OSPod Episode 135: Leaders, Boethius, and Now Introducing Wobethius!

I'm picturing Boethius running his own early morning DJ radio show from his cell. With a soundboard and everything. Yeah. That's awful. That's Boethius' like Wario. Real Boethius is chilling and then in the next sellover is this goblin. Boethius and Wobethius. Wobethius, yeah!

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Overly Sarcastic Podcast. I am Blue, and I'm joined by Red. It's cold brew ice cubes and 2% milk again today. Oh, okay. Gotta lock in. I took a risk because this was like flavored coffee. It's like vanilla hazelnut. And when you make whole brew with flavored coffee, it comes out 10 times stronger. But it's pretty good. It makes it cut through the code pretty nicely. I'm waiting for you to...

inadvertently like fix a bottle of ice water to take with you on like a gym run or something and then you get partway through and it's like these are the coffee ice cubes oh fuck i'm benching faster than i ever thought possible it's bold of you doing assume that i go to a gym but yes um anyway uh yeah so

What do we normally do? God, we're all like, it's so funny. We're at the tail end of the year. We're through most of our really big projects. I'm wrapping up a comic chapter right now, so I know why I'm absolutely fried right now. I don't know why you guys are fried. I'm doing the thing where, like, when we're working on a video, it's mostly a case of, like, head down, finish the task, like, power through it. And then when you come up for air, it's like, okay, cool, great. Yeah.

Oh, fuck. I have a bunch of like random logistical things I need to figure out. So it's like I did all the email. Actually, I didn't do the emails. That's the one thing I didn't do. I wrote our Patreon end of year update, which by this point has already gone out yesterday. If you're a patron, I.

did all the wallpaper packs that I didn't do the last two months because we were too busy on videos and if it was you had a break I didn't have a break and if I had a break and you didn't I wasn't about to bug you for wallpaper frames that day So it's been all of the random odds and ends that have been just kind of fraying at the edges of my neat, pristine organizational structure. Yeah, yeah.

It's funny every time I come out of like a like a work fugue state where I've been working on a project for like weeks and weeks and weeks when I finally finish it, it's actually like i usually do a chores day afterwards because it's strangely satisfying to be able to start and end a task in the space of less than like three weeks um yeah exactly yeah uh

Speaking of finishing big projects, we've had some videos on the channel, two of the last, but not the last one that comes out on Friday. Yes, stay tuned. Red, why don't you start us off by finishing the five-man band with The Leader. Yes. i finally did it i i i said it couldn't be done and then i was wrong uh but i still win

Yeah, I mean, you know, I've talked about the five-man band at length. There's a video about the band as a whole. Then I sort of started zooming in. So there's, you know, there's videos about the Lancer. There's a video about the Heart. I did Powerhouse instead of Big... guy because i thought it was a little bit more on the nose for like what role that teammate actually plays uh and then of course there's smart guy which was always pretty fun and then leader was like

Okay, but what is this guy's deal, actually? Because they seem very, like, Tabula Rasa-esque when it's just like, okay, this person is in charge, but, like, why? And there are so many shows I've watched, especially when I was researching Color Coded Team with a Theme, there were a lot of cases where it's like, why is this person? in charge and it's like well you see they're most prominent on the box art and that is why um

And, you know, like, there's a difference between being a leader and being a main character and being a hero and being a protagonist. You know, all of these things are different. But it is often you hit the bullseye at the center of that Venn diagram and it's like, this is the main guy. And then everyone else is kind of an accessory on the main guy, and that's what we're doing here. So trying to lock in, like, what actually defines a leader?

as a character archetype was very difficult until I ended up just kind of circling back to the tautological definition of like, oh, well, you see, the leader is in charge because everyone follows them. Well, I mean, you joke, but I think it actually really works because the whole thing with the idea of the team is that the leader is the only person who is not defined by a particular.

traits they have intrinsic to like their characterization and thus it is the leader is the leader of a team they are any other person and then when you put them in a team and they're the leader that that's it so i That is why it's so hard. You're not just cheating. That is actually the whole thing. There's a quote from the first episode of Leverage that really locks in.

basically the person who is the leader of that team says, you all know what you can do, but I know what you can do together. And that is basically like, what do you contribute? Oh, okay. I contribute that I can see you guys as pieces on a board and I know how to move you around most.

efficiently, which is, you know... legitimately useful i mean he's he's like a mastermind smart guy type leader so like his whole thing is like yes i have a chessboard and you better believe i'm real smug about it but like um you know there's there's a bunch of other kinds uh thank goodness transformers one came out this year so i could just like point it off to me

prime and be like that that that guy is what i'm talking about today um because he's an interesting case because like i used you as a visual example in the video although i didn't like mention it but like that that movie has two good leaders in it but unfortunately they are on opposite sides by the end unfortunately there are two good leaders in that movie yes uh and one really bad one one really bad one oh man yeah fucking sentinel prime

What not to do. The real goofus in this situation. But it definitely leads to a pretty helpful breakdown of like, okay, both of these guys have... you know what we would consider leadership qualities but like that if anything that was kind of a i guess like a pet peeve that i was dancing around in the video like i don't

Leadership qualities? I'm sorry, are we making a LinkedIn profile? What are you fucking talking about? People are like, well, you see a leader is defined by leadership qualities. Like, show me. Show me. Are the qualities in the room? Are they in this boardroom? Because they're always like...

Oh, confident, charismatic. It's like charismatic just means people like you. Charismatic is not necessarily an innate trait. And confidence, I've seen a lot of confident people absolutely crumble, okay? Like confident does not- mean people will follow um and it's just it's so it's so vague right i think because leadership is one of those qualities like being cool, where people really want to be able to choose for themselves that they have it, but in actuality...

