Podcast appearances and mentions of candy crush

Hoy se sienta con nosotros Úrsula Corberó para hablar de sus grandes pasiones: el lujo, mentir para agradar a los demás, su trabajo, el sushi y —sobre todo— el Candy Crush. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tony and Haygood dig into the 2025 Video Game Hall of Fame inductees, where they were in 1996, how King is using AI on Candy Crush, and more potential tariff-related console price hikes. Even Dreamcast gets name-checked! PLUS:– MEMETASTIC: A Minecraft Movie– GOING APE: Better Man– SLAPPERS ONLY: Tony's favorite Goldeneye settings– SCORE: Beavis & Butthead Do America– WIN: A free code for a RARE game on Steam!This episode was mixed by Tony Sadowski and includes Joe Haygood and Tony Sadowski on vocals. You can download the podcast directly from here or click on one of the links below to subscribe. This episode features “Arcade Puzzler,” “Arcade Heroes,” and “Coin Op Chaos” by Eric Matyas, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.soundimage.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

BIG NEWS!!! Our 2025 Bored Teachers Comedy Tour FALL SHOWS are now on sale! Rally your teacher besties TODAY and lock in your spots for the night of laughter you NEED to make it through the first semester! https://bit.ly/TODBTCT We're coming to Australia, New Zealand and Canada! We'll be heading your way this fall, and tickets are already selling fast! Grab yours NOW: https://bit.ly/TODBTCT Book your hosts for a speaking event at your school: https://teacherspeakers.com/ Check out our MERCH! https://shop.boredteachers.com Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.beacons.ai/teachersoffdutypod Send us a voice message: https://bit.ly/3UPAT5a Listen to the podcast anywhere you stream your favorite shows: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3hHNybdOJb7BOwe0eNE7z6?si=66915da129a04d7b Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/teachers-off-duty/id1602160612 _________________________________ Teachers get your perks!! This episode is brought to you by: LaPure Cosmetics | Go To https://lapurenaturals.com/TOD to get 40% OFF your First Order _________________________________ This week on Teachers Off Duty, Brian, Jess, and Leslie dive into one of the hottest (and most hilarious) debates in education right now: Should we ban cell phones in school? From brutal bathroom fights and TikTok trends to mental health and emergency safety concerns, the crew tackles it all, sprinkled with their signature chaos and comedy, of course. Leslie shares how Virginia's new statewide ban is unfolding, Jess reflects on her own screen-time parenting struggles, and Brian confesses to being personally victimized by the comment section. Plus, they talk about kids turning teachers into memes, the dystopian rise of Life360, and the awkward silence that comes when everyone has to put their phones away—including the teacher. As the gang debates classroom control, digital addiction, and how to parent (or teach) through the noise, one thing becomes clear—there are no easy answers. But with a lot of empathy and a little humor, they explore how teachers can create healthier boundaries with tech while still preparing students for a digital world. Oh, and spoiler alert: stretchy jeans, nostalgic field trips, and Candy Crush all make a surprising appearance too. Whether you're Team “Lock It in a Pouch” or “Let Them Listen to Music,” this episode is packed with laughs, reflection, and some real talk about tech, teaching, and the world our kids are growing up in. Listen now & don't forget to subscribe!   Follow your hosts: Leslie Rob @LeslieRobComedy Jess Smith @TeacherTalesOfMissSmith Brian Moote @MooteComedy Follow us on all platforms @TeachersOffDutyPodcast _________________________________ Teachers Off Duty - A Bored Teachers©️ Podcast

Love on the Spectrum soulmates Abbey & David join the boys to discuss their viral love song, what having autism is like, gifting Logan & Mike handmade hats, reaching level 9566 on Candy Crush, playing the Disney association game, magical first date at the zoo, David surprises Abbey with gummy bears, engagement

What if the biggest impact of AI isn't replacing jobs, but quickly raising the bar for everyone? In this episode of Leader Generation, host Tessa Burg talks with serial entrepreneur and Corpora.ai CEO Mel Morris about AI in business and marketing.  Mel brings decades of experience building and scaling tech companies—from his humble beginnings in data collection to leading King Digital, the force behind Candy Crush. He's now pioneering a new kind of AI-powered research engine—and he's got a lot to say about where we're heading next. Mel gets into the practical realities of AI: how it's shifting the competitive landscape, how it can (and should) be used to save time, and why understanding your unique value is more important than ever. He offers a refreshing perspective on how AI is helping lower-skilled individuals rise up and what that means for marketing teams trying to stand out in a sea of sameness.  Whether you're just starting to explore AI or already knee-deep, this episode will challenge your assumptions and help you think more strategically about your tech stack and your value. Leader Generation is hosted by Tessa Burg and brought to you by Mod Op.    About Mel Morris: Mel Morris is a visionary entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of Corpora.ai, a groundbreaking AI-driven research platform transforming how we harness research. Known as the former chairman of King Digital Entertainment, creators of the global hit Candy Crush Saga, Mel has a proven track record of driving innovation and building market-leading companies. With a deep passion for technology and its potential to transform industries, Mel now focuses on advancing AI to optimize research and decision-making. His leadership and forward-thinking approach continue to shape the future of technology and business.    About Tessa Burg: Tessa is the Chief Technology Officer at Mod Op and Host of the Leader Generation podcast. She has led both technology and marketing teams for 15+ years. Tessa initiated and now leads Mod Op's AI/ML Pilot Team, AI Council and Innovation Pipeline. She started her career in IT and development before following her love for data and strategy into digital marketing. Tessa has held roles on both the consulting and client sides of the business for domestic and international

Mauler's mom plays Candy Crush on a Nokia 3310, Rush plans a trip to space with Rick Moranis, Jenni will happily lap up your foot juice as long as you a ren't a stranger, and Brady hides his beer in a bush at the park. Love the podcast? Leave us a review!

Ever wonder how a pop punk band gets its start?  Joey CXP is right there, defining himself with his immensely talented band and original take on a well-traveled music genre. Currently promoting his latest single "prettiest girl in town" and EP "CANDY CRUSH", the band is getting ready to hit the road and do their first tour in Canada starting May 16!During our podcast, Joey and the band discussed how they met, their beginnings, aspirations, and their excitement about touring outside the country. And they showed their impressive musical chops when they played three acoustic songs in the AP Vibes Studio.Cutting their teeth in the New Brunswick, NJ, basement scene, Joey CXP is expanding upon the pop punk genre, gaining experience and, most importantly, gaining admirers.https://www.joeycxp.com Asbury Park Vibes Podcast Available on Spotify, Apple, Google, iHeart, Audible, and PandoraHosted by Diane DiMemmo & Doug DresherCopyright 2020-2025 Asbury Park Vibes. All rights reserved.

Wird Bastian zum Verspätungs-Zocker? Werden Melanies Sanifair-Bons langsam zur Geldanlage? Und weshalb sorgt Candycrush für einen Rolltreppen-Stau am Hauptbahnhof? Antworten hier.

From cracking down on distracted drivers to flipping the script on Biden's CPB One app, Tara unloads on the chaos of sanctuary policies, illegal immigration loopholes, and Democrat double standards. With Trump now flipping the deportation switch and exposing social security fraud, the left is in meltdown mode—especially as some Dems regret voting to deport rapists. Buckle up—no Candy Crush allowed.

From distracted drivers with Candy Crush addictions to illegal immigrants gaming the system with Biden's CBP One app, this fiery commentary dives into the surge of lawlessness, voter fraud, and political hypocrisy. With new legislation targeting hands-free driving and a crackdown on illegal entry and fraudulent Social Security use, the tide is turning. Meanwhile, Democrats scramble to protect a voting base that shouldn't be on the rolls to begin with—some even backtracking on deporting violent offenders. Buckle up—this ride gets wild.

In this episode of Game Pass or Pass, we break down why Balatro is far more than a gimmick. With combo-stacking strategy, addictive progression, and just enough chaos to keep every run fresh, this game turns your brain into a bluffing machine.Whether you're a poker veteran or a card game rookie, there's a lot to unpack:Is Balatro just a trend ride, or does it have real staying power?How does its roguelike structure stand out from Slay the Spire clones?Is it worth your time on Xbox Game Pass, or just a passing hand?Find out if this card-slinging chaos is a Game Pass… or a pass.

Bobby Kotick built a $69 billion empire from scratch—and the story is even crazier than it sounds.In this episode of The Big Shot, we sit down with gaming's ultimate entrepreneur. Bobby takes us from hustling snacks at baseball games to building one of the most iconic tech companies in the world: Activision Blizzard. Hear how he cold-called Nintendo, got investment from Steve Wynn on a private jet, took over a bankrupt video game company, and turned it into an empire that Microsoft bought for $69 billion.In this episode, you'll hear about:Bobby's early hustles: selling ashtrays, snacks, and party access in NYCDropping out of college after Steve Jobs told him toStarting a dorm room company with Howard MarksConvincing Steve Wynn to invest $300K after a chance meetingReviving Activision from bankruptcy using old IP and gritWhy Pitfall and River Raid were billion-dollar blueprintsHow Activision became the first American Nintendo licenseeThe Apple boardroom showdown with John SculleyTurning Activision into a media empire: Call of Duty, Candy Crush, and Guitar HeroWhat it felt like selling the company to Microsoft for $69 billionHis philosophy on leadership, loyalty, and building an enduring business—In This Episode We Cover:(00:00) Intro(03:19) Selling ashtrays at playdates: Bobby's first hustles(06:39) Shadowing NYC real estate legends like Larry Silverstein(09:59) Dorm room hardware startup with Howard Marks(13:18) Inventing a typewriter-printer hack and launching via Byte magazine(16:38) Meeting Steve Jobs(19:58) Why Steve Jobs tells Bobby to drop out of school(23:17) Getting featured in Forbes and making his parents panic(26:37) The wild story of meeting Steve Wynn at a Texas cowboy gala(29:57) The legendary $300K check in the basement of a casino(33:16) Trying to sell to Apple (and the cigar moment with Sculley)(36:36) Licensing games for EA and learning to be scrappy(39:56) Black Monday, the Amiga, and a failed bid for Commodore(43:15) Buying 20% of Nintendo's U.S. licensing agent(46:35) Discovering Activision buried inside a bankrupt company(49:55) Why Bobby wanted to bring Pitfall and River Raid back to life(53:14) The $400K move that changed gaming history(56:34) A childhood connection saves the Activision bankruptcy deal(59:54) Turning a bankrupt company into a profitable one in months(01:03:13) Raising $40M and going on an acquisition spree(01:06:33) How Bobby became the longest-serving tech CEO(01:09:53) The Toy Story game meeting that cemented Bobby's role(01:13:12) Why Bobby never wanted to run a business that lost money(01:15:32) Reflecting on the Microsoft acquisition and legacy—Where To Find Bobby Kotick:• X: https://x.com/bobbykotick • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbykotick/ —Where To Find Big Shot: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bigshot.show/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@bigshotpodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  • TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@bigshotshow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/bigshotshow/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  • Harley Finkelstein: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/harleyf⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • David Segal: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/tea_maverick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• Production and Marketing: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co⁠

We're officially done talking about Aimee Lou Wood's teeth—let's focus on Walter Goggins' wildly impressive resume. The gang discusses the monster hit, Adolescence, and the most watched shows on Netflix. Is your favorite in the top 10? The cost of iPhones might be going WAY up. A PSA for men: here's one simple way to get an instant confidence boost. Sarah says you can't wear those club pants when you're biking. Vinnie insists he hasn't spent a single dime on Candy Crush—should we believe him?

"Fifteen years of silence. Fifteen years of distance. And then, tragedy brought us back together."On this week's special episode we are joined by Corbett Hoxworth and David Koloroutis as they share the journey, process and creation of "The Goodbyes We Never Get" and honor the one who it was all for, Keith Tackett. Please consider purchasing The Goodbyes We Never GetAll proceeds from this record will go to his wife, Alex, his children, and the Tackett family.https://helloeternal.bandcamp.com/album/the-goodbyes-we-never-get-deluxe-album Time Stamps0:00 - "He's playing Candy Crush, calm down"1:45 - David & Corbett5:15 - Rec N' Rev35:30 - Hello Eternal36:30 - Origins44:20 - Keith54:15 - Theme of The Goodbyes We Never Get1:03:15 - The Process1:18:13 - The Songs1:34:00 - What Have You Learned?1:44:45 - Final ThoughtsStreamThe Goodbyes We Never GetSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/4DtxeOaK2gR7rPx3mOSrGH?si=mDBlXMcsTrK-LPS6XtHi5w Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-goodbyes-we-never-get-deluxe-edition/1786860391 DK Thunder:Spotify:  https://open.spotify.com/artist/4ecONHQKwpuqMeIaZgT5wM?si=gFP5V89CRZyql88Sx-Mr8Q Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/dk-thundah/1519696426 Follow:David Koloroutis/DK Thundah: https://www.instagram.com/dkthundah?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw== Corbett Hoxworth: https://www.instagram.com/corbettoh?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw== 

