come closer. We'll just pretend it's a table for two. I think those people are listening to everything we say. Hi, I'm Bill Rohrabuck. This is Kate Christensen, as you know, and we're here to celebrate her book, The Last Cruise, which I've been involved with for a while. You have, it's true. We traded books, traded manuscripts. I don't know, how long ago was that? Three years ago. You're like in our 20s. And then, you know, one had dinner someplace in... Four Street. Four Street. And we compared notes. It was really rich. You know, it's a great writer-friendship developing, right? And we've continued to... So I've read several drafts, and I just finished reading it yet again. And the testament to the book is that I've enjoyed it so much each time, you know? And it's each time these large changes, incremental changes. This last draft, it's incremental beauties, you know, that add up to a different experience. Completely for me. I really loved it. Okay, Kate. Thank you.  Where did you grow up? Arizona? Arizona is that? I was born in Berkeley. Berkeley. And I lived there for eight years during the 60s, which was an interesting time. As a kid. As a kid. Yeah. And then moved to Arizona in 1970 and lived there for another eight years. That was high school. First two years of high school. Then on. But third grade until my junior year of high school. So I think I grew up in Arizona. I mean, I don't really remember much about Berkeley beyond sort of... No one remembers much about Berkeley. And I was sober the whole time. We called it berserkly, as I recall. And then, okay, so then the trajectory from high school, just being a regular kid, what happened next? After high school? Yeah. I took a couple of years off. I lived in France for a year. What were you doing in France? Well, so here's the thing. The chairman of my high school was sleeping with my friend because it was the 70s. I don't know how many of you remember the 70s, but that was what they did back then. And he was distracted. So he gave me the wrong financial aid form for college. So I got into Reed with great financial aid for my senior year of high school. So I had to take a year off. So I got a job in the middle of France, not Paris, nowhere glamorous, but this muddy district nondescript called the Allier. And the big city in the Allier is called Moulin. Oh, Moulin. Big deal to go to, yeah, right? The mill. You remember it fondly. So I lived at a Rudolph Steiner school and worked taking care of four small boys.  This is why I didn't have them. But I did discover food in France. I discovered things like lettuce. I hadn't eaten. I mean, iceberg was what we had in Arizona. I discovered lamb's ear lettuce, which they called mash, and all these other things in France and learn French. And then after you're in France, where you hated the kids, I noticed your characters never have kids in your book. Or if they do, they're sort of adopted or not really theirs or there's some complication. Or they're pets. Or they're animals. Or they've killed them by accident. OK, so after France, that's cool. So did then you go to college?  Can we blame this on the guy who is sleeping with your friend? Yeah, it's indirectly his fault because I had to leave the country. Who can fill out forms in France and mail them? Nobody. So then, OK, so another year goes by, where? I worked, again, a job for which I had no affinity whatsoever. I worked as the assistant to an architect and contractor who was building another Rudolf Steiner school in Harlemville, New York. And I was his assistant, which is, and I made $4 an hour. That was 1979. No. Probably minimum wage. Yeah, it was like minimum wage back then. But I earned enough to get myself to read the following year with financial aid. To read college in Portland, Oregon. That's correct. So now you're in Portland, Oregon. That's right. How was college? Yeah, I loved it.  I hated college. I was so depressed the whole time. Where did you go? I didn't know I was depressed until like 40 years later. Because I went back, they had me back as a distinguished alumni scholar or something. Where? Ithaca College. And I'm at dinner with the president and the dean and everything. And the dean goes, I remember you. And I look at him and go, Ricky Johnson? Like the drug guy? You're the dean? Yeah, I'm the dean. And I'm like, now I see why I'm back as a, but anyway, being on the campus back there, I walked around and I had this horrible, dark feeling overcoming, you know, that I realized was how I felt the whole time I was at college. It's in upstate New York. Yeah. I was depressed the entire time I lived in upstate New York. Where did you live in upstate New York? I lived in Spencer Town.  Yeah, right? I think the nickname of Spencer Town is Rape Town. Yeah. It's like population 12. How many rapes could there be? Well, there were 12, and that was the end of it. OK, so back to, OK, so Reed College was a success for you? What was your focus? I was getting an education and doing drugs because it was a good school. What kind of drugs did you like to do? Well, we had access to just about anything we wanted. And I felt like it was, as a Reedy, it was my duty to sort of take a lot of classes and sample a lot of different kinds of drugs. Yeah, experience for a writer that's important. It was, yeah. OK. I like how frank you are about that. If anyone is shocked, I apologize. But it's my brain. Well, what's great is now you can sit in a room full of old people, and they all laugh at drug jokes. Old people used to not like this. Now everyone likes this. Old people aren't what they used to be. They're all out of rehab now. OK, so now after Reed, what did you do? You came out with an education. I came out with an education, and then I became a cocktail waitress for a year. Good. Which was awesome. That's the best job I've ever had. Great money. Great money.  That was basically the goal, right?   I went to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Was that in Portland, Portland, Oregon? That was Portland, Oregon. Your other Portland? And so I was on the phone with my mother saying, you know, I really like cocktail waitressing. I think I might make this a career. I was deadly serious. Like I'm really getting a lot out of it. I'm making a lot of money. I wear miniskirts. It's really fun. I meet all the bands and hang out with them afterwards. My mother said, OK, but do me a favor, just apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Oh, wow. So I did. And that was how long after college? A year. I only had a year in my best career ever. Bruce and I were in the bands that you would hang out with. OK, so after, so now you got into the Iowa Writers Workshop. It's miraculous. How did that feel? It felt amazing. So it was the best moment of my life as a writer. When I received that letter and I thought, I'm going to be a writer. It's going to be great. Wait, wait, what made your mom say apply to that? You must have already been writing. Because I was always writing. You're always starting like what, high school? Starting like six years old.  Right? Yeah. You knew. Yeah. Well, my mother knew it. OK, that's a good distinction. All right, so now you're at Iowa Writers Workshop. How did that go? Did you go in and feel like on top of it? Or did you feel underneath it? I so didn't feel on top of it. I so felt underneath it. No, but it was a brutal place. And I was 25. And I feel like I didn't know what I was doing as a writer. I wrote a creative thesis at Reed, which was a big deal at Reed because it's a very academic school. So I basically had to give my advisor a pint of my blood to be allowed to do it. I had to petition. I had to meet with her. I had to prove that I was really serious about writing. And then two of those stories got me into the Writers Workshop. Brilliant. It was great. I know I was so excited. I remember getting the letter and thinking, well, I guess I'll go. If I get in, I'll go. Affirmation not only inside, but people like parents are like, oh, she really is. Well, my mother was happy. But it was an awful place. It was so awful. What did the teacher do with the blood that you gave her? She drank it. OK, and how was it awful? The Idle Writers Workshop? It was the beginning of the reign of Frank Conroy. Did anyone here go to the Idle Writers Workshop? No, good. So I was there for the beginning of the reign of Frank Conroy, who was the director of the workshop for many years. And I took his first ever workshop. This is just an example of how awful it was. In the workshop, he decided that it would be really fun to make every young woman who was writing a coming-of-age novel, i.e., all of us cry at some point during the course of the semester. He didn't make me cry. I was really proud. It's like the best thing that happened at Iowa. But it was a competitive place. And it was very skewed toward white men writing sort of Raymond Carver-esque fiction. Yes, a little careerist. Lead careers. And of course, in Iowa, in case there's any people here who don't know it, that's kind of the preeminent, maybe still is, MFA, Program Master of Fine Arts and Writing. Flannery O'Connor went there. It was the oldest in the country. And the trail of controversy follows it everywhere it goes because people are. Because people like me are just saying how awful it was. People are jealous on the one hand, or they've had a hard time there. Other people love it, of course. It was scary and competitive. And I was a young, sort of vulnerable, naive writer and just living in my writing, in my little world of writing. And really, the truth about it is I wasn't ready to have it torn to shreds.  I should have gone to San Francisco. What year would this have been? This was 1988, I think. The middle of the whole Esth thing where truth at all costs, and yeah. It was kind of the Kmart realism thing. Yeah, that was going on. You all remember that? And Beatty? No, at the time, she was the best. And I wanted to be her. And Raymond Carver and sort of, there were all these beautiful little vintage contemporary books by really cool writers that. Edited by? Yes, Gary Fiskechin. No, was that? That's one of them. It was, you know, Raymond Carver's. Thank you. Gordon Lyscia, who, Carver disavowed him at a certain point and said, I'm going to start publishing my stories the way I, and his last stories are maximalists.  Anyway, that's boring for everyone.  Did you finish? I did, yeah. All right, and now it's, you're still a you.   New York. Ah, New York. And what happened there? That's funny. I was, now was I still there? Yeah, I was still living there when you came to New York. We could have known each other. Where were you living? We've been together all these years. I know. I lived in Soho first, and then I moved to the Meat District. Both places are very different now. When I lived there, they were rugged places, and the Meat District was terrifying, you know? And now it's the new Whitney, is there? But I loved it. Okay, where did you live? Oh, I started out in this weird no-name neighborhood in downtown Brooklyn, St. Mark's, between 3rd and 4th Avenues. What'd you do? I worked in publishing. I got a job as an assistant at William Morrow, which I lasted nine months. I was a terrible assistant, but I was really good at reading and rejecting manuscripts. That was my forte. And I saw some of the manuscripts like Gish-Gen, the writer Gish-Gen. I read her first book, and I thought, oh no, she'll never go anywhere, so I rejected that. So I made some mistakes. I was wrong. But I remember sitting at this desk right outside my, the editor I worked for was named Susan Leon. She was great. And I remember I sat at this little desk outside her office answering her phone. We had typewriters back then. Maybe we had computers. I guess, yeah, we had computers. 