BartenderTranscript:Starr:
I'm the type of tiling Window manager user that never changes any of their layout, basically. I'm the type of tiling Window manager that like has all applications open full screen except for like my terminals, which I have a vertical split. And so, I've got two of those open on a single screen. I actually don't know any shortcuts to any of the Window managers I've ever used. I have to look them up every single time.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, that's the great thing about Amethyst, it is the one that's based on ... It's has nothing to do with Haskell, but it's based on xmonad. But the key bindings are all like ... There's not really much way to change them, it's all pretty simple. It's a lot simpler to use the key bindings than it is to use the Haskell.
Starr:
I use Magnet for my Windows manager.
Josh:
Yeah, that's what I've been using too.
Starr:
Yeah, I really like that. The key combos are easy to remember to put stuff in the various places. I'm always like corner or half or top or bottom, it's super easy.
Josh:
Yeah, that's what I've been doing. It's a different approach. Amethyst, I've used it before and it is really nice because it automatically tiles, it's not like ... Magnet is kind of you just set up, basically, your halves or whatever.
Starr:
That's been around for a while, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Okay. Yeah, I just used to use that, I think.
Josh:
There's a bunch of them like that.
Ben:
We're talking about Mac tools today because-
Josh:
I guess we are. I could go forever on that.
Starr:
I've got a feature request for the makers of Amethyst who I know are dedicated listeners to FounderQuest. For the love of all things good in the world, can we please have a dropdown menu that lets you select different Window actions? Why do I have to use hotkeys, because maybe I want to do something that I do once every six months and I don't want to have to look up the hotkey for it and then try and make my fingers go into that weird chord position.
Josh:
Because it wouldn't be a pure tiling Window manager.
Starr:
I know, it's like come on, just give me a dropdown. It's not pure anyway, let's be honest. There's little bars at the top of the Windows, I can minimize things, I can drag things around, it's not pure anyway. It's already debased-
Josh:
It's not written in Haskell but you got to draw the line somewhere, and the line is dropdown menus.
Starr:
It's like a menu. It's like a GUI, okay. Okay, fine-
Josh:
You're totally making want ... I'm going to have to go try Amethyst again, you're making me want to go check it out. You might look ... There was like a configuration, I think it has a JSON configuration file or something that you can edit.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
Which is exactly what you were looking for if you were looking for a dropdown menu.
Ben:
Do either of you use PopClip?
Starr:
No, what's that?
Josh:
No.
Ben:
PopClip is a little extension thing ... I don't know how you describe it, what do they call it? I don't even know what they call it. I'm looking at their website and they don't really say. But basically, any time you select text, then this little popup pops up right above your cursor. And it's extendable, you can choose what kind of things appear in the little menu that pops up, but by default it does things like copy and paste, but also there's a little search icon. If there's a text you want to search on instead of having to right click, that's much too much work to do, so you can just hit that little search icon. Or there's a dictionary one so you can define something.
Ben:
But I use it a lot because it has an Alfred connection as well, so I will ... I have a bunch of Alfred shortcuts for things like jumping to one of our user records in our admin tool, and so, if I highlight let's say a user ID, then I can ... It'll give the popup, I can then choose Alfred and then I can type in my shortcut and boom, because it puts whatever's highlighted into that little Alfred box for you.
Starr:
Oh, that's really cool.
Ben:
It's super handy.
Josh:
That's cool.
Starr:
You know what's really amusing to me is that ... Because I've been working with you all for so long it's like we sort of like swap ... Okay, we kind of like swap places in weird ways. I remember a long time ago I'd be like, "Okay, I'm using Alfred, what you using, Ben?" And it's like, "Oh, I'm just using Spotlight." And now it's like reversed, it's like, "I just used Spotlight," and it's like, "Oh, Ben's using Alfred now."
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah, I love Alfred.
Ben:
I actually also use Spotlight. The reason why is Alfred I've never really gotten it to work the way I want it to work for looking up files and folders. If there's a file or a folder that I want, I use Spotlight. But anything else, basically, I use Alfred.
Josh:
Yeah, file search in Spotlight seems pretty advanced. It's got all the indexing and stuff built into it.
Starr:
Yeah. It seems like it'd be really hard to get right.