Nuevo episodio de Jugando a Derecho. Volvemos con + noticias interesantes de Jorge, y con la mezcla de dos temas de rabiosa actualidad: finalidades prohibidas de IA (directamente aplicables ya desde el 2 de febrero - Reglamento UE IA), y los micropagos que hacen uso de cosas chungas que comban mal con lo 1º (y también de actualidad por la noticia que habréis visto de los principios UE para que muestre el valor real en dinero). Esperamos que os guste 😊 Noticias: 12:00 Finalidades prohibidas IA y micropagos: 29:59 Enlaces de interés: - El documento de principios que se comenta al inicio: no es regulación de la UE, pero ya veremos su recorrido en las autoridades de consumo que lo acordaron: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/8af13e88-6540-436c-b137-9853e7fe866a_en?filename=Key%20principles%20on%20in-game%20virtual%20currencies.pdf - El “salón de la vergüenza” de patrones oscuros de Harry Brignull: https://www.deceptive.design/hall-of-shame -Enlace a las capturas del collage de maldades de Candy Crush, el ejemplo de perfilado comercial de Praetorians, el de Steam y el ejemplo de neurofuturo de la Comisión Europea : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GnGk23PzCtg8Dp9qRPwmIDUJxOrR1MUi?usp=sharing -Guía de patrones adictivos de la AEPD: https://www.aepd.es/guias/patrones-adictivos-en-tratamiento-de-datos-personales.pdf -Borrador de directrices de la Comisión Europea sobre finalidades prohibidas Reglamento IA: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/commission-publishes-guidelines-prohibited-artificial-intelligence-ai-practices-defined-ai-act -Borrador del Reglamento de IA, pero desde una web que facilita mucho la lectura: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/es/ Música de cabecera e hilo: CC 3.0 - Uso no comercial, reconocimiento y compartir igual -Autor: sawsquarenoise. Pista: RottenMage_SpaceJacked_OST. Fuente: freemusicarchive - https://freemusicarchive.org/ -Autor: Mrplastic. Pista: MrPlastic-Jump. Fuente: Pixabay - https://pixabay.com/es/music/late-mrplastic-jump-11138/ Autor: Pixabay. Pista: NewsReportIntro. Fuente Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/es/sound-effects/newsreportmusic-6242/ Autor: Darsycho (Freesound). Pista: zombie moans. Fuente Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/es/sound-effects/zombie-moans-29924/ Autor: myuserofmusicmagicmaker. Pista: i see money. Fuente Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/es/sound-effects/i-see-money-181273/ Autor: u_byub5wd934. Pista: Cashier "ka-ching" sound effect. Fuente Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/es/sound-effects/cashier-quotka-chingquot-sound-effect-129698/ Imágenes de ilustración - combinación de las siguiente: -Autor:Juhele Imagen: caffeine-4391563_1280 Fuente: https://pixabay.com/es/vectors/cafe%C3%ADna-caf%C3%A9-taza-bebida-cafeter%C3%ADa-4391563/ -Autor: Mohamed_hassan Imagen: tank-2710913_640 Fuente: https://pixabay.com/es/illustrations/tanque-silueta-mec%C3%A1nico-guerra-2710913/ -Autor: Mohamed_hassan Imagen: robotic-5714849_640 Fuente: https://pixabay.com/es/vectors/rob%C3%B3tico-robot-m%C3%A1quina-sistema-5714849/ -Autor: khieyah Imagen: unicorn-7107894_640 Fuente: https://pixabay.com/es/illustrations/unicornio-baile-danza-7107894/ -Autor: OpenClipart-Vectors. Imagen: stars-161939_640. Fuente: https://pixabay.com/es/vectors/estrellas-vistoso-rosado-rojo-161939/ -Autor: Pixabay. Imagen: stars-7395813_640. Fuente: https://pixabay.com/es/vectors/estrellas-nubes-linda-noche-7395813/

Am 25.03.2025 besuchte Sophie Passmann Peter in seinem Stream. Eigentlich wollten sie Candy Crush spielen, aber daraus wurde nix, weil das Gespräch so interessant war :D Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He's a Candy Crush fiend!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

She's ready for player two.Based on the post of MsCherylTerra, in 3 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at My First Time.Player one is me, Ramona Roth. I'm nineteen, blue hair, pierce eyebrow, former president of the student council, virgin.War is hell, they say, but I say they're wrong.Hell is insanity, and insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.Hell is false hopes and flagrant disappointment.Hell is knowing that the squabbling of Ilyra, the princess from the far-off planet of Nianus, and Jostok, the snarky-but-pleasantly-ripped humanoid alien soldier from Quighnan, would attract the attention of Izzon's monstrous space beast.It's knowing that the beast would destroy the vent your plucky band of misfits was crawling through.It's knowing that you'd all tumble into the cavernous belly of the spaceship with only the last-second triggering of a force-field from your omni-cuff to prevent you from turning into gizzard soup on the space-grey floor.I watched Jostok realize that the force field hadn't prevented the princess from being crushed beneath the weight of the metal that tumbled from above. I watched him separate her from the tangled pile of bodies and bionic limbs, cradling her barely conscious form against one beefy, armor-clad bicep.I watched her brilliant violet eyes flutter open, and saw the little half-smile on her face as he called her by her name, and heard the weakness in her voice as she reminded him that it was Princess Ilyra to him. I heard Jostok chuckle wetly and assure her she was going to make it.After all, she was the princess. This was not how princesses died.Which was true, because she didn't die like that.Izzon's beast hurled itself to the ground in front of us, its weight making the spaceship itself shudder violently. A beam of light shot forth from its gaping maw, wrenching Ilyra from Jostok's arms. He reached for her, but before his bionic arm was even fully extended, the beast had pulled her into the air, clutched her between its massive claws, and snapped her in half like she was a fucking Kit Kat bar.So, she died like that instead.There was a beat; a pause as horror dawned across the party. A splash of blood splattered on the floor followed by the delicate circlet Ilyra always wore."No," breathed Jostok.A metallic cackle from above filled the room."So much for your princess," Izzon said as he descended on a floating platform.He landed just in front of the beast. Two long strides brought him to the circlet, and he plucked it from the pool of blood before making a mockery of Ilyra's memory and placing the fragile band of metal on his horned forehead."You killed her," Jostok said, his voice wavering."Well, duh," Izzon said, chuckling. "What, you think this is your fairytale or something, Quighnan? You kill the horrible, evil, sad little man who was just trying to get back what was rightfully his? You think you save the world, you get the girl, you get the glory?"His smile faded, and he straightened the circlet before reaching for his omni-cuff."Well, Quighnan, I have news for you. You failed. The world is mine, the girl is dead, and you; ""Shut up, you piece of Cul excrement!" Jostok roared."Or what?" Izzon taunted."Or this," I muttered.Surprise flashed across Izzon's face as Jostok smashed his omni-cuff, using the last of its power to create his trademark rocket launcher. Hefting it over his shoulder, he screamed as he fired it. Izzon's beast stepped forward, snatching its master from the ground seconds before the ball of certain death hit him, and it was time for me to take over.The battle was hell. It was a place I'd been a million times before, and I let the world around me fade as I focused on Izzon and Izzon alone. His beast didn't like that, of course, but the beast wasn't my concern. There were others to fight the beast; only I could fight Izzon.Sweat beaded on my forehead and dryness scratched at my eyes. I refused to look away, refused to be distracted for even a millisecond from my task. Izzon darted around the battlefield, firing laser after laser in my direction, but I knew how to dodge them. I knew how to use them against him; I knew how to lure the beast to just the right spot for Izzon to maim it himself.And I knew what would happen next.The world shook, a rumbling that vibrated through my bones. Izzon's platform shot up, and I tracked it, ignoring the shouts and cries of the battle raging around me. High above, I saw the flash of light, and I hurled myself out of the way moments before a ball of plasma crashed down and punched a hole through the entire ship.A rush of air sucked through the floor, and I clung to the strategically placed pole for dear life, still refusing to take my eyes off Izzon's platform. I waited, watched, my heart racing as he descended, and descended, and;"Now," I said through clenched teeth, and I jumped.Wind and suction twirled around me as I fought against the force with everything in me. It was a Hail Mary, a last-ditch effort, a moment of pure insanity as I mashed at the omni-cuff wildly. I mashed, and mashed, and mashed, and;I made it.I got to the platform."Oh my fuck," I breathed. "Oh fuck, oh frak, oh; fruck."I finally did it.Izzon stood before me, his wretched face twisted in anger. I pointed my weapon at him, just as I dreamed I would a thousand times before, and without so much as a second thought, I began to fire. One shot hit and his body jostled; another and red splattered around me; one more and;And all went dark.Sudden silence replaced the sounds of battle as blackness overtook me. For half a moment, I thought I had died, like for-real died. Then, my eyes adjusted, and across from me I saw the form of a woman with pale skin, wide eyes, and bright blue hair in the depths of a black mirror."No," I whispered.The woman mimicked me."No," I said again, a low groan as realization dawned on me.The woman's face crumpled. A bolt of lightning flashed through the basement window, and as thunder roared, I screamed."You've got to be frucking kidding me!" I shrieked, and I'm not at all ashamed to admit that I burst into tears."Ramona!" my mom shouted distantly.I ignored her cry; tears were streaming down my cheeks as frantic footsteps thudded on the stairs. Despondently, I slid off the couch and crumpled to the floor, clutching my controller to my chest as I sobbed."Ramona!" Mom gasped again, the faint glow of her cell phone flashlight spilling across the basement. "Are you hurt? Ramona, talk to me, w-what happened, are you; ""The power," I whimpered as she reached me and hesitantly touched my shoulder. "The power went out, and I was so close.""Close to; what?""Beating Izzon," I sniffed.Silent tension filled the basement."In a game," she said flatly."Well, yeah, but; ""You screamed bloody murder in the middle of a huge thunderstorm because the power went out during a game."It was no use trying to explain to her that I'd been stuck on the boss fight in The Circlet of Nianus for days. I stared sullenly across the basement at the darkened TV as Mom launched into another one of her ranting lectures that had become routine since I'd returned home for the summer after my first year of university."This is not proper behavior for a nineteen-year-old woman," she said, probably. I would've had to have been listening to know for sure, which I wasn't, but all her lectures were pretty much the same. "Christ, Ramona, it's like I don't even know who you are anymore. What happened to the sweet girl who left for university last August?"Then, if that lecture was anything like the other ones; which it likely was, but I still wasn't listening; she would have started tearing up."I don't know what I did to deserve you acting like this,   Ramona," she probably said in a watery voice. "What happened to my goody-two-shoes straight-laced brown-noser who would never dream of putting a toe out of line and who I, as the head of the Minwack Falls Homeowners Association, could truly be proud of since she was as cookie-cutter and put-together as the yards and fences I work so hard to keep in line at all times?"Well, she probably didn't say that last part. At least, not out loud. But the implication was there. When I tuned back in to the conversation, she was shaking her head as she looked dramatically in the other direction."Honestly,   Ramona, maybe we made a mistake," she was saying, for real that time. "Sending you to that school; I worried that you weren't ready and now; ""I was perfectly ready to go to university," I said dully. "And I'm an adult, so you didn't send me anywhere. I chose to go. And my name is Ramona.""Adults don't throw tantrums because of a silly game.""It's not silly," I said through gritted teeth. "This is what I want to do with my life.""Play games.""Make games.""Hmm," she said. "Be that as it may, I highly doubt you'll find a summer job making games. I charged the laptop battery up earlier today, so if the power stays out, we can still work on your resume tonight."I sighed. "I have a resume. I already asked if they were hiring at The Sword and Dice and they said they'd get back to me.""I doubt the comic book store is hiring," she said, unimpressed, before she started towards the stairs. "I'm surprised Jordan Cooper's managed to keep it open as long as he has. I'll go down to The Enchanted Florist tomorrow and speak with Owen. That girl he has working there was incredibly rude to me the other day and refused to call him so I could make a complaint about her.""Okay, Karen," I muttered under my breath.Mom turned. "What was that?""Nothing."She clearly didn't believe me and shot a very Karen-esque look in my direction. "Well, if he's willing to hire her, I bet he's one of the few people in town who would be willing to overlook your new; style and possibly offer you a job."And there it was; yet another dig at my hair, and my new eyebrow piercing, and the fact that I wasn't dressed like her President of the Student Council Princess anymore.I wish I could say it had been a gradual transformation, that I hadn't been the stereotypical example of the good-girl going wild as soon as she was on her own for the first time. However, years of living with Liz Roth, head of the Minwack Falls Homeowners Association, vice-president of the Minwack Falls High School Parent-Teacher Association, and volunteer board member for the Minwack Falls Good Neighbor Society, had instilled an almost-detrimental instinct to be honest in me.I was absolutely the model of a rebellious girl experiencing life away from an overbearing mother and semi-absent father.I'd left for university as a geeky girl with suitcases full of modest blouses and nice-but-not-too-tight jeans. At the end of the semester, I returned home with suitcases full of pop culture t-shirts, dark jeans that were ripped in all the right places, and Chuck Taylors that I'd kept on my feet day in and day out so I could get that worn-in look as fast as possible. I was still geeky and still a girl, but now that girl had bright blue hair, an eyebrow ring, and an exasperatedly cynical attitude.I loved who I had become. I loved being Ramona, the girl with wild hair and full of laughter. I loved geeking out with my friends over video games and sci-fi movies and superheroes. I loved being able to show people that girl instead of the girl I had to be under my mother's roof.Back home, though, that girl wasn't welcome. That girl was an embarrassment to the head of the H O A. Worse, I was in for another three full months of putting up with my mom's pressure to dye my hair back to a respectable color and stop wearing studded belts and ripped jeans."Teach you that your choices have consequences," Mom was saying, and I'd been so distracted I hadn't even bothered imagining what she might have said. "If The Enchanted Florist won't hire you, you'll need to get your hair fixed.""My hair isn't broken.""I'm not letting you sit down here playing video games all summer. You need to get a job.""Trust me, I'd like nothing more," I said. "I could use the break."Before Mom could respond; and trust me, her inner Karen was desperate to give me a piece of its mind; we were interrupted by the sound of the door opening above us. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly."Your father's home," she said unnecessarily. "Finish tidying up here and come set the table."I waited until she had started back up the basement stairs to let out the breath I'd been holding, leaning miserably against the couch as the darkness enveloped me again.It was going to be a long frucking summer.Summer Expectations.I was saved from having to work on my resume with my mom peering over my shoulder by her innate need to be involved in every disaster.Dinner was blissfully quiet. Dad didn't say much, as per usual, and Mom's constant chatter manifested as mumbled frustrations while she scrolled through the town Facebook page on her phone, the mushy broccoli and dry chicken on her plate abandoned as she took control of the situation via social media.As quickly as I could, I shoveled bite after bite of mediocre, overcooked blandness into my mouth. Like most of my classmates in first year, I'd gained the ubiquitous Freshman Fifteen, but I hadn't minded in the slightest. I'd been relatively thin most of my life, and putting on some weight had finally made me look less like a twelve-year-old boy and more like an actual, honest-to-God woman.Unfortunately, a full summer of my mom's cooking meant that I'd probably slim down to nothingness again unless I started stopping by the Hokey Pokey Ice Cream Parlor twice a day. Which wasn't a terrible idea, actually; their ice cream was all homemade and it was phenomenal.Except that would take money, and while I was rich in Rupees and Bells and Caps, the owners of the Hokey Pokey only accepted boring old dollars.

