Xbox Was Worse Than We Thought - WAN Show July 10, 2026

15:06Luke Lafreniere:there was halo yeah what an absolute legend move that was huge uh we do have oh right so yeah what would it take what would it take to make you excited about halo again because i guarantee you it won't be making it an xbox exclusive and microsoft seems to be back to like oh yeah xbox exclusives are important like would you buy an xbox to play halo i doubt it 2026 not current ones

15:32Linus Sebastian:um honestly i think there's a lot that they could do um halo infinite multiplayer is actually pretty good i had fun but it doesn't feel completely there that's that's fair in my opinion that's totally fair i also think that the single player like they actually had a pretty interesting idea i was really excited to play it together and then luke

15:58Luke Lafreniere:played like a little bit of it and he was like yeah it's lame don't bother we can still play it together if you want i mean if you ever play video games campaign evolved is coming out okay

16:08Linus Sebastian:yeah we could do that instead yeah yeah um yeah a recreation of the first one we're probably gonna talk about that later in the show too because assassin's creed black flag came out yesterday um have you played it already is it good i have thoughts there it's going to be a longer conversation though so we'll have to get to that later um but yeah i don't know i think going back to roots a little bit i don't like what they've done with cortana um i don't i i think similarly to a few different franchises they need kind of a reset okay so they're weighed down by just like

16:43Luke Lafreniere:a convoluted stupid canon that was written by people who honestly didn't understand what made Halo great in the first place.

16:50Linus Sebastian:Oddly enough is like I read some of the books because I'm a f***ing nerd. So I think you could go back. Go into Master Chief's

16:59Luke Lafreniere:Is there enough like, is there like a time travel mechanism in the Halo universe?

17:03Linus Sebastian:No, but just do a prequel. Halo 1 prequel. You have to do a prequel. You have to do a prequel right though. Like, I I actually think the game could be very different because it could be like John during the, John Halo during during the uh spartan training program sure or something like that it's got to be you can't reach reaches in the past i don't know i stopped paying attention after three it's tough because like

17:31Luke Lafreniere:when your prequel you have to like your next game has to be like bigger and better and more exciting and have new mechanics right but a prequel can't break the rules of the the timeline of the of the universe so like even being so it was 1999 okay i was only 13 when the phantom menace came out and when r2d2 fires up his rocket boosters i'm like i wanted to walk out of the theater i was like that's the dumbest thing i've ever seen if he had rocket thrusters why didn't he use them later and and the whole like canon thing where r2d2 has sentience because he's like never been wiped or whatever so what he forgot he forgot he had rocket thrusters like it's just so so whatever they do in the past they have to fight the urge i will also point out people are

18:28Linus Sebastian:saying reach was in the past people really liked reach i didn't play reach until years afterwards because i think that's when i like first started going to university or something i didn't have time um and i was away from my xbox because i was at school um but people really liked reach reach was a very positively received game so i think they could do something like reach again um but i would i would get off around i would get off the current timeline dear god um i i would try to get off the current timeline or like find some way and it's this is the problem you could just comic book it why not just reset something like that like honestly i

19:05Luke Lafreniere:think i think i think disney should do that with star wars too yeah just reset it start it over because it's it's gotten so convoluted there's so many like there's so many things that started out as a pitch for how to sell a toy that just make no sense in the canon anymore but then i mean i don't meanwhile they try and do a reboot with harry potter and everyone's like oh it's Man, and they did the, uh, they did.

19:31Linus Sebastian:That completely derailed me, and I don't know why. What's going on with my brain today? Oh, right, they did the TV show, and it was just so stupid.

19:42Luke Lafreniere:Like, oh my god. Okay, okay, here's a question, here's a question. Oh, man, we're going to trigger him so hard. He's already probably got an upset headache. Which one do I hate more? What do you hate more? The Warcraft movie? You knew where I was going with this. Or Halo 2.

19:55Linus Sebastian:honestly i think the halo tv show really i think so and the warcraft movie pissed me off but the warcraft movie is so offensive just because blizzard was so good at cinematics and storytelling they did it live action for some reason oh man they had like they they had cinematics so down i bet you can still find it there's like i bet you on youtube there's a like warcraft 3 all cinematics

20:30Linus Sebastian:Warcraft 3 all cinematics in chronological order 2.1 million views Warcraft 3 all cinematics H H high quality remastered 5.6 million views Warcraft 3 cut scenes and cinematics pre wow 2.3 million views oh my god man when you can get that many views on just the cinematics from your game wow yeah and then we can we can lose the plate i think it's i think the joke's over and then they uh and then they changed the story and they did it live action which is just so insane but the halo one is so much worse okay his helmet's off just like all the time like nothing matters no one that worked on that show as far as i can tell ever played the game ever cared anything about the lore just nothing makes any sense it's so it's so ridiculous and then and then you have like the the the waste of cortana which is which is frustrating on multiple platforms i'm gonna say not even levels because then they brought it way too early to like the windows assistant thing whereas if copilot now was cortana i actually bet you it would have

21:43Luke Lafreniere:been received better yeah well people were pretty open to the branding of cortana when they first

21:47Linus Sebastian:introduced and then she ended up just garbage so useless and co-pilot's garbage but it's less garbage than cortana i can see a trajectory where co-pilot could kind of do cortana yeah yeah eventually yeah for sure the original cortana was just never going to go anywhere yeah so it's like they they have just burned cortana which is going to burn any halo player that like projects

22:11Luke Lafreniere:himself to try to be mr john okay so basically um what i'm hearing is a miracle christmas miracle is what it would take for luke to re-engage with the halo universe basically set off some ring

22:24Linus Sebastian:accidentally and instead of blowing up it or like uh biological deleting or whatever those rings do i don't fully remember actually never actually really cared uh it doesn't really matter to be honest whatever the giant ring macguffin is um have one of them go off unexpectedly and it like time warps you or something and they just be like whatever just forget about it nothing else ever happened after we released reach just ignore everything the it was all a dream full reset i remember i think i've told this story on wayne before but i had to review the original xbox elite controller for a video yeah and um i wasn't really sure what to do and i came up with like you know what i'm just gonna go to willow and rent halo 5 and put it up in the the the room up there and after work one day i just stayed back and ordered some pizza played halo 5 he did the pizza with your pc played the play played the campaign and i remember finishing the whole thing and just being like gross good controller but yeah ick i don't like that um i mean just hey if they wanted to

23:33Luke Lafreniere:We gotta start over on Halo. There's a lot of developers out there who could use a project to work on.

23:39Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Speaking of, you know, the really weird engine, as far as I can tell that they're running, maybe they should have used idTech. Oh, dude. Considering Wolfenstein feels great. Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones. Looks so freaking amazing. Doom. Oh my God, what a well-running and good-looking game. like i it's like you know my favorite engine out there dude in a world where there's so much

24:07Luke Lafreniere:yes rage in a world in a world where gamers hate poorly optimized games yeah it has been awesome dude and look i'll be the first to admit that i know nothing about you know choosing an engine to develop my game wouldn't know the first thing about that maybe idtech absolutely sucks hairy donkey sack to work with. I don't know that. But what I do know is, man, does the end result ever look and feel good to play. And so as a gamer, I love that. And I'm a little tired of every single game I play being unreal. We didn't give them the context yet. So the id tech team seems to be literally completely gone.

24:53Luke Lafreniere:No. Like one person or something.

24:55Linus Sebastian:I think it was cut in half. In half? Okay, that's not as bad as I thought. there was a ton of people saying the whole team was gone. So you did get that from people talking online. You didn't just make that up. But I think it's not correct. Okay. The note that we have in the doc is instead of shutting down five studios IP catalog but this wasn't the end. Later last week id Software lost about half its workforce 90 people and has been reduced to the size of the team that released Doom 2016. That's what I've heard. Okay. Well, now people are saying they reduced down to 57 people, which would not be half of its workforce.

25:39Linus Sebastian:I don't know what's going on, but I don't know that the whole team is gone. It sounds like they were massively force-reduced. Well, it's not all Unreal. It's just all made on Unreal 5. Okay.

25:53Luke Lafreniere:No, no, that's what he meant. That was my point. Yeah. You meant Unreal Engine not Unreal Tournament 2004. Yeah.

26:02Linus Sebastian:Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, so I don't know. I'm not sure. No, I mean like I don't know exactly what's happening at id, but it but it sucks because I really did like that engine. Doom 2016, like my god what a well-running game. And some people have pointed out like Indiana Jones wasn't well optimize i don't think indiana jones was about the optimization no but what indiana jones

26:30Luke Lafreniere:was was incredible looking yes for how it did run like that that's the that's the thing right guys it's all it's all relative to a different kind of game what the vision of the game developer was for that game their vision was something that looked filmic oh wow it's weird seeing like we have a tv over here i can see myself move now it's it's odd and and and indiana jones looked freaking filmic not all the time right but there were occasional moments in cut scenes when i was like holy did it did harrison ford get young again like am i watching indiana freaking jones

27:06Linus Sebastian:right now which is wild which is which is incredible they didn't optimize for optimization

27:11Luke Lafreniere:they optimize for yes looking good exactly and and that's a game developer choice fine you don't have to like that choice but not not every game needs to be dota not every game needs to run on absolutely every piece of hardware on the planet in order to maximize how many skins they can sell, right? Everyone's got a different strategy and that's fine. That's acceptable.

27:32Linus Sebastian:Apparently, someone in chat is saying, Digital Foundry said Indiana Jones and Doom TDA are optimized. Indiana Jones is 100 % ray traced and ran on non-ray traced hardware. So cool. Yeah. Anyways, that sucks. Because I don't know. I don't know if I'm well placing this, but I've been a little bit tired of Unreal Engine running basically everything.

28:00Luke Lafreniere:Here's a new discussion question that I assume David did this time. Yeah, of course it was David. He asks, will Xbox exist in 10 years? Which I don't think either of us would have any way of knowing that. But the more interesting part of this question, in my opinion, is who will own it?

28:18Linus Sebastian:microsoft doesn't actually seem that interested these days if microsoft were to sell xbox

28:23Luke Lafreniere:who would be lining up at the door to buy it does amazon still have luna saudi arabia i thought they've been paring back some of their like cultural investments when was

28:37Linus Sebastian:that they bought niantic niantic niantic whatever yeah they did buy it they did buy niantic that

28:43Luke Lafreniere:That was relatively recent. Amazon Luna still exists. Wow. Wow. Featuring top new games, courtroom chaos. From Xbox to A-hole. With Arnold Schwarzenegger.

28:55Linus Sebastian:Get it? Amazon? And their logo has a hole in the middle of it? I get it. Get it? Hey, that is actually kind of the logo for Luna. It's an A... Anyways. Whoa, that was loud. That's all you get.

29:10Luke Lafreniere:Ah, dispatch. Okay. Oh. Shadow of the Tomb Raider I will I'll never be free of this game

29:20Linus Sebastian:I've probably spent more time in that game than like practically any Skyrim Immersive Adventure yeah okay Amazon Luna is still a thing so maybe Amazon load that up and scroll up slightly what was that category what was that second last category there what is this category Immersive World Adventure Games it's like oh wow other than Alan Wake old games Tomb Raider

29:40Luke Lafreniere:Tomb Raider Tomb Raider Skyrim I can't even click on this. Oh, I can go here. Okay, no, we got Hogwarts Legacy. That's in there. That is newer. But you also have Fallout 3 right beside it. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Okay, yeah, well. Okay. Also 4. That's slightly newer.

29:57Linus Sebastian:Yeah. It's not that new anymore.

29:59Luke Lafreniere:No, I said newer.

30:01Linus Sebastian:It's like 10 years old.

30:02Luke Lafreniere:I said newer!

30:06Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, who else?

30:07Linus Sebastian:I also skipped... Oh, who will own it? Who would buy Xbox?

30:09Luke Lafreniere:Amazon is a is I think a pretty good guess you would need to have you need to have like holy would NVIDIA buy it

30:22Linus Sebastian:I don't think NVIDIA is that interested in gaming right now

30:24Luke Lafreniere:I had okay so box G

30:29Linus Sebastian:NVIDIA hasn't

30:35Luke Lafreniere:there's no way it wouldn't be the G spot that's what i was getting at we had xbox we had a hole yeah um okay now hold on hold on a second though in all seriousness though there are people at nvidia who do still care about gaming that's the funny thing about companies right absolutely they're not yeah they're not they don't actually all like march in one direction and sometimes they march in very different directions there's there's people at nvidia who still very much care about gaming and wish that they could get more foundry time as much as any gamer does um and you know when i brought up the possibility of you know yeah could you guys just spin off g-force basically i was met with absolutely not that's our that's our dna that's our that's our history um that's you know gaming is a is a huge part of our culture and it's it we would sooner cut off our left nut you know no matter how small your left nut is relative to your entire body this isn't exactly how they put it but they would sooner cut off a key organ, regardless of the size.

31:35Linus Sebastian:Hear me out. Everyone's going to hate this. You know, if you're playing a video game and there's like this person like that, that person, I'm going to get a everyone hated that. NVIDIA buys it, releases a console. Well, they would. Beats the expected price for Steam machine. It's ARM-based. And the way that they do it is having it be a very low-end machine that can play a lot of what you're playing a lot of the time locally which is your friend slop your whatever it's called machine whatever paint the shoot the

32:09Luke Lafreniere:gun game yeah uh something million whatever it's called mecca chameleon you can play that you can

32:15Linus Sebastian:play golf with friends you can play peak you can play all those kind of things locally and then when you want to play indiana jones in the golden circle you stream it from geforce now so so so in

32:26Luke Lafreniere:order to buy xbox you don't just have to have the money you have to have the hardware development expertise you have to have the games industry software relationships which they definitely have the only companies that i could see having having any kind of a shot at buying the xbox and doing it justice would be like probably amd and nvidia or i mean oh man i guess intel technically could they are technically a player um and then what so what nvidia would do then is they would basically just like they're doing with the rtx spark right is they would accelerate the move towards arm-based cpus with geforce graphics for gaming they would use the leverage that they have with developers to, you know, basically, yeah, optimize for our GPUs.

33:23Luke Lafreniere:Oh, by the way, also it runs on this thing now. I think that there would be an expectation that they partner with Microsoft potentially on the operating system, at least for one generation or a couple of generations. They've already built, to your point, they've already built the cloud streaming infrastructure that Microsoft considers a key part of the Xbox brand with their own streaming.

33:45Linus Sebastian:And as much as I hate it, And as much as people will yell when things like physical games and physical media gets taken away and stuff, people's buying patterns show that if they can take less pain now, but higher consistent overtime pain later, they'll almost always go with that option. Debt, loans, credit card payments, services like this. um i've seen a lot of comments on the steam machine saying that people wish that it was three four hundred bucks but could just play games like mecha chameleon and whatever else if they effectively released that box but you can also get more juice out of it when you need by paying for for geforce now or whatever else i could see people going for it i think that's also a more natural route to something like geforce now than pretty much anyone else is offering at the moment um but i mean from nvidia's perspective i could also just see them going well yeah but

34:49Luke Lafreniere:also just we just don't need to do that at all you know we could just not we uh we're already building geforce now yes we already are gonna have you know rtx spark we'll just sell the shovel that is geforce now to some other company or whatever else yeah but i just i just i don't think i would i don't think i could see anyone other than them pulling it off doing it justice

35:12Linus Sebastian:could you see sony buying them just for the studios no and the expertise or anything no if

35:18Luke Lafreniere:anything i mean sony has been paring down their their development teams as well right now i don't think they're in a i don't think they're in a big acquisition move i mean what was that what was

35:26Linus Sebastian:that catastrophic i agree i was just poking um game that they that they launched for like a few

35:32Luke Lafreniere:days and they spent like hundreds of millions of dollars developing yeah that's the one so

35:38Linus Sebastian:concord you're talking about concord yeah sony's been very frustrating because they had such a strong they were the like strong single player game platform and honestly i think that's why they won a bunch of generations in a row and then they seem to have just gotten so they're just so enamored with live service hard-ons for the whole live service idea Live service. And it's like, it's not...

36:01Luke Lafreniere:Live service games, it seems to be like just trying to brute force.

36:05Linus Sebastian:They were destroying with single players.

36:06Luke Lafreniere:I almost feel like you'd be better off just trying to brute force win the lottery than try to win in the live service game space. And if you win, it's massive.

36:16Linus Sebastian:Yeah, if you win, it's massive. But you probably won't. Same deal as the lottery. Well, yeah.

36:21Luke Lafreniere:It really does seem like...

36:23Linus Sebastian:That's an interesting comparison, actually.

36:24Luke Lafreniere:Dude, you could save yourself... If Sony had spent, apparently according to my AI overview here, Sony was estimated to have spent$400 million to develop Concord. If Sony had bought$400 million in Lotto Max tickets...

36:40Linus Sebastian:I mean, they would have done better.

36:42Luke Lafreniere:They literally would have done better. They would have done better. Because they at least wouldn't have lost the money that they spent.

36:48Linus Sebastian:They would have won the small prizes.

36:49Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, they wouldn't have lost the money that they spent running the servers for it then. At least they would have just... just put the money in an incinerator that's the worst case scenario with the lotto you can't lose

37:00Linus Sebastian:little things yeah probably i don't i literally i don't think i've ever played a traditional

37:05Luke Lafreniere:so it depends how many numbers you get i think i i have i have no familiarity beyond how 649 worked when i was a kid so take that for what it is but yeah no if even if they bought like scratchers they might have at least gotten you know 150 million bucks back yeah yeah yeah because Because the odds a lot of the time are actually mandated. They could have gone to the casino and just put it in the slot machine.

37:32Linus Sebastian:Which is unfortunately super normal these days.

37:34Luke Lafreniere:And gotten more money out of it than developing Concord.

37:38Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

37:39Luke Lafreniere:I mean, obviously hindsight's 20-20 though. I'm not saying that I would have been a Sony exec and I would have been sitting around the boardroom table pitching, why don't we play slot machines? Like obviously, yeah, they had to try something.

37:52Linus Sebastian:but i feel like you do that if you're trying to just completely trash on somebody's idea that's the only because because you're basically saying instead of deleting 400 million why don't we delete 250 million or whatever um yeah and i'm sure they didn't intend to know exactly so like it's there's there's no like super serious way to actually project that idea um

38:17Luke Lafreniere:oh sure sure hit us dan yeah cody sent this comment i have to read it to you if nvidia bought xbox they would rename it to rtx box thank you cody that was actually worth waiting for

38:28Linus Sebastian:yes that was pretty good job

38:34Linus Sebastian:oh man where were we i we kind of skipped a question you asked me um would it be better to just not hire in a in a valve way yeah right over hiring a microsoft and i'm just asking i'm asking questions i'm just asking questions my my default route would be to prefer to go the valve way but i have to admit it's not a terrible point is it there is not only is it not a terrible point the points that you made earlier but also is it noble to have tried to create a job and have succeeded for some amount of time and then eventually fail or is it more noble to have never created the job in the first place, but not have fired someone.

39:21Luke Lafreniere:Like, tell me this. Okay. Let's say, let's say.

39:25Linus Sebastian:I think there is a, I think the true answer is that there's a middle ground. I think Microsoft went way too hard and we knew that the whole time we were calling it out the entire time as people were, as they were buying up too many studios and doing all this crazy stuff. And I think we've been chirping valve for forever for being understaffed. I think there's a middle ground, but. But let's, let's bring it closer to home.

