Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2019-09-17

Hello everybody this is Shane Arman row you’re in the passenger seat with me passenger seat radio. September 17 2019 year on my 13 mile commute home actually going home Welcome to the show. So it’s Tuesday. Day two of the week is down three more to go. nothing going on except for I think I just remembered I’ve got plans on the weekend No. Meeting the in laws for dinner or something. I think I have to I don’t know if I have to drive to Tucson or not. I don’t I don’t remember for meeting halfway or what. Just take the day out of the equation, I suppose. That’s okay, whatever. Whatever whatever. You get a bonus show today. I had a handful of topics that were left behind from yesterday, and I thought why not. I’ve got a nice straight shot to get home. I I’ve already spoken with my wife, which doesn’t mean anything. She could call it anytime I could get a random guy even spoke with with major pickle already, so he probably won’t call him the middle of the show. He’s actually listening to yesterday’s show. So with any luck, we’ll have a nice quiet show. That being said, Let me pull up my topic list here. Okay, so let’s I mentioned talking about Overwatch. And as you guys know, I’ve been I originally started out very cold to Overwatch. I didn’t, I didn’t get it. I often equate Overwatch to those 3d pictures. Remember those from like the 90s the academy they were called realize or realized 3d. There were those weird abstract pattern pictures if you stare at them, just right and you crush your eyes a little bit. Suddenly you see something. Right. You see in the beginning, I didn’t know what I was supposed to see. When I think a 3d I think of something stepping out of the page of me but it turns out You’re actually seeing are things that are sunken in to the picture in 3d. But, you know, I didn’t get those right away and everyone’s like, Oh my god, oh my god, I see it. I see it. I’m gonna I don’t see anything you know, and everyone’s you know, it’s like mall rats right? Everyone thinks that everyone sees the sailboat but this one poor guy and he thinks everyone’s making it up. But Overwatch was so popular and I had friends that were playing it. And I was like, Yeah, I guess I’ll try it. Why not? So I tried it. I like I just I don’t like it. I I like a call of duty. Hey, Travis, what’s up, man? I like Call of Duty. I like running gun shooting. And so of course Overwatch is very team objective based and it’s all about team composition and you can’t with them. It’s a Christmas miracle. Yeah, two days in a row. So with Overwatch, you can’t play hero right? You got to play as a team and you find out very quickly if you’re not playing It team or if you’re not playing a good team composition you tend to get your ass kicked because the other team probably is. Now you might get lucky. And the other team might be a bunch of you know running gun solo slop assholes. And they they play the same shitty way you are And they just becomes a matter of hell Bruce Willis in it becomes a matter of you know, who just happens to get lucky or who happens to have an extra friend online that might be playing with him. But somewhere like a year later, so I dropped out in like six or eight months later, I was like, now give it another try and give it another try. So I got in and just like those 3d pictures when you see him for the first time, it’s like, Oh, I get it. I understand why Overwatch kicks ass. This is awesome. And so since then, there’s been this you know, mostly on sometimes off again, relationship with Overwatch where it’s like, you get burned out, use play and play and play and play three hours a night, three hours a night, six hours a night on the weekend. Bye bye. Blah, blah, blah. And next thing you know, it’s like, I just I can’t play any more Overwatch and so some new solo adventure comes out like you know Assassin’s Creed Odyssey or origins or you know Far Cry five, something comes out and you go and you give yourself a break. You play this. You play this solo game for a little while and then you know the call Overwatch comes back and you slip back that old glove queued up your favorite hero. And next thing you know, you’re hooked on it again for another two or three months and then you take a break. Well, we recently got back into it, probably about a month and a half ago, things started picking back up and everyone was sort of playing it again. And then they introduced something called a role cue. And it was a beta thing, right? So if you were to go into competitive mode, the role q existed in there were essentially there’s a team composition of 16 Characters Borderlands I can I can talk about Borderlands in a minute. So you’re forced every team should really be composed of two of each class of character two tanks to damage and to support right those are the three main classes and in Overwatch and for good proper team composition you really need to have roughly two of each you can get away sometimes with one of each you ever really crack squad but Blizzard sort of understood the concept that team composition is so important we almost have to force the users into doing it because let’s be honest, if you are a very strong support character a very strong tank character you go in and everybody’s playing damage nobody’s playing