Some games are good. Some games are evil. We played the evil ones... a lot. Also, we're unleashing our shiny new listener call-in line. What could go wrong?
CALL 📞 1-774-462-5667
LINKS
CALL 📞 1-774-462-5667
LINKS
- Zuma Game Play
- Farkle Game Play
- Star Trek: 25th Anniversary
- Star Trek 25th Anniversary - Demon World - YouTube
- Star Trekâ„¢: 25th Anniversary on GOG.com
- Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force - YouTube
- Star Trekâ„¢: Voyager - Elite Force on GOG.com
- GREAT INVESTMENT IDEA: 4172 North Toronto STREET, Milwaukee, WI 53216 | MLS #1909360 | Zillow
- Tornado Hits FOX 35 Orlando During Weather Report: VIDEO - Comic Sands
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This is The Launch, episode 14 for March 18th, 20, 25. ... ... ... Streaming from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast, we greet you all a good morning, a good evening, or wherever your timeline may fall. Time-appropriate greetings indeed to one and all. This is The Launch. My name is Chris. And I'm Angela. Hello, Angela. We have a few things everyone needs to know before the show gets going. We'd love it if you called us live. That's right. You can also call after the fact and leave us a voicemail. The number is, get ready, 774-462-5667.
That's 774-462-5667. You can always join us live. The show's live at 11.30 AM Pacific, 2.30 PM Eastern, 7.30 PM UTC on a Tuesday. That's over at jblive.tv or your podcasting 2.0 app of choice. Then the show comes out Wednesday morning for Download On Demand. And we'd love it if you joined us. Download it, listen, call in, leave us a voicemail, all of those things. It's new. The phone's cool again, didn't you know? You can always suggest topics, ask us questions, or comment on something we've talked about. And, of course, we have a 24-7 chat room. the Launch HQ on our matrix server linked at weeklylaunch.rocks. That's our website.
Weeklylaunch.rocks. Yeah, they got .rocks. Can you believe that? They got .everything now. You wouldn't believe it. But I think I got .rocks because it was cheap. I mean, I got to be honest with you. I think it was cheap, and I was going for cheap that day. I got too many domains. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Right? Weeklylaunch. And you got to renew them. Weeklylaunch.rocks. Don't make me waste my money. Go check it out. Andrews, I thought today we'd share a few times where perhaps a video game hooked us in a way that you might even argue was a little addictive. Perhaps we got a little too carried away from time to time and whatever it was, that particular game just really hooked us.
And I thought a couple of mine, I realized, geez, I'm getting old when I look at some of mine. How would you describe yourself? Are you a casual gamer? Are you a serious gamer with like, with it's like one game at a time? Like, how would you describe your? Oh, yeah. I would definitely say it's one game at a time. And, and, and it ends up being like the focal, like a go-to. I need it for my brain, you know, just to like devolve or whatever. But yeah. I find myself to be kind of a multi-game guy. I kind of I'll play one game for a few minutes and I'll switch over to another game for a few minutes and then I switch around.
Well, you don't say doesn't sound like ADHD at all. You know, but there have been games over the years that did really stick. And I wanted to start with one that I really remembered for you, because this was also a brand new idea for the Xbox 360. It was called Zuma, and it was a simple tile-matching style puzzle game developed by PopCap Games. It was originally released in 2003. Now, the Xbox 360 version, which is what we played with Zuma Deluxe, came out in 2005, and this is why it was a big deal. It sort of set a tone for a new type of casual games that were accepted on consoles. Before this people weren't really consoles were like these big serious games Zuma Deluxe became a very popular Xbox arcade lineup game and kind of enshrined more casual games to come and you weren't alone Andrews many players found the game to be quote incredibly addictive yeah and.
I don't even think it's available on iOS anymore and uh but I do have jungle marble which is very similar. Yeah you sort of kind of match up colored balls and when you get a certain set of matches a. Snake of balls. Yeah they explode and the idea is is you want to blow all the balls up before they reach the golden skull you know or otherwise the level is over simple a simple idea but a very fast gameplay like the first level you could you know if you're a decent player you'd be done in less than a minute i mean it moves really quick and i think that's part of why it just it really hooked people but this was before games got social because another game that came along i think a little bit later although because i think it was 2009 because this is when games were blowing up on facebook and every game had a social aspect, You and Farkle.
Yes. Yes. I wasn't necessarily big on Facebook at the time, but that made me big on Facebook at the time. And it was me versus my uncle. We would play against each other and share our results, which is so embarrassing now. Like, first of all, I don't play any Facebook games. But it was part of the competition. Too. You had to share your results. Yeah. But I also. But who cares? Right. Like, who cares? Nobody else in my timeline cared, just my uncle who wanted to beat my score. It's just, I don't know. It's so cringe looking back now. Well, it's wild because their entire business model, and I for a very short time worked for a company that was trying to exploit this with an MMO, was, well, we'll get more users because every time you have a big achievement or a big high score, you share it in your timeline, and that pulls in all your friends and family.
And this is just going to go gangbusters. and social games on Facebook around this time in 2009 were projected, some of the big ones were projected to make $500 million in revenue that year. The biggest game at the time, I guess, was Texas Hold'em. Oh, interesting. I think my mom played that. She also played Words with Friends. Yeah. And I did play that just for a little while, but waiting for the other person to make a move could make the game last a long time. Yeah. 12 million monthly active users for Texas Hold'em at the peak of this. But the whole thing crumbled when Facebook just –, tweaked the algorithms or whatever so that way this stuff didn't get shared in your social feed anymore and like their whole business model collapsed and uh i think this company that made the studio was called viral games some incarnation of them appears to be around and they appear to be making ios games but i'm not even sure if it's the original crew that made farkle like they're just the whole like the companies that were involved with that just are kind of gone now like they just collapsed yeah.
Here's the thing about farkle it's a dice game, right? Or a die game. Plural, right? So it's like five die. And the thing is I got a manual, I got, you know, five die and a, and a can to shake them, basically Yahtzee, you know? Uh, I don't want to play it manually. I don't want, I want a computer or a device, some electronic to tell me, you know, what my score could be. I don't want to have to manually do that. It's computer. Do the computer thing. And that's how I learned Farkle. Thankfully, I didn't learn it the manual way. I mean, maybe, I don't know. Maybe I would feel differently if I had learned it the manual way.
Maybe. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's what it comes from, right? It's analog, just a dice game. But yeah, I have not opened that box of Farkle because I don't care to do it manually. So like I said, mine, I mean, do you have any other games that, oh, I remember the other one that was an Xbox game that really was a grabber for you. Maybe one of the bigger ones was Poker Smash. I can't wait. okay that wasn't one of the okay i remember this song yeah no i i know it's just there was like this haunted one. The graphics are really good. They were and the sound effects and the music.
Yeah it's like tetris with cards here i'll jump ahead to the gameplay maybe, Oh, yeah, I remember this. This holds up. Yeah. That is the ground. We should find that game again. I know. Poker Smash. I so want to play it. I'll just watch gameplay. I love it. It's so nostalgic for me. Well, it's funny you say that because that's what I do for this first game I thought I'd talk about. Now, obviously, caveat here, the Mario games on the NES and Super NES, always a go-to for me on emulators, on physical hardware. where Super Nintendo games in general I love, like Metroid and all the kind of the classic ones there.
Donkey Kong. Yep, yep, yep, and Star Fox and others. I did get sucked into World of Warcraft when that launched, enough that my buddy John and I took a day off of work so that we could raid all day. And they worked at the same place. And then we hurt our backs that day, and I realized, okay, perhaps it's time to dial that one back. And then a little bit later, many of you out there listening that have been around for a while I'll know that I got sucked in pretty hard to Star Trek Online, did a little podcast around all of that, got to meet the developers and go down to the development shop and all of that. That was really great.
So, I mean, those were games that got me for a while, but I don't really go back to those anymore. And I don't do the thing that you just mentioned, where I don't go onto YouTube and re-watch old gameplay. But for a couple of my go-tos, I really still do. In fact, I love watching people play through Star Trek The 25th Anniversary. This was a game, it's a point-and-click adventure game for old DOS computer PCs that was published by Interplay Productions in 1992. And Interplay made the best Star Trek games. They're not around anymore. But this game was one of those sort of point-and-click adventure games where there's multiple solutions.
And later on, the CD-ROM version, first it came out on 3.5-inch floppy disk, but later it came out on CD-ROM, and they improved the sound effects, and they added the voice actors from the original Star Trek series. So it really became something special because it really had the vibe of the original show and the voice acting was fun. And then the multiple choice. It's really an old style game, but it's still fun. Sometimes the actors don't give it their best read, but I still loved it. And it was back in the 90s. I played it with my friend on three and a half inch floppies. And that was the first time I ever had that experience where we started playing, I don't know, 7, 8 p.m., maybe 6 p.m. just after dinner.
And then the next time I looked at the clock, it was 3 a.m. Oh, my gosh. What happened? And we almost beat the whole game in that one night. But it was great. And it also, back then, they tried to prevent you from stealing by just copying that floppy. So in the game you have to give coordinates and you have to specify very specific places on the map to go for each level and if you choose the wrong place you end up in a horrible battle with Romulans or Klingons and the only way you can decode the map is if you have the manual that came in the box that has the decoder in the manual so you're constantly referring back to the manual when you're playing the game very different kind of style of game and then I was a huge huge huge lover of the quake games and quake three in particular was really special because.
I got to play in a computer lab with my school buddies, but something really, really great came along on September 15th, 2000. That was star Trek Voyager elite force built on top of quake three. So this was really neat because I took all the skills I learned from playing Quake 3 and they improved upon the engine. They had several technical challenges that the game creators had to come up with. They had to solve. They had to come up with a way to have a single player mode in Quake, which was designed to be multiplayer. They created a scripting language. That way they could have events and cinematics and cut scenes in the game.
They came up with a new skeletal model that would significantly reduce memory consumptions for character models and they could have more in the game. It was so much fun. Was that actually Captain Janeway? Yeah. Because I was like, if this was a current release, I'd be like, they used AI. No. Right. Wow. I know. It's fun. That is so cool. Kate Monger. And she just nails it. It's a good read. Yes. But, you know, for research purposes last night, because you can get Star Trek the 25th anniversary and a Voyager Elite Force on GOG.com still. And so I already owned it because it's like nine bucks so I bought it years ago and I downloaded and played Elite Force for a few minutes last night and it's so much fun, and it's got a great multiplayer mode so maybe I can talk the kids into it one day but you can still get it if you want to play it at GOG.com no ad or whatever, but I just think it's great so I was wondering Ange I thought maybe we should ask the audience you know where I'm going with this do they have any games that they are addicted to so boost in or leave us a voicemail was there a game that really captured you for a time something that just maybe was a little unhealthy and you love it still boost in and tell us about it because we want to hear about it and it would be i think a great conversation for the next episode or two.
All right, so we got a phone system. It's a beta system. It's an MVP kind of thing that we're building right now. It lets us take live calls, make calls, and receive voicemails. We have a dedicated member line for members, voicemails. It just goes right to the front of the line. No idea if anybody's going to use this, so we're testing it right now. I want to find out if anybody's actually ever going to call us. And I figured, why now? Well, everybody has a video meeting. Since the pandemic, everybody does video meetings, and I kind of miss the simplicity of a phone call. And we love hearing from the community.
So you can try it. You can give us a call at 774-462-5667. That's 774-462-5667. And we can also make outbound calls. And I thought maybe we would give Mr. Wes Payne a call. He could be our first. I guess I can bring him as a guest or a caller. I have a whole system here. He can be our first call on the show. What do you think? Yeah. Let's give it a call. Let's give him a call and see if this works. I really have no idea. Okay, I see the call's connecting. Mr. Wes Payne, do we have you? Hello, Lon. Hello, Wes! Oh, it works. Congratulations. You're the first one. You're our first, Wes. You sound a little bit worse than I'm used to hearing, but you sound good.
All right, yeah. Yeah, I would imagine the phone system's a little limited in bandwidth. Okay, so since we've got you live, I thought I'd ask you what we just asked the audience. We're asking everyone to boost in what was a game that really kind of hooked them, maybe to an unhealthy degree. Do you have one of those, sir? I've got two for you, I think. The first one would be the classic original Pokemon. Oh, Pokemon. Yeah, for sure. Did you ever do then Pokemon Go? Yes, a little bit. It didn't quite hook me, but it's been one of those games, like I remember being a kid on the bus and someone else on the bus was handing out a paper printed out guide that they'd made for how to get the glitch Pokemon in that game, like Missing No, it was called.
I remember like wandering around head down this is before everyone was doing it with cell phones head down with the game boy at recess just sort of blindly wandering around outside yeah and any, time I've been able to install some sort of emulator on a phone just for like a free time game Pokemon is the game that comes back so. You did have to catch them all and that's a classic. The Pokemon. Stuff missed me I think just by a few years I feel a little left out because it seems like a lot of fun okay so that's game one that's a good one what's another one. Okay I'm other one it might be a little more niche uh it was a 2000s era mud multi-user dungeon oh awesome yeah.
I do yeah i do. Okay so this was called night mist it was windows only because they had a custom client a lot of these muds came about over telnut yeah but this one was a mixture of like, uh early gifts and uh other like jpeg assets for sort of all of your inventory items but then most So the interactions was text-based. Oh, wow. So this Windows client had support for all these extra fancy features. This is a serious mud. Yeah, it was. And it kind of took over my school. You know, at first it was kind of just the nerds with computers playing it, but then, I swear by the end of that year, even the jocks were playing it on the computers at school.
That's kind of what happened for us with Quake 3. Everyone that played it at first was just the nerds. And then, yeah, by the end of the year, even the jocks and stuff were coming in the computer lab. I love those moments. And, of course, me being the young little miscreant that I was, I also, this was one of my first programs I started trying to sort of, I don't know, quote-unquote hack. They had a very early sort of CAPTCHA system. So if you were trying to move too fast through the dungeon, you had to solve a math problem. Oh, my gosh.
I wrote a program in Visual Basic that would scan the pixels of the pixelated images they showed you to try to figure out what the result was so it could keep going. I love it. I love that. That's so great. I got a talking to from a mod once because I was playing around with implementing my own custom client. And that revealed I didn't take a ton of advantage of it. So I think that's why they kind of let me off easy. But that revealed they were trusting the client with some of the game state in a way that you would never do these days. So I think I probably could have changed the amount of gold I had.
And they figured that out. I love it because I've seen you even to this day. You know, you'll look at something that the computer needs. And you're like, I bet I could just write something that handles that for me. You know, he still does it to this day. So you were learning early lessons back then, too, that you still apply today. Very valuable. Yeah, that's right. See, video games can be productive, parents. Yeah, there you go. Wes, thank you so much for being our first caller. That was, you know, it's fun. It's fun to just, you know, pop in on your daily life and chat with Wes. So now go about your day and enjoy yourself, okay?
Talk again soon. All right. Bye, Wes. Okay, so if you would like to call into the show or leave a voicemail, you have the number, of course. I'll put it in the show notes too. But also, maybe we could call you. I'm looking for volunteer listeners who would be down for a call from Ange and Chris during our live stream. No guarantees, but I'm hoping I could make a little list of folks that would be up for a call just like we did with Wes. Maybe we'll bounce the question off you. And the way to get on the list would be to call in and leave us a voicemail with your contact deets.
And then I'll note it all down, and we'll put you on a list of somebody we could potentially call during the show just to kind of bring in extra voices. And don't forget, we'll have that member line out there. I just got to figure out how to like sneaky release it for all of you. Sure. But he gets it. Now let's take a break. Andrews. What do you say? Yeah. We have a great song. Now last week we played Hocus Pocus and y'all out there brought it up to number two on the value charts. That is so cool. Super awesome. Thank you everybody who boosted in our value for value track. Now this week. I want to feature somebody that's a really awesome value for value story.
He's a very talented artist who hadn't really got much traction because you can imagine just how many people are publishing to places like Spotify. His name's Ollie, and he started publishing on the Value for Value system, and he immediately got noticed. And this is one of my favorite tracks of his. It is Lost Cause. We'll be back on the other side. Enjoy. Link in the show notes. We do have some boosts to get into, and Mr. Wes Payne is our first booster this week with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats. If the bus is rescued after this LinuxFest Northwest, I propose it makes its official debut at LinuxFest Northwest 2026.
Maybe this boost can be the start of a badass camera fund. I like the way you're thinking, Wes. So the plan right now, quick recap, is on our trip to scale and plan a Nix, Brent picked up a van. It needs some work. After LinuxFest on May 1st, we're flying down to L.A., and Brent and I are going to get that thing on the road and drive it back home as fast as possible. And so, if everything goes as planned, we should be able to debut at least a work in progress at LinuxFest Northwest 2026. I like where you're thinking, Wes. Thank you for the boost.
Southern Fraud Sassafras is here with 2000Sats. Regarding your question about Linus Torvalds for a day, I'm worried about what happens to Linux without Linus. What is the succession plan over there? Who gets to do the final merge then? And regarding Brent's eagle poop conspiracy consistency comment, it's because it's a mix of poo and pee. It's fascinatingly disturbing how far large birds of prey can make it fly. Oh, I agree. I was telling Angie, I think it was after the show, like if you see an eagle poo, you'll know. You'd be amazed. And how dare they too, right? Southern Pride.
I mean, that's implied in your messages. How dare they? Thank you for the boost. Pod bun comes in with 3,000, no, 3,222 sats. You know, it sounded like Chris was a little jealous of the birds. They get to poop everywhere. You know, I don't know. I'm definitely jealous that they get to fly. And I think that bleeds into jealousy in other ways. It's just so unfair if you think about it. I have to, like, go through the TSA, you know, buy a ticket. Like, they just get to, oh, it's so unfair. It really is. And how can we think we're the kings of the earth when they can fly and look down on us? I mean, we're just fooling ourselves.
And I just think we should realize it. That's all. That's all. Rotted Moods here with 9,000 one sats. Just wanted to say that I'm thinking a call-in number would be great and I would probably use it. That said, I can't promise the calls wouldn't be prank calls. Yes. I'd totally expect a prank call back. I was happy to see the show pop up in my feed. Keep it going. All right. Well, let's do it. All right, you got the phone number. Now you got to call in. Now, our next boost, thank you for the boost, comes from BitCryptic2048Sats. So my first computer was a Z80 processor-based kit that I had hand-soldered.
It had two kilobytes of RAM and six-by-seven-segment LED displays and a hex input keyboard for programming. Its usability was limited, but the educational aspect was amazing. I'm just trying to wrap my head around a hex keyboard for input. But my goodness, that's doing it the hard way, BitCryptic. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate hearing from you and the support. Mr. Turd Ferguson's back with 18,666 sats. Oh, good, we got a guilty food. My guilty food is fast food breakfast sandwiches. They're so tasty and easy. Really peak industrial food. Yeah, that's a hard one to kick.
Yeah, yeah, I'll have breakfast any time of day. You know, I've been liking the Wendy's breakfast sandwiches. I don't do it often, but I've been liking the Wendy's breakfast sandwiches. What kind? Well, they've got like a Swiss and it's like a Swiss sauce with a sausage on like this really nice flaky bun. Like a special bun. It's good. You know, I've eaten at Wendy's like three times in my life. They got a good breakfast. Oh, I'm getting hungry just talking about it. Oh, turd. Look what you did to me. He says, by the way, this boost is to celebrate the start of a small business. Hey, congratulations. That's great to hear.
What's the craziest business idea you've ever considered? Ooh, craziest, huh? Do you have any crazy business ideas? I mean, I did envision putting my kids to work, once we moved the studio out of the Third Bay, filling it with birth kits stock and have the kids put kits together. Sure, ship them out. Yep. I mean, I still think you should consider the rent-a-chicken business. Yeah, yeah. You know, I still think that. My craziest idea would be something like in the, I would love to do something with RVs. I don't know what, just I really enjoy that, but I don't know. For a little while, I daydreamed about like, maybe people would want my help making their RV automated and getting their internet set up.
Oh, yeah. You could totally do consulting. Yeah, exactly. And I would love it. So that's my, it's not that crazy though. Love to hear more about yours, Turd. Thank you for the boost. Odyssey Westra is here with 4,444 sats. This cinnamon roll reminds me. Oh, this was live. He boosted this live. Thank you, Odyssey. The cinnamon roll reminds me of the one bit from Fluffy the Comedian. The cocoa shake and the phrase, it's going to happen, went through my head. Yeah, so I was telling in the pre-show the story that my son and I were out for breakfast and the people next to us got a cinnamon roll literally the size of a cake and they needed a guy to come out and help them cut it. It's that big.
Nice to hear from you, Odyssey. Thank you, everybody who boosted. That's all the boosts above the 2,000-sat cutoff for On Air. We had 13 folks stream them sats. Not a lot here. Not a lot here. We stacked a humble 10,777. I like the number, but it's not a lot. But thank you, everybody, who does stream those sats. When you combine them with our total boosters, we stacked a grand total this week of 52,480 sats. Thank you, everybody. If you'd like to boost, it's real easy if you get Fountain. I think River and Bitcoin Well are some of the best places to get sats. The Strike app is killing it these days, over 110 countries.
You just need to get those sats and then send them to Fountain. Or you can go on an adventure of self-hosting and self-sovereignty at podcastapps.com. Podverse is GPL. People love that. Lots of ways to support over there. Now, Andrews, what do you say we shift gears for a moment because, you know, we were just talking about crazy business ideas. Well, how about a crazy investment idea? Now, this would be a bit of a trip to get it set up because it's in Milwaukee, but this is a great buy. This is a listing on Zillow.com. Let me give you the details before I tell you the price, okay, because it's really impressive.
Four bedroom, one bath, almost 1,500 square feet, beautiful location. It's really accessible. There's a bunch of great shopping nearby, quick access to the highway, and also some other beautiful homes in the area. And it's been on Zillow for seven days and nobody has swooped in and it's under $100,000. It's $99,900. So you could pick this thing up and I bet you could flip it for $300,000. Oh yeah, it's a nice one. It needs some work and it does have one problem. Yeah, I mean, I'm like, how did you even find this? This is so random. Well, it's an exciting opportunity for buyers who love a challenge and I think this could be you.
Oh yeah, me? Yeah, well, you see, this is from the description here. Quote, the current occupant adds a touch of unpredictability and the need for an eviction process. Is it a cat? No. If you've ever wanted to put your negotiation skills to a test, now is your chance. However, warning, and this is in all caps, do not approach the property. It is occupied. Seller does not have access to the property. Access will be given for showings, inspections, or appraisals. Cash buys only. Buyer will be responsible for any and all evictions or obtaining a lease from the occupant. Is it a disbarred lawyer?
It's like somebody who is squatting in this house and the person selling it doesn't have the nerve to kick them out. Wow. So they're selling it for super cheap if you're willing to kick out the squatter. And also, by the way, the squatter appears to be dangerous. Okay. Okay. It might be armed. But you get a nice lot. I mean, I don't know if you see these pictures here. It's got a big backyard. I mean, 1,500 square feet, but four bedrooms and only one bathroom? I don't know. Okay. All right. You don't want to kick the squatter out either? It is a cute house, though.
I mean, maybe we could just offer them a service of squatter kicking. You know, we go around, kick squatters out, and then they can sell it for more money. Oh, yeah. I don't think so. It is a whole thing to get people out of places. The tenants are protected to a degree that is ridiculous these days. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you're not in that investment. No, no, thank you. Well, there may be a new studio opportunity for us. This is a real story. It happened kind of recently. There was Fox 35 Orlando and the meteorologist Brooks Garner was on the air covering storms in the area because there was a tornado. This is a real story.
And the tornado ends up taking a turn to go directly over the studio. Oh, my goodness. The audio is incredible. They'll refer to the things on the screen, but there's nothing on the screen except for just gray clouds, so you're not missing anything. The audio has it all, and it's pretty intense, actually. Just southwest of I-4, two miles southwest of I-4, and I'm continuing to look at those cameras there. That I-4 came. Yeah, let's turn it west. That's good. Turn it west so you can see it's going through the tower. Look on the bottom right-hand part of your screen. Keep going. Keep going left.
Keep going left and keep going, keep going. And if we can bring that full, okay. And stop. I was kind of fascinated to see this because like what does a tornado approaching look like? It turns out it just looks like a bunch of dark clouds and rain when it's really close. It doesn't look like some big, super crazy cyclone. TV station of what may be at the very least it's torrential rain crossing I-4 right now. We could be looking at a tornado on camera. Look at those trees. Blowing around. Okay. Bring the camera up, guys, if you can. Zoom out. Can you zoom out? This is a look at the live camera of a tornado, which could be passing by our station right now.
Okay, there's debris. We've got debris on. Okay. Take shelter. Everybody in the Fox 35 building gets here safe. So as it hits, he kind of starts to freak out. But then I got to give him credit. He gets his feet. Debris right now on the roof. Debris on the roof right now. We're hearing, you can see the debris flying there on the camera. This is a tornado. Seek shelter immediately. Get under your desks, guys. Anchors under the desks. Everybody get on the desks. Okay, that was it. We're still in debris zone. Everybody get in. Everybody get in the studio. Come on in, guys.
Okay, we got power flickering out. That's a tornado. This is a confirmed tornado. National Weather Service, if you're listening, this is a confirmed tornado. Right over the lake mary studios this is heading into lake mary and sanford right now get below get below uh the ground level sorry get to the ground level an interior room away from, away from the windows this is a very serious situation this is a real live tornado it just hit our station we saw debris flying it's heading into lake mary going right down lake mary boulevard into Sanford. If you're watching from Winter Springs, if you're watching from Sanford, get below shelter.
We're in a fortified room here. Can we swing the camera right? Is the camera still working on our Lake Mary cam? That kind of reminds me, it wasn't nearly that bad, but it kind of reminds me of my first road trip in Lady Joops. We were coming back up North California I-5 and a little tornado touchdown. And I knew something was wrong. First of all, because it got really, really strong hail and rain and wind all of a sudden came out of nowhere. And then I saw all the big rigs were bailing under the overpasses. And I realized they're taking the best spots. But why are they taking like they're taking shelter?
Then our radio cut in and with a tornado warning. So we pull over. We did not make it under an overpass. And we did not make it under an overpass. And the wind was wild, but what was really nuts was the hail. And I thought for sure, like our vent covers and maybe our air conditioner covers had just been destroyed because huge hail. And so we and just about everybody else, once it passed, because it passed just about right over the freeway ahead of us a bit, we all got back in our vehicles and got off at the next rest stop. And everybody was out inspecting their rigs and their cars and whatnot.
Thankfully, there was no damage. And I remembered at that point that the actual vehicle insurance hadn't kicked in yet for the RV. Oh, so good thing. It would have been horrible. Anyways, this is nuts. And that guy, you know, he did pretty good. He did pretty good. And their studio was fortified. So everybody comes running in to protect themselves and huddle in the studio while he's live on air. Isn't that something? Now, thankfully, although maybe one day we'll be live on air and we'll have an earthquake. They say a big one's coming. Or we also have volcanoes. So that would be really something.
Hopefully not. We will continue to broadcast, though, because it makes for a great podcast if it happens. We would love to have you call us. I'll give it to you one last time before we're out of here, just because hopefully we'll have some voicemails to play next week. That number, get ready to write it down, is just add it to your contacts. Put it in your address book, and whenever you're listening to the podcast, you can open up that phone app, which you probably haven't used in a long time, and give us a call. It is 774-462-5667.
That's 774-462-5667. And I'd love to have you call us and leave us a voicemail and consider calling us live whenever we're going on the show. You can give us a ring and we'll bring you to the show live or we'll play your voicemails. And that's just about it, right? I think it's time to go, right, Andrews? Yeah. Okay, then. Let's get out of here. Links to what we talked about and more, weeklylaunch.rocks. I'll try to put the phone number up there as well. We would love to have you join us live Tuesday, jblive.tv or a podcasting 2.0 app, or just plug jblive.fm into your browser of choice.
It is 1130 a.m. Pacific, but just get it in your time zone at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. That's it for us from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast. Thanks for listening. See you right here next week.
This is The Launch, episode 14 for March 18th, 20, 25. ... ... ... Streaming from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast, we greet you all a good morning, a good evening, or wherever your timeline may fall. Time-appropriate greetings indeed to one and all. This is The Launch. My name is Chris. And I'm Angela. Hello, Angela. We have a few things everyone needs to know before the show gets going. We'd love it if you called us live. That's right. You can also call after the fact and leave us a voicemail. The number is, get ready, 774-462-5667.
That's 774-462-5667. You can always join us live. The show's live at 11.30 AM Pacific, 2.30 PM Eastern, 7.30 PM UTC on a Tuesday. That's over at jblive.tv or your podcasting 2.0 app of choice. Then the show comes out Wednesday morning for Download On Demand. And we'd love it if you joined us. Download it, listen, call in, leave us a voicemail, all of those things. It's new. The phone's cool again, didn't you know? You can always suggest topics, ask us questions, or comment on something we've talked about. And, of course, we have a 24-7 chat room. the Launch HQ on our matrix server linked at weeklylaunch.rocks. That's our website.
Weeklylaunch.rocks. Yeah, they got .rocks. Can you believe that? They got .everything now. You wouldn't believe it. But I think I got .rocks because it was cheap. I mean, I got to be honest with you. I think it was cheap, and I was going for cheap that day. I got too many domains. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Right? Weeklylaunch. And you got to renew them. Weeklylaunch.rocks. Don't make me waste my money. Go check it out. Andrews, I thought today we'd share a few times where perhaps a video game hooked us in a way that you might even argue was a little addictive. Perhaps we got a little too carried away from time to time and whatever it was, that particular game just really hooked us.
And I thought a couple of mine, I realized, geez, I'm getting old when I look at some of mine. How would you describe yourself? Are you a casual gamer? Are you a serious gamer with like, with it's like one game at a time? Like, how would you describe your? Oh, yeah. I would definitely say it's one game at a time. And, and, and it ends up being like the focal, like a go-to. I need it for my brain, you know, just to like devolve or whatever. But yeah. I find myself to be kind of a multi-game guy. I kind of I'll play one game for a few minutes and I'll switch over to another game for a few minutes and then I switch around.
Well, you don't say doesn't sound like ADHD at all. You know, but there have been games over the years that did really stick. And I wanted to start with one that I really remembered for you, because this was also a brand new idea for the Xbox 360. It was called Zuma, and it was a simple tile-matching style puzzle game developed by PopCap Games. It was originally released in 2003. Now, the Xbox 360 version, which is what we played with Zuma Deluxe, came out in 2005, and this is why it was a big deal. It sort of set a tone for a new type of casual games that were accepted on consoles. Before this people weren't really consoles were like these big serious games Zuma Deluxe became a very popular Xbox arcade lineup game and kind of enshrined more casual games to come and you weren't alone Andrews many players found the game to be quote incredibly addictive yeah and.
I don't even think it's available on iOS anymore and uh but I do have jungle marble which is very similar. Yeah you sort of kind of match up colored balls and when you get a certain set of matches a. Snake of balls. Yeah they explode and the idea is is you want to blow all the balls up before they reach the golden skull you know or otherwise the level is over simple a simple idea but a very fast gameplay like the first level you could you know if you're a decent player you'd be done in less than a minute i mean it moves really quick and i think that's part of why it just it really hooked people but this was before games got social because another game that came along i think a little bit later although because i think it was 2009 because this is when games were blowing up on facebook and every game had a social aspect, You and Farkle.
Yes. Yes. I wasn't necessarily big on Facebook at the time, but that made me big on Facebook at the time. And it was me versus my uncle. We would play against each other and share our results, which is so embarrassing now. Like, first of all, I don't play any Facebook games. But it was part of the competition. Too. You had to share your results. Yeah. But I also. But who cares? Right. Like, who cares? Nobody else in my timeline cared, just my uncle who wanted to beat my score. It's just, I don't know. It's so cringe looking back now. Well, it's wild because their entire business model, and I for a very short time worked for a company that was trying to exploit this with an MMO, was, well, we'll get more users because every time you have a big achievement or a big high score, you share it in your timeline, and that pulls in all your friends and family.
And this is just going to go gangbusters. and social games on Facebook around this time in 2009 were projected, some of the big ones were projected to make $500 million in revenue that year. The biggest game at the time, I guess, was Texas Hold'em. Oh, interesting. I think my mom played that. She also played Words with Friends. Yeah. And I did play that just for a little while, but waiting for the other person to make a move could make the game last a long time. Yeah. 12 million monthly active users for Texas Hold'em at the peak of this. But the whole thing crumbled when Facebook just –, tweaked the algorithms or whatever so that way this stuff didn't get shared in your social feed anymore and like their whole business model collapsed and uh i think this company that made the studio was called viral games some incarnation of them appears to be around and they appear to be making ios games but i'm not even sure if it's the original crew that made farkle like they're just the whole like the companies that were involved with that just are kind of gone now like they just collapsed yeah.
Here's the thing about farkle it's a dice game, right? Or a die game. Plural, right? So it's like five die. And the thing is I got a manual, I got, you know, five die and a, and a can to shake them, basically Yahtzee, you know? Uh, I don't want to play it manually. I don't want, I want a computer or a device, some electronic to tell me, you know, what my score could be. I don't want to have to manually do that. It's computer. Do the computer thing. And that's how I learned Farkle. Thankfully, I didn't learn it the manual way. I mean, maybe, I don't know. Maybe I would feel differently if I had learned it the manual way.
Maybe. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's what it comes from, right? It's analog, just a dice game. But yeah, I have not opened that box of Farkle because I don't care to do it manually. So like I said, mine, I mean, do you have any other games that, oh, I remember the other one that was an Xbox game that really was a grabber for you. Maybe one of the bigger ones was Poker Smash. I can't wait. okay that wasn't one of the okay i remember this song yeah no i i know it's just there was like this haunted one. The graphics are really good. They were and the sound effects and the music.
Yeah it's like tetris with cards here i'll jump ahead to the gameplay maybe, Oh, yeah, I remember this. This holds up. Yeah. That is the ground. We should find that game again. I know. Poker Smash. I so want to play it. I'll just watch gameplay. I love it. It's so nostalgic for me. Well, it's funny you say that because that's what I do for this first game I thought I'd talk about. Now, obviously, caveat here, the Mario games on the NES and Super NES, always a go-to for me on emulators, on physical hardware. where Super Nintendo games in general I love, like Metroid and all the kind of the classic ones there.
Donkey Kong. Yep, yep, yep, and Star Fox and others. I did get sucked into World of Warcraft when that launched, enough that my buddy John and I took a day off of work so that we could raid all day. And they worked at the same place. And then we hurt our backs that day, and I realized, okay, perhaps it's time to dial that one back. And then a little bit later, many of you out there listening that have been around for a while I'll know that I got sucked in pretty hard to Star Trek Online, did a little podcast around all of that, got to meet the developers and go down to the development shop and all of that. That was really great.
So, I mean, those were games that got me for a while, but I don't really go back to those anymore. And I don't do the thing that you just mentioned, where I don't go onto YouTube and re-watch old gameplay. But for a couple of my go-tos, I really still do. In fact, I love watching people play through Star Trek The 25th Anniversary. This was a game, it's a point-and-click adventure game for old DOS computer PCs that was published by Interplay Productions in 1992. And Interplay made the best Star Trek games. They're not around anymore. But this game was one of those sort of point-and-click adventure games where there's multiple solutions.
And later on, the CD-ROM version, first it came out on 3.5-inch floppy disk, but later it came out on CD-ROM, and they improved the sound effects, and they added the voice actors from the original Star Trek series. So it really became something special because it really had the vibe of the original show and the voice acting was fun. And then the multiple choice. It's really an old style game, but it's still fun. Sometimes the actors don't give it their best read, but I still loved it. And it was back in the 90s. I played it with my friend on three and a half inch floppies. And that was the first time I ever had that experience where we started playing, I don't know, 7, 8 p.m., maybe 6 p.m. just after dinner.
And then the next time I looked at the clock, it was 3 a.m. Oh, my gosh. What happened? And we almost beat the whole game in that one night. But it was great. And it also, back then, they tried to prevent you from stealing by just copying that floppy. So in the game you have to give coordinates and you have to specify very specific places on the map to go for each level and if you choose the wrong place you end up in a horrible battle with Romulans or Klingons and the only way you can decode the map is if you have the manual that came in the box that has the decoder in the manual so you're constantly referring back to the manual when you're playing the game very different kind of style of game and then I was a huge huge huge lover of the quake games and quake three in particular was really special because.
I got to play in a computer lab with my school buddies, but something really, really great came along on September 15th, 2000. That was star Trek Voyager elite force built on top of quake three. So this was really neat because I took all the skills I learned from playing Quake 3 and they improved upon the engine. They had several technical challenges that the game creators had to come up with. They had to solve. They had to come up with a way to have a single player mode in Quake, which was designed to be multiplayer. They created a scripting language. That way they could have events and cinematics and cut scenes in the game.
They came up with a new skeletal model that would significantly reduce memory consumptions for character models and they could have more in the game. It was so much fun. Was that actually Captain Janeway? Yeah. Because I was like, if this was a current release, I'd be like, they used AI. No. Right. Wow. I know. It's fun. That is so cool. Kate Monger. And she just nails it. It's a good read. Yes. But, you know, for research purposes last night, because you can get Star Trek the 25th anniversary and a Voyager Elite Force on GOG.com still. And so I already owned it because it's like nine bucks so I bought it years ago and I downloaded and played Elite Force for a few minutes last night and it's so much fun, and it's got a great multiplayer mode so maybe I can talk the kids into it one day but you can still get it if you want to play it at GOG.com no ad or whatever, but I just think it's great so I was wondering Ange I thought maybe we should ask the audience you know where I'm going with this do they have any games that they are addicted to so boost in or leave us a voicemail was there a game that really captured you for a time something that just maybe was a little unhealthy and you love it still boost in and tell us about it because we want to hear about it and it would be i think a great conversation for the next episode or two.
All right, so we got a phone system. It's a beta system. It's an MVP kind of thing that we're building right now. It lets us take live calls, make calls, and receive voicemails. We have a dedicated member line for members, voicemails. It just goes right to the front of the line. No idea if anybody's going to use this, so we're testing it right now. I want to find out if anybody's actually ever going to call us. And I figured, why now? Well, everybody has a video meeting. Since the pandemic, everybody does video meetings, and I kind of miss the simplicity of a phone call. And we love hearing from the community.
So you can try it. You can give us a call at 774-462-5667. That's 774-462-5667. And we can also make outbound calls. And I thought maybe we would give Mr. Wes Payne a call. He could be our first. I guess I can bring him as a guest or a caller. I have a whole system here. He can be our first call on the show. What do you think? Yeah. Let's give it a call. Let's give him a call and see if this works. I really have no idea. Okay, I see the call's connecting. Mr. Wes Payne, do we have you? Hello, Lon. Hello, Wes! Oh, it works. Congratulations. You're the first one. You're our first, Wes. You sound a little bit worse than I'm used to hearing, but you sound good.
All right, yeah. Yeah, I would imagine the phone system's a little limited in bandwidth. Okay, so since we've got you live, I thought I'd ask you what we just asked the audience. We're asking everyone to boost in what was a game that really kind of hooked them, maybe to an unhealthy degree. Do you have one of those, sir? I've got two for you, I think. The first one would be the classic original Pokemon. Oh, Pokemon. Yeah, for sure. Did you ever do then Pokemon Go? Yes, a little bit. It didn't quite hook me, but it's been one of those games, like I remember being a kid on the bus and someone else on the bus was handing out a paper printed out guide that they'd made for how to get the glitch Pokemon in that game, like Missing No, it was called.
I remember like wandering around head down this is before everyone was doing it with cell phones head down with the game boy at recess just sort of blindly wandering around outside yeah and any, time I've been able to install some sort of emulator on a phone just for like a free time game Pokemon is the game that comes back so. You did have to catch them all and that's a classic. The Pokemon. Stuff missed me I think just by a few years I feel a little left out because it seems like a lot of fun okay so that's game one that's a good one what's another one. Okay I'm other one it might be a little more niche uh it was a 2000s era mud multi-user dungeon oh awesome yeah.
I do yeah i do. Okay so this was called night mist it was windows only because they had a custom client a lot of these muds came about over telnut yeah but this one was a mixture of like, uh early gifts and uh other like jpeg assets for sort of all of your inventory items but then most So the interactions was text-based. Oh, wow. So this Windows client had support for all these extra fancy features. This is a serious mud. Yeah, it was. And it kind of took over my school. You know, at first it was kind of just the nerds with computers playing it, but then, I swear by the end of that year, even the jocks were playing it on the computers at school.
That's kind of what happened for us with Quake 3. Everyone that played it at first was just the nerds. And then, yeah, by the end of the year, even the jocks and stuff were coming in the computer lab. I love those moments. And, of course, me being the young little miscreant that I was, I also, this was one of my first programs I started trying to sort of, I don't know, quote-unquote hack. They had a very early sort of CAPTCHA system. So if you were trying to move too fast through the dungeon, you had to solve a math problem. Oh, my gosh.
I wrote a program in Visual Basic that would scan the pixels of the pixelated images they showed you to try to figure out what the result was so it could keep going. I love it. I love that. That's so great. I got a talking to from a mod once because I was playing around with implementing my own custom client. And that revealed I didn't take a ton of advantage of it. So I think that's why they kind of let me off easy. But that revealed they were trusting the client with some of the game state in a way that you would never do these days. So I think I probably could have changed the amount of gold I had.
And they figured that out. I love it because I've seen you even to this day. You know, you'll look at something that the computer needs. And you're like, I bet I could just write something that handles that for me. You know, he still does it to this day. So you were learning early lessons back then, too, that you still apply today. Very valuable. Yeah, that's right. See, video games can be productive, parents. Yeah, there you go. Wes, thank you so much for being our first caller. That was, you know, it's fun. It's fun to just, you know, pop in on your daily life and chat with Wes. So now go about your day and enjoy yourself, okay?
Talk again soon. All right. Bye, Wes. Okay, so if you would like to call into the show or leave a voicemail, you have the number, of course. I'll put it in the show notes too. But also, maybe we could call you. I'm looking for volunteer listeners who would be down for a call from Ange and Chris during our live stream. No guarantees, but I'm hoping I could make a little list of folks that would be up for a call just like we did with Wes. Maybe we'll bounce the question off you. And the way to get on the list would be to call in and leave us a voicemail with your contact deets.
And then I'll note it all down, and we'll put you on a list of somebody we could potentially call during the show just to kind of bring in extra voices. And don't forget, we'll have that member line out there. I just got to figure out how to like sneaky release it for all of you. Sure. But he gets it. Now let's take a break. Andrews. What do you say? Yeah. We have a great song. Now last week we played Hocus Pocus and y'all out there brought it up to number two on the value charts. That is so cool. Super awesome. Thank you everybody who boosted in our value for value track. Now this week. I want to feature somebody that's a really awesome value for value story.
He's a very talented artist who hadn't really got much traction because you can imagine just how many people are publishing to places like Spotify. His name's Ollie, and he started publishing on the Value for Value system, and he immediately got noticed. And this is one of my favorite tracks of his. It is Lost Cause. We'll be back on the other side. Enjoy. Link in the show notes. We do have some boosts to get into, and Mr. Wes Payne is our first booster this week with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats. If the bus is rescued after this LinuxFest Northwest, I propose it makes its official debut at LinuxFest Northwest 2026.
Maybe this boost can be the start of a badass camera fund. I like the way you're thinking, Wes. So the plan right now, quick recap, is on our trip to scale and plan a Nix, Brent picked up a van. It needs some work. After LinuxFest on May 1st, we're flying down to L.A., and Brent and I are going to get that thing on the road and drive it back home as fast as possible. And so, if everything goes as planned, we should be able to debut at least a work in progress at LinuxFest Northwest 2026. I like where you're thinking, Wes. Thank you for the boost.
Southern Fraud Sassafras is here with 2000Sats. Regarding your question about Linus Torvalds for a day, I'm worried about what happens to Linux without Linus. What is the succession plan over there? Who gets to do the final merge then? And regarding Brent's eagle poop conspiracy consistency comment, it's because it's a mix of poo and pee. It's fascinatingly disturbing how far large birds of prey can make it fly. Oh, I agree. I was telling Angie, I think it was after the show, like if you see an eagle poo, you'll know. You'd be amazed. And how dare they too, right? Southern Pride.
I mean, that's implied in your messages. How dare they? Thank you for the boost. Pod bun comes in with 3,000, no, 3,222 sats. You know, it sounded like Chris was a little jealous of the birds. They get to poop everywhere. You know, I don't know. I'm definitely jealous that they get to fly. And I think that bleeds into jealousy in other ways. It's just so unfair if you think about it. I have to, like, go through the TSA, you know, buy a ticket. Like, they just get to, oh, it's so unfair. It really is. And how can we think we're the kings of the earth when they can fly and look down on us? I mean, we're just fooling ourselves.
And I just think we should realize it. That's all. That's all. Rotted Moods here with 9,000 one sats. Just wanted to say that I'm thinking a call-in number would be great and I would probably use it. That said, I can't promise the calls wouldn't be prank calls. Yes. I'd totally expect a prank call back. I was happy to see the show pop up in my feed. Keep it going. All right. Well, let's do it. All right, you got the phone number. Now you got to call in. Now, our next boost, thank you for the boost, comes from BitCryptic2048Sats. So my first computer was a Z80 processor-based kit that I had hand-soldered.
It had two kilobytes of RAM and six-by-seven-segment LED displays and a hex input keyboard for programming. Its usability was limited, but the educational aspect was amazing. I'm just trying to wrap my head around a hex keyboard for input. But my goodness, that's doing it the hard way, BitCryptic. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate hearing from you and the support. Mr. Turd Ferguson's back with 18,666 sats. Oh, good, we got a guilty food. My guilty food is fast food breakfast sandwiches. They're so tasty and easy. Really peak industrial food. Yeah, that's a hard one to kick.
Yeah, yeah, I'll have breakfast any time of day. You know, I've been liking the Wendy's breakfast sandwiches. I don't do it often, but I've been liking the Wendy's breakfast sandwiches. What kind? Well, they've got like a Swiss and it's like a Swiss sauce with a sausage on like this really nice flaky bun. Like a special bun. It's good. You know, I've eaten at Wendy's like three times in my life. They got a good breakfast. Oh, I'm getting hungry just talking about it. Oh, turd. Look what you did to me. He says, by the way, this boost is to celebrate the start of a small business. Hey, congratulations. That's great to hear.
What's the craziest business idea you've ever considered? Ooh, craziest, huh? Do you have any crazy business ideas? I mean, I did envision putting my kids to work, once we moved the studio out of the Third Bay, filling it with birth kits stock and have the kids put kits together. Sure, ship them out. Yep. I mean, I still think you should consider the rent-a-chicken business. Yeah, yeah. You know, I still think that. My craziest idea would be something like in the, I would love to do something with RVs. I don't know what, just I really enjoy that, but I don't know. For a little while, I daydreamed about like, maybe people would want my help making their RV automated and getting their internet set up.
Oh, yeah. You could totally do consulting. Yeah, exactly. And I would love it. So that's my, it's not that crazy though. Love to hear more about yours, Turd. Thank you for the boost. Odyssey Westra is here with 4,444 sats. This cinnamon roll reminds me. Oh, this was live. He boosted this live. Thank you, Odyssey. The cinnamon roll reminds me of the one bit from Fluffy the Comedian. The cocoa shake and the phrase, it's going to happen, went through my head. Yeah, so I was telling in the pre-show the story that my son and I were out for breakfast and the people next to us got a cinnamon roll literally the size of a cake and they needed a guy to come out and help them cut it. It's that big.
Nice to hear from you, Odyssey. Thank you, everybody who boosted. That's all the boosts above the 2,000-sat cutoff for On Air. We had 13 folks stream them sats. Not a lot here. Not a lot here. We stacked a humble 10,777. I like the number, but it's not a lot. But thank you, everybody, who does stream those sats. When you combine them with our total boosters, we stacked a grand total this week of 52,480 sats. Thank you, everybody. If you'd like to boost, it's real easy if you get Fountain. I think River and Bitcoin Well are some of the best places to get sats. The Strike app is killing it these days, over 110 countries.
You just need to get those sats and then send them to Fountain. Or you can go on an adventure of self-hosting and self-sovereignty at podcastapps.com. Podverse is GPL. People love that. Lots of ways to support over there. Now, Andrews, what do you say we shift gears for a moment because, you know, we were just talking about crazy business ideas. Well, how about a crazy investment idea? Now, this would be a bit of a trip to get it set up because it's in Milwaukee, but this is a great buy. This is a listing on Zillow.com. Let me give you the details before I tell you the price, okay, because it's really impressive.
Four bedroom, one bath, almost 1,500 square feet, beautiful location. It's really accessible. There's a bunch of great shopping nearby, quick access to the highway, and also some other beautiful homes in the area. And it's been on Zillow for seven days and nobody has swooped in and it's under $100,000. It's $99,900. So you could pick this thing up and I bet you could flip it for $300,000. Oh yeah, it's a nice one. It needs some work and it does have one problem. Yeah, I mean, I'm like, how did you even find this? This is so random. Well, it's an exciting opportunity for buyers who love a challenge and I think this could be you.
Oh yeah, me? Yeah, well, you see, this is from the description here. Quote, the current occupant adds a touch of unpredictability and the need for an eviction process. Is it a cat? No. If you've ever wanted to put your negotiation skills to a test, now is your chance. However, warning, and this is in all caps, do not approach the property. It is occupied. Seller does not have access to the property. Access will be given for showings, inspections, or appraisals. Cash buys only. Buyer will be responsible for any and all evictions or obtaining a lease from the occupant. Is it a disbarred lawyer?
It's like somebody who is squatting in this house and the person selling it doesn't have the nerve to kick them out. Wow. So they're selling it for super cheap if you're willing to kick out the squatter. And also, by the way, the squatter appears to be dangerous. Okay. Okay. It might be armed. But you get a nice lot. I mean, I don't know if you see these pictures here. It's got a big backyard. I mean, 1,500 square feet, but four bedrooms and only one bathroom? I don't know. Okay. All right. You don't want to kick the squatter out either? It is a cute house, though.
I mean, maybe we could just offer them a service of squatter kicking. You know, we go around, kick squatters out, and then they can sell it for more money. Oh, yeah. I don't think so. It is a whole thing to get people out of places. The tenants are protected to a degree that is ridiculous these days. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you're not in that investment. No, no, thank you. Well, there may be a new studio opportunity for us. This is a real story. It happened kind of recently. There was Fox 35 Orlando and the meteorologist Brooks Garner was on the air covering storms in the area because there was a tornado. This is a real story.
And the tornado ends up taking a turn to go directly over the studio. Oh, my goodness. The audio is incredible. They'll refer to the things on the screen, but there's nothing on the screen except for just gray clouds, so you're not missing anything. The audio has it all, and it's pretty intense, actually. Just southwest of I-4, two miles southwest of I-4, and I'm continuing to look at those cameras there. That I-4 came. Yeah, let's turn it west. That's good. Turn it west so you can see it's going through the tower. Look on the bottom right-hand part of your screen. Keep going. Keep going left.
Keep going left and keep going, keep going. And if we can bring that full, okay. And stop. I was kind of fascinated to see this because like what does a tornado approaching look like? It turns out it just looks like a bunch of dark clouds and rain when it's really close. It doesn't look like some big, super crazy cyclone. TV station of what may be at the very least it's torrential rain crossing I-4 right now. We could be looking at a tornado on camera. Look at those trees. Blowing around. Okay. Bring the camera up, guys, if you can. Zoom out. Can you zoom out? This is a look at the live camera of a tornado, which could be passing by our station right now.
Okay, there's debris. We've got debris on. Okay. Take shelter. Everybody in the Fox 35 building gets here safe. So as it hits, he kind of starts to freak out. But then I got to give him credit. He gets his feet. Debris right now on the roof. Debris on the roof right now. We're hearing, you can see the debris flying there on the camera. This is a tornado. Seek shelter immediately. Get under your desks, guys. Anchors under the desks. Everybody get on the desks. Okay, that was it. We're still in debris zone. Everybody get in. Everybody get in the studio. Come on in, guys.
Okay, we got power flickering out. That's a tornado. This is a confirmed tornado. National Weather Service, if you're listening, this is a confirmed tornado. Right over the lake mary studios this is heading into lake mary and sanford right now get below get below uh the ground level sorry get to the ground level an interior room away from, away from the windows this is a very serious situation this is a real live tornado it just hit our station we saw debris flying it's heading into lake mary going right down lake mary boulevard into Sanford. If you're watching from Winter Springs, if you're watching from Sanford, get below shelter.
We're in a fortified room here. Can we swing the camera right? Is the camera still working on our Lake Mary cam? That kind of reminds me, it wasn't nearly that bad, but it kind of reminds me of my first road trip in Lady Joops. We were coming back up North California I-5 and a little tornado touchdown. And I knew something was wrong. First of all, because it got really, really strong hail and rain and wind all of a sudden came out of nowhere. And then I saw all the big rigs were bailing under the overpasses. And I realized they're taking the best spots. But why are they taking like they're taking shelter?
Then our radio cut in and with a tornado warning. So we pull over. We did not make it under an overpass. And we did not make it under an overpass. And the wind was wild, but what was really nuts was the hail. And I thought for sure, like our vent covers and maybe our air conditioner covers had just been destroyed because huge hail. And so we and just about everybody else, once it passed, because it passed just about right over the freeway ahead of us a bit, we all got back in our vehicles and got off at the next rest stop. And everybody was out inspecting their rigs and their cars and whatnot.
Thankfully, there was no damage. And I remembered at that point that the actual vehicle insurance hadn't kicked in yet for the RV. Oh, so good thing. It would have been horrible. Anyways, this is nuts. And that guy, you know, he did pretty good. He did pretty good. And their studio was fortified. So everybody comes running in to protect themselves and huddle in the studio while he's live on air. Isn't that something? Now, thankfully, although maybe one day we'll be live on air and we'll have an earthquake. They say a big one's coming. Or we also have volcanoes. So that would be really something.
Hopefully not. We will continue to broadcast, though, because it makes for a great podcast if it happens. We would love to have you call us. I'll give it to you one last time before we're out of here, just because hopefully we'll have some voicemails to play next week. That number, get ready to write it down, is just add it to your contacts. Put it in your address book, and whenever you're listening to the podcast, you can open up that phone app, which you probably haven't used in a long time, and give us a call. It is 774-462-5667.
That's 774-462-5667. And I'd love to have you call us and leave us a voicemail and consider calling us live whenever we're going on the show. You can give us a ring and we'll bring you to the show live or we'll play your voicemails. And that's just about it, right? I think it's time to go, right, Andrews? Yeah. Okay, then. Let's get out of here. Links to what we talked about and more, weeklylaunch.rocks. I'll try to put the phone number up there as well. We would love to have you join us live Tuesday, jblive.tv or a podcasting 2.0 app, or just plug jblive.fm into your browser of choice.
It is 1130 a.m. Pacific, but just get it in your time zone at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. That's it for us from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast. Thanks for listening. See you right here next week.