Claiming that they have it is one of the least having it things they could be doing in high school check. Yeah Let's be so fucking for real. Do you know how many long coats I had in high school how many long coats I have now But the point is like... You know, any man who must say I am really cool as fuck is no cool guy. I mean, Seto Kaiba is pretty cool. Does Seto Kaiba say he's cool? He's got a whole song about it in that one movie.

Listen to you're not me this morning. You're not me. It doesn't like it's implied. It's implied. Yeah, the coolest is implied. That's what makes him cool. He doesn't say that's right. Yugi. I am tight as fuck actually Come on guys fan dubs yeah that may be his abridged characterization but anyway rushing resume yeah well the point is like you know it is kind of a tough nut to crack to figure out like what makes this character qualified to be a leader

And I think in a lot of these shows, that question just kind of doesn't really come up. They'll usually sort of... They'll do proof by contradiction. They'll have the Lancer get their wish in one episode and be like, this is why I should have been chosen. And then it's like, tough luck, guy. The leader's out of commission this week, and now we're all looking to you like you know what we're doing.

I haven't used it as an example in a while because it's been a while since I rewatched it, but one of those shows that's a real goldmine for exactly what it says on the tin trope executions is like the 2011 Thundercats reboot they did where they hit-

Every single checkbox almost for a bit. And there is an episode where Lion-O is dead temporarily and Tiger gets to be like in charge and he fucking hates it. It's like herding cats. He's not good at it. They're all in jail by the end. Like herding cats? Yeah, yeah. show i'm so i'm so smart and clever uh and then by the end like when lionel comes back he's like oh thank god and then he's just not butthurt about which of them is the favorite son anymore yeah um but

You know, like, when you do that, it's like, well, okay, we've established that the Lancer shouldn't be in charge, but that doesn't really explain why the leader is qualified to be in charge. And because it's kind of a tough question to answer because it's so specific to each character.

um and you know everyone likes bringing it back to last airbender because i so often bring things back to last airbender but like the reason it's not very prominent in this video is team after doesn't really have a leader it kind of shifts around like in season one it's like everyone is following Aang on his quest, and that stays

consistently true. But Aang's not leading, he's just like, I think we should probably, like, this is what we would be told to do if anyone who was supposed to guide me was still alive. So it's like, okay, so we'll do this and then that. And then, I guess in season two, they're sort of following Sokka's lead.

but Sokka doesn't like being in charge, and every time they're like, do you have a plan for us? He's like, why is everyone expecting me to have plans? Yes, I have a plan, but that's not relevant. And then... season three like Zuko finally joins the party things balance out and then he's sort of in charge but not really because he's very much three episodes before the finale right so and then like it's like oh Aang is later Aang's gone for like three quarters of the finale because he got

sent on a turtle's field trip and then he went to fight Ozai himself so like yeah So it doesn't really fit. It doesn't fit the structure. And it's like, any one of these characters could have had Leader stamped on their forehead, but they didn't. Which kind of helps, you know...

impart the point that these are all kids who should not have to be shouldering the responsibility of single-handedly saving the world, which is why none of them is the boss. But I don't know. It was interesting. I'm glad I managed to come up with a thesis that I felt...

sort of made sense that seemed to land decently well with the audience. Yeah, I'm glad you had the perfect show example to pull from in illustrating the variety of ways a leader can lead in Fullmetal Alchemist. The whole back half just being... the full by lock was brotherhood power hour wasn't what i was expecting when i started it out but i think it was one of those like

scripting things that started off as a voice memo while I was driving where I was like okay like I just wanted to get this out of my head but I was sort of thinking about all the different leader archetypes that are in Fulman Alchemist is like this one and that one and I kept thinking of more of them I was like wait shit yeah father's a really bad leader there's that whole thing about

Well, Greed's not great, but he's trying for some reason, and then all the good guys are in military chain of commands except for our protagonists. So I'm glad that worked. I hope it didn't alienate too many people who hadn't watched the show. worried about spoilers uh but hey if it got anyone to watch it front to back

Congratulations. I mean, listen, I need to go back and watch whatever trope talk it was that fully spoils the end conspiracy of Full Metal Alchemist. Cosmic Alignments. Cosmic Alignments. Okay, because I watched it and then just cleared it out of my head. Yep, yep. A spoiler is not a spoiler. the context to understand what it spoils yeah um but yeah so

That was fun. And I'm glad that it seems to have come across well. It was really fun. This was the least hard video to thumbnail almost ever, where it's like, it's just what glamour shot of Optimus Prime am I going to use? There is no better illustration. Yeah. Yeah. You can do the one with a hole in his sternum. I was considering that, but that's a whole different trope. It's too complicated, yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, so that was my second to last video of the year. You capped things off on a kind of niche note. I did cap it off on a very niche note. Since I did the... uh evangelists the the gospels like two years ago at this point i i had like a soft trilogy of history makers where it was um basically the like the history of like

early Christian literature from the evangelist writing the Gospels through St. Augustine last year to this year, Boethius, where it's like, okay, we are out of the Roman world and in the Middle Ages now. And it... The thing about Boethius is that up until like 200 years ago, this wouldn't have been niche. This was like the biggest guy in philosophy for about 500 years after his death until like...

Plato was rediscovered and brought back into Latin in like the 10, 11, 1200s. And he was still super, super popular until like the 1800s. He kind of fell out of it. And now it's like, oh, you only study him if you do like classics. And he's... like one reading out of a whole bunch of stuff you'll do for like a late antiquity kind of course but

This was like the biggest book for the longest time. Second in popularity only to the literal Latin Bible. Fascinating. But I was hemming and hawing of what topic to do. And I was like, oh, no, I.

I should do this. I told myself a long time ago I would do this one. It's like my third end of year in a row on this kind of like Christian history makers trilogy. And I'd somehow forgot about it. I'm like, oh, right. The obvious answer. Right. Okay, cool. And Boethius, of course. Yes, Boethius, of course.

