Peter watches Mad Max: Fury Road for the first time in decades, and Eden — who has seen it at least a dozen times — watches the black-and-chrome edition alongside him. Peter finds the opening act almost too uncomfortable to watch, given its uncomfortable parallels to the current political moment, but gets fully on board the moment the sandstorm hits. They dig into what makes the film a masterpiece of practical filmmaking, why Furiosa holds up better than the prequel, and what it means that George Miller also made Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet.

SHOW NOTES

• Check-in / What we've been up to — Eden is riding their cargo bike in 35mph Iowa wind gusts; Peter is heading to Austin for an Intuitive Surgical robotics event. Eden vents about 18 months of accessibility compliance work being ignored by faculty who don't read their emails.
• Peter's picks — Finishing Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 6 (fun but disposable, and the online fandom's intensity baffles him); finished Season 2 of A Man on the Inside (Ted Danson and his real-life wife Mary Steenburgen falling for each other on screen — highly recommended); Taskmaster Series 21 has started, featuring Kumail Nanjiani.
• Big metal week — Peter covers a stack of new releases: Slave Machine by Nervosa (vicious all-female death-thrash from Brazil); Too Fast to Die by ArchSpire (potential album of the year if not for Neurosis); new Inferi album featuring departing drummer Spencer Moore; Descent by Immolation; and Master Boot Record's first live album Realtime Execution.
• Eden's picks — Eden is scrobbling again on Last.fm and shares a chaotic top-four week: Portishead, Rebecca Black (Salvation EP praised as a stone-cold classic), Neurosis, and new discovery Javiera Mena, a Chilean electro-pop artist. Also watched two bad movies with the bad movie crew: Firecracker (notable for a truly unhinged sex scene) and American Cyborg: Steel Warrior ("Children of Men with a $13 budget"). Currently reading a 3,500-page Chinese web novel called Long Awaited Feelings / My Feelings Can Wait.
• Why Peter struggled with the opening act — Peter found Immortan Joe's cult of worship uncomfortably familiar, given current events, describing it as George Miller predicting how "stupid and gullible people can be." He warmed to the film as it progressed, with the sandstorm sequence being the turning point.
• "A perfect action film" — Eden's framing: not their favorite action film, but possibly a perfect one — no wasted frame, no wasted scene. They've seen it at least a dozen times, and this watch was the black-and-chrome edition, which Miller originally intended before the studio overruled him.
• Practical effects deep dive — 80–90% of the stunts were practical, shot on location in Namibia under miserable conditions. They highlight the pole-cat war boys actually swinging on moving vehicles, and the real flamethrower guitarist who was instructed not to hold the guitar too high.
• On the cast — Charlize Theron gets full credit for owning the film as Furiosa. Tom Hardy's near-silent, physically understated performance is praised. Nicholas Hoult's arc as Nux — going from zealot to sacrifice — is called out as the emotional hinge of the film.
• Frame rate trivia — Eden flags that 50–60% of the film was shot below 24fps, with Miller manipulating frame rates shot-by-shot to control tension and legibility.
• Furiosa comparison — Eden recommends the prequel but notes its heavy CGI and green screen make it feel cheaper and less embodied than Fury Road. Peter says he's now interested to watch it.
• The Babe 2 revelation — The episode ends on Eden's genuine disbelief that the director of Fury Road also made Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet, and a fun piece of trivia: Immortan Joe's actor, Hugh Keays-Byrne, also played Toecutter, the villain of the original Mad Max.

Peter and Eden watch 1981's Escape from New York and land, predictably, on opposite sides: Eden had a blast, Peter was fighting sleep and checking the runtime. Before getting there, they spend a significant chunk of the episode on a surprise Neurosis album drop — An Undying Love for a Burning World — that apparently derailed any other listening either of them did for a week and a half. They also work through a stack of new metal releases, Eden's ongoing Continuity Comics deep dive (cliffhangers with no resolution, going all the way down), and the inevitable sidebar about Ready Player One being one of the worst things ever committed to paper.