39:41Luke Lafreniere:Like if, if Linus media group, if umbrella corporation were to say, look, something isn't working is it is it better for those people to have been paid for two or three or five or ten years or however long it is and gain a bunch of experience that presumably they take with them somewhere else or is it better for me to have just taken all that money and put it in a dragon pile during that time like i think that's the question yeah and i don't know the answer i think in some

40:12Linus Sebastian:cases it's tough and i think for certain people they're going to see it different ways well yeah

40:16Luke Lafreniere:I mean everything's everything's easy to pontificate about there's also there's also Philosophize about yeah until it's until it's your job. Yeah until it's until it's your art right? Like that's the thing you got to remember especially like games industry content creation industry This isn't just for a lot of the people who work here or who work at a game studio. This is not just a job Like they're creating something they put a little bit of their soul and everything they create yeah and that's sure it's really cool and there's some there's some there's there's different types of

40:50Linus Sebastian:pain on both ends of the duration spectrum like if somebody just got hired and then that happened there's a there's a certain type of pain because they just left what might have been a fairly stable job or disrupted their life or moved or something like that yeah um and then there's the other one where like someone might be you know uh lifer level career dedicated to a certain place and then that gets bumped because when stuff like this happens the layoffs are rarely clean like when microsoft is announcing hey we did 1600 layoffs today and we're going to be doing 1600 more by the end of the year there's no way that creates there's for one yeah and there's no way that that was clean there's nowhere that like of course there's gonna be people that maybe shouldn't be there for a variety of reasons and at that volume there's no way that you perfectly cut all of those you know you're gonna get some people that is a really bad loss for your company and you just didn't necessarily realize it when it was happening um and that's gonna burn them and also it's interesting that they pointed out in here like okay obsidian lost 90 people and now they're at the team size that they were at when they released Doom 2016.

42:02Linus Sebastian:No, sorry, you mean id. What did I say? You said Obsidian and Doom, so I assume... I don't know why I said Obsidian. I meant id. I think I read that but meant the other one because I was trying to find it in the notes. But yeah, id. So the same size when they released Doom 2016, but are they at the same energy? I can pretty much guarantee you no. Because Doom 2016 coming out was kind of massive. I don't know necessarily how well the game sold, but that was a refresh of Doom. It was received super, super well. And the engine was mind-blowing. That was Vulcan. That was the beginning of the change.

42:42Linus Sebastian:That was a huge deal. A lot of people were talking about it. There's a lot of energy. There's a lot of positive momentum. There was a lot of potential energy. And then when you get half your workforce laid off, And they're like, well, you're back the size you were when you released that real good game.

43:00Luke Lafreniere:Keep going. And you have all these extra years of experience, so surely you're much better at doing whatever it is that you do.

43:07Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Your potential energy is going to be real low, probably, I assume. So these situations are tough.

43:19Luke Lafreniere:They're ugly, man. I don't envy anyone involved. No, I and and to be clear, I'm sure there are absolute complete sociopaths at Microsoft involved in these decisions who don't care about the impact they're having. But I also genuinely believe in my heart of hearts that there are people for whom these decisions are are like agonizingly difficult. And then on the other side, for the people who are losing their jobs, I'm sure there are people who were not really that engaged, who were looking elsewhere already. and on the other end of the spectrum. I'm sure there were people for whom working at this company was their identity.

44:00Luke Lafreniere:What do you do?

44:01Linus Sebastian:I work for Microsoft.

44:02Luke Lafreniere:Yeah.

44:05Linus Sebastian:I work at Xbox. Yeah. Yeah, it's tough. And like, I don't know, we've talked about it on this show. I was told after we talked about Xbox a little while ago that Halo Infinite costs$800 million to make. Like something was going to break here. It's been, apparently, they've been basically looting minecraft uh and and a couple other things but mostly minecraft for like years to make all these other things and it just it hasn't been working out there's been a lot of duds along the way there's been great games along the way as well but i mean we talked about this

44:38Luke Lafreniere:yesterday i i was or yesterday we talked about this last time on wan show where like i was coming in ready to go guns blazing how could you possibly do anything that harms double fine and then we were looking at their games and we're like wait i'm sorry this is your big game of the year pottery fighting each other that had like a peak concurrent player count of like less than a couple thousand players or something like that like oh my god no no wonder this isn't working yeah there's a

45:08Linus Sebastian:discussion question again from david yeah i really like the questions you came up with this time um other than Forza Horizon 6, when was the last system-selling Xbox game in your opinion? Forza Horizon 5.

45:25Luke Lafreniere:And not everybody's into racing games. I don't give two shits about them.

45:30Linus Sebastian:I really like Forza Horizon 6. I would not buy a console for it. It's not a console-selling game to me. To a lot of people, it is. Oh, I agree. for me it's still a fantastic add-on if i'm buying that console i'm gonna get forza horizon 6 sure but it's not quite a console selling game for me a good halo that's the thing man if they release one good halo we're back baby i'm not even kidding i'm not even like i can't even stress that enough one good halo game everybody will come back i i like i it would happen you know

46:09Luke Lafreniere:what a funny thing is to me and i'm doing it i'm gonna completely derail this but like why does it have to be halo okay there's there's so many great special about halo there's there's so many great intellectual properties out there like how is it that microsoft doesn't just go to terry brooks and be like okay we're gonna do shanara like huh it's it's like it's like a fantasy novel 15 20 novels or something like that best-selling for like decades like there's ips out there you're microsoft you have oh i've seen this enough money to buy the earth and all the heavens um apparently there was a shunara game back in the day okay i had no idea uh and reichencloth says kids don't know those novels yeah kids didn't know halo either it doesn't matter the point is there's amazing there's like there's like an entire small home library worth of lore to mine here license it and make a great new ip like why is it that we can only do like weird stuff like kiln fighter that no one cares about that's double fine double fine that's true this is true this is fair enough but still or or remake remake another remake something i think i mean i think they could i'm just saying if if you if you want to knock it out of the freaking park

47:40Linus Sebastian:it's got to be halo if you want to do well maybe shanara or something like that but if it's a new

47:46Luke Lafreniere:ip i think it's going to be tough but you can't have and you're probably right about like what the first one needs to be but they also have to just in the holster they're going to have to have a lineup of new IPs.

47:59Linus Sebastian:I think so. You got to blow it out of the park with Halo and then you got to follow it up, which is another problem that they have, to be completely honest. But I'm looking this up. Somebody in chat said the last good Halo game was released by Bungie. So I wanted to go verify it. The last Halo game that Bungie released was Halo Reach. So that person is just completely correct. So we've talked about this on the show a bunch of times. One of my massive pet peeve things that has happened to a bunch of my favorite IPs, Star Wars and Halo being two of them, is you get people that come in and they hire a team based around the idea of hiring people that hate the thing that they're building.

48:39Linus Sebastian:This happened with Halo. You can go find it. They hired people to work on Halo who hated Halo. This happened with Star Wars. You can go and find it. They hired people to work on Star Wars that hated Star Wars. This can't be a thing. You can find people and the reason why they did it for both is because they wanted to like renew it and bring some new ideas and stuff like that. And make it appeal to a broader audience. Sure. That's the key. Halo appealed to everyone. Enough people. It would have been fine. Star Wars also appealed to an incredible amount of people. I don't think that was needed for either ship management sim pillar of autumn.

49:18Linus Sebastian:Come on, you play it. There's so many genres that would be perfect. I probably would. yeah you would hell yeah you would a like ftl style game but a taylo would be sick and you're in charge of the pillar of autumn and you're going to defend it from that would be so covenant attack actually i know my god a like more highly produced ftl with more story involved and it's you getting the pillar of autumn out of this like horrible scenario i would play the hell out of

49:44Luke Lafreniere:that smaller teams like there's so many companies that ship out there like star wars um the new the new galactic racers or whatever it's called that's coming out is done by the burnout team

49:56Linus Sebastian:it's not done by like just do something fun okay yeah but like i don't know i think 343 is gonna need some type of a uh staffing refresh sorry oh actually yeah galactic racers coming really soon that game looks so cool october i'm stoked oh my god so stoked especially with the pedigree

50:20Luke Lafreniere:it does look legitimately so sick insanely cool and this is what they could do with the halo franchise it's just be like you know oh you're a studio and you make really good ship management sims here's our ip go and do something cool with that yeah how about we both win you know create win-wins so dope yeah

50:39Linus Sebastian:yeah i'm very excited being behind this is like a perfect fit oh yeah so cool oh that looks awesome

50:45Luke Lafreniere:Just give your IP to different studios. Do not pre-purchase it.

50:48Linus Sebastian:Don't pre-purchase anything ever. But even like, okay, even that being said, and I completely agree with Dan, to be honest, I think you can do sidebar things. There's been a ton of examples lately. Mecha Chameleon is a great version of it where small, fun games with your friends can sell like gangbusters. Do that kind of stuff with these IPs and in these universes, but keep them small games and keep them cheap and have them be group games that you can play with friends and I think it would go pretty well. Cheap is hard.

51:20Luke Lafreniere:It's hard to do because people who succeed at doing something expect raises. You can't just keep things cheap. What you could do is you could just lay off all the people who now are paid more and hire new fresh people who are cheap and you could keep costs down that way but I guarantee you

51:43Linus Sebastian:nobody would like you for it is that is that your employment track into the mainline game

51:49Luke Lafreniere:developer pool though i mean yeah possibly but then you i think you just you eventually end up with that pool being too big and then you end up with concord because what are they going to work on now yeah all right we should probably yeah uh andreese 528 says wait is this still just the

52:12Linus Sebastian:first topic. Do we want to talk about Assassin's Creed now? It shouldn't be too long.

52:18Luke Lafreniere:Alright. Oh, really? Luke is going to talk about an Assassin's Creed game. It won't be too long. Buckles in. Do you want some more water, maybe?

52:30Linus Sebastian:Okay, so... We're going to be here for hours. We could be, but I'll try. Okay, so, first thing that's interesting to me is the reviews. I see mostly positive here. I don't remember how to break it out. By region? Yeah. Can I see that? You can do by language on the left there. Boom! Mostly negative, undersimplified Chinese. Oh, interesting. Yeah, but don't they

52:54Luke Lafreniere:like review bomb stuff if it has a bad translation?

52:56Linus Sebastian:Which makes sense. I think they do that, but apparently I thought most of... Okay. So I do think that's a bit of a thing, and I mean... Yeah, fair enough. That's fair. Yeah. It is language broken out reviews. and if the translation sucks then sure but what i've read online is that this isn't actually necessarily because the translation sucks yeah what i've read is that it's because of things like the microtransactions and stuff like that which i think is kind of funny wait sorry what

53:25Luke Lafreniere:so chinese gamers don't like microtransactions am i missing something here isn't that the land

53:30Linus Sebastian:what brung us genshin impact uh it's the land what brung us many of those mechanics um but it's it's interesting to me because I don't know if my memory is perfect on this. I looked in the microtransaction store so I saw everyone was pissed about it. Horse armor, right? It seemed like the things that you could buy to me were effectively the same things that you could buy last time. So just like last time it just won't and it's fine. Right. Okay. So basically you're not too much i mean i don't like it in every single assassin's creed game for a long time there's been some type of really annoying mechanic and you could just have it not be annoying for the low low price of whatever they're charging for the thing like you can get free treasure maps or you can get free like resources for your ship or whatever else got it um but i just whatever i'm not going to do that um and other than that it's fine i i saw some people pointing out like the graphics aren't that great to be honest for the price of the game and the fact that it's a re-release i think the graphics could be a lot better i think the movement is clunkier than i remember and i remember the movement being clunky to be clear i don't think i'm actually looking at it with rose tinted goggles they also redid the combat because the combat what everyone liked the the ship combat was what i liked um i don't know i haven't actually unlocked the ship yet because i haven't played a ton i think i played for like an hour um the but the the like ground-based fighting combat to be kind of in between i would say the new games which are more like rpg like combat and the old games which the old games were kind of weird the combat was a little broken you could just like permacounter and then you just sort of win.

55:35Linus Sebastian:So it could be like a circle of people around you and you're still going to win the fight, which is like a little absurd. But the new games have the same kind of problem, but it's because it's an RPG and you're just like spamming abilities. Like in the new, not the newest, in the newest one I've played, which is like three old at this point, because I decided that I was going to do every quest in the game before I finished it. And now I'm like over a hundred hours in and I'm not even close. So I'm just never going to play another Assassin's Creed game as far as I can tell. I play it like twice a year at this point.

56:02Linus Sebastian:I'm just still stuck Anyways My character has armor on it That makes people take more fire damage And I have an ability that lights my weapon on fire And then I'll just light people on fire This is not Assassin's Creed anymore At all, the new games are just so far gone But anyways This one is a totally different combat style You're an assassin, shouldn't you not be on fire? No, I have a war hammer And I ride a horse into combat right like an assassin does totally yeah um it's it's yeah it's honestly going back and so i i the like first island you end up on which is the tutorial yeah are you kind of running around i for some reason because i'm weird i used to try to speed run that first tutorial island and without thinking i was just like three quarters through it and i had done like full sprint i remembered every single path and stuff and there was a nostalgia like oh yeah i'm kind of like home again i haven't played this game forever i used to play this game all the time um and then the same kind of things wore on me which is that game until you get your ship sucks and i don't have my ship yet so it's just kind of like okay i'm just wasting time until i get the only good part of this game and then i'm sitting there playing the game but my brain is too busy working on like why is Ubisoft so stupid how did they release this game which the only good part was the ships and then they never released another they didn't release like a ship game they have other Assassin's Creed games that had ships in it but they didn't understand that it wasn't the fact that it was Assassin's Creed and ships it was just the fact that it was just ships and then they finally announced Skull and Bones and everyone's like oh wow you're finally doing the most obvious thing in the f***ing world quadruple a great and then they spent a billion years working on it and they change the idea so many freaking times and they call it quadruple A and then it blows and then they sell it for like $3 and no one plays it anyways.

57:58Linus Sebastian:And it's just like, what is wrong with you guys? And I think that's what a lot of the reviews are on the game. It's just like Ugh. Okay, you got me, right? I bought this nostalgia game for $80 Canadian dollars. Did you really? You spent that much? It cost that much? It cost$80 Canadian dollars. That's a lot. I don't think I spent that much on it. I think there's been currency changes and stuff since then. But these are the prices. And then on launch, they did this, which is like, I think someone told it up. It was like$85 worth of DLC. But to be clear, you don't need any of it. Just ignore it.

58:40Linus Sebastian:Whatever. And then people were also annoyed that when you launch the game, you can flip through the menu and see the other Assassin's Creed games in a timeline and launch them from there because they're really trying to get you onto the new Assassin's Creed games. That doesn't really bother me. It takes four seconds to skip past it. Whatever. There's things that are annoying and there's things that I don't think people are overblown on but ultimately I just keep coming back to like I am not surprised by this. Makes complete sense to me. Wow. They're

59:19Luke Lafreniere:close they're like almost a penny stock they're almost gone and it's like yeah it makes sense

59:25Linus Sebastian:you've pissed away like almost every title you have wow that's kind of wild actually

59:33Luke Lafreniere:and it was incredibly unnecessary yeah it's amazing how much expedition 33 felt like what an ubisoft right or square soft game from their heydays should have been yep Hey, just for fun How many people do you think are playing Skull and Bones right now?

59:55Luke Lafreniere:16. Actually, no, quite a bit better than that. Okay. 325. Oh, wow.

1:00:00Linus Sebastian:That's actually like genuinely a lot better than I would have thought.

1:00:03Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. 325. Good job, Ubisoft. How much did they spend making that? Hundreds of millions? So much money.

1:00:11Linus Sebastian:And like, I just have to come back to, again, okay, when was Cullen Bones announced? Oh, man, a thousand years ago.

1:00:25Linus Sebastian:apparently I've searched this before on this laptop nice officially announced in 2017

1:00:34Luke Lafreniere:for context there's 6 ,000 people almost playing Expedition 33 right now

1:00:39Linus Sebastian:and Skull and Bones is multiplayer so you would expect a longer tale in a multiplayer game so it was announced in 2017 released in 2024 four pivoted on like a million times yeah i i just i keep coming back to like this is kind of similar to the halo thing yeah we're like man they own they own splinter cell when's the last splinter cell game that's come out i actually don't know

1:01:15Luke Lafreniere:uh the last full standalone game according to ai is splinter cell blacklist from August 2013.

1:01:23Linus Sebastian:2013, bro. What's going on, man? There's like no good single-player FPS games. One released. 007. And everybody's like, wow.

1:01:37Luke Lafreniere:Let's all play this. All right, we should move on. I think this is still our first topic. Is Dan even there anymore? I don't think so. And he's gone. I think he abandoned us. Nice.

1:01:47Linus Sebastian:Okay, what do you want to jump into? Hannah Montana. Really? Let's come up for air. Hannah Montana Linux gets modern remastered after nearly two decades, almost as long as it's been since Ubisoft released a good game. It's called Sweet Niblets, and its new version, version 26, is built on Debian with a reskin of KDE Plasma. developer and YouTuber Noah Caggle has released this version a modern remaster of the infamous 2009 meme distro that was abandoned almost immediately after release there's a bunch of stats about it which no one's going to care about. Hot pink Hannah Montana branding, very nice.

1:02:24Linus Sebastian:That hot pink Hannah Montana branding can be yours if you are using KDE Plasma 6 where is it? The original 2009 legendary Linux meme but yeah it's a skin for KDE so you don't actually have to get the probably best distro that there is Hannah Montana Linux if you want your system to be pink pretty terminal

1:02:57yeah

1:02:59Linus Sebastian:you could grab the background and you could skin your KDE and you'd be fine amazing new worlds

1:03:06Luke Lafreniere:thank you uh you should do an i switched do we not even know who the original developer of hannah montana linux was i don't think so i think it was anonymous that is that's pretty wild you can still download it by the way but it would be we we actually did a video a little while ago um trying out random weird linux distros and hannah montana linux was one of them and i don't think we were even able to get it working without using a vm or something like that like i i think it required a workaround. Don't quote me on that. I know some of them did. More usable than Temple OS. I'll give it that.

1:03:42Luke Lafreniere:Okay, well, thank you for that. Why don't I pick something? Yeah. Did you know this, this blew my mind, did you know that you can play Half-Life 2 at over 100 frames per second Yes. In your browser. Wow. I'm gonna do it right now. okay yeah that's actually sick developers sliquant uh reportedly a high school student and 98.006 have slq and i think sure have released a fully playable browser port of half-life 2 after about three months of work the game runs natively in your browser using web assembly to run the engine code and webgl2 to talk directly to your gpu it saves files live in your browser's storage and the full developer console works for cheats it reportedly can hit over 100 fps maxed out even on integrated graphics which i have considerably better than right here thanks to our laptop partner razor um the site serves the entire game for free with no proof of ownership check and the port is built on leaked source engine code so there is no sign whatsoever that valve has authorized any of this valve has historically been pretty chill about fan projects but this one leans a little closer to full-on piracy slash taking of their ip which as we remember from dbrand's companion cube adventure um valve don't take kindly to known bugs include characters rendering with empty eye sockets since the facial animation system had to be disabled entirely to keep the port stable uh i and i'm gonna give it a shot so i've got my got my gaming

1:05:34Linus Sebastian:mouse in my backpack here specifically a gaming mouse for gamers for gamers it's like oh yeah no it's okay yeah it's a super strike x definitely for gamers all right how do you like it um i

1:05:48Luke Lafreniere:haven't actually used it for gaming much this will be the first time i've actually gamed on it That sounds very Linus. I've just been using it as my mouse. That sounds very Linus. Yeah, for like work.