And it was just... cool to look at this moment in time where like I've talked about in the the Rome after empire like what was this place like in the you know post there's no longer a Roman emperor in charge of Rome but a lot of these institutions are still there it's like well let's Look at a guy who was a senator for several years with an illustrious career in the Roman Senate, even though there was a Gothic king in charge until he got thrown in jail and stuff.

philosophically what's going on in the constellations is so, so, so cool. With the way that he blends this classical kind of Neoplatonist angle into Christianity, which one of the wacky things about that is he doesn't actually like mention Jesus by name. He only talks about like capital G God big guy like J man.

does not show up in the consolations. It's just like God the Father, that's it. So there might be some historical wackiness going on there because the Goths were the brand of Christianity that was non-Trinitarian. So they're like, God... Big Guy and Jesus are two different people. It's like that. Now we call that heresy. But at the time, it was a very popular, you know, not the dominant stream, but like a popular thought among the non-Italian, non-Roman original and whatever.

How can they both be one guy? One of them looks like a guy and the other, it just don't make no sense. So many people died over that question. Yeah, exactly. It's so easy to commit heresy these days. It's so, truly so easy. We're going to talk about Wake Up Dead Man and the After After Show. Yeah.

I could smell it, yeah. I could smell it. I do think that one thing that's interesting about it, because I had to take a philosophy class for college as part of the core curriculum, hence the Philosopher's Song, born out of my frustration of that.

I had never heard of Boethius even a little bit before this. So it's like, it's so interesting because, you know, obviously there's, you know, Plato and Socrates. I think most people at least know the names of and like, yeah, platonic dialogues maybe. And then.

All that shit where it's like, oh, fucking Hegel or whatever, you know, Kant, great, whatever. And then you jump ahead 2,000 years. Yeah, yeah. And it's like I had never even heard of Boethius. And when I read the script for it, I thought it sounded very interesting because it's like this is basically a guy speedrun. the five stages of grief with the help of sort of being able to therapize himself because he's got a lot of, you know, a lot of...

Almost all philosophy is trying to make sense of your place in the world. And staring down the barrel of your own imminent execution is a pretty thought-provoking time to be figuring that shit out. So it's interesting to just kind of see a case of this guy using the tools he had and, you know, the...

things that have been imparted to him by his faith and his philosophical background to sort of reason through like what's going on and how do I, how do I not make myself more miserable by then my circumstances already demand? Cause like.

That's a huge part of a ton of philosophies. Like, you know, a lot of things about like, how do I mitigate suffering? You know, like life existence is suffering, et cetera, et cetera. So how do I mitigate that suffering so that I'm not making my situation worse? And that can feel like a weird question in isolation.

like live through something and you're like Hey, am I making myself feel worse by like dwelling on this or like like stewing on it or like contemplating how I deserve this thing like wait There are all these things where like the calls coming from inside the house and I'm the one making this feel shittier and like

looking at this guy who is doomed and like this story ends with him dying like he's he's fine basically there's no cool escape he's just dead and it's like okay that's already that sucks that already sucks so badly And then he works through possibly one of, because that's unfortunately a relatable thing. A lot of people get to see their own death coming. You know, a lot of people get diagnoses or something like that. And then they just have to live with.

oh no i know exactly not necessarily when or where but i know the form that my destroyer will take yeah and how do i live with that how do i accept that um I've derisively referred to this as baby's first existential crisis. Well, because it is, you know, it's the first time you figure out that death is going to be a thing that happens to you someday. Emphasis on first rather than emphasis on babies. Yes.

yeah yeah i say babies because it first hit me when i was like four uh so but that's you know whatever um uh that's the i am not representative of how most people work and i have accepted this and courts of course and courts of course but i do think that uh just like seeing somebody very skilled at what he does reason through this and sort of come to a comforting conclusion in the

of what is already a terrible situation. Not just terrible, unfair. Unfair, I think, adds a lot of sting to any bad situation. It's not just bad, it's unfair. It's abundantly bullshit. Yeah, and I don't know, I just thought... It was very interesting. I might have had more fun in philosophy class if we'd had to read Boethius, but let's be real, I probably wouldn't have.

I mean, the reason I really like Boethius as a writer is because he studied the good shit and knew what was good because he had studied a lot. I mean, Aristotle, of course, but Plato mainly and then a bunch of Latin poetry. So he. had the foresight and the taste to be like, I'm going to make a dialogue and poetry, the best method of conveying philosophy and the best way to write words on a page. And I will do both of those things.

together um you know self inserts and stuff but what i mentioned in the video what struck me the most is like yes in the story lady philosophy helps him and like works through all of this stuff but like in real life boethius the guy if we If we assume that he did not actually get visited by Lady Philosophy in real life, he figured out all of this shit himself within the year that he was imprisoned and then wrote it down and then gave the credit to Lady Philosophy. So it's...

It was incredibly impressive on his part to do it and then selfless to be like, it wasn't all me. In fact, I'm going to put the words in the personified mouth of this field that I love so much. So it's something very... appropriately selfless for someone who is truly staring down the barrel of just the fucking worst outcome for him. I do think that some of that is not that weird. Just like from a writing standpoint.

I think a lot of people have an easier time figuring out stuff when they separate themselves out of the equation. It's like how people will be like, oh, you know, I had a dream or I got visited by this dead relative or I thought to myself, what would my dad say or something like that. And then this idea comes to him and it's like, yeah.

but spoiler alert that came out of your brain like that like you know while we're philosophizing the whole idea that like an ego is sort of a trap like a self-image is um

automatically more limited than a real person is so like your image of yourself cannot do all the things that you yourself can actually do and something like this is sort of a perfect indication of that where it's like you know Boethius the guy probably didn't think he had it in him so he's like wow this must have been like divine

providence you know handed down to me by the embodiment of the field i've dedicated my life to and it's like i you're a guy sitting alone in a room working through some shit and you pulled out some absolute bangers my guy like but it's hard for him to think of himself as the person who's doing that i think uh and also like didn't seem all that interested in like what what good is self-aggrandizing him gonna do at that exactly but it's um yeah

It made for, not that he was like, oh, so, so selfless, but it made for a much better art that he chose to frame it that way rather than like, I figured this out myself. Because a treatise is worse than a dialogue in almost every scenario. 10 tips on surviving your imminent execution. Number seven will shock you.

