Pants Masterson

I am proud to say that -- to the best of my knowledge -- I gave "Please Don't Joke About I, Robot This Christmas" its international radio debut on the morning of December 24, on CFRC, 101.9FM in Kingston, Ontario, on the WAFFLES! Christmas Spectacular. https://audio.cfrc.ca/archives/2016-12-24-09.mp3 I of course mangled the name because I was in a mad rush to clip the audio and dump it onto a USB key before heading out the door that morning. Sorry, Scott/Paul/Eban!

I was compelled to do this:

I mean, money is money, but these Oxy Bump commercials... sheesh. I thought it was a joke product at first, but apparently it's a "real" product, by which I mean it is something that you can exchange money for in a store.

There are 8+ billion people in the world, so I think it's safe to say that you're not the only one. I like Peaches, but her music is definitely more niche than the other musical guests this year -- I've loved them all, especially Diane Coffee, but DC and American Football fit nicely into the wide swath of "indieish rock" while Peaches is pretty much firing off into Knob-Twiddling Electro-Raunch, so I'd expect people to run hot and cold on her a bit more than with the other two.

I love how people who culturally control the conversation 99.99% of the time completely freak out when somebody asks them to knock something off in one tiny, marginal, almost untrafficked part of the Internet. Yes, you've been silenced all your life. My heart bleeds. None have ever felt the pain you've felt in being politely asked not to reduce people down to whether or not you think they're attractive; no great banned work of literature has ever left such a scar on our culture as your being gently dissuaded from reducing humans to physical assets on a comedy forum. I don't understand how you keep going. Your strength. Your nobility in the face of such a threat as this. None may measure up. You are all truly titans of intellectual freedom.

I don't care who the guest is as much as who the character is: all I want is to get some Rob Ford up in my Comedy Bang! Bang!.

With every episode, the discrepancy between "Don't forget Gerry!" in the show intro and Gerry's actual speaking voice seems to get more and more pronounced. What was going on when you were recording that thing? Everyone else sounds like they're a little jacked up on candy or something (Blaine's delivery of "BLAINE!" has an awesome '80s-cartoon vibe to it), but either Gerry is using Nerd Poker to double as Dark Knight Voice Practice, or was being ridden by Ray Romano, voodoo-loa style, when the intro was recorded. [Edit: re-reading, this sounds super negative, which I don't mean it to be, it just keeps striking me weird with every podcast that Gerry's normal speaking voice and the “Don’t forget Gerry!” thing seem like totally different people. It's not a big deal. Just... weird.]

I've been anti-Tim on the forums before -- the whole anti-comedy thing just isn't my bag, and I find it drags the show down -- but I loved this week's episode. I think my problem previously has been Scott and a guest being into it and Tim being anti-into-it, but Scott and Jon and Tim seemed to hit a really great sincere/insincere sweet spot with this episode. Even "breaking" WYR, which is something I usually find tedious and precious from a guest (yes, games are foolish, yes, you're so much cleverer than everyone else in the room) was awesome this time out, because everyone was pretty much in sync with kicking the premise to death.

Probably somebody has already thought of this, but does your board have the capacity to cue sound while recording other sounds? I notice a lot of "in the room, out of the room, covering ears" business, and if you just have people who aren't in the conversation keep their headphones on and switch the headphones to the cue channel, while running a line on the board with some music on the same cue channel, while Sark and his partner have a short 'phones-off conversation, it would make everything a bit more... elegant. This is clear in my head but hard to put into words -- we used to be able to do this in radio, where I could have a song playing on-air, but switch the headphones to Cue, certain board channels to the Cue channel, and have completely different sound being listened to on the headphones than the sound we were broadcasting (in your case, recording). Obviously not great for prolonged absences, but for a "hey Sark can I ask you something in private" sort of situation, like both Brian and Gerry found themselves in in today's ep, it could be a good answer to speed things along.

Hollywood Dates, Hollywood Knives!

Previously, on Comedy Bang Bang:

F, Freedom is something Americans enjoy despite Barack Hussein Obamacare, and they can exercise that freedom by buying this shirt;

This conversation is not very flattering to Ray Romano.