1:05:57Linus Sebastian:You've been inviting this guy to play video games for months, dude.

1:06:00Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, you never message me. That is so not even true. What do you mean? When's the last time you messaged me to play games? I talked to you about it literally last week. When did you message me to play games? Alright, I'll do that then. Yeah, that's what I thought. I'll do that then. Next time, think before you talk s**t.

1:06:19Luke Lafreniere:I don't remember where that line is from That's a line though That's not how I talk to him Usually I can't believe you've done this I can't believe you've done this Okay, okay So here we go Web Half-Life 2 Okay Oh wow You can play episode 1 and episode 2 Where's episode 3? Hold on Let me try and scroll here Ha ha ha ha Just kidding Okay downloading map background 01 full screen obviously I don't know how long this is going to take.

1:06:52Linus Sebastian:It takes a wee bit it will, I did it on mine already oh you did, oh okay cool

1:06:57Luke Lafreniere:sick

1:06:58Linus Sebastian:I didn't full screen mine

1:07:00Luke Lafreniere:here we go you're good, you're good yeah new game, okay can I go to a different chapter? evidently no I don't remember how this interface works so sure start a new game let's go or wait oh shoot i should have checked the options get more resolution time to be stuck for a while i think okay cool oh never mind okay while we get through maybe like some cutscene-y stuff uh what should we do a quick oh oh cw announcement and then explain and do two comms um my screen is covered yeah yeah i got it

1:07:39Linus Sebastian:cool end of season end of season apparel sale oh yeah we've got lots of good stuff in here apparently the discount has increased from 30 to 40 yeah so if you're uh if you're a size that

1:07:53Luke Lafreniere:we are having trouble moving for a particular product or if there's something that appeals to you at 40 off but didn't appeal to you at full price now is a great time to pick up end of season apparel over on lttstore.com and it's an especially great time to pick something up right now because we have comms live you wear your messages just add an item to your cart check out you know i've showed them the flow uh oh that hat i love that hat i wear that hat every day lately it's a sick hat lan hat um is it in stock in both sides oh there's not that many left of the mediums there you go anyway the point is add an item to your cart and you will see our checkout messages interface that will go as soon as you place your order that will go to producer dan there he is hey he'll reply to it or he'll just pop it up on the screen like that one from stephanie r up there or he will curate it for me and luke to respond to it's all up to him he has the power um was i gonna say something else yeah so now's a really good time to pick up something from our end of season and peril sale yay we're doing things more like uh like an actual fashion company now so that's that's a whole thing bridget talked me through it she's basically like yeah you can't you can't do things like you guys do them and i was like why not and she's like because that's not how people do them and i'm like oh okay that's a pretty good conversation well pretty

1:09:22Linus Sebastian:Pretty much. It's not quite how it went. What else is interesting is that the sale runs until July 23rd at 10 a.m. PST. All right. This is also our true spec USB cables are fully stocked with all speeds, lengths and connector combinations available where they need a tiny desk cable or a long charging cable. It's now a time to grab yours at LMG dot GG slash true spec. You see this guy?

1:09:43Luke Lafreniere:P-R-U-E-S-P. Every once in a while he has Jay Leno's chin. That's an older reference. Still checks out. okay so uh dan you want to hit us with a couple of comms sure hello fellow checkout commies luke i'm excited okay that's probably the best one we've seen since the switch to checkout messages i do like that i'm excited to see you at open sauce yeah i'm running a ctf at a booth there any interesting stories from community conferences like open sauce or defcon

1:10:18Linus Sebastian:interesting stories

1:10:25Luke Lafreniere:I remember you were talking about like some cool uh just like um like hijacking like like wireless hijacking stuff that was just for lols like not super malicious or anything

1:10:38Linus Sebastian:at defcon probably yeah there's some really interesting stuff at defcon every year um um there was a pretty cool like baby's first intro to hacking in the um like astro security area where they had some like space security teams which was really interesting to hang out and talk to and then they had this thing where it like it taught you how uh you know i mean lots of satellites are just like open it's just most people aren't going to know how to communicate with them at all that's like basically your security layer uh and how hacking some especially very old satellites is more about like can you find any information on it at all right and if you can and you can get a signal up there you might just be able to take it over which is pretty interesting i remember there was this thing from a bajillion years ago where people took over like an abandoned mcdonald's set up a massive satellite dish uh so they could they could take a bunch of uh a bunch of satellites this is a long time ago but um yeah i mean defcon i have very weird experiences with because i show up to defcon walk the floor for like half an hour and then disappear into a hotel room until the last half an hour of the show um because i just work on gold bug um yeah they're like challenges yeah so like i i don't know the interesting things that happen for me are like solving those those puzzles uh if you look up gold bug crypto village um you'll find the um the page for that and the interesting things there but that's just that's just like puzzle puzzle figure outing um at open sauce it's it's mostly like just meeting people that just have the most interesting interests um i really like walking around the like community booth area um unsurprisingly to me the hobbyist rocketry area was super interesting seeing what some of the kids in school are like machining the the 3d printing revolution what it's done for hobbyist rocketry is like amazing um that's obviously there's there's some really cool stuff you can follow on youtube there as well but seeing not just the people on YouTube, seeing people that are just, you know, doing it as part of a university club or high school club or whatever.

1:13:02Linus Sebastian:It's been really fun. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think I have like a, you know, super exciting story.

1:13:09Luke Lafreniere:No one asked me, but the last time I was at an event, it wasn't that event, but Michael Reeves like almost died. So that was interesting. I sent down a picture. Almost died. I mean, maybe not, but he could have. I feel like that's a lot of his life yeah he didn't seem phased by it at all dan do you want to put up that picture so he was he was going around this corner very fast uh these these carts these are electric carts that do not fuck around and uh his wheel fell off uh just fell off like it could have happened at any moment on a track that was very put together with little tiny um flags like this and and not a lot there's yeah this feels very open sauce michael reeves doing something dangerous

1:14:01Linus Sebastian:on a thing that is attached to an engine and wheels on a track that was thrown together

1:14:08Luke Lafreniere:somewhat shoddily feels very open sauce coated yeah um so yeah pretty much oh michael no so that was fun he's awesome um

1:14:27Linus Sebastian:yeah open sauce is wild man i don't even know how to like explain it it's i'm happy that they somehow still get permits to run that show uh dan do you want

1:14:36Luke Lafreniere:hit us with another? Sure they get permits. For Luke, again, who seems like he might be into it? Have you ever tried wing foiling or any other wind or foil sports? Evolving very quickly over the last few years, buying to use during board setup and teardown. What did they buy? They bought... Wing foiling. Screwdriver bit hex and

1:15:02Linus Sebastian:bit set torques and the bit case. How to wing foil? I think it's like a surfboard with a wing on it like a kite are we going to show your screen sure i think this is it

1:15:13Luke Lafreniere:that seems like the one it looks like it looks like he's holding like a big inflatable dinghy

1:15:19Linus Sebastian:it's got a water foil um yes yeah so you're using the one with the foil the like kite power wind power that you're collecting from the foil i guess the sail inflatable sail foil wing thing No, the foil is the board that comes out of the water because it's got a wing under the water wing. Right. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. No, I mean, that seems super cool. I have always been not good at sports that don't have fully independent foot movement.

1:15:50Luke Lafreniere:Or hitting.

1:15:53Linus Sebastian:I got to have hurt. I do tend to do a little bit better in those. Type five fun. Other people. No, that's one. Other people. That's type one. You inflict pain onto other people Yeah Yeah I know so I mean it sounds Cool but yeah I'm Normally like skateboarding Not so much rollerblading yes That was usually where my brain Went independent foot movement I did better with If both my feet had to be Stuck on something You're okay at snowboarding aren't you I'm okay I would probably be a lot better at skiing I've always had that thought I've never wanted to switch For the first time in over 20 years, like 25 years recently.

1:16:37Linus Sebastian:That's not true.

1:16:38Luke Lafreniere:Oh, skied. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a liar. I hadn't skied since I was a minor, I think. I have never skied. You look like a skier, Luke. You don't have the kind of snowboard vibe. What is that? What is that?

1:16:51Linus Sebastian:It means you're not cool. I think that's what he said. You know what? No, no, no.

1:16:55Luke Lafreniere:So I'm a skier, so I think the opposite. Snowboarding is not cool anymore, though. You don't look like a dick. Skiing's cool now So they're like back in the In the 90s like All the kids wanted to snowboard Snowboarding was the coolest thing ever And skiing was like for grandpa Basically And not anymore

1:17:14Linus Sebastian:Now skiing's cool You know it kind of makes sense to me because I feel like Am I going to be just way off on this Like if you look at how people used to play video games RPG games I'm not going to wear that armor I know it's better but it looks bad snowboarding if you look at nowadays I will look like a complete weird clown or I will pay money to skin my stuff so it looks better but I will always wear the most performant things and I'm going to check my stats and I'm going to try to be better than everyone it's competitive and I'm going to practice and blah blah blah min max all the things skiing interesting that's my theory good theory I agree because skiing is like and snowboarding is more like I mean you can tuck on either yeah yeah but usually the borders are carving and having fun for style points and doing tricks and

1:18:06Luke Lafreniere:stuff i don't know man for the longest time if anything snowboarders had the reputation for just tucking down the hill and like running people over and stuff versus like you know skiers because it was the demo it was a demographic issue like it was a bunch of young irresponsible dudes on snowboards the cool kids yeah exactly that's interesting i i've had more experience with annoying skiers flying down mountains but i think both sides are pretty brutal this is fair um so unfortunately i seem to have crashed it i went up this ladder uh which may have been like a loading point i don't know what clear cash does but okay i can oh no take a guess yeah well i don't know what cache it's clearing, Luke.

1:18:54Luke Lafreniere:I think that was a loading point. Yeah, so if I... Can I load... Okay, can I load this autosave? Because it's been working? I've

1:19:04Linus Sebastian:heard you going around.

1:19:07Luke Lafreniere:Hold on. Full screen. I've been going around. Okay, so here, I guess this is about as good as it's gonna get.

1:19:16Linus Sebastian:Ooh, look at those rays.

1:19:18Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Oh, wow. Wow.

1:19:21Linus Sebastian:What RTX card are you running this on?

1:19:24Luke Lafreniere:It's amazing. How much of my life... Looking back on my life, how much did I spend without these rays? Are you a can putter away-er or a getting beaten Half-Life player? Oh, I can't hear what he's saying. Bet. Hold on, let me try again. Bet. Hold on, hold on. He's a getting beaten guy. No, I'm gonna try again. Bet. Ah!

1:19:48Linus Sebastian:This feels very Linus Coded. This is our savior

1:19:55Luke Lafreniere:This is how I played star citizen Yeah It works I think I think that's valuable for the star citizen community Blah blah blah Here we go Professional physicist Okay so yeah Where's my ladder at Turn around No I won't I don't want to I want to go through here

1:20:20Luke Lafreniere:I'm gonna open this Precinct 13

1:20:22Linus Sebastian:This is why you break Linux and this is why you're a good QA tester Go to Nova Prospect like a good boy

1:20:30Luke Lafreniere:No, I don't want to I'm gonna go in there I like all the blood in the room It's pretty, it's red Free teeth They're like the ducks at the park You can take as many as you want Oh, so no, that wasn't a loading spot then Interesting Oh, that was a bit of a glitchy moment I think that's a dead guy

1:21:04Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, basically It was not good I'm surprised you don't know who that is

1:21:10Linus Sebastian:I might, I'm just really bad with names

1:21:12Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, pretty rough all right why don't we jump into our next topic this is that i am pretty impressed at how well that's running that's kind of crazy um and this was a couple of this was a couple of high school students yeah that's that's incredible really good job yeah wild all right hey on the subject of valve solo German game developer Zorro Arts said that his co-op boat game Paddle Paddle Paddle has been refunded over 55 ,000 times out of roughly 270 ,000 copies sold in its first year a roughly 21 % refund rate which okay on the surface is not a huge problem right except that the game sits at 90 % positive reviews so how is it that you can have 80 of people not refunding it if 90 of people review it positively

1:22:26Luke Lafreniere:discuss so actually you don't need to discuss because the answer is pretty clear steam's policy grants automatic refunds under 14 days of ownership okay and under two hours of play time and while the game was designed around three and a half to four hours of play speed runners and skilled players are rolling credits inside the two-hour window so you'll actually see reviews like dozens of reviews openly saying things like great game finished within an hour and 40 minutes refunded. At an average$4 sale price, we're talking about$158 ,000 in refunded revenue. Now, Zorro Arts is careful to say that he supports Steam's refund policy as a player right, and he's not asking for the refund policy to be removed, but his suggested fix is having Steam display an expected completion time next to the price on every store page so short games aren't punished for being short i don't know if that solution would really work either necessarily maybe you could do an average are you showing the gameplay yeah uh it would be interesting to maybe have

1:23:49Linus Sebastian:like an average amount of time players played this game for and an average completed time

1:23:54Luke Lafreniere:that wouldn't tell yeah that wouldn't tell you that much about it because like i was blown away by how many achievements I got in Expedition 33 for like just being a third of the way through the story. Like the percentage of people who bought this game and just never played it. So I don't know how...

1:24:16Linus Sebastian:The percentages for those things on 007 are very high. It's a very good game. Lots of people are playing it. Oh, really? And lots of people are playing it through. I'm not done the game yet, but I don't know I feel like I'm pretty far into it I've played a decent amount and I wonder how many people are playing right now

1:24:47oh yeah

1:24:49Linus Sebastian:3313 people playing right now single player shooter game that was released like two months ago seems not bad

1:24:55Luke Lafreniere:cat os says it doesn't help that there's youtubers doing challenges of speed running a game and then getting a refund i have heard of that before

1:25:06Linus Sebastian:that's uh that's that's pretty brutal well their thing is they have to keep buying it every time they fail or something right i i also don't think that they refund it they just try so they buy they have to buy it every time they try it i don't know but it's still content that's out there yeah so yeah this one I don't know I do think I mean do they tell people that it's like it's gonna you're gonna play it for an hour because like I know they're saying like it would be nice if Steam put something there but I think they also don't

1:25:40Luke Lafreniere:Gas Racing says if you if you get the game complete achievement you shouldn't be able to refund but like I'm gonna put one of those on the menu yeah yeah What if you make your game 10 minutes long? Like, I could maybe understand. But then it probably wouldn't have positive reviews. So that's where this is a really unique case. I mean, yeah, maybe the solution is that they just put an additional condition in. So two hours, two weeks, two quarters of the game. You know, or something like that. how do you define a quarter of a game I was going for half the game

1:26:22Linus Sebastian:no I know how do you define half the game I don't know that's really tough because what if I spend a bajillion years in act one of BG3 which is possible

1:26:34Luke Lafreniere:but then you'll go over two hours

1:26:37Linus Sebastian:right so it's one of yeah cause this game I don't know I could understand buying this game and then playing it for an hour and being done and feeling bamboozled because what freaking game is an hour long? I know people are saying two hours, but two hours is the limit. There's a lot of people in the reviews saying that they played for an hour. That being said, it's on sale right now for less than four Canadian rubles. It's a very cheap game. If I had a good time with this and I played it for an hour and it was$4, I'm not going to be way too upset. There's definitely things

1:27:17Luke Lafreniere:that I could do for an hour that cost more than$4. Yeah. Yeah.

1:27:22Linus Sebastian:So like, I don't know. I do think some type of visibility on it could be cool, but I also really don't look back fondly on the days of everybody screaming at game developers to make longer games. About how long is the game.

1:27:42Luke Lafreniere:Like, I don't even, yes, a lot of people were screaming for longer games, but for me it's more just like defining the value of a game by how long it is is like defining the value of code by how many lines it is like it's not i always hated that like portal is such a prime example of a game that just completely bucked that trend and its shortness was its greatness if it had been twice as long it wouldn't have been as good in fact controversial take sorry i did not enjoy portal 2 as much as i enjoyed portal 1 it wasn't as fresh it was longer not a controversial take i think it felt more drawn out i just didn't i like portal 2 but i like portal 1 more i did not enjoy it as much as i enjoyed portal 1 and yeah oh uh west 27 in floatplane chat says titanfall 2 another prime example in a night yes and it's absolutely worth i wish i didn't have to i wish i wish it was longer but they do a really good job of they

1:28:43Linus Sebastian:take the good thing away before it was bad it's like a tight script they don't let you get tired

1:28:48Luke Lafreniere:of anything it's amazing spoiler alert that like that like time shifting yeah mechanic i just literally all of it i just wanted to play with that for the rest of the house building thing

1:28:59Linus Sebastian:it could have literally only been yeah it could have literally only been that yeah that would

1:29:05Luke Lafreniere:have been an entire game yep easily um you know what even though it got a little tedious for me just because it was like kind of easy it takes two did a pretty good job of that okay introducing did you ever play it no oh it's it's a great play with the wifey on the couch game um because it's accessible enough that like she can do it even if she's not a hardcore gamer she just wants to play hippocopia now fair enough um that that was a highly successful purchase but a nice thing about it is that it gives you a new mechanic it gives you a short tutorial for how to use it it sets you loose in a world where you have to use it to solve a bunch of problems and then it rips it away yeah good never to be seen again yeah uh someone said also assassin's creed and that yeah what I tried really hard to like Assassin's Creed it's not your kind of game what's that supposed to mean is it too cerebral Linus likes good games

1:30:09Linus Sebastian:you like Anno how could I say that that doesn't work

1:30:14Luke Lafreniere:it's not cerebral enough I tried really hard to get into Assassin's Creed multiple times I would have to check my Steam play history in order to know which one I ultimately tried to play at some point. But I just couldn't. I just got bored. I do not care for Assassin's Creed. I do not care for it. I'm sorry. What you got there?

1:30:42Linus Sebastian:Yeah, he said the older Assassin's Creed games are shorter. 15 hours if you speedrun the campaign and 41 to 45 side quests who plays an adventure game speed running that's what i'm saying like

1:30:54Luke Lafreniere:i don't think assassin's creed was ever like a short game oh wow i i do not own assassin's creed on steam i own it on a disc i do own it i know that and i see it not in my account so

1:31:08Linus Sebastian:that's where we're at on that all righty then yeah i got bored with ac black flag actually i never actually beat assassin creed black flag random fun fact i talk about the game all the

1:31:21Luke Lafreniere:time never beat it oh that's the one that you're trying to 100 all the stuff no oh that's assassin

1:31:26Linus Sebastian:creed 4 got it that's the one that just got remastered nice i never i talk about it all the time i played it on stream a bunch i played it in general a bunch uh i got it pre-release because they gave it to us for like benchmarking review and i was on the top of every leaderboard for every category nice uh just i loved that game never beat it never had any interest at all in beating it because to beat it you have to go on land i just didn't care nice didn't care at all

1:31:58Luke Lafreniere:that's true um okay hold on we have one more question so oh yeah no forget it okay i do have a note about steam's refund policy slash just game purchasing policy if anyone from valve is watching i know you're not but whatever it's worth a shot um i want to talk about my experience trying to buy the jackbox 10 pack recently it was really annoying uh i forget if it was on sale for steam summer sale or if it was just a deal because it was a bundle but basically i saw a price i liked and i was like you know what i like jackbox games i play them like when i'm out and about at other people's houses um we do we do like pool parties and other kinds of get togethers.

