299: Donkey Kong Is a Florida Man

Hey, remember that period of a few weeks earlier this year when I got way into computer security? You mean, I like to think it's your secure boot phase. I went real deep on signing EFI bootloaders and the Linux kernel and stuff like that to work with secure boot because I felt...

I insisted that secure boot be on on all my computers. And I remember saying, man, nobody uses secure boot. It's fine. Just turn it off and then make installing Linux easy. I'm making that hand motion, you know, where you kind of polish your hand on your shirt. oh oh that's what that is okay somebody was ahead of the curve yeah okay so there's some things that happened in the last like 15 years of computers and they're kind of black boxes and secure boot is one of those for me right

Like, I understand theoretically what's happening, but I don't understand the impacts of how it works. And all the BIOSs, sorry, UEFIs, have different descriptions in there of what the settings are. Yeah. And the one time I've screwed it up. It ended up with me reinstalling Windows because I couldn't recover the Windows install with the keys that I had or something. Now, that part I don't get. A lot of the fear mongering I've been seeing. Hang on. We should back up.

Point of order. The reason we're even talking about secure boot is that the Battlefield 6 beta is running this weekend on PCs. Just for the record. Yeah. It's a good one. I should check that out. Yeah.

But on PC, it's level of anti-cheat requires you to have secure boot enabled on your PC in order to run it. This is part of the new... anti-cheat the next cod cod block seven is going to have a secure boot required energy as well same thing um and i think part of the theory is they want to make sure that you're not running a in a vm like you're they want to make sure you're not running windows in a vm so then

can monkey with the state of the vm from outside the vm uh be like that's the only thing i can think of because like i don't think anybody's running boot level cheating programs probably not i think there's also secure the the enabling secure boot also flips on the flag that requires signed drivers which means that hardware hacking devices that people use that are like

I think PCI Express cards interface with software and then can communicate across the system bus or something. Wait, hang on. I need to stop you. Are you suggesting there is cheating hardware out there? My understanding, there was a... I spent some time in the Steam forums this weekend, Brad. Okay. I need to know about this. Not that I want to cheat, but conceptually, that sounds absolutely bizarre. So there was a thread and I'm going to see if I can find it where.

battlefield six said hey we wanted to share an update from our anti-cheat team on secure boot and cheats and then they explained why they did that and how many people they banned yada yada yada and then The third guy responding is a guy named Smoke with a dollar sign as the S, and he has like a weird font for the M-O-K-E. Said, again, secure boot does nothing to deal with cheats. All it takes is $100 side tower.

To spoof a kernel level handshake on that rig, which I assume means you're plugging in. It says a cheater can buy a DMA card fuser in KM box for less than a hundred bucks, which when I did some Googling are things you plug into another computer that you plug into your gaming computer and let you manipulate the state of memory in the game. Interesting. Anyway. Yeah. On the secure boot requires signed drivers. I think that might be at the discretion of the operating system kernel or policy.

I mean, I'm talking about in Windows specifically. In Windows, I'm sure that's the case. I think it's definitely the case in Linux that if you're running secure boots, then the kernel requires kernel modules to be signed as well. Yeah, that makes sense.

Secure Boot, since you asked or you said it's one of those things that's out there and people have heard of it but don't necessarily know exactly, it's just a way of making sure that... Nothing in the chain of executables that have to boot when you turn a computer on until you get to an operating system login screen have been tampered with. Yeah. So and they do that simply by enrolling a set of private keys in your UEFI. Also, I'm going to take a pause here.

There was a point like a year or two ago where I insisted that I would never use the term UEFI, that it would always be BIOS. Yeah, here we are, huh? Well, then I actually looked into what UEFI is and does. And now it's actually I hate saying it. It's a terrible acronym, but I think it's like it is so much more robust and it does so many more things than the old BIOS that I feel like making the distinction is actually useful. The other one was basic and now it's universal. Yes, I guess.

It's just hard to say. Yuffie. That's what we say at PC World. I thought that really, I just, Yuffie. You could say Yuffie, I guess. Wait, Yuffie? Yuffie. Final Fantasy VII Yuffie? I don't know about that. Okay, if I make that connection, maybe that makes sense in my brain. I only played the first part of Final Fantasy VII. I don't think there's a Yuffie in that one.

She's the ninja character. She's an optional character. Actually, I believe you don't have to recruit her. I think she is optional to get. I've only gotten to the end of the first one, not that I didn't play the second one. Yes, she is. Yeah, the real Final Fantasy VII. She is very prominently the new character in Rebirth.

Although she actually, they introduced her in a DLC for, for remake, but then of course, anyway. Okay. Anyway, moving on. The point is, the point is yes. Like you, you have keys, you have private keys enrolled in your UEFI and then.

Everything from the EFI bootloader that the UEFI launches that then launches the OS kernel, like all of those binaries have to be signed with public keys. Sorry, other way around. Private keys. I'm sorry, it's other way around. You have to sign them with the private key.

They're checked against the public key. You are not wrong. The secure boot implementations in UEFI can be terrible. Wild. Can be terrible. Well, there are a bunch of different ways to do it. In Windows, whatever, you just turn secure boot on in the BIOS because Windows is signed with.

Microsoft is a certificate authority. In fact, the certificate authority must be nice for valid secure boot keys. So like every motherboard on the planet is going to work with Windows and secure boot. In fact, I saw people, a lot of the idiot fear mongering that has sprung up in the wake of this requirement.

It's just like I can't even wrap my head around it. There's people out there going, oh, it hurts your performance or, oh, you'll break your motherboard like those things are impossible. That's that's ridiculous. But. Turning it on in the BIOS is definitely can be more complicated than it should be like my my motherboard, which is a nice motherboard. Sometimes this setting doesn't stick for two or three reboots. That's great. You just have to keep doing it over and over.

At one point, it unenrolled. It cleared my custom key that I had enrolled in there, and then it wouldn't boot either until I went and read it. It's Microsoft with a dollar sign doing their dirty business is what it looks like to me. Well, that one's on Asus, but anyway. so yeah the problem i had when i when i nuked the machine uh windows install i had it's an older machine it's a it's a um the 9900k machine so it was

early-ish for secure boot, and I think that I nuked the keys that it was using. I think it was using a separate set of keys. I had enrolled a separate key at some point for Windows 10, and I switched to Windows 11.

And it didn't translate or what I didn't change it over or something. Anyway, the upshot was it failed to boot with a secure boot error over and over and over again until I was just like, it's just going to be easier to reinstall windows on this machine and fix this problem. Wait, so you couldn't just turn secure boot off.

Uh-uh. You should have been able to. Nope. Didn't work. Like I said, I've had mine stick where I had to just keep turning it off and rebooting like two or three times before it would actually do it. it's possible i had that that was a that was a that's a gigabyte board i think but um i i look i i spent about 20 minutes on it i reached the point where i was like this is a simple machine i have everything backed up it'll take me like 20 minutes to reinstall it so i'll just do that yeah

The interaction between UEFI and operating systems is fascinating to me. Like, did you know that Windows Update will modify secure bootkeys in your UEFI? Yeah, I'm aware of that, too. That's how I nuked my cache install the other day. There's there's the DB and the DBX. The DB is like the good keys. The DBX is the list of banned keys. Whoa. That is put out by like security.

professionals. How do you get your key banned? Certain keys become compromised over time. If the private key gets out there, then it's useless. at that point like earlier or whatever i i'm again i'm not a cryptographer but whatever whatever part of that chain of yeah if your private key is no longer private then it becomes useless for cryptography yes or it's maybe it's like the certificate signing

key or something. Some key gets out there and then those keys are useless from a security standpoint. So they have to be revoked anyway. Like if you watch your UEFI after a Windows update, sometimes you'll see the number on the DBX tick up because because Microsoft has. Stealth banned a few more secure boot keys in your UEFI. Great. Computing is fascinating, I find. I mean, it's infinitely complex and infinitely diverse. So I guess good job. Good job.

Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Hey, Battlefield 6, though, pretty good. The tanks, I laid on the back of a tank and healed a guy, healed the tank while other people were shooting at me until somebody sniped me off the back of the tank, and I was like, yeah, I deserve that.

How's it look? It looks like a single player game, Brad. Like it's almost too much visual noise for a multiplayer game. Like they do a thing where they put little diamonds on top of everybody. So. so you can see the enemies in the in the field when they've been pinged by somebody on your team better because like it's it's noisy interesting like the pc version i assume yeah well i mean it's battlefield yes keyboard game brad air air

I'm excited because they're taking another step with the old Battle Royale. And you know how I feel about a Battle Royale. Wait, has Battlefield ever done that before? They did Firebreak with Battlefield 5, I think. Okay. Which was bad. the destructible all the destructible buildings and stuff made made it so there was no cover so that it meant whoever had a tank won the game which you know like real real talk tanks win wars but uh battle royales you want to be a little more

You know, infantry based than that, I think. Anyway, this is 100% like modern military, real world, like serious tone, like no personality at all. I think. It's very serious. Jay and Silent Bob aren't there. They had a King of the Hill mode, but it does not feature Hank and Bobby Hill in their new rebooted Hulu Plus series. I didn't even mean that so much. It was like, you know, at least 2142 had a little bit of a futuristic angle.

Like the ones that are just, here's present day military technology and modern uniforms and it's just real life. I kind of was over that 10 plus years ago. So the weapons are all fake versions of real weapons. They do. They do have stuff like they do have future tech in the in the like skill trees. Right. So like.

I don't know, but basically the missiles are fire and forget aim it. You have to deal with drop or lock on to air targets and then they can fire flares. There's no there's no like space laser or anything like that. If that's what you're asking, it's I would describe this as a classic mainline battlefield.

OK, all right. I don't I don't know if they're using real countries. I haven't sussed that out yet on the I keep meaning to check the load screens to see if they have place names or if they're making up fake countries in the Middle East. So so that, you know.

But it looks like PMC versus military is the is the battle, which seems ripped from the headlines. It sure does. Yeah. You know what else is ripped from the headlines? What's that? Buy in appliances. Sure. I guess we have a two. Everybody's doing it.

yes this is this is we're recording a little late this week we have a two for things have been going on yeah i went to super nintendo world we're going to talk about that and the tech that is is there because they did some neat stuff and i want to i would like to compare and contrast that with the Star Wars land of Batuu in Disneyland. All right. But yeah, I want to I want to hear about your your.

appliance buying adventures. I bought an appliance for the first time in my life. I've just never, I've rented since I became an adult. You never bought a microwave oven? Yeah, but I don't think I count that. Okay, major appliance. Anything that could be delivered normally from Amazon, I feel like, is not in the scope here. I'm talking something that's too big for one person to carry.

OK, that makes sense. And something that you're potentially going to have for a very long time. Although, I mean, again, it's not my fridge. We just rent. But yeah, our fridge randomly crapped out last week. What happened to it? And I didn't bother to deduce. Did the freezers stay cold and the top stayed? Freezers stayed cold, but not cold enough. The inside. Okay, I'll just walk you through the whole thing.

Yeah, paint us a word picture, Brad. At some point, it was definitely, I knew it to be an older fridge. I'd never bothered to try to figure out how old until all this went down. But the compressor, like Tuesday-ish, started making some noises, let's say. Oh, bad noises. It was making like a clicking, grinding kind of sound. Yeah, that'll happen. Getting increasingly angrier sounding. Mm hmm. And I just ignored it. Yeah, I was like, that's probably not great, but like.

This is the benefit of renting, Brad. Is it like you hear a noise like that? I hear a noise like that. Panic sets into my heart because I'm like, I'm about to spend a lot of money. You're like, that's somebody else's problem. Well, but yes, but it's both the benefit and the curse of renting, though, because. The thing I don't like is that...

There's overhead involved. There are other people in the chain of decision making involved. Like, oh, yeah. The advantage you have as a homeowner is that when it dies, you don't have to wait for anybody else to sign off or wait for them to get a refrigerator ordered or, you know what I mean? The downside is that I have to write.

It's not like I can call the bank and be like, hey, can I knock off two grand for a new refrigerator for my mortgage payment this month? Well, OK, well, we'll get to it. But let's say the budget for our new fridge was was far, far lower than two. I mean, the entry point for new fridges is like twelve, thirteen hundred dollars. It seems like now. Nope, not even close. OK, never mind. Not even half that. You've got a hose then. Whatever. It's it's perfectly suitable for the space.

It was making a bad noise. And I was like, it'll probably be fine. I don't want to have to deal with contacting somebody about this. Yeah.

It'll probably be fine. By Wednesday night, though, the noise had gotten loud enough that it occurred to me. And also I had some yogurt and I was like, this doesn't seem quite as cold as it used to be. and decided to put a thermometer in there. 55 degrees Fahrenheit. That's too warm for a fridge. It sure is. You want your fridge to be 40-ish. Yeah, so we've kind of talked weirdly a lot about food safety and spoilage.

the bacterial growth on this podcast but it's always been in a bit of a flippant manner i found look i have long said that every single human being should have to take some some aspect of microbiology as it pertains to food safety because

Most people make some real weird assumptions about what makes food go bad. And it would be really helpful if everybody understood the actual mechanism. Right. So then they're much less likely to poison themselves by, you know, like leaving an egg out overnight and then eating it. Yeah, God, I had to research how eggs are handled in this country and whether referred to it. Anyway, we'll get to that. We're stupid with eggs here just because we don't like poop.

Yes, but now it is time to talk frankly and seriously about the guidance here because I've had to do a crash course and all that stuff. My assumptions were not too far off the mark, but I was definitely a little bit looser than the recommendations, which are. It needs to be below 40 Fahrenheit in there kind of all the time.

There's really not much of a grace period at all. You actually want it to be a little bit lower so that when you open the door and close it, the recovery period takes you back to 40, not above 40. Or below 40, right? Like a 38?

like is what i saw is the general recommendation it depends on the fridge like our fridge if we have it 38 at the bottom in the front the the top where the air comes out of the freezer will freeze whatever is up there solid so anyway And zero degrees Fahrenheit in the freezer, which surprised me because I would think that like kind of anything south of the freezing point would be adequate.

But again, it's about the recovery period. You don't want stuff to thaw and freeze and thaw and freeze. You want to be cold enough that when you open the door and look in there for a minute, it doesn't thaw everything. Yeah. So the freezer in the shitty fridge was actually holding about 10. Okay.

So that stuff's probably fine. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the, we'll, we'll get to it. That's the only food we did not lose. Okay. But, uh, you probably have some mustard in there. That's okay. We saved some ketchup. Okay. That's about it. Um, But whatever, it's still a non-starter with the main fridge compartment at 55. Yeah, no. So long story short.

I contacted the landlord and you tell me if this was a good move or not. I volunteered to handle the acquisition and selection of the new fridge. Well, so I thought that was a good idea until you, until a few minutes ago when you were describing your budget range. Which gave me pause because, yeah, you're in contractor territory when you're south of two grand in San Francisco these days. They were looking to come in around $600 before any taxes and delivery fees.

Do they even sell fridges for $600? Oh, yeah. Does it have an ice maker or anything? No, no. This is the most zero frills. price range category of refrigerator product you can imagine. Did you have an ice maker before? No, we didn't have any of that stuff. Okay. It was a very basic refrigerator. I mean, it's an apartment and also it's a pretty small space. There's a cabinet overhang.

yeah that is 65 inches which it turns out there are not a lot of upright fridges that fit in that space anyway how big is this is like an 18 cubic foot fridge it was 17.5 which is but our old one was 15.8 so this is still space yeah Um, do you pay for electricity in your unit or does he pay for electricity? We do. Did you get one that is, it's energy star. We'll get to the one we got. Okay. Okay. Um, I think it's a net gain overall, but, uh, I went into the fridge.

