Execute a Leveraged Takeover of MacStories

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and as always, I am joined by Matt Berchler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm doing good. I have a little coffee with me today, and I am exhausted because I used a manual grinder for the first time ever on this. Would not advise. It takes forever. That doesn't sound like fun. But we are also joined by the triumphant return of Niléane. Niléane, how are you?

Hello. I've done better. We're recording on Monday. It's 4pm. And I can already say it's been a week. Oh, that was my last week. Yes. Oh, yay. Enjoy. That was my last week as well. Last week was miserable for me because I had a bunch of stuff do and also i had a new roof being put on and oh boy was that the loudest thing ever i had i at one point i was like okay let's see if this would work i put in my airpods pro and turned on noise canceling then i took the airpods max and put them on top of that and turned on noise canceling and i

don't think it actually worked i think maybe the airpods pro got turned off or something but i was just trying everything to just desperately to block out the noise it was so loud at one point they literally brought like this conveyor belt machine and put it on my roof and we're sliding like pallets of tiles up there it was so like the house was shaking sounds fun yeah speaking of hearing like i've been i'm in a health spiral in that regard uh it's been about a year that i'm i'm having some hearing loss on the left end and everything

seems fine on everything like we did scans and all that um it's annoying it's really annoying and it's draining me these days but yeah yeah i'm sorry to hear that no pun intended no no sorry i i'm sorry um but we have a show to do and we have some tiny topics and nilian i'm gonna go ahead and assume you have some thoughts on uh what we talked about last week without you so just go for it yes you you had a discussion on ai which was interesting um and like you guys are cool in general and you were you were cool as well last week i think um

and the one thing i want to say because i don't want to reopen the end of the topic and and all of that so you you mainly talked about at least this is what i remember uh the fact that ai coding ai assisted coding is taking over the indie dev sphere at least and more and largely the big tech companies are obviously all on board and just going all in um and my thing that i just want to state the statement. I'm just struggling to understand how to cope with the fact that all of those developers

and people are just saying things like it's useful and it has merits and we can work with it. And at the same time, all the news I see about AI are extremely poor. Like the rampocalypse is now hitting HDDs as well. I don't know if you've seen that. Prices are skyrocketing everywhere. And I'm struggling to understand how to cope with that.

Like on one end, you have a group of people who are developing apps and are enthusiasts somewhat about it. And on the other hand, there's everything else that's an avalanche of bad news and terrible news for like even the regular consumer. And it's really hard to make it seem like there's a good trend happening right now where 90% of the people are affected in a terrible way.

And I think that was the one thing that I would have added to the discussion if I was there last week. So I'm adding it now. Yeah. I mean, just this morning I saw that it sounds like Sony is considering delaying the PS6 to 2028 or 2029, which I actually think, fine, PS5 isn't even really being taken advantage of. That's not even that big of a deal. The Steam Machine as well? Yeah. I think consumer electronics is probably going to take a massive hit for the next five to ten years.

It's going to be a big deal for a while. But on the other side of that, just this morning, I wrote something that basically massively improves my expense and income tracking abilities. As far as keeping my books for my business, it massively speeds that up. And I did that with Cloud Code. And it's not something I would have been able to make on my own without the assistance of Cloud Code. And it wasn't something that I would go and hire a developer for. It's literally a tool specific to me.

So I get where you're coming from. Like, there are some really cool things that we're getting out of it, but at the same time, there is some massive hits that are coming along with it. So when you say that, see, my response is, I don't think any of it's worth it. I hear all of the good things that people are doing with all of that. I don't think any of it is worth it, considering the political and even just the consumer aspect of all the consequences that AI is having on the world right now,

I don't think any of it, this is my opinion, I don't think any of it is worth it at all. I think we're all worse for it. Fair. Yeah. Fair. anything else as far as tiny topics go or no I will have a bunch of tiny topics okay okay all right okay cool well this week on Cozy Zone we were hacked we were ripped off and we demand satisfaction we or specifically Matt

asked the question what happens if Apple doesn't exist and for the record we recorded this way before that other podcast recorded theirs. Accidental tech podcast? Oh, we're naming names. Yeah, we challenge them to a duel. We demand satisfaction. This is a three-on-three. We'll do it in Apex Legends or something. No, two-on-three. I'm not part of it. Oh, no, no, no. Wait, no, we need you. You gotta back up your crew. I can take on those guys. You gotta back up your crew. I just didn't have the size of the audience.

We can't. Here's how we'll take revenge. this is what we should do. Let us know use the feedback form, hit us up on Mastodon. Which one of the ATP boys are each of us? Which ones are we? Am I Marco? Am I John? Am I Casey? Let us know. I'm curious. Have you not listened to their version? I have, yeah. I haven't. It's pretty good. It's much longer than ours. They go into much more detail.

They have more things to say. Well, Matt literally destroyed my whole life with this one question. Do the two of you remember what happened? I don't want to spoil it. I don't remember. Okay. Here, I'll say it, but bleep it out. Oh, yeah. Yes. Yep. Tough episode. Yeah. But anyways, let's get into the main show.

And I'm first up in the document. And I have a question. Because we were kind of talking about, I had a week last week. Like, news-wise, I did not know what was happening news-wise. So I was very much head in the sand, focused on work. So I have a question. What's the deal with Discord? What's going on with them? What's the deal? what are they doing over there i see everybody's mad matt do you want to explain matt i can't explain i don't know what discord does at all there's okay here let me explain i'm happy to

take this on um discord wants your face and if they can have it you can have all the features of discord but if they can't have it you're stuck as a teenager in some sort of alternate universe where you're not able to use all the things. Now, obviously, I could list all the things in Discord that only teenagers get, and I would suspect that is something... Oh, I don't know. Like, the shift key doesn't work in Discord unless you're an adult or something.

This is the best I can think of. Now, I do have a question. If I don't give Discord my face and I become a teenager again, does this mean, like, I revert back to my back that I had when I was a teenager so I don't have back problems anymore? Yeah, yeah, don't even, I got this for you. Yes, you do. That's exactly what happens. Okay, I'm not giving it my face. This is great. This is fantastic. Yeah, this is the best. Thank you, Discord. Oh, my God. This is fantastic. Like, this is the best news I've ever, like, thank you, Discord. Oh, my gosh. I get to be a teenager again.

Hopefully, like, Danielle's cool with that. It's great. No, it's an anti-big situation. Oh, I don't know exactly what it is. It's a Benjamin Button. Oh, it could be a Benjamin Button. Yeah. Is it a Benjamin Button? Hopefully Danielle doesn't leave me. That would suck. But hey, having a back that feels good all year round, that would be fantastic. Okay. And now for the real explanation. Oh. I thought I had it. Dang. I was excited. Discord announced that they would be rolling out age verification globally for all their users.