1:32:42Luke Lafreniere:And it'd be nice to be able to just like fire up Jackbox on this TV and people can play Jackbox games. It's like a great little, you know, icebreaker. And I was like, I'll just get them all because whatever I can. And then I couldn't because I already owned Party Pack 4 or something. And so if you already own one, you cannot buy a bundle that contains that item.

1:33:07Linus Sebastian:That's that doesn't feel normal.

1:33:09Luke Lafreniere:no it doesn't i would think no like i feel like i thought you used to get no i don't expect a discount but i thought what you used to get was a giftable code for the one you already had

1:33:20Linus Sebastian:no usually usually you get a discount based on the bundles value of okay discount or yeah multi-copy

1:33:27Luke Lafreniere:so then i was like okay fine well it's still a way better deal if i literally delete this game from my account and then buy the 10 pack. So I deleted it from my account, which you like removed it from my library and I tried to buy the 10 pack and it wouldn't let me. Now to Valve's credit, they have a great little mechanism where you can restore an item that you have removed from your library. But because of that, it wouldn't let me buy the stupid thing because I already had it, even though it was not in my library. It wasn't actually removed from my account. So I think you have to actually contact them.

1:34:05Luke Lafreniere:people in the chat are saying that it could be down to the developer to to set that up maybe

1:34:09Linus Sebastian:yeah because i've read into this a number of times and it's it's always a discount based on the value of what you already own um so that is very interesting like i even know uh when slay the spire 2 came out yeah they they did a thing where they made it so that you could have a discount if you own slay the spire 1 and the way that they did that was they made a bundle that was Slaves Fire 1 and Slaves Fire 2. So if you just go to buy the bundle, it would give it to you at a discounted price because you would get the bundle discount, which was like 10 % off or whatever, but it would only be on the one game.

1:34:44Linus Sebastian:So yeah, maybe it's developer controlled. There's a lot of developer controls on Steam.

1:34:49Luke Lafreniere:That makes sense. Well, I don't know. I was very annoyed. People are asking if I contacted Steam support. I was in a hurry. There was a party there.

1:34:59Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

1:35:01Luke Lafreniere:so I was

1:35:02Linus Sebastian:very annoyed I feel like Jackpot games I don't know why I had this thought but I feel like out of probably almost most games on Steam they're probably bought in a hurry more than almost any other one that makes sense because people are like oh god I have a bunch of people at my house I don't know what to do Jackpot games whatever we'll play this thing

1:35:23Luke Lafreniere:that actually makes a ton of sense alright we can we can move on from that what are we supposed to be doing dan more topics i think we've i think we've done a lot of topics haven't we oh sponsor one too oh we should do that all right the show is brought to you by squarespace first impressions matter especially when you're trying to build a client or customer base when someone cross comes across your website you need to make it easy to use and understand or else those potential shoppers are just going to leave you're a respectable business, not a municipality. What does that mean? Oh, this. Oh, lordy.

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1:38:08Linus Sebastian:oh and we're supposed to do our float plane announcements also i just want to say someone in chat has some Jackbox games went to go do the same thing you did same thing happened okay so I'm not imagining it that's always nice to know and it's my guess at that point is it's got to be developer related because I've had it happen the other way multiple times so yeah makes sense it's always nice to know that I'm not totally

1:38:29Luke Lafreniere:crazy all the time I thought I thought you'd like that alright not only do we have another early release for our floaters but we have another video that is exclusive to float plane. That was three years in the making. My motorcycle is a finally a done after three years in the shop. Luke one, he completed final fantasy six before I got there, but I got there eventually. That's me aboard the turbo pink motorcycle. Um, freaking love it. Also, I'm supposed to, I think I'm supposed to go and release a video now. I forget how to do this. Wait, where's the... Am I... Where's the CMS? Oh, okay. Sure. The interface looks kind of...

1:39:22Luke Lafreniere:Oh, oh, oh! Are we releasing this video? Where is it? Uh... Hold on. Wait, what? Is he going to tell me which video I'm releasing? It just says not only do we have an early release, he doesn't tell me which video to release. Oh, here it is. oh yeah okay check this out the 115 inch true rgb tv samsung's excuse me samsung sony's new flagship is here and i and a man who own a display get to unbox it and he gets to experience it for the first time it's absolutely flipping mind-blowing it's like so cool um hold on where was

1:40:06Linus Sebastian:There's also, there's a full-print exclusive. There's the next episode of The Thing. The Thing? Oh, wait, is it not released yet?

1:40:15Luke Lafreniere:Not released yet.

1:40:16Linus Sebastian:Never mind.

1:40:18Luke Lafreniere:Sammy gave me a timestamp that I'm supposed to go look at. One second here. 1927. Hold on. Where are we at? 1927. Good year. That's too close.

1:40:42Luke Lafreniere:I was not actually really going that fast. I'm very pleased. It just looks really fast. Seriously, I was going like 40. No, it's the... It just sounds really good.

1:40:53Linus Sebastian:The closeness effect.

1:40:54Luke Lafreniere:Oh, yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. I'm not really that into... That into like, oh, yeah. But the bike does sound really good. no not miles per hour kilometers per hour kilometers per hour i was not going that fast uh sammy did a great he made me do it twice because he he missed the shot on the first go around

1:41:23Luke Lafreniere:yeah you nailed it good job sammy uh all right

1:41:30Luke Lafreniere:oh right i should probably talk about that uh so yeah get all of this and more at LMG.gg slash FPWEN. Join all the cool peeps over on Floatplane. Also, we already talked about checkout messages and stuff, but hey, if you're looking for something else to pick up over on the store, we have all of our cables in stock right now. Yeah. They are the number one seller every day. People are freaking loving our TrueSpec cables. we still only have type c to c and type a to c but uh sure it's a cable says mario m but what a what a cable it lives up to its name fast charges with a cable that doesn't kink and a shielded with a strong rubber that looks like it's built to last a bravo bravo cable bravo um i have found it's pretty nice this is hilarious they are five inches long they are five inches long the photos don't show that variant 40 gigabit per second 0.32 feet what were you expecting sir um what

1:42:41Luke Lafreniere:what we don't have a different picture for every length of the cable also five inches is a lot it's way more than average is it no average is like 7

1:42:57Linus Sebastian:hi dad you're gonna crush some souls dan relax relax

1:43:11Luke Lafreniere:wow wow

1:43:17Luke Lafreniere:neither of you are being like oh thank god Dan, viewership's dropped like a rock.

1:43:23Linus Sebastian:Way to go, Dan. Everybody ran away from a measuring tape.

1:43:32Linus Sebastian:Oh, lordy.

1:43:35Luke Lafreniere:Anyway, yeah. The cables are doing good. Buy more cables. They're good. Good job, Creator Warehouse team.

1:43:43Linus Sebastian:Okay, what else we got going on today? It's chosen in centimeters and feet. Because I think I saw a Canadian flag, so I was like, maybe...

1:43:48Luke Lafreniere:Shows 10 centimeters. I don't know man. I don't expect people to read the product page for everything they buy I mean it's not a product page.

1:43:55Linus Sebastian:It's the name of the product. Okay. I'm not trying to chirp our own audience But like you literally select on a drop-down It's it's literally it's literally this is like the product page like

1:44:17Anyways.

1:44:18Luke Lafreniere:We appreciate your business. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Alright, why don't we jump right into Next topic, I guess. Discord banned thousands of users for posting pictures of chessboards and Minecraft screenshots. since may discord's automated safety system has wrongly banned thousands of users for posting harmless images including minecraft inventories spreadsheets game textures even just plain transparent backgrounds some users got hit with permanent bans citing child safety violations for posting minecraft screenshots the issue finally blew up after roughly 200 people were banned in a single weekend.

1:45:06Luke Lafreniere:Discord CTO, after they investigated, confirmed that it was apparently two stacked bugs. A single faulty hash in their content matching database would wrongly flag grid patterns as known harmful material and the system then skipped the human review that is supposed to happen before any action takes place going straight to permanent bans. A second bug kept the bans locked in even after staff cleared the accounts. Discord said that everyone affected has been unbanned and the bad hash has been fixed. Our discussion question says, a false child sexual abuse material flag is just about the worst thing that you can attach to someone's account by mistake.

1:45:51Luke Lafreniere:Should permanent bans even be possible without a human actually looking first?

1:45:57Linus Sebastian:Oh, man. At Discord scale, bro, when almost every user is unpaid, bro. And who wants to review those, man? Yeah. Like, I can understand. That, too. Oh, God.

1:46:10Luke Lafreniere:I didn't think about that part. Like, there's a reason that we're just using hashes. I don't like that. So that it's no one's job to review this stuff all day. Like, that's. And there's. Oh, man. There's no. There's no excuse either for banning people's accounts and labeling them child predators when. Okay. When they didn't do anything.

1:46:33Linus Sebastian:Hold on. I'm going to address that a little bit. Sure. Because this thing said the worst thing you can attach to their account. I don't think it tells every other user. I don't know. I feel like...

1:46:43Luke Lafreniere:I don't think so. The principal's office has got to have a permanent record somewhere. Yeah, but the... No, I know, I know. Yeah. But just like... I don't know. Like, I'd feel... They're not putting you on a registry or anything. I'd feel deeply... Well, I don't know which governments they're cooperating with, actually.

1:47:01Linus Sebastian:i'm in a publicly accessible registry i don't want to be on any registry for that i would love to go to court and then pull up the offensive imagery and it's just a bunch of like chess screenshots and i'm sending emma okay i'm gonna tell you though the problem with that

1:47:21Luke Lafreniere:is that it's far easier for people to make things up about you and damage your reputation than it is for your eventual day in court to absolve you yeah you will never reach all those people again

1:47:32Linus Sebastian:yeah totally so it would still be still bad obviously really bad still bad there's a chess comm has a thing right now where if you beat the current bots you get custom chess pieces and there was a forest one and it makes your knights bears and i was very happy about it i sent screenshots

1:47:46Luke Lafreniere:like a lot of people but i didn't get banned okay well that's lucky it's a good thing those bears weren't bear.

1:47:55Luke Lafreniere:Well, they weren't cubs. Yeah, but they just don't live that long. So even an adult bear could be well under 18.

1:48:05Luke Lafreniere:It's feeling gross now.

1:48:11Luke Lafreniere:10 to 25 years, according to AI. I don't know. Most of the ones I know are like 50.

1:48:22Linus Sebastian:I couldn't pass it up Oh he's gonna ding it Thank you Nice

1:48:32Luke Lafreniere:Thanks for bearing with me I had to go do that

1:48:34Linus Sebastian:Oh very good

1:48:39Linus Sebastian:GOG Joint CEO has a point to bear He said the future of gaming shouldn't come At the expense of ownership An interview with Eurogamer responding to Sony's decision to end disc production. GOG joint CEO

1:48:58Linus Sebastian:Krzysztof Paplinski said, as the industry becomes increasingly digital, players should have the full confidence that the games they buy will remain accessible regardless of changes to platform, storefronts or business models. Sick. He repeated that GOG games are DRM free and come with offline installers, giving people lasting control over their purchases. Even if a game vanishes from the GOG storefront, it never leaves your library, which is a stark contrast to Sony's plans to remove hundreds of films from customers' digital libraries without compensation, the result of failing to renew licensing with Studio Canal, which is just up to them to decide if it doesn't feel like it's properly profitable anymore or not um and is is not part of a choice that you're able to make which blows um they're doing something so i'm just going to keep going valve released windows drivers for steam hardware but won't support it apparently uh they released a steam hardware windows resources page providing drivers for steam hardware the resources are offered as is and valve says it will not support windows on steam hardware uh they they they direct users to steam os recovery instructions instead just in case you did have a problem with your windows stuff uh dual boot on steam os is not yet available on steam os

1:50:25Luke Lafreniere:oh wait hey hold on you moved on from the gog topic already yeah well no i wanted to go shopping Okay. How did this not end up in the thing? What do you mean? Yeah. Where is it?

1:50:38Linus Sebastian:Oh, like you had notes that, okay. Yeah. Hold on. Where's it? You want to go shopping on GOG?

1:50:43Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, I want to go shopping on GOG. I want to see.

1:50:46Linus Sebastian:It doesn't need to be in there. Just go to GOG.

1:50:47Luke Lafreniere:Well, yeah, but I forgot. Because if it was in the topic, then you would have known that you were supposed to go shopping and you wouldn't have moved on. That's true. Okay. Pay attention. I was talking to Dan. Relax. I pay attention, sort of. Oh, my God. did we crash GOG? Did we just love hug them? Because it's not loading. Is it loading for you? Working for me, yeah. That's weird. What's my computer doing? Oh, there we go. All right, nice. So basically, the segment is simple. Luke and I are each going to just go on GOG and find a game that we really like that you can get on GOG. Got it. With no...

1:51:22Luke Lafreniere:With no DRM and you just actually own it forever. Like, GOG is so cool. When you download the game, you just get like a file that's like this is the game um okay well Luke found his and he's gonna talk about it stop okay hold on which one is that? okay that is actually a really is that$3.60? Canadian bro this is actually a great deal

1:51:51Linus Sebastian:this is a fantastic game it still holds up it's still really fun I would genuinely actually really recommend you go pick this up it's really cool that they show it's the lowest price in the last 30 days before discount I might have picked that if I'd seen it I kind of picked it as a meme and the more I thought about it it's like that's an incredible deal Game of the Year edition Tomb Raider $3.59 Canadian almost as good as this version of Tomb Raider $3.59 Canadian which is going to be yeah Noki says$3 USD that's crazy go buy this if you haven't played this before just go get it it's really good

1:52:27Luke Lafreniere:it's really good it's wicked it's one of the only games that i played all the way through during the years of like starting lmg and having young children oh yeah yeah yeah um

1:52:40Linus Sebastian:i also played it the whole way and it's it's very good it's a genuinely just really good game

1:52:44Luke Lafreniere:okay let me uh let me have a look here what else uh man you you found yours so fast i did okay i'm going to summer sale encore here okay what else we got uh you know what i'm gonna see if they have man some of these are pretty obscure and not the claire kind the kind that nobody heard of

1:53:08Linus Sebastian:uh what the heck is glazo it's a dollar i like that that was a real ding but it was short i think

1:53:15Luke Lafreniere:that was very i'm trying to i'm trying to work on the the like palette of dings that are available yeah all right well why don't you finish that topic while i find something that uh that i want to recommend to people hopefully for a good price hitman absolution for two dollars and 50

1:53:31Linus Sebastian:cents is also actually pretty sick

1:53:36Linus Sebastian:yeah it seems like all the hitman games are on like steep discount all the older hitman games a dollar 35 for hitman blood money yeah absolution for 250 these are again canadian yeah um these are these are older hitman games like the graphics a little rough but if you go to absolution absolution is not that old much more much more up to date so that's why i was kind of recommending absolution right um yeah that's pretty that's pretty sick

1:54:10Luke Lafreniere:yeah oh dude i okay man it's not as it's definitely not as good of a deal as Tomb Raider 2016 for$3 or whatever that, $4 or whatever that price was. But I absolutely loved Dragon Age Origins and it's 27 Canadian dollars. That's like 20 bucks. Dragon Age Origins is a fantastic game. And you like own it forever now and no one can ever take it away from you, which might be important because if you're like me, then you might put like 100, 200 hours into a character. yeah super awesome game really enjoyed the heck out of it it's a little more casual compared to like you know Neverwinter Nights 2 like some of the some of the older sort of D &D boom or origin games but yeah it's a it's a really enjoyable game boom Deus Ex Mankind Divided I never played

1:55:08Linus Sebastian:Mankind Divided is it good good game I liked it and like graphics like I know we're looking at some of these games are a bit older um graphics on this are still gonna be pretty good so fun fact yeah i i dan said it's okay i i'm not like overwhelmingly positive about this game but i remember it

1:55:25Luke Lafreniere:enjoying it at least for a while the only deus ex game i ever played was deus ex invisible war which apparently is the worst one than that um yeah so i was getting punched i enjoyed the crap out of it i played this all the way through i i don't i look i i but then you're only looking If you had started with the first one, and then you're going to play Mankind Divided, it's kind of not as good. I don't know, man. You're going to love Mankind Divided. That game's awesome.

1:55:52Linus Sebastian:I don't know what to say. I enjoyed it. It was so long ago that I had kind of like, yeah, I mean, it's like playing System Shock.

1:56:00Luke Lafreniere:It's like, I am too used to modern convenience. Yeah. I don't want to play a calculator. I tried to play System Shock 2. I tried to play one of the System Shock games after playing Bioshock because the reviews of Bioshock were like, oh yeah, it's just like it's dumbed down, ripped off System Shock blah blah blah blah blah if you're a real gamer, you do System Shock and so I was like, oh, I mean, I like games I'll play a real game and I tried to play System Shock and I was like, okay, I'm out maybe I like friendly normie games but I enjoyed the heck out of Bioshock Your Memo, Your Memo something like that, I don't know yeah that game's hard to like in modern day there's some mods that make it better whatever i enjoyed deus ex invisible war i got it for free with like a gpu purchase or something remember gpus coming with games yeah and like multiple games that was cool anyway gog games unlimited games all the games gog go find a cool game you'll have spent you'll have spent 25 us dollars and you could have tomb raider and dragon age origins and that'll keep you busy for like the next month or two and you will own those games forever it's pretty sick it is fascinating to me

1:57:15Linus Sebastian:how many how many gooner games there are and how well they sell it is constantly fascinating to me i have all the filters turned off on steam because like i don't want to be bothered by the like are you this old and like i've had my account long enough literally i've had my account long enough that you should know that I am old enough to see whatever I want but then it also shows up in the recommendations I'm sure there's some way I could tune it but it's always under like top selling right now there's some Gooner game and we jump over to GOG best seller very top new releases very top

1:57:53Luke Lafreniere:there's a new one there's a new uh Isakari Succubus sorry I can't read it from here I was trying to pretend I knew what it was yeah yeah

1:58:12Linus Sebastian:anyways next next topic I guess yeah

1:58:21Luke Lafreniere:trying to I'm trying to find that which Raymond game I like played hours and hours and hours of on PC was it like was it like the first one what what yeah there's a bunch of rayman games on uh on gog anyway sorry i'm oh dude uh they have the they have the batman games how much is arkham asylum yeah apparently i can tune my settings to okay so there's a setting to show not safe for work

1:58:51Linus Sebastian:content and separate setting to hide games that are explicitly not safe for work so it would show the witcher but it won't put gunner games in your feed so i guess i need to go tune that

1:59:03Luke Lafreniere:arkham asylum might be 15 bucks us which is probably that's probably pretty good not i maybe try to see if you could catch it on sale but you can always wish list it ah arkham asylum so good i love arkham asylum the other ones just felt like kind of more arkham asylum so i didn't i didn't really find myself getting that into them but yeah arkham asylum was awesome and like oh oh man mark hamill is the joker oh he's just so good oh he's just so good okay what a performance

1:59:41All right.

1:59:42Luke Lafreniere:What do you want to talk about next? Oh, wait. Did you ever actually finish the Valve driver? Yeah, whatever. They don't... They have Windows drivers, but... They have drivers not supporting it. They're not supporting it that much.