Ben:
But one thing I love about Alfred is the Safari shortcut support and one password support. If there's a site I know I want to go to, boom, Alfred, it's three characters away.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And if I have a login I want, if it's a log in thing I can just type in my one password name for it and, boom, it goes there and fills it in for me. It's brilliant.
Josh:
I haven't decided if I want to enable that or not yet because you have to go enable third party access or whatever to your one password database.
Ben:
That's true.
Josh:
I don't know. I've gotten kind of in the habit of using whatever they call one password mini or whatever in the toolbar.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Because they have a system wide hotkey for it, it's like shift command/ or something.
Ben:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Josh:
That'll pop it up. I do that instead.
Ben:
I should do that.
Josh:
Yeah, I don't know. Just something about enabling third party application access to my passwords. Even though I think it's ... It's not the passwords themselves, it's just the index.
Josh:
The metadata.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
I don't know.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
But, yeah. One of my favorite tips, I forgot ... Someone posted this on Twitter a long time ago and I don't remember who it was, but ... Maybe it was one of you. If you option click the notification center icon in the toolbar, it will toggle do not disturb.
Ben:
Yes, I love that.
Josh:
That is a great one.
Starr:
Oh, wait. Really? Okay, I'm going to try it now.
Josh:
Yeah. I use it all the time.
Starr:
It's option, and that's alt, right?
Josh:
That's alt.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
Option click.
Starr:
Oh, wow. That's nice.
Josh:
Isn't that cool?
Starr:
I'm doing it right now.
Josh:
There's another one ... Especially on my ... I have an ultra-wide monitor which I realized I'm not sure ... I might be going back towards the regular size monitor side of the argument because half the time I just want to center the window on a screen anyway. I can center that with Magnet, but if I want to resize the window then from there and do it equally, like expand it out equally, equal sides, and, of course, I'm not using a fancy tiling window manager that does it for me at the moment, hold down option and then drag a corner of the window and it will resize the entire window from the center of the window.
Josh:
That reminded me, last week when I was dealing with ... In the middle of my computer troubleshooting woes, that morning when I was like ... The morning of the second day, which I was already like frazzled and upset and stuff, and I get to my desk and I bumped ... I don't know how I did it, but I bumped my ... I have that ... You know the large trackpad, is it the Pro ... I forget what they call them, it's like the Pro Apple Trackpad or whatever.
Ben:
The Magic Trackpad?
Josh:
The Magic Trackpad that I keep in front of my Ergodox keyboard, bumped it and it fell facedown on my tile floor and shattered.
Starr:
Oh, my God, they can shatter?
Josh:
That was just the icing on the cake. I don't want to have another entire episode of bitching about my Mac problems, but that just ... It sucked.
Starr:
What part of it shattered? I'm curious.
Josh:
The top of it is kind of ... I don't know what it's made out of, it's almost like a glass type material. And it's happened with an Apple watch before in the past too, if you drop something, usually, it does pretty well if you drop it on a corner or something, but if you drop it face down on a tile floor, it's curtains.
Starr:
It's a goner.
Josh:
Yep.
Ben:
You know you have to replace all your tile floors. That's the real solution.
Josh:
I'm now carpeting my office.
Starr:
It is a suggested solution by Apple.
Josh:
Yeah, right.
Starr:
Because hard flooring is for Microsoft users.
Josh:
Apple shag carpet.
Ben:
I have been spending more time at home, thanks to COVID, and ...
Josh:
I was going to say, "Why?"
Ben:
Yeah. And as a result, I've actually started using a keyboard shortcut that I've never really used much in the past. Don't do it now, you don't want to do this now, but if you hold down option command and hit the eject key, that will sleep your computer.
Starr:
Oh, really?
Ben:
And when I'm at my office, I don't have any reason to sleep my computer, but when I'm at home I do. Yeah, I've been using that a lot.
Josh:
Nice. I will try that when I get my eject key back.
Starr:
Can I tell you all something ridiculous? It seems ridiculous to me and this may be the best solution available to me, but it seems really silly. Yeah, as you all know, I got an iMac six months ago or something and it comes with a keyboard and trackpad and everything, and I really like my Kinesis Advantage that I use so I didn't want to switch to the just terrible tiny little keyboard that they ship with it. Yeah, so I used my Advantage, but the problem with that is that I don't have any of the little sort of function keys. I've got the F1, F2, F3, but they don't have the little icons as to what they do, like make the screen brighter, make the volume louder or whatever. And I've got it set up so that they're actually like F1, F2 keys because I do real stuff with my computer, and I don't have that function key anymore. And so, how do I make my screen brighter or turn it up and down? The answer is you keep the original keyboard as a second keyboard underneath the monitor and you just kind of whip it out whenever you use an of those function keys.