86, she might have started having computers. No, this was 89. You probably would have had computers. I think there was a computer, but I think I used a typewriter for everything. There'd be one central computer with a guy. Yeah, with a guy. And he wanted to be on his good side. I can't remember why. But I remember watching the writers come in to meet with Susan, the real writers.  And, but who did you end up being? In other words, how did you transition from editor's assistant to the writer you wanted to be? You started the beginning of that. Well, it took me 10 years. Oh, let's do the 10 years really quickly. So you're in New York that whole 10 years? I was in New York for 20 years. 20 years, okay. And what did you do for 10 years? All different things. In list form. Okay. Worked in publishing. I actually did phone sex also, as like part of my prostitution career. Yeah. I did too, but from the other side. Maybe we, you know. No, I didn't. I didn't actually talk to anyone. I want to make that clear.  What do you mean? This was like self phone sex? It was recorded. I would write these scripts and read them into a microphone for 20 bucks a pop. Publishing didn't pay anything. I made $17,000 a year. And that wasn't even a lot of money back then. Do you have any of these scripts memorized? Because that's like, that's her early writing, right? This is lost early writing. We have to recover this. Notice the attention to character. Anyway, keep going. There was a lot of attention to character. They were good. They were really good. They were good. Yeah. I was an underrated phone sex artist. So I did those two things simultaneously because I had to supplement my meager income somehow. And then I worked for a Countess on the Upper East Side as her ghost writer and assistant. Oh my gosh. For another year. Which became my first novel in The Drink. The Drink. Based on an actual job I had. The Drink I haven't read. Well, you read it, you can know that I actually had that job. I'm gonna find it. Okay. And that keep going. Oh, that's a, but if you, not for a few years, it became your first novel. Well, yeah, well, so I worked for her for a year. It was a, she was fascinating. She was, she was a spy in the OSS in Madrid. And she was a model for Hattie Carnegie. And she married the Count of Romanone. She was a lean Griffith from Pearl River, New York. And she ended up marrying the Count of Romanones who she met at a party when she was spying for the OSS. And he, by all reports, was gay and needed this beautiful young Catholic virgin to marry and give him sons, which she did. And then he died and she moved back to New York and had this apartment, this mausoleum of a pied-a-terre on the Upper East Side. Where I sat in her dining room every day talking to Emelda Marcos, Nancy Reagan and Betsy Bloomingdale and yeah. I think this is what young writers do. If they're, if they're doing it right, is they amass experience. You have to. And then you've got stuff to work with. Okay, so I would love to linger over the counters. I quit. I quit that job. But you quit and then? Went to another Rudolph Steiner school to work as a receptionist. And that's where I started in the drink. At the school. Sitting at my desk. And by now I was using a little word processor. Now we're on a computer. The screen note was just a word processor. Oh, I remember those. The screen was this big. It was like one line at a time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't you remember? I read that William Styron had bought a word processor for $12,000. And I was like, oh my God, you could type it, correct it, you know, it'd still be, I saw it all, like a vision. But I wasn't capable of inventing the laptop. But it was so great when I first got one of those. I know, it's the best thing. Also the worst thing. No, it's the best thing. Is it just the best thing? There's no mixed blessing for you? Well, social media kind of takes up a little bit of time. But, you know, how else would anyone here know about today without, oh, there's other ways? Okay, so, okay, so now, so you did that, someone, and you wrote the book, how'd you get that published? How did that happen? That was hard. That was really hard. And I would think back to that day when I got my acceptance to the Iowa Writers Workshop and think I was so naive, thinking that just, you know, that would launch me on some imaginary trajectory that, you know, that I would, oh, of course, I would write a novel and publish it and it would all just come about because I was now a writer. It didn't happen like that. What happened was that I wrote a really bad draft of In the Drink, but I fell in love with it. And I got back to, writing In the Drink for me was getting away from Iowa and getting away from that kind of writing that I thought I should be doing. Back to the kind of writing I did in eighth grade when I wrote my first book, my first full-length novel. It was called Life Can't Be a Penguin. And I know, it's a great title. Nothing like a true title. Yeah. Okay. And the protagonist was named Claudia and I named my protagonist Claudia and I started just having fun with writing. Claimed yourself. You reclaimed your kid. That's brilliant. And it took, but it took me like 10 years before it was published. Okay, now quickly then, what's working our way up to the last cruise? Did you ever work in restaurants or? I was a line cook in Portland, Oregon, also while I was being a cocktail waitress. I worked at Roxy Hart's Diner, World Diner, which was a gay diner, and I did the night shift with my best friend, Wayne, who was just coming out of the closet and really excited about it. And so we would cook for the post bar rush. Yeah, yeah.  But I think that's my only real, I mean I volunteered at a soup kitchen but this is all good to know. But it's not, I've never really worked in a... It's not much. So it's not like to write such a perfect, beautiful, interesting chef with a real life behind him and then his acolytes and his boss, all very different, very convincing food people. You don't have to do that. No. Because you can make it up. Make it up. That's the amazing thing about fiction. This is a great thing. It's true. It's amazing. It's true. Wow. Okay, well by way of getting us into the last cruise, do you feel like reading a little bit? Or... Sure. Do you guys wanna hear a little bit? Thank you. Because it's so hot out, I have two scenes where people swim. I'm gonna read them to you. What do I need to tell them about the book? It's about a cruise ship. It's a fictional cruise ship. I made it up. It's a vintage... Have you been on a lot of cruise ships? I've never been on a cruise ship. Do you have a great affection for cruise ships? I have zero affection for cruise ships. I also have a phobia of cruises that was not diminished by writing this book. No. So I set my character's adrift in the Pacific on a 1950s vintage-era cruise ship making her last cruise, hence the title. One of the reasons for the title. And going to Hawaii and back from Long Beach, California on what is supposed to be a two-week cruise. And... Say, it opens with, you get to know there's three sets of characters, right? So there's an Israeli string quartet. They're gonna have a job of entertaining.  And then there's his, the people under him. And then there's Christine and... Valerie. Valerie, I was gonna say Vivian, but it's Valerie. And they're friends, all right? So, but you have a music background? I do, I've studied violin for 10 years, pretty seriously. Well, I mean, as a kid. This is what this novelist is doing. Someone who hates cruise ship is making a perfectly believable milieu of the cruise ship. Making an incredibly touching, beautiful four-way relationship of the string quartet with deep musical knowledge. And then doing a kitchen with seemingly deep kitchen novel, I mean knowledge. That sets it up. So, and then we get all these people, we have a sense of what all the pressures are on them, and then off the ship goes into the ocean. That's enough to get started, you think? I know, I should have taken you on tour with me. It would have been nice. I love it a lot, too, the book is good. I should say about Christine. She's a main farmer. And she's in her 30s, and she's married to a main farmer. She was a journalist in New York and left to move home to Maine and be a farmer's wife, like her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother. Her best friend Valerie has invited her as her plus one on this cruise. She's still a journalist in New York, which kind of sets up the scene, I think. Ready? Okay. It's always a transition from talking to reading. I have to sort of... No, nobody laughed. Everyone was thinking, like, yeah, I guess it is. Not that that's a bad thing. Okay, we're on the Queen Isabella, it's the name of the ship, and now we're sort of off into the Pacific Ocean. And again, the Pacific Ocean is an ocean I don't know very well, so I made that up, too. It's my Pacific. Valerie finished her martini. Want to go in the pool and lie on one of those big rafts in our clothes? Why not? I'll leave my phone here. No one will steal it. They arranged themselves head to toe on an empty raft, cradling their drinks. Christine kicked gently against the pool's edge and sent the raft bobbing and floating into the middle. The surface of the water rocked and shimmered. Light from tiki lamps shot upward and dissipated in the still air. There were a few other people dog-paddling with foam noodles, lounging on fat inner tubes, but no one paid attention to them. It was as if they were in a self-contained little bubble, a sanctuary of sorts. Christine lifted her head. Being around Valerie's fast-talking nervous energy made her aware of how slow-installed she had become. She could feel Valerie's brain working now, even when she was silent, the energy of her thoughts running ceaselessly.  Now there were whole swaths of time when her thoughts seemed to stop, when action took over completely and she became a functioning machine carrying out her tasks. She thought with an odd unaccustomed longing of her old walk-up apartment in New York on Orchard Street, the sour, feckon smell of the old tenement stairwell. She remembered climbing up the four flights to her apartment's battered front door in stylish leather boots, heavy plastic bags of groceries wrapped around both wrists. It was odd how real it fell to her, more real than the farm, as if her entire life since going back to Maine had been some sort of hallucination. As if she'd never left that life of late nights in bars and reading books on long subway rides and jostling through crowds of varied, interesting people. She hadn't been looking to escape from that life, not consciously, but one fall weekend she had gone up to Maine to visit her parents in Standish and incidentally to interview a farmer friend of theirs named Ed Thorn for a piece she was thinking of writing on the rising popularity of small organic farms in New England. She had driven her mother's old Subaru over to Freiburg on a clear, crisp day to find Ed, heaping a pile of pumpkins into the back of his truck to take to the farmer's market the next morning. As Ed liked to put it, it was love at first question. She sat on his porch all afternoon with him, drinking mead he'd made with honey from his own bees, and then sat all evening at his table eating the dinner he cooked, food he'd raised and grown himself. And then she spent the night with him and the next night too. It was a relief to admit it to herself. She was tired of being broke in debt, stressed out about money and bills, a hustle of freelancing. Six months later, she left New York and moved back up to Maine to live with Ed. The piece never got written. That had been almost eight years ago. Val, she said now, I have to make a decision. Ed wants kids and I don't. Valerie sat up rocking the raft, splashing them both. You never told me that. What do you mean you don't want