1:59:51Linus Sebastian:The whole doesn't support dual boot thing is definitely not an operating system little thing. That's a machine system. Don't worry about that. You can now use your Sony headphones as free real-time head tracker. Interesting. For race and flight simulators. Developer Nicholas Slattery released Sony Head Tracker, a free open source Windows app that taps into the spatial audio. Oh, that makes sense. The spatial audio motion sensor is already inside the Sony headphones, like the insert model number here and XM6, and turns them into real-time head trackers. It reads the gyroscope data Windows normally ignores and feeds it to OpenTrack, which works with over 200 PC games, including Microsoft Flight Simulator, Assetto Corsa, and Elite Dangerous.

2:00:35Linus Sebastian:the XM4 and older won't work because they lack the sensors and AirPods are out because Apple locks head tracking behind its proprietary protocol. That's pretty cool. That's actually

2:00:48Luke Lafreniere:like, that could be a compelling reason to just abandon my AirPods if anyone else could get the ergonomics right for me. But then I was expecting my Pro 3s to eventually like be comfortable for me. they still aren't the pro twos fit me better so i might be looking for an alternative anyway because i don't think i can stick with these forever so as as can you competitors you can't buy threes uh no i could go back to pro i could go back to my pro twos i literally still have them but the battery life is not that great anymore because they're older now and also you can buy new ones though as competitors you know make better products with better active noise cancellation

2:01:29Linus Sebastian:whatever the pro twos are going to fall behind yeah fair enough um and so i'd be looking for

2:01:34Luke Lafreniere:if i were to move on from the pro threes which i tolerate they're comfortable enough i'd be looking for i'd be looking wider i'd be i'd be casting a wider net yep the next topic i have a bone to pick

2:01:46Linus Sebastian:with me with the world um okay maybe you what did i do you responded being like oh i guess were just boomers i don't agree what what are you talking about go to the next topic oh okay so

2:02:04Luke Lafreniere:last week i complained that there was no way or at least no easy way i think i did kind of disclaim it to sort your steam library by um date added in the desktop interface i showed that i had found it in the big picture mode interface, but not here. And so I was like, well, we've got our filters, we've got sort by recent activity, we've got ready to play games. How the heck do I sort these by whatever? So you could sort them by when you played them, but where the heck is when I bought them? It turns out that it's here.

2:02:43Linus Sebastian:Which is exactly why I don't agree. It's not there. I thought someone sent me a screenshot. They sure did.

2:02:54okay nope

2:02:57Linus Sebastian:let's see how long it takes you two to figure this out I was gonna help and now I'm more interested in not because I know where it is it's that button isn't it

2:03:06Luke Lafreniere:hold on hold on manage can I yeah can I sort no I don't have steam on this computer I think I know what button it is I'll keep it in my brain hold on library okay I'm gonna try and figure it out

2:03:19Linus Sebastian:so the person in the tweet said to click the home button so you could click the home button under library Cog? No. Sorry, home button? Yeah, under library. They said to click the home button. Under library. Oh!

2:03:35Luke Lafreniere:Yep, so that didn't do anything. Collections. Create a new collect... No. Do you want to see it? Hold on. No, not yet. Alright. No, okay. Alright, fine. Show it to me. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Hold on. Don't show me yet. all games hold on here we go here we go there it is data added to library okay I knew I was going to find it wait what's all that stuff on top like I don't have those what's new is that new

2:04:04Linus Sebastian:no I don't have those shelves on mine at least at home at least at home yeah they're on mine at home and on this computer here interesting I just collapsed them all

2:04:15Luke Lafreniere:I just have my all games so that's something

2:04:16Linus Sebastian:how did you even collapse them

2:04:18Luke Lafreniere:I'm not sure what I just did I think these guys are boomers so the reason Luke is the boomer thing back in my day steam was green I can't do any of this we should probably give them the context for that I responded on twitter saying oh I guess we just had a boomer moment not being able to find it but you know what that's not a great interface bro it's below the fold

2:04:41Linus Sebastian:yeah my main thing is where I'm looking for it is up here yeah that's where I sort that's where my games are yes i want it as like either a filter here or an option on one of these

2:04:55Luke Lafreniere:or something like if i wanted to view all my games as giant box art then i would be in big picture mode where i do know how to find it yeah going all the way down there is uh and then clicking this thing and then going down here uh yeah yeah just give me a better sword over on the left and

2:05:12Linus Sebastian:then i think everyone's happy yeah so i don't i don't it's it's below the fold and it's in a weird spot you can reorder the shelves sure yeah but by default it's below the fold yeah default behavior

2:05:24Luke Lafreniere:matters like i i remember back when i used to do more like android phone reviews i'd have people that's so cool i didn't know this was a thing someone make like uh like a snoki linked steam

2:05:38Linus Sebastian:brew old steam yes that's cute this looks so sick actually the buttons i remember the buttons back

2:05:47Luke Lafreniere:Back when I did a lot of like Android phone reviews, I'd take a bunch of flack for evaluating them the way that they come out of the box and using the default settings or type of navigation or the default keyboard or whatever. It's like, why are you not just like immediately downloading a custom launcher? And why are you not immediately like rooting it and getting the most out of it? It's like, dude, I'm not trying to make like your favorite Android phone maker look bad or anything. but these are things that most people are not going to change. So these are things that are important. Default behavior does matter is pretty much all I'm trying to say here.

2:06:24Luke Lafreniere:So what do you, what is this exactly? Old steam. Yeah. But what is it?

2:06:29Linus Sebastian:Infinite hiatus though. I don't know. Oh,

2:06:32Luke Lafreniere:infinite, not indefinite.

2:06:34Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Oh, infinite hiatus.

2:06:37Luke Lafreniere:The glory days of the skin are behind it.

2:06:40Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

2:06:41Luke Lafreniere:Okay. Yeah. This might not be a thing. All right. Bummer.

2:06:44Linus Sebastian:That's cool. Yeah. it's a cool little project looks sweet i miss fun uis like that i find a lot of uis these days are very very very boring uh we had a conversation on a wench a while ago there's that like you know websites from 2006 thing and they're all so much more unique looking and like even just looking from one to the other they all look very very unique and these days like every web store looks the same every every info website looks the same every wiki for every game looks the same this is so cool it's so cool and with the power of modern like css and stuff like my god you could do so much i mean you could run half-life 2 in your browser yeah like the things you can do with browsers these days are amazing and it uh yeah and the problem is i don't even blame i don't blame the developers i don't blame the managers i'm not blaming the companies it's people are following like user behavioral data people are making the things that the people ultimately maybe not say they want but their actions indicate that they want it just it is what it is you guys are born because they need to work on desktop and mobile desktop and mobile and and tons of different versions of everything in between that's a big part of the problem um What's this?

2:08:07Luke Lafreniere:Is this desktop or mobile? Because I can sure move it. Well, no, it matters. It does. It matters. It's a way smaller screen than what I would expect someone to be using on a desktop. Experiences are different from device to device, even if they're like the same version. And I think it's a legitimate question. And some of them are going to have touchscreens. Some of them won't. I wasn't even...

2:08:30Linus Sebastian:It kind of needs to be pretty okay at supporting both of those things. Yeah. there's a lot of reasons why modern websites are honestly really boring and I don't know if we're going to be able to get away from it to be honest.

2:08:45Luke Lafreniere:You know what else we're not going to be able to get away from? LTT Labs publishing some banger articles recently Dude. This is so cool This one did super well actually Ryzen AI Halo is AMD's new little AI dev kit that's meant to take on the dgx spark from nvidia and i'd say to a lesser degree like the the mac studio i the hardware is not necessarily as competitive with something like a mac studio there's just not enough bandwidth but in terms of the pricing especially compared to what the mac studio costs now and in terms of the software that's included to make it just brain dead simple to get up and running with local llms um it's a pretty cool little piece of kit so i i read through all this enjoyed the heck out of it earlier this week and there's another fresh treat for me to enjoy because i actually just made my way through LLM quantization part one because there's some pretty there's some reasonably thick go watch this and also go read this and then come back reference material from it so it took me a little while to remember oh yeah I haven't finished like doing all of my homework and reading that article so I actually just finished part one recently and here we go quantization part two is up so if you guys don't know lttlabs.com doing some actually really amazing content they also have uh companion articles for some of our videos uh here's the short circuit they did a little bit more sort of performance benchmarking for the labs article um because we were in a real hurry to get that thing unboxed and published and then we ultimately sat on it after it was done editing it was a whole thing anyway don't worry about it the point is uh labs team can take their time they did some testing.

2:10:45Luke Lafreniere:Oh my god, the battery life sucks. I mean, I wasn't expecting it to be great, but what the heck? Oh, man. Alright. I mean, yeah, bright display, though. So that's something. Cool. It's just pirate. Yeah, that's a... Yeah, that's a... Check out these stats. That's a fair thing to say. So look at that one.

2:11:16Linus Sebastian:And then swipe to the right to see the second one and zoom into the bottom left hand corner to see where it all came from. But those stats are for, I'm going to publish those, but those stats are for that AI Ryzen box thing, the Ryzen AI Halo dev kit. And it's very interesting to me what's getting views. because the lab site has been having fun with articles. We recognized, we heard you, you know, okay, product page, product review, nobody cares. All right, understood. So we've been working on articles. Articles have been more fun anyways. And it's been really, really interesting seeing stuff that people are interested in.

2:11:58Linus Sebastian:And it seems pretty random sometimes. Like there was a 45 watt power brick from a bit ago that just banged. People loved that for some reason. We didn't get crazy viewership on it, but the sentiment around does the Belkin cable charge the Nintendo Switch 2 faster, even though it's like Nintendo branded thing, the sentiment around this was really positive and fun to read. but yeah you release an article on that AI Ryzen box and people do be clicking on it and staying and reading and coming from different parts of the internet but it's fun and I saw some negative stuff because it's talking about AI in general which is fair enough but I think basically anything that is going to progress the ability for people to run things locally instead of just funneling all of their money into these big companies stealing everything from everyone is better than the alternative.

2:12:58Linus Sebastian:So I'm pretty down with it personally.

2:13:00Luke Lafreniere:Hey, speaking of which, Mid-Journey is trying to flip the script in the copyright lawsuits that has been brought against them by Disney Universal and Warner Brothers who sued last year over their AI generating images of characters like Bart Simpson, Darth Vader, Superman, and Batman. In a new motion, whoops, Midjourney is asking the court to force these studios to reveal how much they use AI behind closed doors, including AI business plans, training data sets, model weights, and even board presentations about AI strategy. Midjourney argues that if the studios are internally training image-generating AI on unlicensed copyrighted data for things like storyboarding, then that proves that it's industry custom to do exactly what these studios are suing Midjourney for.

2:13:53Luke Lafreniere:A magistrate judge already ruled in June that the studios only have to disclose AI use in consumer-facing content, and Midjourney is now asking the district judge to overturn that limit, arguing that it lets the studios cherry-pick documents that support their case while hiding the ones that don't. Midjourney also wants every prompt that studio employees have ever typed into Midjourney itself, along with the outputs. The stakes are massive on both ends. The studios are seeking up to$150 ,000 per infringed work, which across potentially millions of images could be a company ending number for Midjourney.

2:14:30Luke Lafreniere:And the studio's attorneys are calling this discovery push a phishing expedition, insisting they aren't trying to stop AI or shut Midjourney down, just stop it from reproducing their characters. As the first major Hollywood versus AI case, whatever precedent gets set here is going to ripple across dozens of similar lawsuits pending against OpenAI, Anthropic Stability, and others. Our discussion question is, if it comes out that the studios are training their own AI on unlicensed content while suing MidJourney for the same thing, does that actually change whether MidJourney was right or not? or does it just mean that both are wrong?

2:15:09Luke Lafreniere:This will be a short discussion.

2:15:10Linus Sebastian:It's just both are wrong. It's just definitely both are wrong. The amount of, like, yeah, the amount of theft involved with AI stuff is mind-blowing. And they are wrong for it. And we'll see how that goes. Yeah, I don't have a ton to add. It feels like a very, like, I don't remember what all the letters in the acronym mean, but it feels like a very accelerationist mindset to be like, we'll just do all the stealing and potentially get our entire company burned. But as long as this thing happens, then we're fine with it, which is like, I actually guarantee you there are people that think like that.

2:15:46Linus Sebastian:Oh yeah. So like a hundred percent.

2:15:49Luke Lafreniere:Yep. I like, I, it can be comforting to tell ourselves. Surely nobody could be that stupid is probably a bot account. But I mean, I, I, I, I hesitate to bring this up again um oh no you could not I don't know what it is but you could not

2:16:15Linus Sebastian:ah it feels too late it totally isn't

2:16:19Luke Lafreniere:but I'm reminded of that conversation about Tesla with the finance bro oh oh yeah sure whatever um well no um like oh has it gotten back someone in my life watches WAN show and knows the person whose birthday party that was and referred them to the section and they asked me about it. They were like, you mean name, right? I'm like, oh.

2:16:48Luke Lafreniere:Anyway. But that was like meeting, that was like meeting some of the things that they said sounded like the kind of thing that if I wanted to self-soothe, I would tell myself, yeah, but it's probably a bot if I was interacting with this person online. It's like that park ranger quote, where the line between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans is not a line. It's more of an overlap. And I feel like we're well past that, where the line between the most obnoxious or dumbest humans and the smartest AI chatbots is like this. you know like there's a thick thick overlap with a couple of c's yeah this is um this is what i was talking about effective accelerationism eacc and i thought every letter might stand for something but no it's just nice yeah yeah like those kind of people

2:17:56Linus Sebastian:are gonna be fine well you know i mean they're probably walking away with it with tons of money anyways if the company goes down it doesn't mean their personal bank accounts go down

2:18:04Luke Lafreniere:yeah that's the whole thing when you just like raise capital yeah and then it doesn't work out it's like you still got paid for what for the work you were doing yeah and and like you should like that's the whole point of raising capital is that you can afford to be paid to work like you can your value can be appreciated in monetary terms while you work on something that presumably is important enough that somebody gave you money to work on it. That's fine.

2:18:27Linus Sebastian:You're seeing a lot of the stuff where one of these companies go down and all the people are just immediately scattered to other companies. If Mid Journey goes down, it does not mean that there will not be another image generation company. It does not mean that any of the theft that Mid Journey engaged in never happened.

2:18:41Luke Lafreniere:It hasn't been distilled out to other ones as well.

2:18:45Linus Sebastian:A lot of it, I think a lot of the plan legitimately was to make it so that this thing is just on rails and you're not going to be able to stop it.

2:18:53Luke Lafreniere:Tim, Tim, zero, zero, zero X three says, so are you saying that AI has reached human level intelligence a low bar, but I agree. No, I'm not saying that AI has intelligence. I'm saying that, um, in terms of like, quality of engagement through text on the internet, um, or like, like, huh, how do I, or like, like good takes versus bad takes, like just knowing what to say next um i i can't tell the difference between in terms of like the quality of the statement of a of a very cutting-edge bot versus a very not as cutting-edge human brain but however that human brain can do so many things that a chatbot can't do today and looks like is a complete dead end uh for for at least the modern paradigm the modern llm paradigm that's that's what i'll say

2:19:58Luke Lafreniere:uh what else what else we want to talk about today oh sony's being sued for nearly half a billion dollars by a dutch non-profit after they announced that playstation discs are done in 2028 i man i don't know how that's gonna work yeah i don't know what well yeah okay here we go let's let's get through it let's get through it okay uh so sony's facing a lawsuit in the netherlands um claiming that sony's push towards an all digital playstation ecosystem would give it too much control over game pricing and hurt consumers the lawsuit argues that ending discs in 2028 would eliminate the used game market and leave players with no real alternative to buying through the PlayStation Store, giving Sony effective control over prices.

2:20:41Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, that sounds about right.

2:20:43Linus Sebastian:I suspect they did it now because their current console is fairly old and they don't want this to be a news cycle around their new console. That's right. The Dutch Consumer Group says

2:20:51Luke Lafreniere:that removing physical media and resale options would reduce consumer choice, weakened competition, and could ultimately mean higher prices for PlayStation users.

2:21:02Luke Lafreniere:In our discussion questions is what apparently someone put down as a Linus Maid question. Sure. Could Sony solve this by just putting an ironclad clause in their terms of service that gives digital asset owners the same rights as physical asset owners? If they did that, would this whole conversation just completely go away?

2:21:24Linus Sebastian:I mean, the conversation about them being big mean guys might go away, but their whole money situation will get astronomically worse. We've talked about this before. The ability to pass around digital games is not equivalent to the ability to pass around physical games. They are completely different beasts. If everyone on the internet can just hand around digital games, the barrier of entry of doing that is so low that it will actually have a notable impact on game developers. Whether you're okay with that or not is not the conversation we're having, to be clear. The conversation we're having is just pointing out that that is a wildly different beast.

2:21:59Linus Sebastian:What if, what if, okay, hear me out.

2:22:06Luke Lafreniere:what if you couldn't lend games but they allowed you to sell them same problem and hold on hold on i'm going somewhere with this and the game developer gets a cut maybe not a full maybe not a not the cut of a full game but they get 10 you're still just reducing their revenue but that

2:22:23Linus Sebastian:is interesting because that's kind of like the uh does that does that the marketplace yeah does

2:22:28Luke Lafreniere:that does that blunt it a little bit does that does that does that make you less angry does that make does that make game developers maybe more open to this could we get could we could we reach a compromise that everyone's unhappy with i have no idea to be honest i can't i can't uh posture as a game developer um i think i would also have a very different tune depending on what

2:22:56Linus Sebastian:type of game developer i was am i a big triple a game developer am i a little indie game developer if I made Mecha Chameleon do I care if I made Mecha Chameleon maybe I would actually prefer that it worked that way because then maybe at least there wouldn't be more more people playing knockoffs on Roblox of my game than there are people playing my game on Steam so maybe that would actually make me happier not sure. This is one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes lines

2:23:35Linus Sebastian:tangential news years of Chinese court rulings on inherited game accounts and in-game items are now only gaining attention in the west after reddit user slower something shared translated case summaries with help from his wife a Chinese lawyer and certified translator one old ruling involved a valuable sword from an MMO that after its owner died was ruled to have real economic value and should be sold with the proceeds split 50-50 between the deceased legal wife and his in-game wife! What? Since both contributed to owning it Oh no!

2:24:22Luke Lafreniere:I didn't think it was going that way Dan, get that toucan out of here. Whoa! I cannot anymore.

2:24:29Linus Sebastian:That was the line. I've heard of work wives and work husbands, and I thought that crap was ridiculous. I mean, we had WoW weddings. Yeah, we also had WoW mounts. Do you know about that story? Is that just sex in WoW? I think that's the wife. There was a lady in Burning Crusade when flying mounts were introduced. Flying mounts, epic flying was incredibly expensive, and she wanted an epic flying mount. And she was like, well, you can mount me if you give me the gold to buy an epic flying mount. It's an old Craigslist post. As far as my understanding goes, it was completely real. It's like legendary.

2:25:06Linus Sebastian:Oh, I was joking. Oh, my God. No, this is... Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is real. I'm actually pretty sure it was real.

2:25:16Luke Lafreniere:I mean, okay. Hear me out. Hear me out. Is it really any more selling your body than if you did a bunch of, like, back-breaking labor for the WoW gold to buy an epic flying mount? I sell my body to Linus, and then I can go home and play WoW by myself. We all do that. There is... Prostitution under capitalism is what we all do. You know, I'm gonna do this. There we go.

2:25:44Linus Sebastian:Yeah, that'll teach you.