Theodoric is like, can we kill him faster? Can we please just kill him faster? He's becoming insufferable. I'm picturing, like, Boethius running his own, like, early morning DJ radio show from his cell. Oh, with a sound. onboard and everything. Yeah. That's awful. That's Boethius' like Wario. Real Boethius is chilling and then in the next sellover is this goblin. Boethius and Wobethius. Wobethius, yeah!

shock jock philosopher daytime radio oh my god he like takes in calls from people and gives them bad advice will be this is my new favorite character this is like up there with our like Machiavelli react video series idea. Was that in text or was that on the podcast? No, we were hanging out in the car and we were like, what if we did a Machiavelli react to like famous villain schemes?

We'll follow up. Machiavelli reacts and we'll be theists. Stay tuned. Ask questions about Machiavelli reacts so we can continue this bit. But for right now, we need to quickly make a plug that on next Tuesday, time of upload of this video, the 30th.

We're doing our annual New Year's Eve charity stream. I'll be going for several hours playing through some more Skyrim with some friends of the channel. And it should be a fun time. Yeah. So that'll be exciting. And I don't think we have anything else to announce. No. So... Q&A. Yay!

Hello and welcome to the Q&A portion of the Overly Sarcastic Podcast where we answer your questions from AskOSPod on Discord. As I'm doing this, I'm realizing I don't know which number of podcasts this is. Is this a multiple of five? Oh, I think it might be. It is. It is a multiple of five. So that means that we are going to be doing another thrilling installment of your favorite bit and mine, the lightning round. Bye.

We're going to be going through the list of incredibly long amounts of properties of things that exist in the world, whether that is a piece of architecture or a video game or what have you. And we're going to tell you if we've watched, read, seen it, etc. as fast as possible in the effort. getting through as many of these as possible so with that first up we have sky children of the light

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I played a whole bunch of it. It's by some of the team. Yeah, it's by Jenova Chen, the lead developer on Journey. Yeah. It's very pretty. I played through it once. It was... Fine. It feels like the first draft of Journey, which is weird considering it came after. It's got the slight problem that it seems to require infinite replayability to sort of just grind for cosmetics or whatever, but the gameplay itself is...

Pretty simple, but it's very beautiful and very soothing. Very pretty, very pretty. Yeah, yeah. The Old Guard, the movie. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I didn't see the second one, but I watched the first one, and it was real good. The Old Guard 2, the slightly newer guard. No, I haven't seen it. The movie The Bad Guys. I've been meaning to. It's on my to-do list. It's not available on any of my streaming services, so I'm going to have to watch it some other way.

But I've heard good things about it. I've basically heard that it's just furry loop on the third. So like, of course, I'm going to like fire emblems, sacred stones. one of my all-time favorite video games and probably my favorite fire emblem but i don't think anyone else on this call has played it no i don't have the patience for for those it's a game boy

war game. It's truly not for most people, but hey, if you want to get into Fire Emblem, that's my rec. Download an emulator and play Sacred Stones. Are any of the Smash Bros. boys in there? Because that's my only exposure to Fire Emblem. This is the one where it's... twins erica and ephraim who i don't think are in all right whatever no if it's not ike and maybe marth and roy then i don't i don't know your investment vanished so fast yeah

The right era for a Roy, but the wrong game for a Roy. Rip. The Secret History by Donna Tartt. No, I've heard of it, but I haven't partaken or read it, I think. Legends of Tomorrow. Oh my god. Sky Captain and the... No, no, no, no. Legends of Tomorrow was one of the, like, when we were in early college, it was one of the superhero shows that got spun off from all of these things. I get it. This is Arrowverse related, if I remember correctly. Yeah, it was Arrowverse.

like supergirl and flash related and they were doing the doctor who thing they were traveling through time and they even got the actor for rory from doctor who to be what's his nuts the guy in charge whose ship it is uh and i thought that was very fun and charming but i was so so busy uh and i fell off of it and then it ran for like eight seasons and i don't know anything that happens in it after a certain point uh mini minute man oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah super cool guy yeah

loading ready run no uh nope sentai spider-man oh i've heard of this guy i've seen gifs uh i haven't watched the show but yeah no yeah uh far escape Oh, I've caught a few episodes. It's on one of the sci-fi channels on Pluto TV, and I catch it on rotation. I think my parents watched it. It looks interesting. Not necessarily enough for me to watch the whole thing front to back. Let me explain studios.

I've for sure seen it recommended at least. Another YouTube, I think. Yeah, this is definitely a YouTube channel. The Little Trash Maid. The Little... Trash... Trash made. Oh! That's like... It's funny how some of these are media franchises and some of these are a Tumblr blog that posts art sometimes. I have seen the doodles of the little trash maid and she seems very whimsical. Oh, very nice. Glass Onion.

Yeah, obviously. It was good. Really good. Omniscient reader. No. Kill six billion demons. Yes. Ugh. A webcomic that gives everyone crazy standards for webcomics. I almost understand about half of what's going on on any given page. I don't think I have enough theology degrees to really get it, but, like, the art's real pretty.