them? I'm not sure. But don't you need them to collect eggs and harvest stuff and put wood on the fire? Valerie laughed. All I know is Little House on the Prairie. I don't want to turn into a mother, said Christine, my mother. Listen, I get it. I don't want kids either, said Valerie, at all. But if I were married and lived on a farm, I'd totally have them. Sometimes I miss my old life. You never loved New York and you didn't love journalism either. You were good at it, but you always said you hated the bias and slant and trashiness of it all. Maybe so, Christine said. She went silent, let the whole subject go, feeling disappointed and slightly depressed. She had expected Valerie to say something different, had wanted her to even. Someone jumped into the pool near them, water sloshed into Christine's ear, and Jin went up her nose. She coughed. The raft bobbed on the wake, overhead. The Milky Way sprawled across the length of the sky, a violently lavish expanse of light, exactly as it did on clear nights in the sky above the farm. But it looked more dazzling and savage here. Christine felt a burst of wild open excitement. Here she was, drunk on a raft in a pool, on a ship, on a dark ocean, thousands of miles from home, anything was possible. Do you want another swimming scene? Is it making you feel cooler? Oh, you don't have to clap for that. Oh, this is chapter 21, and a lot has changed in the course of the story. I'm not gonna tell you what, but this again is Valerie and Christine swimming. Down in their cabin, Christine put on her green bikini and waited by the open balcony door in the hot breeze, staring at the ocean longingly. While Valerie changed out of her black bikini into a black one piece, and stood looking at herself from various angles in the mirror, changed back into the bikini again, put on lipstick, wiped it off, draped herself in a gauzy sundress, and reapplied her lipstick. They climbed down into the ship's belly. As they went along the B-deck corridor, Christine saw a light ahead and heard voices, muted, almost drowned out by a series of groans and clanks that seemed to come from the ship's frame. As she followed Valerie along the corridor, the smell of old smoke began to dissipate. A stream of fresh air poured toward them. Christine saw daylight ahead, and soon they emerged into a long, narrow room lined with shelves and cabinets and lockers. At the far end, double doors were propped open, leading to stairs down to a small platform extending from the ship's hull, hovering just above the surface of the ocean. A small crowd of people were already there, looking down with excitement at the calm, still, light, dappled water. The air was soft with spray and haze. Look at this, said Theodore to Christine. He gestured outward. It's our new swimming pool, the biggest in the world. I've never swum in the middle of the ocean before, said somebody, said someone nearby, sounding nervous, me neither. This is cool. Theodore was the first to jump in. He cannonballed, went under, and emerged with a roar. His fist raised. It's great he yelled at the people still standing on the dock. Others gamely jumped in with shrieks and splashes. Oh, Jesus, said Valerie. I'm dizzy just thinking about it. Don't think, said Christine. Once we're in, we'll be fine. She held her breath and jumped. Under water, with her eyes shut, she experienced a brief moment of horrified panic, thinking about how deep the water was below her, stretching miles down into the darkness. Then her head bobbed up, and she took a breath, looked around at the sparkling surface of the rocking, gentle bath. She began to move her limbs with pleasure through the salty, sunlit water, cool enough to tingle on her skin. There was a splash beside her, and Valerie was in too. Her hair streaming with seawater, her eyes soft without her glasses. Christine Frog kicked around in a leisurely breaststroke. In the hazy brightness and hot light, she saw bobbing human heads, and above more people on the ship, crowding the upper decks, looking down at the swimmers. She passed a floating plastic bottle, probably thrown overboard than another. She thought of the invisible cloud of trillions of disintegrated plastic microbits interspersed throughout the water, inseparable from it, part of it, like smog and filtering air. She had seen so many online news stories, TV shows, documentaries that cataloged and exposed humanity's unstoppable destruction of the oceans with images of vast gyres of trash, miles-long oil slicks bleached and dying coral reefs, seabird stomachs full of deadly plastic, whales and dolphins entangled in fishing nets, algae blooms. She had absorbed all this information with a sense of helpless grief-sickened rage. It reminded her of reading horror novels as a teenager, unable to look away, sucked in a stifled scream in the pit of her stomach, eyes shocked wide. Hey, Val, she said.  I kind of wish I'd brought my shampoo down. My scalp is so itchy. Why did you pick this cruise? What do you mean? Why didn't you take a cruise on a new megaship with Wi-Fi? Valerie did a couple of slow underwater horizontal jumping jacks while she thought about this.  I thought it would be good for me to give up the internet for a while. I was so wrong. Wrong about giving up internet or for picking this cruise. Well, this cruise was obviously a colossally bad choice to put it mildly. But what I really learned is that life without the internet is not very interesting. I just feel like I'm missing out. I'm not in touch. I'm often some slow lane. What's wrong with being online all the time? It's not like anything is happening anywhere else. Take this cruise, string quartets, old people, stuffy food. The library is full of old books no one reads anymore. Christine laughed, Philistine. I am not, said Valerie, but she laughed too. The ocean feels smaller than it used to. Everything feels smaller, doesn't it? Or is it just me?  They were silent a while, suspended there together while tiny waves lapped at their skin. Christine looked up at the Isabella feeling like an explorer or an astronaut who'd left the mothership, ventured away for the first time and was looking back at it from the void of space. Seen from here, the ship looked small and alone, the only shelter and protection for these hundreds of souls who clung to her creaky old frame. But she also looked reassuring, human-scaled in all that depless blue, elegant and starkly white in the sunlight, all her curves and stacked terraced decks soaring above the sea surface. She was aware all of a sudden of music coming from an upper deck of the ship. Two-stringed instruments, it sounded like, playing a fugue-like duet that burst on the still hot air and gusts of notes, liquid and rippling, orderly, resonant, civilized. Well, you're such a wonderful reader. I really enjoyed listening. You do friendship so well. And in this book, there are several layers of friendships among different groups of people. From the start, Christine and, I keep wanting to say Vivian because that was Sarah's character. Oh yeah, that's right. Valerie. Also her name was Melanie in an earlier draft, so. Oh, that's right, yeah. Valerie feels like the main character for such a long time, you know, and that starts to shift. But where did you start? What's the germ for this book? Someone who hates cruise ships? And, you know. Yeah, yeah, I do. It's an interesting question. Was Valerie, who was the character that arrived first? Was it a musician, a cook, a Valerie? No, it was none of them, none of the characters. The book came out of, it came out of an idea that I had years ago to write about a cruise ship because in the early aughts, I had an accountant who was on a cruise and he, I heard from him, I got an email from him saying, I'm sorry, your taxes are gonna be late.  I mean, I come from Arizona, I don't know from cruise ships. And so I started thinking about what that must have been like for him and I asked him about it when I went in to meet with him to do my taxes and he said, oh, it was a nightmare, you know?  It's awful and after that, I started the way you notice a word when you learn a word. I started reading stories about cruise ships everywhere and I was riveted to them and I didn't know why. Kind of unaccountably just, you know, about there was a ship that floated off the coast of Mexico a hundred miles from land without any power propulsion. There was an engine room fire. There were no backup generators because the cruise ship company was cutting corners because cruise ships are capitalist money-generating machines so any way you can make more money, you do safety be damned or any way in those days. And so I followed this story just like, like it was a horror story in the news. They had to sleep in tent cities up on the deck. All the passengers brought their sheets and mattresses up and established this sort of like, it looked like a homeless encampment and the crew was making sandwiches with like wilted lettuce and stale bread and that's what they ate. And, you know, there was just bottled water rationed and I thought, God, for five days and they had to wait for tugboats to come and get them. This cruise ship, this enormous floating mega-hotel was just dead in the water. And I was just, I mean, I think that story was the germ of this novel. Like, what is that, it gave me existential chills. It really feels like a simulacrum of, you know, this apocalyptic world we're living in, you know, like, you can do the whole disaster in one compact little universe. Also, I love stories about self-contained systems, human systems, stuck in or moving through a wilderness. I think it's a great premise. I mean, the Odyssey is one. Star Trek, Das Bu, there are so many. And the idea that humans, what happens to a human system or civilization when the shit hits the fan in terms of, like, stuff going, stuff going awry as it does in this book. So I started, so I started thinking about, also, we had moved to Portland, which is a stop on the, you probably all know this, a stop on the cruise ship route up the Eastern seaboard. And so it's like, so we would walk our dog in the Eastern prom and look out and there would be this enormous hulking white cruise ship bigger than our biggest building, I think.  It's like a city pulling up and then disgorging all these people who infuse all this cash into the local economy and take up all the streets in the old port and then get back on the cruise ship. Use up all the pastel colors. Right, there's no pastel for anyone else. And then off they go again. And it's sort of like this, I just kept thinking, you know, and this is during the run up to the 2016 presidential election. When I'm feeling things kind of going wrong in our country and I had a bad feeling Trump was gonna win and I really wanted to go out. No, why was that a bad feeling? I mean, Bruce and I were coming over the million dollar bridge and there's the cruise ship going out, you know. It's enormous, these things. And they're kind of fascinating. I mean. Yeah, I think you used it. It was like, it feels symbolic but that goes away quickly but the metaphor is always kind of available and the book becomes sort of surprisingly in a way but it's political in all kinds of angles because you have the Israeli musicians, you've got the people below ships, all the people of color are below ships, you know. And they're having their own stresses and then. That's where the characters came from because once you have a cruise ship, you have to populate it. And I did a lot of research because I haven't been on a cruise. You started with a cruise ship. I started with the idea of a cruise ship and I started with the idea of this sort of microcosm for I wanted to write about America and I wanted to write about capitalism and sort of all these things that I was really engaged with thinking about. But I wanted it to be a story because it's not like a novelism of treatise. So I needed people. So what about capitalism? Well, so I feel like, I mean I kind of touch on it in that scene I read of them swimming about the ship but I feel like a cruise ship is a money generating machine. It's like a capitalist, it's like a symbol of, I mean it's the perfect symbol of capitalism. It exists without any kind of checks and balances because there are no real regulations or laws on the high seas. All kinds of crimes happen on them that aren't prosecuted because you can't. They discharge tremendous amounts of waste and exhaust and use a huge amount of fuel without any kind of, but they're making money, so that's okay. And I love the way you make it the last cruise of a old, beautiful old ship that's gonna be retired. That's the last cruise. That's because I feel nostalgic. Arly, but also it's kind of the wreckage of capitalism too, right? And then one of the characters on the boat is the owner of the ship. There's a billionaire on board. And of course, he's not gonna share the fate of some of the others. No he isn't, because he doesn't have to. And that came out of thinking about, well all the billionaires, what are they doing right now? They don't care about the environment. Sorry if any of you are billionaires, but you should care. They're building bunkers.  