support you have no healer right? That’s where that you know all these means come from I needed we need a healer we need a healer. We need a healer. Well, now pretty much with Roll queues, you can’t have a team without a healer, or a support person that can probably heal. So in reality, it seemed to sort of it seemed to sort of make sense that, you know, roll Q is a good thing. So they rolled it into beta, and we were playing around with it. And it didn’t get rolled into quick play. It was only it was only for like competitive modes and special modes. And it’s like, Okay, this is kind of cool. It sort of forces a good team composition, or at least the framework of a good team composition. The other problem that you know, if you’re, if you’re a longtime Overwatch player, or you play a lot, is that people will often change out of critical classes of characters or critical roles. And you’ll think that, you know, you start the game with a particular team composition, and it’s like, yes, this is going to work out we’ve got a nice well balanced team will soon When somebody gets their ass kicked two or three times they flip out of the character that they’re in. Now, you still think you have a mercy or you still think you haven’t Orissa. And so you’re going is Bastion, or somebody who really needs in a reserve shield character, and they’re not there anymore. And it’s like, damn it, you know, you shouldn’t be able to do that you shouldn’t be able to, like, you know, screw up the team composition. So that’s what this whole roll q thing is, you’re locked into your class. So if you want to change from a resident diva, if you want to change from, you know from soldier 76 to Reaper, or you want to change from mercy to Moira, you can do that right, you can stay within your own class and still change characters throughout the match. So that’s how you compensate for a team composition matchup failure. I talk a good game, but I’m still not that great at Overwatch. So the role cue seemed like a good idea. They rolled the roll cue into quick play. So now quick play. which used to be sort of Lucy goosey non competitive you know just fun play just fun quick play not competitive not getting ratings not getting rated you know these you know it’s not like there’s a bloodbath going on it’s quick play it’s supposed to be fun supposed to be you know kind of laid back play well then they move roll Q into that and of course everybody’s all pissed off email key This sucks This sucks. I don’t like being stuck in class I man. But that wasn’t that didn’t bother me. I’m okay sticking within a class but something happened. As a result. Hey, there’s Javier just in time for me to bitch about role QY not role qubit about Overwatch. Something happened with the introduction of role q that completely broke matchmaking in Overwatch. So, for those of you who may not be familiar with just this sort of multiplayer gaming in general, I can’t believe anybody who listens to this show. would not have an idea what’s going on. But the basic idea is that matchmaking is supposed to match up people from different skill sets different experience levels, put them on fair and balanced teams, where the end of the match isn’t a slaughter fest. Right? So the best games that you’ll play an overwatch or any multiplayer game are games that are close, right? If you’re playing Team Deathmatch and Call of Duty, and it turns out to be 200 to 10 that’s a shitty matchmaking job right? They they put people who are way too experienced and way too good with people who weren’t Overwatch is is a blizzard in general is renowned for having excellent role matchmaking algorithms. Role q completely fucked this up somehow. And they don’t give me the impression of even acknowledging the problem, or I mean, people are bitching about it constantly. And yet I don’t see anybody talking about how they’re going to fix it. So what happens when you have shitty matchmaking is you go in and either you absolutely slaughter the enemy team, or you get absolutely slaughtered. And listen, when you’re the one doing the slaughtering. It’s fun for a round or two. It’s a Yeah, right. Look at all this experience points for gold medals. Well, that’s like, you know, this is kind of sad. They really, they really, really fucked everybody up with this whole. They fucked everybody up with this. And when you’re playing the slaughtering team, you start feeling you feel bad, you feel actually bad about that sort of level of slaughtering, just like you feel like shit when you get slaughtered. But in this case, you feel bad for the enemy team. What’s Javier saying? That a reset on the matchmaking I’ve been trying to address it, but it looks like the board. Yeah, it’s boring man. And I’ll tell you what, there was a period of time recently that I wanted the fuck out of Overwatch. I never wanted to play it again. It was that it was that discouraging. I mean, I wouldn’t get on Hey, Brian hope I would get on. And listen, I’m an average player at best I can do okay, in tanks. I’m actually decently rated as a support role. But as an average player, I should have a win loss ratio that’s, you know, pretty close to 5050. Right? Guess what? bash it’s been out the window. I have had like 10 rounds in a row last. And that’s not staying with the same group of people for 10 rounds that’s going