After all this was going down, it was bought in 2003. Yeah, I mean, fridge has lasted a long time. But yes, so like at first, 2003 struck me as like, man, this thing is probably ready to go. But then my parents' fridge, nice like upstairs fridge, is like 25 years old.

So they have my grandma's old and old fridge is in the basement, which is from well over 40 years, I think. Well, so there's a there's a. time on appliances especially now as we've gotten better at making stuff and stuff gets a little bit more efficient right up until the point at which we killed the energy star program and the ability to track that stuff a few months ago um where

keeping old appliances that run on electricity is probably costing you more than you would say than you would save like that's probably true keeping an 80s refrigerator at this point a is not going to be unless you've replaced the seals and everything it's going to be leaky so that means it's going to run all the time it means it's going to use a ton of electricity um but okay so first off i want to share i want to like i've been looking for a refrigerator for a long time oh

ours the space that they made in the custom cabinetry in our cabinets fits like four models of refrigerator yeah that's so kind of where we were at yeah it's like damn the people to hell who decided to do this And also because our fridge is right up against the wall, it has to have a specific kind of hinge or else you won't be able to open the left, the left side at all because it hits the like.

if the hinge pokes out past the edge of the thing like it would if it was hanging out with cabinets on either side it would be no problem but with the wall there if the if the door opens the wrong way then the door will only open like 30 degrees and that is obviously bad so yeah

Anyway, yeah, this experience, we've also got some stuff in the floor that limits the range of door motion here. This whole experience, if and when I ever own a home, I think I'm sold on the like as freestanding a refrigerator as possible concept. You just put in the middle of the room. Yep. That's right. Worship it. All right. So this brings us to Friday when the temperature in the fridge had been above 50 degrees for over two days.

Also, I got to say, I'm shocked that there are six hundred dollar fridges in a I know you pay for rent and it's a little offensive that he's going to hit you for. Yeah. Get a six hundred dollar fridge with no ice maker water or any of that nonsense.

I'm of two minds on that stuff because every single person, I mean, like I think almost every refrigerator I have come across ever that has water and ice dispensers in it, one of those things is broken. I've had those for the last 30 years, Brad, and I've never had a problem with them. That's a data point of one. I'm telling you, I have run into so many broken ice makers in refrigerators. I'm kind of...

It's the old TV VCR combo problem. I don't like combining a lot of functionality into one unit because the more things that can break on there, the harder it gets to maintain. I mean, OK, so in fairness, I have replaced an ice maker before, but it was like a $70 part that took 15 minutes to swap out. So it's not like it was a hard. That's fine. But whatever. I can I can fill up an ice tray. I'm not worried about that. Wow. But.

We got to talk about throwing out the food. Yeah. Like I said, it very quickly became clear we were not keeping anything that had not been in the freezer. Did you just put it on too good to go and call it a day? Sure. No. Do you have a compost bin? Yeah, there is a bin downstairs. It was a scene, man. We are not that far removed from our last Costco run. Oh, no. So there were like.

There were jumbo economy sized containers of, let's see, there was a big thing of kimchi that had just opened and it had like one serving from. Kimchi's probably okay, actually. Everything said refrigerate after opening. Oh, okay. Refrigerate, like. We just decided to we decided to go zero tolerance, clean slate. Let's not risk it. I mean, I will say having had bad food poisoning, it's.

Like, yeah. Also, your landlord should pay for replacing the food. Yeah. Well, we'll see how that goes. Yeah. Anyway, there was one point, though, it was like it was like a giant thing of sauerkraut, a giant thing of kimchi.

Oh, God, I'm trying to think what else. A lot of fermented cabbage in your life these days, huh, Brad? Pickles. There was a whole thing of pickles that we had barely gotten into. I think pickles are probably, I would have kept the pickles. I considered that for all of the fermented stuff, but they all, the wording on all the labels.

was direct enough that I just decided it was not worth it was not worth saving the 15 to 20 bucks on that stuff but my girlfriend was handling a lot of that disposal uh-huh and at one point she just dumped all that stuff into the sink yeah And I had to take a picture of it because it looked like weirdly artistic. Well, that's short. There was something there was something weirdly artsy about the look of like.

This giant bed of kimchi and then this layer of sauerkraut and this pile of pickles. There's probably somebody on TikTok who makes like portraits of people using fermented cabbage dishes. I bet that smelled good. It was pungent from all the way down the other end of the house. But anyway, the food disposal was a whole thing. But again, we just decided to treat it as kind of a clean slate. Let's just start over, buy all new stuff. So here we are. Yeah.

Anyway, on the fridge selection. Yeah. So I was going to say like if you had like a real budget to do this, I can imagine that the fridge selection is fraught and difficult.

At the budget he gave you, I imagine there's like three choices and they're all kind of crappy. There were actually quite a few choices. Again, it was the cabinet overhang overhead being so low that was the actual needing factor. That always sucks. It was not the price because there were quite a few models in the and they were they were.

fuzzy they sent me they sent me a um one suggestion that was 650 you know i think they would have okay they would have wiggled a little bit on a better model but but again like i what i ended up doing was just filtering by height And that got it down to not very many models. It turned out because there were like so many models that were like two inches too tall. Like it was such a small margin. But anyway, the Dremel.

I did look at the bottom of that overhang and I was like, I bet you can take a couple inches off that beam. Yeah, it's hard to do. It turns out looking real janky.

I talked to Vinny and Alex at NextLander about it a little bit because they're both homeowners. And I got a couple of recommendations that they have gotten in the past that they passed along that I thought were interesting. Okay. The one Alex had been told was... Focus on brands that just make appliances versus brands that make everything. I that used to be true. I don't know that I necessarily agree with that anymore. So the brands that just make appliances are like Whirlpool and Maytag.

It's Western brands versus Eastern brands, typically, because the Eastern brands are generally vertically integrated across a wide variety of industries. Right. And the other category is stuff like Samsung and LG that makes TVs. And so the thing about everything we can think of.

Whirlpool and Maytag are all owned by one company now. Oh, I didn't know that. So yeah, I learned this when I bought a hot water heater. There was a Maytag hot water heater that I thought was a nice expensive one. And it turns out it's just a world shitty janky one with the same badge on it. Good to know.

Um, I, uh, um, the, the thing I would say is generally speaking, especially if you're spending your own money, go to someplace that actually sells those appliances like that, that specializes in appliances, not Best Buy. And then. um i like to ask the repair guys so for example when our fridge conked out i asked the repair guy who came to fix the fridge what his favorite brand of fridge was which ones he doesn't see and he's like oh here are the ones that i like for that

Kind of like which one would you buy for yourself? Yeah. Which one do you have? Although if he recommends you one that doesn't need a lot of repairs, he's that's less repair work for him. But I mean, the true, true. But like it's worked really well on the hot water heater front.

the hot water heater guys were like yeah don't buy these brands they're all the same thing they're just rebadged and when they have a problem they all have the same problem yeah we we ended up with an lg because uh um Cause it's what fit the space. It was the biggest internal capacity we could get that would fit in that, in that small height. Yeah. Um, but the, the thing that, uh, the thing that Vinny said he has heard is that it's the.

It's the these days, it's the very, very cheap fridges and the very, very expensive ones that last forever. It's the mid range. I think that's probably right. It's the mid range that are like not too expensive, but have a ton of features crammed into them are the ones that are constantly breaking down.

it's the terry pratchett uh work boot theory right you if you can afford the you either buy the cheap one 50 times but i think that these days the cheap one is actually made for people like you who have like like People who rent apartments and stuff like that and don't want to be hassled

Whereas the mid range stuff is like aspirationally upgraded, but it's kind of crappy. And the prices on that is low enough. And I don't know what the margin is, but like the number of features they pack in there, but keep the price down probably means that the.

quality of the product is lower right well or um so for example our stove had a issue out of the gate when we bought it a few years ago and the repair guy came out and was like yeah i've seen a lot of these they just did they just had cold solders on the line which you know our our sony receivers had cold solders on the screens and is that an intentional choice designed to make it last a limited period of time before you have to upgrade it or is that just somebody up on the line

And there's no way to know. Right. That's the old incompetence versus malice. Yeah. Yeah. Except for Sony has a real reputation for doing cold solders. So, you know, maybe, maybe a little from column a, a little from column B. Yeah, sure.