I went to Louis the 14th. Yeah. I don't think so. That's a good point. Yeah, someone has to keep those bunkers going. That's true. And they're not gonna keep those bunkers going. All those hard-working underpaid people. No they're not.  But all that aside, it's a beautiful day here in Portland, man. Pastel afternoon. All right, so you know, yeah. Okay, but can I just say, I wanted this book to be fun to read. It is fun. That's what I was kind of moved to that. I didn't wanna write a heavy book about America. And that's where the friendship comes in. There's a beautiful love story that blew me away. I love that, and I don't wanna say too much, but just to have elderly, old friends, decide, you know what? I say as much as I'll say. And... I know, I love that. I love that a lot. I love the people. And I love the way the musicians, their relationship has to do with music a lot. And they've been doing this together for so long that the only way they can communicate almost is through these concherti and stuff that they're working on. Or not the only way, but it's fascinating what you do with the people. And you quickly forget that this is some kind of symbol of capital. Good, I'm glad. But deep underneath, that's always thrumming, you know? Like the engine of, oh, I don't know, like a... I just can't come up with a metaphor. Okay, so I wanna go back quickly to... Now you've had quite a few books by now, and I wanna get a sense of how they lead to this book. So I can't list them in order, but The Last Man I Adored. There's also two threads. There's non-fiction thread and there's the fiction thread too. I think this novel is a departure for me. It felt different from... My other books are sort of, you know, they're really about failure, I think. I was, because I had experiences with failure before I published my book, I feel like failure is a really interesting thing to write about. And there are a lot, you know, there are about people in New York and groups like systems of people and power between people and like dark comedies, but really generated by... Well, I think it's important to say the dark comedy part because you don't read it and feel depressed by failure. No, you shouldn't. I think failure is a very cheerful thing. And what would you say this one's about, the one word? In one word? Yeah. I think you did it. You just said it to me this one. I'm trying to remember what you said. What did I say? Ah. It's hanging in the air. It's too hot to think. No, but it's about... I don't know. To me it's about the ends of things, you know? Yes. Well, so I feel like it's... Oh, I know. There is no, you know, it is a disaster. Nature wins. Nature wins. That says it should be. Nature always wins. That's a good... But that's not a conventional way to look at it because usually in this kind of book, it's about humans overcoming nature and it's about our ability to sort of overcome anything. The civilized system, even though it breaks down or whatever, there's usually some sort of triumph at the end. But I don't really believe that anymore. I think a lot of novels are starting to end with trouble. So... How about writing? What's life like as a writer now? Is it changing? Yeah, it's changing. I feel like people really used to read novels. And think about them and want novels to be sort of textured and disturbing even. But I feel like now people are turning to novels for comfort before anything else. And so to write something that doesn't offer that is a risk and a problem and vexing, I think, to a large group of the readership. I think people really want safety and entertainment and coziness and answers. Entertainment's our job, really. You know, we deny that at our peril. So how was your tour with this book? How did it feel out there in America? It felt... Well, you know, I was... Here's where I went on my tour. Taos, New Mexico, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Northampton, Massachusetts. So I feel like I... Odyssey. No, I didn't. I went to this amazing, it's called the Book Mill in Montague, actually. I don't know that one. Well, keep going, sorry. Bookstore. It felt good. Okay. It was nice. There's something despite all the... People are still reading. The disasters we are... I just feel like I'm walking around in a disaster and yet then I go outside and it's like, oh, it's a beautiful day. It's amazing. I know. I know, figure this out. Cognitive dissonance. Well, do you want to take a question or two? Sure. And thank you so much. You're just so interesting to think about this long love from age six of writing and of curious relationships and how they come together and recombinate. Anyone have a question? Does anyone have an answer? I know. The Iowa workshop is where you talk to her. She takes a place. Did you carry any of that in your writing? I don't know if you did say, did you start with writing, but you can't again as a person. But was there anything you got that contributed to your talk with her? Did you all hear the question about the Iowa Writers Workshop? Did I get anything out of it, basically? Well, I went back to teach there about three and a half years ago and it had changed so much. And it wasn't until then, until I went back and I was terrified to teach there, but we bought an old house and we needed the money because we have to renovate it, so I took the job. And so I lived back in Iowa City for three months and I realized what an amazing thing it is to be a young writer, even if you're terrified and even if it's competitive and even if there's bloodshed every day on the floor of the workshop. There is a sense of taking yourself seriously that I saw in my students, too. And the fact that you have this time to write, I had two years to write in my 20s. I didn't have to do anything else. And I feel like what it instilled in me was a sense of taking writing seriously in the sense of doing it every day and treating it like a job. So discipline, I think, is what I got out of it. And it's the best thing you can have as a writer, I think. Other people seem to be able to have it without needing to go to Iowa, but. Genevieve. I'm wondering if, as you said, with your previous fiction books, they were more about New York and the bubble that you were living in New York and then each one writing a memoir, two memoirs, nonfiction. And then in the process of the writing of your memoirs, in other words, writing a memoir and then looking at it at home, give you the courage to move forward in your fiction into this larger scale, larger scale. Yes. That is. Yes. Well, I think in my early novels, that's a wonderful question, Genevieve, who was the editor of one of my memoirs. I think that in my early novels, I was working stuff out in my own life and there was a kind of autobiographical component to every single one of them. And there were all these questions I was asking about where I came from, my past, and sort of the way we do in maybe our early work as novelists, but this book wasn't that at all. And I think having written my actual life, the autobiography of my, you know, it felt necessary, it was like a purging. And I don't feel at all interested in myself as a subject and at all anymore. So, yeah. How many novels did you write before you got un-published? Well, there was Life Can't Be a Penguin. In The Drink was my first novel. I was trying to write a different book at Iowa, which was this very Falknerian book set in Arizona about two girls growing up in a trailer. And again, I was trying to be a kind of writer I wasn't and so it never, I'd never got beyond the third chapter of it and that was my thesis. So In The Drink was really my first novel. I don't have any novels in drawers. But I feel like In The Drink took me 10 years to write and so it was teaching myself how to write a novel with draft after draft. I found a writing group. I gave it to everyone who would read it. I walked around thinking about it. I kept notes. It was this decade of obsessive sort of drawing on every book I'd ever read, every novel I'd loved. All the lessons of the readers who, I mean the writers that I read, you know, coming up, especially the mid-20th century British female sort of like Penelope Fitzgerald and Margaret Drabble and these writers who did incisive sort of psychological ironic and with a shade toward darkness writing that I wasn't seeing anywhere in this country and I wasn't reading it among my contemporaries and so I felt like I was trying to do this thing that was out of fashion and that I didn't think anyone else really cared about but I cared about it with my whole heart and soul. This was what I wanted to do and the kind of writer I wanted to be. So I feel like that first novel was me sort of claiming my territory in spite of fashion, in spite of what anyone wanted and it was rejected by every editor in New York. I think 27 rejections before someone finally agreed to publish it and even then it was in trouble because they weren't gonna bring it out in paperback. They didn't know what to do with me. I was sort of this anomalous like, they thought I was chick lit because that was in fashion at the time but I wasn't, I mean I didn't sell like a chick lit writer, right? So this one novel was sort of my crucible, my proving ground, my training ground and I never went away from that way of writing. It's the only way I can write and we all as writers can only write the way we write. It's really, really, really stirring, you know? It's so good and I feel so lucky to have been part of this process along the way and learn so much from watching you piece together your ideas and walk away from missteps and ignore my bad advice. He said, more bloodshed, you don't give bad advice.  And then to read it one more time and just find, I can forget all that work that I saw happening and now here's the object and it's perfect and thanks for having me today and thanks for being here. Thank you and I just wanna say the thing I love about living in, one of my favorite things about living in Portland is that I have friends who are writers who I love, whose work I love and I see you in the audience and like, this town is great for writers. It's just an amazing place to live and I'm so happy I moved here. Anyway, thank you all for coming. Thanks to the library. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


I wish you a great PM House, I'm Zengi, Zengi, so my team wish you a great PM House. I'm excited for this one because we've never had an opportunity before and I would like to thank you, especially the Prime Minister Modi.


