¶ Podcast Welcome and Aurora Updates
But yeah, I I ideally like to not be Jumanjied, and if that means never putting myself in a situation to be Jumanjied, so be it.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't play in board game nights because I don't tend to find the experience more fun than it is draining to learn the rules. You don't play in board game nights because you know on the outside chance you get Jumanjied, you're not about that life.
I will simply not be doing it. I'm not walking into a haunted house if someone tells me that there's ghost murdering people in there and I'm not getting Jumanj'd. Indigo's immune, baby.
It's really funny how we already know which of us would die first in a horror movie scenario, it's me, and which of us would survive to be the final girl, it's Dev. Uh because I l listen I am too much of a stubborn contrarian. If someone says, Oh my god, that's the murder house with ghosts in it, I'd be like, Ghosts aren't real and I'd walk in there and then I would die because I wouldn't know what genre I was in. Um
And I've had to watch enough horror movies to be like, I know exactly what genre we're in. Bye, Reds, you know.
I'll tell the ghost you said hi.
🎵 Music
Hello and welcome to another Oops All QA episode of the Overly Sarcastic Podcast. Uh all of us are here as per usual. Say hi, red and blue.
Hello!
Hi red and blue.
I uh adjusted for inflation by bringing two bit. Which definitely wasn't because I ordered two beverages with dinner last night and only had one of them and forgot one was in my fridge this morning. Nice.
What an incredible power move to get two bevs with dinner. Like I something I think about doing all the time and never have the guts to do and ve I can I mean this incredibly genuinely. At Red I'm in awe.
Listen, yesterday was a day, okay? When I remembered I needed to have food, I was not gonna tell myself, Oh, I shouldn't have brown sugar boba milk and also a lychee rose soda. I shouldn't do that because that would be too nice. No, I wasn't gonna tell myself that shit. So I had both and I had the milk with the boba in it and then I was like, I'll save the lychee soda for later.
It's a nice nice. Well, something that's also very nice is our one quick announcement before we get into all of these QA questions. We got pins.
Yeah. Uh we've released uh two Aurora based enamel pens. Uh we did four when the first volume came out last year, and now I've rounded out the the main group Of six characters, the sextet, it's what that's called. Don't be weird. Uh the the like the next two main characters have pins now. Uh and I hope you like
And time for volume two, which is out now in stores.
Yes, as of last month, volume two is now out in stores. I got a text from a friend who doesn't text me very often that just like showed up with the preview, just like screaming into key smash and I was like, Oh shit, are you okay? And then it was a picture of Aurora Volume Two in their local barns in Noble and I was like, Oh so anyway um
Nice.
Yeah.
¶ Cats' Favorite 'Toys' and Pop Culture Quirks
Uh well, why don't we leave those pins for you to find on the CrowdMade site linked down below and move on to the QA questions, the first of which comes from one of our lovely patrons. If you'd like to support the podcast, support the channel, consider becoming a patron for a chance to have your question read first in a future episode.
Uh, this question I think predates the knowledge that Wolf was around, so uh it's going to be addressed to two of us, but I'm going to say it's open to everyone because we now all have cats uh and comes from Dragon Queen, Death Ray Faye, Emily Crow, Two Blue and Indigo, and now Red. Uh, we all know the habit of cats to ignore all the expensive and handpicked toys, beds, and cat towers and go for something you didn't intend for them to enjoy.
What's been the most amusing and simultaneously annoying time that Cleo and Ziggy, and now Wolf, have abandoned a hand-picked item for something like a fresh empty Very famously cats will ignore their nice toys in favor of, you know, the box the allure of box. Um do you guys have any? Uh a s a a pristine cat.
Well I mean Wolf still hasn't gotten over the delicious allure of every single charging cable in my apartment, which is so fun. Uh There's that. Um it also took her like a month before she used the cat bed I got her, uh preferring instead to sleep in my bed on top of me, uh or at the foot of my bed on one of my uh rugs, which
Don't be mad. Yeah, that's optimal.
Oh no, she just loves me too much. Uh but yeah, so she has started using her uh her bed, which is nice, uh, but she'll still sleep mostly on my
Cleo likes to eat wrappers. Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
Loves her some plastic.
Yes she does.
I don't I think I must have mentioned on the pod at one point, uh where you left you guys had like an errand to run and you left me with Cleo for like an hour and she like meowed at me and signaled me to follow and then opened a cabinet door, got inside and started licking all the plastic and I was like, Well I don't think you're supposed to be doing that, but I'm not the pet parent, so I don't really know. And the fact that she like
wanted me to like keep a lookout for the cops or something. It was just really funny.
I think she was telling you check this shit out.
Yeah. Yo, I could never get away with this one.
Home.
As far as uh Like l uh ignoring a fancy thing for a not fancy thing. Simply too many items to list. We get her a lot of nice toys. Uh we have like a meow box thing. She likes the box because it smells very strongly of catnip because all the catnip toys are inside of it. And frankly the box smells more like catnip than the toys by the time the toys are out. Um so we just leave the box and she like sits in it. It's not a large box so
She's gonna like stand. She can't get comfy in it. Um, but we got a uh uh a runner for one of our uh staircases because I I fell on my ass uh one day and I decided never again. I'll be the last person to ever slip down these stairs. So we got a runner for it. Um, and she really liked the box and we're like, well, I guess we can keep it. So like we painted it, uh we wrote like cat in a box. We wrote like a little poem on the side of it and like made it nice and she still uses it.
Enough that we've kept it like over a year later, but she doesn't use it as much as she did before we painted it, so maybe she doesn't like the paint. I uh there's truly no winning.
Yeah.
Yeah, I had a very similar situation. Ziggy likes to like rotate through her toys and her her cap and be able to like fruit in it'cause she's the filling, but um she doesn't always love it super much. We I'm very, very happy that we did get her a a little cat tower, a little cat tree for uh Christmas a few years ago, and she does actually really like it. She likes the hand. Like
Her orb.