Something's not right in the world of location data.In January, a location data broker named Gravy Analytics was hacked, with the alleged cybercriminal behind the attack posting an enormous amount of data online as proof. Though relatively unknown to most of the public, Gravy Analytics is big in the world of location data collection, and, according to an enforcement action from the US Federal Trade Commission last year, the company claimed to “collect, process, and curate more than 17 billion signals from around a billion mobile devices daily.”Those many billions of signals, because of the hack, were now on display for security researchers, journalists, and curious onlookers to peruse, and when they did, they found something interesting. Listed amongst the breached location data were occasional references to thousands of popular mobile apps, including Tinder, Grindr, Candy Crush, My Fitness Pal, Tumblr, and more.The implication, though unproven, was obvious: The mobile apps were named with specific lines of breached data because those apps were the source of that breached data. And, considering how readily location data is traded directly from mobile apps to data brokers to advertisers, this wasn't too unusual a suggestion.Today, nearly every free mobile app makes money through ads. But ad purchasing and selling online is far more sophisticated than it used to be for newspapers and television programs. While companies still want to place their ads in front of demographics they believe will have the highest chance of making a purchase—think wealth planning ads inside the Wall Street Journal or toy commercials during cartoons—most of the process now happens through pieces of software that can place bids at data “auctions.” In short, mobile apps sometimes collect data about their users, including their location, device type, and even battery level. The apps then bring that data to an advertising auction, and separate companies “bid” on the ability to send their ads to, say, iPhone users in a certain time zone or Android users who speak a certain language.This process happens every single day, countless times every hour, but in the case of the Gravy Analytics breach, some of the apps referenced in the data expressed that, one, they'd never heard of Gravy Analytics, and two, no advertiser had the right to collect their users' location data.In speaking to 404 Media, a representative from Tinder said:“We have no relationship with Gravy Analytics and have no evidence that this data was obtained from the Tinder app.”A representative for Grindr echoed the sentiment:“Grindr has never worked with or provided data to Gravy Analytics. We do not share data with data aggregators or brokers and have not shared geolocation with ad partners for many years.”And a representative for a Muslim prayer app, Muslim Pro, said much of the same:“Yes, we display ads through several ad networks to support the free version of the app. However, as mentioned above, we do not authorize these networks to collect location data of our users.”What all of this suggested was that some other mechanism was allowing for users of these apps to have their locations leaked and collected online.And to try to prove that, one independent researcher conducted an experiment: Could he find himself in his own potentially leaked data?Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with independent research Tim Shott about his investigation into leaked location data. In his experiment, Shott installed two mobile games that were referenced in the breach, an old game called Stack, and a more current game...

A British woman's Candy Crush addiction just earned her a $215,000 payout in court.  Plus, a former high school student from Connecticut is now suing her school district because she graduated without being taught how to read or write. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi friends! Excited to share this interview from my *other* show, Colette & Matt Have Entered the Chat, where we cover video games and their communities. This one is about the extraordinary legacy of "Minesweeper," which changed the Internet in more ways than you might think. Enjoy! -Original show notes from March 24, 2023- Get the full episode here (or in your favorite pod app): https://haveenteredthechat.com/episodes/100-minesweeper-kyle-orland-diablo-4 When "Minesweeper" and "Solitaire" were first bundled with Microsoft's Windows operating system in the early '90s, they introduced millions of people to PC gaming, many of whom had never used a mouse before. "Minesweeper" in particular became a favorite addiction of many Microsoft programmers, including Bill Gates. Kyle Orland, senior gaming editor at Ars Technica, has written an upcoming book about the legacy of the grey, tiled Roguelike that paved the way for a more robust ecosystem of PC games and eventually the Xbox brand we know today. The ubiquity of these casual pack-in games rivaled the scale of current "Candy Crush" obsessions, and also caused moral panic among business and political leaders, who decried office workers frittering away their productivity on addictive games. Kyle dives into the curious exploits that competitive Minesweepers discovered when they were finally connected to the Internet, and how Microsoft missed its chance for "Solitaire" to become the "Fortnite" of the Windows Store. He also shares stories from his early days curating a Super Mario Bros. fan site when he was 15, interviewing Shigeru Miyamoto, and why "Bubble Bobble" desperately needs a 3D reboot. Plus, we absolve Colette's guilt about giving Blizzard money for the "Diablo IV" beta and why a new Tactics + Roguelite + RPG + Tower Defense + Diabloish game has got its hooks in Matt. Pre-order Kyle's book "Minesweeper" from Boss Fight Books: https://bossfightbooks.com/products/minesweeper-by-kyle-orland Or on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Minesweeper-31-Boss-Fight-Books/dp/B0BRSKKLGV/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Candy Crush Addiction by Maine's Coast 93.1

02-26-25 The Bizarre File #1772 A woman was arrested for urinating on grocery store food and filming it after cops find trove of similar videos dating back 4 years. A couple was forced to sit next to a dead passenger for four hours on a flight. A woman claims she has the power to control men through her menstrual blood. A Georgia man was sentenced to 20 years for bombing woman’s home. A woman received six figure payout from NHS after she developed an addiction to Candy Crush. All that and more in the Bizarre File!

Bobby talks about a guy gesture to his fiance that took 3 years and some are claiming is the most romantic of all-time. Bobby reveals why companies make us intentionally wait when we call for customer service. Bobby talks about a wild story of how a woman won a lawsuit after medication forced her to become addicted to the game Candy Crush. Bobby talks about a close call on a Chicago runway where two planes almost hit each other.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ask your smart speaker to "Play One Oh Three One Austin"

2GG Best Of: Candy Crush by Two Girls and a Guy

Bobby talks about a guy gesture to his fiance that took 3 years and some are claiming is the most romantic of all-time. Bobby reveals why companies make us intentionally wait when we call for customer service. Bobby talks about a wild story of how a woman won a lawsuit after medication forced her to become addicted to the game Candy Crush. Bobby talks about a close call on a Chicago runway where two planes almost hit each other.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dave and Chuck the Freak talk about Dave slipped and fell in mud, top things servers secretly hate, 100-year-old driver crashed into building, plane had to make emergency landing shortly after takeoff, woman lured older men on dating app to rob them, one of the Island Boys arrested for drugs and gun, guy busted with U-Haul full of weed, people complaining that their illegal license plate blockers weren’t working, grandmother and grandson working on restoring a car together, Burger King workers honor regular customer who passed away, Uncut announcement, NHL ref took puck to nuts, Michael Wilhoite punches cop, projected NBA champs, highest average ticket prices for a single game in sprots, cast of Friends weren’t in Matthew Perry documentary, Kim Kardashian, Fyre Festival creator talks about second festival, Lester Holt will retire from Nightly News, Meghan Markel shared new logo but it was copied from a town in Spain, Wu Tang Clan announce farewell tour, Roberta Flack died, rub and tug busted woman named Soon Bang, woman and child helped man escape from prison, woman busted with coke in luggage, man got out of prison after 30 years for crime he didn’t commit, have you had a Vagacial?, women are spreading glitter on themselves to see if they are dating a married man, sexual health days, old man smeared substance on car door handles for parking on his land, man stabbed guy with fork when tried to car jack him, update on guy who got face and double hand transplant, tooth in eye surgery, woman thought she was buying a Picasso but it was a scam, woman stole sink from restaurant, woman got hooked on Candy Crush and won settlement, thousands of seagulls plague a town, camera found hidden in ceiling of college bathroom, update on woman who was poisoned with antifreeze at bar, JoAnn Fabrics closing down, chocolate prices rising, are men or women more generous?, telephobia, Pokémon shaped Cheeto, strange way guy smuggled drugs, and more!

8a-9a Scott Capurro joins the show, a woman's Candy Crush gets her a payday in court, anther stupid TikTok challenge involving dropping things on your foot, and a clerks mistake wins a woman $2 million.

The trial for the suspects accused of stealing that solid gold toilet from and English palace is underway, In other UK bathroom fixture news, someone stole the entire sink from a restaurants bathroom, Woman wins $215,000 court payout because she was addicted to Candy Crush, Cat survived for 3 weeks trapped in a sofa that had been in a storage facility and then moved from Washington to Colorado

What's grabbing your attention today—Astros vs. Mets, DeMeco Ryans at the Combine, or Rockets vs. Bucks? Plus, Reggie's man-crush says the Texans should make a bold trade, but Lopez thinks it's not that bold and totally worth the compensation. QOTD: What real inanimate object would you absolutely bid on if you could? Around the NFL, B Scott joins to discuss rule changes, including a potential ban on the “Tush Push,” and a DT hitting the trade market. Plus, B Scott's thoughts on Astros Spring Training and What's Popping, with UH going back-to-back. ITL dives into key NFL Draft and Combine questions with hindsight in mind. In Lunch-Time Confessions, did Lopez get into Sean's head? And Seth Payne joins live from Palm Springs with the latest Astros updates. DeMeco Ryans speaks live from Indy—what did he have to say? Plus, Figgy's Mixtape features a stupid criminal, a mistaken criminal, and a Candy Crush addict who just got paid. More live updates from DeMeco at the Combine!

I have almost NO snow in my front yard after yesterday. Backyard is a swampy disaster, but the front of my house is clear! Even that dreaded hump at the end of the driveway is gone. More warm weather the rest of this week with a possibility of 55° on Friday! In the news this morning, the latest on the condition of the Pope, a deadly gas leak in Oakdale, legendary singer Roberta Flack passed away yesterday at the age of 88, and the Joann Fabric store in Onalaska will now close permanently. Over to the world of sports, where the Bucks are in Houston tonight to take on the Rockets and may be without Giannis, the Badgers stay at #11 in the most recent AP Top 25 poll and play tonight at home against unranked Washington, the Packers apparently are lobbying to get the "tush push" banned by the NFL, and a Broncos coach was arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer at an airport. Elsewhere in sports, the IU Indianapolis men's basketball team escaped without injury after their bus caught fire, and a hockey ref took a puck right to the wedding tackle! We also talked to Grant Bilse of the Wisco Sports Show…on his birthday!!! Let you know what's new on New Release Tuesday and we also talked about Starbucks discontinuing some of their less-popular menu items. Crazy story about a family's cat that went missing while they were moving only to show up in their new home after it got stuck in a couch! There's another stupid trend on TikTok where people drop different items on their feet and rate the level of pain. Interesting move by JetBlue as they will now comp your vacation if it gets rained out(with stipulations, of course!) We talked about some of the federal offices in Wisconsin that are being looked at by the DOGE, and did you see Alec Baldwin get harassed by a Trump impersonator? Surprised he kept his cool. And in today's edition of "Bad News with Happy Music", we had stories about a woman who got addicted to Candy Crush and just won a bunch of money in a lawsuit because of her addiction, a guy who got busted trying to smuggle cocaine in his wig, a pilot who got bit by a tarantula MID-FLIGHT, a woman in NH who was peeing on the food at a grocery store where she worked for the last four years, and a couple who got stuck on a flight sitting next to a dead woman. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In today's episode, Dr. Caroline Spaner joins the team to present a case where a double take was necessary to finding answers. A patient who appears well enough, who was up in bed playing Candy Crush quickly takes a turn and its up to the Physicians to don their detective hats to solve the case. 

Ever wondered why some games blow up while others fade into obscurity? We dive headfirst into the surprisingly complex world of Solitaire games—yes, Solitaire! Especiall, Candy Crush Solitaire! We unpack how this classic genre has evolved from your grandma's desktop time-killer to a booming corner of the gaming industry, fueled by IP powerhouses like Candy Crush Solitaire.Oh, and we're not holding back on the Candy Crush of it all. We swing between hype and skepticism about its latest spin-off, asking: Can a titanic IP guarantee success, or is the market too unpredictable? This episode's got hot takes, cold truths, and enough Solitaire trivia to impress your group chat.Get our MERCH NOW: 25gamers.com/shop--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Youtube: https://youtu.be/uKTs4zqksY8Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-2um8eguhf-c~H9idcxM271mnPzdWbipgChapters00:00 Introduction to Solitaire and Personal Updates03:14 Metrics and Predictions in the Gaming Industry07:10 The Evolution of Solitaire Games13:10 New Entrants in the Solitaire Market19:11 Challenges and Opportunities in Game Development21:10 Review of Candy Crush Solitaire24:43 Brand Recognition and Game Mechanics26:04 Gameplay Dynamics and Strategic Depth29:43 Balancing Complexity and User Experience31:09 Monetization Strategies and Game Economics33:12 Advertising and Revenue Generation35:52 Event Rotation and Player Engagement41:54 Future Prospects and Market Competition44:58 Cultural Differences in Gaming45:47 Market Challenges and Pessimism47:03 User Acquisition Strategies48:47 The Role of Playable Ads50:00 Nostalgia in Game Marketing51:33 User-Generated Content and Its Impact53:42 Revenue Insights and Market Analysis57:41 Future Predictions for Solitaire Games---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------TakeawaysThe gaming industry is witnessing a battlefield of Solitaire games.Gameplay mechanics can create strategic depth in Solitaire games.The evolution of Solitaire games reflects changing player preferences.The future of Solitaire games may involve more aggressive monetization tactics. Pessimism about game launches can stem from high expectations and market competition.---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me---------------------------------------If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lancaric.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric

On today's MJ Morning Show: Brake pad dust Esophagus story #1 Morons in the news Asteroid odds Brian Setzer's health New Oreo flavors Worst EX stories Warning: MJ's Instagram MJ is 'undiagnosed' according to Fester Guys take video of woman playing Candy Crush in traffic ASAP Rocky trial Esophagus story #2 Westshore Plaza update (and an idea of what to do before it's gone) Florida's nursing school students aren't passing exams What is "Costco Therapy" Key to great sex, according to psychology Other passenger on a plane invading your space? Gas prices are cheaper in Sarasota than Tampa Bay area Android phones warning Food delivered with note 'had to get rid of these'

  Apple: 0:57 - iPhone SE possible launch incoming - Apple TV+ is now on Android - Powerbeats Pro 2   Google: 11:29 - Goole I/O date is revealed - Android 16 Beta 2 is available - Paramount vs YouTube TV   General Tech: 19:37 - AMD reveals actual reveal date for 9070 GPUs - Nvidia 5070 TI launches this week - Asus Zenfone 12 Ultra - Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro - Netflix Bites   Gaming: 39:59 - Candy Crush Solitaire is a thing   Doom: 44:22 - Doom on a Lightning HDMI dongle   One More Thing: 49:57 - Doom on Android 16 Beta Linux Terminal     https://www.patreon.com/callingallplatforms    T-Shirts!   Contact: podcast@callingallplatforms.com Social: Facebook Twitter YouTube   Apple Podcasts Spotify Android  

This week, we're covering everything from Kendrick vs. Drake to whether Billie Eilish was really snubbed at the Grammys. Plus, the downfall of streaming, Candy Crush lore (yes, really), and why terrible people can still make timeless art. In between, I get into finding balance in life, the pressures of adulthood, and whether celebritiesactually need to be role models. Oh, and somehow, we end up discussingAmerican Psycho and Bruno Mars teaming up with Sexyy Red. It's a ride—buckle up.-Follow me on social media:https://linktr.ee/toriphillips5

How can AI revolutionize the way we research and understand complex topics? In this Tech Talks Daily episode, I speak with Mel Morris, founder and CEO of Corpora.AI. This research engine redefines how individuals, businesses, and institutions approach knowledge discovery. With traditional search engines struggling to deliver depth and AI tools often relying on outdated or incomplete data, Corpora.AI takes a different approach. The platform processes millions of documents per second using advanced AI and proprietary language graph technology, delivering research reports with real-time insights and source attribution. Unlike conventional AI models that generate content from limited datasets, Corpora.AI dynamically ingests over 100 petabytes of open-source intelligence, ensuring users can access the most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date information. Mel shares his vision for democratizing access to high-level research, making it possible for users across academia, medicine, law, finance, government, and journalism to gain deeper insights faster. We explore how Corpora.AI's real-time data ingestion and multilingual capabilities allow professionals to conduct advanced research in one language and receive results in another.  From patent research and market analysis to education and rapid learning, the applications of this research engine extend far beyond what traditional AI-powered search tools can offer. We also discuss how Corpora.AI is tackling some of the biggest challenges in AI-driven research, including bias, credibility, and transparency. By providing research reports with 400-500 cited sources per query, the platform ensures that every insight is traceable, allowing users to verify information and make informed decisions. With AI reshaping how we access and interpret knowledge, what does the future hold for research, education, and data-driven decision-making? Will AI-driven research engines like Corpora.AI replace traditional search methods? And how can businesses and institutions leverage these tools to stay ahead of the curve? Join me for this fascinating discussion as we explore the future of AI-powered research and how Corpora.AI is setting a new standard for knowledge discovery.