SHOW NOTES

• Continuity Comics / Death Watch 2000 — Eden is deep into the indie comics boom-and-bust era. Death Watch 2000 (20 issues, zero through nineteen) ends on a cliffhanger because issue 20 never came out. The follow-up crossover, Rise of Magic, also ends on a cliffhanger — because the company went under. Eden is reading Ms. Mystic through all of this.
• Dungeon Crawler Carl — Peter is on book five (nearly six) of the LitRPG series. Eden remains skeptical on principle, largely due to the covers, a detailed bit about the Mantar illustration, and a Chuck Tingle tangent.
• Project Hail Mary (film) — Peter saw it in St. George during spring break and liked it. Eden knows the twist, is annoyed it was in the trailer, and delivers the hot take that the film is secretly about "exospecies gay love" — which, they argue, makes Andy Weir's claims to apolitical writing somewhat complicated.
• New metal releases rundown — Peter ran down a week where six metal albums dropped at once: Exodus's Goliath (disappointing 😞), Garea's Loss ("what if black metal Sleep Token" 🥺), Ethereal Darkness's Echoes (solid), Hanging Garden's Isle of Bliss (melancholy melodic death for the right mood), and The Holeum's Ensis (Peter's second favorite of the batch after Neurosis). New Winterfylleth also dropped.
• The Neurosis surprise drop — An Undying Love for a Burning World hit Bandcamp with zero announcement, and both hosts describe it as a fully realized return to form. Aaron Turner (of ISIS/Sumac) joins as second guitarist and vocalist, filling the Scott Kelly-shaped hole. Both Peter and Eden consider it a vital, emotionally resonant album for 2026.
• Fire in the Mountains Festival — Neurosis is playing a festival on Blackfeet Nation land in Montana this summer, organized in part by Steve Von Till, with proceeds going toward suicide prevention for First Nations teens. Peter is trying to figure out the logistics post-London trip.
• Escape from New York (1981, dir. John Carpenter) — The main event. Eden loved it unreservedly and immediately downloaded the soundtrack; Peter found it slow, confusing, and full of deus ex machina plotting. They both agree Snake Plissken essentially does nothing heroic in his own movie.
• Peter's mystery genre director — A running thread emerges: Eden is trying to figure out who Peter's equivalent of her John Carpenter is. The search is ongoing; James Cameron is a candidate. Mad Max: Fury Road is teased as the next watch-along.

Peter and Eden kick off with Eden's very dramatic Iowa snowstorm (back of the house: buried; front of the house: a dusting) and a quick check-in before diving into their respective "what have you been checking out" updates — Eden on two gloriously bad movies from March Badness, plus a deep dive into obscure 80s/90s indie comics; Peter on the new Lamb of God album, Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 4, and the news that he scored VIP tickets to the Rest Is History Festival in London. The main event is a 64-entry tabletop/board/card game bracket that Peter built himself, working through matchups fast and loose until Uno improbably but correctly takes the whole thing.