We call it her salacious crumbing because she's not going to be able to do it. But yeah, yeah.
One of the best club shadows in all of Star.
And all timer. I mean an ice.
Here's why it's called Glush. Without him like skewing the vowel curve in Star Wars, they'd be called something
There's no there's there's a lot of Glup Shiddos. It's you can't put it just on Salacious Crom. He's great, but there's a lot there's a lot of reasons Glup Shiddo is such a ubiquitous thing in Star Wars.
It's a it's a storied part of the Star Wars legacy. But but to to put a point on it, Ziggy does uh use her toys for the most part, except for one exactly Ziggy size like Amazon box that she just got immensely attached to. I think because we'cause of where our recycling is, it was directly across from her food bowl. And so, uh
She would sit in the box and stare at her automatic feeder waiting for it to go off. And I think it just became like, this is deeply the routine. So now we can never get rid of that box. But we do we try to decorate it on occasion. We'll wrap it up around the holidays and So that she's the gift that keeps on giving. But yeah, every cat's gonna ignore and go for box.
Yeah.
All all evolution leads to Kat and a boss.
I got Wolf a couple like toys and I had some toys on But the th the the stuffed thing that she enjoys the most is a memory foam floor pillow I've had She will like clamp onto the side of it, do the little bunny kicks to try and disembowel it. Like it's pretty sturdy. She hasn't done lasting damage, although I have found teeth marks around the edges sometimes because it is memory foam. Um
And uh yeah, I really wish she'd p play with a little stuffed shadow the hedgehog I got her instead. But this also works. As long as she's having fun, I'm not gonna complain.
Yeah.
They we uh we just wanna be having a good time at the end of the day. Um and uh Blue's been laughing to himself for a while about something and I feel like I got
I was I Googled best Gluff Shiddos in Star Wars and I was looking at people's rankings. I forgot about Elon Slea's Bagano from episode two. That's an all-timer.
I don't remember this at all.
Motor nodes. Max Rebo.
I mean the maxie book boys. Who's the little guy who pops up in the new one and goes like Well, hey um, he's on that planet where they've had to rebuild C three PO or whatever and then they the like white it's the new
Is it the the wheel droid?
No, no, he's like a little sock puppet looking guy. It's gonna drive me crazy that I can't remember his name because I think my boyfriend has referenced him four times in the book.
Yeah.
Oh no what?
And then for the meme Yarrell Poof. Uh he's not quite as much of a Glup shitto, but he's Classic episode one character.
¶ The Great Toothpaste Debate
Star Wars is made or made or broken on the quality of its club shittos, but luckily for us, uh we are not. We are made and broken on the quality of our questions. And this next one comes from Half Baked Cat To All Preferred Toothpaste Flavor.
Mm.
If you say anything other than mint I don't trust you inherently what are we doing?
Let me let me uh e uh extrapolate on that indigo, anyone who has like any specific flavor that's like more than two words long, I do not trust.
When I was a kid it was a different story. Um I don't know exactly why the toothpaste uh on offer were changing. I think my mom was going through an organics phase, so that might have led to some strange toothpaste purchases. Uh but for a while'cause here's the thing, it was never hard to make me brush my teeth because Toothpaste, when you're a kid, it they usually make it glittery. And I was just so enamored with I I remember at one point I went to the dentist and they got me like
And I loved it so much that I brushed my teeth four times that day because it was just so sparkly, uh, that I wanted to experience more of it. Uh, but there was a stretch of time where we had this like strawberry weird toothpaste, and uh I liked it enough that I would just eat it. Uh and I realized that probably that was unwise later, but nobody told me and it tasted nice, so you know.
I okay, hear me out on this one. I feel like there's a really strong
Love craft.
esque story of like there's a weird new toothpaste and everyone's going insane because of it. This feels like a very Lovecraft kind of thing to be suspicious of.
Well, yeah, I guess. But that that makes me, you know, schmuck number one for falling for it and eating it by the ounce rather than just using it as intent.
Yeah, you are the mountains of madness.
Yeah, I I'm like the first to go simply because I'm experiencing way more of it than anyone else.
The only flavors when you when I go to the dentist to get my my annual uh or my biannual teeth cleanings, uh they have two uh flavor options for the like toothpaste and then like the floor.
Oh yeah.
And one is mint, which a hundred percent makes sense, and the other is always cherry, and I've always wondered like getting cherry in the eleventh hour of your dental cleaning. Who's like, I don't want to be minty fresh. Right in if you're the person who's been getting uh you
You really have to dentist be of the mindset of like telling the dentist, you know what? Fuck me up, give me the cherry.
I'm not driving after that.
You're choosing violence if you want the cherry.
Yeah. They also uh use red toothpaste, which feels like an oversight to me because as someone who had kind of chronic gum bleeding uh problems no matter how much I I've I've had great success with the new toothpaste that reduces it recently. Uh all mint flavored, of course,'cause I'm not insane. But
Indigo, it's color theory. Red is the color of health and life.
Yeah.
Actually correct.
Yeah, got it shipped straight from the children's hospital.
It feels like whenever I rinse and spit, then it's just like, oh, and now blood is gushing out of my mouth. And it's like, no, it's the red toothpaste. And I was like, well, why would you use red toothpaste?
You're having that like uh I have like a I I'm a movie character with a chronic illness that I won't tell anybody about but I do a discreetly coughed up blood under my handkerchief and now I'm gonna conceal this from my
A hundred percent. Uh But yeah, I I think we're we're a a united front on mint is the best flavor, uh as adults at least.
I just I've been brushing my teeth for so long I don't really think about the taste of I think it would weird me out more.