The panel discusses CES 2025 How Watch Duty's wildfire tracking app became a crucial lifeline for LA Worst in Show awards 2025 Aaron Swartz v Sam Altman We've not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure All the Meta stuff (fact checking, etc.) Heritage Foundation plans to 'identify and target' Wikipedia editors The Government Wants to Protect Robux From Hackers Twitch Streamers Come Home After Big-Money Contracts at Rivals Dried Up Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Nicholas De Leon, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Cory Doctorow Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: coda.io/twit expressvpn.com/twit threatlocker.com for This Week in Tech uscloud.com bitwarden.com/twit

The panel discusses CES 2025 How Watch Duty's wildfire tracking app became a crucial lifeline for LA Worst in Show awards 2025 Aaron Swartz v Sam Altman We've not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure All the Meta stuff (fact checking, etc.) Heritage Foundation plans to 'identify and target' Wikipedia editors The Government Wants to Protect Robux From Hackers Twitch Streamers Come Home After Big-Money Contracts at Rivals Dried Up Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Nicholas De Leon, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Cory Doctorow Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: coda.io/twit expressvpn.com/twit threatlocker.com for This Week in Tech uscloud.com bitwarden.com/twit

The panel discusses CES 2025 How Watch Duty's wildfire tracking app became a crucial lifeline for LA Worst in Show awards 2025 Aaron Swartz v Sam Altman We've not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure All the Meta stuff (fact checking, etc.) Heritage Foundation plans to 'identify and target' Wikipedia editors The Government Wants to Protect Robux From Hackers Twitch Streamers Come Home After Big-Money Contracts at Rivals Dried Up Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Nicholas De Leon, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Cory Doctorow Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: coda.io/twit expressvpn.com/twit threatlocker.com for This Week in Tech uscloud.com bitwarden.com/twit

The panel discusses CES 2025 How Watch Duty's wildfire tracking app became a crucial lifeline for LA Worst in Show awards 2025 Aaron Swartz v Sam Altman We've not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure All the Meta stuff (fact checking, etc.) Heritage Foundation plans to 'identify and target' Wikipedia editors The Government Wants to Protect Robux From Hackers Twitch Streamers Come Home After Big-Money Contracts at Rivals Dried Up Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Nicholas De Leon, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Cory Doctorow Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: coda.io/twit expressvpn.com/twit threatlocker.com for This Week in Tech uscloud.com bitwarden.com/twit

The panel discusses CES 2025 How Watch Duty's wildfire tracking app became a crucial lifeline for LA Worst in Show awards 2025 Aaron Swartz v Sam Altman We've not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure All the Meta stuff (fact checking, etc.) Heritage Foundation plans to 'identify and target' Wikipedia editors The Government Wants to Protect Robux From Hackers Twitch Streamers Come Home After Big-Money Contracts at Rivals Dried Up Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Nicholas De Leon, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Cory Doctorow Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: coda.io/twit expressvpn.com/twit threatlocker.com for This Week in Tech uscloud.com bitwarden.com/twit