Josh:
That's a life hack right there.
Starr:
It is. It feels so silly that I have to do this.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And yeah, I literally ... I assume there's some way to adjust my screen brightness without using the OEM keyboard, but ...
Josh:
That's a good point. I never adjust my screen brightness like that because I use an external monitor. Is that a thing with externals? I know that iMac has it.
Ben:
Yeah, you can do that. I have that, I have the LG, the UltraFine, and yeah, you can use the Apple keyboard to change the brightness on that.
Starr:
Oh, nice.
Josh:
I should have set up some ... I should configure my keyboard to have shortcuts for that. I have the Ergodox which is a split one, a little bit like Kinesis but they're detached, but I have some custom key bindings for volume and stuff that are handy.
Ben:
You reminded me, speaking of keybindings for volume, and remembering the UltraFine. There's one snag to the UltraFine and that is its audio. It had audio and it has speakers and they're great, but the problem is that basically normal volume that you would enjoy typically as your computer making sounds is the first notch on the volume scale.
Starr:
Oh, wow.
Ben:
First notch. And there's like, I don't know what, 10 notches or whatever? There's 1, 2, 3, 4 ... I don't know, 15. I don't know. Okay. If you hit the volume up key once, you get notch number two, and it freaking blows you away.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
And you might think, "Oh, but there's nothing between one and two so I'm just hosed now." That's actually not correct. Another key combo you can use, it is shift option volume up, which increases the volume by a quarter.
Starr:
What? Wait, there's like a fine volume adjustment on Mac's?
Ben:
Yes. Yep.
Starr:
Wow.
Ben:
Shift option up and down changes it by a quarter rather than a full step, which is absolutely critical if you have an UltraFine display because you cannot go to two without killing yourself, you have to go to one and a quarter if you want the volume to go up.
Josh:
That's the most Linux issue like old school Unix or Linux style issue on a Mac that I've heard recently.
Starr:
Yeah. But unless you know ... The UltraFine is the monitor to get if you want to have some house parties, if you want to be jamming with your tunes.
Josh:
Yeah, you got your ... Or if you want to plug your guitar into it and rock the neighborhood. You've got like a Marshall stack built into it.
Ben:
Disclaimer, I have never taken the volume on the UltraFine beyond three, because I've been too afraid to do so. I don't know if actually does actually keep going up to-
Josh:
I have one question. Does it go to 11?
Starr:
Apparently, it doesn't need to. Or does it destroy itself before it gets to 10?
Ben:
Do either of you use Bartender?
Josh:
Yes. Bartender's cool.
Starr:
I used to, but I haven't recently. About six months ago, whenever I got the iMac is when I switched back to using Mac. I lost a lot of my institutional memory of Mac apps.
Ben:
Plus, your Mac screen's probably big enough you don't care about all the stuff in the-
Starr:
It is really big, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. You got plenty of room. But when I switched to a 13 inch back in the day, I realized just how much room all those icons can take up. And so, Bartender is fantastic. If anyone doesn't know what that is, it hides menubar icons, and you can define which ones get hidden and how you can toggle between the ones that are hidden and shown. And it's pretty handy if you find your menu bar filling with icons, you can use Bartender to help manage that chaos. And I hide Docker, I hide Dropbox, and I hide Alfred.
Josh:
Yeah. You can also configure it to ... If it's like an icon that changes, if it updates its status occasionally you can have it appear when its changed, and then it will disappear.
Ben:
Hide again, yeah.
Starr:
Nice. This is reminding me of when I was on Linux and I had a sort of ultra high definition monitor hooked up to it. And it for the most part worked okay at sort of scaled resolution, but one of the little icons in my top sort of toolbar at the top of my screen, it didn't scale, and so, I had normal icons and this one half size icon, and then the rest of the box where it should have scaled up to fill the box was just white as opposed to the black of the toolbar. That's why I quit using the Linux on the desktop.