This next question comes from Gary the Goblin to Red and Blue. I am going on a road trip to Chicago. What are some places you would recommend visiting while I'm there? Yes. Because grew up in the area. What are some places uh people should visit in Chicago?
¶ Chicago Travel Guide & Museum Highlights
So fortunately Chicago has a surplus of cool museums. Yeah. Super easy. Um the there's sort of the museum campus area, uh like eleventh Street, uh, which is the uh
Bottom of Grand Park.
Yeah, uh the Field Museum, the uh Adler Planetarium, the Shed Aquarium, I think those are the only Yeah. It's also just like a beautiful little stretch of lakefront if you go like if you're going I don't know how this question is if you're going in like anywhere that's not winter, it'll be very nice and pretty there. Uh you'll have a really cool view of the
The field and the shed are right next to each other, but the walk, that long promenade, oof peep.
Yeah, and there's these like hills. There's like an interesting little stretch of actual on the water lakefront.'Cause there are some like lakefront walks in Chicago that are designed to be nice and this one kind of isn't it's a little bit like rough concrete short up with a slab of rusted metal. Uh but the walk and the view itself is very nice. Uh there's also uh further south in Hyde Park where we went to high school, uh and you went to middle school, uh is
Anyway, the Museum of Science and Industry is down there. It's uh I think it's a remnant of uh what, the World's Columbian Exposition or something.
It's like the only thing that was built in the material that could be preserved. Everything else was plastic.
Yes. Uh the MSI is great fun. Uh I'd say it skews a little bit younger maybe than the Field Museum. Well the Field Museum has giant dinosaur. So like obviously kids are welcome, but like the MSI has a lot more like interactive stuff, cool demos, big Tesla coil on the ceiling, you know, that kind of thing. Uh so
And then they have the submarine, U five oh five.
pretty sweet. I do I do love that submarine. Uh they've also got I think it's like an OmniMax theater that they use for some of the like science. Yeah. Uh also further up downtown, uh the Art Institute. Huge uh I like
I think
Comparable to the Met in terms of quality of collection, maybe smaller, I think it by but the Methodist.
Quality is the same, it's just smaller.
Yeah. Uh but the art institute is great. It's also in a very nice part of downtown. Uh I guess the only thing I'd advise is probably don't go to Navy Pier unless you really It's like the go to tourist trap in Chicago and it's fun to walk. It's it's a nice walk, but like w Why would you do any of the rides, you know?
Oh I mean sure.
Exactly.
Listen, I don't even know what it looks like anymore. The last time I was there was before they did all the construction.
Uh well, uh it's still basically a peer as far as I understand it, and it doesn't have an IMAX theater anymore. Uh which is where
when they had the children's museum when I was like nine, but cannot comment on nowadays.
Anyway, uh I would advise you to just do the full museum circuit that will easily eat multiple days of your trip. Uh
Yeah. As far as things to to see like outside, Chicago is such a beautifully walkable city. I I love the walk from basically like where the old water tower is down Michigan Avenue to the river. Get to see the Tribune Tower, one of my favorite videos. Um and then the river walk, all of the restaurants are turbo overpriced. Yes. Uh but it's pretty to walk by. And then you're like right on the lakefront. Uh you're by Grand Park, you can easily walk down to uh some of the museums Red was mentioning.
There are oh else's is kind of in that area. Uh Yeah, Lincoln Park is pretty, um, especially in like spring and summer when all the uh plants are up. Yeah. I was not as much into like The zoo part of it, because I got pooped on by a pigeon there one time and it traumatized me. But I like the park part of it. Lincoln Park is great. And then it's like a lot of much more like niche tiny places. Well, like this is just the neighborhood that I grew up in, and I liked this.
park uh a bunch, but it's like, okay, that's not like you need to see it when you're in Chicago. This is just the park near my house I like.
If you're in the vein of like more chill stuff, uh Hyde Park is the neighborhood around the University of Chicago. and it's basically a little college town that's just been subsumed by the Greater Chicago area. So it's got an extremely high density of bookstores and coffee shops
and like little parks and places to study and the the Chicago the Chicago quad is very nice. Uh so that that this is a very, very beautiful neighborhood. Uh not like a hot tourist attraction, but if you want to shop for books used and new, that is a very good neighborhood.
Chicago for me just like big city, walk down Michigan Avenue, enjoy the enjoy the streets, enjoy the sights, and then pop into any of the many, many, many museums on the south side of the river.
Yes, yeah, they are kinda everywhere.
And then just walk the lake.
Yeah.
Yeah, some good uh travel recommendations. Uh
¶ Red's Approach to Worldbuilding
Coming at ya. Um, this next question is for Red from Scarlet Nova. I've been having trouble world building my own world for a project I've had for a long time, and was curious what your main inspirations for Aurora's world building were. I absolutely love how it's built and the small details in it and its overall presentation. So do you have any uh inspiration for Aurora's world building and advice for world building?
Yeah. Um so the thing is, world building has no bottom, you know, it doesn't tap out at any depth. You can just kind of keep going, but also that way mad Uh world building is a part of writing that is sort of weirdly cordoned off in its own general area. Like you can build a whole setting and not have
Uh which is why it's really cool now that there are things like like T T RPGs, uh where you can just basically plop down a setting world and say, You guys figure out all the character stuff. I've just I've already done the part that's fun for me. Um But with that in mind, a lot of the kind of rich world building uh in my experience actually comes out of the character.