I don't normally do this, but content warning, this episode talks at length about death and funerals and, while I continue to approach everything with an inappropriate degree of levity, if that's something you're not game to listen to right now, go ahead and skip the first hour of this one. Recommend me your favorite show or video game at podcast@searls.co and I will either play/watch it or lie and say I did. Thanks! Now: links and transcript: Kirkland Signature, Organic Non-Dairy Oat Beverage Die with Zero book The "Prefer tabs when opening documents" setting Aaron's puns, ranked Amazon hoped more people would quit BoldVoice Accent Oracle Cab drivers get Alzheimer's less Video Games Can't Afford to Look This Good LG announces Bachelor's Only TV Can the rich world escape its baby crisis? Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? The Diplomat The Penguin It's in the Game Madden documentary Like a Dragon / Yakuza 7 Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Transcript: [00:00:29] It is our first new year together in this relationship. [00:00:36] Breaking Change survived season one. [00:00:39] We are now in season two. [00:00:43] I don't know what, you know, how seasons should translate to a show about nothing. [00:00:51] I like to talk about how, you know, in different stages of life, we go through different seasons, right? [00:00:58] You know, like maybe, you know, after, you know, the seasonal life when maybe you get married or you have a kid, your first kid and all the changes that kind of go with that. [00:01:08] And if you play multiplayer competitive games, you might go through different seasons. [00:01:15] You know, like if you play Diablo four or Call of Duty, you might be in a particular eight week or 12 week season. [00:01:24] Now, as you grind your battle pass, that's similar in in scale and scope to having a child or having some big life event, because it turns out none of this fucking matters. [00:01:35] Hello, welcome. [00:01:36] This is a this is your kind and friendly host, Justin Searles, son of Fred Searles, son of Fred Searles himself, son of a Fred Searles. [00:01:48] That's yeah, there were there were, I think, three Fred's before me and then my dad was like combo breaker and he named me Justin. [00:02:02] Uh, thank you for subscribing to the advertisement free version of the podcast. [00:02:08] Uh, if you, if you think that there should be an advertisement version of the podcast, feel free to write in a podcast at Searles.co and then pay me money to read about your shit. [00:02:20] And I will do that. [00:02:21] Uh, and, and, you know, I'm happy to have all the conflicts of interest in the world because, uh, if your product sucks and I use it, I can't help myself. [00:02:32] I'm just, I'm just going to say it's bad. [00:02:34] So, uh, that's a real, you know, I, I, if you can't tell, I also run the ad sales department of this journalistic outfit and, uh, that might have something to do with the total lack of, uh, corporate funding. [00:02:48] Well, anyway, this is version 28 of the program. [00:02:54] This, this, this episode's breaking change titled, do you regret it yet? [00:02:59] And that'll make sense, uh, momentarily. [00:03:03] Uh, so, um, it's a big one in a sense, you know, it's something that, uh, there's very little in life that I'm not comfortable talking about. [00:03:14] And that's because, you know, well, I'll just dive right in. [00:03:20] So, so I read it, uh, I read an article, uh, uh, some number of years ago that explained that part of the reason why foot fetishes are so common in men is like part of the brain that identifies feet. [00:03:38] And part of the brain that is like erogenous in its, you know, there's different parts of the brain. [00:03:46] They do different things, but if you got to pick which neuron cluster you lived in as a part of the brain, erogenous zone, that would be sweet. [00:03:53] That'd be a lot more fun than the, um, whatever the, the part of the brain is that gets scared easily, which, uh, because I get stressed and anxious, [00:04:04] even just talking into a microphone with zero stakes on a recording that I could stop. [00:04:08] That makes me no money. [00:04:10] I'm too nervous to remember the fear part of the amygdala. [00:04:13] There it is. [00:04:14] You see, and if it just, and, and that gets back to my point in my particular fucked up brain soup, [00:04:22] the, uh, the, uh, the part of my brain that talks out my mouth hole is right next to the part of my brain that critically reasons through things. [00:04:37] So for me, it is very difficult to process something without talking it, talking it through. [00:04:47] And the idea that something is taboo has always been really uncomfortable for me. [00:04:52] And you can just sort of see the pained look on my face as I try to hold it in like a, like a burp or something. [00:04:57] Like I, I, I got to let it out somehow. [00:05:00] And so I'm, I, you know, I'm glad, I'm glad I get to be here with you. [00:05:05] I hope you find it kind of entertaining. [00:05:06] Unfortunately, the thing to talk about first thing, as I get into the section of this to-do list, that is this podcast titled life is that the big thing that happened since the last major breaking change, uh, uh, back in version 26, which is, I, I, I understand two numbers away from 28. [00:05:30] Uh, the big thing that changed, uh, is, uh, my father, Fred, he of a, a long and proud line of Fred's, uh, he passed away, uh, uh, uh, December 15th. [00:05:45] So just, just shortly after, uh, the previous, the previous version aired and, uh, pretty much every it's January 4th today and we're still working through it. [00:05:59] Um, he had a heart attack. [00:06:02] I think that's fair to say at this point, there's no, you know, no way to be a thousand percent sure, but all the signs suggest that's what it was. [00:06:11] And, uh, you know, without getting into, uh, the, the details, my side of the story is like, I was at Epcot with my brother, Jeremy. [00:06:26] So at least we were together. [00:06:28] Um, Jeremy gets the call and, uh, you know, we were, we were in that little tequila bar, uh, hanging out with a friend of ours who works there. [00:06:40] And, uh, the tequila bar inside of the Mexican pavilion pyramid. [00:06:44] And, uh, he had just brought us out the three kind of specialty cocktails that they got going on right now. [00:06:53] Uh, which is, uh, you know, wasn't, we are in a great time. [00:06:57] It was a lot of fun. [00:06:58] And, uh, Jeremy gets the call. [00:07:00] We process a little bit. [00:07:02] We realized like, we got to get home. [00:07:04] We got to figure this shit out. [00:07:06] You know, he's, he's a, he was a former emergency responder. [00:07:09] So he's really good at, uh, at thinking through the logistical things that you have to do with a relatively cool head. [00:07:16] It, you know, he comes across as like, you know, not drill sergeanty, but somebody who's like, you know, part of being calm and collected in an urgent situation is you have to be very direct. [00:07:28] And boom, boom, boom, boom. [00:07:30] So that was as soon as he knew what was happening. [00:07:35] That's the mode he flipped on. [00:07:37] And the mode that I flipped on was intense, uh, metabolization is the best word I can think of it. [00:07:44] Cause like you have like, like, like, like the saves take four shots of liquor, right? [00:07:48] You will metabolize that at whatever speed you do, and it'll hit you really hard and maybe you'll black out and maybe you'll, uh, you're a slower burn. [00:07:56] But for me, I feel, I feel things, whether they're chemical toxicology report showing up things or emotions, I tend to feel them extremely intensely and, and, and, and, and in a relatively brief burst, you know, uh, if you ever lit in a strip of magnesium on fire, which for some reason I did several times. [00:08:19] I was in, in, in different science lab classes as a kid, it brights, it burns real bright and real hot, but not for very long. [00:08:27] So while, while Jeremy was in his, you know, we got to figure out what to do mode. [00:08:33] Uh, we got to get out of here. [00:08:35] Uh, we gotta, you gotta, you know, we gotta book the next flight to Michigan to take care of this shit. [00:08:43] I was in, I'm going to, I'm going to just take a little, I'm going to pop a little deep squat here in Epcot, uh, right outside this bar. [00:08:56] And I'm going to just allow my vision to get blurry, which it did. [00:09:04] Um, my heart to race, my stomach to turn. [00:09:08] And I just needed that, you know, you lose track of time when something big and, and, and, and, and earth shaken happens. [00:09:20] I [00:09:22] snapped out of it is, you know, it's, it's crude way. [00:09:31] Words don't, words that you use for everyday things end up getting used for big life-changing things. [00:09:40] And it makes it feel smaller. [00:09:43] So even though I'm verbally processing every time I tell the story or think through it and, and talk it out. [00:09:53] I, I, I, I kind of came to my normal Justin senses pretty quickly, uh, where normal Justin senses means, you know, back in the bar, you know, everyone's, you know, who'd heard was upset and immediately like they're in their own kind of sense of shock, even not knowing my dad. [00:10:14] And I, I was, you know, uh, comforting them immediately and, you know, just asking our host, Hey, you know, because as a, as a staff member, he, he's able to get us out of the park a little bit more expeditiously, uh, than having to go all the way out and do this big, you know, what would have felt like a 15 minute walk of shame out of a theme park. [00:10:39] And, uh, yeah, anyway, so he got us out of there, we got home, booked flight, got, went up to Michigan the next day, uh, pretty much immediately. [00:10:50] And, and, and, and, and, and kudos to my brother for, for having that serious first response. [00:10:56] Cause like my first response after asking for, Hey, get us out of here was to see those three specialty cocktails on the table and be like, well, that, that would be a waste and B I could probably use a drink. [00:11:08] And so I, you know, one of them was a sake and, uh, mezcal infusion. [00:11:13] And I was like, well, they'd already poured it. [00:11:16] So I just threw that back on, on my way out the door. [00:11:18] That was probably a good move. [00:11:21] Uh, so we got up to Michigan, right? [00:11:25] And I don't want to tell anyone else's story about how, how they work through stuff and families. [00:11:31] Everyone processes things differently. [00:11:34] Uh, uh, so I'll skip all that shit. [00:11:36] I'll just say that like pretty quickly, the service planning, like that takes over, you know, the, uh, this is the first time I've had an immediate family member pass, but pretty quickly you're like, all right, well, there is this kind of, you know, process. [00:11:53] It's like not dissimilar from wedding planning, but instead of having six months, a year, or if you're an elder millennial, like eight years to plan, you have, uh, a few days. [00:12:07] And fortunately, uh, uh, dad had just by coincidence of, of, of another, uh, person we know passing had found a funeral home that he really liked. [00:12:18] And he, he said he wanted to do that one. [00:12:20] So that, that was off the table. [00:12:21] That was, that worked out. [00:12:23] But, uh, then, you know, even, and that was helpful. [00:12:28] That was really helpful to sit down and, and, and, you know, of course you go to the funeral home, you talk to the funeral home director and super sympathetic there. [00:12:35] It takes a certain kind, right? [00:12:38] A person, you know, you gotta have the strategically placed tissue boxes all over the place and then know when to stop talking and when to hand it and when to back away. [00:12:46] And, you know, dude is an absolute champ, but he's also done this before and he knows the questions to ask. [00:12:55] And it's not to like boil it down into a questionnaire, but it, it's a questionnaire. [00:13:00] It's like, Hey, what do you want? [00:13:01] How do you got to do this? [00:13:02] You know, you're being bang, boom. [00:13:04] What? [00:13:04] And fortunately, uh, collectively we came to the table with a lot of answers to a lot of those stock questions at the ready. [00:13:15] Um, but the thing that stood out to me was, you know, there's going to be a service we're going to have to write an obituary. [00:13:22] They gave us a start and, um, a start is actually the perfect thing to give me when it, when it comes to writing, you know, if you give me a blank page, it could take me all week. [00:13:32] But if you give me something I don't like and like me not writing in a hurry would result in the thing I don't like going out, then all of a sudden I get the motivation to go and write some shit. [00:13:46] So we, we, we, we, we worked together and we cleaned up the eulogy or the, excuse me, the obituary, all these terms you only use sparingly. [00:13:55] Occasionally, uh, got the obituary out, had a tremendous response, maybe from some of you because it was up on the website. [00:14:05] Had a tremendous response from people. [00:14:07] Everyone was shocked. [00:14:08] You know, no one expected that, uh, dad had a tremendously large social network being a dentist for 45 plus years in a community of people who loved him. [00:14:20] And he was genuinely, you know, an incredibly kind and friendly guy everywhere he went. [00:14:26] Uh, so, so that was good. [00:14:29] And you re and, and it was the obituary that made me realize like, well, I, you know, I knew this intellectually, but be like, oh yeah, like next few days here are for them. [00:14:37] It's for everybody else to understand process grief. [00:14:42] And so as soon as the obituary out, I was like, all right, next eulogy time. [00:14:48] So I, uh, I approached it as soon as I knew it's a, when I know something's for me, I let it be for me. [00:14:58] I'm not, I've, I accept myself. [00:15:00] I love myself and take care of myself as best I can. [00:15:03] I don't, I'm not a martyr, right? [00:15:06] Like I don't push down my needs and interests for the sake of other people. [00:15:12] To the point of other people's viewing it as selfish sometimes. [00:15:15] And increasingly over the years, I'm viewing it as like, maybe you, maybe it's the children who are wrong. [00:15:21] Maybe this is just the way to be, because it turns out that when you take good care of yourself, you can show up for other people. [00:15:26] Well, right. [00:15:26] So anyway, I, I, as soon as I knew that like the point of the service wasn't for me, the point of the service was, uh, the other people in the room who, who, some of whom drove hours and stayed overnight in hotels to come be there. [00:15:42] It was, it was to give them something. [00:15:46] So as soon as that bit flipped in my brain, it became very easy to write a eulogy because I, I approached it like work. [00:15:56] I approached it like a conference talk or yeah, like it, I didn't actually open keynote, but I thought about it because that's how, that's how I tend to storyboard and work out conference talks. [00:16:09] And I, I thought about like, well, maybe I just do that and I just don't show the slides, you know, because I think it would be possibly inappropriate to, to have a PowerPoint presentation at your, I, at a funeral. [00:16:23] I don't know. [00:16:24] I guess I had to make one anyway. [00:16:26] We'll talk about that. [00:16:29] So anyway, writing, the eulogy took over. [00:16:31] It went smoothly. [00:16:33] It, I liked how it turned out. [00:16:35] If you subscribe to the newsletter, you'll get a copy of it. [00:16:38] So, so justin.searles.co slash newsletter. [00:16:41] It's called Searles of Wisdom, which of course, you know, me making that sound kitschy right now in this rather grave moment might sound inappropriate to, to, to shill, but you will get a copy of the eulogy. [00:16:53] I'm happy with it, how it turned out. [00:16:56] I, uh, as soon as I wrote it then, of course, and this is what I'm trying to illustrate is like everything just became task A. [00:17:03] Like, okay, task A is complete, task B, no real time in there for processing and thinking through things through. [00:17:11] Uh, so the eulogy took over, wrote it, and as soon as I'd written it, I was now task C, I gotta deliver it, you know. [00:17:21] I don't typically read a script when I speak, uh, but I had to write it all out as if it was being spoken. [00:17:32] And I had to even practice and rehearse it as if I was reading it because I knew that in an emotionally, you know, the best way that people seem to talk about this is like, it's, your emotions are close to the surface as if like any little tiny thing could just break the surface tension and, and, and spill over. [00:17:51] Right. [00:17:52] I knew that out of my control, I might, I might tear up. [00:17:56] I might cry. [00:17:57] I might need a minute. [00:18:01] While delivering this. [00:18:02] And so I, uh, I, I practiced it to be read, but I knew like, man, there's just a, there's a, I call it a 5%, 10% chance that I just have a fucking breakdown and I can't get through this thing. [00:18:18] And the anxiety in the day and a half leading up to the service worrying that I would fail as a public speaker outside the context of, you know, sure. [00:18:32] Everyone would give you a break if your dad just died. [00:18:35] Right. [00:18:35] But this is like the last thing I'm doing for him, you know, in a, in a publicly meaningful way. [00:18:40] And it's also a skill that I've spent a lot of time working on. [00:18:45] And so I wouldn't for me to fail at that by, by breaking or by even, even just failing to deliver it successfully and in a, in an impactful way would have been hard for me. [00:19:05] And it would have been something I probably would be ruminating on here. [00:19:08] We are a couple of weeks later. [00:19:10] And as a result, what happened is the same thing that happens before I give a conference talk in front of a bunch of people at a conference or whatever. [00:19:18] It's the, the, the, the, uh, stress hormone gets released, the adrenaline and the cortisol starts coming out. [00:19:26] And so the morning of the funeral, everyone else is kind of approaching it their own way. [00:19:31] And I'm like, it's game time, you know, like I, I'm dialed in my, you know, all of my instincts are about just getting through that five to seven minute speech. [00:19:47] And no emotional response before then. [00:19:50] And afterwards, to be honest, the biggest emotional response afterwards was the relief of successfully. [00:19:57] And I did successfully deliver it. [00:19:59] And, uh, and then as soon as task C of delivering it is done, then task D starts of now it's the end of a funeral service. [00:20:08] And you've got a receiving line of all these guests coming up and they, you know, they're, they're approaching the open casket and they're, they're coming to, you know, hug you, talk to you. [00:20:17] See how you are. [00:20:18] And there's a performative aspect to that, right? [00:20:22] Like you gotta be like, all right, who's ready for lunch? [00:20:24] That would be inappropriate. [00:20:25] Right. [00:20:26] But the, you know, also talking about how, like, oh, I'm actually mostly focused on how I did a good job. [00:20:32] Giving this speech would separately be maybe, you know, off color, but these are the things that go through our brains in the, in these high impact moments. [00:20:43] When you just have to, when, when, whenever a situation dictates that your behavior be misaligned or the statements about oneself be at all discordant with what's really going on inside you in that literal moment. [00:21:08] And so, so I did my best, uh, of course, to make it about other people and see how they're doing and answer their questions in as, uh, productive a way as possible. [00:21:20] Right. [00:21:20] Give them answers about myself that gave them the things that they needed was my primary response all through. [00:21:29] And then, and then through that, and then task E, the wake. [00:21:32] Right. [00:21:33] And, and, uh, you do, you, you do that. [00:21:35] And then suddenly, uh, well, now you have task F after, after all that stuff of like, okay, well, we've got all this leftover food we got to take home. [00:21:42] So it's like load up the car and, and, and, and help everyone out and see everyone on their way safely. [00:21:48] And then, you know, you're exhausted and you want to just go back and, and, you know, get out of this fucking suit that barely fits. [00:21:58] Nope. [00:21:59] Task G is you got to go turn around, drive 20 minutes in the opposite direction to go back to the funeral home, to pick up all of these flowers. [00:22:05] Cause you, you tell people not to send flowers. [00:22:07] Uh, you, you say, you know, in dad's case, donate to the humane society, but people send flowers. [00:22:14] And then, you know, what do you fucking do with them? [00:22:16] Right. [00:22:17] It's like, well, here's look, if you or someone you're affiliated with sent flowers to this particular funeral, I'm deeply grateful. [00:22:25] And I had a moving moment, actually looking at all the flowers of friends of mine, people who never met dad. [00:22:31] Most of the time, a couple of our neighbors, right. [00:22:35] Who we don't really know well, but they're just really lovely people. [00:22:38] They, they did a bouquet and it was really nice. [00:22:40] You know, flowers are beautiful, but. [00:22:49] Like a cigarette can be really, really nice, but a carton can be a lot. [00:22:53] Uh, you know, a cocktail can be really nice, but drinking a whole fifth is problematic. [00:23:00] When you have so many bouquets that you can't fit them into your vehicle and also the people in the vehicle. [00:23:06] It's all it's, it, it just, it, it becomes a work. [00:23:10] Right. [00:23:11] And so that's what, you know, that's one of the ways in which having this service like this become sort of, you know, like less about the immediate family and more about the surrounding, you know, network of people that somebody knows. [00:23:24] And maybe this is all common sense and, and I should have been more conscientious of this going into the experience, but looking back on it, uh, I was just sort of like, all right, well, here's next task is figure out how to cram all these flowers. [00:23:39] And then you get home and it's like, where'd all these flowers go? [00:23:43] And so you just kind of scatter them throughout the house. [00:23:48] Uh, but they're all, you know, like they're not invasives or they're not like going to survive the long winter. [00:23:53] Like they're, they're now all on their own separate week to two week timer of themselves dying and needing to be dealt with, which is like, you know, a, let's just say an echo or a reverberation of like kind of what you're thinking about. [00:24:07] So maybe, okay, look, I don't want to spend this whole fucking podcast talking about a funeral. [00:24:15] I realize it's like maybe a bit of a downer, but you know, there's other stuff going on to like, I skipped a whole fucking half day activity. [00:24:25] Actually is wedge a task in there between B and C if you're for anyone playing the home game and keeping track of this, not that it's that complicated, uh, you got to come up with a slideshow, right? [00:24:39] So you've got the visitation before the service and we also had it the night before for anyone who couldn't make it or, you know, maybe acquaintances and whatnot, who didn't feel like going to the whole service, whatever it is. [00:24:57] You got to come up with a slideshow, which is theoretically easy these days because there's so many goddamn pictures of all of us. [00:25:04] It's theoretically easy because you have tools like, uh, shared iCloud photo libraries, uh, and shared albums, which, you know, as soon as somebody suggested a shared album, I went into my like pre canned speech. [00:25:20] And I think of, well, actually shared albums predate, you know, modern ways of sharing photos in the photos app. [00:25:25] And so whenever you put anything in a shared album, Apple compresses it pretty badly. [00:25:30] It, it downscales the resolution. [00:25:32] It also, you know, adjusts downward, the quality of the image. [00:25:39] And I got halfway through that spiel and being like, you know, this is going to go up on a 10 ADP TV in the back of a room. [00:25:45] Like it's fine. [00:25:46] That's not the issue. [00:25:47] But then the next issue is, you know, everyone goes in the people and pets and photo library, sees all the pictures of dad that aren't bad. [00:25:56] And we all dump them into the same shared library, shared photo album, which is like, like, that's no one's fault, but mine. [00:26:02] I told people just do that and I'll clear them out. [00:26:04] But then you wind up with, and it turns out, this is how that stupid fucking system works. [00:26:09] The shared photo album will treat all of those duplicates as distinct. [00:26:14] And there's, even though there's duplicate deduping now in the photos app, it does not apply to shared library, shared photo albums. [00:26:21] And on top of that, if somebody adds something to a shared photo album, they can remove it. [00:26:27] But for somebody else, like, like, let's say I added a photo of dad that Becky didn't want in there. [00:26:33] Well, Becky can't go in and remove it. [00:26:35] Only the organizer can remove it or the person who posted it. [00:26:39] So then I had to be the person going through and, like, servicing any requests people had for photos to, like, ban from the slideshow. [00:26:46] Because for whatever reason, you know, it's a sensitive time. [00:26:49] And then after it was all done, you realize the slideshow tools don't work correctly. [00:26:56] Like, just the play button and all the different options in the Mac, like, just don't work correctly in a shared album. [00:27:01] Because, of course, they don't. [00:27:02] So then you've got to copy them all. [00:27:07] You thought I was talking about feelings, but it all comes back. [00:27:11] All comes back to Apple shit. [00:27:13] So you've got to copy them all into your photo library, whoever is going to be running the slideshow. [00:27:17] Create a new slideshow project from there. [00:27:20] Dump them all in there. [00:27:22] And then realize there's no, once you've dumped shit into a slideshow project, there is no way to reorder them. [00:27:27] Short of manually drag dropping extremely slowly in a left-right horizontal scroll dingus. [00:27:34] And you've got 500 pictures or something, just fucking forget about it. [00:27:37] And on top of that, I had all these dupes. [00:27:40] Like, I had manually de-duped as best as I could before. [00:27:43] But first question I get half an hour into the visitation is like, yeah, it just seems weird. [00:27:48] Because, like, there's this one picture of me that's going to come up, like, four times. [00:27:52] I was like, I'm sorry, bud. [00:27:54] I said, oh, it's randomized or whatever, you know. [00:28:01] So after you get all of those into a photo slideshow project, and successfully, I installed amphetamine, which will keep your screen awake. [00:28:11] And you plug that into HDMI, and you know how to put a fucking Mac on a TV. [00:28:15] I don't need to tell you that. [00:28:16] After all of it was done and I got home, the two days later I realized, oh, yeah, shit. [00:28:24] Because now my photo library is full, all of the most recent photos are just shit that was copied, that was already initially in my photo library anyway. [00:28:32] And none of them are showing up in the little dupes thing, of course, because it needs days to analyze on Wi-Fi. [00:28:39] So I went to the recent imports or recently saved tab, and then I had to manually go through and delete, like, 1,400 pictures of my dad. [00:28:50] And then hope that, like, I wasn't deleting one that wasn't a dupe. [00:28:55] So I had to go through and, like, manually tease these out. [00:28:59] It took me a fucking hour and a half. [00:29:02] And, yeah, so then I deleted all those to kind of dedupe it, because I was confident I had copies of all those pictures already somewhere else in the library. [00:29:11] That could have been smoother, is the short version of this story. [00:29:16] And, of course, there's no goddamn good software that does this. [00:29:20] There are two people who have made apps that simply shuffle photos in a slideshow. [00:29:26] And they're bad apps. [00:29:27] So they look old. [00:29:28] It's like they basically had to reinvent slideshow stuff, including the software and the shuffling and the crossfades and the Ken Burns effect and the music and all the stuff that the Apple product does. [00:29:38] They had to reinvent all that just to have a shuffle button, which is what you probably want, especially if you've got a mix of scanned photos and, you know, contemporaneous photos. [00:29:50] Because there's no way you're going to make the timeline actually contiguous. [00:29:54] So instead, like, well, here's, like, a bunch of photos between, like, 2003 and 2017, because that's the digital photography era. [00:30:05] And then in 2018, when we scanned all of our photo albums, suddenly it's just all of the photo albums in random order. [00:30:12] And then you have 2019 to 2024. [00:30:15] Like, it's not a cohesive experience. [00:30:20] Now, I would say, well, you know, it's a visitation. [00:30:23] People are coming and going. [00:30:24] They go in, they visit the casket, and they spend time chatting. [00:30:28] But, like, they don't, though. [00:30:30] All the chairs are pointing at this TV, and people just sat there for more than an hour. [00:30:36] They'd watch multiple. [00:30:37] Like, I thought that having a 45-minute long slideshow, that pacing would be okay. [00:30:43] People watched it two or three times while they chatted, you know, just the state of, the lack of kinetic energy throughout the entire experience of somebody passing. [00:30:54] You know, the phrase sit Shiva from Judaism. [00:30:58] Like, I am somebody who is relatively uncomfortable just sitting around, around other people. [00:31:06] I'm happy to sit around by myself. [00:31:08] I'm doing it right now. [00:31:09] I'm actually pretty good at it. [00:31:10] Ask anybody. [00:31:11] But to not have an activity with other people, and also not to have, like, interesting conversation to have with other people, [00:31:20] to just have to be around and with other people, is really goddamn hard. [00:31:25] And I suspect I'm not the only one who feels that way. [00:31:28] Hence, everyone just staring at the slideshow and making a comment here and there. [00:31:32] So, a couple things did jump out at me about that service and about the visitation, though, that were interesting. [00:31:40] One was, Dad had mentored a couple of younger dentists in his last couple years practicing. [00:31:48] People who had intended to take over the practice. [00:31:51] That's his own long story. [00:31:52] But they were, my age or younger, probably younger, definitely younger, come to think of it. [00:31:59] Splendid people. [00:32:00] Like, super upbeat, super duper energetic, just, like, fun. [00:32:05] They forced my dad to do stuff like go fishing and get out and do things that he normally wouldn't do. [00:32:13] And they blew me away by just saying, like, you know, dad was 72. [00:32:18] He was like, this guy, most dentists, when they get older, the hands get shaky. [00:32:25] Their craft gets sloppy. [00:32:28] But your dad was, he, he, I think he said, he set the standard. [00:32:33] He was just a beast. [00:32:34] He was, and I was like, what do you mean? [00:32:36] Like, actually, I've never really talked to anyone about his craft, right? [00:32:41] Because he didn't want to talk about it. [00:32:44] He was like, his prep work and, and, and how he prepped for each procedure was meticulous and perfect every single time. [00:32:53] And his technique while doing things was, was like, like phenomenal. [00:33:00] And they went into a handful of specifics for me. [00:33:02] And that was really special to me because I, like, I, I know that about myself that I'm chasing this asymptotic goal of perfection, but I didn't have evidence that my dad was as well outside of just stuff around the house. [00:33:16] And you can say that, well, that's perfectionism and that's OCD. [00:33:19] And we both have like, you know, traits of that too. [00:33:20] But the, that was really interesting because everyone had only ever experienced my dad as a patient or somebody who's like really, really gregarious and friendly and good at comforting patients. [00:33:33] But yeah, their stories were really, really encouraging. [00:33:39] And that was, that was one where it's like, I was glad to be able to walk away from that series of experiences and learn new stuff about my dad, uh, new stuff that rounded out the story of him in my mind. [00:33:54] Uh, so I'm really thankful to those guys, uh, because they were able to dive in and baby bird for me, explain like I'm five, like the ways in which he was a great dentist, which is just a thing that like, you know, everyone. [00:34:08] How do you rate your dentist, right? [00:34:10] Well, he's good at comforting me. [00:34:12] He's good at explaining things. [00:34:13] He doesn't upsell me a lot. [00:34:15] You know, I'm not afraid when I'm in the chair with him. [00:34:17] And then afterwards things seem to go pretty well, but like, really like the, the work is a black box. [00:34:22] You can't see what's going on in your fucking mouth. [00:34:24] You're, you're conscious. [00:34:25] You know how you feel before and how you feel after, but it's, uh, that was really cool. [00:34:31] Uh, the other, uh, another dentist that worked for him earlier in, in, in, uh, his career, uh, she, she had previously lost her dad and she said, you know, she said something that felt at the time, extremely true. [00:34:47] That a funeral is like having to host the worst party ever. [00:34:51] Uh, so that just to put a cap on it, that's, uh, accurate. [00:35:00] It felt like a party because I got to see a whole lot of people, friends from college, you know, Mark Van Holstein, the president or former president, but co-founder, founder of, uh, mutually human software in Grand Rapids. [00:35:10] You had my former housemate. [00:35:11] He came out, uh, uh, other kid, uh, other friends from, from middle school, high school made the trick, trick, trick, trick, Jeff and Dan. [00:35:21] It was really great to see so many people under, you know, suboptimal circumstances. [00:35:28] And then of course the whole set of extended family where it's like weddings and funerals, huh? [00:35:33] And then like the obligatory, like, yeah, we should really figure out a way to see each other more. [00:35:37] And it's like true. [00:35:38] And no one doesn't feel that way. [00:35:40] It's just like structurally unlikely the way people's lives work. [00:35:44] Uh, and so there's a sort of, uh, uh, nihilism is definitely the wrong word. [00:35:52] There's a sort of resignation that one has about what even are weddings and funerals and why is it that there's this whole cast of characters in your life that are important or close to you and via affiliation or history in some way. [00:36:12] But that you only see at these really like, like, like, like loud life events where it's a big, the background sound is a huge gong going off that distracts from actually getting to know the people. [00:36:26] If you just, you know, picked them on a random Tuesday and went to lunch, you'd probably learn a lot about the person. [00:36:31] But if it's just in the context of like, you know, like looking at, you know, a tray of sandwiches and having to find something to say, it's all going to be sucked in by the event. [00:36:41] And that's too bad, but that's, that's life, I guess, uh, tasks, you know, H through Z day after I, I had intentionally put off any sort of like looking at stuff, like, like thinking about the logistics, uh, the finances, the legal side, the, all that stuff, life insurance, yada, yada. [00:37:06] Uh, but then, you know, it was a lot of that, right. [00:37:09] For, for the rest of our trip, we were there for, for, for 11 days. [00:37:12] I would say skipping a lot of the minutiae because I, of course, you know, when the, when the, when, when a, when a household had a household or breadwinner passes and they didn't leave instructions, like you got to go and do the forensic analysis to figure out like, what are all the, where is everything? [00:37:32] Right. [00:37:32] That's, that's what it was. [00:37:34] It's all fine. [00:37:36] But the, uh, the tech support son, which is like my, you know, uh, it's not an official designation, but, uh, you know, it's a, it's a role I've stepped into and I feel like I've grown into pretty well. [00:37:48] One of the things that jumped is, all right, so we got a couple of things going on. [00:37:54] One, my mom is in an Apple family organized to buy my dad's Apple ID. [00:37:59] Now what? [00:38:00] All the purchases have been made in general on dad's Apple ID, including their Apple one premiere subscription. [00:38:06] Okay. [00:38:07] Well, you know, next eight, you can imagine my next eight Google searches or coggy searches. [00:38:13] All right. [00:38:14] Well, how do you change head of house or organizer of a family answer? [00:38:19] You cannot. [00:38:19] Okay. [00:38:20] Well, how can I transfer the purchases from an organizer to somebody else in the family? [00:38:28] You cannot. [00:38:28] Okay. [00:38:29] Is there a process by which I can make somebody sort of like a legacy page on Facebook, a legacy [00:38:35] human Apple ID? [00:38:37] No. [00:38:39] Okay. [00:38:40] So what do I do? [00:38:41] And they're like, well, you can call Apple support and they may need a death certificate, [00:38:45] but then you can call them and then they can do some amount of stuff, but some, but you don't [00:38:52] get to know what. [00:38:52] And once you kind of go through that process, the Apple ID gets like locked out or that's a, [00:38:57] that's a risk. [00:38:58] And all the sort of, you know, contingent, other things related to that. [00:39:02] I was like, all right, well, I don't necessarily want to do that as a first resort, but I do got [00:39:09] to figure this out because having just like this extra Apple, having this whole like digital [00:39:14] twin to borrow a, an industry term, continue to be a part of a, you know, an Apple family, [00:39:22] a one password family or all this for years into years, just because the software companies [00:39:27] don't make it logistically possible to die. [00:39:30] Uh, that seems great, you know, like, like, so working through that, you know, like I, I still [00:39:38] don't quite have a solution to that. [00:39:39] I'm just going to get through a couple of billing cycles on all the other stuff first, [00:39:43] before I think too hard about it. [00:39:44] Just kidding. [00:39:45] I've thought really hard about it and I've got a 15 step, you know, uh, set of to do's, [00:39:50] but they're just gonna, I gracefully, mercifully, I mercifully punted them two weeks into the [00:39:56] future. [00:39:56] Uh, I, one of the biggest things other than the Apple family stuff was my, my dad had just [00:40:09] bought a new iPhone 16. [00:40:12] I, and he set it up and all that stuff, but my mom was on an older one, like a 12 pro or a 12 mini or a 13 mini. [00:40:19] And it didn't make sense to leave her with the old phone and the new 16, just like in a drawer, [00:40:30] it made sense to give her the new phone. [00:40:33] Right. [00:40:34] Otherwise that the other phone's old enough. [00:40:36] It's like, I'll just be back in six months or, or, or, you know, like we'll, you'll be wasting [00:40:39] money. [00:40:40] So, and that, you know, just like deleting photos of your dad because of a stupid duplication bug, [00:40:45] having to go through a whole bunch of hoops to, to migrate one phone to the other was like the [00:40:50] next challenge. [00:40:52] Cause here was why it was thorny, right? [00:40:54] If, if all of the bank accounts and multi-factor authentication against banks is almost exclusively [00:41:03] SMS, right? [00:41:04] Cause they didn't get on the bandwagon for a, a T O T P or, you know, like you scan the QR code and you [00:41:11] get an authenticator app to, to show it. [00:41:13] And because they, they certainly don't support pass keys. [00:41:16] Uh, we can't just turn off dad's cellular line until we work through all the financial stuff. [00:41:22] But at the same time, okay. [00:41:25] So like if I'm resetting dad's phone and moving mom's stuff onto dad's phone, then how do I [00:41:30] transfer, how do I get these, how do I make it so that dad's SIM doesn't just disappear? [00:41:35] Cause like last thing I want to do is have to call T-Mobile and explain, and then set up the [00:41:41] old phone from scratch and then have them like, I guess, restart the e-SIM process over the phone [00:41:46] on Christmas, you know, Christmas Eve or whatever. [00:41:51] So I, um, I came up with like a towers of Hanoi solution that I actually kind of liked. [00:41:56] What I did was I transferred dad's SIM from the 16 to mom's 13, call it. [00:42:03] So now she had two SIMs on her phone. [00:42:05] She had her primary SIM and dad's SIM, uh, e-SIM. [00:42:09] Uh, uh, and then I, oh, and the 13 or the 12, whatever has one physical and one e-SIM. [00:42:17] And she fortunately had a physical SIM in there. [00:42:19] So she was able to, to, to receive dad's old e-SIM. [00:42:22] So now the 13 of that stage has a physical, a physical nano SIM and an e-SIM. [00:42:27] And then that allowed me to go to dad's phone, back it up, of course, and all that, and then [00:42:32] wipe it. [00:42:33] Cause it had no cellular plan on it. [00:42:35] And then you set it up new, you set it up for mom. [00:42:40] And during that wizard, you know, you do the direct transfer, they're connected via, you [00:42:45] know, USB cables or whatever. [00:42:46] You set it up for mom. [00:42:49] And she has to, she, it says, Hey, you're ready to transfer your cellular plans. [00:42:56] I'm like, yes. [00:42:56] And then I, it's, I realized it's not, you click, you tap one in it and a check box goes [00:43:02] up next to that number. [00:43:03] And then you check the other one and the check box, the check mark moves. [00:43:07] It's clearly like it doesn't support actually initializing a phone with two SIMs, which means [00:43:14] now it's like, okay, so I'll move for a primary SIM first as part of this direct transfer. [00:43:20] And then the direct transfer, because her router was simultaneously and coincidentally failing, [00:43:25] the direct transfer failed because the wifi timed out. [00:43:30] And when you're in the direct transfer mode between two phones in that setting, you can't [00:43:36] like get to control center and turn off the wifi nick. [00:43:39] So then I've got these two phones that I can clearly tell are timing out in the activation [00:43:43] process while the SIM is moving. [00:43:45] And I'm like, fuck sake. [00:43:47] But it's also like a mesh router and there's three mesh access points throughout the house [00:43:52] and I don't know where they are. [00:43:53] So I, I can't just unplug them and make the SSID go away. [00:43:57] So then I would like throw on my winter coat, it's fucking freezing outside and I start marching [00:44:03] down the street until I can get to like far enough away that they both lose the wifi signal [00:44:09] so that the transfer doesn't fail. [00:44:11] So I, it took 15 houses. [00:44:14] I'm, you know, in, in, in, in, uh, uh, my winter coat, 15 houses, they finally get onto [00:44:21] five G and then the, the, the transfer starts succeeding. [00:44:23] And then I start walking back and then it's just instantly says failed. [00:44:26] So then I get back to the house, start the whole thing over again. [00:44:30] And now of course, mom's primary SIM is like trapped on the first phone or the second, the [00:44:36] new 16, but in setting it up again, it doesn't see it anymore because like it was just at that [00:44:41] perfect moment when all the e-sim juice lands in the 16 or whatever. [00:44:48] So I started the whole process over again. [00:44:50] I, I, I set it up fair and square and then I, I, uh, uh, it all went fine after a few hours. [00:44:59] And then the last thing it does is the 13 or whatever says, Hey, okay, time to delete [00:45:04] me. [00:45:04] And then it's like a, basically two taps and you've deleted the phone that just was the [00:45:08] sender or the old phone in the transfer process. [00:45:11] And I almost habitually clicked it. [00:45:13] And I was like, wait, no, that will delete the SIM, the e-sim. [00:45:16] So click, no, cancel out of that, restart the phone. [00:45:20] And then, and then you can transfer that second SIM back to the first one. [00:45:23] So like when that was just two phones, just moving to e-sims, like again, you know, note [00:45:28] to Apple, like this could probably be made easier. [00:45:31] Uh, it's just, it's edge cases like this, that all software companies are really, really bad [00:45:37] at, uh, especially ones that don't have a great track record of automated testing and stuff [00:45:43] like, so I get it. [00:45:45] I know why it happened. [00:45:47] The other thing that sucked was a dad had an Apple card and if we're not going to have [00:45:52] a phone with dad on it, you don't want, there's no other fucking way to cancel an Apple card. [00:45:57] You have to be on the phone that has the Apple card to cancel it. [00:46:01] But if there's no phone with Fred on it, like that meant I, that forced the issue. [00:46:05] Like I'm not, I'm putting off all the financial stuff, right? [00:46:07] But I had to cancel the Apple card, but I had a balance. [00:46:10] So now I've got to like pay a balance on this Apple card. [00:46:13] And of course the banking connection, he didn't like, like it expired or something. [00:46:18] So I have to go and find the banking information. [00:46:21] I log in, whatever I hit cancel. [00:46:23] And it's, you can cancel the card. [00:46:25] It wants you to pay the balance first. [00:46:27] I tried to pay the exact balance. [00:46:30] It was $218 and 17 cents. [00:46:32] I, and I tried 15 goddamn times. [00:46:35] Uh, I changed to a different bank and it said insufficient balance. [00:46:41] And I was like, does that mean like the checking accounts overdrawn? [00:46:45] So then I'm panicking. [00:46:45] It's like, so I go into the bank account. [00:46:47] I'm like, is it easy overdrawn or what? [00:46:50] Hour of, you know, me retrying and doing this only to realize that there's a fucking bug, [00:46:58] a rounding bug of sub decimal sense. [00:47:02] Because when it said $218 and 17 cents as being the balance owed, it was probably a floating [00:47:09] point under there of $218 and call it 16.51 cents. [00:47:16] Because when I tried to do $218 and 17 cents, it failed. [00:47:21] It's an insufficient balance, which made me think insufficient funds. [00:47:25] But then I had the bright idea to try just one penny less than that. [00:47:28] And it cleared. [00:47:30] It meant that you can't make a payment on the card that is in excess of what is owed on the [00:47:35] card. [00:47:35] And it saw that fraction of a penny as being, oh, hey now, a little too generous. [00:47:40] So an Apple, you know, be good guy, Apple, making sure people can't overpay. [00:47:44] Also, the bad guy, Apple doesn't write tests or use, you know, appropriate data structures [00:47:50] for storing goddamn dollars. [00:47:52] Results in, I can't close this card out. [00:47:56] So eventually, so I got it down to one penny. [00:47:58] And then when it was down to one penny, it let me pay one penny, which is separately hilarious. [00:48:02] So I close the Apple card and then the Apple card says, all right, you're closed now. [00:48:09] The card is removed from all your devices. [00:48:14] Now monitor for the next few months and make payments against anything that shows up in [00:48:18] the statement, right? [00:48:19] Because like, that's how credit cards work. [00:48:20] Things don't post immediately. [00:48:22] I was like, well, I have no idea what was getting charged onto this thing. [00:48:26] What might hit it? [00:48:28] I'd scrolled through a statement. [00:48:31] I had a feeling it wouldn't be bad. [00:48:32] But then of course, like as soon as I wipe that phone, I even restored it. [00:48:36] I restored dad's Apple ID onto another phone because I had a burner phone back when I got [00:48:42] home just to see like, would it, would it, would it, would the, would it, the iCloud sync [00:48:47] work, you know, where your wallet shit just shows up in the new phone just magically after [00:48:52] setup. [00:48:52] And the answer is no, because the Apple card is closed. [00:48:55] So there's no reason to put the Apple card on the new phone. [00:48:58] People would be confused, even though it's just in this removed state of like, watch the [00:49:01] balance, which means now that once the phone gets wiped, there's actually no way to pay [00:49:06] a balance. [00:49:06] If one were to materialize, I guess it would just go to collections. [00:49:10] So now, you know, like, please don't post any transactions to my dad's defunct Apple card. [00:49:16] Cause like, I don't have any fucking way to pay it. [00:49:18] There's card.apple.com. [00:49:19] But like, that's just for downloading statements. [00:49:22] So great job, Apple, like you should really make it easier to die. [00:49:26] Like, fuck, fuck it's sake. [00:49:27] This is a, I realized this has been a lot. [00:49:33] I'm going to move right along. [00:49:37] While we were up, we wanted to just, we needed a break. [00:49:42] It'd been like day after day of the same, you know, emotional and logistical tumult. [00:49:48] Just a real grind. [00:49:49] So we want to go see a movie and like, like, uh, uh, Jeremy had expressed interest in seeing [00:49:53] wicked, which is an autobiography about Ariana Grande as a person, as best I can tell. [00:50:00] Real just, she seems like a piece of shit in real life, but also she got to play one in [00:50:08] a movie. [00:50:08] And so like, uh, it's like one of those things where it's like, well, that Bill Murray just [00:50:12] like plays himself. [00:50:13] And it just so happens that he is such a delightful and interesting person that everything he's [00:50:18] in is always amazing. [00:50:19] So I'm glad she got to play herself. [00:50:21] It seemed well acted, but I knew it was probably just who she is. [00:50:27] Uh, huge fan. [00:50:31] Uh, so anyway, we went to see wicked and all of a sudden, you know, we joked about it beforehand, [00:50:37] but like, I can't, I don't understand lyrics. [00:50:39] I have a thing I've got a, uh, a worm lives inside my brain. [00:50:43] And whenever there's a song playing, uh, that worm starts humming and I can't hear the lyrics [00:50:49] to the song. [00:50:50] I can't understand or discriminate where the words are starting and stopping. [00:50:53] I can't tell what is being said. [00:50:56] And if I can barely make it out, then I'm so overwrought and focusing on what's being said. [00:51:01] Then, then I kind of lose the thread. [00:51:02] Like I'll hear the individual words if I really focus, but then not understand what is being [00:51:08] communicated through lyrics. [00:51:10] At the same time, you go to a musical, you go to like, when I went to Hamilton, this was [00:51:15] like extremely clear. [00:51:16] It's like, Oh, I, I put, we went to Hamilton, uh, when, when Hamilton was still cool and not [00:51:21] seen as some sort of, you know, uh, uh, white supremacist whitewashing by putting BIPOC [00:51:27] people in, in these roles and whatnot, 2020 was a hell of a year, uh, when we went to [00:51:33] Hamilton, I got, they got through the first number and I was like, that was very impressive. [00:51:38] I, I appreciate the, this tonal, you know, interesting take. [00:51:43] This is like very like, like skillfully and artfully, uh, done. [00:51:47] Uh, and then, uh, you know, then they go straight into another song and I turned to Becky. [00:51:54] He was like, is there, is there no talking in this one? [00:51:56] Is there zero spoken dialogue in this? [00:52:00] And it turned out that the answer was yes. [00:52:02] And I was like, I don't understand anything. [00:52:04] And so, uh, when we went to Hamilton, which I'd paid a lot of money to go to, uh, I walked [00:52:09] to the lobby in the middle of the show. [00:52:12] And then I ordered like two thingies of wine, uh, which I paid a lot of money for the wine. [00:52:20] And then I got back to the seat, threw back both wines and fell asleep. [00:52:23] So that was Hamilton for me. [00:52:26] So here I am at wicked and we're in the first little ditty. [00:52:28] And I'm like, I don't understand any of these fucking words. [00:52:33] I don't, I don't know what's happening. [00:52:35] And I've got to worry that this is going to be a song heavy movie, which it was. [00:52:40] So I was like, you know what, like normally I'd be embarrassed to do this, [00:52:44] but I'm going to go to the front and say, like, I'm hard of hearing. [00:52:49] Can I have a subtitle machine dingus? [00:52:52] I knew that theaters had them. [00:52:55] I didn't really know how they worked or what they were, if they were any good. [00:52:58] But I was like, you know, for the sake of science and technology, I'm going to try the [00:53:02] subtitle dingus. [00:53:04] So I went to the front, I went to the little, like, you know, whatever ticket booth, and [00:53:08] they handed me a gooseneck snake thing where the bottom is like, it's like a, a drill that [00:53:17] would bore a tunnel, but it goes in the cup holder. [00:53:20] So it's like a cup holder drill and it screws in. [00:53:23] So it goes in the cup holder. [00:53:25] You screw it in to secure it. [00:53:27] And then there's a long gooseneck, a too long, in my opinion, gooseneck. [00:53:31] It's like probably two feet. [00:53:34] If you don't know the term gooseneck, like, like, like, like bendy, like, like, you know, [00:53:42] relatively thick, not a cable, but like a, like a pole that is pliable. [00:53:48] So you can bend it in all sorts of different directions to kind of adjust it. [00:53:53] And then on the top, it was a, a device that had a blinder on the top so that other people [00:53:59] weren't getting a whole bunch of illumination and seeing subtitles and a radio system in [00:54:05] the center, as well as like a kind of internal projector unit. [00:54:08] And so it was very interesting to see how these worked. [00:54:11] You would, and, and, and honestly, because I was uninterested in the Ariana Grande story, [00:54:16] I was mostly just futzing with, and it gave me something to do for the three and a half [00:54:23] hours. [00:54:23] By the way, I had been told that there was an intermission and I was told that because somebody [00:54:29] had in the game of telephone and said they broke it up into two parts. [00:54:32] So like I went in expecting an intermission and then we're like three hours in, it's almost [00:54:37] like 11 fucking o'clock. [00:54:38] And I'm like, I got to pee, but like, I hear there's an intermission. [00:54:41] How late are we going to be here? [00:54:44] So that was, that kept me busy too. [00:54:46] I had something else to do, but anyway, the, the, the subtitle machine was really interesting [00:54:50] because as you look at it and once you get it configured, right, you realize like while [00:55:00] I was walking down the, the, the corridor, it just said, Hey, you know, go inside the theater [00:55:06] or whatever. [00:55:07] When you go in the side of theater, it'll just start showing up. [00:55:09] And when I looked inside the theater, just at the, at the edge of the theater, it was like, [00:55:14] malfunctioning. [00:55:15] It said like something about an, a reader. [00:55:16] And then I realized, Oh, what's happening here is, and this is really one of those kind [00:55:20] of old school, cool technology, you know, innovations where they couldn't just use a digital system [00:55:27] for this per se. [00:55:28] Like a protocol, right? [00:55:30] Like if you were to build this today, these would be like lithium ion battery devices that [00:55:34] would have some charging dock and some kind of software that ran on, like on top of some [00:55:38] minimal Linux stack. [00:55:40] And then it would use the, the, the theater's wifi to send subtitles, which would require [00:55:46] all of this configuration, right? [00:55:47] Like, okay, now punch in on the touch screen on your subtitle device, like which theater, [00:55:52] which theater you're in and which movie time. [00:55:54] And we'll play it. [00:55:55] Right. [00:55:55] But instead, this was just like a short wave radio system. [00:55:58] So you'd be inside the theater and every theater you, you've never even noticed this. [00:56:03] Probably you're in the theater and you're watching a movie. [00:56:06] And the subtitle machine is just receiving these waves that you can't see because the projector [00:56:13] area, I presume is just always blasting out radio waves of the current line of dialogue. [00:56:20] You just didn't have the device to see it. [00:56:22] And so I got the thing screwed in with Jeremy's help because I'm not very handy and I got to [00:56:29] actually follow along the rest of the movie, which makes me an authority on, on, on being [00:56:34] able to say not that great. [00:56:35] Not very interesting. [00:56:37] I I'm on the Kinsey scale. [00:56:40] I'm all the way to hetero male, which means musical theater is not, doesn't come naturally [00:56:48] to me in terms of being like something that gets me real excited deep down there. [00:56:53] Uh, sorry if that's you, I'm just saying it's not it anyway. [00:57:02] Uh, yeah. [00:57:03] So that was, that was pretty cool. [00:57:05] Uh, other life stuff. [00:57:13] Well, the, the version, I guess tying a bow around the, uh, the trip up there and all [00:57:21] that realizing I've gone an hour on it now. [00:57:25] People, when you move from the Midwest United States to Florida and you do it because you [00:57:35] feel like the Midwest kind of sucks, you know, it's cold. [00:57:38] A lot of the time, uh, a lot of the rest belt States are, well, they're called rust belt. [00:57:45] They're dying economically. [00:57:46] There's less economic activity. [00:57:48] There's less new stuff. [00:57:50] There's less vibrancy. [00:57:51] Uh, when you move from the Midwest to Florida and you have a great setup there and lots of sunshine [00:58:00] and, and, and, and stuff to do people react in very different ways. [00:58:08] No one just says, Oh my God, that's so great for you. [00:58:10] I'm really, really happy for you. [00:58:11] Wow. [00:58:12] That sounds awesome. [00:58:12] I mean, some people kind of do, uh, a lot of people are either jealous or in some state [00:58:20] of denial or, or frustration by it, you know, like you feel abandoned or whatnot. [00:58:27] I think, I think the people who genuinely think the Midwest is better and the people who are [00:58:34] jealous, both end up asking the same question of us Midwestern expats. [00:58:41] And that, that question is, do you regret it yet? [00:58:44] God, I've been down here for four years. [00:58:48] Right. [00:58:49] And here I am. [00:58:50] My dad just died. [00:58:52] Just put on a funeral, you know, staying at a Hampton Inn. [00:58:57] Huh? [00:58:59] A Hampton Inn where like, it was a great experience. [00:59:02] The staff were really great, but like they had a desk in the laundry room that was never screwed [00:59:07] in or, or, or secured properly. [00:59:08] So I set down my brand new MacBook pro and a Coke, a can of Coke. [00:59:13] And then it just collapsed all of it all at once to the floor. [00:59:17] So my MacBook got soaking wet and Coke. [00:59:19] And also the, the unibody enclosure got super scraped up. [00:59:23] And, uh, the, the day before the funeral, I was all, you know, in a lot of neck pain from, [00:59:29] from the fall and the general manager still hasn't gotten back to me. [00:59:33] It was gray outside. [00:59:35] It was cold. [00:59:37] You know, and I, and I was struggling like for activities and things we could do as a [00:59:42] family and, and settled. [00:59:43] Uh, and the best, most entertaining thing to do was the Ariana Grande story. [00:59:50] And they ask, do you regret it yet? [00:59:52] Like totally just straight. [00:59:56] Every time we go back, I thought like, this is going to be the trip. [01:00:00] I go back and I don't have a single person ask me that, but then it came up relative at the [01:00:06] wake. [01:00:09] And I was like, man, thank you for asking. [01:00:11] You know, I think about it a lot. [01:00:14] I love Michigan. [01:00:14] Michigan's beautiful in the summers, but inside I'm like, come on. [01:00:17] No, I don't regret it. [01:00:19] Yes. [01:00:20] I'm already homesick. [01:00:21] Uh, it's fucking awesome here. [01:00:23] I'm not going to lie. [01:00:24] Like I live in goddamn paradise. [01:00:26] I don't know why more people don't do it. [01:00:28] I don't, you know, politics are part of the equation for a lot of folks, uh, politics and [01:00:35] policies. [01:00:36] Uh, and I, and I get it, but man, like I am so much fucking happier here just on a [01:00:42] day-to-day basis. [01:00:43] Like you, you blind out all of the sort of like metal layer stuff and just like my meat [01:00:48] bag gets a lot more sun and a lot more movement and a lot more just stuff going on down here. [01:00:53] And so, no, I don't regret it yet. [01:00:54] Uh, but if I ever do, I'll let you know, I've got a podcast, so I definitely will. [01:01:02] Uh, one thing I do regret is eating so, or is, uh, uh, drinking so little dairy in my [01:01:07] twenties because I have become extremely lactose intolerant. [01:01:12] Uh, so I don't have any lactase to the point where even if I drink lactaid, like, like what [01:01:19] they call like lactose free milk, but, but actually is lactose full milk with also lactase enzyme [01:01:25] added to it so that your tummy will process it. [01:01:28] Even when I drink that, I drank 20 grams two nights ago and the whole next day I was [01:01:33] wrecked. [01:01:33] That's not a lot of fucking milk. [01:01:35] Uh, now you call that an allergy or an intolerance. [01:01:39] Um, but like if I want cereal, like it's going to happen. [01:01:42] So sure you can pathologize it, but I was like, I, I am making a trade with my future self. [01:01:48] Like I'm going to put up with some indigestion so that I can have this deal. [01:01:52] Okay. [01:01:53] We're in, uh, if I had a peanut allergy to the point of like anaphylactic shock, I'd be [01:02:01] having the same negotiation. [01:02:03] I would just probably not take the deal most of the time. [01:02:07] Uh, anyway, I finally caved. [01:02:11] Cause like I talking about politics, I am politically, um, unaccepting intolerant of, [01:02:19] uh, milk alternatives. [01:02:22] Cause it's not milk. [01:02:24] People call almond milk, milk. [01:02:26] That's not milk. [01:02:27] That's just squeezed almond. [01:02:29] And like the amount of water that goes into making an almond is insane. [01:02:32] And so the, whatever almond milk is must be not, not really great from a sustainability [01:02:37] perspective. [01:02:38] And it's just, it's not, it's not what it says on the 10. [01:02:41] It shouldn't be allowed to be called milk. [01:02:43] It's like that fake egg product called just egg. [01:02:45] I was like, that's no, it's unjust egg. [01:02:48] This is not an egg. [01:02:49] Uh, so I, I, I caved and I bought Kirkland dairy-free oat beverage is what it says in the [01:03:00] box and oat milk. [01:03:02] And I had that last night and I'm still mad at myself about it, but here we are. [01:03:08] I'm going to say that's, I'm going to cap it at an hour of life updates. [01:03:16] I knew it would be life heavy. [01:03:18] Um, but, and because it's a heavy period of life right now, but if you're curious after all [01:03:24] of this shit and all the storytelling and all me getting stuff off my chest, I'm actually [01:03:28] doing great. [01:03:29] I'm processing things. [01:03:30] Love my dad dearly. [01:03:31] Um, I, I've taken the moments, you know, to be quiet and still and to spend effort and [01:03:44] time genuinely reflecting and going through old things and, you know, letting feelings happen [01:03:51] and letting those memories come by and doing other

