers. Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefully steer a mower around the cemetery grounds. Some of us paint houses. Some of us monitor the power grid. Some of us ring you up while some of us crisscross a parking lot to gather the shopping carts into one long rolling clamorous and glittering backbone jesus a lot of stuff in there there's a lot of really really good i honestly my mind kind of like went blank after jesus never leveled his eye to a bedroom keyhole like that hit me that hit me so

fucking right and my brain was like let's sit with that and then you kept saying dope stuff i was like wait i gotta keep i gotta keep on rolling yeah i i really like i feel like this poem should be in a time capsule no kidding like it it is such a good representation of like the time that we are living in now. Well, what's wild is you said the book came out in 2016. Was that pre-election 2016 or post-election 2016? I don't know. shit got so so bad like was already such a like wild and disillusioning and exhausting year just with the election cycle that we're in and i think that it feels like that poem speaks to a lot of that kind of like uh came out march 2016 okay that that feeling of like

wild disenfranchisement that came from that whole year really uh i don't know obviously it speaks to an experience uh that i do not uh you know that i have not lived but it is it is wild to me that poem came out in in the year that i did yeah i i really i like i mean i like list listy poems you know especially if they're exploring a lot in that list, which I think is exactly what he's doing. Right. And yeah, I just I feel like it's a big task to undertake to write a poem called All American and to try and cover a lot of ground and do it in a way that feels unique. And that's exactly what he did yeah um i found an interview with him from 2017 uh it's an interview that was in uh the rumpus and it's uh talking to him

right after or shortly after that book dear sincerely came out that the poem is from and he said uh david hernandez said my poems are partially autobiographical to put a percentage on it 57.4 percent honestly it depends from poem to poem some are more informed by events in my life while others are less so here's the thing when i'm writing a poem that's based on an experience from memory, I don't feel beholden to the facts. That's the job of journalists. I'm more concerned about conveying an emotional truth with making art through

language. If the poem's telling me, look, I know you had bananas this morning in your cereal, but blueberries is sonically more interesting. I'm going with blueberries. That's really good. I feel like that's that's like a nice uh i don't know a nice touch point when you think about the poem i just read

of just like his willingness to to just double down on this idea that that he is both sides he is everything he's right and yeah uh and to feel okay about that even though like as a country we are so strongly divided on a lot of those things you talked about. Yeah, of course. So yeah, David Hernand is a poet I just found. I'm excited that he has so many collections. Yeah. And I wanted to share them.

Well, thank you. It's always a delight to be in the corner. I actually left my keys here last time. Oh, you just found them. I just found them, yeah. Great. It's been a couple months. Now you can finally leave the poetry house. That's true. Yeah, I tried. I have been captive

here for a while. Gosh, does that make sense? Would there be a poetry corner in a poetry house? No. What would the house be? The house is love. Oh. The house is love. Oh. The house is us. Can I tell you what our friends at home are talking about?

Yes. Got one here from Miss B from NKC who says, My small wonder is my students trying to read Romeo and Juliet with as many accents as they can try. Cowboy Tybalt is my favorite. That is very, very good. That's fantastic. favorite that is very very good that's fantastic uh i got another one here from uh will who says my small wonder is when rachel mentions anything from our hometown of webster groves i graduated in 2005 around the same age as griffin yep exactly the same it sounds like uh so i usually recognize her ultra local references i had dane williams as a band teacher at Steger, which no longer exists, and as a

guitar teacher at the high school. I haven't been able to go to any live shows, but any general STL culture is great, too. Oh, that's awesome. Thank you for reading that one to me. Yeah. Yeah, 2005, we wouldn't have crossed paths at any point. No. But you obviously would have had pretty much

the exact same experience I did. Sounds like it. That's cool uh thank you to bowen and augustus for these for theme song money won't pay you'll find a link to that in the episode description and thank you to maximum fun for having us on the network max fun drive is coming up uh very soon in march we have some exciting stuff to share with you later on wait i genuinely am so stoked for this max fun drive we We have done some truly wild Boko for you this year, and I cannot wait to talk more about it. We have some merch over at MacRoyMerch.com, and it's almost March, which means we're going to be deploying even more new merch there. So check it out now.

Sometimes it rains in Trap Nation. Sure, I adore some fungalore stuff up in there too. And again, more coming down the pipe. That's it for this week's episode of Wonderful. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Wonderful. And we hope you'll join us for next week's episode. This was an episode that we created that was called Wonderful. And now it's, as we say in the podcasting

business, in the can. Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it. Money won't pay. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows.

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