Ben:
That is the reason why you quit using-
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, it's one of them but look at like ... If you want to drive somebody slowly crazy, just have them look at that every single day for years on end. It'll drive them mad.
Ben:
Okay. Well, you just brought back memories of when I used Linux on a desktop, which was a long time ago. But when I first started using Linux on a desktop, I-
Josh:
You're going to get me going.
Ben:
I was blown away ... Well, this is kind of a double sided coin. I was blown away by X Windows, right, the whole idea that you could run something on a server somewhere and you're getting the UI on your machine, you know? I thought that was just amazing. The double sided coin is it was horrendously hard to set up, to actually get my monitor to work and get X server to work properly.
Starr:
Do you still remember your Vsync?
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Your Vsync numbers?
Ben:
For real.
Josh:
It was probably easier to hack than it was to set up, I would imagine.
Ben:
Yeah, totally.
Ben:
But the thing that really brought this back to my memory when you said that was this week GitHub announced their Codespaces.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's like their cloud nine thing where you can have your visual studio code running on someone else's server, and it just displays the UI on your machine. I'm like, "We've come full circle. Now we're back to X Windows."
Josh:
Well, and they have a lot of remote tooling built into VS code as well, which I suspect ... And I haven't read all of the things that they released, but I suspect that eventually you'll be able to also like connect that locally, which is kind of similar. You'll be happy to know that remote X is disabled or deprecated by default in modern X now.
Ben:
What? That's so sad.
Josh:
But I think that you can ... There's still an arch Linux guy that you can use to enable it or something if you really want to. But, yeah, X it's still the primary display thing on Linux at the moment. It's going to be replaced by Wayland in the future, which is a much more secure server.
Ben:
Get off my lawn.
Josh:
But, yes, X is still for now ... And it's one reason that Linux desktops are still inherently insecure from a screen recording standpoint.
Ben:
You can take your Wayland and you can take your system D and you can go just take a hike.
Josh:
Right?
Ben:
I need my X and leave me alone.
Josh:
And your Gen 2.
Ben:
Slackware.
Starr:
The reason I'm not saying anything is because I'm over here having flashbacks. They're not good. Because if you didn't have a brand name monitor, they didn't actually tell you your Hsync and Vsync and all those numbers, so you just had to like try them, you had to try all of them.
Ben:
And hope they didn't fry your monitor in the process.
Starr:
And hope thy didn't fry your monitor.
Josh:
See, I remember you all talking about that. That was definitely before my ... Because my Linux experience is more recent, I was on it for four years or something. I don't know if it was that long.
Josh:
Just like frying the monitor is like ... That's crazy.
Starr:
And it was because it like ... If your screen goes away, there's really no way to just recover from that, at least not that I knew at the time. You have to essentially reboot every time, so it takes you five minutes to try a new config value, and then it just blanks your mind really quick. And it makes a really scary noise when it does it, kind of like a ... Almost like something breaking, something really expensive breaking.
Ben:
Now, this is a key combo I do not remember actually accurately, but it might have been alt F6 or alt 6, I don't know, but that was the key combo that I discovered while working on X that actually got you to a text console. So Slack had like five or six virtual consoles, and that was like the one console-
Josh:
Oh, no, no ... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I use that. I still use that when I'm troubleshooting X. It's not as common on like ... If you use a Ubuntu or something you don't have to do that anymore, but if you use one of the more DIY Linux distributions, which are fine, you learn a lot and it's probably a lot more like OG Linux used to be.
Ben:
Right, totally.
Josh:
But, yeah, that's all just basic TTY stuff, right, so you're switching the terminal.
Starr:
I even got ... I was using Ubuntu and I went to turn on my computer one day because I had some work to do, like you do, and no graphic, no GUI.
Josh:
Sounds like my Monday.
Starr:
And like a 4K monitor, and so, that means no scaling. All the texts, like two millimeters high, and it's just gobs and gobs of just error texts that I have no idea what it means. And I'll give you a guess, Josh, as to what caused it.
Josh:
Did you accidentally replace your X resources file or common out the DPI setting?
Starr:
No.
Josh:
Because that's what it was for me.
Starr:
No, I'll give you one more guess, because I hadn't made any changes to any configuration.
Josh:
Okay, no changes.
Starr:
Well, maybe I ... Okay, I hadn't intentionally made any changes to anything.