to the you know, getting out of the game going back and getting slaughtered getting out of that group going back in getting slaughtered. And it used to be the more of your own team that you had, even if You are just a bunch of average Joes which aside from my son, who’s this Reaper maniac, most of us are fairly average maybe a little above maybe a little below which makes us a really good average team we shouldn’t do pretty well. Overall we should do an average 5050 win loss ratio. But lately it has been even if you have five Randalls with you or five other teammates with you that you play with constantly, it is so unbalanced it makes you ill and makes you want to just throw your controller or throw your mouse and it’s disgusting. You know, we get we get getting put into groups where there are these mouse using Korean Ganges. Literally, you can’t hit them. You can’t kill them, and they kill you instantly. The second that they see you and they come after you you are up, you’re marked as dead. You’re dead man walking. You can’t stop it. There’s no shield you can use. There’s no there’s no tactics you can use The Ganges will kill you the second he sees you, and comes after you. There’s no fun in that that game is not fun at all, that Ganji should have an opposing team Ganji. That’s just as bad as as he is. That No, it’s disgusting. It’s really is disgusting. But here’s something interesting that I realized. And take this for what it’s worth, I actually started having a little bit more fun once I realized this. So first off, there is a non role cue version of quick play that sits in the arcade. So instead of going to quick play, you go to the arcade and you can play the standard six v six with no role cue. So that’s the first thing if you don’t want to be in the role queue, then you can go play there. Of course, guess what, nobody’s playing there. Everyone’s playing quick play. They’ll they’ll sit there and bitch about the role queue but that’s they’ll still stay there and not go to the arcade and play without the role cue right? So that’s where all the games are. They’re quick play, whether they like it or not, they’re in there. So you have to sit and skirmish for eight to 10 minutes to get a game outside of playing with role q. So what does that leave you? All right, so it’s either you’re playing quick play and you get slaughtered or get this. You would think that by going to competitive play, it would be a slaughter Fest, right? Because let’s be honest, I’m an average player. You know people who are playing competitive those guys are way the hell too serious. They’re very very worried about their stats. They’re worried about their win loss if you’re not on a headset communicating with them constantly throughout the game they be rate you they say terrible things about you. You shouldn’t be in competitive play if you don’t have a mic, dude. Come on, bro. He You shouldn’t have a controller and competitive play man. Go back to quick play, man. Yeah, that’s that’s the sort of normal shipping you get in a competitive environment. Lately, it seems like people are figuring out that competitive play is where it’s almost fair. And I got this finally figured out why. So, the majority people landing quick play, right? It’s the first menu item. It’s where you default to. It’s where the newbies are going to go. It’s where the new people are going to go. It’s it’s the most common played mode. But does that mean you’re going to get a wider disparity of players skill sets within quick play? Now you go to competitive mode. Yes, some of those people in their assholes. Yes, some of those people think Overwatch is the most important thing ever. And Heaven forbid you tread in their game and don’t perform and do your job. They will. They will be right you mercilessly. Yes, there are people in there. But I will also tell you what some of the most fun I’ve had an Overwatch is in competitive play mode, which is nuts because I stay the fuck out of there. I don’t want to be ratings. I’m not that great of a player. I don’t belong in competitive mode. But I’ll tell you right now the matchmaking for whatever reason, I don’t know if it’s because there’s an algorithmic difference or whatever, but the people who play in competitive mode typically are more seasoned, better balanced players. And with the role Q, taking those better players, and putting them into their specialty skill set, the matches tend to be more fair, they tend to be more equitable. The, the skirmish time is lower than if you were to if you were to go and play in the arcade version. Right, yeah. So yeah, so Javier saying that competitive seems more squared away And right now, definitely it is. And he says he turns off comms to anybody who you don’t know. Yeah, so that’s usually My plan of attack to, but I have to tell you that the toxicity in competitive play seems to have dropped off. I’ve met some really good people, some good solid team members even made friends and added added each other to our friends list in competitive play, so I tend to, if possible, right? So I don’t get to do comms very often because my wife so she’s watching TV. I’ve got noise going on, whatever. So I don’t tend to have comms on a lot even when I’m playing with my friends. But if I have the opportunity, I will turn them on even with random even with non