Before I get into this video, I want to remind you that we are giving away a Legend of Zelda highly in shield replica, that's right an actual replica shield, we're also giving away two copies of Tears of the Kingdom Collectors edition and two Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom Zelda Switch OLEDs, these are a kickoff giveaway for Prime Gaming Fest, you can enter it right now by heading down to the pinned comment or in the description, click the link, enter all that's required as you have to be subscribed because it is a giveaway for our subscribers, we're on our road to 133,000 subscribers which, yeah, we're trying to match 133 years of Nintendo. Now let's get into this rumor out here, we're going to call this a rumor, it doesn't feel like much of a rumor, it feels like almost a certainty but whenever somebody utters the words Nintendo showcase and it's somebody that potentially could be connected and would be in the know, it's worth at least talking about and frankly we have not heard anything about another Nintendo Direct or a showcase or an indie world from anybody, all of our typical insiders like the Jeff Grubbs and the Nate Drake's of the world have really dried up and told us, hey when we hear something maybe we'll tell you guys but right now we haven't heard anything. Well that seems to have changed because Ethan Gash has now gone out there to say something, now Ethan Gash is a senior editor at Kotaku and yes he is one of those senior editors that was acting all sour puss over the lack of tears of the kingdom stuff at Nintendo so you might go hey if Nintendo won't give these people access to tears of the kingdom how the heck would they have access to information, well that's because when you're getting inside information it has nothing to do with what the company tells you, it has to do with who you know and whether you like them or not Kotaku does get invited to pretty much all of the press events all over the world and makes lots of connections and thus it's highly likely that Ethan Gash does have connections directly with employees at Nintendo so what did he say because this news wasn't just about Nintendo it's also about Sony and it might be more exciting for PlayStation fans than Nintendo fans but let's read what he put in a tweet he just did this a couple hours ago it says sources are telling me both PlayStation and Nintendo will have additional digital showcases this year keep your eyes tuned to this channel and watch the space for more developments in the coming weeks and months now what's interesting here is he mentions weeks and months weeks would suggest hey something's happening in June now PlayStation just went so it wouldn't really make sense if they had a showcase coming up here in June after they just did one the only one that makes sense in coming weeks would be Nintendo but you know months and months from now could be another PlayStation showcase now others have mentioned that Sony might have another PlayStation showcase this year which is quite interesting because it was two years since the last PlayStation showcase then they had this one that seemed to underwhelm most people who watched it and now they got another one potentially coming later this year but for our purposes here at Nintendo Prime well we will obviously cover that showcase and live react to it what we're interested in is a Nintendo side of things so again we have heard nothing from Nintendo nothing from the typical insiders and Ethan Gash is not someone who typically gives us this sort of information so saying Nintendo will have an additional digital showcase or showcases this year you know it's a given that we're gonna get more directs right like just saying hey Nintendo's gonna have more directs this year that's not really news the news part to me is when he says developments in the coming weeks and when you say coming weeks that really just feels like that is centered around Nintendo months being centered around PlayStation now does this mean we're going to get a Nintendo event in June well if you think about this year already we've had an indie showcase and a Nintendo direct it's highly likely we're gonna get at least one more Nintendo direct this year probably another one maybe two indie showcases heck we could end up getting a third-party partner showcase thrown in there as well let alone individual game directs such as a direct for none other than Pikmin 4 or Metroid Prime 4 if that comes this year or whatever Nintendo has cooking now here's the thing we do know Nintendo is at Gamescom in August Nintendo announced it themselves that they are going to be at Gamescom with game demos now what's really interesting about being at Gamescom with game demos is that Nintendo doesn't have any new games currently announced for that period or beyond and Nintendo doesn't always really go to Gamescom in fact Nintendo typically doesn't go there at all but with no E3 this year Nintendo is attending Gamescom with game demos they're also doing Nintendo live and Pax West right at the beginning of September which is quickly after Gamescom conclude so it's really within two weeks they're gonna be having a bunch of demos both here in the east and in the west and we're talking Eastern and Western hemispheres so with Nintendo had planning to show games at least game demos of games during that time period they naturally need to announce those games before so you sort of catch my drift but when Ethan Gash is sitting you're saying hey PlayStation and Nintendo will have additional digital showcases this year and to keep your eyes peeled to him and I'm assuming he means Kotaku for future developments in the coming weeks and months it really feels like Nintendo's the one in the coming weeks they gotta ask something in June or July or early August that's really what we're looking at here it is now the end of May so we're heading into June and then there's July and early August so it really within somewhere within five six weeks from now we gotta have something so the way I look at this is this indicates to me that if Nintendo has a direct coming it's gonna be at the end of June unfortunately that means it'll miss Prime Gaming fast which I know you guys don't know what that is yet we'll give details on that soon but it is interesting thinking about Nintendo's timing on this and why they might not be letting people know if you remember we did have rumors going into last year's June a little bit we had some rumors that a direct was coming but they were from the sort of insiders that have been known to sort of make guesses Nate Drake didn't really say anything about a direct coming until halfway through June and then he mentioned hey we're gonna have like a third-party direct and that turned out to be what it is so there's still plenty of time for our usual trusted insiders to get information and share but Ethan Gashard the first one putting out there that hey he's got sources that Nintendo's doing something what games that could be showing that is the big question is Nintendo holding back for hardware what are they doing is I mean honestly your guess is as good as mine we know there's a ton of DLC coming and I'm sure some of that DLC would be featured in this but what else could be in the mix what are the new games coming and right now while we have rumored games like F0 GX remaster or I don't know that Donkey Kong game that's been rumored for a couple years honestly we don't know what Nintendo is dropping and if the last direct is anything to go off of remember they gave us Metroid Prime remaster in that direct out of nowhere just Shadow dropped it available now so that really means that we have no idea what Nintendo is doing Nintendo is gonna Nintendo which means they're gonna surprise they're gonna hit us on a left field and we're not gonna see it coming so you know what I'm looking really forward to the next show and maybe the big reason is because Pikmin 4 is all we really have from Nintendo at this point and honestly that means Nintendo must be holding back some pretty big announcements especially if they're gonna be a gamescom and do a Nintendo live impacts what I really suggest hey you know what maybe they didn't have enough games they wanted to show at E3 again Nintendo's words that was their excuse for not being part of E3 they also might have saw you know the writing that hey you know what no one else is going to E3 so why are we gonna go to E3 but Nintendo is clearly planning to do something this summer and show us games so I can't wait to see what it is I guess shout out to Ethan Gash for being the first insider to let us know that something's coming not as if we didn't think something was coming anyways but now we at least can put a name and an outlet to one of the first sources that we are going to get a Nintendo showcase or in this case a Nintendo Direct at some point thank you guys so much for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video


There's nobody in here yet. Every time I do one of these, if you watch it later, you just have to sit and wait for me to actually engage someone when somebody actually comes in. So I thought I might start with something. Hello Chad, how are you? And Anne-Marie, nice to see you. Alright, I'm just gonna grab the link here and put it in Facebook and we'll be ready to rock and roll. Hi Kevin. Hi Brandon. And Pennsylvania. And codename players. Hello everybody. Hey everybody, show it up once. Hi John. And Matt. I didn't have a topic this time, so I thought I would just talk to you guys, give you guys some updates and see how you're doing. See if you have something you'd like to talk about. Brandon, thank you. 6,000, yeah. Hello that dude Robo. And Matt. And Mark. And Chili Swerve. Hi everybody. Okay. How's everybody doing tonight? Sorry, I was started a little bit late. We had to stop and get some food on the way home. We were doing something with, at my daughter's school, family stuff. Yeah, 6,000. Hey from New Zealand. Hello from the United States. Okay. Yeah, New Zealand. We are international. You meant hello? I thought you meant hell. I thought it was a New Zealand thing.  