I long for it every time I go to our local comic shop because it's got very, very pretty art on the trade edition of it, but I have not picked it up yet. Rain World. No, I think I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is. mythology and fiction explained this is i see i think another youtube channel i assume it's another youtube channel the 2022 version of all quiet on the western front no

I've already seen one version of that movie and I'm good. I've been meaning to because it like cleaned up at the Oscars that year, but I haven't actually seen it. Of course it did. It would have been incredibly bleak and miserable. It had a lot of very cool cinematography techniques.

that it used. But movie-wise, I don't think I'm ever going to be re-watching it. The awards circuit loves two kinds of movies. Hollywood gassing up how great Hollywood is and Europeans being sad. Those are the only two movies that matter in the awards circuit. St. Vincent, the band or musician. I'm not sure if it's a seal situation. Monument Mythos. Nope. Sounds like another YouTube channel. Yep. Maybe. Sage's Reign. Nope. Nope. Death Note. Yes. Yes, obviously.

I've seen those text posts of like Columbo figuring out what's going on with the Death Note. Death Note is one of those things that's so influential because it's got a ton of potential with something deeply wrong with it. Everyone's like, yeah, it's great up until about the one third mark.

where they kill the most interesting character and replace him with two less interesting versions, and then the rest of the show is not very good. And they're like, it's perfect, 10 out of 10, best anime ever made, don't look at the back two-thirds of it. And then they do other stuff based on it, they make a musical, they do Columbo text post jokes about it.

yeah so anyway yes um they we all know the chart if they could solve figure out the mystery and or if they could figure out the mechanics of the death note it's different these are different things uh big bang theory The TV show, not just the scientific principle. Not all of it. And closely followed up with it is Young Sheldon. No. Oh, well, Young Sheldon. No, Janet, could you imagine? Sir!

Well, on that note, I think that that's going to take us out of this lightning round. Continue to drop those media properties and whatnot into AskOSPod on Discord for a chance for your stuff to pop up there. But if you are a patron, you may be...

one of the first people to have your question properly read first on an episode like this lovely patron that we're about to ask a question from here this comes from Clemming to all if you were a villain of the week from an early Yu-Gi-Oh! episode what game would you play and what ironic penalty game would Yami Yugi inflict upon defeating you so what game would you pick if you were a villain of the week in an early issue of Yu-Gi-Oh I guess that's so good

Okay. I would be... Do you want to go first? No, no, no, no. I got to mull this over. Okay. I would be the asshole who brings, like, a game console to school. So, like, I'd be one of the rival classmates and basically... bullies people by like snaring them in to play my my video game on like a like a Game Boy or like I somehow set up like a PlayStation like on the school TV or something and I have like this whole gang of friends that like

makes me seem really cool because i'm good at this like fighting game or something and then i beat people up by bringing them into the game and beating them up at like tekken or mortal kombat or something and then i bully like poor little yugi and eventually yami's like no bitch i actually think there is a chapter where the bad guy is like he's like a fiend for street fighter and also he dresses up like bruce lee and he kicks yugi

really hard and then joey kills him yeah i'm that guy doesn't kill him but like well yeah there is a knife involved but nobody gets stabbed with it so it's fine my karmic punishment is that yami makes me fight him in the shadow realm for real

But I'm all talk and no bite and no kick nor any punch because it's just I'm all on the controller. But if I have to actually fight, get my ass beat. Yeah, you get like rebooted into it. And then you're like, wait, this sword's really heavy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's good. that's good um oh my god it's like smash bros i jump over a small pit and fall in yeah you expect to be able to jump twice your standing height and for some reason it's not working god uh

You know, I feel like- Fucking master-handed. Yeah, yeah. It's been done. I think I'd be a Bakora type. We'd have to play D&D. Pretty good, pretty good. But, like, the thing is, Bakora's kind of a good DM. Like, he does suck people into the- and, you know, fucks him over that way, but he's pretty good at maintaining the rules of the game.

Although he does drop an unkillable monster on them and is like, it's not cheating. It's the stats are right here. And then they have to bullshit to win. But I think I'd probably like be like a really bad DM. I'd be like really railroady or whatever. Or like, I think if we're talking. Early Season Zero, I think I would be like the DM in a Chick Tracks version of D&D where it's like, your character is dead and that means you must be sacrificed to Satan or some shit like that.

And yeah, I think my karmic punishment is that I have to roll a die to see if I survive and I roll a nat 1 and I just die. Yeah, it's pretty good. yeah i think maybe i'm just gonna keep it simple um i'm not very good at ping pong but i think it's conceptually really funny to play high stakes ping pong so let's go with that and i do think that the kind of karmic punishment is that you are perpetually stuck chasing a ball that has bounced off to the side of whatever weird

gymnasium so it's not ping pong but there is uh there there's a chapter where it's like this it's the school festival and they're trying to get like a spot for their club or whatever and then like the takoyaki people who's like whole thing is we make fries foods are like out of the way nerd this is our spot and they like set up this massive cast iron like flat skillet and they like use it to crush their setup and then yami's like huh enough of this and then he

He challenges the guy. They're using little, like, spatulas to knock a puck of ice with a vial of gunpowder in it across the super hot skillet. And so if the ice melts and the gunpowder... It's not exactly ping-pong, but the muscle memory is almost identical. to say this reminds me of the foosball episode of Community, but that goes way farther off the rails.

Yeah. Well, we've got a lot of ways to fall in our leave. What a great question. Yeah. Every game is on the table. This next question comes from smiles through fandoms to all. I recently got the Muppets Christmas Carol off of iTunes, so it's making me nostalgic for all the Christmas specials I watch. as a kit my question is what other christmas movie or tv specials did you guys enjoy growing up

I was always fond of Tom and Jerry's Nutcracker or the Looney Tunes adaptation of Christmas Carol myself. Happy holidays. So are there any holiday specials or movies that like you watched notably as a kid that you that's like in there forever? We had our Christmas movie gauntlet detailed iatrive a few years back. So obviously I got to go to bat for the original Grinch. But I think I've also mentioned in a previous episode somewhere in the previous years that there's an episode of the show.

where santa uh falls to his death in central park and there's seemingly no records of like a helicopter being in that area so Castle's like, well, the real Santa fell off his sleigh and died, obviously. And it's a great episode, and it's obviously about the real meaning of Christmas, and I find it very sweet. So I'll go to bat for that one. It's not a special in quite the same way, but I like that one a lot.