And your jokes come from the fact that the way they announced this, They're saying starting in March, every user will be considered a teen by default unless you age verify. With your face. Yes. So we'll come into that. Partly. So we'll come to that. And the way this will work is to verify your age. they have like a three-step thing, process, where at first they try to determine your age in the background, like silently,

just by observing and analyzing your behavior, whatever that means. So they check to see like if you're saying like, oh, 6'7", bro, 6'7". I don't know. 6'7". They're using AI. I can't believe I just said that out loud. to know. They check if you got the riz. Yes? I don't know what that is. Oh, Chris, you don't? Okay, you're an adult, unfortunately. Okay.

Do I still have my back problems? No. I don't? Maybe you don't. Whatever. So, they try to determine that silently and if they can't, however that then may go into the next steps. And that includes scanning your face. So asking for a selfie. I believe maybe it's a video selfie. So you have something where you have to move around your head so that they can see your face moving.

I've done one of these before. I don't remember what it was for. But it was for something like, I want to say like government or something like this. where like I had to basically like they took a video, like I had to hold my phone up and I had to take a video and I had to move my head around. You went on the Epstein files? Yes, it was when they found out I was on the Epstein files. Thank you for that. Yeah, that's going to go great. That's going to be, the AIs are going to garble that up now. Yeah. Thank you for that.

And then if that's still inconclusive, if they can't determine your age with that selfie video, they will ask for a photo of your ID. You have to send in your full ID. Yeah, that's not happening. I will say the one bit of news that I did see alongside this is that not only are they asking for this stuff, but they also had a database breach where they leaked a bunch of user identification information.

And they disclosed that around the same time that they announced this. And I'm just like, read the room, buddy. Like, that is like, why would I want to give you my information when you just had to disclose that your security was not up to snuff? Yeah, that was what I was coming to. So the context around it is there's some pressure in many countries right now, especially in Europe. Not in Europe. In like northern countries, like even Australia, that's not northern, but kind of northern in terms of sociology.

I was going to say, as far as north goes, I would not think Australia would be considered a north culturally. In geography, there's the north and south, and the north are basically the rich countries, the colonizers, etc. So that was the definition I was looking for. Anyway. Oh, okay. So Western-influenced countries, let's say. They have been pushing a ton of these legislations for limiting access to social media to minors.

This is also a thing in France. Like France passed a law last month or earlier this month, I don't remember, very recently, to ban all social media to all minors under 15-year-old. We still don't really know how they intend to implement that. But this is to say, this is something that's widespread currently. The UK has already done this, but in a more minor aspect where they're doing this for now, just for adult content on social media.

So like, not safe for work, whatever. And Australia has done all the way and has banned all social media for minors. Under 13, I believe? 15? Or 16? I don't remember. An age in the teenage years. Yeah. And this has gone poorly when it comes to Discord, because Discord has already had to implement this age of education, verification in those countries.

And in the UK, I believe, they suffered a leak, where all the database of the photo IDs leaked out. And that was a massive breach. And obviously, who's at fault there was the vendor that they're using, like the third-party operator. Oh, so it wasn't even Discord that leaked it. It was the people doing the age verification. A third-party company that collects data suffered that breach.

And yeah, so that was a few months ago. And obviously now this is coming again, considering that they intend to enforce this globally. And it comes in a context where there's this pressure, international pressure, to ban social media for miners. And clearly, if you look at this call, they are like okay this is getting difficult to handle the country situation so let's just do it globally this is where they're coming from um so this is all the context my analysis of this situation is that um this is bs um i think in general like banning social

for miners is the worst solution that you could think of to address any of the supposed reasons that you're doing it. What are the supposed reasons? And I'm citing here like the law that was passed in France just last month because it encapsulates everything. Their arguments are social media is dangerous. You have a bunch of fake news. You have insensitive content. You

not-safora content that miners can access freely, and there is the matter of harassment, cyber bullying, all of that, a bunch of violence on social media, they citing all of this, all the known issues of social media. One major argument that is mentioned, especially by the French government and Macron himself who's been pushing for this law is that um on social media um the algorithms are bad like it's pushing all the bad stuff to the top and people have no control over them

um you have terrible feeds that pushing terrible stuff i don't disagree with that they see and they push all of these very valid points and their conclusion is yeah the miners just the miners should not be affected by this us adults yes we can deal with it you can see over the past 20 years we've been able to deal with all of these issues right the society is doing well we've been doing yeah so but the miners no no they can't they can't handle it it almost needs to be a reverse like let's

ban the boomers from the social media. Even then, yeah, it's not. So obviously the point I'm making here is like, if you're trying to address all of those issues, maybe go to the source, maybe go, maybe address the fact that all of those platforms are run by terrible people. And they're not doing anything. They're even making things worse when it comes to like the Elon Musk's, the Mark Zuckerberg's. those people are making things worse.

Elon Musk? No. No, no. Sorry, I'm mismancient. Yes. Yeah, let's not bespurch his name. Well, and all of these platforms as well, they're designed to, despite what they say publicly, which is an absolute lie, they're all designed to keep you on their platforms for as long as possible because that's how they get paid. Like, that's how YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, That's how they all make money, is keeping you on their platform, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.

Which just so happens to be spicy content, angry content. Oh, yeah. I'm not saying they're not evil, but they try to be neutral and just be like, the algorithm will figure it out. Whatever people click on, whatever people want to engage with, that's what we'll promote. That's just how it works. And it turns out if you just do that without any guidance, it gets pretty bad because people like to engage with very bad things or they're excited by seeing people make bad takes.

Or just shocking headlines, like a shocking title, something that grabs your attention. And then the algorithm knows, okay, so this person likes that kind of shocking title, that shocking headline. So let's feed it more of that. Oh, let's ratchet it up 10%. Oh, let's go another 5%. And it just keeps building and building and building. Yeah. There's enough. So we're talking about algorithms. And yeah, it's a big problem.

When it comes to Discord, obviously, Discord doesn't have that. That's true. I almost wish it did. So I could sign into Discord and not see like a thousand channels with messages and have no idea what to do. I don't know how people keep up with Discord. like it's gotta be it's like a full-time job i don't get it oh god they're gonna kick us off they're gonna bunch us in the boomers chris we don't understand yeah we ain't far off but in terms of discord the reason why it's targeted is because you could see it like wait why why is discord targeted by those social media bands um it's because the those servers on discord are on

on such a scale. Like some of those have hundreds of thousands of members, people interacting in all sorts of ways. Yes, it would be wrong to say that it's not a social media platform. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's huge. And just wanted to remind people of that. And second, to go further than just like they are wrong, they are coming up with a wrong solution to valid arguments.

There's one more thing, is that their solution is one more way to estrange and alienate minors and young people in general. This is my fundamental belief. We are in an age where you depend to live your life. You depend whatever age you are on all of those platforms.

And like these social media bands are not affecting just Discord. It's also affecting sometimes WhatsApp in some of those legislations, like messaging apps in general and all the Instagram where like young people interact even privately with people and with friends and family. You are doing something, I believe, sociologically terrible where you're isolating young people.

You're really cutting them off from the network. What are they going to do? Obviously, they're going to search for solutions and alternatives. Those will rise. So you're just displacing the problem. and also this is violent I think this is terribly violent another way that adults are coming upon the world

of young people who are just dealing with terrible world we are in and just dealing with the cards they are dealt as well because you're a young person you need a phone, you need to be online you need a laptop you need to So like when even in school, I don't know about the US, but in France, like if you're in school right now, everything is online. Your course is online. Like teachers, they send you stuff online. There's even an official platform. And you have to email people.

You have to message people. Like you can't even go through school without social media. And that's not their choice. This is what it's like. You have to deal with it. Can I interject here really quick? there was something that's going to cause you to rage really hard. Go ahead. So in California, starting this year, and I found out from this from my old film school teacher when I was doing some stuff there, students are banned from bringing cell phones to school now.

They are going so far backwards. People are trying to bury their head in the sand thinking, these are the problems. No, these are the tools. These are the tools we have now. This would be like banning a calculator in the 90s or banning like that. This is this is what we have. When I do work, when I work, I own my own business. I work. I use my phone for work. Don't ban people from using tools.

That would be like that would be like, OK, hey, Chris, you're going to have a wood shop class this year. But we're not going to allow you to use a hammer because we think we're going to, you're going to use that hammer and you're going to hit your thumb. Just FYI before Matt, you go ahead. In France, the bill that I'm talking about also includes this. It's also banning schools, smartphones from high schools. It was already banned. Macron already banned it in his first mandate in middle schools.

And now this bill would ban them as well in high school. So we're talking people up to 18-year-olds banned from bringing their phones to school. That's so stupid. That's literally going backwards. Like, we should be using technology to go forward and be, this is how... Go ahead. Go for it. Okay, so context. My wife is a teacher, high school teacher. I would be very curious of the specifics of these bans.

I don't know them off the top of my head, so I don't really know. If it's a ban from using your phone in the classroom, I don't think that's the worst thing. Well, that's always been the case. It is a ban from physically having it. Yeah. You cannot have it on you at school now. Yeah. Okay. When I was young, there was no bans, but you were not allowed to use your phone in class. That was already the case. You know what we used to do? And here's the thing. Kids will always find a way around.

In middle school and high school, I was in a laptop program. We brought laptops to school. We would connect to the school internet. Of course, the school internet would try and block certain things. And we would find a way around. And it was nothing bad. It was always like gaming news websites and stuff like that. Like, that's the stuff that we were trying to get to. And we always found a way around. Kids will always find a way around. We were banned from having iPods. You know what we used to do? We used to wear hooded sweatshirts. We'd put the iPod in the front pocket. We'd cut a hole in the backside of the sweatshirt, run our headphones up, put the headphone in the ear and throw the hoodie on.

Like, yeah. Sorry, Matt. I interrupted you. But life finds a way is my point. It does. Yes. I mean, her position is that the kids are hopelessly lost and have no attention span and are on their phones. Not using them for work. Certainly not using them for work. They're using them for TikTok all day, every day. Headphones in, hair over the AirPod. not listening um but uh if these are bans on having phones in school in general i actually don't understand how that works at all um like literally you can't bring it on to the premises

is that the deal yeah you have to leave it in your locker which is just speaking of friends yeah this is the state of the thing if this law passes it will just apply the same rules that's already applied in middle schools to high schools, which is that you can't bring your phone to the school. You can't bring it. - Okay. Interesting. - Yeah. - But I don't think it works. - Okay. - You're asking how does it work? I don't think it works.

- Okay, I'm seeing something about phone pouches. I'll move off that. Because you two want phones and hands all the time, obviously. No, I think it was in a recent platformer issue. Casey Newton was looking at some of these bans on social media. And one of the studies that he found that I thought was interesting was there's kind of this bell curve, as there so often is, of like general happiness.

I don't think that was the exact measure, but let's just go with that. And it was for the least happy people on either end of the bell curve, for people who are totally cut off from social media and social apps and those who use it all the time. If you use it none, like if you're in one of the extremes, those tend to be the least happy kids. And if you have this kind of healthy medium, those tend to be the happiest. And I think it is probably for the reasons you're talking about is it's connection to people. That's how it happens. like yeah we're not going to be we're in a world with internet connection as a thing like you are going to see your friends in real life but that's not the only way you're going to see your friends

and interact with them and interact with the world so i would agree that a uh these bands are not the way to go um some sort of some sort of thing to i continue to think that humanity does not understand how to communicate with every single person anytime they want and send a notification. It is absurd that I can have a thought and then I can have a notification appear on someone else's phone across the globe any moment I want if they have social media notifications turned on. That's

insane. And I don't think our human brains are still grappling with it after these couple decades of doing it. So it's even worse for kids. It's hard for all of us, but it's definitely hard for so yeah I don't know what the solution is but I would agree a ban is not the way to do it yeah one thing one additional thing is you know how for example you're saying your wife is a teacher and basically all the teachers have the same

observation these days like yes the kids are on their phones all the time on TikTok whatever even in class and that's not tenable and we're coming back to the root of the discussion. Like, why are they all the time on TikTok? And I have two questions to respond to that question. The first is, is it their fault first? And the answer is obviously no, so why are we punishing them for it?

And second is, if you're banning them from this, You're just isolating them without any like alternate, like without a solution to compensate for anything. Yeah. I got it. I've got it. Okay. So here's what we do. We let them ban all the stuff that's currently on the internet. We, you know, the Instagrams, the TikToks, the YouTubes, the Discord. We let them ban all of that. Then we let one guy at one school, maybe at like Harvard, We let him hack the whole school and download all the pictures of all the women.

And then he can create a site called like Hot or Not. And then he'll get in trouble for that. But then like he can go on and create like something else. And then it can be like maybe a book face, like a book that has all the faces in it. And then like it can go to different schools and stuff like that. You know, problem solved, right? Sounds like a good movie. Not the worst idea. If it just stopped there. yeah one final thing and we can move on that I really want to mention is that as like you know I'm queer

I'm an activist and all of that blah blah blah as someone who's lived through teenage years and then early adulthood as a queer person those online spaces are precious to a point that you have no idea. If you're not in it, you don't understand how precious those spaces are, especially as a teenager, where your only circles are the people

you have to hang out with at school. You did not choose to hang out with them. They're just there like you. So you have no choice there. You have to hang out with your parents and close family. You have no choice there as well. This is what your life is dealing you with. And those online spaces where you're queer or you're even like very marginalized in any way are extremely precious to even stay alive for some teenagers. Is there a solution, an alternative to banning those spaces to those marginalized young people?

And the answer is right now, no, there is not. And I am not afraid to go to the extreme conclusion, which is this is going to hurt people. And anyway, you get the point. This is going to hurt people. Not in a good way at all. But yeah. So this is the deal with this code, Chris. Thank you. Thank you for explaining that.

now it's your turn to talk yay I'm glad I like to talk well we missed you last week so I know I know you were talking about formula 1 whatever and 3D printing we're left alone I couldn't help myself no that was nice yes so I have as always when I miss an episode I go back and I accumulate stuff too many to talk about. So I just have a bunch of tiny topics that together they make my segment today.

First one is have you seen macOS 26.3 is out? I'm looking at it right now. You're installing it? I already installed it. It's already installed. So I was hoping it would fix my studio display flickering issue and I will say I haven't seen the studio display flicker since I installed. Now, I haven't used it very much, but I haven't seen it flicker since. So, this may relate to what I'm about to say, which is so, you know, ever since I've upgraded to Tahoe, I've been complaining about it

all kinds of ways. No, I haven't heard you complain about Tahoe at all. No, no, no. But one reason why I've been complaining about it is that it's been slowing down my Windows to a crawl, like mission control, Windows animations, resizing stuff, moving windows on screen, that's been sluggish as hell on my MacBook Air M2, which was like, this machine has been smooth as heck until the dawn of Tahoe, like on Sequoia, smooth as heck.

Then Tahoe came and mission control is lagging insanely, even though I'm not doing anything differently. Like just entering mission control, I boom, three FPS just to move around the windows on screen. And this is, remember, this is why I had enabled Reduce Motion on my Mac, because the mission control lagging all the time, that was just too distracting to me. I had to turn off all the animations of macOS to be able to bear with it. And I think they fixed it 26.3, because just like when 26.1 came out, just like when 26.2 came out, I disabled Reduce Motion just to check,

26.1 did not fix it 0.2 did not fix it 0.3 mission control is move again at least for me this is my report mission control is move again at least for me and I think it may relate to what to your studio display maybe getting fixed is that as far as I understand because Apple obviously doesn't say anything about this they're not even acknowledging that this issue has existed but it seems according to what people are writing online

and that those window server performance issues relate to having an external monitor plugged in and the general handling of external monitors and this is my setup obviously I use the built-in display of my MacBook as well as an external monitor so like maybe they have fixed a bunch of things in the background that relate to this yeah but this is good like it feels

it feels my Mac feels like it's fast again even though this was just UI you know there was no like performance real performance hit it was just like UI issues and it looked terrible and felt sluggish and I really wanted throw MacBook in the bin and buy something more powerful just to get rid of this. I obviously can't afford it, but yes, this is good. 26.3 seems to have fixed it, and now I've cursed myself. 26.4 is going to bring it all back,

obviously. Obviously. Yeah, I'm hitting the mission control button, and it looks pretty smooth on the MacBook Pro. Nice. Well, Apple doesn't really intend you to use an external monitor, you know? Right. I mean, they update them once every eight years. Especially if you're like a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio user, you don't need to use an external monitor with those. And even then, like, why are you using an external display? You shouldn't. You shouldn't. You should be using the command line. Just figure out what's happening.

You should use it, I feel. You should use it with the Vision Pro. Oh, there you go. There you go. There you go. Real quick thing on that, not to mention ATP again, but in their latest episode, We still challenge them to a duel and demand satisfaction. We still very much dislike them, and we'd like to know who we are. We want satisfaction. There's this rumor going out right now that the next studio display will be 90 hertz and not 120 at the very least. It won't be ProMotion. It'll just be a locked 90. And I was mildly bummed.

I was genuinely bummed by this. And then I was just kind of like, whatever. It is what it is. And then Mr. Syracuse reminded us that Apple updates this display every like eight years. So what you get now is what we're going to have in like 2034. So in 2034, are we going to have a 90 hertz monitor when everyone else is pushing a thousand or something? Anyway, I really hope they do promotion. In 2034, maybe like the RAM will be...

There you go. Yeah, anyway, I will not finish that sentence. Okay. Not necessarily eight years. I just looked it up. The studio display came out three years ago. No. Really? I'm looking at my video. It says three years ago. Let me look at the date. Let me look at the date. Hang on. Maybe I'm thinking about the SDR. March 22nd, 2022 was when I released my video. It came out March 18th. I got my studio display on March 18th. Maybe I'm talking about the pro display.

I think he might be talking about the Pro display because that one came out with the Mac Pro. Yeah. Well, anyway, they're not really quick about it, so that's all. Yeah. They should do promotion. Yeah, I agree. It should be 120 hertz. I don't know why they're doing this 90 hertz thing, but... Look, give me HDMI end, Apple. Like, you're not going to, but give me HDMI end. Give me the ability to not just plug in a Mac or an iPad, but also a PlayStation or an Xbox.

I demand it. I'm sorry for tangent. You're welcome to tangent all the time. That's like the name of this podcast. Tangent zone. My second bullet point, my second item, is I forgot last time to mention it, and that was two weeks ago now since I was away last week. I forgot to mention iFanP. Do you remember Fampi? Of course. It's probably one of my favorites. Like, next to Ivory, I will put them on equal foot.

Like, I like them both just as much. It's a master's client. Fampi is a web client, and it works really well. It's so good. It's got all of the features you can imagine and more. Like, it's got features that nothing else has. It can recap your year of toots. You can catch up on your timeline. It's amazing. But does it have Hush for the iPad? Yes. Oh! Next question. So, yeah, it's a web app.

It's great. I've talked about it before on the show. And Matt Fentinel, listener of Comfort Zone and developer, adapted FanPy to run on iOS. So you can already run it on iOS as a PWA. You can install it as a web app on your home screen. That works really well. But what he's done is that he's made it into a proper iOS app. It's not native, of course. It's just like in a wrapper. But that wrapper enables better performance.

It stays in memory longer. And scrolling is smoother. It's much better experience overall to use this version of Fanby that's adapted to iOS. It's called iFanby. So just like FNP with an eye in front. And so the way that... What am I saying? I'm lost my words. Yes. So I FNP and now it's out. Simply as that. He released it. It's out on AltStore in the EU.

You can access AltStore as well as in Japan. I don't know if you've seen this. AltStore is available in Japan. But also on the App Store, like the regular App Store, the regular WorldGarden App Store. Yeah, and the way that this has been possible is so Matt initially only wanted to release like on App Store and unofficial ways of distributing it because they had to pay for the developer fee and they could not afford it and could not justify the cost

because obviously it's an open source project. It's not bringing anything for him. Even for the original developer of FanPay, it's not bringing anything. But it turns out that the folks at AltStore helped him pay for the fee. Oh, nice. Yes, and this is why he was able to distribute it on the App Store as well. Funny thing which I learned, which is that you also, like, even if you're only publishing it on a third-party app store,

like Alstore, you need to pay that fee. You need to pay that yearly, what is it, $99 fee? Yeah. Yeah, that's still it. So even if you're not distributing on Apple's platform at all, you're only distributing on a third-party marketplace, you still need to pay that fee, which is insane. The EU should do something about this. This is obviously a big loophole in a way. It's another way where Apple is exploiting the flaws of the DMA and all of that.

But anyway. Isn't the $99 fee, though, to keep scammers out, so basically you can't start spamming the App Store or Alt Store or something like that, get your account banned and just open up another one and do it again and again and again? Like, isn't that kind of, like, the reason why they have that? I don't think so. I think it relates to the fact that you needed an Apple developer account to get your app, what is it called? Notarized. Notarized. Yeah, but, like, even before they were doing notarization, they had that $99 fee.

And from what I was kind of understood and what I've read in the past, It was always to kind of like help keep down the scammers. Like $99. But how does that make sense if you're not distributing on the App Store? Like right now you need to pay for that fee. Even if you're distributing anywhere but the App Store. Anyway. Yeah, fair point. The app is out. It's great. I've been using it. I've been using it. Just wanted to mention. It's completely free. And it's an amazing mastermind client.

If you can't, like Ivory is a paid app and it's great value, I think. It's an amazing app. But if you can't afford it, I think IFNP is an amazing alternative. Next point is a follow-up to Vivaldi. I switched to Vivaldi a few weeks ago and I'm happy, people. Like, I think I'm happy, really happy with Vivaldi. And I've made a statement on Mastodon. Have you seen my statement?

Yes, yes, I have. I will read my statement. Let me pull it. Oh, I tweet a lot. I tweet a lot, I should say. Yes, I wrote, I just want to say sorry to every comforted listener who has been recommending Vivaldi to me over the past year. You were right. I'm in love with it now. I think Vivaldi is amazing. And I've already talked about the reasons why it's sticking to me right now. But I wanted to bring up a couple of things in addition to that.

The first is, remember how I was turned off by the tab management? I thought it was overwhelming at first because in Vivaldi, you can have your tabs, regular tabs, and you can stack tabs together. And you can also have workspaces, basically you can maintain different tab bars that are hidden away, but you can activate at any time. At first, I disabled all of that and was only using profiles because I depend on isolating cookies for different workflows.

And now I've embraced all of the tab features. I've embraced. They're amazing. They work amazingly well together, I think. This is well thought out. The tab stacks especially, I think they're really good. When you click on a tab stack, it displays another tab bar underneath so you can have tons of space to display all your tabs inside that tab stack. It's not like in Chrome where if you group tabs together, like it's an accordion that just collapses all the tabs.

It makes it so you have less space. The Vivaldi's approach to tab stacks, chef's gift, it's great. And combined with workspaces, it's amazing as well. You can color code the tab stacks. Yeah, this is great. And two more things about Vivaldi that are making it stick is, remember when browsers used to have a dedicated search bar in the address bar?

Oh, yeah. I saw your take. So, hear me out. So, nowadays, browsers, they have a single search field, right? where you enter URLs and you search for things as well. Vivaldi also has that by default, I think. It's just the address as well. But you can add back that dedicated search field on the right side, or you can put it anywhere. Basically, by the way, every time I mention UI in Vivaldi, just assume you can put it anywhere.

You can have that search field be anywhere. And I've played around with the UI. You might be thinking, you mean just two or three places? No, anywhere. And you can put it at the bottom of the screen, like on the left side, anywhere you want. Anyway, you can have even you can have your tabs and your search bar and your address bar all on the same line. You can have a super compact browser UI as well. Anyway, so that dedicated search field, I think it's good. And you know why it's good? Because Vivaldi is making, unlike other browsers, it makes it really easy to add custom engines.

And by that, I mean, if you're on a website, like, for example, I read French newspapers a lot, including, like, Le Monde, one of the main press titles in France. Oftentimes, I search for articles on LeMonde.fr. Just, like, go to the search section on their website, search for things. In Vivaldi, you can right-click that search field on the website and click Add to search engines. This will have, obviously, most browsers allow you to do that. allow you to add custom search engines.

But the fact that you can have a dedicated search field in the UI where you can select in a dropdown a specific website to search through, I think it's an amazing piece of little convenience that I really like that I do not want to give away. Why do you not like it? I don't think you need it. I don't think you need it. One of my favorite Safari plugins is Xsearch, which gives you the ability to add other search engines

or other custom search engines to that bar. And you just do like, so if you're going to want to search YouTube specifically, you just type YT and then whatever you want to search YouTube for or Amazon, you'd hit A and then whatever you want to search for. You can have that as well. Yeah, so you don't need it. So you don't need that separate bar. Yeah, it's all right. I can do Command K and focus the search field and I can do YT and it searches YouTube from that search field. It's amazing.

I'll let it go. I'll let you have it. Okay, okay. Yeah. I'll allow you to have it on your Mac but I don't want it on mine. Okay. And the final thing that's also like an old school thing that I really like about Vivaldi is that you can have a status bar. You can have a full-blown status bar at the bottom. Remember when browsers Oh, yeah. I like that. And Vivaldi has that. You can obviously completely disable it, but I've embraced it. My status bar at the bottom. So it shows you where, when you hover over a link, it shows you where that link goes, right, in that status bar at the bottom.

But you can also have your extensions there. You can have a zoom slider to zoom in on the web page. It's really nice to be able to zoom in precisely because you get to see the percentage there. And also sometimes I'm zoomed in on websites and I forget about it. And the way this status bar lets me see at a glance whether I'm zoomed in or zoomed out on a website and reset it with just a click. It's really nice. Having the status bar there is great. And I think if you use Vivaldi, I have a tip for you.

Put your extensions in there. Instead of having them at the top near the address bar, just try moving them to the status bar, the bottom of the window. It makes it so you still have all your extensions accessible. You don't have to hide them behind like an overflow menu and you forget about them and it's hard to access when you need them. No, you can have all of them laid out in the status bar, all of them. If you have six extensions, all of them in the status bar. And since they're at the bottom of the window, they're not distracting.

Most often extensions, they have like badges on top of them, like with numbers, especially content blockers. But even like a user script extension, you have badges when user scripts are active on the web page. If they are at the bottom, those badges are not distracting. This is my tip. And I'm done with Vivaldi. You're done with Vivaldi. What are you using now? You're moving on. What's your browser? I'm still in love. Okay. Yes. I thought you were like, all these things are great about Vivaldi. but I am moving on.

Yeah. I've also made custom themes for each of my profiles to every profile of my Vivaldi looks unique and it's easy to tell them apart. Really like that. All right. Fourth item. Somebody revived a cool DMARC app that I really like and that I've talked about on the show like very early on on the show. Oh, you're a big supporter of ICE. That's right. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, you like ice. Yeah, that's right. Nelian likes ice.

Oh, no. I just realized. Okay. Yes, ice used to be like a bartender alternative for the Mac where you can... It's got many of the main bartender features where you can hide icons in an overflow menu. You can customize how your menu bar icons appear and disappear and all of that. and you can automate a bunch of small things with it. And unfortunately, the developer, and we had covered this on the show, had to let the project go because busy with life,

they can't afford to keep working on it. Often happens with open source projects, unfortunately, because it's not bringing in any revenue. But I saw recently that somebody forked the app, revived it, and is adding new features to it. And this fork is called Thor, and T-H-A-W Thor it's also open source it's basically just ICE with new features like they're adding they're going through the initial roadmap of the original developer and adding the stuff

as time goes so if you're still looking for a bartender alternative and ICE you liked but you are sad that it's not maintained anymore especially I've seen that on Taho ICE is buggy um And apparently, like, this fork, Thor, has fixes as well for Tahoe. So there you go. Just wanted to mention that. And final bullet point is a tiny app that I discovered last week.

It's called Itsy Home. And just click the link. Click the link. See what it is. You will like it. Okay. Clicking, clicking. It's called Itsy Home. Oh, okay. Yeah. So this is a menu bar app. that's all it's a home kit menu bar hub, it lets you control everything, your lights your scenes any home kit accessory, per room you can view even like the temperatures if you have sensors in specific rooms you can view those information right from the

menu bar, you can pin stuff to the menu bar, like if you want a specific light to have its own menu bar item you can do that, you can also pin cameras. You can have a one-click access to one of your HomeKit cameras right from the menu bar and it pops up in the popover. It's really good. I've been using since Tahoe one of those custom control centers where you can create additional control centers in Tahoe and in the menu bar. That's terrible. I don't like it.

I've replaced this with Itsy Home. It's great. It's free. It's on GitHub. I think you can pay for some of the features, like favoriting stuff, but it's a one-time purchase. I don't remember what it was, but it's pretty affordable. It's great. This looks really cool. It looks like the sort of thing that would be native in macOS. Like, this should be what the home app has. Yeah. It looks nice. And if you look at some of the controls, like in the screenshot, like, that's not my case, but if you have an AC unit,

it's got all the controls. from the menu bar. You can go from auto to cool to heat. And you can change the light of your, like the color of your light, RGB lights, right from the menu bar as well because it's got a color picker in there. And it's well done. Like you would think all of this jammed in drop downs, but now it's done really well, I think. Yeah, it looks really nice. And you can customize every icon as well. Every icon is customizable. Yeah, it's really good.

Nice. Or should I say ice? No. That was the previous bullet point. Okay, I'm done. Okay. All right. See, I go away for one week. I accumulate stuff. And that's not the full list. I've left out stuff. Got to save some for next week. Yeah. All right. Well, let's get to the challenge. The challenge was from two weeks ago because we put it off because Neil Leon wasn't here last week. Matt, it was your challenge. What did you have us do?

Well, I had us hold for dramatic effect. Did you forget? Did you forget what it was? Did you forget your own challenge? I had us use Apple's new creative suite? Studio? What are they called? Creator Studio. Creator Studio. Hey, by the way, people, sorry. If you go on X right now, I'd rather not. It has every topic this week. If you go on X right now, I swear to God, in the...

So you know how on X.com, in the left navigation, Elon is adding like anything and whatever every week. Well, it is the everything app. Yes. And this week, there is an item in that menu that's creator studio. Oh. Oh my God. I don't know what that is, but it's there. I'm sure it's perfect and wonderful. Oh, unproblematic. No. Okay. So obviously we had to use a different creative studio. Yeah.

Creator. Creator. Creator. Ah, yes. Creator studio. Psychonics. Yes. To make something that we wouldn't normally make. So no videos allowed, for example. Chris was very upset about that. And so we all had to make something. And there were no rules around it, just something. So I can go first. Okay. Because I did do it. Don't act like I forgot. I did it. Oh, what is happening? Hello. Oh.

Hello. So today... It's a slideshow. Yes. I would like to talk to you about why you should invest in Comfort Zone and why we really deserve our first round of funding. I like this. I like this a lot already. So honestly, just clip this and send it to investors. This is a, so here's why you should invest in us. Your portfolio is boring. It's so boring. What are you investing in right now?

AI, some more AI stuff. You're probably just, you're making bets on RAM futures, hard drive futures now too. And then there's something else that you forgot about, but your investments are boring. We're interesting. We're much more interesting than what you are working on right now. and our fans are more passionate than you even imagine. Comfort Zone is my favorite podcast. I listen every week and I want to give them money. With your help, this could be lots of people.

This is not a real quote. This is a real quote that I just said. Okay. Here's what we offer. We have three incredible hosts. And in fact, like a hundred and some other describers that Chris has used over the years. We have the best Apple coverage you can find. We have over a hundred years of combined lived experience, which I think is unique to us. We have a passion for aerospace. We have a passion for clack. And we have a passion for apps that remove background noise.

And we would love if they could run on the iPad. All facts. True. This is a photo of someone boxing. Well as we fight the competition That's what it stands for Yes it is a stock asset Is that included? It is That does not cost me anything And we have so much room to grow There are over 8 billion humans Who have never heard of Comfort Zone So our growth potential is incredible And let's be real We want new microphones

We want to go on more vacations that's true and we want to execute a leveraged takeover of mac stories that's true we would very much like to hostile takeover mac stories so with all this said comfort zone is worth one billion dollars that's true i have a source i don't want to cite it the browser dumb bunny no elon musk himself said it's worth over a billion dollars thank you for your time and money wow this was very good

very good many a use of the stock assets I did but I did sign up for a free trial of the studio creator creator studio to get access to this slide deck theme because it was not available to filthy free users I think free users just get all the ones that existed before and all the new ones are part of the paid thing. You're welcome.

Thank you, Andreessen. Thank you. All the other people. I look forward to spending this investment money. Oh, me too. On microphones, vacations, and a leverage to take over of Mac Stories. I can guarantee if somebody would like to invest $1 billion into Mac Stories, we will do at least one show a year where all three of us are together. Matt and I will fly out to France. Maybe we'll meet in some third-party location. I know Neilion's not interested in coming to the U.S. Totally understandable.

Oh, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can go to Canada or something. I don't know. Look, if you want to invest in $1 billion, we will get together and do an in-person show. This will definitely cost $1 billion, too. Look, how about this? If you invest $1 billion, we'll even make this easier. If you invest $1 million, we'll fly to where you are and we'll do a live show in front of you. I'm willing to make it even better. As long as it's not in a country that we don't want to go to. If you invest $100,000, we will make an episode about whatever you want us to make an episode about.

That's true. That's true, too. I want to make it a bit better. If you invest just $1,000, just me, I will get my phone. Okay. Okay. Okay. I was going to say, I need more than that to get out of bed. I'm bougie. I'm bougie like that. It's a nice slide deck. It's good. I like it. Thank you. So is it my turn? Sure. I have also used Keynote for this challenge.

First thing, Matt, I suppose you saw the same thing. When you launched Keynote, now it just tells you, no, no, no, not this Keynote. this is the wrong keynote what are you doing go to the app store and get the new keynote with the worst icons yeah a little bit of a backstory here like I talked about in our creator studio when I talked about the creator studio in an earlier episode I had early access to this none of the reviewers were told this is what was going to happen it does it once and then never

again we didn't know there wasn't an actual upgrade pat like we didn't know like this was going to be the experience yeah so yeah i i i saw i saw it with numbers as well because i use numbers every once in a while and so i opened numbers and i saw the notification i was like if this shows every time i launch this app i'm gonna scream and it only showed once and i was like oh the weird thing is that when so i've installed a new keynote of course but then now they coexist on your mac yeah yeah you have two keynotes with two different icons, but they're also kind of the same if you're not paying.

Well, I'll tell you what. I had to make this on iPad Keynote because I could not install the new Keynote. It wouldn't install from the Mac App Store for whatever reason. And I thought maybe there's some confusion here because I already have the old Keynote. So I uninstalled the old Keynote, tried to install the new Keynote. It still won't install. I've rebooted. I've done all the things. So now I have no Keynotes on my Mac and I don't know how to get one back. Get PowerPoint. You can still install the old Keynote. No, I can't install Keynote. It does not install.

Even the old one? Oh, my God. He can't have the Keynote. I finally got a Tahoe bug that really impacts me personally, and now I'm invested in burning it to the ground. Invest $1 billion in MacStory so Matt can buy a new Mac. And Keynote. And install Keynote. And Keynote. So, anyway, so I also used Keynote, and I have made art, and this is it. You can unfold my spoiler tag in the Notion document. Was this generated by their image generation thing? So you can see I've uploaded as well the Keynote file.

So you can download it and open it. Unless you're Matt and you don't have Keynote. I can download it and open it. Thank you for the screenshot. I just realized that you will not be able to open it. But yes, description. This is a rendition of our comfort zone artwork, remade entirely in Keynote using shapes and just shapes. So, you know, in Keynote, you can have like circles, rectangles, whatever, ellipses.

I've recreated our artwork entirely out of shapes in Keynote. This was really annoying to make. Yeah, this looks interesting. And I've done it comfort zone 2.0 because obviously this is the artwork for the next era of Comfortzone. Oh, this is great. This is really impressive. No. It does look like we are wizards. It does. It does look like we're holding wands.

I guess so. I suppose those are supposed to be phones. It definitely looks like we're Ron, Harry, and Hermione. I mean, Chris is holding his iPad. Matt is holding his phone. I think in the wizarding world, Chris is still an iPad guy. Yeah. Oh, yeah. All the magic in the world, I still need my iPadOS. Come on. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that is the magic. This is really cool. This is cool, right? This is very cool. I'm an artist. I like this. I like this a lot. And why I did this, because I remembered some time ago, like there was a bit of news a few years ago where apparently the kids, they design stuff in PowerPoint.

Oh, I've seen people do this. It's horrifying. Yeah. People design entire stuff in Powerpoint, even web mock-ups, like some web designers. I work with someone. I work with someone. He's not a professional designer, but he does some design stuff. And he wanted to mock-up a login flow. And he started sharing his screen, and he opened PowerPoint, and I was like, well, obviously that was a mistake. And then he went and mocked up a login page with PowerPoint. I was shook.

yeah what so I was inspired by this and I was like okay so I can design something in Keynote and you did this is great this is cool I like it I like it a lot so I'm glad that you approved in this general assembly formally approved our new artwork it's going to be the artwork for this episode I was going to say we should make it the artwork for this episode I may have Matt is able to install Keynote exactly this so yeah alright I like this this is very cool Neil Leon I like this a lot. Thank you. I went the more, so I used Pixelmator Pro.

And so throughout the week, I've been designing thumbnails. And I've used Pixelmator Pro for them, which isn't necessarily the part of the challenge. But what I did do is in Pixelmator Pro, I painstakingly, because this was a pain, got as close as possible to recreating my Lightroom thumbnail templates. So my top-down one, my one of devices, and my one of people in the frame. And I think I did a pretty good job recreating these Lightroom thumbnail templates in Pixelmator Pro to the point where I can essentially click them and have a good, like, almost ready to go.

I'll still adjust a few things because I'm nitpicky about that. But, like, I just have one click button in Pixelmator Pro now. And, yeah, I'm pretty happy with how these turned out. So are these like a preset? Like you feed it in the raw photo and then... Yeah. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in Pixelmator Pro, just like in Lightroom, you can make all of your adjustments and then you can save it as a preset. So I can just insert the raw photo now.

Sorry, I probably didn't explain it very well. I can just load up the raw photo, click the preset, and boom, they're there. It saves me so much time, especially because I usually forget about the thumbnail until the moment I upload and go, oh, yeah, I need a thumbnail. And then I'm desperately. So I put a few examples in our show notes. So the first and second photos are the same? So the first two photos are the same photo. I don't know why I put both of them in there. But I have three templates I've used in Lightroom for years now. I have what I call my top-down template.

So whenever you see a thumbnail of a top-down shot, like usually with my wooden desk as the background, Then I have a device template, which is the third image in here. And then I have a template with what I call a thumbnail with people. And it's usually kind of the same as the device one, but usually the skin tones are a little more cleaned up. Because I'll go a little more saturated when it's just a device than when it's just a person. So I have these three templates now.

And depending on which one I need, I can just click them and boom. I have them in Pixelmator Pro now. Nice. You know what? That second to last photo, I've been seeing this on my YouTube homepage for the past two weeks. You should. I actually won't see it now. And I still don't dare click it. Oh, you'll like that video. You will like that video. But I think that video, I think that thumbnail is gone now because I think the AB test finished and I think it picked the last one, which let me double check.

Before I say that, yes, it did. I was like, this is so dense. Yeah, let's see. Let's see the A-B test result. This is a rare one where I didn't do three. I only did two. So the one, the second to the last one where I'm very intense, the title was Fixing My Focus. It got 45.7% of the watch time. And the second one where it's me looking at the iPad doing the thinking face got 54.3%. So the thinking face won. Okay. Hey, you got glasses.

I have reading glasses. I'm an old man. I need reading glasses. Those are videos. I don't usually wear them when I film because then you get glare. Wearing glasses and filming yourself is incredibly difficult. So funny story. When I record a video and I'm sitting in front of my camera like this, I have my iPad off to the side with the script. I use IA Writer to put my script up there because it's just a markdown file. But what's nice about IA Writer is you can increase the font to be super huge.

So I make it incredibly large so I can read it from my iPad off to the side and I don't need to wear reading glasses. That's why if you watch the video version of Comfort Zone and you see me putting my head right up next to my MacBook Pro, It's because I'm not wearing my reading glasses and I'm trying to read something or see something the other two sent me. You do do that. I do that a lot. It's because I don't have my reading glasses on while I film. And I'm just bearing the glare.

I'm not professional. No, I get it. I totally get it. If it wasn't for me doing YouTube all the time, I would just wear the glasses during comfort zone. Okay, glad I won this one. I don't know who won this one. I don't know who won. I mean, I earned us a billion dollars, so that's a... Look, if somebody actually invests in Comfort Zone, and we are serious, we are taking investments, then I would say Matt won.

But if nobody invests, then... We got a new artwork out of him. And me, I got practical templates. Well, all right, I'm going to go bring this pitch deck around town and see who's willing. Yeah, take it around the valley, Matt. Take it around the valley. All right, Nelian, it is your challenge. Yes. What do you got for us this week? So I will try to clarify things first to make sure the challenge is valid.

Do you guys keep your phones on mute all the time, just like me? Yes, 100%. Oh, no. So let's not do that. The challenge is live with sounds on your iPhone for a full week. You're a monster. You're a monster, Nelian. I have the silent switch on my control center. I haven't touched it in years. Me neither.

That was my favorite thing about the action button was that they added that virtual toggle Because I would sit there and play with the mute switch before the action button when it was the physical mute and unmute switch. I'd play with it. So sometimes my phone would become, you know, sounds would get turned on. This was my favorite addition to that iPhone. The 16. Hmm. You are a monster, Neelion. Well, here's what I'll say. This Apple Watch is going to help a lot.

Oh, there you go. Yep. Because that'll silence most of the notifications. But when this sucker's charging, I'm going to be a menace to society. and I mean when you when you have when mute is off you can still disable most of the sounds right so you can go in and customize the issue like the when we come back to record we will have experienced what it is like to go and disable everything if we wanted to I don't even know what my ringtone is anymore like I legitimately do not know like for years it was the Imperial March

but I've wiped my phone and stuff like that since then and I've never bothered to look at any of the sounds that my phone makes because my phone is always silent well we're going to learn stuff about ourselves my phone is going to be in do not disturb a lot this week that works that's it okay alright this is this might be the hardest one obviously if you're in meetings do put yourself in trouble, all of that.

Yeah, Matt, can you send us your schedule this week so we know when to call you? You've seen my calendar. Just call any time during working hours and I'll be in a meeting. That's true, yeah. All right, well, that brings us to the end of the show, but I have an end of the show question for the two of you, and I thought of this one this morning, and I was like, okay, this is brilliant because I know my answer right away. Is there a piece of fashion from the past you would like to bring back? And if so, what is it? So like clothing? Clothing, just fashion in general.

Could be like an item or something, you know? Something that we no longer have? Something that's no longer fashionable. I've never been fashionable. Like it could still exist because like it was already around in the past, but like it's not fashionable. Like if you were to wear it or have it or carry it with you, you're going to get some looks. I can go first if you'd like. Oh, go ahead. A rattlesnake suitcase and rattlesnake boots. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Okay. What does that mean? Yeah. First off, I hate snakes. Absolutely hate snakes. You should. But even if they're the worst, I lived in Texas. It was like knowing what a rattlesnake is and staying away was like a real thing. But even if I didn't go real Rattlesnake, like fake Rattlesnake, just design-wise. What is this? Is it a music band? No. No, it's not a band. Rattlesnake's boot case is a band, for your information.

It's very possible they're wearing these. So I know that's a snake, okay. Google is not helpful. Wow, there is a band named Rattlesnake. Oh, you know what? I bet you they're a Guns N' Roses cover band is what they are. Is Rattlesake? Hang on. I've sent a picture in our iMessage to see if that's what you're talking about. Jesus, what is this? Oh, so literally like a suitcase with snakes? Yeah, made a snake. Okay. But like that with boots?

Yeah. Yeah, that pattern. Like it's a textured pattern. Like it is meant to feel like an actual snake. Oh. Yep, yep, yep. I don't like it. No, it's pretty terrible. It is. it is bad chris no oh yeah no no it's problematic i totally i love that this is not conversation history now okay yeah you'll you'll you'll you'll you'll be uh you'll see it in your like spotlight suggestions every in like five years and be like why is it recommending me this insane suitcase uh it'll be the chapter art don't worry um i think i would bring back mine is much less fun Mine would be to bring back cargo shorts

with the big pockets so that you can carry around your Game Boy and all the batteries you need for the Game Boy. That's what I would bring back. You can still wear that. But they're not fashionable. They are, kind of. I see them around the time these days. You're 40, Matt. You can pull it off now. That's true. I can just wear whatever I want. I don't care anymore. You can have hammers poking out of the pockets. Hammers? Yeah, hammers and tools. Oh, okay. Like if you had a tool belt?

No, it's specifically Game Boys and AA batteries. That's awesome. I'm trying to think all this time about my answer. I still don't have one. I don't know what to say. I really don't have no idea. I have a second answer then if we need a third one. Well, we do need a third. Mine is I want to bring back like gelled spiky hair that's like hard to the touch. Yeah. Oh, no. Early 2000s. Oh, yeah. Bleached the tips. Oh, yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Bring it back. Oh. Yeah. See, Neelian's still young. She missed these. And I've never been... No, you're wrong, by the way. I did not miss those. I remember them. Okay. Okay. But I've never been fashionable, so I don't have anything to bring back, you know? Oh, I've never been fashionable either, but I was a fashionable child. I think I I I so I I sent you guys a picture of rattlesnake boots I think I can pull those off I think I can

pull those off oh yeah somehow this fits you yeah I can pull those off it does actually work the Ford hat really with that and then just me climbing into a big old pickup truck an old pickup truck not a new pickup truck like an old like an old like like 60s 70s Ford pickup Maybe a Chevy. Probably a Chevy. No. No. I'm not a monster, Matt. My answer is the PSP. I would just like.

There you go. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there you go. All right. Well, that does it for this week. Thank you all so much for listening. Huge thank you to Max Stories. We are a Max Stories podcast after all. And go check out everything on the website. Have a great day. Bye. Bye.