I don't know. Okay. There we go. Hi Ronald. Thanks, yeah. There is a reason I have this up. Hey, fun school Ronnie. Awesome. Yeah. For the next video, I've got some green screen stuff. Yeah, comic tropes. You know what this means? You get a screen capture. And then you know, put whatever you want to behind there. Sorry, I had to reconnect. Lost connection for a second. Okay. All right, we're ready to rock and roll. Here we go. I got McNuggets Benny. Just your regular chicken McNuggets. And they even forgot my barbecue sauce. Yeah. Okay. Good idea. Best background meme wins a shout out. Argentina. Hello Argentina from the United States. Well, we've got folks from all over this time. That's awesome. Well, I wanted to start by letting everybody know that the situation in my personal and professional life has improved a great deal. And I feel like we're going to be getting back to normal. Do I have a topic today? I don't have a topic because I was in a hurry. I didn't think of a topic from Canada. Rat face from Canada. Welcome from the United States. Yeah. Over the last month and a half or so, it's just kind of been a weight on me and on the channel that I've had to deal with some things regarding my job. But last week, I kind of forced the issue and I forced them to make a decision. I basically laid it out for them and said something had to change. So they did make a change. The change they almost made was I almost didn't have a job, but instead they moved me to something else, something that fits me a lot better. So we're in a lot better shape now. So we're going to be chugging along. I don't feel like the channel will be negatively affected at all. The only thing is I'm a little bit further behind on the video production than I usually like to be. Like this upcoming weekend's review, I would normally like to already have completed, but I'm still working on it. And thank you everybody. Thank you. Normally I wouldn't share a whole lot of my personal issues, but there was a possibility that it could affect the channel and I thought you guys deserve to know about it. But I feel like we're in good shape now. But yeah, as a result, I'm a little bit behind. I mean, everything will go up on time. I'm not in danger of missing deadlines. But normally I would like to, oh, comic tropes, thank you. Thank you for that. I love your show too. Hey, you missed up one. Hey, how you doing? Yeah, normally I would have this coming week's video done by last weekend. And comic tropes, I love your show too. Now, if you want to talk about hello, Jose from Missouri, hello from the United States, you want to talk about a show that has found some success. Comic tropes has really taken off like a rocket and deservedly so.  You do this YouTube thing for a while. And sometimes you see people succeed. Sometimes you see channels succeed and you don't feel like they necessarily deserve it. So when I see somebody who's succeeding that I think deserves it, that's one of the good guys and that is, you know, doing it the right way, that gives me a lot of joy. So comic tropes doing it the right way, you know, being a good guy about it and is doing great. So fantastic. Oh, thank you. Thank you.  Do I have the mobile battle bunker? Yeah, somebody sent me the mobile battle bunker. Oh, Mike Lopez from Kuwait. Hello from the United States. And thank you for all your help. And Matt, yeah, 6000. I believe I do have the mobile battle bunker. Somebody sent that to me. I don't know if it's complete yet. I'll need to take a look at it again, but I do believe I have that one. Hasbro Universe crossovers action figures. You like the super trooper video. Thank you. I'm trying not to drink too much while I'm doing this because I don't want to belch through the show. How do you think will you fill the current content, content gap once you new Joe media, even this original fan made stuff? That's a good question. And right now it's mainly like the comic books.  As for fan made stuff. Hey, Brandon. As for fan made stuff, you get like what a lot of us YouTubers do, which is more along the lines of like reviews. But GI Joe Berg does sometime, sometimes do like stories and, you know, they have some fun playing with the toys. So that's pretty cool. And we've got a couple really good cosplay groups with the finest in the fighting seven, eight, eight, that do fantastic cosplay stuff. So, I mean, they could, they could do something with that. They could do like years ago, like I saw on YouTube, like some fan made movies and things like that. And that stuff is fun. But yeah, I think as a fan community, even though I think we're doing a lot, I actually think we're doing pretty good for the size of the community that it is. I think we can do more. I think there's more than we can do. I know a lot of guys are jumping into like the toy reviewing game, but there are some other, there are some uncapped potential areas of creativity that I think we can do more. And we can roll into the new movie in 2020, kind of riding a high with a whole bunch of really awesome fan made stuff. Hoodie Coco. Cobra Earthquake. Thanks, I'm a super trooper. Okay, yeah, like I said, I didn't bring a topic this time. I just wanted to talk to you guys. Yeah. Three, the three versions of Covergirl. Yeah, they have to pick up the others. I like Covergirl. I really do. I always have. In some ways, Covergirl is sort of like what G.I. Joe has always been about. So just very, something about Covergirl at the very heart of G.I. Joe. Matt's not excited about the movie. Well, you know, it's, you never know how things are going to go. It sets your expectations real low and make it very easy for them to exceed them. Have I cosplayed at conventions? I haven't. Excuse me. It's something that I've thought about, but I haven't got around to doing it yet. People have been encouraging me to do it, and I eventually, it probably will. But I haven't gone through the, the time, I don't have that time really, to create something. Susan, I'll check on that, Brandon, sorry. Reinvent the PSAs for Hasbro. Can you do like a real serious PSA now? Is it possible to do a PSA that isn't a parody? Because you do a PSA nowadays and you automatically think, it's easy to parody, right? It's easy satire. Who would I cosplay as? I feel like, I could do a pretty good, well obviously, I would do a hooded Cobra Commander, right? That's, you know, might as well start with that. But I feel like I could do a good one. I've got some ideas for how to do the costume that I think would actually look pretty good. I've got some ideas. But being inexperienced at cosplay, you know, I can have all the ideas in the world when it comes to actually making the thing is much more difficult. I could do rock and roll. Yes, I got the gun. I got the Cobra Commander gun. I wanted to see if I could make the backpack laser charger. I'm curious about that. I wonder what it would take to make something like that. Getting a panel at Joe Con 2019. Oh, at Joe Fest. There aren't any more official Joe cons, but the unofficial Joe Fest. The plan is, yeah, I should have a panel. They've offered me that. I should have a panel. I should have a table as well. So I'll be all hooked up and I look forward to seeing some folks there. I go with blue for the costume. Whoever was asking. Yeah, I try to make it like the figure as close to the figure as possible, but, you know, add a little bit to the detail and make it perhaps a little more realistic. Anyway, that's the idea. I have the idea in my head. Yeah, Ed Schumacher's convention. Yeah, that's what we're talking about. It'll be Joe Fest in Augusta, Georgia. It'll be June of next year. And they've been very gracious to invite me and offer, you know, for my family to go to. So, yeah. So that's the plan for next year. It's not going to be exactly the same as Joe Conn, but it sounds like it's going to have a lot of the Joe Conn regulars there. So it'll be fun to still be able to see people that normally only get to see once a year. Cosplay as a dreadknock. As a dreadknock. Okay, which dreadknock though? Which dreadknock would I be? Or just make up my own dreadknock? Yeah, I could cosplay as Zartan, but that's really easy because Zartan can look like anything. Or I can just not go and pretend to be invisible Zartan. Hey, Chad, thank you for that. Thank you for the super chat, Chad. Thank you very much. Chad Kimmel. Chris Brewer, you're doing hurricane prep. Please be careful. Be safe. Please. Nagahide.  I gotta review Nagahide. I'm looking forward to that. Ninja Zartan with the... Do I keep spares, multiples, or doubles when it comes to figures and vehicles? Sometimes I used to have a policy of I would only keep one of each thing. If I had an extra, I would give it away or sell it. But then I ran into situations where I regretted getting rid of certain things because, you know, I would discover there's a flaw with the one I kept or it somehow ends up getting broken. And then I really wished I had the spare. So now my policy is I don't try to get two of each thing, but if I end up with two of each thing, I'll keep two. Just so I can have a backup. So I have a spare just in case. And since I'm reviewing things, having that contingency is kind of a big deal because, you know, if something happens and it does happen sometime, I've really tried to not break anything to be careful with things and keep things intact. But accidents happen. I have pets. I have cats that are very destructive. So, yeah, now I'm trying to keep a backup. You know, if I come across a second of an item, I'm trying to hold on to it. In the long run, though, you know, when I'm actually like done with reviewing, my intention really is to just keep one. I really only need one of each thing. I'm not a hoarder, I promise. I wrote out Hurricane Hugo in 1989 on an island. Yeah, if you have the ability to go inland, run. I would. You know, here in Oklahoma, we get tornadoes. And tornadoes are really scary.  That's all you can do. But tornadoes are small. Hurricanes are really big. I would be as far away from it as I possibly could. I would consider an O-ring video about different sizes for different years. Oh, for sizes of O-rings. That's an interesting idea. O-rings are replaced so often, though, that I'd have to... Yeah, I'd have to think about that. Your wife will not allow you to buy a small house to display for your collection of these displayed. And yeah, mine either. Oh, yeah, New York gets both hurricanes and tornadoes. It's not fun. Hey, JJ. Better late than never. Which true builder has the overall best uniform Crimson Guard Viper eels? That's a good question. Of course, the eels, that's my favorite. Because I'm partial to the old blue shirts, too. And then Crimson Guard just looks awesome. You're asking difficult questions this time. I'll have to really think about it. Yeah, the Crimson Guard uniform has decorations all over it. Yeah, it looks more like a dress uniform than a combat uniform. That seems to be what they were going for. And Green Yeti is on Team Golobulas. All right. When coming over to Southern California, I don't know, but I'd love to. I like Southern California. I like Los Angeles. I like San Diego. Hey, Green Yeti. What's up? Thoughts on the trading cards? I credit it with roping it back in the GI Joe. Folks have given me more of the trading cards, so I have a full set now. And it's kind of cool to look at. So yeah, I like the trading cards. I'm going to visit Seattle. Apparently I need to make an entire West Coast tour. I'll start up north in Seattle and I'll work my way down. We'll hit San Francisco and just work our way down the coast and hit Los Angeles and San Diego. How's that sound? There's something we should do for a crowdfunding campaign. Give me a vacation to California, Florida. Green Yeti, I did go to Florida last year. I did. I did. We went to Orlando for Jo-Con last year. And we spent a lot of time there. We spent extra time there because we went with, like the whole family went. Max Trebo's ghost music. Kevin in your opening act. Yeah, see, man, all right, certain people that I would love to meet, man, I would love to meet Kevin in person. He just seems like such a good guy. Yeah, Portland Sea. Now I got to hit every city on the West Coast. All right, this is my new goal, is to have a West Coast tour. Then of course we're going to have to do an East Coast tour. We can't leave the East Coast out. And somehow we got to fit in a middle of the country tour. Yeah, since the debacle with my job, which seems to have resolved itself now, I got uncomfortably close to not having a job. And that certainly made me think about the future and what I do here.  