SHOW NOTES

• Eden's snowstorm saga — A dramatic morning shoveling reveal: six inches of heavy, shovel-sticking snow piled against the back door; the front walkway needed about five seconds of clearing. Wind had blown everything to one side of the house.
• March Badness — Eden attended a bracket-format bad movie night with friends. The event has been running since 2022 and involves voting down from 32 trailers to four films, then watching two. This year's picks: Oblivion (1990s sci-fi western featuring the very tall man from Twin Peaks in a towering top hat — "boring bad") and Hell Squad (1986 exploitation film about Vegas dancers recruited as mercenary commandos — "the second worst movie I've ever seen," edged out only by the 2025 War of the Worlds with Ice Cube).
• Defiant Comics / Warriors of Plasm / Ms. Mystic — Eden acquired Issue Zero of Warriors of Plasm, which was released as a series of trading cards you assemble into comic pages. This spiraled into a rabbit hole of obscure 80s/90s indie publishers, including Continuity Comics (founded by Neal Adams), and Eden declaring that Ms. Mystic — a character with 15 issues total — is now her favorite superhero on the strength of her zipatone-gradient costume alone.
• Lamb of God — Into Oblivion — Peter's been on repeat with the new Lamb of God album (released Friday). Highlight: the single "Sepsis," which opens as an unexpectedly sludgy, slow-burn bass groove before shifting into more traditional territory. Peter calls it his favorite LOG album since Resolution (2012). Ten songs, 39 minutes — "comes in, punches you in the nuts, and leaves."
• Dungeon Crawler Carl — Peter finished Book 4 on the drive back from Boise and is into Book 5. The epilogue of Book 4 opens up the surface-level lore in a meaningful way.
• Rest Is History Festival — Peter won a lottery for VIP tickets to the inaugural Rest Is History Festival, July 4–5 at Hampton Court Palace (Henry VIII's palace) in London. He and his wife are planning a 10-day trip around it. He notes the podcast pulls ~45,000 paying subscribers and around a million YouTube streams per episode.
• The Board Game Bracket — The main segment: Peter built a custom bracket website (following his tier list site) and ran a 64-entry tabletop/card/board game tournament with Eden. Notable moments: near-unanimous hatred of Monopoly (Eden explains the original Quaker socialist two-part design that Milton Bradley gutted), Cards Against Humanity deemed fun exactly twice before becoming "the Edgelord game," and genuine anguish over Little Flower Shop vs. Carcassonne in the Final Four ("Sophie's Choice").
• The Winner: Uno — Uno defeated Little Flower Shop in the final. Both agree it's the rare game that works straight out of the box, with house rules, and across weird spin-off versions. Eden: "Maybe the quintessential card game."
• Notable early exits: Settlers of Catan (Eden: "Fuck Settlers of Catan" — Cassie concurs), Ticket to Ride (fun twice, then "okay"), Munchkin (Eden used to own five versions; now owns zero).

This week, we did something a little different — we built our own tier list website just so we could rank 80s sitcoms without fighting pop-ups and autoplay ads. Totally normal behavior.

But here’s the twist: we’re not ranking them based on how “important” they were at the time. We’re asking a much more dangerous question:

Would we actually rewatch this in 2026?

That framework leads to some very strong opinions.

🏆 The S-Tier Is Earned

A handful of shows prove they’re more than nostalgia. The writing still lands. The characters still feel alive. The cultural relevance hasn’t completely evaporated.

We talk about why certain series:

• Hold up surprisingly well
• Feel sharper now than they did then
• Or still manage to feel relevant without being preachy

There’s one in particular that we both immediately elevate without debate.

🚫 The Hall of Shame

There’s one show we don’t even rank.

We talk about:

• When “separating the art from the artist” stops being possible
• How cultural legacy changes over time
• And why historical importance doesn’t automatically equal rewatchability

It’s a sobering but necessary conversation.

🤔 The Middle Tier Dilemmas

This is where things get interesting.

We wrestle with:

• Working-class representation vs. caricature
• “Very Special Episode” overload
• Sitcom dads getting infinite second chances while sitcom moms don’t
• When a breakout character slowly destroys their own show

We also revisit the strange cultural phenomenon of:

• Every sitcom family in the 80s somehow living in a house they absolutely could not afford.

🔻 The Ones That Don’t Survive Rewatch

Some shows are huge in memory… and rough in reality.

We talk about:

• Nostalgia for actors vs. nostalgia for writing
• How certain catchphrases aged like milk
• Boomer sentimentality as a genre
• And why some “beloved” shows just don’t work outside their original era

🎧 What Else We’ve Been Into

Before the tier list chaos:

• Eden talks about a wildly violent light novel series featuring a sociopathic child adventurer who refuses to follow the script of her own destiny.
• Peter shares recent music discoveries, a disappointing Tool take, and why The Dark Forest might require an emotional recovery period.
• There’s also a brief detour into why everyone in Cheers looks 20 years older than we do right now.