Of course, Muppet Christmas Carol was the main thing we watched when I was little. But there's also a Muppet Family Christmas, which is not the same. I haven't watched it in ages. I think I haven't seen it since I was like under 10 years old. So all the memories are very vague and gaussian blurred, but like it's, it's, I remember I was so enamored with it because it involves the fraggles showing up at one point. I was like, everyone's here. All of my boys.

Cause it was like, it's very heartwarming. Like, oh my God, Miss Piggy might get lost in the blizzard. How do we go and get her? But other than that, it's like, it's very cozy. It's like at home, we're all setting up for Christmas. Everyone's coming. And then it's like, doctor. sprocket is there and sprocket the dog and also uh the guy whose name is escaping me because he might not have a name the guy who's house the fraggles live in he's also shows up anyway um

It was very, very whimsical. I haven't seen it in ages and ages, but it was definitely formative. And then when it got made, we watched the six-part Hogfather miniseries semi-regularly because my mom would read Hogfather to us sometimes, which was fun. And this was kind of like that, but she didn't have to do as much work. It was probably nice considering all the other stuff they had to do for Christmas dinner. Yeah. Yeah.

It's not one I necessarily grew up watching, but like after a certain point, I got deep enough into it. My dad and I both really like a lot of British murder mystery shows. One, Midsommar Murders, has been around for a long time. They've got a couple of Christmas episodes, but one is like the first episode where they'd switch.

the casting on the main detective and so it's like now it's Chief Barnaby's cousin who's also named Barnaby and he's got to get introduced to his like new assistant or whatever and it's a holiday episode which I always find very charming But the real answer to this for me is, and this is evergreen and eternal, it remains beautiful to this day, but the Sesame Street Christmas special is...

an icon in all its forms. It traumatized me as a child. I thought Big Bird was going to die for real out there in the snow. It gave me beautiful, beautiful gifts, like the whole ice skating sequence, which is at times heartfelt, introduces you to the song Feliz Navidad.

and then also gives us the best one minute and 20 seconds of puppet stunt work ever put to screen when they start the whip. Start the whip. I truly cannot recommend this video enough. I'm going to be doing this all season in all formats. Please pause the podcast.

look up sesame streakers is special start the whip it's one minute 20 seconds of pure gold um but yeah that was my dad i'm gonna open it up and watch it again after this episode please do i posted it on blue sky so if you need it found for you It's there. It's so good. The things I do, the thoughts that I have of just like, wow, if I was let loose in the Sesame Street workshop with the ability to throw that puppet through a wall. Boy, howdy, do I know it works.

But yeah, there's a lot of great specials out there. I get a lot of nostalgia for the ones you watch growing up. But we've got other questions to get to. This one comes from Three Snakes in a Trench Coat. To all. So it turns out seasonal depression hits a lot harder when it's your first year of college and you don't have any close friends nearby. So my question is, what festive or general holiday activities do you guys enjoy to do on your own and also on the cheap?

Happy holidays. So what are some things you do by yourselves or like in your household to get into the spirit? well the good thing is we just listed a bunch of really fun things you can watch which is yes top of the list yeah either very cheaply or for free yeah yeah um the oh man uh it can be very good to like smell festive so i'll make like like mulled cider uh so just like you know normal apple juicer cider and then spices in it and then just in a stock pot

like over low heat for like an hour and your your place will smell really really good if you have the ability to cook not every college dorm does uh i remember we had kettles bans they were really aggressive yeah i think kettles were illegal but i still had one I definitely had an illegal kettle shoved under a bunk bed at some point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, because also buried in this question is the difficulty of being festive.

in a college dorm room which is not easy on the face of it well the good thing is the space is small you can't have a lot of stuff in there yeah you don't necessarily have to stay in your dorm room one thing that i used to like to do is be like it's always free to walk around well decorated neighborhoods and look at the pretty lights or like I was gonna say downtown of

yeah yeah go to a part of town where they put up a tree or like done some sort of thing like take a nice walk maybe like pick up yourself a hot chocolate or make that because that's usually something you can find relatively cheap and just like take a nice little stroll it's good to get yourself moving get all bundled up and you don't have to have anyone with you

to do that no one's gonna be like oh my gosh that person's looking at lights alone no they're gonna be like okay i put lights up now i'm going to go do other things and not think about anyone anything else i'll give you a pro tip most things are fine to do by yourself and you will almost never be judged for it if anything the best part about like going out to eat by yourself

there will always be a place for them to put you. And it'll usually be a nice little table with a great view that they never get to use because it's always couples. So, yeah, can confirm. Like, if that was a component of this question, don't feel self-conscious about doing stuff alone. It can be great, very freeing, and nobody is going to be a dick to your face about it. Yeah, you can listen to your tunes of choice.

Yeah, I think it was some Roman guys like tonight. Lusolus dines with Lusolus because he would like to eat by himself a couple times a week. Yeah. But yeah, get or like make. on your own, a huge thermos of hot chocolate and just take it with you as you walk around and see wherever the lights are closest to you, whether you're on a campus that's kind of in the middle of nowhere, or if you're close to a city, if there's like a downtime you can check out, that's usually decorated pretty festively.