And I know that
That's not necessarily the most like roadbuilding pure way to do it. Uh but I always liked sort of coming at storycrafting from two directions where you start on like the big scale, the aesthetic, like wha how do I want this world to do it? And also you get really in the weeds of like, who do I want to be what are my super cool OCs that I want to be running around in
Uh and then you sort of build out from there. So like with the very early stages of Aurora world building, it was like, okay, I want it to be a fantastical setting with these cool visuals, but I also want it to be like recognizable, like I want the people to running around to look like humans.
and, you know, anyone who's not, I want to like look recognizably humanoid. Uh which's not necessary. You know, after a certain point fantasy world building just turns into sci fi if you let the world get a little too uh
Separate from the aesthetic, but I knew I wanted to do that. And then it was like, okay, I wanna have this cool guy with like powers that he gets from a god. So now I need gods. I need to build out pantheon of gods. What are they gonna look like? That uh part of the world building completely changed from draft.
I was 11, it wasn't gonna be good. Uh but like that's you know, or it's like, oh, I want this guy to be a cool wizard, which means I need to build out the magic system. Okay, well, how do I want it to look? I do want people to But I also want to, you know, not let this sort of thing happen that would sort of undercut the fight choreography. Um but it's like you build top down from the aesthetic and then bottom up from the right.
to have a place in the world. And sometimes that means it's like, oh, I want to build this cool guy, so I guess I'll build the entire culture there from Uh because it helps to have anchor When you're world building, like individual
fixed points that you sort of already know going in, like you've had the little inspiration. You you have like a beat of the story that you want to play out and you're like, okay, how do I get here? What do I need to set up in this like uh what's what's the word for it? Uh It's like the the four dimensional path you travel through time, uh like space time. It's how how much of like the world line do I need to
Like
build out to lead up to this one cool like two sentence exchange where this thing Um but yeah, in my experience world building is a lot easier when you have specific And uh obviously, like most of the world building for Aurora, at least on the large scale, has been done for ages, uh although obviously I flesh things out on the smaller scale.
Uh but more recently, the like the fresher world building project I've been doing has been this setting world for a DD 3.5 home game that I'm And he goes in, so I'm not gonna spoil, but like that also started kind of like Top down, what do I want this world to look like? And it was truly the most I was road tripping back, I was exhausted, and I was like, Man, wouldn't it be cool if most of the places people lived were like cities in the sky and the surface was uninhabitable?
Wonder what would make that happen. And then I was just like, well so I had the aesthetic, I had the visual in mind. And then it's like, okay, well, what do I want to do here? What what chain of events do I want to have caused this? And it's like I'm really big into the K T extinction event right now. So then it turned into what happens if you take a standard DD setting world and you hit it with a giant magic meteor? What does the world look like a few centuries after that?
And that just kind of turned into cause and effect, just asking myself questions like if this happened in this area, what would happen there? Or like, what would happen to this thing? post uh post-apocalyptic situations a lot better. Our mammal ancestors were just little like subterranean rats kind of doing okay. But like all the T-Rexes, all the big guys, they all died. So I was like, in the D world. What happened to all the giants? There's a lot of'em. They also need to eat a lot.
Did they all just go extinct? Did I fucking obliterate them? Uh and it's just, you know, after a certain point, it just turns into asking yourself questions and then like puzzling through your best answers. Uh you know, start with an aesthetic and then just start flushing things out. Uh I I hope that made any sense.
I like that with red all roads lead to the K T Somehow or another every podcast we find a way to talk about.
Listen, okay. There there's a Tumblr post that's basically like it's so amazing the process of learning like, yeah, dinosaurs were real. Earth used to have giant monsters, and then they all died when the sky exploded, and this is real. It's like That yeah, th my my life has peaked at the knowledge of this is a thing that actually happened, and I will keep circling back to it because it rules.
Arc VT Extinction.
No, that's a good thing.
I'm sorry, Blue, I cut you off as you were about to say something much more intelligent than oh wow, KT extinction again, huh?
¶ Blue's Worldbuilding Philosophy: Quality Over Quantity
Building off of what what Red was saying, I I think I've gone on record that I I I tend to be uh put off by uh over zealous world building, where I think, uh especially in the last like decade or so, we've been Graced by an abundance of very competently world-built things out there, you know, like your critical roles and stuff like that, where it's like, it is very impressive how much world-building there is. And I think it's led some people to think that.
Quantity of world building is proportional to quality of the written product. afterwards. And I find that very much not the case. Uh, because then it's like, but I have all these notes about this thing. I need to exposit it. And it's like, well, now I'm just reading a wiki page instead of a story. So for me, I I like to The worlds where there's clearly some like
Some engine at the center of it that is the reason the story is being told that that connects everything Red, you mentioned anchor points. For me, when I read Aurora, everything comes back to the magic. Every choice about the structure of the world, what the characters can do, are Consistently informed by this magic.
So it feels like everything builds into the central idea, which is a lot more compelling for me than and then we have this thing over here and this thing over here, and here's what the illicit substances in this city look like. It's like, why does any of this matter?
What?
Would it be fucked up if there was a big uh metal cube in the sky or what? You know, but uh when it all comes together, it feels like it reinforces itself rather than and here's my eighteen volumes of world building lore that you should be so impressed that I wrote. I I like when stories relate back to a a central kind of moving principle or or an engine or a thesis. Um and there's some stories that I think do that really well.
Um so I I would say everything that Red said is true, but also uh do not be fooled uh by the uh the kind of cultural moment we're in that uh more world building is better world building.
I think there was a a little smosh try not to laugh bit at one point where it was like Damien just comes in and starts monologuing a bunch of like fantasy jury and is like, this takes place a thousand years before our story begins.
He absolutely nailed the vibes on that'cause there there's so many stories I've seen where it really feels like it's world built for its own sake to the point where it almost self-sabotages. I think there's um there's just a little bit of like an anecdotal wisdom from like Uh if this isn't the most interesting period in this character's life or this isn't the most interesting thing that happened in this world, why am I not
Instead. Yeah. And so if you whirl build out like too extensively and it's like a thousand years ago a great hero rose and managed to overcome the demon king and now we're following this dipshit. And it's like, Can we go back a thousand years? That sounds real cool actually. Yeah. Um
Anyway.
Yeah, uh very cool advice uh in general for all of those who might be world building.
¶ Architectural Conversations and Legendary Swords
Um we've got another question coming up here from Eastern Red Squirrel two Blue. If you were granted the power to cast if these walls could talk on any building or feat of architecture, what would you pick and what would you want to talk to it about? After watching your Leaning Tower of Pisa video, I love to hear about the moment the builders first realized it was leaning. So if you could speak to any piece of architecture, uh, which one would you want to speak with?
Um oh there are simply so many options. Uh I feel like any of the like ancient Roman ruins that were converted into churches would uh would have a lot to say. I feel like some statues uh have seen some shit. I'd love to hear what the Kariotids are up to. Um
We uh you go to Rhodes and you like lean on the oldest wall you can find. It's like, So what happened to the Colossus? Where to go?
Sunk. But yeah, I Yeah, there some classical statues I think would be really cool to listen to. Um Parthenon is an obvious one, although I think that one's pretty straightforward. I think Pantheon will be hard to beat because so much stuff happened in there being the the first uh known pagan temple to be converted into a Christian church. uh A D uh and also just uh th the dome. It was fun to have the conversation. Uh be like, what's it like being the best one? But I wish I had a better answer.
It'd be fun to hear some stories. I'm on a Rome kick right now. I've been reading a bunch of books for reasons I'll talk about later. Um'cause it it's been a while since I've done a video on Rome. Uh it's been since I did the complete history a couple of years back. Come on, Blue, think of something.
I'd like to know how they did Stonehenge. Like there's theories, but I want to know.
That's perfect.
It's one of those cases where like Stonehenge is simple enough that I don't see too many people ancient aliens in it, you know? But it is still like it's a pretty big rock. And I think I remember hearing that like the kind of rock it is is not
Yeah, it was carted from somewhere distinct.
So I was like, what's up with that? Like why? Why'd they do that? Why bother? They definitely have rocks here, right?
🔇 Silence
No better answers present themselves. I'm gonna go with the kariotids.
Very fascinating.
Very fair.
I'll goss with the ladies.
Well this next question comes from that guy that draws Draven. To all, what is your favorite fictional sword name? For example, Excalibur, Clarant, Widow's Whale, etc. Mine is Dark Sister. So what's your favorite fictional sword name? Personally, I think I come down on don't overcomplicate it. Sting is great. Sting gets the exact point I want it to across.
Yeah, I man, I haven't read a book.
I I remember uh Red you telling me that you really liked uh grass cut. Uh Kusanagi as a name because it's I love the understated sword names. If you're trying too hard, it comes off like okay, sure. Uh but I I will also say um I love that the master sword has like 40
The sword that seals the darkness, the blade of evil's bane. When I'm watching a Zeltic video and he just like rattles off different epithets each time, oh, that is peak. Yeah. God, it's so fucking it's the answer's the master sword. It's the master sword. Okay.
And I think...
Yeah.
I will go with my old pick of grass cutter, even though it it's less literary and more theoretically historical. Uh but yeah, I'll take it. It's just so cool but it's like the oh th the the fact that this thing can kill people isn't even its primary purpose. Yeah.
I know I said like, Oh, I don't like when the names are trying too hard and some of the some of the Master Sword epithets are are a little big but I th there's there's a sauce to them that that works together. If it was any one of them it would be I think too much. But the fact that they're like interchangeable, it speaks to a a legendary status that like it ha had it has had different names in different eras and different people think of it in in in different uh
It kind of contributes to that weird time abyss feeling.
Right against it.
one timeline of like, this thing is so fucking old it's called so many things.
And here's bringing it back to the two questions ago, uh like the the eternality of Zelda for me is like the thing about it. That is the engine of Zelda, and everything that supports it is the good shit. So like Zelda's reincarnation is the spirit of the goddess, the master sword.
Oh
like fulfills that idea, which is why it works so well for me.
I have a second pick. Stormbringer from the Elric saga, Michael Moorcock. It's so good that it made me not name things an Aurora Stormbringer because then I would be
Because it's it's so it's this it's this like evil demon sword uh that like drains the souls from those it slays to empower its wielder. But because the guy who's wielding it, Elric is like this fundamentally trying to be decent against all of his training dude, who also has like a chronic medical condition and is physically very frail, so he's using this badass evil sword as a mobility aid.
and trying not to also turn evil in the process. Uh and I just think that that's neat. Uh there's other stuff about Stormbringer that make it cool, but there's spoilers, so I shan't say
Yeah, there's there's a lot of good uh sword names in Skyrim, which I think is a side effect of it just needing to have a lot of swords that have cool names for the loot. Um but I a as someone who's a chronic one handed sword, one handed conjuration spell build player, uh I gotta shout out my my boys Dawnbreaker and Shilrand coming in t hot but
There's something about the simplicity of Sting that really appeals to me, where it is like it it kind of describes exactly what it would feel like to get uh murdered by that sword and I appreciate it. Um
Yes, I was correct. Uh one of the twin swords used by Driz Dorden in Ari Salvatore's Driz books is named Oh. So that rules. Yeah. Maybe it sounds more badass and elvish.
Yeah.
Uh
I remember when we did um very briefly a screama in like junior and senior year of high school, and you named your screama sticks Thunder and Clyde.
Oh yeah, I did. Oh man. I should uh I should dig those things up. Thunder and Clyde deserve better than to gather dust in my old trunk.
Do you still have them?
All right. Well this next question comes from Ducky to all. What weather condition, rain, snow, fog, etc. are you most comfortable or tolerant of driving in?