🖥️ Bonus: DIY Internet Energy

Peter casually mentions:

• Taking a screenshot of a tier list site
• Feeding it to Claude
• Coding a cleaner version
• And deploying it live via GitHub Pages

Because apparently that’s what we do now.

In our 100th real episode, we did something intentionally unserious: we gave ourselves 15 seconds at a time to talk about things we love. What started as a goofy structural constraint quickly turned into a revealing conversation about taste, memory, comfort, obsession, and why certain art, habits, and rituals stick with us. Along the way, we touched on music, books, games, food, family, creative work, and the quiet joy of finding things that feel like home — especially in a world that’s been exhausting lately. It's a bit messy, but it's also genuinely us.

Episode Notes

• This episode marks our 100th regular, full-length episode, so instead of a standard format, we leaned into something playful and deliberately constrained: 100 things we like, 15 seconds at a time.
• A recurring theme is comfort versus depth: comfort movies, comfort albums, comfort routines — but also art that challenges us, wrecks us emotionally, or reshapes how we think.
• We talked about taste as biography — how the things we love are often tied to specific eras of our lives, relationships, or moments of becoming.
• There’s a strong undercurrent of making space for joy without justification, whether that’s bad movies, heavy music, silly rituals, or deeply personal creative practices.
• The episode also works as a quiet statement about community — family, friends, partners, collaborators — and how shared enthusiasm keeps us connected.

Shows to check out:
Devo-teas
Generations

This week, we wandered through a grab-bag of games, music, and reading before settling into a long-overdue cultural reckoning with This Is Spinal Tap. We talked Sonic games and cursed Sonic-sonas, gacha updates that somehow turn into cyberpunk motorbike fantasies, cheerful amnesia manga, extreme metal singles that absolutely rip, and a handful of games that ranged from surprisingly delightful to instantly forgettable. But the heart of the episode was finally sitting down with Spinal Tap itself—an enormously influential mockumentary that, forty years on, felt quieter, subtler, and stranger than its reputation. We landed somewhere between “mid” and “actually pretty good,” unpacking where it still works, where it shows its age, and why its legacy looms so much larger than the movie itself.

Episode Notes

What We’ve Been Into

• Games
  • Eden dives into Sonic Forces, embracing the chaos of creating a cursed Sonic-sona (a dog with a grapple gun).
  • A return to Wuthering Waves with the 3.0 update: underground cyberpunk cities, summonable motorcycles, and Sega crossover bike liveries.
  • Peter spends real time with the Playdate handheld and unexpectedly loves Dig Dig Dino—dogs, dinosaurs, and eldritch horror.
  • Mixed feelings on Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: clunky combat, nonstop chatter, and controller prompts that can’t decide what console they’re on.
  • Dispatch lands as enjoyable but oddly forgettable—pure popcorn gaming that evaporates once it’s done.
• Reading
  • Cheerful Amnesia delivers wholesome, funny yuri romance built on anime-logic memory loss.
  • A shout-out to Adachi and Shimamura short stories, still reigning supreme.
  • Peter continues through The Dark Forest, the second book in Remembrance of Earth’s Past, digging into Wallfacers, Wallbreakers, and long-term cosmic dread.
• Music
  • New doom EP from The Eternal—short, tight, and surprisingly restrained.
  • Reliance by Soen: less adventurous, more consistent, and maybe better for it.
  • Absolute hype for Archspire’s new single “Limb of Leviticus”—blisteringly fast with just enough groove to breathe.