I like this theory a lot. I think I think this is this one. This one reads to me. Yeah. And one thing Vinny said is that those super, super high end ones are also just fridges like those really, you know, we're talking the like seven thousand dollar fridges for the wealthy or whatever, but like the.

At the high end, a lot of them are also just basic fridges with a bunch of frills because you just want a thing that is quality and does its job well. So honestly, this is what's kept us from upgrading our fridge because like when the ice maker cocked out i looked i was like am i going to spend 70 bucks on a new ice maker or am i just going to spend 1200 on a new fridge

And then I looked at what the new fridge is, what the what the like twelve hundred to two thousand dollar. I mean, what was twelve hundred then and now is probably two grand. What those fridges, what those fridges, what you get in those. And it's invariably like. high complexity so we like an ice maker and we like water in the fridge uh with a filter um and getting

They move the ice makers out of the freezers because they're less convenient because people wanted door ice ice in the door. And as a result, you have these really complicated ice makers that either shuttle ice up from the freezer down to the to the front or. It takes up all of one door with an ice maker that is less efficient and prone to clogging and all this stuff that just just sucks.

So I am, like I said, this is my first appliance purchase or selection process. I'm getting a taste of what I will be like as a homeowner. It's going to be minimalism and modularity all the way. It's just going to be everything. It's going to be the Unix philosophy applied to a house. Every tool has one job and it needs to do it well.

Well, so I think you can get I mean, I think I think there are still good appliances in these categories. I think the problem is you're not going to find them at Best Buy. You're not going to find them at Lowe's and Home Depot, really, in my experience there. So like washing machines and dryers are fine to get. at Home Depot and Lowe's. I think actually we bought ours at Best Buy because they had a deal and they price matched.

I like buying something like a fridge that's going to stick with me for 20 years, someplace that that will swap it out for a different one if I don't like it when I get there. Sure. Because the other big problem with a lot of this stuff is that. the user interface choices and i don't mean software i mean like how you interact with the device you're not going to realize annoy the out of you until it's too late

If you buy it at Best Buy. There's already, there's already like three things about this one that are like slightly more annoying than the old one, but, but there are enough upsides to it that I'm, I'm calling it at least, at least a break, even if not a net gain.

Yeah, well, more space is good. Yeah, it's got more space, but like the top shelf is weirdly limited and can't be adjusted. So our big, like you said, we also like to keep a big water filter pitcher thing in there. That thing no longer fits on the top shelf, which is a real bummer.

yeah if you've got a fridge with water in it you'd not have this problem you know i suppose that's the case maybe before people write in and tell me that the water pipe to their fridge burst and it caused them to flood their house i know it happens i don't i'm fine i'm fine taking that risk yes uh the biggest net gain i'll just i'll just say it now um

Got a few more points to get through here, but it is so much quieter than the old one. And I think you've been in our apartment before, right? Like our kitchen and our living room are directly adjacent and there's not a door. It's like they had cut the wall out. It's just completely open. So the fridge is open air 15 feet away from me when we're watching TV, playing games, whatever. And even before the old fridge started getting very angry, it was pretty loud when the compressor kicked on.

Maybe that was a warning sign in retrospect. Maybe cannot even hear this thing from the couch. I literally, when it's running, cannot even hear it like that. That alone is. Yeah, that's a huge, huge gain. Anyway, I'll get to.

The last bit of the selection stuff here. Um, it is an energy star. Yeah. And so that, that helps I'm sure with the efficiency and the, and the noise and stuff like that. I got really excited though, once I was granted some agency to pick this thing out myself within a budget. Okay.

Because I've been kind of fascinated with the phenomenon of the bottom freezer drawer. So we have a bottom freezer drawer and I have mixed feelings about it, but go on. Yeah. So that's what I found when I started looking into them. I mean, first of all, I found that there were zero models available that fit within our tight budget. Yeah, that's an upgrade feature at this point. I've quickly realized that has been positioned as a luxury.

Well, it also has more parts because the freezer on top has there has to be an impeller in the bottom ones to get cold air from the freezer to the. bridge so this goes back to my minimalism is that now that i've actually read about this i think that the my my dreams of bottom freezer have been dashed for all time because there are because there are i mean it literally is less efficient like you're going to use more electricity the

The top freezer is common for a reason, not just because it's cheaper to make, like it's actually more efficient to operate the fridge. I looked it up. The Department of Energy says that. classic top freezer models are 10 to 25% more energy efficient than the bottom freezer. That's crazy. Which is kind of a lot. I wasn't, I couldn't find definitively the reason for that. I found a couple of suggestions.

One suggestion I found is that there is a more natural convection cycle of warm and cold air flowing in the top freezer, but I'd... Well, I think those compartments are airtight. So like, no, no, no. The air moves from the freezer and fridge connected. The way the fridge is cooled is there's a fan that moves or there's there's a system that moves air from the cold freezer to the to the.

to the refrigerator. Okay. And it maintains the temperature by cycling the amount of air that's allowed in and out. Right. But on the because cold because heat rises. Yeah.

Because cold air, the cold air from the freezer sinks into the fridge compartment. Naturally sinks. Yeah. The problem is on the downhill ones, you have to have some sort of mechanism that brings air from the cold bottom to the top. Yep. That's just another thing to break. So I guess I'll never have one. I will tell you on our fridge that.

did break about 10 years after we bought the house and it cost, it was, it was a classic $25 part hour of labor, $400 worth of food that was ruined because the fridge got warm and we didn't realize it until we had.

a similar warm yogurt moment no thank you uh i also i read elsewhere that it may also have to do with the placement of the compressor that on the top freezer models the compressor is farther away from the refrigerated compartments oh that makes sense and on these it's below where it's going to heat up right probably yeah because compressors generate heat right yeah yeah yeah so anyway no more no more no more bottom freezer uh i so

What I will say, having had one of these bottom freezers for like 10 years, we were side by side people for years and years, which I quite like. Yeah, that's what my parents have. The bottom freezer.

lets you hold a lot more stuff in your freezer and make it more accessible if you're like like for example when we make a soup or something and freeze it we put it into freezer bags and lay them out flat so they freeze like like hanging files sure and then they go in there it's an enormous pain in the ass if you have a lot of frozen vegetables so like we have frozen peas and stuff like that in there or like like smoothie frozen stuff

And those bags just become amorphous blobs in the basket at the bottom. I would much rather have this side by side if I were doing it again. It's one of the reasons I keep waiting. One of the problems we have is because of where the wall is, the side-by-side absolutely will not work because of the hinges hitting the doors and the wall and all that stuff. Anyway.

I keep hoping somebody's going to make a better side by side hinge. But yeah, I like I like the fridge on top. The fridge on top is incredibly convenient when you're in there looking for stuff when you're pulling stuff out. It's funny because our fridge is from the time before they started adding all the electronic crap to the fridges. So like the bonus features for us are like pull out drawers, pull out shelves.

so like you can you can grab the shelf and pull it out um it's not i don't know it's it's weird it's it's it's the newer ones are much weirder i think yeah and then you get like all this weird electronic crap that you really don't need I don't know that there are any circuit boards in this one. I mean, there's probably something very basic, but very basic. Probably no IC. Okay, a couple other things real quick.

I mean, this is common to anybody who buys things online, I guess, these days. But appliances, I feel like, are an extreme example. Sifting through reviews for this was a complete mess. Well, part of the problem, the big problem is there's no SKUs. We looked at this when we started tested. Maytag and Whirlpool make separate SKUs of the exact same refrigerator with slightly different fascia on it or Lowe's, Home Depot, Best Buy, Walmart, all the places you can buy fridges.