¶ Driving in Inclement Weather & Monster Hunting
For example, it's been raining or foggy recently where I live, and I am much more comfortable driving in rain over fog because at least you can see for the most part. So if you have to drive in inclement weather, what kind of inclement weather are
I think rain is probably the best of the options. Uh if nothing else because uh my car has these like Adaptive cruise control features that work on like a rate of the event. in the front, and some conditions make that stop worse. uh extreme fog can make it malfunction and uh the problem is it takes it a minute before it realizes it's not working.
So in the meantime, it'll be like, hey, there's nobody in front of us. We can go full speed. And it's like, we can't actually. There's a car fifteen feet ahead. Uh which is why don't rely fully on your car's driving features and actually keep your eyes on the road. Yeah. But so like fog can be a little bit brutal. I have driven through rain bad enough that it also trips up my radar. Yeah. Uh but it it's kind of rare. And um
I think snow is worse because it can make the road itself far more hazardous and also makes it a lot harder to see where the lanes are. Very dangerous.
I was driving through Quebec uh last year with And I was basically in a just straight line of a thunderstorm for like two or three s hours where I could not see the car in front of me almost the entire time. Uh that was uh horrible.
I've had a couple of night drives.
Yeah, my my favorite um inclement weather to drive in, the one that I'm most skilled in is uh trying to park and That's Uh i m you know, rain is obviously the the answer of this is the the safest condition if it's medium rain. But um I could parallel park before I could drive on a highway and I I'd like to lean into that as much as possible. And also no one will get mad at you like an old woman who put a cone out and just trying to s space save her.
She's more likely to punch your car than a piece of hail is, I think.
Jumping back a question, I remember that I named my fencing sword in college murder in Mayhem because it was a saber and I've been playing Assassin's Creed four lately and there's a line about you know nothing but murder in mayhem so That's how cool edgy I was.
The only thing that I think is slightly declasse about that is that you should have named the sword murder and you're like main gosh uh
We don't have an off hand.
Yeah.
That's the problem. I think probably you should have been doing some cool HEMA shit instead.
I don't think my school had HEMA
Yeah. They didn't. There was kendo and there was fencing. Boston has HEMA more broadly, but we didn't we didn't have it at our our university. But uh we did occasionally rig um the circuit systems to be able to have do dual
Double savers.
Yeah. Which was which was fun. So in that case it could have been
And I wasn't about to write on one of the like standard issue club savers that wasn't mine.
I as the armorer, I don't think I would have cared, but I appreciate that.
I didn't realize you wrote murder and mayhem on your sword.
I wrote it on the inside of the guard.
Wow.
You gotta put your name on it anyway. Might as well have a name for the weapon. Yeah, I guess. Well this next question comes from Lazy Eye of Horus. To all, if you were a monster hunter, which supernatural threats would you specialize in taking down? Vampires, ghosts, werewolves, etc. Um, so if you were a monster hunter, and in this instance you're not like a catch-all monster. you're specializing in one type. Um, what kind of monster are you hunting?
I definitely ha have spent more time exploring the idea of like a psychological I always thought that was kind of neat. Uh personally well it also depends on what Because in the vast majority of cases there is at least one designation. That in that case, hunting those guys is bad and a recipe for you getting your ass beat, uh deservedly so.
So I think Like with the big asterisk of like, you know, setting dependent, I do think probably vampire I think werewolves have a greater tendency to be chill, especially in modern media, or at least kind of broadly on the side of the angels. Uh, and vampires, unless you strip away the very thing that makes them vampires, are inherently predatory. And in that case it's like not necessarily killing'em, but like keeping'em away from like vulnerable populations.
I think that at least feels like kind of a cool worthy cause. Yeah.
Yeah, if I'm in a world where I'm assuming all Halloween monsters are acting monstrous and not in any way, you know, exhibiting traits of uh internal life that would make them the protagonist of the story. I think I also have to go vampires, but I think it's just'cause I've consumed so much garlic in my life at this point. I feel like I have to be naturally resistant. Like there's no way they can they could get
Um I got that uh Italian American between the Catholicism and the the amount of garlic in our food, I feel like we're just sort of inherently resistant to the development of vampires. That's why it's so funny to me That in the Twilight series, the like headquarters for the vampire council or whatever is in Italy. Like, what are you doing? It's the worst place you could live.
They well they have none of the standard.
Like running. The go to answer as well. Mm-hmm.
Yesterday I watched an episode of I th this is going somewhere I promise of Criminal Minds where it was um It was called hashtag. It's basically the like social media is bad and dangerous episode and like the the killer is basically doing a a riff on Slender Man. Um and so my answer is
The year twenty eleven.
It was a twenty fourteen yeah.
I knew it, yeah.
Yeah. So I'm like, ah yes, what uh
What?
What monster that's preying on uh the innocent can I take out? Uh
Ha ha ha.
Minecraft YouTubers.
Honestly, I do think that cryptid hunting is the the coolest profession that I wish was real, you know? Like or rather, cryptid's a the coolest concept that I wish was real. And therefore cryptid hunt in the same way that like being an archaeologist does not make you Indiana. Because the world is simply not cooperating. The world does not provide you with the things that your skill set would be good at dealing with. Ancient trap temples.
Cause then it would be awesome. Then but as things stand, once you discover a cryptid, it's just an animal. You know, giant squids were cryptids, and then we got proof of them, and now they're not cryptid. If we found a Bigfoot, they'd stop being cryptids.
Maybe maybe Roblox YouTubers are worse, but I haven't really been exposed to any of that ecosystem so I don't know if
We we missed the uh boat on that.
I also feel like the not this is a complete tangent from the question. I feel like internet eras are going by quicker than Oh yes. Because I've been watching like things where it's like, oh yes, and this collective of YouTubers founded in 2022 messily destroyed itself in 2025. And I'm like, Jesus, was I just not looking in the right direction when this was happening? I didn't catch any of that.