[SEGMENT 1-1] Christopher Wray is quitting   "So, Christopher Wray says he's quitting? Is that how they're spinning it? As if keeping his job was an option. This guy isn't walking out the door—he's being shot out of a CANNON. If the DOJ were 'The Apprentice,' there'd be no cliffhanger for the next season, because we know who's getting FIRED!   And don't get me started on his testimony to Congress.Asking Christopher Wray a question is like asking a Magic 8-Ball with commitment issues: 'Director Wray, what's your shoe size?' 'Well, Congressman, as you know, I can't comment on ongoing investigations…' 'Your shoes are under investigation?' “As I said, I can't comment about something that may or may not be under investigation.”   Let's talk about his accomplishments—or lack thereof.  [SEGMENT 1-2] Christopher Wray is quitting 2     How many terror attacks happened on Wray's watch where the FBI already had the bad guy profiled? Isn't it ironic, though that almost every mass murderer in recent memory had the FBI's attention beforehand. But they were all dismissed as 'not a person of interest.' Why? Because Wray's agents were too busy tailing legal gun owners and ignoring trans maniacs openly posting their manifestos on Facebook.It's like the FBI motto has gone from 'Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity' to 'Oops, Our Bad.' Sick twisted maniacs were practically live-streaming their plots, and wearing ‘Future Terrorist' shirts…and the FBI was like, 'Hmm… we'll keep an eye on it.' These shooters had more red flags than a Communist parade, and Wray's team is out here playing Candy Crush.   Apparently, the FBI search-engine bots no longer search for keyword terrorist, but instead look for MAGA. And it only searches the database for legal gun owners.   The FBI couldn't unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone but can unlock doors at Mar-a-Lago like they've got the master key.I mean, they raided Trump's house faster than you can say “classified documents,” but when it's a literal terrorist? "Oh no, Apple says we need a passcode!" Did Wray try “1234”? No wonder the terrorists weren't scared. I'd be willing to bet that most of America's terrorists have “FBI Chris” as a contact in their phones.   And let's not forget his crowning achievement: locking up over 1,000 unarmed January 6th protesters for four years. Four years for trespassing! But hey, you're safer now, right?While actual terrorists are probably planning their next move from the comfort of an Airbnb in Ohio, the FBI's like, 'We got those grandmas who took selfies in the rotunda. Mission accomplished.' Understand, the FBI infiltrates January 6th and dresses up as Trump supporters. Wray refuses to say how many agents were there, because so many were there. And what of that guy who planted the so-called bomb? Would it surprise anybody to learn that the guy is one of Wray's agents? [SEGMENT 1-3] Christopher Wray is quitting 3   I bet you won't hear anybody discuss Chris Wray like I'm discussing him. This man writes the comedy. He's the Barney Fife of FBI folklore Worse than Comey, because we expected so much more from Wray. Christmas is coming up, and I want to do a Christmas show soon.I don't like how commercialized Christmas has become, because you get bombarded with things to buy. But I get it. I hope you will look at some of our merch as potential Christmas presents. I want to discuss Christmas songs soon. I have so many favorite Christmas songs. I heard a lady discussing her Christmas party play list, which prompted me to potentially do a show on that. And what about the raid on Trump's home? The national security threat of a president who got us out of multiple wars, negotiated peace in the Middle East, brought the two Koreas together, but he was a national security threat? So much so that they need to raid his home with a “kill order” given by a demented clown who doesn't know whether to wind his butt or scratch his watch?And let's not forget Joe Biden had actual documents next to his Corvette. Wray's response: "Oh, that's just Grandpa being Grandpa." They treat Trump's papers like nuclear launch codes, but Joe's stuff is fine even though it's stored under a pile of Chinese wire transfer documents in a box in the garage.  [SEGMENT 1-4] Chrisopher Wray is quitting 4 Chris Wray is quitting. How will America survive without him at the helm of the FBI. Don't you feel just a little more anxious with him leaving. How will the world work? All jokes aside, I feel safer now that Chris Wray is leaving the FBI.This transition period may be the only one in recent history where the most solid citizens of America aren't being targeted for something stupid. The FBI is an enigma to me. Because it treated the best citizens of America like criminals while wholly ignoring real criminals, including terrorists.From the Steele dossier to blatant lying to Congress, the FBI has a massive stain.   https://x.com/kylenabecker/status/1866522166025691508Breaking News. Fulton County Superior Court has issued a default judgment against District Attorney Fani Willis for refusing to turn over records that could document her collusion with the J6 committee and Special Counsel Jack Smith. The court order states: "By finding the Defendant in default, the Court has effectively declared that she violated the ORA [Open Records Act]. The Court further ORDERS the Defendant to conduct a thorough search of her records for responsive materials within five business days of this Order's entry." "Within the same five-day period, the Defendant is ORDERED to provide the Plaintiff with copies of all responsive records that are not legally exempt or excepted from disclosure. If the Defendant must or chooses to withhold any portion of a requested record, she is instructed to adhere to the procedures outlined in the ORA."However, the Fulton County D.A. claims that such records don't exist, potentially putting her at legal risk of perjury and obstruction of justice. The court makes it clear that it has substantive reason to believe Willis is withholding records: "Defendant is further ORDERED to provide an explanation why such correspondence does not exist in Defendant's records (or why it is being withheld)." However, if Willis does turn over the records, it could provide proof of a criminal conspiracy. Oh, the irony. Oh the irony that the FBI believes it protected the country from those parents who are overzealous about their children's education. You know how DANGEROUS plugged-in parents can be. You read about their crimes ALL THE TIME. And when Wray's FBI wasn't tormenting Trump, it labeled parents who dared to complain at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.” Really? Because doting mothers were upset about their children learning about gender theory during “Rainbow Reading Hour” where Little Susie had to look at the “Johnson” of no-panty-wearing drag king? Meanwhile, real terrorists are taking notes.Like, “All we have to do is NOT act like a concerned parent, and the FBI will ignore you!” How many terrorists are in America? How many are known and under surveillance by the FBI now. Known criminals who came here illegally, yet the FBI refuses to get them deported? How about that Supreme Court leaker? Still unsolved. After all, there are so many potential suspects of the 50 or so potential people it could have been. We're not talking about the Pentagon; it's a glorified book club with robes. 12 justices and staffers. My 17-year old could have solved this mystery during his lunch break at the hamburger joint where he works and without the rest of the clan from Scooby Doo. But Wray's FBI is still all over this one. Rumors are, they suspect Trump.My personal favorite unsolved FBI mystery is the White House coke scandal. Really, Chris? Still looking into that? I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but the suspect list is shorter than Joe Biden's monthly to-do agenda. Do we really need a drug-sniffing dog to figure this one out? Let me narrow it down: Who was sweating profusely and asking if there's a Taco Bell nearby? Hunter? Kamala? Or—plot twist—Jill Biden crushing it between shifts. Anybody remember the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history? How does one guy rent out a floor of a hotel, turn it into an armory, commit this, and leave no trace of motive? The FBI says, “The Las Vegas shooting a mystery.”You know what else is a mystery? What Wray actually does all day. I'd really like to know how much overlap is there between the FBI and NY prosecutors targeting Trump? I'm willing to wager that they have a WhatsApp group chat on how to get Trump. Let's just say, if they coordinated this much against actual criminals, America would look like a Hallmark movie. But on Wray's watch, the FBI's biggest mission has been Operation Clockwork Orange. What will be revealed once Wray leaves? That the FBI was an adjunct operation for the Democrats. That Wray spied on MAGA-supporting Americans, and he did it to “save the democracy,” or for “the greater good”.   Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kevin-jackson-show--2896352/support.