Josh:
I don't know, there's probably a ton of potential reasons, but yeah, tell me.
Starr:
NVIDIA drivers.
Josh:
Ah, yes.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. The computer did some automatic update or something which meant that my NVIDIA drivers no longer worked at all, which meant that no GUI. And it wouldn't just be like, "Hey, your NVIDIA drivers need updating," because that would be like for news, that would let the riffraff in. Instead, you got to spend all morning trying to figure out how to upgrade your NVIDIA drivers.
Ben:
Funny you should mention that, because there was a Hacker News thread this week about Ubuntu until 2004, which is their latest long term release, just came out.
Josh:
Yeah, I have that on my desktop right now in the meantime while my Mac's out.
Ben:
And the people are pissed off because of Snap and auto updates and things like that.
Josh:
Yeah, I noticed that.
Ben:
We do the security auto updates on our Ubuntu servers, so I didn't think much about it, but now that you're talking about drivers getting updated overnight and now you can't even see your UI, I'm like, "Oh, I can see why people get upset about that."
Josh:
That could be tricky. I'm generally in favor of auto updating just for security reasons, but yeah, it can be kind of tricky. And especially with that, specifically, you have to enable third party repositories or something on Ubuntu to enable those drivers. Yeah, if you're not using the stock drivers then you're probably going to want to turn off that auto updating setting based on what Starr's saying. It probably works okay with like all the true ... If you're a true opensource person that won't use any proprietary drivers, then I bet it all works pretty well.
Starr:
Oh, that's right. That's right, it was a moral problem. I wasn't sure-
Josh:
It's a moral failing, Starr, yes.
Ben:
I think if you're a true opensource person-
Ben:
You're compiling all your things from scratch, you're not packaging something, come on, people.
Josh:
If you were just a good person-
Starr:
I just want to mention, who gave me this NVIDIA card that I'm holding up right now? Who gave me this, Josh?
Josh:
I gave you that. I did give that to you, Starr.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
I'm sorry. I'm sorry for bestowing that plague upon you for free.
Starr:
It was a really nice graphics card, thank you.
Josh:
I'm glad you got some use out of it.
Ben:
The memories, they're flooding back now. The other awesome thing about Linux circa 1995 was having to know what network chip manufacturer of your network card, right, so you could load the right driver so you could actually use your ethernet.
Starr:
Oh, no.
Josh:
Ethernet, yeah.
Ben:
The ethernet, heck yeah. Wi-Fi wasn't a thing.
Josh:
Yeah, there was no Wi-Fi.
Starr:
That's terrible.
Ben:
You had to know ... Oh, I have a Realtek card and my no name knockoff brand happens to use a Realtek chip. Or it's a-
Josh:
It's still a little bit like that on DYI Linux for Wi-Fi cards. If you have a certain proprietary one you have to install the specific ... It's like the whatever driver slash or dash your card, dash-
Starr:
Or maybe you have a cheap one but then you have to know which chips it's compatible with, which chips that it's ripping off, right?
Ben:
Right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Compatible means stealing in tech.
Josh:
I will say, Fedora and Ubuntu and the other pre-packed ... They're relatively much better these days. And I have actually been pretty impressed with this little desktop I've set up, it gets the job done at least. To take it back to Mac though, so do either of you configure your Macs with Ansible?
Ben:
No, I configure my server with Ansible, but yeah, that's hardcore.
Starr:
No.
Josh:
I configure my Mac with Ansible.
Ben:
Did you?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah? That's impressive.
Josh:
I also ... Do either of you store all your system configuration in an executable shell script that basically has like every Mac OS default in it that's changeable so you can commit to your-
Josh:
Wait, you didn't even make that one, right?
Josh:
I didn't make that. I forked it from a guy, his name is Mathias. But it's amazing, it's a community maintained shell script set up for your Mac. But when I go and set up a new Mac, before I would go and I'd have all these ... I like things a lot different from the defaults and you'd have to go in and have a list of things to hit and system preferences to go and configure it the way you like. With this, you keep it in Git so it's got history and everything, and it just changes the option in the file and then you run the shell script and it sets all of the defaults for you.
Ben:
You got to link me up with that.
Josh:
Yeah, I got it right here.
Ben:
Sounds cool.