friends. Because it seems to be better the toxicity seemed yet Listen, there’s assholes, of course, but you mute them and you move on and you work with the rest of your teammates. So anyway, I didn’t mean to go on and on about this, but I sort of had this epiphany that the Overwatch competitive place the mode you should be probably playing right now at least until they get that shit fixed for quick play. And I don’t hold roll key responsible for this nonsense. I really don’t. I think that once you move yourself into a class or a role, I think you should stay within it for the match, I really do. Listen, the match will be over in 10 minutes or less. And you can flip it sort of the way that the way that Paladin does it as well, right. So you can say I want to be in Team Deathmatch, I want to be an objective, or I want to be in a special mode. And then it puts you in a game that meets what you’re looking for. That’s the same thing here. If you want to find a game where they need a support person and you’re a good support player, by choosing only support, it gives you an option to be guaranteed to get that class and that’s kind of cool. I think roll Q is okay. Despite everybody bitching about it. I think what people really are bitching about is the is the matchmaking nonsense. The matchmaking nonsense is broke as fuck. So, yeah, I’m okay with it. So that’s my official stance on The whole Overwatch thing and I haven’t talked about Overwatch in a while so I thought it was do let’s see. So I had a follow up so I did as a did a little commentary on the government wanting to step in and ban fruit flavored vape juice and guy named Lee I won’t use his last name in case he doesn’t want to be known on the air but a guy named Lee wrote to me and said yeah, you need to look between the lines. This whole this whole thing is big tobacco trying to combat vaping and send me some interesting information. I double checked and verify the information, which he was missing. He was wrong in a couple of numbers but the idea is sound. So jewel JUUL is like the biggest manufacturer of vaping electronic cigarettes. What a vaporizer, let’s just call it that. that are out there. A company called El Tria, which you probably have no clue who the hell they are just spent $12.8 billion now you’ll understand where that money came from once you find out that out Tria is actually Philip Morris. That’s right. The biggest tobacco company on the planet renamed themselves just like Internet Explorer renamed itself to edge because of the bad name connotation. I’ll tree is spent $12.8 billion to buy controlling more or less controlling interest in jewel 35% interest and jewel. Now a lot of people would look at that and say, Yeah, well that’s they’re going to go in there. They’re going to buy up the biggest vaping company on the planet and they’re going to sabotage you they’re gonna close it down. They’re going to destroy it, so that people go back to smoking right to where tobacco is making money. But I’ll tell you though, I don’t necessarily think that that’s true. If you look at the statistics, smoking is very much on the decline. Now. You wouldn’t know living in Arizona, where like if I look ahead of me five out of the six cars I can see it my vision right now somebody smoking in there, and I still don’t get that. But suffice to say it’s on the decline, right? And these big tobacco companies, they need another source of revenue, they need a back door, they need a methodology of preserving their profits. And so that’s what this really could be. And listen, could they be in there trying to kill vaping? Sure, but if they can make a shitload of money on vaping why not do that? Right? I mean, people are going to do one or the other. And if smoking is on the decline, and it’s not cool, it’s not hip it’s you know, it’s getting this terrible moniker. But vaping is cool right? They know the kids are doing it Yeah. Right. So yeah, why not get in on that money? 12.8 billion that’s nothing that’s pocket change. Right like you know, that’s my that’s my change my little change purse right here for Philip Morris. I’m sorry, l Tria. john was nice. It was nice. see somebody write in and comment on the show. I like that. So interesting. Again, a little other interesting information. So I’ve been reading the news a little bit more lately trying to you know, I read a lot of news every day, but it’s very, it’s very nice. I follow technology I follow, you know, Oculus, I follow Nintendo, I follow PC stuff. But I don’t typically follow a lot of politics and a lot of general World News, which is really bad. I should follow more because I’m a grown man. I’m a middle aged man. Now, by the way, and as as such, I should be reading the news. Well, for those of you following what’s going on, Saudi Arabia is main, one of their main oil refineries got hit by what appears to be some sort of a terrorist attack or some sort of an attack against them, which dropped oil production worldwide by 5%. Now, that doesn’t sound like a lot. But it’s enough that our President decided that he was going to allow The Federal oil reserve to be tapped to prevent, prevent this oil shortage from affecting us consumers. Now listen, I get this right this he’s not the only one that’s ever tapped the oil reserves. Clinton had the oil reserves tap and happens about every