Oh God, we're all aging, aren't we? Um Uh well this next question comes from
¶ Trapped in a Board Game Scenario
Uh mini noises to all. Oh no, you've been transported into the world of a board game. What board game are you trapped in and how will you escape? Um not to crib what I think is maybe the best SNL sketch of all. But um I will simply not be Jumanj'd. I think that uh you can't get me to to play a board game long enough to Jumanji me. This is uh we were talking we were talking on the on stage.
Yeah, this resonated on the stream where both of us were like, Oh my god, I thought I was the only non-board game person in our extended friend group. Um
Red and Indigo clasping hands and not wanting to play the game at the board game party.
Listen, I'll come hang out at the board game night, but I'll be in the kitchen making snacks and commenting on other people playing. It's too much effort to make me learn the rules.
And I won't really have that much fun. Uh which actually honestly getting Jumanji to Welcome to the Jum or just regular Jumanji into a board game, I think could make it more exciting for me'cause at that point I have to learn those rules through trial and error or perish. That's way easier than getting through a book.
I I do think we run into the issue though of like'cause because I will almost never seek out a board game, I'm probably going to get sucked into a board game that is not necessarily one that I was interested in in the first place. So like Suddenly I have to do wingspan is like, Oh god, I'm getting Jumanj'd in real life or some shit like that.
I actually have a choice. Uh, there was a board game that we we had a copy of when I was little that I really liked, in part because of the It was very simple. And the premise was it was a a board game, uh, with basically A few tiles placed permanently on the board that were like pieces of a maze. Yeah. And then every other tile was another component of the maze. And you added them by sliding them in the side and moving an entire row of the maze down.
Which could completely change the paths of traversal. Uh and of course point was to get through it and collect the hamper your opponents by like sliding the maze around in inconvenient ways.
I really liked it. I I thought it was very simple. I think it would be one of those things O one of those board games where you could make a really solid like movie adaptation that is ostensibly based on it and does have the mechanics of the game world in it, but there's so little there that then you just get free reign to build out whatever the fuck you want for the rest of the
Uh sadly there is already a Labyrinth movie, but I think that uh b with your help we can make Labyrinth the movie, not that one actually, a reality. And it's just me navigating some like weird fucked up slides. And that's my pitch. One billion dollars, please.
It would be really funny to get Carcassonne, but then you just become like a stonemason in like fourteenth century France. You just have to actually build the thing.
I refuse to believe you wouldn't enjoy playing Dragoon from the end.
Well, depends on if you're the dragons or the people.
No.
'Cause in in most humanity situations, um You know, when when well when Jumanji comes out,'cause Jumanji is Jumanji comes out, it's not that you get Jumanji into Jumanji. Um I love that sketch so much. If you haven't seen the Jumanji sketch, please go watch it.
This required viewing after we did the slug blaster uh one shot where you Jumanji two, welcome to the jungle to
Oh good. It's so funny and they have no idea how to end it, so it just has like the most milk toast uh sputtering out of an outro. But uh I you know, cause because you have to think about like you're not about to become a board game character. All of the board game things are happening around you, but you're still you is kind of the general rule. So like uh you wouldn't be one of the dragons in Dragoon, but you would have to do Dragon things, you know.
Ah, yes, yeah.
Candyland could be good. Yeah,'cause that feels very on the rails, straightforward. Um shoots and ladders could be kind of fun because you get to do much climbing and then you get to go slider out. Although sometimes we see and that's
Yeah, I was gonna say as long as it's shoots and ladders and not snakes and lads,'cause
Yeah.
Uh but yeah, I I ideally like to not be Jumanjied and if that means never putting myself in a situation to be Jumanjied, so be it.
Yeah. Yeah, uh I don't play in board game nights because I don't tend to find the experience more fun than it is draining to learn the rules. You don't play in board game nights because you know on the outside chance you get Jumanjid, you're not about that life.
I will simply not be doing it. I'm not walking into a haunted house if someone tells me that there's ghost murder people in there and I'm not getting Jumanj'd. Indigo's immune, baby.
It's really funny how we already know which of us would die first in a horror movie scenario, it's me, and which of us would survive to be the final girl, it's Dev. Uh because I l listen I am too much of a stubborn contrarian. If someone says, Oh my god, that's the murder house with ghosts in it, I'd be like, Ghosts aren't real and I'd walk in there and then I would die because I wouldn't know what genre I was in. Um
Yeah, and I've had to watch enough horror movies to be like, I know exactly what genre we're in. Bye Reds, you know.
Ha ha ha. I'll tell the ghosts you said hi. And that's me you you get rid of me five minutes in'cause I'm too expensive to keep in the movie for the rest of it.'Cause I need that one billion dollars to make labyrinth a movie, no, not that one.
¶ Designing an OSP-Themed Video Game
Uh well I I think we've got time for at least one more question, if not. This is one that I think could potentially spiral out, so I'm gonna throw that in here. Um this comes from Left Unsupervised to All. If you were to design an OSP themed video game, maybe even Time Heist related, although left open-ended to
Uh, what might that game look like? Are we fighting red on a moonlit rooftop with swords, trying to get through the right puzzle like dialogue with blue about history, or have a reward for beating one hundred percent of the game given to us by Indigo? So if we're creating an OSP video game, I think to just structure this a little bit, like what kind of game is it? And then we can kind of fill in
Are we going for a puzzle game? Are we doing a big open world adventure? Is this a roguelite? Where what's the OSPU video game?
Red, you once almost made a video game of the dating.
I didn't know.
You actually programmed the menu.
Well, yeah, I mean th in terms of making a video game that's like one percent uh
I I think that uh what we really need is a game that allows for a lot of mini games. Um not necessarily l I think right now most people think some Undertale when they hear that, where it's like, yeah, you know, you're you're we're moving through an open world, but the encounters proc weird little mini encounters that have sort of And I think that's a pretty good structure to include, uh having kind of like an open world.