And it means that it's really, really hard to do reviews because you can't often tell that they're the same part. And it's so that it's so that it's so that. Home Depot can say, oh, yeah, we price match everything. And then there's nothing to price match against because it's all different skews. Good stuff. Great. I went to Consumer Reports. They wanted a subscription.

to show the review for this refrigerator, but it was very unclear to me based on the way they blurred the page out, whether a human had even done a test on this refrigerator. It kind of looked like what was being blurred out was really not much more than the manufacturer's specs. So my experience when I buy, I don't know. I don't actually know how well they cover this part of the market. Like, I know that when you're buying.

if you're spending 2000 like when i bought when i bought hot water heaters and stuff like that when i've had to spend a couple grand on an appliance i usually shell out for a month or two consumer reports um because they're generally pretty good and if they Even if they don't have a review of a particular model, they'll have reviews of other models from that vendor, which kind of gives me a read on the situation. I will say I think Consumer Reports is really good at the kind of speeds and feeds.

side of reviewing like how energy efficient is it how much space does it have does it does it have like convenient features like the pullout shelves or adjustable shelves or stuff like that i don't think they're particularly good at user experience stuff so like interesting

for example we bought a toaster oven one time i looked at a consumer reports review of it and they were like oh yeah we absolutely love this and then i got it and it was the the user interface for the thing was unintelligible to humans And I was like, did you guys try to make a piece of toast in this thing? So I'm a reasonably smart person and I can't figure it out. So we took that one back and got a different one. All right.

Yeah, if it had been my fridge in my house, I probably would have shelled out for the sub. But also, again, it didn't look like they had done a review. And I think, like you said, they probably are not covering this. segment of the market very uh intensively i don't know i like i kind of wonder because i feel like this the this is like the contractor side of the market right and i feel like like those people do a lot of volume

And maybe, like, I don't know. I'd be curious to find out. Like I said, I don't really look at this. This is, I think of this as like a garage fridge, right? So we're getting to that. This thing is absolutely, this is literally labeled as a garage ready fridge, which I think might have some implications on the thermodynamics of it. And looking at user reviews, absolutely the majority of people I think I saw were using it as a garage fridge.

Guys, let's put the beer. That's right. But man, having a garage and hang out in your garage and drinking a beer in your garage sounds pretty good. Uh, anyway, most of the guys I know that do that in my neighborhood don't seem particularly happy though. So maybe, you know, uh, maybe not something to aspire to. Um, I went through a lot of user reviews on Lowe's and Home Depot and Best Buy places that had them.

And on LG sites, like the phenomenon. I love that. The phenomenon of user reviews on the site made by the company that makes the product is weird. They're all five stars. Is that it? Oh, really? I guess if you I guess if you like a fridge enough to go to the manufacturer's website and leave a review, you either really love it or really hate it. Yeah, I don't know. I guess they're legitimate, but like I can't remember which one of those retailers it was. It might have been Home Depot.

Yeah. A lot of the reviews were marked as like influencer reviews or part of some like pilot. I can't remember how they phrased it. It was part of some like pilot promotional influencer type program or something. I mean, to their credit, I think all three of those sites. did mark legitimate purchases, verified purchases, so you could filter by and you could see who had actually just paid for the thing and reviewed it.

Who's doing influencer reviews of garage fridges? I can't remember. I can't remember exactly what the wording was on that, but it was it was enough to make me think those reviews were maybe, you know, it's kind of like the kind of like the Amazon reviews or even the steam. Yeah. Steam user reviews that are marked like received as promotional product or whatever. Yeah. Amazon has been seeding reviews with some.

like prime reviewers for years and years now yeah and one of those one of those retailers had the same user reviews from the lg site mixed in and at least again yeah they were labeled as from the manufacturer's site but i thought that was another weird way to muddy up look

Look, man, the home warehouse business is wild. Really? That's the impression I was getting. Anyway, we'll wrap this up. But yeah, so that LG we got is labeled as garage ready, which I got the sense. means it's rated to perform in higher ambient temperature uh it could be it could be that it works in a wider range of temperatures yeah it could be that it's noisier it could be that it does that it doesn't work well in a cabinet in a closed space

I think it's probably just marketing, though, that they're saying, hey, this is a fridge you can put in your garage because it's cheap. Well, part of that description said it's rated to work in ambient temperature up to 100 Fahrenheit. I think that's probably normal for some of the reviews, some of the user reviews, maybe discreet that part a little bit, but it's been a hundred degrees in my house when we've had a bad heat wave before. Yeah. And then.

Last thing, this is, I'm sure old hat for anybody who's ever bought a fridge. I was surprised that it takes, they said it takes 24 hours for it to be fully cold. Yeah. Because I have a thermometer in there and like literally this thing seems very powerful after like two hours.

The freezer was reading minus 10. Well, yeah, but they, but there's nothing in there. The other stuff has to cool down. Right. Yeah. So is that, I was wondering, is that, is that that the, like the actual like structure of the fridge has to get cold as well? I think you're probably the first person who's ever read those instructions, Brad. Well, the delivery guys also stressed on the way out the door. They're like, hey, 24 hours before it'll be all the way cold.

oh there you go there's mass it has mass right like it's not that i'm worried about it i'm just curious what the physics of that are like i just like knowing how things work and why they are the way they are i wondered i wondered if that meant that like parts of the actual structure of the fridge had to reach equilibrium Is your thermometer metal? It is metal. Yeah, so the inside of the fridge is plastic, right?

Yes. So metal conducts heat. So the air to metal interface is going to be way better than the air to plastic interface, is my guess. Of course. Okay. Yeah. Good to know. All right. But you need a steel refrigerator so that it cools down real fast. And if you lick it, you'll stick to it. Okay. Anyway. Yeah. I'm excited to have a refrigerator again. Eating out for every meal actually is not all it's cracked up to be.

No, it sucks. Yeah, it's bad for you. Oh, I bet you ate out a lot at Super Nintendo World. So, yeah, we went to Universal Universal Hollywood, which is. Like a small theme park on the side of the North Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles. We were down in Los Angeles for something else and had an extra day. And we were like, hey, I want to see Super Nintendo World, which is the new addition to Universal's host of.

theme parks I guess like there's a that's the place where they have the Harry Potter world they have some Simpsons stuff they have Jurassic Park rides they have it's where Back to the Future used to be before they got rid of that rip

And the famous, the water world, famously, the water world show is there with the jet skis and the fire. Yeah, I still haven't been. Nobody, nobody else in my family has any interest in going to see the water world show. So I get hosed out of going every time. Did I hear. I should look this up. After we did Waterworld for the Next Lander Watchcast last fall, I will always remember it because it was the night of the election. Oh God, that's grim. Which, anyway.

I thought I might have read after we did that watchcast and I was Googling around that that Waterworld attraction is like insanely popular. It fills up every time. Yeah. Yeah. You have to get in line for it. For all of the iffy reputation of the movie that that attraction is like actually one of their most successful things.

All I know is every time I've been there, occasionally you see a big flare go up, which I assume is the smokers seeing the swimmer. Are they doing smokers and makeup and everything? I assume that they have Dennis Hopper's animated corpse there, man. But yeah, they jumped, they jumped jet skis through rings of fire in a giant tank, Brad. Why would I not want to see that? I might have to put that on my list anyway. If you want to go sometime, let me know. I'll totally go down with you. So.

So we're tripping the Ionic. I'm going to see if that thing goes on. Okay. Anyway. Okay. So hold on. Side note. We drove. This is the first time we've done a long, like more than one charge drive with the Ionic. Oh, I thought you had done LA trips. I haven't been to LA since we got that car. Really? No. I've been out to the Valley a few times. We went to Tahoe. But we left full, charged at Harris Ranch, which is basically the halfway point.

and we got all the way to santa clarita and had enough charge to get there with like 10 to the hotel with 10 left okay now and then i had to pee so we stopped at walmart and charged and peed for like five minutes but that was it Was that getting white knuckle on the charge when you're approaching 10%? That's a calculation of are we going to really screw ourselves if we try to push this? 10% is 30 miles. So I called the hotel to make sure they had chargers.