five or six years, it seems like we have a little tiny tapping of the oil reserves. And frankly, I’m fascinated that there are these huge underground, like salt caverns that they store millions of gallons of oil. And I, I have I have this this picture in my head of what this must look like. So I was doing a little research just because you know, I want to be educated on the topic. What exactly is it? I know what the Federal Reserve is right? The United States and this was set way back set up way back when I don’t have the facts in front of me when it was set up or what. But essentially, the idea was to keep the United States prepared in case of some sort of an oil shortage and we have actually tapped it over Serves numerous times. We’ve sold oil, the 28 million gallons was sold, I think by Bill Clinton, he sold it to some coat country that needed it. We’ve tapped the reserves, I believe in the 70s. We had an oil reserve tap. And we had one during I think Desert Storm, we had an oil reserve tap. But here’s some interesting, just a couple of interesting numbers for you. Right? So we all know that oil drives the entire planet, right? If we don’t, if we have an oil shortage or we have a gasoline shortage, or we have a sharp increase in gasoline prices, then everything eventually suffers right as soon as, as soon as the effects are felt. Then trucking companies start going out of business trucking companies can’t afford to deliver which means produce isn’t delivered which means food and and and and medical supplies and everything else to rely on oil based. Transportation goes into the shelter and all the sudden You know, we’re paying, you know, six bucks for a dozen eggs and all this other nonsense, which of course, it’s a whole domino effect, right? So what exactly do we have in our oil reserves? I did a little research. I was curious. Right now the last known number of millions of gallons of oil that we have stashed in the reserves 644 million gallons of oil, right? Holy shit, that’s a lot of oil. Right now remember, this is oil, not gasoline, right? Oil itself isn’t necessarily super useful on itself, it has to be refined. So that oil refineries, right, it has to be refined into gasoline or kerosene or whatever it is that the that the final product actually provides us with something useful, right? So just because you have oil laying around doesn’t mean you have gasoline laying around. So you still have to have refineries to turn into gasoline, blah, blah, blah. So first First of all, having 644 million gallons of oil sounds great, but it’s not like having two months of salary in your savings account, right? It’s not immediately convertible into something you need right away. That’s one thing to think about. The other thing to think about is okay, so 644 million gallons sounds like an ass load of oil. How long would that actually last? Right? So you know, if you have two months salary in the bank, you can look for a job for two months before you run out of money. How long before we run out of oil? How much does 644 million gallons by us? Here’s the truth. According to my research, the United States alone this United States, not Canada, not North America, not world. The United States uses 20.5 million gallons of oil a day, a day. Now, let’s That’s assuming standard operating procedure, right? That means that if, if suddenly we ran, we couldn’t get oil from anywhere else and we had to completely rely on the United States. That means that we would we would we would start putting into place, you know, some, some, we will put into place some policies, right, we will put into some to some salvaging types that we went, we would make changes so that we weren’t consuming 20.5. But let’s say it was business as usual. And we consume 20.5 million gallons per day. We have a one month reserve of oil in the United States one month. Now remember, that doesn’t mean that we immediately can tap it for gas or whatever that has to be refined and there’s some sort of nones, we have a month’s worth of oil in the federal reserve one month. That’s some crazy shit. We only have a month of oil in the reserves, something to think about right. And there were presidents that There were people in power that said, we need to get rid of that. We don’t need it. We don’t need it. There are people that have tried to reduce it drastically from a readiness point of view, right? I mean, all sorts of crazy shit. But yeah, there’s there’s, there’s tons of interesting information. It’s really funny, you know, we are fast food consumers, the American public at least, and I’m sure this is globally, we could say the same thing. You know? We’re fast food, consumers of everything. News, for example, right. When you see, you know, President authorizes tapping the Federal Reserve, nobody goes and looks at how many talents we have in the Federal Reserve. Nobody says Well, shit 644 million. How long is that going to last? Right? If there’s a big, you know, problem. You know, you don’t do that anymore. I mean, I did this only because I thought it’d be an interesting story to tell. Talk about here. But we don’t. We were headline consumers were fast food consumers. We look at the headlines, and we think we know shit, but we don’t know anything. So then we read the first paragraph, which by the way, news itself has turned it