So yeah, keep me busy. I love to travel. I love to do it more. The main reason I can't travel more is just because of time, getting the time to do it. One of the things that we've been aiming to do for several years is to go back to the UK. We really enjoyed our time in the UK. So we have some friends there that we'd like to see again. But we just haven't made it. We went in 2014 and we just have not made it back there since. But we've been a little busy. I mean, in the intervening time, I finished law school. I took and passed the bar. I got a job. These things are important. So the national domination tour, I'm for it. I'm for it. I'm for it. The action force cosplay. That would be fun. How can I do an action force? I haven't seen anybody do a cosplay of the red jackal of the action force, Destro, or Baron Ironblood. I've seen a white jumpsuit with the skull thing and get a helmet. Yeah, a cosplay of red laser. At least I've never seen anybody in the United States do that. Yeah, the Crimson twins were clearly doing something illegal. Now remember, at the end of that eco-warriors issue, they did bring in the lawyer. They brought in the secret weapon. The bar exam is a beast who took sister to four tries. Yeah, man, that is a tough test. And I know classmates that had to take it more than once. I was so relieved to pass it my first time. It does this thing psychologically to you. After you take the exam, you feel like you did okay. You probably didn't do great, but you probably did okay as soon as you finished the exam. They don't announce the results for quite some time after that. You get further down the road and the longer it gets, the further it goes, the worse you think you did.   So that's where I was before the results came out.  I know I failed. I'm going to have to take it again. An action force continuity cutter of each header from New Zealand. Yeah, I need to read more of the action force continuity. I've read some of it thanks to CyberTiger who sent me some issues. Oh, and I got some more too. But I think the action force continuity is interesting. They had to reconnect there for a second. Yeah, they're intentionally difficult. Do a special episode about Gijo's lax dress and facial hair standards. Yeah, I don't know if I do a whole episode about it, but I could do it as a segment. In a review. Because there is a little bit of precedent for that in certain special forces units. So I could kind of give a little bit of a historical background on where this idea of like these American soldiers growing beards and having unusual weapons and uniforms. I can kind of give a historical background where that idea might come from. Who got away with more hardball or Budo? Well, you know, hardball is at least wearing regular clothes. Budo is wearing an ancient samurai armor kit that would be absolutely useless against bullets. That's something that, you know, would cling around, make a lot of noise. It would hinder his movement. And I don't think his teammates would be thrilled to have him going on a mission with that clunky armor. Budo for Ninja Force. See, there you go. See? Hey guys, how you doing? And once again, you know, I didn't bring a topic, but I did want to touch base with all you guys and just talk about stuff. Just talk about stuff. Did I ever play the G.I. Joe Nintendo games? I didn't. And I still haven't. I played the G.I. Joe Atari game. I remember getting the Atari game for the Atari 2600 back when that existed. And being very underwhelmed with it. But I was never much of a video game kid. So, you know, video games, I just didn't get into that much. Why do I not have the live streams in the toy room? The only reason is just more comfortable here behind the table. I could set up over there sometime. But for me, it's just more comfortable here. What does Cobra Commander shine his face with? Shinola. I don't know. He used Bonami. Hey, does anybody get that? There's a reference. There's kind of a deep cut for you. And they used Bonami. Who knows what movie that's from? Livestream while drawing. Yes, I really should do that. Speaking of drawing, did I bring enough McDonald's for the rest of this? Yes, I did. Come on over. Your share is right here. Yeah, I need to do that. I've only done it once. I should do it more. But I just, right now, I've got so much going on. I did one batch of sketches for patrons. I have another batch of sketches I need to do still. I'm running a little bit behind. Apparently, well, last month there was such a huge influx of support that I was trying to get a whole bunch done. And apparently when I put the names of the patrons in the videos, I misspelled a couple names. So I got to fix that now. So I'm trying to keep up. Yeah, doing a Livestream drawing, I think is a fine idea. I have to think about the logistics of that. But I think it would be fun. Hey, it's Joefan82. Cool. Hey, it's nice to see Joefan82 here. That's awesome. But yeah, when I draw, I'm never entirely sure how it's going to come out. So, you know, I do a lot of drawings and I have to discard some because they just don't turn out very well. Sometimes it takes a few tries. But I think it would be fun. I really should. I think it's a good idea. Oops, oops, oops. Draw stick figures like a champ.  I mean, that's how most drawings start. Good, you got your code book. Those code books, by the way, they were Susan's idea. We actually did look for somebody who would like manufacture decoder rings or something like that, like a physical ring or something. But we couldn't find anybody that would do that. I thought we might like buy some in bulk. So, the next best thing was to just kind of do our own code book and do secret codes that way. But hey, Joefan82 is going to have a new video this week. That's awesome. Yeah, incorporate live stream sketching with the Tuesday live stream. Yeah, that's how I would do it if I did it. I wouldn't need to think about the logistics of it because for this, I just put my phone on a tripod and I sit here and talk to you guys. For that, I would need to make sure that the drawing is in frame. So, that's something I have to work out, but I'm sure I could figure out how to do it. Painting a Cobra Toxo Viper on a skateboard deck. That sounds very interesting. I'd like to see that. Robot Chicken. Oh, hey, it's SEO Tourview. Yeah, SEO Tourview mentions the decoder rings being cost prohibitive. Yeah, that's probably true. We did explore the idea, though, anyway, because I just thought it would be fun. But it's hard to find anyone that doesn't.  So, we just went with a different plan. But I think the secret code stuff is fun. When I go to a cold slither show, sure. Hey, Matt. Matt got the reference. The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Starring one of my favorite actors, Don Knott. Yeah. I haven't been to any concerts for a while, but I used to go to the concerts all the time. I've seen some pretty great bands. Have any of the G.I. Joe Micro Machines or Micro Force ones. I don't have those. The Viper. You guys run the show anyway. You guys make this entertaining. I don't need a topic. You guys got your own topics. Sven Gulli. Hey, that was a fun show. You were on Sven Gulli a couple of Saturdays ago? Well, I haven't watched that show in a while. Now I gotta go find it. I gotta go find your appearance. Pleasantville with Don Knott's small but important part. Yes, I saw that movie. I liked that movie back when it came out. Yeah, that was a pretty good movie. Don Knott's is one of the corrupt generals known as the jugglers. Yeah, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is kind of a guilty pleasure. Technically it's really not a good movie, but it's just so goofy every once in a while. I just enjoy watching it. Can you believe that we have 80 people in here? We have 80 people in this live stream. You guys are incredible. I'm so grateful that you guys show up for this. Thank you. Next time I swear I will have a topic. I just didn't have any time for a show prep. We went and did something at my daughter's school. Then we had to get some food and then I ran right here and set up and went ahead and get started. I didn't have any time to prepare. But I just like seeing you guys. Mr. Limpid, the Apple dumpling game with Tim Conway. What was that? Oh, the private eyes. Anybody remember Private Eyes? It also had Tim Conway. I watched that movie again a few years ago. I guess I didn't think it was funny as I did when I was a kid. But when I was a kid I thought that movie was hilarious. Three's Company. All right, now we're all just talking about Don Knotts. Look forward to me, Sergeant Slaughter, again at Retrocon Oak Park, Pennsylvania this October. I would love to meet Sergeant Slaughter once, even once. And that comes back to my difficulty in finding the time to travel. I wish I could go to more shows and conventions. Some of you guys, like Kevin from SEO Tour Reviews, goes to conventions and stuff. I'm so jealous. What's Knotts to like? Don Knotts' mail-away figure, yeah. You can, you know, it's perfect. You do Don Knotts as Barney Fife. He's got the revolver and it only comes with one bullet. Yeah, I need to keep track of where Sergeant Slaughter's going to be appearing because I would love to meet that guy. He seems like a great guy. And he seems to really enjoy his involvement with G.I. Joe. And I think it's great. I'd love to shake his hand, let him put me in a headlock, get my picture taken. That'd be fantastic. Almost as great as meeting Larry Hama. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah, wasn't he in Scooby-Doo? Movies, Bob Hope Entertaining the Joe's During a Rise or Pent or a Rise. You know, you guys, I got to hand it to you guys. You guys know the classics. You know, a lot of these young kids, you say Bob Hope, they're like Bob Hope Who. But you guys, you guys know the classics. Used a picture of you and Sarge on Christmas card one year. That's fantastic. That's so great. Heard a 21-year-old ask who's Clint Eastwood. Yeah. Hey Mac, thank you. I'm glad you like the videos. Mac MC, much appreciated. Yeah, I made sure that my kids watched movies that were made before they were born. I thought it was important that they realized that the world did exist before they were born. And there's some things that happened in it. So, yeah, especially my oldest daughter, she really gets into some of those older movies. So, yeah, we've gone through my collection of VHS cassettes. I still have a ton of movies on VHS cassettes. And I'm not converting. VHS, I still got a working VCR. I'm sticking with VHS. Oh yeah, the music video on YouTube. The Funny or Die one. The Ballad of G.I. Joe. Yeah, at the end. Yeah, at the end of my review of the Terror Drone, we did a little parody of that. We had fun with it. Yes, Green Yeti. How can I help you? All right, you've got everybody's attention now. I don't know anybody who fixes Betamax. I don't know anybody who even opens up these old VCRs anymore. You know, even up to a few years ago, I used to be able to like just get one, just buy one, but they're not even made anymore as far as I know. Show the kids Citizen Kane. Oh, cool. Citizen Kane, Jaws, Psycho. Man, those are great movies. Those are great movies. Whole Bodies of Weapon. I'm so glad that somebody besides me has seen The Ghost in Mr. Chicken. Yeah, we always had VHS as well. I don't know, last year, maybe the year before, I found an episode of the G.I. Joe animated series on VHS at a thrift shop. So far, that's the only G.I. Joe VHS cassette that I've run across. Hey, you caught me live. Thanks, Havert Havert. I'm sorry if I mispronounce your name. Oh, Green Yeti, I'm sorry I embarrassed you. You have the original Star Wars on Betamax? Yeah, we have the original Star Wars on VHS, which is the only way to see the non-special edition version. So, I mean, sometimes, I mean, I have all the Star Wars movies on Blu-ray as well. Hey, it's Mike Murdock. How you doing? Well, that's okay, you know, Mike. It's better, you know, better half than none. So, I'm glad to have you here. The Dark Lawn. Oh, yeah. Dark Lawn. I will put it on the schedule. My review schedule for the last couple months of the year is kind of open. I still got to work out when certain things are going to be reviewed. I have a plan, I think, for October. But if I'm going to do that in October, I kind of have to jump on it, because I need to pick up a couple things. If I'm going to do what I think I'm doing for October.  