Because if they didn't have like L2 chargers there, I would have stopped and put more juice in it. So I didn't just didn't have to fool with it the next day. But yeah, no, it was good. How long did you have to charge at Harris Ranch? We charged for 25 minutes, I think. We had stopped and picked up some food. The kiddo went and sat and ate a picnic bench. I went to the barbecue place across the street, grabbed a barbecue sandwich, ate half of that, and we were ready to go. All right. Yeah.

It was OK. It was good. OK, so Universal Studios. It's also worth mentioning they have the studio tour there, which is where you get on the studio tour bus. Like you're going to drive around the back lots and they drive around the back lots a little bit. And then it turns out to be a fucking awesome ride. I like the thing from the wizard. I don't know. I've never seen the wizard.

You're probably good. Actually. Okay. We did that for the watch cast as well. And man, talk about movies that don't hold up. Is that the Fred Savage Nintendo one? Yes. That's the Fred Savage road trip across the country to the Nintendo world championship movie. Oh man. It's bad. That sucks. But yeah, so you ride the cart and you like you you see young Peter Jackson talking about King Kong and also anyway, it's good. It's a it's a it's a good ride. So Super Nintendo World, you walk into.

It's down in the lower lot, down near the sound stages, and you kind of walk around a corner and you see a tunnel, a pipe, and like Mario Brothers Hills. And you walk through the pipe and there's a bunch of lights and stuff. And then later in the day when it's really hot and people are looking for shade, there's a bunch of people sitting around the edges of it kind of just enjoying shade and stale air in there with everybody else.

And then you turn a corner and there's like Nintendo 60, Mario 64 pictures that like you could. I mean, they look like you can jump into when you try to jump into them. It doesn't work. um but they change and they like to have the pictures of the like the bomb uh big bomb on the hill and all this other stuff and then you turn another corner and it's like you're in super you're in a super mario brothers game

Like how thoroughly, like how, how extensive are the decorations? You can't see any, like you can. There's a couple of places when you're in there that you can see like a couple of high-rise skyscrapers poking out. Okay. But the rest of it, you can't see anything. So you see like a hill. That looks like a vertical Super Mario Brothers three level with like piranha plants and cactus guys and Koopas and all like there's keys all over the place. Like the the I guess those are.

super mario brothers three keys i guess the circle with the key in it circle with the key in it yeah it's like a pickup you get sometimes you usually have to collect multiples to do something i was thinking about the mario 2 keys it's not the mario 2 key no no

No Mario 2 representation at all here. Yeah, I know. I didn't see any Shy Guys. That game does not get its due. Birdo Erasure will not stand. Is it possible to color asphalt? I don't know if that's what they're... putting down there but it seems like you can paint it but this is like a treated floor surface it looks like it looks like bricks and stuff oh so they do make it yeah yeah oh yeah like it's it is

It is incredibly well done. There's much like the shade things are mushrooms, like toadstool mushrooms. There's mini games throughout. So I guess we have to start out.

by saying the first thing they do when you when you're going to nintendo world they don't really hit you over the head with it but if you do your homework you're like you should get amiibo wristbands how is that is that optional you don't have to get them but but they're 50 45 bucks a pop pop i think and they're slap bracelets with amiibos in them and you can get them in uh mario there's two mario flavors there's a red mario and then a gold mario there's a daisy a peach and a yoshi maybe a luigi

But no Waluigi, no like Daisy is the farthest off character you get access to. This is just a Mario ass theme park. It sounds like I mean, it's called Super Nintendo World, right? Not Super Mario World. So in other parks in. Universal Japan and Universal Florida, they Orlando, I guess they have a Donkey Kong Bonanza right now, too. So there may not be Bonanza, but they have a Donkey Kong ride like a like a Zelda version of this would be very appealing to me.

I want a Zelda version. I want a Luigi's Mansion, right? Real bad. I think that would be rad. But anyway, so Amiibo wristbands. So Amiibo wristbands, there's blocks and question blocks. There's like brick blocks and question blocks all over the place. You can punch them. Wow. When you punch them, if you assume you use your amiibo hand, it registers your punch and it tracks every punch that you do in the park because you scan a QR code in the back of the amiibo wristband with your phone.

and then it hooks you up to a leaderboard right so you can you can kind of like there's there's multiple aspects um there's a scavenger hunt where you have to click all the tap all the blocks there's like things you can bump it up against and and that will like light up uh an 8-bit mario or peach or bowser or whatever in the world around you and we assume this is just nfc

standard just standard s you can tap it on your switch when you get home and it shows up as a mario mario uh amiibo oh it actually works as an amiibo in the ecosystem regular ass amiibo But not a special one. It's not classed as its own like Super Nintendo World one. It's just rings up as one of the retail ones. They are they work the other place that Mario Amiibos work. I don't there. I think I think technically they're in a special group in the thing like they don't.

I haven't I don't think I've played a Mario game since then, but I'll tap it and see. Yeah, not a huge deal. I mean, I was thinking what I was the reason I was asking if they are classed as their own specific amiibo is they could block specific. unique rewards up behind them in games and stuff? I would hope so. For 47 bucks, I would like some special rewards. Well, but also, I mean, I won't get into it here, but I've looked a little bit into the world of spoofing Amiibos.

oh i've done the hell out of it when we were deep in animal crossing i bought a bunch of those discs i haven't bought an amiibo in five years yes it is it is wildly doable if there's an app called ally on your phone that you put it into dark mode or something and then And then you can just download a spreadsheet full of Amiibo codes. And look, I'm just saying getting those Zelda costumes and Tears of the Kingdom was pretty easy anyway. OK, so there's a scavenger hunt aspect.

There's also a series of mini games throughout the park. So the mini games are like they're themed for different ages, mostly accessible to pretty young kids. And like some of them are like run around and punch some alarm clocks when the lights turn green, turn red. Right. And when you can successfully complete a mini game challenge, then you get a gold key that if you tap your wristband, it also shows up in the app.

When you collect multiples, three of those gold keys, you unlock a Bowser Jr. fight, which was... Fucking rad. So you go into this room where there's no line because nobody knows that they should be doing this and hardly anybody's actually doing this because it didn't look like very many people bought the wristbands. But you stand in front of a big screen with like five or six other people.

and you see your silhouette on that screen and it's like a fiery kind of background like a like a bowser fight in a in a modern mario game background and it gives you countdown three two one go and it tells you what to do And you punch Bob bombs and Koopa shells as they come down. You have to duck under bullet bills that cross the screen at different times. You have to punch power ups and.

It looks like your silhouette is a shadow from the projection behind you. But then when you when you hit a mushroom, the silhouette gets big. And when you jump, your guy jumps way, way, way up in the air, like 10, 15 feet up in the air. It's like five minutes. It's really stupid. It was really good. It made me wish that there was more stuff like that tied to the amiibo wristbands.

I bet I bet the people who build modern theme park attractions like this have some of the most fun doing their jobs of anybody on the planet. I think it's got to be a fun job. Yeah, because like just the Nexus, the Nexus of like user experience and modern technology. And creativity and the whole thing, you know, it's just like you can, there's so many ideas and probably near unlimited budget or, you know, like pretty, pretty hefty budget. Like you can.

The range of like crazy ideas you can have and then just execute in that space must be really fun. Well, I mean, and like this was gamier than most of these that I've seen have been right, which like I want to say in the in the wizarding world of Harry Potter.

there's they have like stations as you're walking around the shops area where you can buy a wand for 80 or 100 bucks i'm sure and you wave it in front of some cameras and then it makes some prop that's in a in a shop window do something like lift up off the ground or shake or something and this stuff felt

more impactful for this a because everybody can engage with like all the kids were up there punching blocks where they had wristbands or not because punching the blocks makes a good sound and it like lit up and it was fun right oh wait so you could get in there without a wristband or In fact, I was going to ask earlier how they gate access to this thing if you have to. It's just you walk in. It's just a normal part of the park. There's no gate.