Jay plays a game where he scores party songs to video of horrific tragedies to show the power of music. Conversation of Pedro from The Real World comes up and as it turns out, Bobby was dating during the AIDS crisis. Jay gets inspired to change his fashion to that of a drag queen. He plays video games like Candy Crush and shows Bob how it's done. Black Lou shows off his Oculus vest and Jay sees it as a lonely technology. *To hear the full show to go www.siriusxm.com/bonfire to learn more FOLLOW THE CREW ON SOCIAL MEDIA: @thebonfiresxm @louisjohnson @christinemevans @bigjayoakerson @robertkellylive @louwitzkee @jjbwolfSubscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Last year, Microsoft closed its takeover of Activision Blizzard, the maker of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Candy Crush. In the months that followed, interest rates rose, expectations changed, and Microsoft Gaming eliminated 8% of its workforce. Jason Schreier is the author of Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment and a reporter at Bloomberg. Schreier joined Ricky Mulvey for a conversation about: - The magic that made Blizzard Entertainment. - The state of the video game industry. - Why Grand Theft Auto VI is taking so long to develop. Companies discussed: MSFT, TTWO, OTC: NTDOY Host: Ricky Mulvey Guest: Jason Schreier Producer: Mary Long Engineer: Desireé Jones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Local Axe Murderer; The Time My English Teacher, Candy Crush, And Donald Trump Almost Got Us All Killed; We Went Screaming in the Night; My Aunts' Recollections of Ken McElroy; Demon's Road - The Big Fat "NOPE!"; and My Therapy Guinea Pig. Click here to submit your odd but true stories. Click here to sign up for our Patreon and receive hundreds of hours of bonus content. Click here to leave a review and tell us what you think of the show.