Main Topic:

This Is Spinal Tap

• Prompted by renewed discussion of Rob Reiner and his legacy, we finally sat down with his directorial debut.
• Initial reaction: not nearly as laugh-out-loud funny as its reputation suggests.
• Over time, appreciation grew for:
  • Its subtlety and deadpan delivery.
  • The improvised dialogue paired with surprisingly tight plotting and long-payoff jokes.
  • Iconic moments (“these go to eleven,” the cocoon stage prop, mysteriously exploding drummers).
• Nigel Tufnel emerges as the emotional and comedic core, hinting at the future of Christopher Guest’s mockumentary career.
• We talked about how much of Spinal Tap’s impact comes from being first—laying the groundwork for an entire genre that others would later perfect.
• Final verdict: historically essential, quietly funny, better on reflection than on first watch—and a reminder that movies used to trust audiences more.

Big Picture Takeaways

• Cultural influence doesn’t always match immediate enjoyment.
• Subtlety and restraint are skills we’ve mostly lost in modern filmmaking.
• Maybe we should make smaller, cheaper movies again—and let weird ideas breathe.

This week, we kick off 2026 by talking about Ambrosia Sky, a short, atmospheric sci-fi game that quietly wrecked us more than we expected. What starts as a PowerWash-adjacent cleanup sim turns into a meditation on grief, abandonment, and the emotional cost of leaving home. We talk about why smaller, constrained games are thriving right now, how Ambrosia Sky uses limitation as a strength, and why finishing Act One left us with far more questions than answers — in the best possible way.

Episode Notes

• We open the first episode of 2026 in full post-holiday time confusion: strange schedules, too much work, and no reliable sense of what day it is.
• Eden talks about covering extra shifts at the comic shop, double-dipping PTO, and the unfortunate result of biking home in brutal weather and bruising their ribs.
• A digression on sleep rituals follows, including Peter’s famously corpse-like sleeping position and Eden’s highly specific side-switching requirements.
• With it being January 1st, we reflect on 2025 as a pop-culture year — broadly rough, but not without meaningful discoveries.
• We note a shared shift toward shorter, more focused media, especially in games.

🎮 Why We Played

Ambrosia Sky

• We wanted something short, contained, and emotionally grounded.
• The “PowerWash Simulator with a story” pitch undersells what the game actually does.
• We appreciated the decision to release this explicitly as Act One, rather than early access.

🌌 Setting & Premise

• You play as Dalia, a “Scarab” who cleans exofungus and reclaims bodies for the Ambrosia Project.
• She returns to the asteroid colony she fled 15 years earlier — built inside a dead Leviathan.
• The colony is effectively empty; the story unfolds through terminals, logs, and environmental details.
• There are no live conversations, reinforcing isolation and loss.

🧠 Themes

• Grief, abandonment, and the emotional cost of leaving home.
• Labor as mourning: cleaning and reclamation as acts of reckoning.
• Unresolved relationships, especially between Dahlia and Maeve.
• Absence as a storytelling tool.

🛠️ Gameplay & Structure

• Core loop centers on spraying substances to remove fungal growth.
• Light Metroidvania structure with optional backtracking.
• Grappling hook works well, with occasional jank.
• Specialized sprays exist but feel lightly used.
• Puzzles focus on power routing and environmental access.
• The game benefits from being short; it would not sustain a longer runtime.

🎧 Atmosphere

• Strong, understated soundtrack that reinforces loneliness.
• Art direction does heavy emotional lifting despite a small budget.
• Exterior space sequences are a standout moment.
• The game consistently favors mood over exposition.

⚠️ Act One Ending

• The story ends abruptly and deliberately, offering few answers.
• Maeve is alive, but clearly changed.
• Major concepts — the Ambrosia Project, the Leviathan — remain unexplained.
• We found the ambiguity compelling rather than frustrating.

🧾 Closing Thoughts

• We’re glad we stuck with the game past early hesitation.
• The Act-based release feels honest and respectful of the player.
• Both of us plan to play the remaining acts at launch.
• Ambrosia Sky is a strong example of how small games can carry real emotional weight.