I think they do a first hour. You have to have a reservation. Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe that's the way the notes were worded. I thought you had to do something with the wristbands to unlock access to this thing. That's not the case. The Bowser Jr. thing you can only do if you've completed. the scavenger hunt okay that's what i was asking the rest of super nintendo world you can just walk into yeah yeah yeah

Well, that's what I meant, though. How do they limit access to Bowser Jr. with the wrist? Do you have to swipe the wristband to open the door or something? So, yeah, you walk up and hit a wristband on a thing and it's like turns one color if you're approved and another if you're not. Got it.

Only one person in your party had to be approved. So if you're going with your kid and you don't want to spend $300 on wristbands, you can just get one and make one kid do all the work and then everybody can benefit. They had some other stuff like oddly. The other the other Nintendo brand that was represented here that wasn't Mario was Pikmin. Weird. There were little Pikmin all through the park, like kind of hidden all over the place. And like some of the.

Some of the scavenger hunt things were like, look at Pikmin. You know, the binoculars, the big green binoculars from like the 3D Mario games, they had those up on a kind of out of the way edge of the park that you didn't go to if you weren't doing the scavenger hunt stuff. And it had a digital like it was it was basically a camera with a screen and you could aim it and zoom in and out at different parts of the park and see like.

pikmin hiding up on the top of the far side of the thing where you'd never be able to see it otherwise um it was it was it was weird and like oddly half-assed like it felt like there should be more stuff there i like I saw I simultaneously really enjoyed the Bowser Jr. thing. I thought the scavenger hunt was kind of OK, but but like the right amount of tedious like you had to do. You only had to get three of the keys, which was like.

you kind of could do incidentally if you were just whacking blocks when you walked by them. I wish that there was more stuff like the Bowser thing because it felt like that was really fun. It was really clever. It felt like a game which feels appropriate. for Super Nintendo World. And overall, it's pretty good. The other thing I want to say is in the Star Wars land at Disney, they have the same kind of stuff, right? So there's areas that you can interact with as a guest.

uh that like sometimes make things make things happen like kylo ren's spaceship will shoot smoke if you've done enough things for the for the for the empire or for the resistance when you're when you're like going through that park and it that The way that works is you have an app on your phone and you interact with the app directly. And if you do that enough, eventually like cast members will come in and pull you into things sometimes or like.

You'll be able to do interactions with the big props. You'll be able to open a door that normally doesn't open and go see something secret and stuff like that. But the downside of that is that if you're there with the kids who are too young to have a. Everybody's walking around with their fucking phone out the whole time, which sucks. Yeah. B, if you're there with kids that are too young to have phones.

You end up in the, hey, dad, can I use your phone? Or, hey, mom, can I use your phone? So then you're paying hundreds of dollars to go to Disneyland and be outside and spend fun family time together so that all of your kids can be glued to their phone doing the bullshit. Or worse. you're a parent and you want to do the bullshit and then you're on your phone neglecting the you know the fun family like it's just having your phone like i i actually

I initially my initial reaction on, hey, we have to spend 50 bucks on these stupid fucking wristbands was bad. And then once I realized that I was walking around Super Nintendo land and nobody had their phones out, I was like, oh, this is actually pretty good. Yeah, I was going to say like that. Probably the one upside of the Disney strategy is it's maybe not free, but at least cheaper to use a phone app instead of this wristband.

Yeah, so the phone app's free. Oh, it is free. Yeah, like it's just a subset of the Disney park. So if you go to a modern park, you have to have you download the app because it has the maps and the wait times and all that stuff on it. Right, right. You also, depending on.

which park you're at i think the disney fast pass stuff all works through the app now too okay so you like you you can say hey i want a fast pass for haunted mansion if you're not a haunted mansion and then it tells you what time to show up and you skip the line yeah i mean 45 per person for even a modest size family is not nothing like that's a pretty substantial cost but also once you're at a modern theme park I guess and for a penny and for a pound at that point anyway

They're going to turn you upside down and shake the money out of you. But that sounds like a massively better, like I have started developing some derision for the amount of noses buried in phones in modern society. Yeah, days. And so like an experience that explicitly keeps people off their phones and doing a thing and looking at a thing seems pretty good. It was it was nice. And some of the mini games were really fun. Like one of them, you had to control a Koopa shell like you had to punch.

punch a koopa shell that was going back and forth across just stuck bouncing for eternity and if you punched it the right time it would go up and hit a power block and then some stuff would happen and that was that was kind of fun um

Like, overall, styling was really good. There's also a ride, obviously. The Mario Kart ride is there. Bowser's Fury or Bowser's Revenge or something. I can't remember what it's actually called. But it's a combo kart. You ride a cart with three other people, and then you also put on this AR headset. They give you a halo kind of headband that you put on, like the PSVR ones.

And then when you sit down in the cart, there's a wired in pair of goggles that just snap, snap onto that, that headband that you're wearing. And you tap your Amiibo onto the steering wheel to let the car know that you're you. And then there's a game kind of like the Buzz Lightyear adventure at Disneyland, the old one that you drive around and shoot stuff. But it's all the cart. The car ride is riding around in this really lovely stylized area.

And then the game is shooting Koopalings that shoot in front of you with shells, collecting shells and shooting Koopalings and shooting extra stuff in the environment. So it's all PVE. It's all PVE. One person can control the steering or maybe multiple people control. It seems like one person controlled the steering in the carts that we were in. The big issue I have with this ride in general is that.

You didn't need the ride for the game to work. And the way the AR headset is set up, it's really, really bright. So you're not really like you're seeing overlays on the world that are three dimensional and tracked, but not. like the brightness of the world versus the brightness of the things that are being projected on the ar screen is such that you can't really see the world which is a bummer because the world design is awesome

Like how, how, how, um, it's the word I'm looking for. Like how pervasive are the images? They are images. Like, is it like a, like a ton of your view is constantly obscured. It's not a ton of your view, but it's like, it's not rendering landscape or any of this. It's just, it's just the Koopalings. Okay. Yes. So, and it does, it's funny cause it does a, it does an interesting thing at the start where like the tutorial section is 2d, like 16 bit era couplings.

And then once you transition out of there, it becomes the modern Mario Kart 8 boobling 3D renders. That's neat. But the fundamental problem is that the game is so pervasive that you don't focus on the... you it's hard to focus on the ride sure um i think the ride maybe is a little underwhelming actually is probably why it's like that but um and so you shoot the coupings by aiming with your head so you aim with your head you have two trigger buttons on your steering wheel

and you shoot shells whatever power up you have by by aiming and shooting sure and then they give you your car a score at the end and let you know how you stacked up against the people in the other lane as well as everybody else who rode that week

which is weird. I don't know how they're tracking this. That's the, that's the other interesting thing is it seemed to be motion tracked. I don't know if they're keeping everybody in sync with everybody else, but like the Koopalings rode down the track. when they were riding away from you they didn't just fly off into space or whatever so like they're they're doing some aspect of 60 of tracking with it um and it felt pretty

Pretty good. I mean, AR is a little more forgiving than VR in terms of motion sickness and stuff, but none of the people we're with who sometimes have motion sickness issues have any problems. All right. I assume this park is so Mario-centric to synergize with the success of the movie. Or to put it another way, I would guess maybe any planned Zelda attractions might be something they're saving for that movie to come out and be huge.