It's like, oh, we've encountered one of Blue's little secret hideaways and now we get to do like a puzzle game or it's like, Oh, uh we've we found Maybe if you find a like a n a scenic enough part of the game, you find me there who's like, At last a worthy opponent. This backdrop rips, let's have a sword fight. Uh and then uh we can have uh little indigo spots around the world.
where uh it's like hundred percent completion but it's Every single hundred percent completion thing is an indigo except for the fishing mini game, which is not run by indigo, it's run by someone
Yeah, I know.
It actually counts against your completion percent.
If you won hundred percent the fishing mini game, I'll actually shut your game off without having saved it. Like it just blank screens and you have to reload.
You start pulling some flowy shit in the menu.
Yeah. Uh if if you've played Mar Mario Odyssey, after you beat the game, Princess Peach like goes kingdom to kingdom. You are in a whole bunch of different like fancy vistas and the player runs into you and you're like, Yeah, this one's okay, but not quite and you're like finding different vistas, each progressively nicer than the last, and then the final one is like, you're okay, here's the boss fight. Uhhuh. And then you finally fight because you found the the correct uh vista to duel in
But I think instead of uh fighting us necessarily, I think you're collecting us. Like you do our weird little mini games to g add us to your party. so that you can do whatever final battle we want. Uh it's sorta like how you, you know, you collect the sages in like Tears of the Kingdom and then they show
I think that that would be fun. Uh, and it also allows us to be uh rather than simply antagonistic forces, um, we get to actually help out a little bit. I just don't know what the big bad would be. Seizures.
We would not be served by doing a time height. I think there's enough of like the canon of that game that's been said that trying to bring too much like channel stuff into it ends up not working.
Yeah, have I said it once I've said it before, you shouldn't try and adapt a narrative video game to a different format and vice. Although they do have a a strong affinity for those early two thousands, uh, GBA movie tie ins, you know? Some you gotta and they're we're just like, have you wanted to do a platformer version of Aladdin, good fucking law?
Oh boy, the shovelware age. I think the bad guy should be Alexander the Great, uh and you Times but uh it's like different epithets every time and he's bringing in like different And then like as he builds in power
More threatening is the epithets change.
Exactly. And finally when we face him for real, it's Alexander the Great. Um Yeah. But then like we as you knock his health bars down, the epithets go back to like the lamer ones. Um until eventually it's Alexander. Yeah.
¶ The Utility of In-Universe Games & Podcast Outro
Anyway, I think we've peaked with that idea. Uh the uh the rest of the shenanigans we'll have to wait for later. We Man, the time heist is the bit that just keeps getting more legs. Uh but I worry that we've spawned off a second unrelated bit that's also gonna grow legs and wander off in a different direction.
Have a time heist strategy game, a time heist souls.
Time heist movie adaptation, but specifically from the game. Time heist movie, not that one.
Time heist Bellatro.
Real quick tangent on that, just as I can indulge. Uh I think that one of the world building things that is I think it gets maligned and it shouldn't is just making up a little s like Project within a project, a little bit of side bullshit. Like, oh, this is the anime that my characters are watching and writing fanfiction for in my dark gritty urban fantasy, or like, oh, this is the game that my heroes are playing like Gwent. Uh and I just think that's
fun and harmless. Like I I've seen people like sometimes get on creators' cases where like, why are you building this secondary bullshit instead of writing more plot? And it's like, well, because a a writer is not a machine that you insert time into and linear progress comes out. If designing the rules for Gwent is what makes you happy, fucking design more Gwent. It's great. Who could say no to more Gwent? I don't know anything about Gwent. Anyway.
It w what I do like about Gwent and I'll give the credit for is that it specifically ties back into Geralt's characterization where like he's this gruff monster hunter But he loves a fucking card game. And I think that becomes a character feature rather than just like, oh, and there's a board game that people play but never intersects with the plot. Okay, yeah, that's true. It doesn't intersect the plot, but it intersects with the plot.
The character, and that has a utility to like the Witcher as Geralt story, him being the anchor point, in a way where like. If there happens to be like four fucking chapters of the Silmarillion that are all about like Elvin Gwent, that's like, okay, who gives a shit? Yeah.
Yeah. I don't remember that being in the possible that it was cut in the edit. I can't say he didn't.
Well then he's a fool for not coming up with it first.
Elvin Gwent. Um I d in the in the Discworld novel Thud, it's named after an in-universe board game called Thud, which was then made in real life that uh by my parents have a copy of. I've played it. It's fun. It's an interesting it's a strategy recreating this historical battle between
dwarves and uh trolls. And it's uh turns out to be plot critical. Uh not in a like you must understand the rules and strategy of Thud to understand this, but like it does keep coming up because it's being used in this sort of
diplomatic relations that are starting to form between dwarves and trolls, these hereditary enemies. Like they'll meet up in little underground club uh and play thud together, but they won't play the sides you might expect them to. And it and anyway, it's a whole thing. Re good book, read book. Um Uh I think that is actually all the time we have inside baseball.
Uh Indigo had to bail real quick to do some cat and mouse related shenanigans. Uh so that's all fun. Uh so we it's our responsibility to end out the pod, which is why we've been going uninterrupted on a tangent for four minutes now. So I think probably we have a lot of. So, thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the Overly Sarcastic Podcast. We will be back in two weeks with a more normal episode where we will be discussing videos that came out.
month at the time of recording. And also I believe we will have a guest, friend of the channel.
Yeah.
So that'll be fun. Uh tune in for that. Um also, if you have not already gotten the Aurora pins, consider getting them. And if you have not yet gotten Aurora Volume 2, consider looking for it. Yes.
Yeah.
Oh, and if you're a patron, go and uh listen to the After After Show Show, which we are about to record, because this has been the Overly Sarcastic Podcast. Nailed it. Nailed the dismount.
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