into a shithole. You know, I took journalism in high school, right, so let’s, let’s, let’s turn the Wayback Machine. When I studied journalism in high school, there was a very specific format for news articles, right? You answered the five questions, you know who, what, why, where, when and how you answer that, like in the first couple of paragraphs, everything else became filler. So, news was supposed to be about facts, and then a peripheral facts. And it occurred to me that regardless of what your partisan beliefs are, whether you’re democrat or republican or independent, Did you love cnn you love Fox? It doesn’t matter. We we’ve left behind what actual journalism and news is, it’s See, but the channel is going wild talking about this oil reserve. Yeah, okay, that’s Overwatch stuff. No healers yet. Yeah, I know that there’s other oil reserves and I know that we would up production. I’m just saying that like looking at straight old numbers, right, you know, you have 644 million on hand. How long can you make that last based on the consumption? You know, consumption versus availability, right. And listen, we would we would bring in rationing and we would do all this other stuff, it would last longer. But it’s my point here is if I know you guys are probably 15 or 20 seconds by and my point is, is that we look at these we look at these headlines and we look at news. As we look at everything else is disposable, right? We’ve gotten to the point where there’s so much news. There’s so much music, there’s so many Movies are so many TV shows. And this all goes back to the idea that we are fast food consumers. We don’t spend any time chewing our food, because we’re going to the next thing. We don’t watch us we don’t watch a movie more than once on Netflix has got 900 other movies to watch. It’s a very different age and news as yet another casualty of this fast food cafeteria nonsense. News by nature, the word news this shouldn’t mean that there’s anything subjective about it. Right if you read if you read an article in Encyclopedia Britannica and you open up the a and you look up aardvark there’s no commentary on whether the aardvark is a nice animal. Whether or not it plays well. I mean, it doesn’t talk about what the author might think of that. aardvark you know, it’s it’s really a past you ever hear you know, you never hear the You know, an aardvark call the past, necessarily, right, because that’s subjective. Maybe an aardvarks a pest to you. But news shouldn’t be subjective. It should be factual and we don’t have factual news sources anymore. Everybody’s owned by somebody who’s got an agenda. Right? It’s kind of sad. And we don’t care. That’s probably the worst part about it. Right? Nobody gives a shit. Nobody cares that their news is tainted. They’re looking for confirmation bias. You watch fox news because you want to be told how bad Hillary Clinton is. You watch CNN, you hear how bad Trump is? I mean, you’re aligning yourself. You’re you’re aligning your news with a bias and getting it really sucks. You know, and what’s even worse is you can’t listen to the other side either because they’re using an agenda based plot to curate the news in a manner to make sure that you’re not getting the real newseum. It’s just It’s terrible. It’s just it sucks. And I don’t remember this being an old man issue, right? It’s like all Shane. Here’s the grumpy old man. You know, you can’t see that streaming is the future of music. Fuck your CDs. Okay, yeah, Fine, whatever. You know my dad liked vinyl. I liked CDs and cassettes right now. My son likes you know Google Play news. It’s the old bands generation shift. I don’t remember news being ever subjective, right? I mean, you had you had anchor people that the world depended on you know the Tom Brokaw and the Dan rather’s these people build a reputation by being journalists not being round table entertainers surrounded by chicks and short skirts with great legs, right? No, I don’t know. Anyway, enough ranting about the news. That was just sort of one of those side side things along with the oil reserve. I wanted to talk about hey, I like to tell you guys about the feels like there’s a great sort of Minecraft slash survival slash adventure game called portal nights. And it this rip through my little community a couple years back. It’s still a really solid game, especially if you’re playing it not on the switch. Because on the switch you have to stay in the same world and play together. But if you’re playing on the PC or on console’s portal nights is a really fun game. And you can go explore one world by gathering stuff you need. Your friends are exploring some other worlds you can collaborate. But portal nights is part of a recent Humble Bundle package that you can achieve nirvana with portal nights along with six other games for $3 and 62 cents. That’s a great deal portal nights alone is worth $3 and 62 cents and then you get a handful of other games to go along with it. And I don’t know how long that deals good for but I highly recommend if you do not already own portal nights, because I know I’ve talked about it on the show before. Pick it up. It’s $3 and 62 cents. You know what I’m saying? That’s a that’s cheap. That’s a deal. You don’t have to sit there and calculate how many hours you need to play it to make up $3 and 62 cents, you