Seeing the lights makes the brain go burr. Yes. And if you're in an area that has less light pollution, flip side, go stargazing. And I will say, I have a fiendishly weird cold tolerance, and I have willingly done the out till 4am.

in the cold till I can't hit my legs kind of thing don't necessarily do that but winter stargazing is really good there's like more bright stars the air is clearer uh it's because of like the distribution of the stars in the sky is asymmetrical the winter night sky has more going on it's very very beautiful um if you haven't tried it before thermos of hot chocolate folding chair

nice dark spot go to town it's really fun um yeah yeah yeah as well as buried in here being the like how to be festive at college is also the like how to be festive when you know feeling alone on one level and i think there are a lot of people in the like especially first college out um out of the house out in your own world um struggling with that i think there is

great virtue and being able to enjoy those things by yourself because you're building, you know, lifelong skills and you can then enjoy them on your own time whenever you want. Even if it's like August and you just want to feel that you, you can, that's allowed. You can do that. But also if. if this person does want to try and be festive in a social way, if you ask other people who you're even like, maybe.

only like sort of acquaintances with odds are pretty good they will want to go do it especially in that first semester when most people haven't really found their their group yet unless you get really lucky and stumble into the fencing club like you know i did immediately And even then, if.

If you want to go do this socially, like, be willing to take a couple shots and ask some people if they're into it. Some people might not be, some people might be busy, but you will probably surprise yourself with people who are like, oh yeah, no, that sounds fun, let's go walk around and have hot chocolate. Yeah, no, great.

yeah if you want to make it because a lot of people will need to do holiday shopping so yeah that's all to do holiday shopping but to make it even easier on yourself a lot of uh universities are a great place to get involved in extracurricular activities or where a lot of like campus organizations and clubs

we'll do holiday events that are open to non-members. So like maybe you're like, oh, I want to try and find something to go do. Like I want to go. I know there were a lot of clubs. I used to work at a student activities office. So I was intimately familiar with the sheer number of these that were happening every year. And in a university, there's a lot of clubs that'll host like...

We're doing a movie screening with hot chocolate. Usually it's like a couple bucks or free to get in and you can go hang out with other people in the room and, you know, watch the movie. So like, even if you don't want to be the person who does that yourself, if you're in a university setting or even just like.

Go to your public library and look to see if there are community events happening because very often that there are around the holidays. There's a lot of great places where you can find that kind of community engagement if you do want. To hang out with other people. Or go solo. There's a lot of great options. He's got to kind of find what makes you feel the most festive. You can see if there's an ice rink near you.

depending on whether or not ice skating is your thing. I'm like 50-50 on it. I haven't done it in a while, but it is very thematically appropriate for the season. And it's usually, like, not expensive to rent skates. It might... it might be a little bit it does strong depends sorry i guess i'm thinking of like like suburban ice rinks where the skates are usually not the right size and very ratty so like but my point is like yeah it it strong depends but

Definitely look into it. A lot of those places, it's like cheaper to rent the skates than it is to get a cup of hot cocoa there. So like, you know, yeah. yeah but yeah a lot of great holiday options i hope that you're able to find something that makes you feel festive and uh get into the holiday spirit this year um this next question comes from strawberry to

Both, how long does the average research take for one topic for a video? Oof. Strong depends. Strong depends. Yeah. It's, yeah, like... In the New Year's Eve bonus podcast that we recorded recently, I said the...

Hardest video that I worked on this year was the muses because the research for that took actual years. And it wasn't like I was sitting with my nose in a book for three years running. It's just that's how long it took me to pull it together and like get enough information that I thought was solid.

But then there are some where it's like, it's one story, it's from one book, we're gonna do it front to back, and it'll be fine. So... Anyway, yeah. It's, uh... it takes a long time it's faster with tropes uh with tropes it's much more chill although sometimes when i'm like i need to do this one to justice i'll have to like watch a show front to back to to really weigh in but like Yeah, it strong depends. There is no real rule.

I have a video that will go into this in more depth in February. It's a detailed diatribe basically explaining like the process of how I do like historical research and storytelling. So longer answer forthcoming. But usually. a few days of solid like nose in book work and then a few days to script it out and then spot check stuff i missed so it's like all in all um

the research and writing process can be pretty fluid where it's like, I'm researching, I'm writing, I'm back to researching again. And it takes like a week and a bit of like solid full days of work. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very cool. Well, that work aside, we've got a question from Eastern Red Squirrel.

To Red and Blue, in thanks for keeping their stories alive, you've been invited to participate in a secret Santa gift exchange with all the historical figures and fictional characters you've discussed in your videos this year. Which would you most like to be the Secret Santa for and what would you get them? So all of the subjects of your videos are now options for you to get.

gifts for uh is there any uh figure or character that you are most inclined to gift and what would you get them i give boethius a key And I give Wobethius his own podcaster mic setup. Blue Yeti. Blue Yeti, we're not even selling out for the Shure. I mean, it's a secret Santa, so theoretically, crossing a hundred is a little gauche.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to agree on a budget. Oh, boy. And if we have, like, you know, Lao Tzu in there as well, he's not going to... get anything even remotely expensive he's gonna like just tell you some things like here's some thoughts that i had i'm gonna go into the west now goodbye i i hand wrote it um i think it would be the best well

I say this despite my contentious relationship with them. I think it would be the best to be on the receiving end of a gift from the muses. Yes. Even though it would absolutely be some karmic shit. Like I would need to be so, so careful using it and like making sure to send them a.

Thank you notes. They knew I was grateful and they didn't confiscate my eyeballs about it. But I think that in the long run, that would serve me the best. It would be like, oh, you know, it's not really, it doesn't really have a cash price, but we did decide to just make you the world's best guitar.

player it's like oh thanks um like i think that it would it would unequivocally be good to to be on the receiving end of the muses yeah the homemade gifts are always a great hack for any gift exchange such as divinely inspired hiring someone. Exactly, exactly. And to give a gift to, cause the thing is like I have all of the trope talk characters i brought up technically like in in my rotation of people who i could theoretically and the thing is i think i think like the the more paragon they are

the more of a double-edged sword it is. Because it's like, I think Optimus Prime would be very easy to shop for because he would always be very, very nice about whatever you give him. But I think he would be very hard to get a good gift for for exactly that reason. So I think that's almost like the cop-out answer. He's going to put world peace on his list as Santa and be disappointed if it's anything else. He puts it on the list every year, but he's still grateful for everything he receives.