Yes, they did, and that was why Blackie couldn't carry Amarth's body up to the rest of the group after he had impacted into a railing with the force of one million meteors. I was wondering what effect Levitate would have to mitigate the fall if Blackie had managed to intercept Amarth. If his limit was 100 lbs./level and Amarth weighed just over that limit, could they have fallen a lot more slowly or guided themselves into a passageway with minimal harm, or... ? The apparent answer, though, is that there's no flex in Levitate for "hey this is over the limit but we're going to apply as much Levitate as we can to this," it's more "this is over the limit, so no Levitate for you," so either Blackie would have let him fall or they both would have died horribly anyway.

I was curious enough about what would have happened if Blackie had been under Amarth that I asked the boffins at Stack Exchange about it. No replies yet, but I'm interested in seeing what would (theoretically) have happened if Blackie had been in a position to break, slow, or direct Amarth's fall. http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/29360/what-happens-to-a-levitating-character-catching-something-heavy-in-dd

Is it weird that I was expecting this, a bit, after the whole "leaping on the elevator" business from the previous episode and Sark's stern warning that "sometimes it's the most mundane things that get you"? Were this all pre-written, I'd accuse the gang of clunky foreshadowing, but I think the near-fail on the elevator door and then the total fail on the rope climb -- both Amarth -- made the rope fall kind of fitting in a weird way. You can't cheat the Mundane Reaper more than once, my friend.

I think you mean Beef Done.

U as in Unlimited. Unlimited love for shirt designer Sara Pocock.

The fact that everyone forgot that the fourth book was Germany by the end of the podcast and had planned a fifth (fourth) and fifth (sixth) book was awesome.

I am passionately in love with the K.N.I.F.E.G.R.A.B. shirt.

I think they were talking about Mazes and Monsters, a brutal '80s movie starring a young Tom Hanks as an impressionable college student who gets caught up in a faux-D&D game. It does not end well. I was popping in to say that any podcast that manages to make elevator manufacturer jokes and name-check Numberwang! is a great podcast indeed -- if anyone else caught the offhand reference to Numberwang!, it was a reference to Britain's GOAT sketch show*, That Mitchell and Webb Look: http://youtu.be/qjOZtWZ56lc *Python excluded, because c'mon.

What is it? Who performs it? This may be covered deep in some other thread, but isn't a top-level topic from what I can see. I'm actually starting to get into the damn song. Kill the orc! Slay the orc! Kill the orc!

It's not a massive problem for me, but I'd appreciate it if the thread creators (or magic robots, if it's automated) could link to the page for a show ep when it generates a thread for said episode. Maybe I'm a singular weirdo, but my listening-to-a-show vector often starts with the forum, and not with browsing Earwolf archives, so having to then go find that show is actually a bit of a drag. Especially when you have long-standing shows like CBB, where somebody can bump a two-year-old episode, inspiring me to want to listen to it again, but then having a heck of a time digging it up.

Not to be a nag, but here's a good example: I'm in the CBB forums, because that's my podcast of preference, but I click up a couple of levels to the main forum, scroll down -- holy shit! Jeff Garlin interviewed Vince Gilligan? Cool! I can see that because it's the most recent thread commented on in the Garlin sub-forum. What luck! I click on the forum link to check out the thread and some feedback real quick -- if the general consensus is "that was terrible", I may not bother to listen to the whole thing. So I wind up here. Now I know there's a Vince Gilligan interview, and it looks awesome. I want to listen to it! So from there, I... ...well, I don't click the link to the podcast in the thread about the podcast. I scroll up to the top of the page, click on "Shows," wait for the Shows page to load, read through the page until I find the link to the Jeff Garlin podcast, click on the link for the podcast, wait for the podcast page to load, scroll down through the episodes until I find the Vince Gilligan episode (in this case, Jeff Garlin is near the top of the podcast list, and Vince Gilligan is the first listed ep, which is lucky), then click on that, wait for the page to load, and then -- o blessed saviour -- listen to the podcast. This is not, on balance, the worst thing I have ever had to do. But it definitely slows down the discovery/experimentation process, and has a chilling effect on me. I'd love to cruise the forums for other Earwolf shows and try to gauge which shows to check out based on which forums are active and engaging. I got into Improv4Humans because of a mention of something that happened in the I4H forum (crazy sockpuppet activity), which led me to the forum and then the podcast. So it'd be nice to have, I guess.

I'm also going to try to adopt Scott's sensible policies regarding advisories of incoming wordplay.