know, I’m saying I got out and saw the David Bowie murals I was talking about on yesterday’s show. I got out at lunchtime I did a quick walk. I came back got in my car, and I ran over and grab pictures, nice pictures of the entire all I think it was six or eight panels. I’d have to go back and look. And I posted these on Twitter. I posted them in the discord. And I showed him of course with my little my little chat community. And of course the people who would find it cool like my kid my daughter loves David Bowie loves labyrinth. I got it. I took a picture of me with David Bowie is the Goblin King. Good stuff and it’s only going to be around for a couple weeks before they get getting cleared off and they’ll put something else up there. But great stuff. So I wanted to follow up and let you know I did. Finally Good to see it. I got pictures taken. And they were really damn cool. So I time looking like here. Okay, how much time do I have? I have maybe five minutes left. So I should probably not jump onto a good. A good topic. Let’s talk about some nonsense going on with the switch scene. Right. So Nintendo Switch, you know, I have a hack switch that allows me to play homebrew as well as, basically pirated software can’t play online or anything like that. But it gives you an opportunity to, to taste games that are 30 4050 bucks, including the switch tags. So it’s a nice way of doing demos, which is exactly what I use it for. And if I like the game, I end up buying and putting it on my real switch. Well, you know, it’s so weird. There’s politics in everything. You know, back in the old days, it was Commodore vs Atari. You know, and every time there’s a new pilot Is the scene or there’s some, you know, some new community going on for things like this. Eventually everybody wants to get together and band together. Let’s crack the switch open. Let’s figure out how to pirate software. Let’s figure out the best way to get the best performance in emulators. You know, blah blah blah. Everyone unites and bands together and then there’s always some asshole outlier. That tries to make money on it like team executor. Or there’s some group that turns into little fucking untitled shit heads. So and so this the switch scene I’ve been I’ve been part of it long enough to watch the transgression from helpful community to elitist assholes. So if you’re part of the switch community, you know about this thing called HBG, which is essentially a free shop, right? So it’s a piece of homebrew software that lets you tap into Google Drive servers to directly download your favorite games. Right? piracy. It’s a piracy tool. Well, the developers are starting to get a little big for their britches. So they want you to use it exactly the way they they want you to use it. So. So, on the switch, there’s two ways to get into homebrew. One of them is going through something called applet mode, which means you you you execute the album application which runs in a little tiny protected space, limited ran limited CPU usage, right, because you can use the album anywhere, you’re going to be in the middle of the game, hit the home button, go to album and do something with those pictures and then go right back into the game. So this is what they call applet mode. Well, if you want to run emulators, or you want to run big, heavy lifting applications on the switch, you don’t want to run an applet mode. You want to have full resources. So typically Speaking you would enter homebrew while launching a game, intercepts it and then it sends you straight to homebrew. And now you have access to all the RAM and all the CPU that a game would have access to. Right, that makes sense. Well, recently, they’re trying to force you into using applet mode exclusively, to get to homebrew, to get to the HPG free shop to get to this new homebrew menu called mercury. They’ve decided that you shouldn’t be launching anything without going through album, which makes no sense to me. And nobody’s been able to explain to me in any of these discord servers, why on earth, they would want to do that. Well, for a brief period of time after they made that change, you could go into a config file a dot III file and change it back. Right. I want to be able to override any application and I want to be able to use the right bumper to do it. You save that back to your config because it’s part of the atmosphere custom firmware that lets you do that. All the sudden, as soon as people started doing that, the developers created a cig patch that would no longer allow you to change the i&i file. If you change the i&i file, it didn’t match the SIG patch checksum and it would tell you that your HBG was corrupted and you needed to reinstall it. So now, there’s no way to use HBG in anything but applet mode, which is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. And not only that they included digital, basically digital rights management, including SIG patches to stop you from altering their piracy tool. Is that the most insane thing you’ve ever heard? So now you’ve got another group that is taking, essentially patching out the DRM of the free shop that lets you pirate software. It is absolutely ridiculous. All right. I’m over And range of my Wi Fi. I’m going to get out of here. This is Shane Armin row past UC radio. We’ll see you next time. Take care everybody