So many different things have confirmed that Santa is real. I wonder if he's real in the Transformers universe. He's definitely a robot, right? He's got to be like a fucking sleigh that turns into a dude. He transforms into the sleigh. Yeah. Santatron. Santatron. Okay, real answer of what I would want and what I would give. Although I guess I can stick with my Boethius, Wobethius answer. What would I want? Who has something that I can?

Oh, gosh. I feel like Michelangelo could make me like a scale model of one of his things. That'd be pretty sick. I'd take like a little mini statue to put on my desk. That'd be pretty tight. Raphael could paint me like a small little thing to like put over my over like my little laptop or like my little desk area.

I think Michelangelo's a good call. I'll take a small little desk-sized David by Michelangelo. That'd be great. But how funny would it fucking be if he just got you a gift card or something? He's like, I'm sorry, I'm busy. Listen, I don't do work for free. I know my work. The Pope's going to have my ass if this dome isn't finished. Oh my gosh. Michelangelo pulled my name. This is so exciting. Oh, cool. Olive Garden.

Oh, my God. And he's Italian, so he knows that he fucked me. Would it be cruel to give Michelangelo one of those little like drawing model posable guys, except it's just the human female form and not ripped and shredded? I think you give Michelangelo one of those like how to draw manga books that are like $5 at Target drawn by somebody who has never read a manga in their life or seen a woman. Oh, man.

Well, I hope that they're all happy with how this gift exchange goes down. We love the fun stories we've been able to tell. I'd give Michelangelo a body pillow of some classical hot boy. Oh, absolutely. Pretty good. Listen, with like new like workout technology, we've got hot boys the likes of which he's never seen before. I didn't even know that. had that many abs. We just show him Captain Erica the First Avenger.

I've gotten you this Blu-ray disc. Don't worry about what Blu-ray means. No, it's one of those digital picture frames, but it just plays a gif of Steve coming out of the pod on repeat. Yes! I think we should give Da Vinci that too. Just two birds, one stone.

Da Vinci appreciated it more on a mathematical... A scientific experimental level. So Da Vinci, we give Winter Soldier so he can appreciate all the angles that Steve is doing. He's doing the chase through the building and he bounces off the wall. It's like, oh, momentum. Yes, I see. Da Vinci's very much an unbiased...

observer. He was big in the aesthetic mode. Yeah. Well, I think we've got time for one last question here before we wrap up. This comes from Tartarostromuller. Oh, God. Tartarostromuller.

Stromler. Cool. Anyway, this is to Red and Indigo. Why must Red face the arcane trial of the outro every fortnight when the bad boy of the pod provides all of that information again just moments later? Because it's funny. Because it's funny that I make you do the outro.

Yeah, every time I listen back through the pod, it does always blindside me that I stumble through the outro and then immediately it cuts to you in like the crispest audio room. Just like, thank you all so much for listening. If you, you know, it's just like the most.

And then when I was listening through Movie Struck, I was like, she's got this shit down to a science, too. Why am I always on the hook? And she brings the Indigo. You bring like the dates of the next episode, too, which is crazy. Actually, that's kind of a fatal flaw of the outro is that I couldn't just record it one.

time at my best take and then just drag and drop that file to every episode because i say the date of the next episode in every outro um so that's on me that's my mistake but no it's it's we we do it because it's funny and i want to make sure that people still have all the information which is why i then do it again after the bit uh with all of the proper info included just in case you missed something in the main episode so it's um it's a bit

It's a bit that we do, and we're nothing if not committed to that bit. Speaking of, Red. It's like why there are two different voices on the subway in New York, so you get the information twice. It is also helpful for me because my memory is not...

good so it's useful for me to also be like oh yeah and also this thing is happening we said it before but that was like 20 whole minutes ago so i forgot yeah yes please tell me you remember what we talked about this episode because you need to do the outro for this episode Yes, fortunately, I have the cheat sheet of the chat right next to where you guys are, where I could just look over and see. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the Overly Sarcastic Podcast. We will be back.

sooner than you might think for the special New Year's Eve bonus podcast. But then we will also be back at the end of the month. Yeah, end of January. End of January. Wow. Sooner than you might think and also later than you might think. We'll be back at the end of January with a return to form and a fun and funky discussion of two whole videos that will have come out by then, which should be nice. Three, technically.

because there's more video left in the air that we're gonna have to cover. So, also, charity stream, we're gonna be doing our Skyrim mega stream, our semi-annual, bi-annual mega stream will be happening.

Next Tuesday, December 30th, I will be playing Skyrim. We are returning to the continuing adventures of Ebony Darkness Dementia. So I hope you're all ready for that. It's going to be fun. It's going to be funky. It's going to be real gothic. I think that's actually everything we had to talk about. So... Until 2026, I have been red. I've been blue. And this has been the Overly Sarcastic Podcast. Take it away, Indigo from the future!

Thanks, Red from the Past, and thank you for listening to this episode of the Overly Sarcastic Podcast. We'll be back with a bonus New Year's special on Wednesday, the 31st, New Year's Eve, and then on a little bit of a hiatus into January, but regular podcast episodes will resume on January 28th.

Thank you guys so much for listening all throughout the year. And if you think of any questions you want to submit to the podcast in the meantime, head over to AskOSPod on Discord for a chance for your question to be featured in a future episode.

If you enjoyed the show, please rate us and leave a review on your preferred podcast platform. And if you really enjoyed the show, consider becoming a patron for even more exclusive benefits like access to the After After Show Show. The show after the show show where we talk about things after the show. Thanks for listening and a happy new year and happy holidays to all of you wonderful OzPod folks.