I don't think they've announced any Zelda movies. None of this was movie. I'm sorry. Zelda rides. Oh, rides. Yeah. None of this is Zelda. None of this was movie focused. Well, yeah, but what I just mean that Mario is like, I mean, Mario is always bigger than anything else Nintendo has. But like Mario is extra, extra huge in the wake of that movie. I mean, I guess I guess that's why they did the Donkey Kong thing next. Probably. Maybe it's it's weird because like so.

like the queues one of the things that universal does really well is their queue styling is really good so when you're waiting in line there's a ton of interesting stuff to look at and it like the queue is walking through bowser's castle okay so you like there's a huge picture of bowser there's like But it's all Mario Kart 8 styling.

Like the track, like the circuits are all, there's badges for the circuits on the walls everywhere. They're all the Mario Kart 8 ones. The trophies are all the Mario Kart 8 ones. So you're saying they have old Donkey Kong? I'm saying they have old Donkey Kong, classic DK.

They have obsolete Donkey Kong. I don't know if Donkey Kong actually shows up in there. They have bananas, but I don't know if I saw Donkey Kong in this way. Donkey Kong's in Florida, not in. He's a Florida man. Welcome. Welcome to your Florida Kong. I mean, I'm not wrong. I think you're probably exactly right. Yeah. So, so yeah, it's like, it's really. I love walking through the queues. The lines weren't too bad. It was like a 50 minute wait. Most of the time we were there.

And then they do like a whole tutorial video where they show you how to put on the helmet and how to play the game. They show you how to play the game like three times, which I thought was interesting. And yeah, that's pretty much.

That's pretty much it. We had lunch at the Toadstool Cafe, which I'd been recommended to get a reservation for. It was Park. Pretty good. I would say good to very good for park food. I'm looking for a menu. Yeah, they we had I had a Mario burger. Everything has mushrooms on it. Oh, wow. Because it's a mushroom kingdom.

I love mushrooms, but some people certainly do not. Well, so most of our party does not like mushrooms. One of the things that I think they did a kind of crap job on is all of the food that you order in a sit down place at Universal, you can get them to customize because they make it all to order.

So it's not like typical theme parks where there's 50 million corn dogs back there and you just get the corn dog that they make for everybody. So we got all of our stuff without mushrooms and like the fries came without truffle oil and all that stuff. But they don't really make that clear until you're talking to a person ordering food, which which like was a source of stress. I finally found the menu. Yeah. Yoshi's Fettuccine Alfredo. Yeah.

It was a real plate of pasta. I saw somebody get that at the table next to us. Somebody got this enormous Bowser's Bowser's dynamite meatball. I think Bowser's fireball challenge. There you go. It was the biggest meatball I've ever seen, Brad. It's a one pound meatball topped with mozzarella cheese served with mushroom marinara sauce. It looked like the size of my head. Bowser puff pastry.

We didn't get those, but they look pretty good. They have both a Mario burger and a Luigi burger. The Luigi burger is chicken, which I feel like is, I feel like Luigi will not stand for this slight. Do we not remember the year of Luigi, people? That's all I'm saying. We got peach cupcakes. If I had known that the peach cupcakes were as big as they were, we could have split one of them for the three of us. But we took one home.

There's something funny about reading peach cupcake, raspberry filled cupcake. It's like it's a peach cupcake filled with raspberry. I mean, look, there's a I know it's her name and not a fruit. Peach contains multitudes. she she loves both peach but her favorite color is pink so everything in there was pink and uh yeah i will say the food there was better than the crusty burger which is where we ate dinner that night so yeah

That's a lot of themed food for one day. It was a lot of themed food, Brad. So, yeah, Mario Kart. OK. mario super nintendo world awesome all right maybe figure out how to do a bootleg band rather than pay the 57 bucks if you're uh i don't know how you would register your bootleg amiibo band to their app is the thing and without the app i think it would be

A little bit less fun. Hmm. Yeah. Interesting. All right. Yeah. I found, I found a picture. I finally found a picture of these wristbands. Those look awesome. They're very cool. To be fair, to be fair, those look really cool, actually. Like. a slap bracelets still awesome after all these years b i got the gold mario one so i turned it upside down so it looked like a wario one i thought that was pretty good yeah uh c pretty uncomfortable over the length of the day i'm gonna say

They're quite big. Well, but also the bend on the slap bracelet is not such that it is sized for an adult wrist. Okay. I wish they had more character representation in the wristband choices. Sure. All right. Yeah, so Super Nintendo World. I would go back. I don't know if I'm going to go to a Florida one, but maybe I'll go to the one in Japan. That looks cool. Yeah. And yeah, give me a Luigi's Mansion game. That's all I want. It's never going to happen, is it?

game or attraction attraction i'm gonna say no to both i mean look there's a there's a luigi's mansion arcade game that's pretty dope oh okay i mean you ever seen that no i have not i mean they just did three not that many years ago but yeah Those make money. The arcade game has a big giant ghost. I can't remember the name of the vacuum cleaner, but it's the ghost vacuum. Okay. And you get to hold it in the booth.

Succotron 5000? I don't remember. Yeah, it's Gus. Isn't it Gus something? Oh, yes. Now I need to know before we end this podcast. I'm going to look that up. This is why we do this podcast because I was getting ready to go look through. Poltergust 3000. Poltergust. That's a good name. It's pretty good. That deserves a ride, man. That's all I'm saying. Sure. That'll do it for us this week. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Brad, I'm glad you had a voyage of discovery.

Personal growth. Yeah. We are, let's see, about six hours out from the 24-hour mark. Going to go grocery shopping? I think we should probably go buy some groceries. It seems nice. Yeah, it seems like we can get some ham. Need to do a Costco run, though.

I mean, rent a car, head down to Costco. As always, Brad Well-Mated TechPod is a listener-supported show. That means we would not be here without you, the listeners. We appreciate each and every one of you. If you would like to find out. how to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash tech pod. Again, that's patreon.com slash tech pod, where for five bucks a month, you get access to the fabulous tech pod discord, which is full of nerds who.

We'll talk about all sorts of interesting things. I had a conversation in there the other day and I'm completely blanking on what it was right now, but it was incredibly helpful. Damn. What was it? Was it when my monitor died? No, maybe. What were we talking about? It was in the PC hardware channel. From colon Will. Actually, what is your username? It's not Will. I'm just Will. My username on Discord is Will. It was a bad choice. Oh, that's not coming up. I said Shirley.

Surely I'm not going to be able to get just will as a, as a, as a username. I can't get it to come up and search. Discord search is. I mean, bad. Discord search is bad. I couldn't get it either. Anyway. You get access to the discord. You get the monthly patron exclusive episode where we talk about projects that are going on and things that we find interesting, but not so interesting. We're going to do a full episode about and other stuff.

just things and stuff. Sometimes we have an interview with people. We might, we might do some more interviews there. Cause I liked doing those interviews and it was fun. Yeah. But that'll do it for us this month. Thanks everybody for listening. Oh, wait. Executive producer to your patrons. We especially appreciate our executive producer to your patrons. We do. Including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippet, Bunny Fiend, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon.

makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you also so much. Yes, thank you. And that'll do it for us this month. We will be back this week. Feels like it's been a month already. It's already mid-August. What's happening, man? We've been over this. Yeah. Yeah. Time is fungible. I understand. You know what's happening. Your fudge hog is just getting older every day. It's getting gray back there. Man. Fudge hog is eternal. Okay. Fudge hog. Fudge hog will never.

Look, we need a fudge hog land is what we need. Where's the pinata land? You don't even say that. Can you imagine? I, Brad, I did get my picture taken with Toad. Okay. I didn't wait in the Mario and Luigi line because it was too long. Toad deserves love too. Toad was super stoked. I got my picture with Toad and a fake Krusty the Clown. Toad picks things up the fastest. Arguably the best character. Fastest jump too.

In the bad Mario game, Toad is the best. But yeah, we'll be back next week with another edition of the TechPod. Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for listening. I can't say everybody today, Brad. I'm not cutting any of this out. God damn it. No, you got to cut this out. Try again. Thanks for listening, everyone. And we will be back next week with another edition of the TechPod. As always, please consider the environment for printing this podcast.