Is that bad? It's not bad if you wanted fake accessories. You know, if that's what you wanted, then it's fine. The Laser Discs. Yeah, the Laser Discs were like, it's been, you know, a wide-ranging conversation this time. Thank you, folks. Thank you. Yeah, so, I haven't put much thought into Halloween-themed content for this year. Yeah. See, SEO, SEO, I get it. I understand. And October's going to be here before you know it. And I'm not good at doing, like, theme months or planning things around holidays. I'm just terrible at that. I put things on a calendar, and I don't think about the fact that this date is a holiday, or it's around a holiday, and I could do something themed to that holiday. I just... But for October, I have an idea for October, but it's not like monsters. That's, you know, Timmer from Half the Battle does his monster month, and I wouldn't want to step in that territory. But some kind of theme month might work, and I have an idea for it, but I don't have everything I need for it. So if I were to do it, I need to... I really need to jump on it. Yeah, Dark Lawn is cool. Monsters in my pocket. What was your question, Mike? Brandon, you are correct. That yellow color variant, paint variant on the Cobra bat is something that I am trying to nail down. Yeah. Customs... Customs like costumes. Hey, it's almost the same thing. Somebody, when I was asking for ideas of things to add to the show, I think somebody brought up the idea of somehow sharing your customs, you know, the viewer's custom figures. If I can figure out a way to do that, I think that might be fun. Out of the Joe vehicles, which was the weirdest looking Joe vehicle and the weirdest Cobra vehicle and why? Let's see. I think one of the weirdest Cobra vehicles is the Buzz Board. That is a strange thing. Cobra had a lot of weird vehicles, though, and the Buzz Board... Well, and the Pogo was pretty weird, too, but I am going to stick with the Buzz Board. There are lots that could tie for that. Weirdest Joe vehicle? Let me think about that. Let me think, think, think. That's going to be harder. Yeah. Weirdest Joe vehicle? Let me think here for a second. Yeah, the LCV recon sled was weird, but it was kind of just sort of like a deconstructed motorcycle. Man, I'm blanking on Joe vehicles. I'll have to think about that. The X-wing helicopter... Oh, yeah, the Skystorm. That Skystorm is pretty weird. Is it a jet? Is it a helicopter? Yeah. Joe vehicles, even the weird Joe vehicles, usually still had some kind of... You know, we're still somewhat grounded. I've got to think about that. Bye, Green Yeti. Thanks for showing up. Do I think there's no place for sci-fi slash supernatural in G.I. Joe, or does it fit in some context? Well, some science fiction is fine. Now, I can only speak for myself. It's a matter of preference. I prefer the more military-themed toys and characters. That's just why I prefer. As for whether something else fits into it, sci-fi, supernatural, zombies, it's a matter of preference. And it's just not what I prefer. I'm sorry, I'm missing some of your comments. The Coastal Defender. Hey, that's a contender for weird. That one's pretty weird. Not going to do an Elon Musk on a video. Yeah, I decided against that. That's funny, by the way. International G.I. Joe toy review with unique figures from different countries. Well, I do know that at some point I've got to do some more action force reviews. And in fact, in this next one, I did get to sneak in a little bit of action force. So that's cool. Airwolf. Airwolf. Oh, man, that was a great show. I loved that show. If I had enough stuff to do a whole month of action force, I think that would be awesome. I don't know if I have that much stuff, though. But I do have a fair amount of action force stuff now. Enough to at least do maybe one more video. What else do I still have to review in the future that excites me? I tell you what. Some day, some day I'm going to get that 1982 Cobra missile command headquarters. And I know it's only cardboard. I know it's only cardboard. It is a rinky dinky flimsy little thing. But I get that thing. I will have completed 1982. It's the only thing that's keeping me from completing 1982. And I am going to be thrilled to get it. Thrilled to review it. And that will be the final send off for the 82s. Yeah, they're extra. Yes, they are not cheap. In fact, like complete, you know, not in box ones are now getting kind of hard to find at any price. How do I feel about touching up vintage figures? You know, as long as it doesn't, you know, detract from the figure, I really don't have a problem with it. Touching up figures, to me, it's kind of like, you know, replacing o-rings. You just kind of, you got to do it. However, some collectors don't want anything messed around. They want it, you know, completely 100% authentic original. So if you end up selling something to a collector that doesn't want a figure that's been touched up or repaired, you got to disclose that, right? You'll always be ethical as a seller and make sure the buyer knows what they're getting. Personally, I don't mind. I mean, I want a figure that's intact and I don't need a figure that's perfect. I just want one that's in good enough condition to review and to put in front of the camera so that people who watch the video can get an idea what it's supposed to look like. Do I have one of the Cobra bunkers Tim reviewed for Cobra Convergence 3? I do not have that. Yeah, Retroblasting does restorations and they do a really good job with restorations. Restoration is something that I've always wanted to do. Toypalloy also, the channel Toypalloy is great at restorations and repairs. I just haven't, you know, had the time to really get into that just, you know, it's hard enough for me to just get my regular work done. But excuse me, I do have to repair things from time to time. I just think being a toy collector means that sometimes you have to repair things. It's just part of the hobby. Yeah, Timmer's catalog video, yeah, wasn't that cool? They put some extra work into that Belgian catalog. The photography was fantastic. Yeah, Toypalloy is a great channel. Toypalloy is an excellent channel. I missed somebody's comment. I'm sorry. Yeah, the action packs. Yes, check out that Timmer fellow. He's quite the chap. My philosophy, I mean, if I were just collecting just for me, like, and I wasn't reviewing things, I really wouldn't care all that much about the condition. In fact, if you look at my early videos, some of the toys are really not in great condition. As the channel grows and as I think more about, like, what I'm going to put in front of the camera, I care more about the condition of the toy now. So I'm trying to give you better examples of what's reviewed. Man, we've got 90 people in here. 90 people? Can you believe that? That's incredible. Troublemaker, hello, how are you doing? Yeah, Broken Heel is not good. Broken Thumbs are worse. That stinks. World Peacekeepers Humvee, that sounds awesome. Yeah, the GI Joe Hammer. That is another one that, you know, it's on my radar, but finding that vanilla rice viper. Hey, finding that antenna is just a bugaboo. I would love to meet friend Flint Dilly. That would be really cool. Yeah, I don't know how much this is lagging. I'm trying to keep up with you guys. So what I'm seeing on the screen here and what you're seeing may, there may be a few seconds of difference. So sorry about that. Oh, you're back into a dice call. Well, hey, you know, if you're collecting again, that's fantastic. I hope you enjoy your collecting journey. It is a journey and it's not a sprint. It's a marathon. You don't have to get in a big hurry. But, you know, there are lots of different ways to enjoy GI Joe other than just spending a lot of money on stuff. You know, there are a lot of aspects of the hobby. Rap viper, like, oh, I'm blanking on his name. The guy that's at Jotcon every year. Oh, man, I feel bad. I'm totally blanking on his name. When it comes to GI Joe knockoffs, do you stand out as a special, any of the stand out is especially amusing. Not right offhand. Hello, Boston. Hello from Oklahoma. Plenty on making wooden vehicles. That's cool. Well, hey, guys, it's been almost an hour. So in about three minutes, I'll probably shut it down. But thank you all for showing up. This is awesome.  But you guys have kept the conversation going. So thank you. Now, before I, before anyone showed up in the live stream, I said a word. There's one word that I said as soon as the live stream started.  You can only find out by watching the replay. So when you watch the replay, make a comment of the one word I said, the first word I said on this live stream, just because it will amuse me. The first person who comments will leave when absolutely nothing. There is no prize whatsoever. Usually when I do these live streams, it's, I spend the first few minutes kind of in silence because I'm trying to, you know, get the link and post it on Facebook. So yeah, tacos. Anyway, almost done. Okay. So a lot of you did catch it. All right. Well, I have to think some other way to trick you. I'm going to have to think of something else.  You're too quick. There's no prize guys. You win nothing. You win nothing. Sorry. Thank you, Matt. And thanks everybody for showing up. It's been a fantastic live stream. Next week, I'm going to make sure to have a topic. I will say one thing for anybody who missed the show earlier. Things personally are going a lot better. We're going to get back to normal. My stress level is coming down. So that's good. The channel should go on. And the only thing is that I'm a little bit behind on the video production. Normally I'd like to work ahead. I'm not missing any deadlines yet, but I'm getting close to them. So I don't like to run that far behind. So that's really the only thing that will be affected. I'll work to catch up. But right now everything's going great. And thank you everyone for your support. It's been a tough month and a half. Really tough. But I think we might be finally past that now. So thank you everyone for helping me through that. You guys did more for me than I can tell you. So thank you, Mikey. Thank you everyone. And yep, that will be an hour. I will say goodnight to you guys. We will do this again next week and I will plan it better. We will have a topic. I will bring a topic to talk about or bring something to show you and we'll have fun. So I'm going to work on the next review now and I will see you guys later.