Starr:
Yeah, it's used for a lot of stuff. I use it on my laptop and I didn't use it on my desktop this time because I don't like some of the settings it has and I just was not really feeling-
Josh:
Yeah. Well, you kind of need to maintain your own ... I forked it.
Ben:
Yeah, so I've got a new technique, it's for getting set up on computers super fast, which is just to be like the most basic computer user ever.
Josh:
Yeah, just use the defaults.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Also, a very valid approach.
Starr:
Also, store all your photos, if you are a Mac user, on Apple photos and use Apple notes and Apple reminders, and Apple cloud storage for everything. And it's kind of amazing how little maintenance that requires.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And once you fully buy into the ecosystem thing, then your life is so much better. It's like sunshine and lollipops-
Josh:
Drink the Kool-Aid is what you're saying?
Ben:
Yeah, pretty much.
Starr:
Yeah, except the Kool-Aid doesn't kill you, it actually-
Ben:
It tastes good.
Starr:
It tastes good, yeah. It kind of has the cherry thing, it tastes like childhood in summer.
Josh:
I thought it was apple flavored.
Ben:
Well, what's your favorite Kool-Aid flavor?
Starr:
My Kool-Aid flavor? Well, I've got peaches on my island, so I'm going to have to go with peach.
Ben:
Really?
Starr:
No, I'm joking. That's an Animal Crossing references for anybody who isn't playing Animal Crossing. We bought some Kool-Aid for my kid a couple months ago and I hadn't had it in so long. I guess just red, I'm a red person.
Ben:
Tropical punch?
Josh:
I was going to say red. I don't remember the flavors.
Starr:
I don't know. Just red.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Whatever.
Ben:
Yeah, it's probably a tropical punch. That's I think the most common choice for people with Kool-Aid. Because cherry's different, and black cherry, even more different. I'm a Kool-Aid connoisseur, sorry.
Josh:
Yeah, you're a connoisseur.
Starr:
Yeah, don't get him started, he'll go on and on about the tarrior.
Josh:
What is the ... Yeah.
Ben:
Like grape is pretty good, but it's not a grape soda kind of grape.
Josh:
What is the nuance between cherry and black cherry though?
Ben:
Yeah, so black cherry definitely a bit on the bitter side, like it has-
Starr:
Oh.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
A slightly bitter finish.
Starr:
Before we bought this I tried to make Ida some drink out of ... We got these rally concentrated flavorings for like cooking and candy making and stuff, so I tried to make her some strawberry soda out of that, and she was not impressed. I think I didn't put any sort of acidic element into it. I think it really needs some sort of like sour ...
Ben:
I would think that these days kids taste buds are a little more refined than ours were at a comparable age, right? If we got cherry we were like, "Woo hoo, it's not water," right? And they're all like, "Oh, no, that's got to have this particular-"
Starr:
Oh, no, she loves Kool-Aid, she just didn't like my DIY life hack, not "Kool-Aid" Kool-Aid.
Ben:
Got it. You got to get the real stuff.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. I don't know, she sure as hell like eats a lot less sugar than I did.
Ben:
Okay. Speaking of ... I'm on a random kick today. Speaking of sugar ...
Josh:
This is the random episode.
Ben:
Okay. One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was I would ride my bike with my friends down to the convenience store. It was like, I don't know, maybe half a mile, a mile away from my house. And they had like a couple of arcade games and candy and candy and candy, right? Every kind of candy you could possibly want was in this convenience store. I guess they knew their clientele pretty well. We would go down there, we would play a video game, grab some candy and it was the thing we did like every day. But the thing that I never understood were people who chose Lick 'em sticks or Dip 'em sticks.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Those are pretty good, occasionally.
Ben:
It's a sugar stick and you're dipping it in sugar.
Starr:
Yeah, what else would you dip it in?
Josh:
Yeah, that's what that is.
Ben:
I don't get it. It's like no.
Starr:
But it's kind of like a powdery sugarless flavorless sugar stick and you're dipping it in flavor.
Josh:
Like Pixie stick kind of thing, right, only you dip it.The sugar is like pixie-
Ben:
Right, you're dipping it in stuff like pixie sticks innards, yeah, yeah.
Josh:
No, let's just dump it straight into my mouth, please.
Ben:
Exactly. That's what I'm talking about.