2:25:48Luke Lafreniere:hello i need 5 000 world of gold okay for my epic flying mount in return you can mount me if you have an account on the laughing skull server and i want the 5 000 before we do anything we can make the trade at your place since i can't host because i'm having a lot of dumb guys message me who clearly don't have the gold make sure you send a picture of yourself and a screenshot of your character with the 5 000 gold i will be checking armory profiles thanks i play a level 79 elf druid. I would prefer someone who's into roleplaying. I have a costume. Anyone will do as long as you have the gold. I would also be okay with a woman too as long as you have the gold.

2:26:21Luke Lafreniere:Also not averse to the idea of group and anal. Please send a pic and be real and drug and disease free with 5000 gold on the Laughing Skull server. It is not okay to contact them about other commercial interests.

2:26:35Linus Sebastian:Yep.

2:26:40Linus Sebastian:Okay. See, when I turned 16, the super rich kids would get a car. My dad got me an Epic Flying Mount. And I didn't even have to sell my body on Craigslist. Really?

2:26:56Luke Lafreniere:How much was an Epic Flying Mount? It's a little... I mean, don't take this... Because your family didn't have a ton of money. Was she for like not very much?

2:27:05Linus Sebastian:Not her. Not her. He actually bought me an in-game... No, no, I know. I just mean... Farmed gold in-game for my brother and I and bought us both glasses. Oh, so he didn't, like... No.

2:27:14Luke Lafreniere:Buy it. So, what... Sorry, when was this? How much money was it? Gold. Gold. No, no, I know, I know, I know. But what was 5 ,000 gold in real money?

2:27:23Linus Sebastian:Oh, back then, I have no idea. Well, I guess what I'm trying to ask is, like... That would have been 2006. Okay, so... I think 2006.

2:27:34Luke Lafreniere:what was 5 ,000 gold worth in real USD in 2006 like no no wow gold

2:27:43Linus Sebastian:so it would have been 2007 sorry 2007 like

2:27:52Linus Sebastian:I don't know I don't know if gold buying was I'm sure it was a thing I guess but I don't know AI overview

2:28:01Luke Lafreniere:um

2:28:05Luke Lafreniere:Okay, hold on, hold on. Memory insufficient. That sounds like a pretty geeky website. Okay, do we have US? Oh, good Lord. Hold on. US, can I? Okay, give me US dollars. Okay, now you know what? Let's go dollar sign. Okay, give me a dollar sign. Two-factor authentication, blah, blah, blah. Maintenance costs were something, something. Seven per year. Okay. not tradables. Okay, I don't think we're going to find it here. Wow to USD. Wow to USD converter and calculator? All? Okay, here we go.

2:28:45Linus Sebastian:Wow to USD converter calculator. Oh.

2:28:48Luke Lafreniere:Oh, this is just some stupid crypto thing. For crying out loud. You know what? I'm just going to go with the AI answer. It may not be the right answer, but early in 2007, gold sold for about$5 ,200 per thousand gold. So wait, we're talking like$250 to$500?

2:29:04Linus Sebastian:And then inflation. It's been a while.

2:29:07Luke Lafreniere:Is that a good price for paid relations? I have no idea. No context for this.

2:29:14Linus Sebastian:Asking the wrong person, brother.

2:29:15Luke Lafreniere:I was walking up the Vegas Strip with someone who was a troll, who I'm not going to name, but you probably know who they are. I can take a few guesses. And to embarrass me, because I was very shy and not worldly, so to speak. This was earlier on before they had kind of made Vegas a little bit more kid-friendly. Yeah, it was not when we first started going. In my early days of NCIX. And just to embarrass me, they yelled out very loud, like, how much is a sexual act?

2:29:55Linus Sebastian:Was there a response?

2:29:56Luke Lafreniere:It was less than I thought.

2:30:04Luke Lafreniere:So, that was interesting to know. Hasn't come up again since then, but... You know, hey, my luck could change, so... Good to know.

2:30:19Luke Lafreniere:Anyways. Luke and Linus, are you two each other's in-game wives, or who would come to mind as your in-game wife? Who's your in-game wife, Luke?

2:30:31Linus Sebastian:A lot of my gaming these days is solo. So maybe I'm just, you know, maybe I'm, yeah, exactly. I was trying to think of how to even call that. Leftina or Rochelle? Yeah, maybe I'm one of those.

2:30:55Luke Lafreniere:yeah uh okay our other discussion question for this topic was if lmg started a physical media library and allowed staff to use it do you think that would go over well it's actually something that i have talked about before because um it came up that it would be pretty convenient to have like an lmg plex for times when we're just like making content and we want to put on some piece of media and it's very inconvenient to go get a blu-ray and if we just had like uh like kind of like remember when the u.s dollar used to be backed by the gold standard if we had like our plex server was backed by the blue standard so as long as there's a blu-ray and as long as only one person's watching it at once then you know you know whatever and so i did actually kick the idea around of having like an on-prem vault of blu-rays you would you would throw away all the packaging throw away all the like art and everything people internally take it i don't care but so you basically just have towers and towers of discs for your like because theoretically as long as they're working at the office regularly they have to come here every day they could conceivably go get the disc and could conceivably go take it home so what's the difference in fact i think we've

2:32:11Linus Sebastian:even talked about this on wan show before i think maybe and i think we came to the conclusion that

2:32:15Luke Lafreniere:It's closer, but it's not quite the barrier that physical media is, and therefore, you know, probably still piracy.

2:32:27Linus Sebastian:See, even that doesn't do it. I was going to say, what if you had to, like, go take the Blu-ray and put it on your desk before you left work?

2:32:33Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, I mean, but you can't enforce that. You can't enforce it. Yeah, it's an honor system, right?

2:32:37Linus Sebastian:And it's still not the barrier because Blu-ray players are going to become a problem. Honestly, I don't remember if I talked this about this. I don't remember if I talked about this on WAN or if I talked about this to Emma. I've never owned one. Well, yeah, I guess you just, yeah, fair enough.

2:32:55Luke Lafreniere:Well, I have a drive. Yeah. I've ripped media. Yeah. I stopped bothering at a certain point because I was like, why am I even doing this? If as long as I have the thing, then what difference does it make? I'll just download it.

2:33:05Linus Sebastian:There are people that want to play it directly off though. And a lot of those people's, my goodness, a lot of those people have been using consoles for a while now. Yeah. I've never owned a PlayStation. And with next-gen consoles probably not having disk drives. That's not quite true.

2:33:18Luke Lafreniere:I have a PlayStation 2. But I didn't own it when it was current. My friend bought a PlayStation 3 and gave me his old PS2 because it was backwards compatible and he had no use for it. Sorry. That's cool. Just clarification. I like to be honest. I like to be upfront. Transparency.

2:33:32Linus Sebastian:With the easiest route and most common route for people to have those drives being gone and very recently on WAN Show, us talking about how a bunch of companies that made them are stopping making them at the same time. Yeah. physical media is going to be in a tough spot. I suspect there will be like one or two brands that are able to hang on, just continuing to make players. Polaroid still makes film for crying out loud. Yeah. So I'm sure it'll be okay, but it won't be as easy to get into. Also, there was a comment on last WAN show that I made the Apollo 11 movie thing up. What I'm screwing up when I say it and why I got a little weird about it last time is because I keep calling it a movie.

2:34:16Linus Sebastian:It's a doc. That's why I kept thinking you meant Apollo 13.

2:34:20Luke Lafreniere:I know, but like... Yeah, no, no, but we found it last week, so I knew what you were talking about.

2:34:24Linus Sebastian:There was more than one comment where people were like, why are you trying to cover up a mistake? It's not a mistake. I bought this. Yeah. Relax. I had to go to... I bought it online. I got it shipped to me. I had to go to a used place because this, as much as it's well rated, is not anywhere near as well known as most mainline movie releases. Like Apollo 13. Yeah. So I couldn't buy a new one of it. I had to buy a used one. Someone said, or you're just weird. Yeah, I would take that. That's fine. I have no problem with that.

2:34:55Luke Lafreniere:Okay. Forget the in-game life. I didn't make it up. Go watch it yourself. I'm totally changing the subject here. Who would inherit your Steam library? Oh. If you could leave it to someone.

2:35:14Luke Lafreniere:When do I die? Um, when your heart stops beating?

2:35:18Linus Sebastian:No, like... Stupid question.

2:35:20Luke Lafreniere:No, it's a good question. No, I don't. Just kidding. Like, am I dying? No, no, I know. No, no. So you die... Is this now, or is this... I mean, you have to write your will now, so... You don't get to decide after you die. As soon as the Elder Scrolls 6 finishes installing.

2:35:36Linus Sebastian:Damn. That would be so disappointing. Isn't it ironic? Don't you think? Or lucky. we don't know yet um too ironic i right now i think it would be my brother okay yeah yeah uh and part of that reason is because anything that i have already planned to effectively give to his kids is just going to him oh that makes sense and then he can arbiter it um but yeah i

2:36:02Luke Lafreniere:would i would say yeah i um man i don't i don't know i i how would i leave that to one person like i with that sword the in-game sword like selling it and then and then splitting the proceeds like

2:36:19Linus Sebastian:that kind of makes sense sorry tim said i'll give you 250 if you leave it to me in your will i'll give you the 250 now honestly it sounds like a good deal i think you should take it you should

2:36:32Luke Lafreniere:take it i don't think he'd kill you over 250 dollars there's you can't lose i'd have to like show him proof that's a great deal why not here's my last will and testament to tim i leave my

2:36:47Linus Sebastian:x3 yeah i mean yeah sure i you'll you'll just have to you'll put you'll have to put like uh

2:36:54Luke Lafreniere:i don't know maybe you could maybe you could like you could like roll up a like a password like a recovery code and then just like embed in your skin so that when you're dead, I mean, it won't hurt. They'll take it out and they'll give it to Tim. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he could recover the account. Sounds like... G-Dub says, do I hear $500? Hold on a second. There's a bidding war starting. Brando says$400. Mr. McQueen,$450. Kirkland Signature,$450. My Steam account has got a lot of games on it, you know. Brando says$600. Noki,$666. Kinjaro,$1 ,000. $1 ,000. Would you take$1 ,000 to put some random from float plane in your will to have your Steam account?

2:37:39Luke Lafreniere:It's still going up. I don't think I should answer that. I mean, that's a pretty good amount of money. You could afford multiple... You could afford half a Steam machine. You could afford to give someone two epic flying mounts for that.

2:37:55Luke Lafreniere:Or get them. Wait, hold on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could afford to... Hold on. you could afford to buy enough wow gold to get two real world mounts hold on and then they would both have epic flying mounts yeah right you're an epic flying mount distributor that's what you

2:38:13Linus Sebastian:are some chicken too maybe i don't know it's see it's not needed in this case right you don't need it yep that's what the flying that chicken that chicken flies you want a k truck oh dude now we're getting into like assets okay wait someone's offering you a k truck noki's offering me

2:38:38Luke Lafreniere:1500 and a 5090s hold on tim seems like the most serious though he says 500 i will fly to vancouver linus can make a short out of it okay now i'm interested

2:38:53Luke Lafreniere:Oh my goodness Alright I think we can move on Okay this one's funny Come to Whale Land This is hilarious

2:39:04Linus Sebastian:We'll talk about it Come to Whale Land

2:39:09Luke Lafreniere:Bloomberg reports Netflix viewers are abandoning shows After one season Netflix's biggest hits are losing more than half of their audience After one season And I don't know, the paywall came up, but I'm pretty sure I read more about this somewhere before. And apparently their executives are trying to figure out why. So the internet had some ideas for why. Maybe it's because you get invested in a Netflix show, and then they just don't f***ing finish it. oh maybe it's because they do a season of a show and it's like a handful of episodes and you're hooked you're riveted and then the next season comes out like years later and you've moved on

2:39:57Linus Sebastian:in your with your life i so i think that's true i also think and you know this if this is completely true. I think this would have happened years ago. But in the era of everyone watches things on TV, things would just kind of show up and people would lean towards different options more, right? Now there is so many options. And you're starting to see this on YouTube, where back in the day, you used to be able to do series on YouTube. And people would re-tune in all the time. They would watch the follow-up episodes. And that is rough now. Yeah, playlists get

2:40:33Luke Lafreniere:like, guys, no traction like i will see occasionally i'll see someone talk about like oh yeah oh hey um can you guys do can you guys do a playlist for uh for tech house actually i thought i thought we had one oh yeah here it is can you guys do a playlist for tech dude dude nobody clicks on this i i don't i can't bring up the metrics right now because i'm not signed into the right account on this computer but like literally no one tunes in to to that playlist yeah no yeah but but even

2:41:02Linus Sebastian:any form of multi-episode content like this is this is what even most serialized thing we've done in years but it's not even quite wouldn't even call this multi-episode i mean it's got an intro this is multiple episodes on the same topic this is multiple pieces of content on the same topic it has you're not really posing this as like episode two it has a theme song yeah but you're

2:41:27Luke Lafreniere:not posing this as episode whatever it has it has a like look at it it's a it's a it's a show it's an episode come on look at this i don't know it's not the same thing in my mind

2:41:38Linus Sebastian:i understand what you're saying i don't even think you're wrong but something about it is something about it is off for me and i don't know what yeah maybe it's just the packaging maybe it's just that you guys aren't including an episode number and stuff like that but i feel like one of the reasons why you're doing that it's because it doesn't work is because it doesn't work yeah and it would probably deter people if anything list it's like lifetime playlist views

2:42:01Luke Lafreniere:yeah 87 000 that's actually more than i thought um and it's still very low that's still that like not not a that that's not gonna move the needle for us at at our scale out of 7.3 million total views yeah yeah cool good chat yeah episodic stuff is tough these days people just want to

2:42:30Linus Sebastian:binge the hell out of something and then move on yep

2:42:35Luke Lafreniere:what else we got here hey this is fun this is another this is another we get to go on an adventure and try something topic knockoff is a new chrome extension and luke's going to install it right now from josh pigford that claims to filter knockoff items and junk brands from your amazon search results the extension currently works on amazon.com and.com.be and lets you label i will not install it right now oh you won't nope oh uh oh i did okay you got it thanks to ThreatLocker, which is a really good piece of software. That is actually good. And it's really good that it said no to him installing a random

2:43:22Linus Sebastian:I wouldn't want this to be able to be randomly installed. Browser extensions. Browser extensions are a very fantastic way to exfiltrate a very large amount of data.

2:43:28Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, so we're not endorsing this thing. We're just trying it live and hopefully not compromising our infrastructure. Anyway, the point is what it lets you do is label dim or totally hide sort of rando suspect items as well as giving you the option to hide sponsored listings entirely or even filter out established chinese brands if that's something that you feel the need to do it seems a little hit or miss um here we can look at the results for uh no because i don't think it's going to work because i don't have the extension so you'll have to click on them uh it seems a little hit or miss um jordan who prepared this topic gave us a couple links links to click on like dog bed where it worked pretty well and sdxc card where it only blocked one of the dozens of gigastone results um and jordan also said from my quick testing it only works on search results i.e your url looks like amazon.com slash s question mark k equals if you're just clicking around it doesn't really do anything um our discussion question while luke's going ahead and installing it is where does an extension like this fit in the ad blocking conversation i'd say for sponsored items it fits very well with the ad blocking conversation but in terms of filtering out brands that i'm not interested in i i feel like that's i feel like i'm not even costing them anything i'm just making sure that my eyes don't have to see stuff that i knew i wasn't going to want to buy anyway like just give give me like a jbl bluetooth speaker then rather than a rando one okay so you've got it set to to dim items from like rando brands i can control it here okay let's have a look so let's do hidden maybe no no i want to see dimmed because i want to see what it's okay what it's filtering out so okay so eh yoga brand it gets rid of but the bed shore orthopedic dog bed is allowed who decides I don't know it's a good question because to me sun hair bed doesn't sound any worse than puck blue

2:45:39Hmm

2:45:46Linus Sebastian:Likely pseudo brand on the known pseudo brand list then you can control it reporters real great cool I mean, that's okay

2:45:53Luke Lafreniere:Okay, so we're in the very early stages of this maybe being a more crowdsourced thing.

2:45:58Linus Sebastian:This could be pretty sick, genuinely. I almost feel like I need a browser now for shopping that I can add a bunch of add-ons to that I only really use for shopping. Because we talked recently about how vinegar is maybe becoming a thing. Yeah. Which is a... Go ahead. It's a project I've talked about someone hopefully taking for a while and somebody did and they're working on it. And they seem to talk about like they have a privacy policy and blah, blah, blah, blah. But extensions are just kind of spooky. Now, if you're someone who has a bug almost flew directly to my eyeball. If you're someone who has just a billion extensions installed anyways and you don't really care, which to be honest, I think is most people.

2:46:49Linus Sebastian:then just maybe go for it and who cares and you can have vinegar and you can have uh knockoff whatever installed and then your shopping experience is going to actually be pretty cool i think with the combination that's pretty sick um but my god browser extensions i can just read your data is crazy like yeah people be like all mad about uh windows recall and then meanwhile

2:47:15Luke Lafreniere:installing browser extensions. Let me just install every extension ever. Yeah. It's a really funny thing how we selectively apply our principles on privacy. And I mean inclusive of myself.

2:47:34Linus Sebastian:Everyone's got their lines.

2:47:35Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. And everyone's got their blind spots where they just didn't think of it. Or the convenience outweighs the the risk.

2:47:45Linus Sebastian:Right now for I use Chrome for work. I have a ton of different work profiles and I find profile switching in Chrome to be unmatched. But for personal, I only really have one profile I use often. So I just run one browser genuinely, generally. And usually it's Zen, which is a Firefox spinoff. But lately, I've been poking around with Waterfox as well. and knowing that there's like 10 billion different Firefox and Chromium iterations, you could have different browsers with different add-on loadouts for different things. Totally. It might genuinely be reasonable to have like, with the current state of shopping, it might be reasonable to have a shopping browser where you have some of these different add-ons enabled.

2:48:33Because like, I mean, that's pretty sweet.

2:48:36Linus Sebastian:It is difficult these days, honestly. And it's like everywhere. yeah walmart's website best buy's website so many websites are like they're just marketplaces now

2:48:46Luke Lafreniere:and they're unusable yeah they're just so full of just like spin the wheel to get a discount and oh are you sure you want to navigate here and like just go away and let me just find the thing

2:49:00Linus Sebastian:i'm trying to give you money get out of my way it's wild dude uh using derivatives of firefox still absolutely supports Firefox. I just want to flag that real quick. And the container tabs is just not as good as Chromium profiles, at least for me personally. And I will continue to use Chrome for work. I've always had a very specific line that I can have my personal preferences for things, but if it's slower or gets in the way of productivity and I'm using it for work, I will not use it. I will use the work standard thing. So I use Chrome.

2:49:33Luke Lafreniere:Okay, Noki sent something over. I'll bite. I'll click the link. uh it's called how i experience web today.com uh okay i searched something this shows me something okay oh god yeah okay no yeah okay uh block for sure no thanks uh oh i love this um this is great go away this is really funny this is a static ad an article i want to read yeah how can i help Oh my God. There's actually not enough interruptions in this content. There should be way more ads. Dude, there's a - Honestly, this isn't enough ads. There's a news site that keeps showing up in my Google feed that gets me to click it pretty often that will replay video ads forever after you close them.

2:50:26Luke Lafreniere:It'll just keep reopening them no matter how many times you close them. It's like, dude, I closed the ad. I am trying to read the article. please move oh when you go to close the tab it does this

2:50:42Linus Sebastian:that's actually pretty good i like that that's pretty funny i um my little project of having no infinite scrolling on my phone has been really interesting yeah it's it's been really interesting because now that i'm at zero i never felt this until i got to zero but now that i'm at zero every once in a while my brain will go like all right give me some of that just junk dopamine and i'll i'll pull the phone out and go to scroll on something and there's nothing i can go to yeah and i have the little like brain moment where it's like i'll have to find something else to do let me go do let me go scroll something and it's like no i have to do something else and it is always better every time i've never been like oh man i really wish i spent the last hour just scrolling stuff i won't remember ever like i've never had that reaction and it's been it's been interesting but it's like it has to be defended which is a weird thing like i had to install i don't know what it was recently i think it was x or something because i had to check a message x gonna give it to you and i just i you i have to uninstall it right after i do the thing it's it's i have like a single purpose okay i i am going into this i'm checking a dm i'm responding to the dm i am uninstalling the application there's no you can't leave it there whatever because that moment when your brain's like let me do the thing it has to not be able to yeah that's the trick and it you i like i'm i'm kind of over the whole um time limits thing because they're all too easy to ignore i've watched people that i've talked to about doing this repeatedly just click the no i'll take 10 more minutes or whatever that is able to be easily done in like basically every app that has a time limit thing are you wearing the google fit whoop thing it's it's uh yeah the google fitbit zero or whatever it's called yeah it's like the one wearable i've been able to consistently wear interesting and this is a man that couldn't even wear pants to work yeah it's pretty impressive i am very surprised i haven't lost it yet I don't suspect it'll make it too much longer nice but yeah it's been pretty okay um it's not amazing cool and they try to sell you on ai stuff constantly nice but it's fine I'm using it basically as a sleep and step tracker and it's doing totally fine at both of those things and I'm not subscribed to anything or getting any ai stuff or whatever dude it's so annoying that you

2:53:12Luke Lafreniere:have to have the meta app in order to use their smart glasses because it will just ping you you can't really turn off notifications entirely because there's like stuff you might need to do like it might have a sync error when ingesting your video or whatever uh but i was using it for like a family vlog video recently we're actually going to put that channel live pretty soon okay um and um so i like had to use the app and it's just like paying me about random stuff and it's just like garbage ai slop all over it and it's just so annoying yeah um anyway hey on the subject of privacy the eu is now mandating that every new car sold has to have an advanced driver distraction warning or addw device which uses a camera to track your gaze this will be true as of july 7th um under the final phase of the general safety regulation so in practice this means a small infrared camera near the steering wheel that tracks your eyes head position and your gaze look away from the road for more than three and a half seconds if you're above 50 kilometers an hour or six seconds at lower speeds, and the car will escalate through visual, audio, and haptic warnings until you look back at the road.

2:54:22Luke Lafreniere:It activates automatically above about 20 kilometers an hour, and while you can switch it off manually, it re-enables every time you start the car. This rule has technically applied to newly designed models since 2024, and then July 7th closed the loophole for everything else. The good news is the privacy protections, at least on paper, are actually pretty decent. The regulation requires processing in a closed loop inside the vehicle it explicitly bans facial recognition and biometric identification it forbids the data being made available to third parties and requires it to be deleted immediately after processing the problem is enforcement yeah we're we're learning a lot about that over the last two years and change um there is no law that nobody if nobody is willing to enforce it um there's no independent audit mechanism to verify that any automaker actually complies no defined retention window and this lands in an industry where a 2023 mozilla review found that roughly 84 of car brands share or sell driver data early real world well yes that's true it's a dumb car early real world impressions are mixed belgian outlet go car tested an xpeng p7 plus and found that it flagged a driver for glancing at scenery on an empty highway and one ford puma uh renter described distraction warnings every 10 minutes with the alerts themselves becoming the distraction on the other side the eu estimates that distraction plays a role in five to 25 percent of crashes and projects the full safety package will save over 25 000 lives

2:55:55Linus Sebastian:by 2038 i well i don't necessarily agree because i mean if the warnings themselves are a distraction

2:56:02Luke Lafreniere:dude it is so what are we talking about flipping obnoxious how often my car will just like wrench my steering wheel away from me.

2:56:11Linus Sebastian:This was exactly what I was going to talk about. I drive Emma's car and it has like lane keep assist and stuff. There was an area near our place that was under construction for a while and it had cones in a certain area that did not follow the road lines and the car would try to throw me into the cones all the time, which had workers behind it. The car was trying to throw itself into people like no i hate it so much it might be better for some people maybe but like my god oh not good oof that happened with my mom's car while i was avoiding a cyclist yeah i don't like things like lane lane assist and and whatnot i know people that do i

2:56:55Luke Lafreniere:know a fair amount of people that do i know people that should use it sure there's some pretty bad drivers out there.

2:57:01Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

2:57:02Luke Lafreniere:But like, dang, man. Uh-oh. You know what? No. We'll do that one later. Oh, oh, sponsors. Right. Okay. Oh. We've got some really good topics. Sorry, I got distracted. The show is brought to you by Toshiba. Really? Oh. Hi, Toshiba. I don't think you've ever sponsored WAN show before. Nice to have you around. Hello. Your business needs to have a place to store and backup data and files as well as a way to access them quickly. Toshiba's N300 is a reliable and scalable internal hard drive for your team's network attached storage and each is optimized for a 24 7 raid environment and at 7 200 rpm spindle speeds with sustained transfers above 309 oh above 300 megabytes a second you and your team can access what you need when you need it sorry up to 309 sorry i better get that right that 24 7 operation is backed with a workload rate of up to 550 terabytes per year, as well as a five-year limited warranty.

2:58:02Luke Lafreniere:Toshiba works with a wide range of NAS system manufacturers to extensively test their drives and ensure compatibility with most NAS systems. They also use something called NAS Link, which is firmware that can adjust to mixed NAS workloads to make the most out of cache usage in real time. So you get consistent performance for file sharing, backups, and RAID operations. So pick up some Toshiba N300 Pro drives for your NAS today. using our link in the video description. The show is also brought to you by Motion Grey. Working eight hours a day at your desk, then spending several hours at another desk at home, while gaming can certainly make your lower back feel less than stellar.

2:58:39Luke Lafreniere:It's important to take breaks in between emails and ranked matches to stretch your legs and back, and Motion Grey's Ergo Pro 2 sit-stand desk can help with that. You can work while standing for longer periods, plus the desk comes with a bunch of customization options like cable management or foot massagers. No matter what size desk you go with, MotionGray's Ergo 2 supports up to 176 pounds and comes in both light and dark color options. The desk is easy to clean, has smooth edges, and is built to handle most scuffs and scratches that a desk would face, not to mention it's powered by German Bosch Motors.

2:59:12Luke Lafreniere:You know, the Germans always make good stuff. When you order your desk, everything comes in a single box, so you don't have to worry about getting your legs on Friday and then the actual desk after the weekend. And everything you need to assemble, including the necessary tools is packaged with the desk so grab your motion gray ergo 2 pro at our link in the video description my first laptop was a toshiba and i actually really really liked it i gotta get some new drives i'm approaching five years no errors yet oh they're gonna be expensive yeah i was gonna say uh this oh the show is brought to you no no i'm sure it's brought to by the next topic.

2:59:51Luke Lafreniere:The color blue. The letter E. Lenovo is now shipping laptops with Chinese NAND and Apple has begun testing CXMT chips. It begins. That's right. Notebook Check says, Notebook Check says, in the midst of the RAM and SSD crisis, a new player has appeared. This YMTC SSD, shipping in the ThinkBook 14 G9 in Europe, but not North America, is a 512 gig M.2 2242 drive that has sequential reads up to 3950 megabytes a second and writes up to 2514. That's below average for an SSD in an office laptop these days, and it apparently throttles under load, but an everyday use is still more than fast enough. And then in related news, Apple is testing memory chips from CXMT for Apple devices sold in China.

3:00:40Luke Lafreniere:The company is also lobbying Washington to allow broader use of CXMT chips despite geopolitical sensitivities. Financial Times says CXMT is now the world's fourth largest DRAM maker and a key pillar of China's semiconductor ambitions, though analysts say its production is still too constrained to meaningfully ease the global memory crunch anytime soon. But those Apple dollars would probably help to turn that around. In other China news, ByteDance and Alibaba have killed custom AI companions following new rules in China. This is the, China is putting into effect what they're calling interim measures for AI anthropomorphic interaction services on July 15th.

3:01:24Luke Lafreniere:And basically this policy is designed to prohibit services that simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns, and communication styles to provide sustained emotional interaction. so customer service bots knowledge Q &A's workplace assistance and education and research tools are excluded provided that they avoid sustained emotional interaction so nextweb.com thenextweb.com says companions out workers in so both ByteDance and Alibaba have just killed their products that were designed to provide companionship it is That's very disappointing to me whenever I have to side with the Chinese government and acknowledge that they're just doing a common sense thing that probably everyone should be doing.

3:02:24Linus Sebastian:I don't know, Blade Runner's pretty cool. I saved the best topic for last. NVIDIA's making new cards. Yeah! Woo! NVIDIA's dropping a free limited edition GeForce Trading Card Series 1 collection celebrating iconic GPUs, games, and RTX tech demos. You can get them through summer of RTX giveaways or at select gaming events while supplies last.

3:02:57Linus Sebastian:Nathan thought, possibly not appropriate or copyright safe, but it reminds me of a bit of Flanders Bible trading cards from the Simpsons.

3:03:08Luke Lafreniere:Yeah.

3:03:10Linus Sebastian:That's a deep cut. That's an old reference. I don't remember that. I actually used to watch a lot of Simpsons. I don't remember that. I don't think we should watch it, though. We're not going to. I'm going to. Jordan Block can't wait for NVIDIA's crossover with Magic the Gathering. And based on some of Magic's previous crossovers, the NVIDIA partnership isn't even that far-fetched. Cool. Discussion question. Do you have any rare slash interesting tech merch that you're particularly fond of? Oh my god. Sorry. So good.

3:03:42Luke Lafreniere:So good.

3:03:44Linus Sebastian:I like the 1000 series launch They sent out those like weird triangles Oh yeah I remember that I actually thought that was really cool because it felt like Like a Nathan Drake Artifact Uncharted Da Vinci Code And it's funny I still have it in my like little storage unit thing And whenever I pull it out I'm like what is this because the box isn't really Marked much and I open it up I'm like oh yeah And there's just an unmarked letter And then the triangle I'm like this is cool when I die eventually and someone gets this they're going to be like what the

3:04:15Luke Lafreniere:they used to do such cool stuff remember when they sent out those those green crowbars yeah actually kind of sick we have a GeForce ammo box kicking around somewhere that the I believe the oh man the 590 I guess it was the dual GPU one from that generation I know at least one reviewer whose card arrived damaged because like it wasn't really quite big enough and like not pack that well. But it was cool. Yep.

3:04:46Linus Sebastian:So anyway. People are just trying to buy everything I have now. Someone's trying to offer me money for the triangle. Go away.

3:04:53Luke Lafreniere:That would be a very interesting auction around here. Like the LMG goes out of business auction, just like all the weird artifacts.

3:05:01Linus Sebastian:There's some stuff I'd be interested in for sure.

3:05:06Luke Lafreniere:Oh.

3:05:10Linus Sebastian:I assume you'd want this. Yeah, yeah, definitely. That's for sure what I was talking about. Yeah, for sure. Reverse it? Reverse it real quick? Nice.

3:05:22Luke Lafreniere:Very good. My daughter was in the office earlier this week, and she came across this and was just very enamored by it, and she dragged it into the video that we were shooting together. Great. It was a fun video, though. So I told her, yeah, I'll buy a new battery for your phone, but you have to put it in. And she came and she helped me do a battery swap.

3:05:49Linus Sebastian:I need to do that soon. I was thinking recently, I've heard about some of the leak rumors of the Pixel 11, and it sounds really not cool. But I'm on a Pixel 8, so it's starting to feel a little bit old. And I was thinking, honestly, the only thing that's really feeling that old about it is the battery. So maybe I should just do a little swap. Do it, you coward. not even upgrade because honestly at this point like who cares my phone is fine dude her phone

3:06:15Luke Lafreniere:is six years old yeah and i couldn't even like tell she's on a note 10 i didn't even realize how old that phone was until i looked it up and i was like oh yeah that battery is at the end yeah

3:06:27Linus Sebastian:yeah so my phone is three years old ish it's right about that like the normal cadence i would expect Yeah, I bet. To potentially replace a phone.

3:06:37Luke Lafreniere:A fresh battery and a Graphene OS install, and it'll feel like a brand new phone. Yeah. So, like, whatever. Just like it's a brand new after dark. Dan, do you want to hit us with some checkout messages? Oh, yeah. You're just getting good at these transitions. I don't even have time anymore. That button. That button.

3:06:57Linus Sebastian:Okay, I did it. Now I have to read things. Good job, Dan. I've only done a couple of these. It'll be a load.

3:07:03Luke Lafreniere:Hey, Lacku, Lines, and Dunn. One of my co-workers just got a shirt with the definition of ask-hole on it. Very funny. Do you have any fun, any type, of stories of ask-holes in your lives? What's an ask?

3:07:18Linus Sebastian:A person who asks for advice but refuses to follow it. A person who asks excessive or offensive questions or favors.

3:07:32Linus Sebastian:Oh, man.

3:07:34Luke Lafreniere:i actually don't feel like i run into this too often um oh i definitely do um i like some other people in the tech industry um i have a not super secret contact info and i you know other than just makes sense other other than people just like soliciting crap which I just ignore and filter forever. You know, I try to, if someone has a really good idea for a video, you'll occasionally see us acknowledge it like in the video and be like, yeah, so-and-so sent the thing. To be clear, it's not the best way to get acknowledged. Probably I'm more likely to ignore you if you email me versus if you like, you know, at me on the forum or something like that.

3:08:31Luke Lafreniere:um but i do get some people who you know i will i'll i'll send a like hey thanks for you know whatever you appreciate you like i i we're not pen pals and i have limited time to reply to like work-related emails and stuff so some people just don't really seem to like get it that this is like a one email.

3:09:00Linus Sebastian:You can't stop me. I'll still email you every few years. Yeah.

3:09:03Luke Lafreniere:Noki, that's fine. You like actually, like we pay you and stuff. Like you kind of work here sort of from around the globe. It's complicated.

3:09:19Linus Sebastian:Anyway, yeah. I mean, I've ran into this. You know, you read it and I recognize it. I get it. I just don't think it's super common.

3:09:26Luke Lafreniere:At events. People will come and they'll ask you a question and you'll be like, oh yeah, I don't know. This motherboard seems pretty good. It has the features you want. And then they're like, oh yeah, like what GPU should I plug into? I'm like, bro, go watch a video. That's what I do for a living is I make content so that you can go watch it and then you know the answer. So yeah, it's tough. It's tough.

3:09:50More?

3:09:52Luke Lafreniere:As for like asking advice only to ignore the guidance, I definitely, I'm not willing to throw any real life people under the bus over this, but I think everyone has people in their life who mostly, when they ask for advice, just want to make noise. Hot take. Yeah. I think everyone's done that. Everyone's done it, but some people do it a lot.

3:10:15Linus Sebastian:That's fair.

3:10:17Luke Lafreniere:Everyone does something that's against the better judgment of them and everyone in their life once in a while. Yeah. Yeah. I bought a plane.

3:10:33Luke Lafreniere:I've broken him. I knew that was gonna get him. An epic flying mount, says Amaria.

3:10:50Luke Lafreniere:We've broken him, ladies and gentlemen. Oh my god.

3:11:00Luke Lafreniere:Dan hit me Sure Question for Slick Did you ever complete Star Wars Outlaws? I just did not enjoy it

3:11:09Linus Sebastian:No I didn't Hello Mr. I might go back to it at some point I don't even remember why I stopped It might have been Linux challenge In general I'm not finding Ubisoft games to be very friendly with Linux

3:11:29Luke Lafreniere:um yeah hello mr tip of technology in a previous show you said you wouldn't let your kids be esport pros just want to hear your reasoning okay yeah i can explain that pretty easily actually um the it's for the same reason that i won't let my kids play the lottery because while the reward at the end of the rainbow is theoretically totally worth the time investment, the very, very select few who make it to that point are very few and very select. And literally everyone else who invested all of that time and all that singular focus and energy into that one thing will not go pro and will ultimately have to be a well-rounded person who knows other things about other things and can do other stuff so it's not so much that i would have objected to them achieving the the pinnacle of success in gaming it's that we weren't going to do all the stuff that was going to give them that shot they we're not going to spend that much time in front of a screen period.

3:12:47Luke Lafreniere:I just don't think it's part of, to be clear, they are allowed to play video games and they get screen time pretty much every day. They trade it for doing other enriching things.

3:12:58Linus Sebastian:It doesn't even feel like a particularly low amount of screen time. There's just, like you said, they got to do stuff to,

3:13:05Luke Lafreniere:my son's really good at rocket league and pretty darn good at Minecraft. He's had enough time to like get good enough at video games that, because video games are a huge social thing. I don't want them to be... You don't want to just like suck. Yeah, you don't want them to not be able to like hang out and play some Ultimate Chicken Horse.

3:13:22Linus Sebastian:Yes, exactly.

3:13:23Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, like that's not actually good either. So for me, it was... It is a current cultural thing. It was just part of... It will be forever. It was part of the whole strategy of wanting to raise balanced human beings. And for the same reason, while I support like sports, for instance, I've made it very clear from day zero that like you're not going to be a professional athlete not because it's impossible but because the odds are so slim that i might as well be saying you will not win the lottery um what if

3:13:56Linus Sebastian:yes and i i feel like i know we're gonna go with this but i'm just gonna throw the what if anyways yeah what if uh you know little man is really really really really really really good at a certain thing yeah he goes to provincials for it and he's the mvp on the winning team of provincials the chances at that point are genuinely quite high what do you do so at that point what we do

3:14:25Luke Lafreniere:is we basically lay down some ground rules because he's old enough by then that he's it's time to start making his own choices because that that's like that's the east oh right that's the third pillar of why no esports because your career is over when you're like 26 um and you might be able to be a successful streamer but a lot of esports pros do not successfully transition there so that was the last part of that one uh sports has a bit of a little bit of a higher ceiling i mean uh but jokovic is still playing at an elite level in tennis he's almost 40 i think honestly sports

3:14:59Linus Sebastian:is way more potentially stable of a path than esports is like traditional i don't even think

3:15:05Luke Lafreniere:that's a crazy take i don't think so either so so okay so by that point he's old enough that he's starting to have some of his own agency right up until that point we've been pretty supportive so he him in particular uh he's for one athletic pursuit or another been training as often as three to four times a week for his entire childhood pretty much going back like six seven eight years now so we we're supportive of be good at sports because that's another thing that's really important socially it is hard to meet people as adults but if you are good at a sport it actually becomes way it's amazing how many doors get open for you like when i was getting into badminton it was so hard to socially network with people in that community all of a sudden now that i'm pretty good people like want to meet you that's like oh that that just i was never good at sports so that was not a that was not a window that i had ever looked through but it's totally a thing

3:16:07Linus Sebastian:and and so a lot of it's honestly once you get to a certain age people are trying to do the activity and holding your hand is not really doing the activity yeah that's something you do for your girlfriend or your boyfriend almost doesn't even matter what the activity is sports is a good

3:16:24Luke Lafreniere:example here it could be a lot of different things games too yep where it's like man like okay if you

3:16:30Linus Sebastian:want to play with us sure sounds good but you should probably go like kind of figure it out on your own and then come join us once you know what you're doing yep the one except if i see

3:16:39Luke Lafreniere:two people on a court or like two people playing a video game who have like a vastly different level of skill my assume is they're related or they're banging yep like there's there's already a

3:16:53Linus Sebastian:different or they want to related reason yeah yeah they want to be either that's the saddest of the three yeah uh they uh you have some like highly invested very long-term reason why you might want to whatever maybe this is a friend that you've played a lot of other games with and they just haven't played this one and you're you're pretty sure they'll pick it up pretty quick so you just need to kind of get them there or whatever like that's fine so yeah uh would we

3:17:22Luke Lafreniere:would we support pursuing a professional athlete path i think what it would look like is helping them make their own decision and helping them come to a conclusion that you need to set some guardrails here and you need to have an escape hatch i think because it probably won't work out But if you could win some scholarships, by all means, win the scholarships. We will give you the resources to hone this skill, but you're still going to school.

3:17:51Linus Sebastian:I think there's also a tremendous amount of skills that you learn from both, but more traditional sports in my opinion, but from both, that do transfer out of it. and traditional sports there's plenty of athletes that have become pro and gotten proper good degrees and done lots of things outside of that because you need rest time and stuff much more than you need it in the esports world oh this is so true too so like in that rest time in that downtime you could be doing other stuff you could be studying you could be doing whatever else you can't be in the gym all day yeah you need to rest and like you might be young and not feel like that's as true but it's it's gonna become more true uh and it is pretty true for you as well so like there is there is more inherent built-in downtime with traditional sports um and i think

3:18:42Luke Lafreniere:sports teaches us a lot about how to deal with people social situations yeah it's very easy to

3:18:48Linus Sebastian:cycle people out in the video game world it's a lot harder to do that when you're on a team and those aren't even your decisions anyways so yeah um bottom line is um you know look at shaq he

3:19:00Luke Lafreniere:transition from sports to everything yeah that's pretty good to buy a printer all right go ahead hit me down sure thing hey wanda dll luke loving bud and pal with sammy do you all have any preliminary ideas for future videos what's coming next it was awesome to meet you all in taiwan oh minus dan i'm glad you i'm glad you're happy i wasn't there i don't think that's what he meant

3:19:27Linus Sebastian:uh i don't know sort of we've done some ideation but it's not like it's uh as i've talked about on the show before it's it's a it's a creative brain stretching exercise it's not a job so like it'll happen when it happens we were planning a shoot for like maybe late next month if you go paintballing i'm in oh interesting that's a fun idea i don't know if that's a video

3:19:54Luke Lafreniere:but whatever.

3:19:55Linus Sebastian:There would have to be some like weird challenge involved or something but I'm sure we could figure something out.

3:20:00Luke Lafreniere:I'm down for weird challenges. Challenge. Spraying my ankle even worse playing paintball with Luke again.

3:20:09Luke Lafreniere:Sammy has

3:20:10Linus Sebastian:two different ideas right now but I don't know how he'd feel with me spoiling them so I'm gonna. Oh yeah no no keep them to yourself. I'm gonna hold them for now but they're pretty creative. Sammy's a very creative guy. He is that. This for me has been a really good experience because of that largely. Like I've technically made a ton of content, but it's either been Wancho or Tech Stuff with a tiny amount of Channel Superfund thrown in. But the Channel Superfund, I was very much just participator. Yeah. And they were all like pretty similarly flavored, if that makes sense. So this is Sammy going crazy and doing Sammy things.

3:20:47Linus Sebastian:He does do that. And me trying to hold on largely, which is fun. And I think good for my brain because it gets me out of just the doing kind of the same thing all the time, which is good. Especially I find when you get older, that can become a much more of a default state. And it's one of the reasons why it feels like time goes so fast is because there's not a lot of deviation to your day. You just kind of do the same thing. You're working on the same problems. You start finding routine because that's what's efficient and you hang out with the same people. You talk about the same things, et cetera.

3:21:20Linus Sebastian:So yeah, getting out there and doing something different has been really fun. I'm excited to keep doing more of it and I'm happy you enjoyed it. But it's not, the schedule is always going to be completely random because it's just going to be like whatever we can swing. We are going to try to figure out more like one day shoot things. That would be a way to make it not so onerous. Yeah. So the plan moving forward is the two plans that he has are both one day shoots. so we can just do it on like a you know a Saturday or whatever so

3:21:52Luke Lafreniere:we'll see how it goes alright well I volunteer as tribute if you guys ever need a third buddy yeah sweet I'll mention that not always around but and there's no pressure yeah I don't know insert myself

3:22:06Linus Sebastian:we'll see how it goes I'm sure we'll do something at some point that makes sense to have a bigger group of people okay

3:22:12Luke Lafreniere:Linus where have you gone skiing Skiing. What was your favorite? I love skiing. My favorite was Lake Tahoe. Love the undies. I, too, picked skiing back up after 25 years. Oh, nice. How do you ski on a lake is my one question. I think it's a mountain near the lake, Dan, but yes. Well, you didn't say that. You should have said that. You should have been more specific. Water skiing? Oh. That's pretty good. That's good. That's good. Now I look like an idiot. More than normal. Well, it's not so much that you look like an idiot. It's more sound like an idiot. well why not both

3:22:56Linus Sebastian:I would have laughed so hard if you put the card up of us just put your head in Linus's little

3:23:05Luke Lafreniere:it's too hard I've actually not been skiing that many places I've been up to Hemlock which I think is called something else out in like Agassi Mission Area I don't know what they're called now. I've been to On Grouse and Seymour locally. I've skied Whistler here a lot when I was younger, but I wouldn't bother going up there now. It's just - Super overcrowded and super expensive. Yeah. Like it just manages to be the worst of both worlds. Like if it was crazy expensive, it was like, you know, I don't even know. But if it was like - What number that would be. It was like more, but I just like skied right onto the lift at the bottom.

3:23:44Luke Lafreniere:And there's fresh powder everywhere. Yeah, then I might even consider that. As like a special treat. But as it is now, it's like, well, it's the worst of both worlds. Or if it was cheap, then fine, I'll stand in line. But right now it's expensive and I stand in line. What are we even doing here?

3:24:01Linus Sebastian:I had a pretty good routine of going to Seymour for a while, but Seymour, like, I'm worried about them. They're pretty low. They barely got any snow last year. like I'm actually worried about their ability to keep going. We went to Big White this year

3:24:16Luke Lafreniere:for a family vlog so oh cool yeah you'll see how much I enjoyed Big White it's freaking awesome.

3:24:22Linus Sebastian:I was gonna say I'm pretty sure they're holding on pretty okay in regards to snow and stuff.

3:24:26Luke Lafreniere:It was funny the locals there were complaining a ton about the snow I'm like y 'all got snow y 'all need to shut up yeah this seems great to me.

3:24:35Linus Sebastian:That's a that's a luxury right now yeah Yeah, we've had some real warm winters. I was talking to my brother about this. I remember growing up pulling icicles off the house that were like huge. Like, man, when's the last time I saw an icicle hanging off of anything? I feel like it's been a very long time. We had a few years there where we'd get at least like a couple weeks of some pretty solid snow. But it's been a while, I think. It's been a while.

3:25:05Luke Lafreniere:Hey, Linus and Luke. love the merch all right blocked um what's both of your favorite merch in your wardrobe

3:25:13Linus Sebastian:i actually really like this shirt oh the siberia yeah it sold really well i really like this shirt i have always really liked shirts where the branding isn't like super obvious and where it's small logo front big logo back i will say however you were right the green siberia shirt where it's big logo front. I do actually like it, but I think it's because it's not a logo. It's more like one of those. Oh, where it's graffiti kind of like artsy and just kind of neat. I will always kind of fall back to these small logo front, big logo back. Uh, but I, I, I like Siberia.

3:25:49Luke Lafreniere:It's pretty cool. It's hard for me to pick a favorite child. Uh, the new socks are a candidate. I'm really excited about them. If I had to pick something, I think the framework

3:26:01Linus Sebastian:embroidered the framework is wicked it's so cool um my favorite all time is the the 3d down jacket

3:26:10Luke Lafreniere:we we have a we have a kind of successor it's not using the same 3d down but it's a very similar style it has a bit more reflective the hood has been fine-tuned um i tried it on earlier this

3:26:23Linus Sebastian:week and we're going ahead to mass production my favorite part was not the 3d down yeah it's it's

3:26:28Luke Lafreniere:I think it's a worthy successor. I think you'll really like it.

3:26:31Linus Sebastian:My favorite part about that jacket was that it actually looked really like clean and sharp. I could wear that with nice clothes and it would fit it. And it's a jacket. Like it was nice. I actually got a lot of comments on it because I usually wear this and a variation of color of the same pair of shorts. Nice. Almost all of the time. So the fact that I wore something that was kind of nice, people were like, oh, which is not a good sign.

3:27:05Linus Sebastian:And I'm going to be, yeah, yeah.

3:27:13Linus Sebastian:I need to cycle the shorts out. This is something I've accepted. It's good for me now because there's the, we have nice pants. The tech pants. I do kind of wish there was a couple more colors. How are the tech pants selling? I haven't asked about that. Actually, we're starting to get the hang of bottoms. Nice. The tall, well, maybe not nice for other people, but some of the tall tech pants are sold out, which is maybe a good sign for them becoming a thing again.

3:27:48Yeah.

3:27:51Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I really, the tech pants are actually very nice.

3:27:54Luke Lafreniere:Hit us, Dan. ldl with the release of the price of the steam machine are we optimistic for the price of the frame will luke still buy it um i mean i think valve feels like a different category yeah i think they're still gonna pull it off i think they're still gonna manage to be pretty close to index pricing because they weren't even trying to be cheap on that one nope and i don't know if luke's gonna buy it i mean he bought a big screen beyond two and then still to to my knowledge hasn't used it. Yeah, when are you going to try it? I need to know. Have you even tried it?

3:28:29Linus Sebastian:No. Something that might benefit the frame, though, is that I don't... At this point, I don't think I get aesthetic choices when it comes to the condo. Right. Yeah, that's all Emma's domain, I guess. So the frame might actually be able to be used more easily. Ah. I mean, I think I've told you that I've barely touched... There's one way to drill big boxes in the wall.

3:28:51Luke Lafreniere:I've barely touched my VR setup. ever since I put that passive case, you know, the one I'm talking about, the Calios collab with Streetcom, right? Yeah.

3:28:59Linus Sebastian:God, it's such a cool case.

3:29:00Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. So ever since I put that there, because of the way the IO works on it, it like doesn't really work very well with the little IO boxes on the index and the big screen beyond. So it's been like kind of janky and weird for like quite a while. And what I really want to do is I want to get that case up off the floor. So it's like more showcase-y, get the panels on it properly, like cable managed it all nicely but i just kind of as soon as i found out about the steam frame i went well i'm not even going to bother because then everything's going to be wireless and i'm just kind of sitting here happy to happy to happy to happy to happy patiently waiting okay steam frame because even if the displays are not as good as the big screen beyond i i man the wireless streaming dude i tried it i was there i was there when they revealed the wireless streaming it's so good i keep forgetting that it has wireless streaming wireless streaming don't tell me that

3:29:52Linus Sebastian:I also like, I had my bench where the computers are. Yeah. And that was very space restrictive. So this last weekend we moved the bench out to a different room where it's kind of like out of the way. Yeah. Which is good. And, you know, now people won't stub their toes on my weights and stuff. So it probably makes more sense to be over there.

3:30:22Linus Sebastian:yeah so maybe that'll clear up some room and maybe i can do that now but we'll see

3:30:28Luke Lafreniere:last one i've got here is for luke question for luke can you shout out any tools the devs have built to up arrow their call that would be useful outside of ltt i've been working on a cli tool for managing the tasks i'm assigned in our project management system any quality of life

3:30:47Linus Sebastian:That would be useful outside of LTT. I mean, we've contributed to open source projects, but outside of that, like the stuff we build internally is not external. LTT Labs has some of their stuff open sourced. You can check out, I think it's literally LTT Labs OSS on GitHub. But I don't know. We've built some internal tools. Ah... I can't think of much that would be particularly helpful outside of, outside of LTT. The main one that I know of is, is called yelling bird. Um, and it was made by Mr. Peter and it's just a Slack bot, which shows the progress of videos as they transcode, um, on, on float plane and well, and the the total full plane infrastructure because it includes sauce plus um and that's been pretty nice actually especially because you can do like actions from it and stuff um and you there's there's buttons there to open like the acp or the admin ui so you can see what's going on and it has a little progress indicator as it goes and it tells you the unique id of the video and blah blah blah so like that's that's really useful but in terms of like cicd stuff that we built i don't know i can't really think of anything the team will probably shoot me now but

3:32:15Luke Lafreniere:yeah holy crap i just got invited on a podcast with victor axelson who oh you know who that is because of you oh i see okay cool you've mentioned him a few times i'm excited that's cool that's fun yeah i met him once already and it was horrible i know not because of him i know because of me there's video of this isn't there unfortunately yes well here now's your time to make it up yeah hopefully it'll be less awkward i mean it couldn't be more awkward you should bring up the story on the show sure fine oh i definitely will because

3:32:54Linus Sebastian:i'm gonna have to explain myself you'll be fine this is probably good because now you won't be stuck with like the one time you met victor axelson yeah yeah now you'll have some the redeeming time

3:33:10Luke Lafreniere:i met victor axelson yeah uh people are asking who he is he's uh olympic gold men's singles badminton player um was world number one for like a long time um absolute chad he runs a youtube channel uh super cool he actually just recently retired from the tour uh but he's still doing content apparently and uh he's going on a podcast so do you know when nope i just got a i just got a ping from the uh the guys who run our badminton club apparently the outreach came through them okay so maybe let when people know when you know yeah no i'm yeah i'm stoked it'll be awesome sweet yeah that business is um going interesting for smash champs it's um

3:33:57Linus Sebastian:I heard that call last week. I don't know. I doubt you want to talk about that, but it's interesting. The training thing.

3:34:04Luke Lafreniere:Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're going to be running our own training programs rather than partnering with someone else going forward. That's I think going to start in September. So we're hiring a head coach right now. And it's one of those things where like, if it was my full-time job, there's like so much stuff that I'd want to do. but also I think accelerating it to that degree would not be cost effective so taking this slow and steady approach makes a ton of sense and the guys who are running it are just like they're so dialed like they're so they're just like badminton people like neither of them had a career whatsoever in like badminton but they just are like super super super super passionate and then just really smart people and so we kind of figured well you know whatever figure a lot of things smart people People who are passionate will figure it out.

3:34:55Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. And so they did. The lead up to like opening was like hell. And I'm sure, I'm putting words in their mouth, but I'm sure both of them almost quit multiple times. Because a startup is hard. Starting something up from nothing is hard. If you've never done it before and you criticize someone else who started something, you need to go do it first. Then you're allowed to throw stones. Because it's hard. Nobody, like something as simple as like picking which, payment terminal like it's not as simple nothing is simple you have to figure out everything and so yeah they but well again once we got to grand opening things got better and they're figuring out a lot but you know we're like we realized something we had our grand opening tournament about a year ago and we gave away like a lot of like memberships and what we noticed is like membership sign up stalled around the like one year anniversary we went oh people are probably waiting for us to like give away more memberships during our anniversary tournament like like there's just so many little mistakes you're gonna make like maybe we went too aggressive on that um i don't forget where i was going with this but it's it's been interesting not really running because i'm more just like the i'm almost more of like a sponsor of the business or like an investor in the business in a sense not that i ever expect like a big return from it or anything because i'm not running it day to day but it's been very interesting running a completely different business and i think it's an investor relationship because you

3:36:23Linus Sebastian:give input and stuff oh yeah yeah but i don't but i don't run it yeah totally yeah um it's like if you think about how framework originally expected your relationship to work oh that is it more similar to that uh no uh they originally want input and stuff framework i don't even remember i thought they wanted to have like calls with you and stuff and you're just like whatever good luck uh that might have been that might have been ashtag okay maybe i don't know and i talk i

3:36:57Luke Lafreniere:talk to them occasionally i talk to them occasionally but that's honestly though that's mostly just because john's super chill and like i like john yeah sure but that's it's funny because that's so much of like how business works and i never really like wanted it to be like that like if i could if i could will business to not work like that if everything was just on merit if i could will that into existence i would but it's just not how it works yeah some of it makes

3:37:26Linus Sebastian:sense to me you gotta be not horrible to work with oh i remember what i was trying to say about

3:37:31Luke Lafreniere:smash champs right so one of the things that we're looking at is a way to increase value for our for our premium members who are the ones that really like help us fund the club um although you know everyone who comes and plays obviously like is, is appreciated to help, you know, get build momentum and build a community there. But the premium members, the ones who are, who are signing up for the long haul and who are in there, you know, two, three, four or five times a week and are like the, the, the, the seed crystal around which something can grow because nobody signs up for a sports session that has zero people.

3:38:06Luke Lafreniere:You know what I mean? Like that, like your core, right? so we're trying to find ways to create more value and things like bringing in former pros or prominent badminton YouTubers to do clinics and stuff there's actually a channel badminton family yeah these guys these guys are doing a clinic this summer like at Smash? yeah so he came out for a scouting mission he was looking for a facility in the lower mainland to to do like an in-person uh camp uh they apparently do these in um in denmark and you basically go for like i think it's a week and it's for professional amateurs

3:38:53Linus Sebastian:and he just happened to be looking for a badminton facility in the lower mainland

3:38:57Luke Lafreniere:wanted to do one in western north america and so he came to to find the right location okay and so they so they do them in denmark and it's like uh it sounds like the kind of thing i'd love to do they market them to professional amateurs and you basically go for an entire week and you do nothing but eat breathe and sleep badminton for a week and just like you do training and coaching you go to the gym you get a bunch of like one-on-one time with the coach you hang you network with people you meet people it sounds really cool so they're going to do one at our club you sure are yeah there it is family family camp bc canada 2026 i don't know if they actually have any spots open but if they do then now would be a great time to uh pay and secure your spot so we worked out a deal with them where we gave them a really good deal on the court time so they're still making profit even though um they got to come all the way out here in order to host it and then they have one in uh indonesia as well in october which is super cool what a what a neat uh like what a neat thing to do to kind of really engage in person with your community and honestly I think it's a pretty good value for what it is

3:40:10Linus Sebastian:interesting yeah pretty cool yeah these types of four day program

3:40:18Luke Lafreniere:and he's like a crazy good player I played with him just like he was just he was going easy on me just goofing around but just the shot quality and movement makes me feel bad but in a motivating way. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's all I got? Yeah. What do you want, Crystal? It's$800 just for a week. Like, what do you think professional training costs? Like, I don't know, man.

3:40:49Linus Sebastian:Money's got to money. Depending on the class size for that many days of training, it's not super outlandish to me for this type of thing. I don't think so either.

3:41:00Luke Lafreniere:And I, is that it for today? Yeah. Wow. We've got a special guest for the outro. We have a special guest for the outro. Sad Michael Reeves. All right. I'll see you guys again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

3:41:14Linus Sebastian:Bye.

3:41:32you