Episode 39 - March For Novelty

Good morning, listeners!  Rise and shine!  Because we did; apparently for no good reason.  So coffee up (with regular, non-aged coffee) because we're about to embark on one of our most rage-filled episodes to date as we bring in the following issues:

-Novelty Items
-Video Game Ratings
-Dress Code Complainers
-Marches and/or Protests

If there's one thing that I've grown sick of in my life, it's clutter.  It doesn't help that I'm a naturally lazy person, so I leave things like soda cans laying around, which pile up and start to bug me until I eventually wait until everyone is out of the house and have a furious meltdown of shame and anxiety as I storm around the house like the Tasmanian Devil, frantically picking up detritus and chastising myself with chains.  But that's not the only source of clutter.  You can also simply collect too much useless crap in the form of trinkets, souvenirs, and "collectibles".  From tourist gift shops to video game swag, these things just seem to pile up, and eventually over run your home, until you just live in a shrine to pointless things that you've wasted time on in your life.  I mean, everyone except me seems to think that a decorative sword on the wall is cool, or that a dragon statuette is to die for, but after the novelty wears off, what is it good for?  How does it enrich your life?  Or does it just get in the way, take up space, and distract you from life at hand?  Oh, and the one-time-use things like eclipse sunglasses.  But, while Buck has a problem with video game swag, Tab has another issue with something related to video games . . .

When I was a kid, we didn't have many ads for video games.  Maybe the occasional Saturday morning or weekday afternoon commercial in the war between Nintendo and Sega, but by and large, if you wanted to know what video games were out there, you had to beg your mom to take you to the store and just browse.  You'd check out box art, maybe ask the clerk, or some other kid at the store, but eventually you wanted the real scoop on whether or not a game was any good.  Enter the internet.  Now, you have a sea of websites, blogs, podcasts, and youtubers vying for your attention, trying to make a living telling you what games you should play.  The problem?  They lie.  As it turns out, there's a problem in the industry with getting your hands on an advanced copy of a game for the purposes of reviewing it.  Why?  Well, as it turns out, lots of video games just plain suck, but if you come out and say that, the company that published it might not send you a copy of the next one to take a dump on.  And that's a problem.  One would think that there'd be a system of honor (a code, if you will) by which companies would conduct themselves, allowing honest, potentially negative reviews to fairly assess their products.  You'd be wrong in thinking that.  But while that code doesn't seem to exist, there's another that does . . .

Fair warning, this is probably the most contentious issue that's been brought in.  I'd wager the rage levels ping even higher than the air compressor debacle (and I, unfortunately, suspect that the fallout will take just as long).  I'm talking about dress codes.  There's been a low-key campaign for several years of saying that dress codes are the system's way of telling girls to be ashamed of their bodies.  That's not the topic that was debated today, oddly enough.  The topic was, should there be a dress code at all?  Buck argues that, while they may indeed be superfluous, they've been around since dirt was invented, and they're probably not going anywhere, so we may as well get over them and focus on more important things.  Tab . . . is of a different opinion.  And even though the debate got heated, in the end, I think we both made our opinions understood.  Because that's what discourse is: two people hash things out until a reasonable consensus is reached, and both parties are enriched.  Of course, not everyone takes that approach . . . Politics today has become a very frustrating game of "Who can shout the loudest".  While the scale of transgression may not be balanced, both sides of the aisle have been guilty of useless, inflamatory grandstanding.  Often in the form of a march, or a protest.  And while such things were useful once, decades ago, the advent of the internet and social media have essentially rendered them a moot point.  Awareness of any and every given topic can be achieved via facebook or twitter campaigns, leaving the realm of marches to devolve into mass virtue signaling and violence.  When will people, regular old people, just sit down, like rational adults, in front of a couple of microphones, and scream at each other until they can find common ground?  Who knows.

We spend some time catching up on two weeks worth of voicemails.  I want to take this time to say that we really appreciate everyone who has taken the time out of their day not only to listen to our show, but to engage by commenting, calling in, or hopping onto our Discord and saying hello.  And if you follow the link below, you too can join in on the fun on Discord, and talk to not only us (we're almost always around in some capacity or another), but also each other!  One question remains: which of us has the better Donald Trump impersonation?  You'll have to tune in to this week's episode to find out!

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