Josh:
The large ... Do you remember the huge one? They have a large size of pixie stick, I think.
Ben:
My favorite was Now and Laters. Those were the best.
Starr:
Now and Laters?
Josh:
I was more of like an ice cream sandwich kind of kid.
Ben:
Yeah, Now and Laters.
Starr:
Oh, wow. I was ... I got my Sugar Daddy's, which is like ...
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Why did they name it that? It's just a giant caramel.
Josh:
Because we're talking about it now.
Starr:
It's like a giant stick of caramel. Yeah, so I get my Sugar Daddy, I go watch Scrooge McDuck on DuckTales, which I guess there's a pattern happening here.
Josh:
We've been doing-
Starr:
Recently, I got Disney+, and so, I was like, "Hey, it's got DuckTales, I'm going to watch DuckTales."
Josh:
Watching some DuckTales.
Starr:
And oh, man, DuckTales, it's kind of disappointing me in terms-
Josh:
Really?
Starr:
It's still entertaining and stuff, but there's some kind of gross stuff on ... They put in like a fat kid character who eats everything and they're like just making fun of him, and his name is Duffus. Like, come on DuckTales, that's just ... Like come on. And I was like a little chunky kid watching DuckTales so it's like I'm like-
Josh:
What was that telling you?
Starr:
What was this telling me about myself? Yeah. And there's some episodes that are like ... A lot of the episodes are super really kind of ... I don't know if it counts as racism, but very like 1980s stereotypes of like various not white cultures that you would not be able to put on TV today. I don't know.
Josh:
It ain't the 90s anymore.
Starr:
No, no. That was the 80s even, I think it was like '89.
Josh:
DuckTales was ... Yeah, okay, like late 80.
Starr:
Yeah. And also, Scrooge McDuck, a little bit of an asshole. I thought it was like, okay, it's fiction, like, "Okay, he got his money through ... He just happened to do some really clever things and gets some money." Then there was an episode where somebody defaulted on a debt so he took ownership of a TV production studio, and then he went in and immediately went into his nephew's favorite show and was like, "I'm shutting this down because the ratings are crap."
Josh:
I hope Scrooge doesn't listen to this podcast.
Starr:
I know, right? I know. And then the show is actually kind of like making fun of all the employees who were kind of sucking up to him because they don't want to lose their jobs, right? This guy comes in, he's their new boss, they're trying not to lose their jobs, it's like, "Oh, look at them, they're so ridiculous and gross because they're trying to suck up to him." It's just like, "What?" Did Elon Musk pay for this show to be made for like propaganda purposes? I don't know.
Josh:
He really looked up to those characters and he watched DuckTales.
Starr:
Yeah, my timelines are a bit mixed. It requires Elon Musk to invent a time machine and go back and-
Josh:
That would be amazing, modern DuckTales.
Starr:
They have it. Yeah, they have it. They remade it a couple years ago. I haven't watched a ton of it.
Josh:
But it would be awesome if they made it just like vintage DuckTales but then they worked in, like you said, characters from now show up in time machines and stuff like that.
Starr:
Oh, yeah? That would be funny.
Josh:
I will say, for Darkwing Duck there's one thing I can still say, he is still the terror that flaps in the night. So some things never change.
Starr:
Thank goodness. It's good to know there's constants in the world.
Ben:
We totally need to make that our wrap. You saying that needs to be the end of this episode.
Starr:
Oh, I thought you meant like a music rap.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, I wouldn't put that past us either.
Starr:
I'd put that past myself. I'd put that past myself, yeah. That can be a Josh and Ben duet. All right.
Josh:
It's got to be Fresh Prince style.
Starr:
Well, since we've obviously reached the climax of our genius ...
Josh:
We've recorded like an hour of this.
Starr:
I know.
Ben:
There's ample stuff to cut in this episode.
Josh:
Yeah, I don't know. This is all gold to me.
Starr:
Ship it. We'll ship it and if anything breaks we can edit it back out.
Josh:
Yep.
Ben:
In production.
Starr:
All right. Well, it's been great talking with y'all. If our loyal listeners would like to review us on Apple podcast, go for it. If you want to write for us, check out our blog, we have a "Write for us" thing in the top part of it if you want to do tutorial type stuff. Yeah, until then, catch you next week, and this has been Founder Quest.