Kurt and Scotty talk about a robber caught after sitting down to finish a book, start up alarmed when AI starts RickRolling clients, teacher fired after phone reveals how much Candy Crush was played during class! Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/4a61tMk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some very popular drinks turn out to be really bad for your teeth. This episode begins with that list of drinks, what they do to your teeth and some strategies to help you minimize the damage if you are going to drink them. https://news.uthscsa.edu/more-u-s-teeth-susceptible-to-silent-enamel-eating-syndrome/ We are surrounded by gases - oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, natural gas, steam. Gases are everywhere. They fill our lungs, power our movement, create stars, and warm our atmosphere. As important as they are (we wouldn't be here without them) they are the least understood materials in our world. But you are about to understand them much better as you listen to my guest, Mark Miodownik. He is a professor of materials and society at University College London and author of the book It's A Gas: The Sublime and Elusive Elements That Expand Our World (https://amzn.to/3XDpcjX). People often say they are addicted to their phones or to shopping, or to social media or that their kids are addicted to video games. But are these things really addictions or just something to do when you have time to kill? What's the harm of scrolling through social media or playing Candy Crush, or going shopping even if you don't really need anything? That is what Talitha Fosh is here to discuss. Talitha is a psychotherapist who works primarily with addiction and she is author of the book, Hooked: Why we are addicted and how to break free (https://amzn.to/3XDW8sq). You should wear shoes when you drive. But not just any shoes. Some shoes are well-suited for driving and others are potentially quite dangerous. And what about driving barefoot? Listen as I sort this all out and tell you which shoes are the best to wear when you drive. https://www.rd.com/list/shoes-shouldnt-wear-driving/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices