<- Part 1

Travis: From their point of view.

Tybee: From their point of view, ya.

So a character who’s gimmick is that they are super fat, from a joke vault where EVERYONE is massively obese and so, to them, he is skinny as a twig, but out in the wasteland he’s a big fat guy, THIS is the positive, fat representation that Tybee is proud to have brought to her audience who, you know she doesn’t relate to him, but the fans, ‘from their point of view’, can relate to him so much!

Ah, but you see, parts of Tybee’s team pushed back on this fat guy getting a love interest because ‘no one wanted to see that, because ‘Twig isn’t sexy’.’ But Tybee ‘hated that so much’ and pushed back ‘so hard’ because she knows fat people deserve love too.

If Travis is in the corner, ‘reading Playboy for the articles’, Tybee is sitting in front of a class in the inner city, going, ‘Did you know Shakespeare was the gangster rapper of his day?’

Travis, trying to understand why people had an issue with ‘Twig’ getting a love interest asks, “Did people just not believe its even possible for a fat guy to find a love interest or just that they think people wouldn’t want to see that?”

Tybee responds, “Both!”

Both… BOTH!? You genuinely think the push back came from people on your team being so rock stupid they thought it was IMPOSSIBLE for a overweight person to find love? That it was ACTUALLY impossible and not just people being shitty?

These two act like god damn space aliens sometimes…

Travis describes the end result as, “Really good and doesn’t feel forced at all!”

And Tybee, after basking in the adoration for a bit, pivots her own argument from, ‘people didn’t think the audience would like AND some people could not comprehend a fat person finding love’ to, ‘actually the company was falling apart, everyone hated everyone else and the push back came from person A rejecting the idea just cus person B was for it.’

Which, tellingly, Tybee JUST got done saying she was the one who was pushing for this to happen, so the push back apparently had more to do with allot of people on the production just really not liking her and disagreeing with her on principle. Which is either a serious self report on just how unlikable she is OR her developing a hell of a victim complex and declaring people only pushed back on the idea because she was in favor of it.

Either way, this show sounds like a fucking nightmare on the back end…

She also apparently declared that another character, ‘Scar’ could NOT have a love interest because then the show would be to cliche.

Which, you know, I’ve not seen this show myself, but if you have a character named ‘Scar’ who it would be ‘cliche’ to give a love interest too, I’m guessing it’s because he’s already the bad boy loner and you named that character ‘Scar’ and your fat guy ‘Twig’ so I’d REALLY not be all that worried about falling into cliches at this point…

Travis then declares that, ‘tropes are fine actually’ because we rely on them for story telling. That he likes to just put things he already likes into his stories and that ‘The Heroes Journey’ is a ‘good trope’ because, and I quote:

Travis: Because I don’t have to think to hard about [my story], because I already know how the Hero’s Journey storyline works.

Don’t worry Travis, I already kinda figured you didn’t put much thought into your stories.

Also ‘The Hero’s Journey’ isn’t a trope, its a (flawed) theory about how all stories, especially mythology, fit into a fixed broad story structure. It’s just treated like a writing guide cus George Lucas used it as a reference for the Star Wars movies and then overstated just how closely his movies matched up to the Hero’s Journey in an interview which lead English teachers the world over to leap at the chance to teach their students about Joseph Campbell by going, “Did you know that the Odyssey AND Star Wars follow the same story structure? It’s true!”

I’m getting REAL distracted, but just… god so many rants, so little time…

Oh, also apparently ALL of this was just to get back to the idea of changing things in adaptations and Tybee’s theory that the problem with basically ALL adaptations is… they change too much and thus they suck. They don’t do enough fan services and her show was good because it did allot of fanserives, I guess.

Apparently the McElroy Brothers and Client all love Final Fantasy, but Travis was DEEPLY offended by The Spirits Within because it ‘didn’t have enough Final Fantasy stuff in it!’

Ah, but Travis feels like movies based on things MUST be made for the fans explicitly and exclusively, BUT they cannot do TOO MUCH fan service or else its pandering, but too little and its a betrayal!

So if you make something based on a show or movie or game or comic, make sure it hits that fine line between too much and too little fan service or else Travis and Tybee will be PISSED! What is that line? Eh, you’ll figure it out, probably…

Travis uses as an example, ‘The King Killer Chronicles’ and how the main character has red hair and its mentioned a number of times, so if the character does NOT have red hair in an adaptation, ‘what the FUCK are you even doing?’ Which just makes me think about all the terrible wigs used to make characters ‘accurate’ and… well I guess we now know who keeps demanding that shit.

Hmm… Travis brings up Harry Potter as another example and declares, “Not everything can make it into an adaptation, but if you had a teacher who was a woman and made them a man, then what are you doing? Do you think the fans won’t notice!? You didn’t swap that for time, you just fucking changed it!”

Tybee: Ya and people will say it doesn’t matter, but it does! It changes the interpersonal relationships within the story! Every peace of it matters!

Travis: And it doesn’t matter if its a minor character with three lines of duologue, the description of that character matters and someone might love that character because their three lines really spoke to them and made them feel scene and they wrote hundreds of books worth of fan-fiction about them! Or that was their avatar on twitter and YOU made them a man or made them have long hair when they where meant to have short hair or made them brunet when they where SUPPOSED to be blond! And sure, maybe that’s just 0.1% of your audience who that effects, but [laughing] that 0.1% of the audience and a following and can tell everyone to not watch your movie! Like, make it for them!

These people… This is one to one just the Ghostbuster fan complaint they had at the start! They are doing the same thing as the people they where complaining about, but hey… at least they are being woke about it. At least its about gender bending a woman to be a man and not say… race bending a white character black… they’d never complain about-

Tybee: And the same thing is happening with the Dark Tower adaption right now, with Idris Elba playing Roland and that WILL effect the story, because as I understand it, he has a relationship with a woman who is black and so him being white is important to the story!

I’m going to walk into the desert, pursued by a gunslinger…

Travis begins explaining that, no, Roland being black isn’t actually going to mess up the story, that Tybee is thinking of the relationship between Eddie and Susannah.

[Cutting a VERY long section talking about Stephen King. As a Mainer and a writer I have many thoughts on him, good and bad and that would double this recap’s length.]

Travis ends off by doing a REAL weird bit where he goes, “I hadn’t thought about it till now, but having your main, awesome, badass gunslinger character ALSO be black? Weeeeeell that is INTERESTING!”

HUGE ‘I’d have voted for Obama a third time!’ Energy.

Tybee, seeming to realize she probably just stepped in it back peddles with, “I’m not saying it will change it for the worse, it might be great! It might add something new and he’s an incredible actor! So I’m sure it will be great! But I do… uh, you know, its just a case where someones color does effect their interpersonal relationships so I wonder… I just know some people will be upset so…”

Travis declares he’s going to hit Tybee with a hard one and then asks:

Travis: Do you think their is a defensible stance for someone to say they don’t like the new Ghostbusters because of the changes they made to the original?

Travis, for the love of… I DON’T AGREE WITH THIS, BUT BY YOUR OWN LOGIC YES! 100%! You genuinely argued changing a characters hair style was indefensible and Tybee threw out that as far as she’s concerned even a progressive change like adding MORE diversity is problematic, how could EITHER of you at this point argue that their is NO reason for someone to be upset about a Ghostbusters remake where all the characters are gender flipped and the plot is reworked from scratch!?

Again, it’s not even about agreeing with that point myself, at this point YOU have constructed a black and white, all or nothing version of this argument where ANY change is too much and now are forced to look at a situation where EVERYTHING is changed and YOU are going to ask if its even remotely possible for someone to be slightly valid in not liking that!?

Tybee: No. Because no one took that movie out of their hands. They still have it.

Travis smugly: Exactly!

I’m so fucking mad I’m animorphing into an alt right grifter! AAAAAAHHHH I AM SO FULL OF FACTS AND LOGIC!!! DEBATE ME!!! DEEEEBATE MEEEEEE!!!

Okay, I’m back.

Travis: That’s a great point Tybee! Because I was starting to feel like a hypocrite! Because of this and that and the things I said, but your right, it’s not like they have an adaptation and its bad, instead, they have a movie and its called-

Both: Ghostbuster!

I can’t be wrong, the person who agrees with everything I say said I’m right!

Travis starts gassing Tybee up for being so smart as they start patting one another on the back and my urge to rampage through Tokyo as a giant monster grows…

Tybee: And I don’t think their is a defensible stance for like, saying, [mokingly] ‘I want my Roland white!’, but I do, I mean, in terms of framing it as like… it changes interpersonal relationships… it’s interesting. But I don’t care, cus I didn’t read the books! But I do wonder how it will make people feel who really love them.

God I hate them so fucking much.

Like you can just stop at, ‘Arguing Roland HAS to be white is dumb and kinda racist’, you don’t then need to follow it up with, ‘UNLESS you frame that dumb and racist take in a way I’d find smart sounding, in which case…’

Travis talks about reading the Dark Tower and finishing it, but getting caught up repeatedly on Wizard and Glass which… ya you know, if Travis was going to get stuck on anything, it would be the book that’s a tragic love story instead of a gun slinging adventure yarn.

And he uses this just to say, “You know… it [Roland being black] didn’t bother me!” In the tone of someone declaring, ‘I actually found this 10k bike ride very refreshing and not tiring at all!’

Travis then expresses, “The one upside to people complaining when you make a black, gay lesbian is that they then cannot complain when you make a white character black!” Which… no? What the fuck does that even mean? Someone complaining about a diverse character is not going to go, ‘dang you got me!’ if you then make a previously white character black… what the fuck are you even talking about!?

I’m losing my fucking mind, I need a break, be back soon…

Tybee, continuing on the Dark Tower talk: I think you have a responsibility, when adapting a book, to change it to match the current social climate and not the social climate the book was released in! And if you leave that out, if you don’t take that into consideration, your making a HUGE mistake and being totally irresponsible!

Okay, whatever. I, again, agree in general with this take, update adaptations as needed to make them feel modern and representative, don’t just use the fact that allot of old books were written by crusty old white Europeans and Americans to refuse to cast people of color or women or queer people, est. But to hear THESE TWO go on for over half an hour about how changing ANYTHING in an adaption is a sin worthy of damnation, but then when that classhes with their self-purported progressive values it’s suddenly like, “Can you imagine someone getting bent out of shape over something as trivial as changing a characters race or gender?”

They are just such massive pricks!

Travis: Okay, I agree with you, except on one thing…

Tybee: Oh ya, I mean I’m just coming up with all of this on the spot!

Travis: Because I feel like your right, but- except under the circumstance where the thing that is happening is..

Jesus Christ, he’s getting so worked up, it sounds like he’s about to cum! Like hes taking quick, short breaths, sounding increasingly tense, but excited and then…

Travis: Is like the impetus, is like… it MEANS something… LIKE FOR EXAMPLE! It means something that someone called someone a F*GOT!

Tybee: No no no! I’m not saying leave THAT out! That’s not what I’m saying! I’m saying, story like what your describing should be left as is. I think we should explore the edges of violence, I don’t think we should pull punches, I don’t think we should pull punches…

TYBEE IN THE FIRST EPISODE OF THE SHOW YOU ADVOCATED THAT EXACT THING! I have the receipts, mother fucker! I HAVE YOUR ASS!

Tybee: I’m saying… Gone Girl didn’t need to be released when it was released.

Travis asks what she meant by that and Tybee immediately walks back her own point by saying Gone Girl discredits Me Too and thus should have been banned.

She then concludes by saying that if you CAN make Roland black and it won’t change the story, you should.

This, as a reminder, all started because she herself brought up making Roland black as an example of a BAD change that should not have been made in adapting The Dark Tower.

Oh here we go, it’s Diversity Hires time!

Travis brings up that it’s ironic because Idris Elba should have been hired as the best person for the job, because in a perfect world everyone would be equally represented and race blind casting would be a thing.

Tybee then equates this to ‘Affirmative Action’ and says, “Some people equate it to equality, it’s not, its a step towards equality. ALLOT of people say it doesn’t work, but I donno, I’m not trying to comment on if it does or doesn’t, I’m just saying in terms of what it’s SUPPOSED to do, it’s not equality, its just the precursor to it.”

Travis: (Sigh) You know, Brent and I were talking about this the other day and I don’t think it made it to air, but we were talking about like… sometimes it can seem like people who are fighting for equality or people who are people who are fighting for ‘blank’ are pushing TOO HARD. Are pushing for MORE then what equality is…

OH BOY! I was so nervous they where going to have the bog standard liberal take on this and just go, ‘ya people who complain about diversity are bad’, but NO! We have Travis declaring that equality HAS GONE TO FAR! Affirmative action and diversity hiring has moved past equality and into reverse racism land! LETS GO CRAZY!

Tybee: Ya.

Good to know you agree Tybee, would hate to leave you out of this…

Travis: And the realization I think the world needs to come to is that if you only push back as hard as they are pushing back it doesn’t move the needle. You need to push the need harder to push the needle back to zero, because we are not at zero yet.

Wait… your saying that we DO need to push harder… because we aren’t actually at equality and thus need to push back to a point of true equality? Fuuuuck are you going to turn out to be reasonable on this?

But then what was the whole, ‘they are pushing too hard and pushing for more then equality’ shit!? Ugh, let’s roll this forward and I’ll report back after they’ve had a chance to clarify their point more.

Okay, OKAY! I see the argument they are making now!

Travis’s argument is that we are CURRENTLY unequal and that we need ‘radical leftists like Bernie Sanders’ and black people playing traditional white roles to help push things back to the middle. AND THEN, once we are in the middle, back to TRUE equality, then he’s going to start pushing back against the left and progressives because THEN they’d be pushing for TOO MUCH diversity and progress! In Travis and Tybee’s ideal world, we would be perfectly centered, with equal pressure from progressives and racists to ensure no one achieves any movement one way or the other.

Travis is only a progressive because, like a true 2eD&D druid, he feels like the balance of the world has been thrown off and he MUST return us to a place of perfect balance between good and evil, law and chaos.

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: The World’s Most Laughable Centrist

Tybee: And here’s the deal, and this will make me really emotional, but I’m going to talk about it anyway… It’s not fair. It’s not fair at all! I recently was up for a- Sorry, I’m going to cry, I was up for like, my dream job! (Actually starts to audible tear up) AND I DIDN’T GET IT! I lost it to A DIVERSITY HIRE! (Voice shaking) And like… that ‘person’, it was a black woman, and I was told by a friend who was a producer, you did EVERYTHING RIGHT! You were perfect in every way! And they NEEDED to hire someone of color… (tiny, breath) And… their is- the intersectional feminist in me is like ‘okay! Okay!’ (actually starts crying) I want to see women of color on screen… (sounding legit bitter as fuck) I want that… BUT IT DOESN’T MEAN I DIDN’T LOSE MY DREAM JOB!

Travis, sounding totally unemotional: Yep.

Tybee: IT’S NOT FAIR! IT’S NOT! BUT… I don’t get to be mad and I don’t get to throw a shit fit! (sniff) And I don’t get to decide now that I don’t like affirmative actions and diversity hires! I either have to be FOR IT AND FUCKING STICK TO IT! Or I’m a coward… and self serving. And I’m not either of those things.

Travis, still sounding detached: I agree.

Tybee: So I will watch that show and I will support that girl and you won’t hear me bitch about it publicly- (realizes in real time she’s bitching about it publicly) I’m talking about it now, NOT bitching about it, but just to say that while people will say its unfair, and it is, imagine all the chances I got because I was white…

Travis: Ya.

Tybee: And like, it came to the big one and I lost… (laughs bitterly) And that SUCKS!

Travis: Ya.

Tybee: But… it’s better… and I’m not saying, aren’t I a saint? For not being upset? I’m FUCKING UPSET! I’m fucking upset!

Travis: But I think it’s very respectable to realize like, you can’t draw a line between how it effects you personally and how it effects the world.

Oh yes, I am very sure that you find it VERY respectable for someone to not understand how to put their own personal feelings behind their understanding that the world is bigger then them, Travis, I bet you find that a VERY admirable quality!

And Tybee continues, talking about how much money she would have made, how much work she’d get, how this was a BIG DEAL for her and how she’s angry and upset and how she earned this and deserves it and it was basically stolen from her, but, you know… it doesn’t matter because if she wants to claim to be an intersectional feminist, she actually has to be one.

Nothing tells me your over something and cool with it and hold no grudges like a tearful rant about how much you hate that thing and have not, nor will ever get over how much you wish it had gone differently.

Travis thinks this was all an excellent point because most people in Tybee’s position would not be as mature as her and look at it and go, “Damn this is a thing that was taken away from me!” Rather then focusing on the fact that it’s about the wider scale issues of inequality.

Travis… your co-host just got done literally crying about how this was taken away from her. Where you actually listening or do you just turn off your brain till your allowed to talk again?

Tybee: I want young girls of color to have people to look up to.

Travis: EXACTLY! Because in a perfect world, we won’t need affirmative action or diversity hires! Cus it won’t be necessary! And I see people go, ‘this is unfair to white people!’ And it’s not, because we need to balance the scales because eventually, when their is equal representation across the board-

Tybee: IT IS UNFAIR!

Travis: Oh, ya it is unfair! If we are talking about, on paper, statistically, sure. But we just need to balance the scales so we can all start operating from a level playing field.

Tybee: The problem is people cannot zoom out… [allot of waffling then] But I CAN zoom out and so you better fucking shine, [because you stole my job], but I support this.

God these two…

So Travis’s goal is basically, ‘make everything equal, that way, we can have a TRUE meritocracy! With no more racism to get in the way of the best of the best rising to the top, unfettered by inequality!”

And Tybee’s point is, ‘I just want everyone to know, diversity hires suck, but we have to put up with them, even though they suck and hurt me personally, but I’m dealing with it, so so can you.’

Travis praises Tybee for being brave and honest and then says he loves her, followed by a sudden pivot to, “ANYWAY THAT’S GONNA DO IT FOR US THIS WEEK!”

Well that wasn’t so bad and I got it down to… 7.9k words!? Ah hell…

Okay, well, sorry for another long one, but I’ll see you next time Travnation!

I am still hoping to eventually do Amnesty, but for now, as long as I can keep this site working, I’ll keep the Interrobang flame alive!

Oh shit last note, while playing the outro Travis hit me with this:

Travis: We are glad you all like listening to us and if their is, heh, some small, tiny subset of people who disagree with everything we say and just hate me and Tybee, well we still appreciate you!

Thanks?

Okay… oh and then they talk about how all their fans (who sent in photos???) are so sexy and so ‘bang-able’.

I’m out, I’m leaving, I might need to start Amnesty next just to wash that out of my mouth! EW EW EW!

“I’m so mad. im gonna have sex with my girl friend so i wont be so mad”

Sonic - Tails Gets Trolled

*Post script edit: I have dyslexia, I don’t have a transcript, spelling mistakes and all that will happen. Also look for my work on furaffinty and Itch.io, I’m Duhad everywhere, yada yada.

That last Interrobang took it out of me and made me pretty hesitant to start up this next episode, but I am not about to let Travis and Tybee beat me down!

This time, from the start, I am going to TRY and keep it a little faster, a little lighter in terms of note taking and quoiting and god willing, this will NOT be so long I nearly have to break it into 3 parts… cus ya that last one was over 8k total words and Reddit did NOT like that…

Luckily, unlike ‘the IRS and Fluid’, I’m sure this new episode should be nice and light with nothing to get hung up about…

From Derailing Conversations to Diversity Hires

… you know, I’ve started playing Mewgenics again recently and I could probably just boot that up and do an act three run instead… oh intro music is playing, I guess we are doing this…

Content warning, Strong Language, ‘References To Homophobic Slurs and Gun Violence’.

References to homophobic slurs? Do you say them or not? Actually, can I say them or will Reddit flag that? Better be safe, I guess…

This weeks nicknames are ‘Travis SUPER GREENS McElroy’ and ‘Tybee GRAPE ESCAPE Diskin’. Tybee cracks up at her own nickname and Travis sings a song about ‘grape escape’ which… seems to be a board game from the early 90’s using play-doh for grape player pieces that you can squash. I actually might have played that in preschool come to think of it…

If your wondering why I got hung up on that, I started the podcast at 3x speed and it genuinely sounded like Tybee was talking about ‘grape’ without the ‘g’ and cracking up at that which threw me off badly enough to go back and re-listen at normal speed.

Travis starts us off by jumping in with a topic he ‘really needs to talk about’ and then prefaces it by explaining that he “needs to remember the people who I’m talking about are also listening to this podcast.” Which… doubt. But also, man are you actually throwing shade at people in your life by complaining about things, ‘some people do’ that annoy you and forgetting they are listening to your show? Because if so, your either an idiot or, based on previous episodes I’ve listen to, forgetting other people are in fact real and capable of acting independent of you when your not watching them.

Alright the thing he was building up to is, ‘derailing conversations’, further evidence that these names are genuinely just the first and last topics they bring up.

Apparently Travis HATES it when someone gets off topic, especially online, like when he walks to talk about ‘if red or blue is better and someone leaves a comment about how their favorite color is yellow.’

Just want to throw in that, while I skip this part, part of the intro to this show, the part RIGHT before this conversation was Tybee talking about how, “This show will just ramble and move from topic to topic till we are done.” So… exactly what your talking about, Travis.

While Travis claims he ‘doesn’t mind’ if the conversation is about ‘best N64 games and he gives you three options and you mention a 4th game instead’ he gets really upset when he brings up something, “politics or religion adjacent” and people “derail the conversation by talking about divisive things like how much they hate liberals or conservatives or catholics and now my name is attached to that thread!”

He apparently believes that people talking about, “if you like this candidate or that candidate” on a thread he started, something that apparently was happening allot at the time of this episode, then it reflects badly on him and he has no way of telling people to shut up and go away because he’s not talking about that.

When was Interrobang being recorded again? 2016? Who was running at that time? Donald Trump? Hmmm… ya can’t imagine why people where fired up about politics at that time, total mystery.

He talks about… cutting people like that out of his life because he’s an adult and… I’ve heard this conversation before… I swear to god, he was talking about this in another episode I covered!

I can’t find it with a quick word search, but I swear to god I’ve heard him make these same arguments before…

And then Tybee starts talking about trans people being put in danger because Caitlyn Jenner came out and because America’s gun culture is so crazy, trans people are now in danger and on Tumbler someone used that post to talk about how they like guns and Tybee got REAL mad about it because they where “hijacking my shit!”

And then the episode broke and I had to work to get it to play again… this archive is not doing so hot. Getting this episode to play in the first place took awhile and now it’s breaking… fingers crossed I can get to the end…

Travis, ‘doesn’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist’, but has the revelation that, “They do this on the news too! They’ll talk about gun violence and then someone will change the topic to mental health issues or someone will bring up trans bathrooms and someone else will change the topic to children's safety!”

Travis, that’s not a conspiracy theory and it’s NOT the same thing as people getting distracted and talking about other topics under your posts, it’s a pretty normal rhetorical tactic for redirecting an argument from something that is harder to defend, ‘mass shootings are fine actually’ to something easier to argue, ‘mental health is a serious concern and allot of people are suffering without adequate services to deal with people in crises’.

This man is like a children's PSA character going, ‘Wait, I’m not being given a job just because you don’t like my beard? But that’s unfair! Your judging me just cus of how I look… oh my god, just like I was judging that black guy based on the way HE looked! Now I realize, being prejudice is wrong!’

Tybee nods along with Travis’s talking about, ‘people changing topics to misdirect a conversation’ by confidently declaring, “That’s gas-lighting!”

No it isn’t you… the fuck is wrong with you!? Changing the topic of a conversation has nothing to do with gas-lighting!

Like I guess you COULD gas-light someone by constantly misdirecting them, but going, ‘I don’t like the idea of trans people using their identified bathrooms because of my concerns around the safety of children’ isn’t gas-lighting. It’s more often then not disingenuous and obfuscating the actual problem you have, being uncomfortable around people your bigoted against, but it’s not gas-lighting!

Aaaaaaaa!

FOCUS!

Travis and Tybee continue this gas-lighting conversation by stating that, ‘if you yes and’ a post by going, ‘I agree with what your saying and also…’ they are fine with it, but if you ignore or misdirect the post by getting onto something else all together, your clearly working with some sort of agenda and trying to manipulate them towards your own ends.

Ah I see, it’s because “people like us with influence and followers” are the target of malicious actors trying to parasite-off their good names to get attention for their own points.

Which again, are both politics and religion AND ALSO which N64 games they like, something Travis keeps going back to despite previously saying he ‘didn’t mind’ if it was a conversation about that… to the point where I feel like someone did derail him talking about an N64 game he enjoyed by talking about one he didn’t and that pissed him off.

Tybee complains about guys accusing her of hating men (which, ya, she’s a woman with opinions online, I 100% believe MANY men have just accuse her of being a ‘man hating feminist’) which leads her to declare, “That’s right! I hate all men!” Which Travis joins in with, “And I hate all women!” Before both of them get cold feet and begin frantically walking back the joke as if afraid people will actually believe them.

Not me, I hate all men AND all women! Only non-binary people are valid! BWA HA HA!

Travis then gets weirdly passionate and angry about, ‘both sides’ of… dads being weird and possessive of their daughters bodies and ALSO men being told that, ‘men often have a hard time expressing their feelings’. And despite insisting BOTH sides of this apparent coin are bad, he gets REAL worked up over, ‘men having a hard time expressing their feelings’ because to him, saying that is, ‘telling men that they CAN’T express themselves!’ That when feminists talk about the difficulties men face with being emotionally honest and vulnerable, they are in fact actively… trying to prevent men from being open by telling them it’s hard???

I guess the idea being that men in our society are actually really good and healthy, but the second someone tells them, ‘Actually, your societally conditioned to hide your true feelings and vulnerabilities’ they just clam up and shut down?

Fuck the episode broke again…

It is REALLY fighting me on this!

Getting a 502 error from the server…

Trying to find an alternative site for the show… nothing.

Okay we are back for now, though this archive is breaking actively so… fingers crossed!

HA! Finally managed to get it to download! Now I at least can finish this without the site constantly breaking!

Downside… I can only turn the speed up to 2x speed rather then 3x. :(

Okay and we return to Travis and Tybee moving from ‘men can’t express themselves’ to the Ghostbusters 2016 reboot with Travis and Tybee confidently declaring, “Kate McKinnon is going to be every bodies crush, across the spectrum!”

Does anyone else remember back when people where convinced that Kate McKinnon was going to be the breakout star of that movie? Like the people who thought the film was good to at least okay all seemed convinced that it was going to be a star making role for McKinnon and that she was clearly going to be the next big thing in comedy movies going forward.

I guess she was fun in her small cameo in the Barbie Movie.

Travis gets annoyed about the fact that people called the Ghostbusters remake trailer, ‘the worst trailer ever’, in part due to its terrible like to dislike ratio, not because he liked it, but because ‘their are other trailers that are worse!’

Ya man, it’s hyperbole.

Ah, he’s back on his ‘I’m not trying to be conspiratorial, but…’ thing as he talks about how, “It’s a bad trailer, but I think it’s possible, you know, the fact it’s an all female Ghostbusters remake might be influencing the like to dislike ratio…”

He is so… ugh.

He follows up by comparing people not liking the trailer to ‘a guy not liking another guy cus he’s black and that is ignoring the wider context around white people and black people not getting along’.

Which… I get what he is TRYING to say, that it’s possible to say something inoffensive, but still have that come off as offensive because of the wider context, but man, really?

This is such a weird fucking argument he’s having with a straw man of a Ghostbuster’s trailer disliker, over a trailer he himself didn’t like, but wants to argue was bad, but not the worst trailer ever because he doesn’t want to come off as sexist around the all female remake of a ghost-busting based action comedy film.

I am… so fucking tired…

The annoying thing is that I DO get what (I think) he’s trying to get at cus I had a similar reaction to the film ‘The Last Jedi’. I personally found it mid as fuck, but the backlash against it was so bad I’ve spent more time defending it as a fine movie then I have spent talking about many movies I genuinely like!

Sometimes the worst people in the world really hate something you dislike and you end up feeling compelled to stick up for it if only just on principle, but he is, as always, going about it in the most unbearable, ‘Just so you know, I agree with both sides, but especially with whichever side will make people like me more!’ Bullshit way!

Tybee concludes by talking about how much she wants the movie to be good, just so that it proves the people who knee jerk hated it on concept alone wrong. Which again… I feel that.

Travis complains the movie, ‘can’t be good because people are already prepared to be unfair to it’ and is surprised when Tybee expresses that, ‘she just wants the movie to be good, as a movie, regardless of what the public thinks.’ Travis apparently forgetting that your opinion of a piece of art can be a personal thing and not an objectively correct/incorrect position based on weather or not the general public has agreed a movie is acceptable to enjoy.

Tybee then explains how she hopes the movie will be a ‘6’ on a scale from Batman vs Superman to Mean Girls.

Hey, I’ll take BvS slander! That’s one of three movies I legit regretted going to the theater over, the other two being Last Jedi and Avatar, specifically seeing it a second time and getting aggressively board by the halfway point.

Travis brings up the idea that expectations around movies can make them better or worse, talking about how he watched Star Wars when he was 7 and his dad told him it was great and thus he had a good time because he was a kid and believed his dad, but:

Travis: If your thirty and you’ve not seen Star Wars, I’m sorry, but you can’t watch it anymore. Because you’ll be going in expecting it to be the best movie ever and hate it because within the first 4 minutes it’s not good enough!

… Travis what the fuck are you talking about!?!?

Plenty of people watch great movies later in their life just fine! My partner watched Jaws for the first time a few weeks ago and while he wasn’t as blown away by it as I was as a tiny child, he ended up thinking it was a good movie, if not one of his all time favorites. And I imagine if I showed him Star Wars, something he has also not seen, he’d probably have a pretty decent time with that as well.

Hell, we are watching ‘The Simpsons’ actively and that’s a show that ANYONE who’s grown up around Millennials or Gen-Xers has probably had run into the ground for them! Our generations treat the golden age of The Simpson's as more or less the best thing ever made and the bases of our entire cultural lexicon and you know what? Even with all of that build up, he STILL thinks the show is pretty funny and has come around to really enjoying it after a little bit of a rocky start with the first couple seasons.

Cus as it turns out, you can still enjoy a thing that is good, even if it’s been hyped up to the point where it’s not going to live up to the highest highs promised by its biggest fans, because most people can understand, ‘Oh… this is a thing that means allot to you, so I’ll take it with a grain of salt when you tell me how amazing this thing is and just judge it for myself.’

Anyway, sorry for the tangent, as cromulent as my points maybe, they are getting off topic and as Travis has made clear, getting side tracked and going off on a tangent is the worst thing a person can do!

Tybee talks about being on a Marvel News podcast and her co-hosts LOVING Peter Parker Spiderman, comparing it to how people identify with and love Harry Potter.

Ah 2016… pretty sure we already knew Rowling was a TERF at that point, but I guess it was still a few years before her big open letter where she went fully mask off.

Travis agrees that people love Peter and Harry because, “They are outsiders no one knows or cares about normally and when they are being themselves no one gives them the time of day, but when they are pretending to be something else, everyone thinks they are the greatest shit in the world! Ya, it’s a very relatable idea!”

Ignoring for a moment that doesn’t really apply to Harry Potter, that is such a weird takeaway from Spiderman. That the fantasy of being Spiderman isn’t having great powers and using them to help people, but that you suck and no one gives a shit about you, but when you put on a mask, everyone loves you and that’s an amazing fantasy that is very relatable.

Also, Spiderman is constantly getting shit on, he has a whole on going thing where the news paper he works for actively demonetizes him, so… no this doesn’t even really work as a Spidy thing! It’s JUST Travis revealing some weird complex he seems to have about only being beloved and paid attention to when he became, ‘Travis McElroy, Podcaster!’

Anyway all of this was so Tybee could complain that she feels robbed because… her friends got the experience of seeing a character they love portrayed on screen (in Captain America: Civil War) in a way they felt did them justice, but she doesn’t get that and wants to have a character she loves and relates to portrayed just as accurately and faithfully… but she doesn’t say which, if any characters she’d want that for so, I guess it’s just the general concept of getting a faithful adaptation of a character she likes that she feels robbed for not getting.

Travis counters that, Tybee at least doesn’t suffer the heart break of having that happen in reverse, where a character she likes and relates to is portrayed badly, like Clark Kent in Man Of Steel, a movie he apparently was badly let down by, along with every other depiction of Clark Kent since ‘Lois and Clark’.

I’m raising an eyebrow at Travis ‘relating to Superman’, but to be fair, Clark is a pretty relatable character when written well…

Wait, ‘Lois and Clark’ came out in 1993, that was BEFORE Superman The Animated Series! He’s talking shit about Tim Daly’s Superman!

Screw off Travis, animated Superman was great!

Grumble grumble…

Anyway Tybee admits she apparently has never actually related to a character in a way where she’s felt all that strongly, positive or negative, about their portrayal, but feels like it’s similar to being a fan of a sports team and being upset when they lose and happy when they win.

Travis talks about how, “If a show or movie has a character you love in it and they get it right, its the best feeling in the world, but if its not done perfectly, if they only get it 99% right, its heart breaking and ruins the whole thing!”

Which… look, I’ll admit, the 2025 Superman movie made me REAL happy as a big fan of Superman, it felt super validating to see more or less my ideal Superman up on the big screen, but I cannot wrap my head around the black and white, ‘make it perfect or don’t bother trying’ mentality here since like, especially with a character who has had SO many interpretations, so many variants, so much history, their is no ‘one true’ version of them and the idea of refusing to accept anything, but perfection in their adaptation is just… sad.

Okay Tybee, after being pressed by Travis comes up with a character she cares about enough to be invested in that an adaption getting them right or wrong would matter to her. Lisbeth Salander from ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”.

Apparently the Swedish version of the movie got the story write, but not the tone where the American version got the tone right, but cut parts of the story, which she’s okay with, because they got Lisbeth Salander more or less perfectly, as far as she’s concerned.

I have not read the books or watched the movies so… sound off if you have opinions, cus I do not.

Travis tries to push Tybee to pick a childhood character, but apparently Tybee didn’t read as a kid and Travis admits his childhood picks would be Han Solo and Data from Startrek so they already started as on screen characters, rather then people he had to imagine.

Ah he eventually lands on, “Xanth” as a series he read as a kid, which apparently included a book called ‘The Color of Her Panties’ and spent allot of time focused on describing centaur tits, something Travis is quick to assure us he does not stand for now, but you know, as a kid he thought the series was great and inspired him… BECAUSE OF THE MAGIC SYSTEM! Not the titties! Oh and because the lead character was an outsider who didn’t have talent and felt like a loner who no one understood, something he found really relatable and profound… and people who just focus on the tits and the panties and the adolescent horniness miss the really deep aspects of this story he liked as a kid.

Real quick pivot here from, ‘Look I was a kid, it’s a little embarrassing, but it had elements I liked and you know, at that age your gonna be a little cringe’ to ‘Actually it was good and people focusing on the problematic aspects are missing what I was seeing as a young man, which was the deep and meaningful elements of the story! Panties and titties!? Why I hardly even noticed them!’

This man would unironically try and tell you he only reads Playboy for the articles and only jerks it to keep his hands busy as he thinks about the personalities and rich inner worlds of the naked women he’s staring at.

Anyway he starts complaining about the Dresden Files show, how they changed the name of the Wizard PI’s cop buddy from Karrin Murphy to Connie Murphy and that really upset him. They gave her a daughter, they changed her hair color and Travis is genuinely angry they would change all these details when the show should be for the fans, with Tybee chiming in that the show ‘betrayed’ the fans with these alterations.

I’m sure this is all very annoying to fans of the show, but man these two come off as exactly the kinda, “THEY CHANGED IT AND NOW IT’S RUINED!” Fans they just got done complaining about with the Ghostbusters movie.

Tybee starts talking about her show, ‘Nuka Break’ which would be the Fallout Fan show she talked about in the last episode I recapped, the one where she got weirdly competitive and hostile with other fan projects, treating them as competitors to beat and undermine, rather then fellow creators to lift up.

Well apparently the show features a love story involving a character called ‘Twig’ who’s gimmick is that they are fat. The vault they grew up in had tons of food and everyone in it was REALLY fat and called this guy ‘Twig’ cus he was comparatively skinny, but out in the wasteland he’s SUPER fat and that’s… very funny to Tybee, I guess?

Ah it’s also:

Tybee: [This character is] Very wonderful because it gave our audience someone relatable they could attach themselves too. Someone who looked like them and who they could see themselves in.

Part 2 ->

<- Part 1

Travis then adds his own ‘hard truth’ story where he and three other kids had to do a scene together and his teacher harshly, but fairly told them one of the kids wasn’t talented and that Travis and one of the other kids where REALLY GOOD, but not trying hard enough because their natural talent was great enough that they where not putting in the effort that they should.

And then everyone clapped!

Oh god continuing that:

Travis as the teacher: You did good, but I know you didn’t give it your 100% best, because its hard, but I know when you DO give your 100%, its scary! But even at 75%, your really good and its easier to not challenge yourself to give it your all.

Travis: And that was really harsh, but she was smiling and pleasant, but it was devastating because she pulled open my soul and looked at the core of me and saw my greatest fear was looking stupid.

I thought your greatest fear was killing a man?

Also really now? The hardest, most brutal thing anyone has ever said to you was that your SO GOOD that you don’t need to put 100% effort in, but you can and should because you have so much more to give?

Fuck off…

He then ‘humbly’ admits he can’t be a truly great actor because he’s to afraid of failure to be as great as he could be. That when it comes to comedy, he kills it and is so funny and so talented and just does AMAZING on My Brother My Brother And Me, but tragically will never be a great dramatic actor because he’s simply not able to flex his god given talent as hard as he could.

Ah, apparently he’s just… not an actor, because he’s NATURALLY charismatic and funny, so he’s more of an entertainer because he’s just being himself and that’s where he’s able to just easily and effortlessly be the funniest person in the room.

The sea calls to me…

Oh and after talking about how they cannot and WILL not shout out their friends and their work, they start talking about Tybee’s friend who does impressions and Travis talks about his friendship with Brentalfloss where he was their with him at the start of his careerer and how making money off the internet is perfect for them as it just lets them be themselves.

This leads to them both patting themselves on the back because, “Getting famous online is not a get rich quick scheme, you have to be REALLY good at it and really work your butt off to EARN the fame and money we make!”

OOOOH HI! Okay here we go!

Travis: Its also hard, because we don’t live in a meritocracy. Their are great actors and musicians and entertainers who are unable to make it big because UNLIKE IN LAW OR BUSINESS, you can’t just follow a clear path! You can’t just work hard and ask your boss what you need to do to become partner or the CEO.

So Travis identifies we are NOT in a meritocracy, BUT not generally, just in the creative arts because UNLIKE in business and law, which ARE meritocracies where the best and brightest will work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps till they make it to partner or the position of CEO, you need to be talented and lucky and work your ass off to make it doing what he and Tybee do.

Amazing seeing a man boast about being lucky and talented and hard working, all while he has a boot halfway down his throat.

A bunch of yapping about bands and one hit wonders follow, about how amazing musicians get lucky once and then vanish, even though they had so much talent and… look unless we are talking rock or 90-00’s NYC hiphop, I’m pretty much lost on music talk so if they are saying some dumb shit about the bands they mention I wouldn’t know.

Tybee complains that she gave up on music because she was in a band and hated relying on other people and feeling like her career could be ruined by someone else in the band not doing their part. Which Travis agrees, saying that, “If someone just has a bad day or slept bad last night it could reflect badly on you!”

Which… setting aside how much of an asshole these two are, Travis your WHOLE THING is doing a show with your family! Your NOT a solo act!

Travis begins a very long analogy which I’ll just try and sum up rather then write out in full.

Travis (Paraphrased): If you want to get into acting or the arts, you should think of it like being a professional poker player. You play with your friends and you practice alone, but you go in assuming you’ll lose allot of money and win allot of money and it’s not about getting lucky on your first hand, but just gambling over and over till you come out on top. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon got big with Goodwill Hunting, but that happened after years of doing commercials so you need to just do little things like that until you hit it big.

OH MY GOD THAT THEN PIVOTS INTO TRAVIS TALKING ABOUT FUCKING ENTOURAGE AGAIN!?!?

He loves it and has seen every episode, including the movie because:

Travis: […] it contains a haunting truth in this otherwise fluffy, gross, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic thing. And that is that throughout, if you watch every episode in order, his life is never good. His career is never solid, he’s always in danger of becoming unknown, he makes terrible career choices and everyone in his life convinces him to make terrible career choices and he’s barely getting work and he- they have to like, find the guy making the thing and convince him to put Vince [the protagonist] in a movie and he mishandles his career throughout. And because its a TV show, everything swings out his way and he always makes it out. But even though *EVERYTHING IN HIS LIFE IS GOOD* his career is a shitty career in the show! And on some level, I think that’s really realistic because, he refuses to do a commercial when he’s bankrupt and about to lose his house! And a real actor, a real adult in that situation would be like, “Yes I have bills to pay.” So it’s like, ‘what if you where beloved, but where terrible at your job?’ And that’s what Entourage is.

So…

Sigh…

So Entourage is realistic and has this core element of truth to it because the main character suffers from being bad at his job… aside from the fact that he always ends up okay and has an amazing life and everything works out, BUT IN REALITY a real actor would probably be better at his job…

Oh and Travis doesn’t mention this part, but famously one of the complaints about Entourage is that while Vince’s agent Ari Gold and best friend E are constantly bending over backwards trying to save Vince’s career, Vince himself constantly talks about how he doesn’t care about being an actor or having a big mansion and is happy to lose it all and go back to living his old life.

So like, their are no stakes ever because even the protagonist doesn’t give a shit if he loses everything and so him not caring and being bad at his job is a non issue for everyone, but his entourage.

Ah, but to Travis, the idea of losing his career and ‘being beloved, but bad at his job’ is a terrifying and all to real reality!

I mean… he’s got moments of self-awareness, I’ll give him that.

Travis: This is a job for me! If I don’t podcast, I get evicted and I don’t eat! I work 6-8 hours a day, 6 days a week!

REALLY NOW? REALLY NOW TRAVIS!? I know you do allot of shows, but more or less a full work day 6 days a week!? HOW!? You don’t do research, you don’t heavily edit these episodes, what the fuck are you actually doing all day, assuming your not just lying?

EXPLODING WITH RAGE AT THIS NEXT PART!

Travis: And this is something I hate about our generation and the generations that come after us! They just want to bounce around until they find a thing they like. But sometimes the thing you like isn’t the thing you get paid for and that’s fine! My dad worked in radio and he loved it, but he also was in movies and wrote comic books and other things that made him happy, but only after he did the thing that put a roof over our heads and put clothes on three kids and a wife! […] And that’s life, not every life has to be royalty. For me, when I found success, it was by being famous. And I used to feel guilty about that, but then I realized I have used being famous to help people and platform positivity and that makes me a great entertainer! But now I want to focus on a smaller scale of entertaining my family and my wife and I’d much rather have 10 people I care about like what I do then 10 million people I don’t give two shits about like what I make.

GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU BOOMER ASSHOLE!

‘Oh the kids today don’t understand the value of working a job to provide for your family. Unlike me, who got famous and now I only want to do things that benefit me and the people I care about because it’s more important for me to do what I love for the people I love them to try and be a successful entertainer to the masses!’

You spent the first half of the podcast talking about how you can’t afford to promote your friends because it might take away from the success you need to live, then you talk about how the kids today need to eat shit and be grateful and then ended off by talking about how you don’t care about being liked or successful as long as your happy and entertaining your friends and immediate family!?

Hey Travis, I’m pissed as fuck right now, by yours and Tybee’s logic, you two ought to SHUT THE FUCK UP and try and make me happy because it would be wrong to prevent me from venting about how much you suck!

GAAAAH!

DEEP BREATHS!

Tybee talks about not wanting to get plastic surgery done because, ‘I want people to love me for me, if millions of people are like, that’s a great nose, it doesn’t matter if its not my real nose.’ And how she, ‘see’s success as making allot of money, while being happy, doing something good in the world and having a dog and a family.’

What an original take. Happiness, money, family and the generic idea of ‘doing good’? I don’t think ANYONE else would imagine success like that!

Travis thinks that people who don’t try to change you are the people who really love you. That he loves Teresa because she ‘never nags’ him or ‘tries to get [him] to be a better person’, but just by being with her, he’s become a better person by example.

Ya, I bet you love that she never confronts or criticizes you, but just passively tries to make you act better by silent example you fucking asshole…

Apparently if someone tries to teach you or tries to make you better, its an unhealthy friendship and as we know from the first half, if a friendship isn’t healthy, that person is ACTUALLY your enemy!

Tybee calls out the fan Facebook group for being ‘awesome’ because the people their, ‘share stories, cry on each others shoulders, support one another and PROMOTE EACH OTHERS STUFF’!

Tybee, I might be MORE angry at Travis right now, but you suck so much as well! Even your fans, who you acknowledge are good for this, are promoting and lifting one another up! I hope to god NONE OF THEM learn anything from you two!

Oh and she brings this up to say that she is MAD at the fans because they have described this show as, ‘the hosts talking about things they don’t like and trying to change actions they think are bad’ which Tybee LOATHES! Because they would never try and change anyone's actions… but then she realized, it’s okay, because what they are actually doing is sharing how they CANNOT control over peoples actions and so she is simply… enlightened and above it all.

Travis: I know of myself, I can be very manipulative and I TRY not to do it on the show… but control is such a broad term. Do you mean controlling people like a teacher or like a dictator or like a guide or someone driving a truck?

Tybee: Right, we are more like leaders. I try and set an ex sample and express both my successes and failures on this show.

I can’t… I just can’t…

Tybee talks about trying not to be to manipulative when getting people to do what she wants and Travis jumps in with, “I actually think its fine to be manipulative.”

He is apparently ‘really good at reading people and knowing what to say to get them to do what he wants’ and he just ‘recognizes he’s doing it’ which makes it better then people who do it unconsciously since he doesn’t try and steal from people or get them to do ‘bad actions’.

If Travis had The Purple Man’s powers from Jessica Jones, he’d be irredeemably evil, that’s all I’m going to say.

Tybee: I’m okay living in a universe where altruism does not exist. I’m comfortable with that! If people say, ‘oh your only doing that for yourself’, and I’m like, who cares? If I do something to help someone else only because it makes me happy and for the attention what does it matter? And its not like I think ALL instances of it are like that, but who gives a shit?

Travis: What kind of standard are we holding people too?

They really are the most selfish people on Earth. They will do nice things, but ONLY if it makes them feel good and helps make them more famous and get upset at the idea that anyone else would be doing it for any other reason or that people might question their motives since… why do anything good ever if your not going to be rewarded?

Tybee apparently hates that she saved a persons life, but when she talks about it, she feels self conscious about it and wishes she could just brag about it without any guilt.

Travis, unsurprisingly, says he just brags all the time and doesn’t care.

They then start ‘shushing’ and condescendingly talking down to the hypothetical listener who might question why they do nice things or ask their motivations or just hold them to any sort of standard because, ‘the adults are talking’ and they understand no one does anything without wanting to get something out of it for themselves.

I am going to put my head through my monitor!

Travis validates my comments about him coming off like someone trying to run for office by declaring, “I want to be a leader! I would be really good at it! I know just what to say to get people to like me!”

THAT’S NOT WHAT A LEADER IS TO DULL FUCK! That’s how you get elected, but that has nothing to do with how you actually lead people!

Tybee meanwhile ‘is the opposite’ in that she likes being unliked.

GOOD! FUCK YOU! I HATE YOU!

Travis claims Tybee is way nicer then him because, while he’s build this public face, which is real! He’s totally as nice as his public image, Tybee is more nice IRL, I guess?

Travis: This is why I’d be a good leader, I want to do good! I am not a villain, I’m a real life super hero! I’m like Booster Gold!

Get his name out of your fucking mouth, Travis!

Travis: I want people to like me, I want to do good things. I want people to talk about me the way they talk about Abraham Lincoln and JFK and Barack Obama!

I… fine, you know what? I’ll talk about you like the guy who helped make ICE what it is today and drone struck the fuck out of the Middle East, that’s fine, I can do that for you big man.

Travis: That’s what I’m saying! When I see someone who is the president or a rock star or a king, I think, that could be me! And I’d use it for good! Because I don’t think their is any such thing as altruism!

Tybee: It’s not a real thing.

Travis: But the BEST people recognize that, but still do good things! The worst people are people who THINK altruism is real and convince themselves they are doing good without personally benefiting from it. Cus its best not to lie to yourself and do good things for the right reasons AND get something out of it!

So you know, anyone who’s selflessly done things to benefit others is a piece of shit, but billionaires who enrich themselves off charities that are more about funneling money back to themselves and dodge paying taxes, THEY are the biggest heroes of all…

Oh hey, that’s ALMOST like we are back on the subject of the IRS! It’s ALMOST like this episode wasn’t a fucking lie!

Travis: I’m a good person, because I make people happy and do nice things, because it makes me happy! And in an alternate universe, in a mirror world episode of Interrobang, I’d be a dictator of a small country or I’d be the CEO of a major company and break people down with brutal honesty, but instead I do things that make them happy!

Declaring that the only thing stopping you from being a heartless CEO or a dictator is that you personally get more satisfaction out of making people smile is not the charming flex you think it is.

Travis brags that he’s so multifaceted he can watch football AND boxing AND do Shakespeare AND do D&D!

Let me tell you a little bit about my eldest brother (younger then me, but the oldest of my three younger siblings.)

He was an all state quarterback, he now works as a photographer, shooting wildfires and major disasters. He LOVES Lord of the Rings and growing up he was in all my RPG games while getting overwhelmingly excited about getting to be a fantasy adventurer, while also being a body building jock. He was also on the honor roll because, like me he has always been a neurotic over-worker who dedicates way, WAY to much time to the things that he hyper fixates on, in his case, that being sports and school work.

This is because its really not that weird being both a ‘jock’ and a ‘nerd’. These two things are not impossible opposites that someone has to be a truly unique special snowflake to somehow ride the line between.

Travis seems to view the world through the lens of high school and more over, the lens of high school as depicted in movies and TV shows. And so anything that wouldn’t fit neatly into a High School Musical characters bio is basically a unicorn as far as he’s concerned.

And all of this is just to say… having a man like that tell me that ‘altruism isn’t real and anyone who thinks people do anything for any reason besides personal gain is a naive child in need of a lecture from him and Tybee about how the world actually works’ is not only insulting, but fighting words!

Travis, talking about all his various facets and how he’s ‘cut away’ parts of himself as time has gone on: Back in college, I was- Not that I ever was a misogynist, but I could have had that conversation if that’s what it took to have that conversation back then! But I don’t do that anymore, I’ve cut away the bad shit!

God he’s so exhausting…

Dude just say you used to be misogynistic! You don’t have to play this game about how you NEVER were, but ‘could have that conversation’ all while framing it like you just had this part of yourself you pruned off on your own because no one is ever allowed to influence you!

I used to be massively misogynistic! I STILL can be misogynistic, racist, homophobic and ablest, because I grew up in Maine in the 90’s and its taken decades to unlearn the many, MANY bad lessons I grew up passively taking in! Their is no shame in being a flawed person, but you need to be able to admit your wrong before you can learn to be right.

And again, to be told by someone who claims that ‘it’s bad to think you can do something for others selflessly, because your lying to yourself if you think anything you ever do isn’t rooted in selfishness’, going, ‘I’ve never been misogynistic, but I used to be able to at least intellectually have that conversation without, myself being problematic, before cutting that away because it was a bad part of myself!’ Is so… god he’s just unbearable!

Okay and we reach ‘fluid’ right here, in the last 4 minutes.

I swear these fucking titles are literally just the first and last things they talk about that neatly fit into a title…

Anyway ‘fluid’ turns out to be about how Tybee is, you’ll never believe this, a fluid person who can be many things to many different people and isn’t simply one solid thing at all times.

Fucking riveting.

Travis then says, “Their are two ways to be fluid. To constantly be able to change OR to develop so many sides that eventually you just have so many different sides to show people, but eventually someone can turn you around and see all of your sides.”

So… being multi faceted. Like basically EVERYONE IS!

God he is so fundamentally incurious that he seems to genuinely think he and Tybee are unique people in that they are not cardboard cut outs, like he undoubtedly sees the rest of humanity as…

And that’s the end. Next time they are doing a ‘gang bang’ with fan mail.

AND IT’S OVER!

Jesus I need to find a way of cutting these things down, this is WAY to much!

I also have been thinking about doing a recap of all of Amnesty after doing more of Interrobang, but I also might just start doing that alongside episodes of this because if I keep mainlining interrobang, I’ll probably end up just writing, “All Work And No Play Makes April A Dull Girl” over and over for 20k words within a few more episodes.

But weather the next thing I write for here is Amnesty 1 or another Interrobang, more Interrobang WILL be coming!

Till then though, take care of yourselves Trev-Nation!

OH ACTUALLY ONE MORE THING…

Just out of spite for Travis and Tybee, allow me to quickly say:

Go read u/weedshrek's incredible Graduation recaps, they are the highlight of my weeks!

Go read u/KPopMyHoleBod's delightful recaps of Shmanners, they inspired me to write these recaps in the first place!

Go read u/ginEpigs's Shmonday Morning Quarterback series, I’ve not been following it as closely, but it seems really good and they are doing gods work!

And go watch Hunter The Parenting, it’s just a really good show on youtube!

Support creators you like, support friends who ask you for help and if you feel the urge to help someone, don’t try and find an angle to benefit from it, just be nice for fuck sake!

Peace!

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!”

Howard Beale - Network

I’m struggling friends.

Not to do these recaps, they are rather fun! And it’s not about finding good material, god knows the episode list is a gold mine, but that’s the trouble! Their are SO MANY HITS HERE!

Do I recap old timey racism? Or the episode where Travis talks at length about his childs birth? Or the one that apparently includes a content warning about how the episode was recorded before Travis learned about Milo Yiannopoulos being a predator which… you know, what the hell was Travis talking about Milo that he had to cover his ass by retroactively letting folks know he’s a creep?

The well is DEEP and a few times now I’ve picked an episode, found a funny hate related quote to slap at the top of it, but then went, “Wait… but what if I do THAT one instead?”

In the end, I decided to just settle on this one because I’m curious if it will help definitively prove Weedsherk’s hypothesis that Travis’s is a closet libertarian.

If not, well… I am also curious about fluids.

Oh and as always, dyslexic, no transcript, read my other work on itch.io and furaffinity, I’m Duhad everywhere… and this episode, I’m at least starting the recap for drunk at 1am.

It’s been a weird day.

From IRS Frustration to Fluid

Content warning this time is just ‘strong language’ again, but after last episode, I’m not letting my guard down. Apparently in Travis’s head ‘strong language’ ranges from ‘fuck’ to hate speech so who even knows.

Travis this week is ‘can you just be whelmed?’ McElroy and Tybee is ‘the ghost of Christmas yet to come’. Both of which are kinda lame since… ya ‘whelmed’ is a word and ‘the ghost of Christmas yet to come’ is literally just ‘the ghost of Christmas future’, so zero points for your quirky nick names this week.

Travis follows Tybee’s intro with, “That’s a good question, can you just be whelmed?” Which, again, yes you can and also god damn dude, your just going to brush past your co-host so you can pat yourself on the back for how good your shitty nick name for the week is? Incredible start to the show.

I guess I’m also feeling bitchy tonight so… this’ll be fun.

OH! Travis is right in on the IRS! He starts by introducing the show as being about, ‘starting on a subject and meandering through various topics that annoy us, you and everyone else in the world’ before instantly jumping to, ‘So I owe the IRS money.’

I was a little worried this might be one of those times where one part of the title is saved for the last 5 minutes of the show and gets no attention, but it seems we’ve struck a nerve when it comes to the subject of taxes!

He starts by explaining that he doesn’t hate paying taxes, that he owes the IRS money and thus, it’s fine to pay them, BUT he’s annoyed by the run around he gets when trying to call them to actually set up a payment plan. Apparently after getting in touch with an IRS agent, they where unable to have him email them the information they needed and so required him to fax or mail it to them instead. Something both hosts are flabbergasted by the idea of.

Travis went on twitter to complain and was given back the response by others that, “The IRS is underfunded. They are wildly over hated by people and have a difficult job to do.” Which Travis response with:

Travis: They aren’t wrong, but that doesn’t change that I’m annoyed with them. So I don’t want to complain about the IRS, I want to complain about people telling me why I logically should not be upset by something!

Tybee: Oh that’s my most hated thing on the planet!

FUCK! FUCK YOU TRAVIS YOU SON OF A BITCH! You baited me into recapping this episode with the promise of a libertarian rant about the evils of taxation and then switched it out for a complaint about how other people don’t let you complain enough!?

Aaaah oh I am annoyed!

They complain about how annoying it is to have someone you want to vent to try to talk you down from your position, which sure is frustrating, but like, come on man. This is the 21st hour long show in your series ALL ABOUT COMPLAINING uninterrupted and you have the gall to say the worst thing in the world is that you can’t complain enough?

This is like Larry David unironically saying his biggest issue in life is not being able to speak his mind.

Tybee throws in her two cents which is that, ‘no one understands how to deal with being vented too’ which is apparently to nod and say nothing, because she just wants to get things off her chest without actually talking about it.

Which, look, sometimes that really is needed and good, but if you think your friend is a bad listener because they are trying to problem solve and talk back when you vent to them and this happens enough that its your biggest frustration, chances are your kinda a shitty friend. No one wants to be friends with someone who just treats them as a human sounding board and never wants to actually talk to them, only at them.

Anyway, Tybee suggest that she and Travis are ‘such good friends’ because both of them understand that when someone vents at you, you should just let them.

Which, honestly, if the bases of their friendship is that both of them are just delighted to have a buddy they can talk at who never meaningfully response to them, just lets them talk while they wait for their own turn to do the same, that… would explain allot, actually.

Travis: If their was one tiny kernel at the heart of this show that I wish people would take away, from this episode if not the whole show all together it’s that their is such a specific difference between frustration and anger. Frustration and violence. Frustration and- frustration is this specific thing where it is like this stagnated emotion. It’s not that I feel anger. If I had anywhere to direct this feeling to or any solution to this problem that’s out their I wouldn’t feel frustrated… frustration is like, I ran into a road block and I don’t know what to do, but say out loud, what the fuck! And have people go, ‘I know, right?’ Like that’s it! And frustration has made people look for solutions, it’s made people come together and say they are all sick of a thing and so they come together to find a solution, so frustration is a useful tool!

Okay… long ramble their, but given its apparently ‘the core of the whole show’ I felt it was worth trying to transcribe in more or less full.

So the KEY to understanding Interrobang, the lesson Travis wants to get across in this and ALL episodes of the show is as follows:

1. Frustration isn’t the same thing as anger or violence.
2. Frustration is about being angry at something that has no clear solution and wanting people to just agree, ‘ya that sucks’ without trying to find a solution for you.
3. Frustration is good, because it inspires people to get together and find a solution to the thing that was frustrating them.

Travis might just be an idiot.

Oh hey and Tybee throws in her own red flag! She apparently HATES when people ‘try to shut down [her] anger.’ And that when someone tries to calm her down or tell her she’s getting to upset at something, she, in her own words, ‘goes through the fucking roof!’ Because SHE would never tell anyone else they are getting to angry and so no one should tell her that.

She then goes on to say, “If someone gets mad at me, I don’t tell them to calm down, I just say, okay, lets try and fix this and change my behavior, I change my voice, I change my tone, I try and work through it with them because I HATE being told to calm down! But it keeps happening to me!”

Tybee… what the fuck!?

Look, women getting told to calm down and not express their genuine emotions is a real issue, this is true, but the solution is not, “If someone is pissed, just do whatever they want and in turn, assume they’ll let YOU do whatever YOU want when you get angry!”

As someone who used to have MAJOR anger issues, it is frankly upsetting to hear these assholes going, “The issue with people getting unreasonably upset is that other people try and get them to calm down instead of just bowing down and trying to placate them! And if they don’t like it, just get even more mad and then you can be the one who tells everyone what to do!”

Tybee ends off by saying that she blew up on someone who ‘cares about me and was just frustrated at me’ who tried to tell her, ‘your not yourself when your this angry’ and that ‘the next time someone tells me to calm down, I’m going to pop their fucking head off!’ While Travis keeps trying to jump in to agree that he’s ‘a diamond with so many facets he’s impossible to understand’.

Travis finally takes over the conversation again by declaring that:

Travis: This was something I had to learn when Teresa and I started dating she would get frustrated by something and I’d be like we can like fix this and we can figure this out. And she would say, my emotions are valid and its not just about facts and shit I’m also like my emotions are valid and I’m allowed to feel however the fuck I want too! And I was like, oh ya ya ya that’s right! That’s true. That’s an excellent point. Feel that way for five minutes, fifteen minutes, half hour, hour, however long you have to, then when your done expending that emotion, we can work on solutions.

Tybee: Yaaaaa… their is a chemical dump that’s happening! And I don’t want to clean it up!

I shutter at the thought that even one of these two has a child.

Oh then ‘zen master Travis’ talks about how when he was learning to ‘do zen’ he had to learn about understanding his feelings and that, ‘It’s not about mastering your emotions, its about understanding your feeling a way and just accepting that and letting it go.’

Travis, I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure if your version of zen is, based on everything you’ve said till now, just ‘rant and vent and let yourself just embrace your unfiltered emotions so you can eventually let them go after you stop feeling them’, that’s not actually zen.

Travis ends this little zen talk by saying that, after learning these techniques that he realized that if he has a friend who stresses him out and he feels obligated to be around, that friend is toxic and he just cuts them out of his life.

If Travis’s friends followed this advice, he’d be alone in the world.

Tybee calls this ‘a cute analogy’ and Travis gets weird by declaring, “If someone is a bad friend like that, they are actually your enemy.” And Tybee agrees and declares:

Tybee: That’s why I’m no longer friends with my old best friend. I felt like, its toxic, but bros before hoes and that was the thing with her. If your in public, you defend your friend no matter what and then privately talk to them later if they are in the wrong and I did that for her, but she didn’t do that for me. She prioritized her boyfriend over me and so I didn’t have a big fight with her, but I did just stop talking too her.

She quickly adds that she HATES ghosting people, that it’s the worst thing in the world to her and its awful… but also her friend wasn’t worth it since apparently she just ‘didn’t think like that’ and so it wasn’t worth talking to her about it, just cut her off without a word. Because, “She didn’t feel the way I felt about her so we don’t even need to have that conversation. She acted in a way that implied I’m not as important to her as she is to me, so I’m out!”

Travis throws in that, ‘most of the time its worth trying to salvage a friendship like that, but if you don’t like hanging out with them, then just don’t bother.’

GOD THEY ARE THE WORST!

Like, look, if you are in a toxic friendship, obviously get out of it, it’s not worth it, but good lord! Even from their own perspective, from a one sided version of the story where they can make themselves sound as good as possible, it still boils down to, “Eh… I just wasn’t feeling it, so this friend I had since college I just one day stopped talking to and never gave an explanation too as to why because I felt like it probably wouldn’t have been worth the effort.”

I’m so… tired. It’s 3am and I’m less then 20 minutes in.

Time for some skimming before hitting the the 30 minute point where I can put this aside and pick it up again tomorrow when I’m sober and better rested.

Tybee talks about her first best friend in pre-school who she loved because, “She was shy so she just let me steer her around and make all the decisions for her and she liked it, because she didn’t have to make any choices for herself.”

Then years later, they met up again when they where 16 and this kid had become a punk rock girl and now they are even BETTER friends because she’s so cool.

Travis talks about being insecure and screaming at other kids for ‘not being his real friends’ who where not actually doing anything wrong. This, he contrasts with how, “I’m now a really confident adult! I used to seek out the alpha male of a group- I MEAN THE ALPHA PERSON OF THE GROUP!”

Nice catch…

Anyway he’d seek out the ‘alpha PERSON of a group so he wouldn’t have to make any choices or decisions on his own and could be ‘just the fun one’. But NOW thanks to either being older, being married or being on shows, he wants to be in charge of EVERYTHING and thus he could never hang out with his old friends because they would challenge him for his position as leader and be to alpha to be able to hang with him.

I picked this episode cus I wanted to know Travis’s thoughts on road maintenance, why am I instead learning about his position within the alpha-beta-sigma-bullshit system???

As we approach my exit point for the night, Tybee swoops in one more time to start talking about, ‘promoting friends projects’.

She doesn’t believe in it.

If she doesn’t know its going to be good, she’s not going to help promote something a friend is making or use the following she’s accrued to help anyone else because it’s her fanbase, she earned it and no one else, friend or not, is owed her good word.

Apparently one of her friends partners sent her a message basically asking for support that was clearly a copy-paste thing since she was sending it to allot of people and Tybee decided to put that friend on blast by publicly posting on her facebook about how annoying she found that kinda thing. Going as far as to call her disingenuous and that claiming, ‘I know you don’t give a shit about what I’m working on so don’t pretend like you do and don’t fake like you like me to get me to share your thing, that sucks!’

Unsurprisingly, she got blocked.

Oh, sorry, I meant VERY surprisingly and unreasonably Tybee was blocked!

A year later, this person saw Tybee IRL, said “Hi” and Tybee called her a bitch and told her not to talk to her ever again.

Travis, presenting his own pearls of wisdom declares the following:

Travis: In general, here is a good lesson for people who want their friends to help promote their things. First, the internet is not full of people seeking out- NO ONE on the internet is going, “I don’t know where content is, I hope someone will tell me.” If anything, their is already to much content on the internet. Their for, what I have found is that MY fanbase is only interested in something if I am in it. If I am not directly involved in it, their interest decreases. If I am a host it starts up here at an 8. If its a FULL McElroy cast, its a 10, if its just me, its an 8. If I’m a guest on it, its like a 5. If its a friend of mine it’s a 2 and if its just something I have no involvement in and someone just asked me to help promote it people are NOT coming to me as a taste maker to see what things I support. So if I pushed and supported everything…

Tybee: You’d dilute your own pull.

Fuck both of you.

1. You both advertise, you directly use your recommendations to try and sell things to people and you have, in the episodes I’ve watched of this very show, talked about and recommended other shows like The Flophouse, Rose Buddies and Bunker Buddies.
2. You ask your fans to ‘spread the word’ about this show at the end of every episode. What the fuck do you think that is besides your fans telling their own friends and followers to watch you? Do they not count because they are not as famous as you? Why am I asking that, of coarse that’s the reason…
3. Just go fuck yourselves! Both of you, seriously, your so self absorbed you won’t even help spread the word when the people you care about make a thing? You are so selfish and self centered you wouldn’t even post the equivalent of an online flier because the risk it might ‘dilute your own brand’ is to high to lift a finger to help a friend? You both suck so god damn much it makes me sick!

Hitting play, first thing that Travis says after Tybee’s mentioning of, ‘diluting your own pull’ is:

Travis: AND I NEED THEM TO SUPPORT MY STUFF!

Tybee: Ya!

Travis: Right and, I’m sorry, but its not selfish to say I build a fanbase to support the things I MAKE for the sake of supporting the things I MAKE! Because that’s how I make a living!

Ya and god knows if you helped others you’d be laying in a gutter within a week.

Prick.

Last thing before I pack it in, Tybee talks about doing a Fallout fan show and getting requests by other community members to help promote other fan things and says:

Tybee: Why would I direct someone to our competition? I’m not even making money off it, but as a business person, why would I do that?

Travis: I need the eyeballs.

Tybee: What would I get out of that?

Travis: Why would I say, ‘look over their?’ Why would I delude it like that?

Because other fan creators are not business rivals they are your fellow community members you selfish, self-centered, capitalist brain rotted pigs! They want you to shout them out, not to steal your thunder, but to lift up the community as a whole and you myopic assholes cannot think further then, “Yes, but the time people spend looking at or playing or listening to the things they make COULD be time spend EXCLUSIVELY on my thing!”

I’m going to… sleep.

I’ll be back after I rest and sober up, I’m getting too hot under the collar.

THE NEXT DAY

Okay… now I’m just a little groggy and hungover, but a little more locked in. Lets continue…

Alright to try and avoid… writing 3.4k words on thirty minutes of this god forsaken show again, I’m going to try a new strategy. Listening in 5 minute chunks instead of just pausing every-time Travis or Tybee says something insane.

Okay a minute twenty in and I already have to break my rule cus they are continuing this AWFUL topic from before and Travis is comparing, shouting out friends work to being asked to borrow 10$.

“If you keep asking for 10$ and I don’t have 10$ to give, I’m not going to be your friend anymore! Don’t ask me for 10$ if I don’t have 10$ to give and don’t ask me for fan attention when I don’t have fan attention to give!”

In this situation, your the equivalent of a millionaire with effectively infinite money to give, complaining that your friend who works a 9 to 5 at minimum wage is asking you to cover dinner. Your NOT the good guy here, stop trying to play for sympathy!

Travis: The idea here is that it doesn’t cost me anything, but it does! It doesn’t cost me money, but it costs me intangible things! If I have a thing that I need someone to pledge 20$ for and they already pledged 20$ to your thing cus I told them to, I don’t have 20$ anymore.

‘It doesn’t cost me money, just intangible things, like money!’

Tybee: I was in a show once that I did a cameo in and they asked me to promote the rest of the show, but I was like no, its not good and I don’t want to lose my fans.

‘This show is terrible and I don’t want my fans wasting their time on it… aside from the bits I’m in! Go watch them!’

Okay and then they move along to Travis asking if people should tell you if your show is bad, if they ask you for feedback.

Tybee: Yes, if they asked, I’ll tell them what I think.

Travis: (Deep breath) Hmmmm… well it’s difficult because their is a third thing… where they just say, ‘IT’S GOOD! But it just needs a couple tweaks!’

Hey Travis, are you upset that people don’t like your shows? Are you kinda wishing they’d just universally say, ‘they are almost perfect, but here is a list of the things you can improve’ so you don’t have to feel bad that your shit sucks?

Oh, actually, that then pivots to him saying he also DOES think people should be more harshly honest when someone has no chance because he, quote “Saw allot of kids in acting classes where not good and someone needed to tell them that they’d never be actors and teachers need to get better about explaining when a kid just doesn’t have talent.”

So basically their are three kinds of feedback:

This is perfect and I love it!

This is almost perfect, just maybe tweak these few things you glorious, handsome, strong big man!

And your terrible and should give up now because Travis has written you off.

Good to know!

Tybee throws in a small story about being told she’d never make it as a musician by a teacher and how she agrees sometimes you just need to give kids the hard truth.

Part 2 ->

<- Previously on: Interrobang

On second thought, no. We jerk this son of a bitch to completion!

Took a couple of days due to chronic pain related issues, but I’m back to finish what I started, so lets load up the episode and continue on from minute 36 of From Bad Movies to Upsetting Words.

We start back up with Travis talking about his high school mascot, ‘The Blue Streaks’, with allot of giggling around the word ‘streaks’ before continuing to talk about other mascots their schools had or could have used, including, ‘the bucks’, ‘the trail blazers’, ‘the pony express’ and other fairly innocuous names.

It’s honestly a little weird hearing all of this after, you know, EVERYTHING we left off on in the first half, but I’m not going to complain…

And we get the first bit of Travis oddness as Tybee talks about her brother getting bullied with Travis, very legitimately surprised sounding interjecting:

Travis: REALLY!? But your brother is super cool!?

Tybee: Ya.

Travis: Huh…

Apparently he was a bit of a nerd, big book dork, so he got bullied, which Travis continues to assert, “Makes him cool!” While Tybee continues that she, also, was bullied allot. Something Travis notably does not seem shocked or confused by.

But ya, Travis really seemed thrown off by the idea that someone he sees as cool could possibly have been bullied, which leads me to the tragic conclusion that no one ever bullied Travis as a kid. An experience that I, as someone with three brothers and as a neurodivergent queer kid can tell you from experience, really helps to beat shame into you. (Then you can grow up and become even MORE cringe out of spite and actually earn that shit!)

Tybee continues that her brothers class got to vote on the name of their mascot, but had the name ‘T-Bone” rejected in favor of the runner up name of “Timmy The Timber Wolf” as the principle realized the name T-Bone was deffo just an excuse to be able to nickname him ‘boner’ and chant that at games.

Travis first gleefully starts chanting, “Boner! Boner! Boner!” Then hard pivots to, “Why the hell do we even let kids vote on anything?”

Cus its a mascot for the kids sports team, representing the kids school and because encouraging children to engage in elections is good for a healthy democracy, Travis. Also cus kids are creative and funny! Calling the wolf boner would have been the morally correct choice and you yourself got excited by the dumb joke so why the hell shouldn’t these kids?

Anyway, Travis continues his point by… oh no…

Travis: My senior class, my senior year was the year 9/11 happened.

Tybee, worried: Oh my god…

Travis: My senior year colors where red, white and blue, our senior class song was ‘Proud To Be An American’, like it was UPSETTTTING for allot of reasons, but, like, 9/11 sucked, but like, is that how you wanted to define our senior year of high school guys?

Okay that wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Honestly, I remember 9/11 (EAGLE_CRY.sfx) and this seems pretty normal and standard for much of the country at that time. Travis blaming it on the students getting the vote seems wildly misguided when EVERYONE was tripling down on shows of patriotic zealotry in the aftermath of the towers coming down. If the student’s hadn’t voted for that nonsense, the staff would have pushed it anyway and frankly, it was probably the teachers and parents who where encouraging that to be voted on in the first place.

The podcast was interrupted at this point by a couple Jehovah's Witnesses coming to the door to tell me about Jesus, specifically a new webseries they made about him that’s apparently more accurate and ‘can be followed along word for word with your bible’.

I’ll give them credit for this much, the trailer they showed me had Jesus as a middle eastern man rather then a blond white dude so… hey that’s something!

Also amusingly they seemed to take my dead name (I’m not outting myself to JWs) as evidence that I’m clearly a deeply faithful Christian, since it’s a biblical name, not really picking up on its old testament origins as noteworthy.

Anyway, unfortunately with the old ladies gone, I have no choice, but to return my attention to interrobang…

Tybee talks about her experience growing up in the South where the hyper patriotism was pretty pervasive, even beyond the year 9/11 happened, complaining that as she was not, “one of the little redneck kids” she was annoyed by the whole thing. Travis agreeing with, “Ya, I’m proud of allot of things that I don’t need to sing about in public!”

Oh and Travis follows up by talking about how, “I’m proud to be an American, I’m a narcissist, I’m proud to be whatever I am!” Which I guess is a nice bit of self awareness. He then follows that by talking about how he’s, “Proud to be literate, but [he] doesn’t feel the need to sing songs about everything [he’s] proud of!” Which is such a funny thing to say when your in the middle of recording a podcast (one of many you host) where you share your opinions and hot takes with the world.

Like, I don’t like ‘ra ra America’ shit either, but come on man, you can’t call other people out for being way to excited to sing about things they think are important and cool, while ensuring your every stray thought is recorded for thousands of potential fans to listen too and (presumably) agree with.

Travis pivots this to then talking about how he cannot sing in public anymore because he’s too shy, which is fair, I guess, but wild coming from a guy who actively does MASSIVE live shows with his brothers. But I guess I can’t sing in front of my friends so fair’s fair.

Oh Tybee mentions feeling awkward singing choral music cus it’s all religious and they don’t have much in the way of Jewish songs, so she ends up having to sing Christian hymns instead. I guess she’s Jewish? That’s cool, I guess.

Man, off topic, but I miss when finding out someone else was Jewish was like, “Oh cool!” instead of feeling this sudden intense cageyness as I start trying to figure out how to slip, “So… we both agree genocide is bad, right?” Into the conversation.

Anyway, the conversation turns to the subject of how their is no new choir music being written, so we are stuck with Christian religious songs and Travis talks about how you can’t make a new Christmas song, it’s only the classics and that cannot change.

“Make my wish come true, all I want for Christmas is yooooooou to shut the fuck up Travis!”

Tybee talks about being in religious plays and how her friend who is also Jewish was Scrooge in a Christmas Carol, that that is just part of being part of a minority group that has to find roles where they can when nothing is written for you.

Travis then jumps in to ask, “Is Scrooge not a Jewish name? I just always assumed. Their is just nothing inherently Christian about- well, I guess it’s Christmas.”

… I don’t want to just knee jerk jump to anti-antisemitism on this, but man it feels REAL weird to be like, “The famous greedy miser who hates Christmas and exploits their workers? Ya for some reason I just always assumed he was Jewish.”

Travis: I mean their is nothing where it says, “He was a greedy old miser AND he was a good CHRISTIAN man! It just doesn’t really say anything about him being religious one way or another.”

Tybee: I mean the spirit of Christmas is giving.

Travis: Oh shit!

Tybee: I mean in A Christmas Carol. In real life it’s selfishness.

Travis: It’s selfish!

Tybee: It’s capitalism.

Travis: It’s cookies!

Tybee: It’s cookies.

Travis: It’s DEFINITELY cookies!

I like how Travis will happily wade into the subject of indigenous people getting exploited and culturally appropriated with all the grace of a rhinoceros charging into an antique store, but even a WHIFF of conversation around the commercialization of Chrismas, a holiday he actually cares about and its HARD pivot to jokes and shouting about cookies till the conversation can move on.

Oh wait, not ‘like’, what’s the word I’m looking for?

Hate.

I hate this man.

The conversation they change too is Tybee going on AT LENGTH about a youtube video of a kid being cute and Travis talking about ‘unlikely animal friendship videos.’ Really feels like they flew too close to the sun and both desperately needed to cool things off with the most inane, feel good bullshit they could think of.

Which again, same episode as Travis berating Tybee over The Bachelor and casual conversations about college kids wearing red face and screaming, “Scalp em’!”

These two have the most unhinged priorities I swear to god!

And another break as I had to go get my boyfriend from his job and take him to Winco. This recap has been more then a little cursed, but we persist!

Shmanners referenced! For some reason I thought this show was hosted prior to that one, but I guess Travis just likes running multiple simultaneous shows.

The context was about Travis talking about the ‘lion and dog make friends’ video he had previously brought up and commenting about how, “I hope that lion didn’t eat the dog.”

Okay I need to transcribe this next bit:

Travis: I was talking about this on an episode of Shmanners, we were talking about dogs and the reason you can have a dog as a house pet and not a wolf as a house pet is that at the end of the day is that their is a BIG difference between a wolf and a dog. (Pause) And their is a big difference between a dog and a lion and that is that its very common for lions to fight and kill each other.

What? What the fuck are you- Travis, it is not ‘very common’ for lions to fight and kill each other anymore then any other pack animal that has a dominance hierarchy. Male lions might fight over who gets to lead a pride, but they are not generally murdering one another during these contests since, most animals, ESPECIALLY big carnivores, don’t want to risk suffering injuries that could prevent them from hunting and thus starving to death, over basically anything that isn’t itself a matter of life or death.

Meanwhile, DOGS FIGHT LIKE CRAZY! I have in my life fallen out of trees, been hit by a car and been shot at and STILL the worst injuries I’ve suffered have pretty much all come from domesticated cats and dogs because your precious pupper will kill the shit out of another dog if it’s not been properly trained and it gets into what it feels is a fight for it’s home and family. And it WILL bite other humans who try and stop it! And cats, if not cared for properly, will develop a set of daggers that they can and will use to slice you open if you pet them wrong.

I LOVE animals and I do not hold any ill will towards cats or dogs who hurt me cus most of the time when I get hurt, its because me or the other pet owner did something wrong when caring for these animals, but their is not an invisible line where domestic pets are perfectly safe and tamed wild animals are ready to kill you for no reason at a moments notice.

Like look, it is TRUE that wolves and lions and similar wild-tamed animals are MUCH more dangerous for the average person to own then a domesticated dog or cat. Hell, reptiles and most other ‘exotic pets’ are harder to handle without risk of injury just cus most people don’t know how to handle them. But this kind of demonizing of certain kinds of animals is no less harmful then the opposite reaction of people acting like wolves, bears and sharks are all basically just puppies and that touching them in the wild is safe because they saw a youtube video of them being pet by a trained handler with years of experience.

Respect wild animals, treat them as what they are, not monsters and not harmless puppies, but living beings that require understanding and care.

Sigh…

Sorry, anyway Tybee is talking about the chimp who ripped it’s owners face off and Travis is going, “Wow for real!?”

These fuckers could be hosting Shark Week and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

Some more talking about wolf-dog hybrids and how they are cute, but people should still fear wolves… guns are also dangerous apparently and Tybee talks about a film school class fucking about with prop guns and the professor firing a blank into the air to teach them that playing with guns, even prop guns is still dangerous.

Travis went to a range to fire guns because he wanted to try new things and complains that people were, “-turning their guns sideways and not understanding why they couldn’t hit things. They where closing their eyes and turning and firing backwards and basically only two people knew what they where doing and demonstrating real proficiency.”

I wonder who one of those-

Travis: I was actually one of those, I was actually really good at it thanks to my years of video gaming.

That was not said sarcastically or jokingly, this man legit just said, “No one in the class could hit anything cus they where turning their guns sideways and closing their eyes, but cus I’m a gamer I was really good. Literally only me and one other person at the range where actually shooting well.” And how much do you want to bet the other was the instructor?

I’m sure if he wasn’t using this story to complain that everyone else bought guns right after apparently comically being bad at shooting, this story would have ended with everyone clapping for him after he hit all the bulls-eyes.

Also not to put to fine a point on it, but, “They were turning their guns sideways to shoot” huh? I wonder, Travis, did these young men also have baggy pants and listen to loud music? Just curious about these guys you where clowning on with your sick COD skills.

Ah some pearls of wisdom:

Travis: This is my problem. I believe in gun control in as far as I believe some people do not deserve to have a gun. Like I’m not saying we should ban guns or restrict everyone from having guns, but I’m saying guns are dangerous and only certified professionals- I mean, only certified people should be allowed to use them! I worked as a carpenter for 4 or 5 years and I used machines that could easily kill you if we let people who didn’t know how to use them use them! […] So I wasn’t about to let anyone who didn’t know what they where doing use it! […] So what I’m saying is guns are super cool, guns are a super effective tool that only qualified people should own. (With the qualification being that you be of age and wait 2 days to get them.)

What a long winded way of saying almost nothing.

Like I cut that down a bit and the WHOLE thing boils down to, “I want gun control… but only the SMALLEST amount of gun control possible! Guns are great, but they are dangerous and so we should restrict them, but in a way where everyone who wants one, gets one.”

I swear if you told me this man was running for office, I’d believe you in a heart beat!

Tybee talks about how she can’t shoot guns without crying because of the visceral violence of them.

For me, I just don’t like loud sounds.

And also PTSD.

They talk at length about how they both want to know how to disarm and dismantle a gun. Tybee because shes terrified of fire arms and Travis he wants to be prepared for a situation where he’s walking in the woods and finds a random gun just laying around and can dismantle it to keep his family safe and also so he can own a gun and keep it in two separate safes, “That I’d just use for target practice.”

Hmmmhmmm…

Also apparently cus he does ‘Bunker Buddies’ and that’s inspired him to want to know how to use a gun so in an apocalyptic scenario if someone went, “Do you know how to shoot a gun?” He can go, “Ya, I’ve practiced on the range.”

Meanwhile all I can think is Travis in Dead Rising being asked if he knows how to shoot a gun and replying, “Ya, I’ve played Call of Duty you know!”

Travis: I also understand some people, thanks to Bunker Buddies, that some people are black and white, guns are bad. And I’m sorry, but for good or bad, guns are why we are were we are in society.

Tybee: Ya and I don’t like them, but-

Travis: I don’t like them either, but they ARE a useful tool! For what they are designed to do, we have spent allot of time and money making them as effective as they can be! For what a gun is supposed to do! They are terrifying, but cars are also terrifying! Also planes are inherently terrifying!

Ya, but cars and planes serve a purpose beyond killing things, Travis. And ya, guns are probably the most effective, personal use sized tool for murder, but like… unless your a hunter, the only thing your going to be using that tool on is your fellow man.

I have complex feelings on firearms which I will not be getting into here, but I find the idea of boiling them down to, “We have to use something and nothing is a better tool for the job then a gun!” To be a weird argument from someone who at least claims to have no desire to use them for either of the two things you’d actually use a gun for as a tool.

Like, generously lets say guns have 3 real practical uses, things that make them a tool rather then a collectors item or a plaything. You can use them to shoot at an animal, shoot at a human or convince a human to do/not do something under the implicit understanding you COULD shoot at them. Travis has made it clear he’d want a gun only to shoot at the range, so he’s not hunting with it and if he wants to keep a gun in his house in two separate pieces, locked away safely he’s hardly using it for home defense and it’s not much of a deterrent so… what’s the job you need this ‘tool’ for Trav?

Sorry, ranting about guns over, onto cars… Travis talking about driving a 16 wheeler for a Shakespeare company and feeling annoyed at smaller cars being risky around him because, “I could just crush you and not even notice.”

Travis ‘My Greatest Fear Is Killing Someone’ McElroy!

Travis: One last thing, then we’ll wrap this up. You used the term pussy…

FUCK! God damn it, ten minutes from the end and you pull the, ‘So am I allowed to use this word?’ Card NOW!?

Travis, who earlier this episode shouted a racial slur multiple times, clarifies that he said ‘pussy’ ONLY IN CHARACTER while recording an episode of Bunker Buddies and ‘immediately felt bad’.

Tybee then reassures him that pussy as an insult does NOT come from the same root word as pussy, the slang term for what my boyfriend rocks. Thus its fine to use as an insult and she doesn’t like it as a term for genitals.

Travis then asks about words that ‘just make you feel bad to say’ and Tybee throws up… Stinky? Apparently it makes her feel uncomfortable to just say it… which okay, fine, but that’s a new one to me in terms of ‘icky words’.

Travis: I hate the word panties. I HATE THAT WORD! It’s a weird word, it reminds me of children and people using it to describe a womans underwear is just eeeeeeehhhhh! […] Its skeevy! I hate that word! I hate it! Its not just that I hate when its said, but if its used in ANY kind of sexual context I hate it! (retching sounds) ITS NOT ATTRACTIVE! THAT’s NOT GOOD! It’s skeevy and I hate it!

The fuck is wrong with you dude? Genuinely, what the fuck are you talking about man, that is… so specific and weird as a thing to get hung up on and to the point of ranting and rambling about just how much you hate it… go to bed!

Ugh and then they move onto moist which Travis, who JUST got done ranting about how much he hates the word ‘panties’ instantly goes, “Oh no one minds moist, people have just been told they are meant to not like it. If I said a cake is moist no one would actually care.”

I’m going to take my thumbs and [MAKE A DELICIOUS CAKE] till your [SO HAPPY] you [LOVELY] man!

Travis: You know what word I love? Boobs! I love the word, I love all the sounds in the word!

SHUT THE FUCK UP!

You just got done ranting about how panties as a word is to immature and thus is icky and bad and awful, but boobs, the immature slang word for breasts is your FAVORITE word in the world? Gooooo fuck yourself you condescending piece of-

DEEP BREATH!

7 minutes left, lets just get through it…

Travis gets excited to talk about poop, Tybee doesn’t like the word, Travis says it over and over and claims that Tybee is smiling so she MUST like it, Tybee says she’s just happy he's happy, Travis CONTINUES TO TALK ABOUT POOP!

They talk about Travis having a great voice for radio. Sure.

Tybee has light skin and Travis really loves that about her. I know he’s just being nice, but after everything else this episode, complimenting how much you like your co-hosts white skin feels just a little sus Travis.

Travis talks about being a little awkward as a kid, but now he’s a ‘burly man and studdly and handsome and beautiful’.

Look, I think guys with beards are hot. I have a thing for dad bods. I think George ‘Super Bunnyhop’ Weidman is really handsome. Travis though? Hard pass.

Travis: I think that’s everything! Do you have anything else you want to add?

Tybee: *Takes a deep breath*

Travis: No?

Tybee: I watched Daredevil.

Travis: Okay, is it good?

Tybee: Yes.

Travis: Okay that’s it.

Travis suddenly really rushing to get to the end of this show as fast as possible, hurrying Tybee along before asking people to like, comment, share, blah blah blah.

The show is NOT a Maxfun show, but WILL support Maxfun and apparently a ‘group bang’ episode was just had and will come again. I’m guessing that’s user submitted topics of conversation?

Oh god the episode before this was the first ‘group bang’ and it’s between ‘old racism’ and the shit we just watched…

I guess I’ll be back…

Till then, take care of yourselves Trav-Nation and thank you SO MUCH for all the kind words and support for these recaps so far! It means the world to me and it inspires me to keep going!

I will see you all… next time!

“I was machine and you- Were flesh. And I began to hate.”

AM - I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

Hey jerk-bags, it’s ya girl, Duhad, back at it again with another dip into the putrid waters of Interrobang! This time, at the recommendation of u/KPopMyHoleBod and u/CardInternational753, I’m jumping around a little rather then just straight forwardly going through these episodes one by one and as such, our next port of call on the exploration of Travis and Tybee’s big list of things they hate, we’ll be stopping in to hear about:

From Bad Movies to Upsetting Words

But before we dive in, a few quick house keeping things to mention.

As before and… as will just always be the case for me, I am dyslexic as hell and I don’t have a transcript so spelling mistakes and paraphrased quotes abound!

Also, if you like what I do, but would rather see my writing in the form of weird smut or free RPGs and journal games, go check out my Furaffinity and Itch.io pages respectively. I’m Duhad or Duhad8 literally everywhere, it will not be hard to find me.

And with that out of the way… lets get mad.

Starting off, our content warning for this episode is… strong language.

Alright, compared to sexual assault last time, I’m pretty fuck’n cheesed to hear that!

We open the episode proper with the hosts talking about how much they like Hook which transitions into Travis expressing the apparently brand new to him concept that, ‘other people are allowed to not like the things I like’. Which then moves into both hosts talking about how it’s both okay to not like something other people like or to like something others don’t, with Tybee using ‘The Amazing Spiderman’ as an example of something she likes that others have argued is not as good as the older Spiderman movies.

Travis then goes on to defend Kung-Pow Enter the Fist, which… man it’s weird, unrelated to the episode, but I had not thought about that movie in over a decade and then maybe a month ago and Australian friend of mine started talking about it out of the blue. Just kinda odd how that movie seems to be lightly haunting me recently.

Anyway back in the episode Trav and Tybee are still complaining about how people will dislike that they like a thing, with Trav’s arguing that people who care about shot composition and ‘film things’ apparently will just try and convince him that ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Bang’ is objectively bad, but, chad that he is, he simply doesn’t care.

From their, we enter into MST3K and bad movie shows, with references to The Flop House and Bunker Buddies, about how their are ‘bad bad’ movies and ‘good bad movies’. All fairly unobjectionable stuff.

Not much to comment on here so far, which is a shame as I was sort of hoping they might be more down on bad movies so I could get on my own high horse to talk about how much I personally enjoy a bit of cinematic trash, but no… it’s just generic, “You know, some people like a movie that isn’t traditionally good and, hot take, that’s actually okay!”

Tybee does toss me a small bone by first saying she DOESN’T like horror and then declares that, “People who like horror don’t actually like being scared, they just enjoy the thrill.” Which is a revelation she apparently got after going to a makeup artists house who likes creepy stuff and had some Halloween-esc decor.

Naturally, this is a fairly ill-informed take, (one Travis does not push back on as he’s obviously not much of a horror man himself) but no, obviously their are ALLOT of types of horror. Campy, goofy horror that’s more dark comedy then real scares, schlocky B-Horror that wants to get you to jump in your seat and then have a nervous laugh as the tension is released and slow, brutal, creeping horror that lingers with you for days afterwards, leaving you with a deliciously sick and painful fear that gnaws at you in the dead of night…

And obviously, my personal favorite horror, big monsters with BIG teeth that make me cum!

Oh right, the episode…

Travis is talking about how live theater feels very safe to him so he doesn’t feel fear or stress from high drama since, “We are not in a theater in Cincinnati, we are in Nazi Germany, seeing a scene that takes place in a concentration camp! But when the curtain comes down, the make up comes off and everyone goes home. But in a movie I’m watching the day in the life of a character and when one of them dies-”

Tybee: “When your actually watching a real horse sinks into the mud and get hurt.”

Travis: “Ya.”

Oh and apparently that was a pivot into the Never Ending Story.

Which feels like a hell of a pivot from, ‘Nazi Germany at a concentration camp’, but… sure. It’s not objectively wrong, but it feels like Tybee’s cinematic palate is pretty limited if her first pull after Travis talks about war dramas about real life genocides is ‘That time the horse got sad and drowned in a kids movie from the 80s.’

Okay to be fair, she explains that that scene makes her sad cus apparently the real life horse on set got hurt, which is a more understandable response, even if I’m still a little suspect about this being her big pull for, “Oh ya, the Holocaust is harrowing stuff! Much like when a horse gets hurt!”

Travis for some reason takes this as evidence for why movies are a harder experience for him to enjoy dramas in because, ‘Its too real!’

Dog, buddy, the vast vast vast majority of movies do not involve the actors actually being brutalized on set! Statistically, only one actress is traumatized on any given movie shoot and that’s with Kubrick and Hitchcock weighing the scales like a neutron star.

Anyway Travis continues to express that, since he can meet and talk with the actors of a play, he’s big in the scene, no biggy, it’s easier for him to just not worry about anything traumatic happening in a play because he can be reminded it’s not real.

Setting aside the fact that you can ALSO watch interviews with actors to see that they too are not actually dead after dying in a movie, this man is describing the behavior I’d show to a child.

“Don’t worry Travy, see? It’s all just ketchup! He’s fine, don’t cry!”

Moving along, they start talking about the bachelor. Tybee is a fan, Travis just watches Griffins podcast about it. Tybee can pick the winners cus she’s just that good. Good for her.

Travis talks about a reality show called ‘Murder In Small Town X’ where a town populated by actors keeps having murders while 10 or 12 non actor investigator players have to try and solve the case. Then eliminations involved two people looking in two locations, trying to find clues to the next episodes case while avoiding the killer who could ‘murder’ the investigators to take them out of the show… and their is a cult!? The way they do set cleaning and maintenance is by just saying all the janitorial team is part of a cult that believe in ritualistic purification via cleaning!? Wait this show actually sounds kinda sick!

Oh and apparently the winner of the show was a firefighter who died in 9/11 before the thing was fully aired and they ended up canning the show after that.

And then he talks about ‘Solitary’ which is apparently a reality show about people being stuck in solitary confinement and doing challenges and the like, while just slowly going insane in isolation. Oh and they just randomly would play loud sounds, baby cries and alarms to wake people up at odd hours, feed them only protein bars to limit their quality of life and just generally torture the poor contestants! Jesus, that first show sounded like high effort, campy fun, this sounds like a nightmare!

Oh and Travis loved it, naturally…

Wait, Travis, you said you could not watch drama MOVIES because the suffering of the characters was too real and made you sad, but a REALITY show about contestants being subjected to psychological torture is great and fun and no problem at all for you?

I genuinely do not understand this man’s mind.

I was just letting the EP play while I wrote and oh! Okay apparently Travis’s favorite part of this show was the physical challenges, one of which involved being strapped to an electric chair with a ball gag shoved in their mouths! So apparently it’s not JUST psychological, they ALSO physically hurt these people to try and drive them to give up and quit the show!

Tybee: I hate that stuff.

Travis: I LOVE IT! I hate it in movies, but when it’s-

Tybee: ‘I hate when it’s fake people, but I LOVE torturing real people!’

GET HIS ASS TYBEE!

Travis: Cus it never pushes past the point of like, any other reality show! Like, on Survivor, when people eat bugs-

Tybee: I don’t watch Survivor.

Travis: Oh.

Tybee: Any of these shows.

Travis: WELL I GUESS MY POINT IS RUINED.

Oh he’s maaaaad! He’s big, ‘I’m not mad, look at me smile, would I be smiling if I was fucking mad?’ Mad!

Tybee: I just don’t like any shows where people are put into these sorts of situations.

Travis: (sounding legit upset and accusatory) But you watch The Bachelor! I- But- I- But I’d rather like-

Tybee: (Patronizing) How is that ANYTHING like-

Travis: I WOULD- *Breath* much rather eat bugs and be hungry then be on a game where I had to tell someone I loved them to be famous. Do you know what I mean? I mean like, I mean-

Tybee: Well that’s like a really cynical way to look at it.

Travis: Well I’ve never watched The Bachelor! That’s just my impression of it!

Travis, if you’ve not watched the show… shut the fuck up about it. Don’t drag someone else’s favorite reality trash just cus they are calling you out for being into sadist shit RIGHT AFTER talking about how your to much of an UwU soft boy to watch drama films!

I’ve not seen The Bachelor, the closest I’ve got is, ‘Summer Lovin’ the I Think You Should Leave parody sketch, but even so, I’m sure it’s no where near the level of bug eating and even then, bug eating feels like a BIG step down in terms of sadism from strapping someone into a chair, putting a ball gag in their mouth and spending, in Travis’s own words, 3 to 4 hours in that position till they are let go for entertainment purposes.

Travis, in response to being told the shows about 6 episodes of madness followed by people falling in love: (Soundingly deeply skeptical) In a believable way? And I mean that sincerely.

Tybee: Ya! Ya sometimes! I mean sometimes its like, that was fast, but other times its like, ya those two people belong together.

Travis, who’s been making, “Hmmm…” sounds while Tybee was talking: I guessss it’s just curious to me because its already so hard in life to find somebody who you are like ‘in love with’ I’m gonna like, (little breath out) spend the rest of my life with you?

He genuinely sounds like the idea of this is weird and he’s annoyed at the concept of being in love with someone you’d want to share your life with.

Buddy, pal, my internet best friend who I hold hands with everyday… were you not already married in 2016? Cus like, if I heard either of my partners talking like this, I’d be seriously questioning our long term relationship and if my SPOUSE talked like this? Couch!

Tavis, with the smuggest, most shit eating grin-type voice: So what’s funny to me is that a show that SEEMS to be all about romance and the idea of marrying is like… COMPLETELY undermining the idea of ‘the one’ or ‘destiny’ or anything like that.

Tybee, sounding a little hurt: Sure. I agree with you. It’s not that I think its the way a person should do it, but I think its interesting and sometimes it works.

Their is background sounds of chairs moving and at one point Tybee audibly has to steady herself with a breath as it honestly sounds like she’s on the verge of crying before taking a second and then in a louder, clearer voice continues.

Tybee: OBVIOUSLY most of the time it doesn’t work cus they don’t work out!

Travis, sharply: Ya.

Tybee: But like sometimes it works and it’s kinda cool to watch!

Travis: Is their a prize on The Bachelor, besides getting married?

Okay I’m just going to take a second because I’m getting genuinely upset. Travis seriously has the energy of someone ready to keep fighting about something while Tybee comes off like she’s trying not to ‘ruin the show’ by letting on how hurt she is by the way Travis just snapped at her and started shit talking a show she clearly likes because she, RIGHTLY pointed out he was being kinda hypocritical about his own favorite reality TV show.

I genuinely REALLY dislike this man! So far, allot of what he’s done and said comes off as cringe and a little suspect, but this interaction felt like putting on the They Live glasses and seeing all the red flags just reveal themselves in an instant!

Genuinely, GENUINELY uncomfortable…

Alright, I’m going to just blast through the rest of this segment and hope that things get better on the other side.

Travis talks about how much he likes Steven Universe and I find myself liking the show a little less. (I still like it allot, but after all of that, hearing THIS man describe it as sweet and nice and making him cry makes me tense up like a cat who’s tail was just tread on.)

Tybee tosses in an interjection about a friends dog who she pretends is a super hero and sings a little song too. It has nothing to do with Travis Steven Universe talk and normally I’d call it out for being just random and off topic, but after that last segment, I’m just happy Tybee seems to be having fun thinking about a dog and singing a little song.

Travis brings up Steven Universes toxic fandom, highlighting a fan artist who was bullied for drawing characters thinner then they are on the show and wags his finger at the fans for not internalizing the messages about forgiveness and heart.

Tybee expresses some sympathy for fans upset about the erasure of positive depictions of thicker women to which Travis jumps in to say that, while he didn’t see the art himself, he assumes it was just someone drawing a character ‘a little thinner’ to which Tybee agrees that REGARDLESS harassing an artist over something like this isn’t good.

Tybee talks about meeting a woman who really didn't like cosplay and Travis talks about seeing a super high effort skeksis cosplay and that they takes a ton of effort, so cosplay is cool actually. Tybee then continues that the woman turned out to be a fashion designer who shows off dresses she’s made inspired by shows at cons and thus, it made no sense she’d not like cosplay, which Travis jumps on to call her crazy.

Now look, I don’t want too defend this random woman to much, cosplay rules and shitting on other peoples art sucks! (Now shitting on other peoples podcasts, THAT is cool and sexy!) But to give credit where it is due, despite what Travis and Tybee seem to think, it’s really not that insane that someone who’s job is to create unique and original fashion and uses popular media as INSPIRATION for her work would find others just 1 to 1 copying things from popular shows to be uninspired and derivative. I would disagree with that take, BUT it’s really not as insane or unimaginable as these two knuckle heads seem to think.

Like, I write professionally, it’s my primary job and allot of what I write is fiction, but if I was to say I didn’t like fanfiction because it is not doing something original, I’d be an asshole, but it wouldn’t be like, “Hmmm you say fanfiction is bad and yet, you write fiction? That’s hypocritical! Check and mate!”

Travis, continuing from the cosplay bit: I’ve been thinking about this allot because I’ve done allot of research into furries and we did a whole story about furries on Trends Like These.

SORRY YOU WHAT!? No, don’t get distracted April, focus! We can go be mad about Travis trying to speak for furries another time, for now, we’ve got another 40 minutes of this show to get through.

Yada yada, Travis doesn’t like when you judge people for things that don’t effect you. Fine. Good even.

Travis declares, “Bullies are just people who have nothing going on in their own lives. So when people would make fun of me for my video games or my D&D books they were just mad cus I liked a thing and they don’t like anything.”

Travis, I am dyslexic to the point where reading can be physically painful for me and I hate D&D and yet I’ve still read more D&D books then you, shut the fuck up.

Tybee talks about her college having a rivalry with the Florida college that created Gatorade (after their gator mascot) and Travis jumps in to ask, in a quiet, serious voice,

Travis: Is your mascot being a, uh, ‘Native American Chief’ caused any controversies?

Tybee seems confused and tries to think of one before both of them get confused what their email is and what they should call their fans.

Tybee: We are NEVER calling anything the ‘gang bang’!

Travis: We should call them the ‘interrobang gang’.

Tybee: Okay, they are the ‘interrobang gang.’

Travis: I love that.

This man’s idea of, ‘yes AND’ is, ‘no, but I’m going to do it anyway AND’.

Anyway Tybee claims that as best she knows her school asked a local tribe if they should change their school mascot and they basically shrugged and said no.

Tybee: So I guess its fine, cus its not like a slur, it’s the name of-

Travis: IT’S NOT LIKE THE [Washington football team name that got changed]!

Jesus, he really just full throated shouts that one, like he was SO excited to get to say a slur in the context of calling it bad!

Tybee: Right, it’s not like-

Travis: [The same slur again, just as loud, just as excited]

Tybee: Y-Ya it’s not like [slur]. But the issue is, the mascot is usually a white student in red-face.

… what the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK!? CHAT IS THIS FUCKING REAL!?

Travis: Hm.

Tybee: Which is… uuuhhh…

YA IT’s A LITTLE ‘UHH’ ISN’T IT? Burried the lead on that one a bit didn’t cha!?

Tybee after a long pause: I will say… that the person who plays chief Osceola has to have a crazy amount of equestrian training and have really high grades and be really respectful and really respectable and learn a ton of steps so it’s not like it’s not without… it’s serious respect. So their is allot of cultural appropriation that goes with the kinda, cultural appropriation LIKE aspect of it… and they don’t seem to have a problem with it.[…]

It goes on with Travis making little, “Hm” sounds every now and then, but OH MY GOD!

Oh well, hey, the white guy in red face has to be good with horses and be good at math and is expected to be POLITE when he trots around pretending to be an actual native American historical figure as a football teams mascot! COOL! THAT’S ALRIGHT THEN!

Hey, if you ever want to put on a kippah and a rubber nose and run around tossing gold coins to the crowd while calling yourself the Seattle Rabbi or some shit, just know it’s all good with me as long as your respectful about it and really ace your geography finals!

Fuck’in assholes…

Tybee: So it’s my understanding they are okay with it, but I’d be naive to say their isn’t something a *little* problematic with it…

I’m going to walk into the sea.

OH MY GOD!

Tybee adds, “The one thing I know we changed is that they stopped starting chants of ‘scalp em’. That got phased out.”

Travis then ends this nightmare by comparing Tybee’s KKK university to his high school having a mascot named after claim jumpers, which he explains is about settlers stealing land from one another, an equally awful thing to the whole ‘real life native chief being a mascot played by a white dude in red face riding around while all the kids scream ‘scalp em’ over and over.’

Also, man ya, those nasty land grabbers, stealing land claims from the poor settlers who were promised that land that *no one else was living on*! What dastardly crooks! They are the REAL villains of the story of Manifest Destiny!

I’m being unfair and uncharitable, but this episode has pissed me right the fuck off and we are only half way through!

Fuck it…

We stop here! Their is still another 34 minutes left in the podcast and maybe I’ll finish it later, but this write up is already longer then ALL of EP1 and I don’t know if I want to actually finish this thing at all.

If you really want to hear about the back half of this and get to more ‘upsetting words’, let me know, otherwise, I might return later or I might move onto another episode.

Either way, take care of yourselves, Trav nation and I’ll see you all when next I feel too good about myself and I need another drop-me-down!

What’s up pals? Long time jerker, first time buster here and after dragging my feet far too long on this, I’m finally sitting down to listen to ‘Interrobang With Travis And Tybee’!

Why Interrobang? Well that’s simple, as a GM with around 25 years of experience running games including an RPG live show, credits on actual indy RPGs and a host of small, personal RPG related projects under my belt, I felt like the most obvious place to start recapping TAZ adjacent shows would be… some random Travis side project no one cares about!

In all seriousness, I’ve always been fascinate by these weird McElroy side projects and as much as I’d love to rant about table top games, I really want to dig my hands into the dirt and uncover… just what the hell Interrobang even is!

Also someone's already recapping Aether Sea and as someone with shark autism, that would have been my starting point anyway so plan B it is!

Oh and one last thing before I load up the episode, their are no transcripts for these and I am INCREDIBLY dyslexic (as you probably already noticed despite my best efforts to clean up this after the fact) so quotes will be (awkwardly) paraphrased and spelling and grammar mistakes will happen.

Alright, I lied, one more pit stop before we get into ‘From Film Ratings to Jessica Jones’ the first proper episode. They have a little, “Coming Soon!” Announcement and given the terrible name of this show, I want to know how they tried to sell this project to the good people of Trav Nation.

Interrobang with Travis and Tybee Coming Soon!

Right off the bat, apparently ‘Interrobang’ is a punctuation mark used for a question combined with an interjection… looking that up, it’s real, but it remains a terrible name that really doesn’t tell you anything about this show.

Also after this fairly straight forward explanation of the word, both hosts ‘demonstrate its use’ but shouting censored swears and declaring, “You don’t know him! You don’t know her! You don’t know anybody!”

Cool.

I guess… it’s a show about learning stuff, but also the hosts are angry?

Okay ya that did nothing to really explain what this shows about, so I guess we’ll just have to proceed to the first episode proper to get a handle on what ‘interrorbang - the show’ is actually about.

From Film Ratings to Jessica Jones

We open with a content warning: Strong Language and ‘Discussions of simulated [SA] on film.’

Fuck’n WILD way to open, but I’ve seen at least a few episodes of Jessica Jones so I’m guessing it’s in reference to that. Still, that really caught me off guard.

And we open the show proper with a repeat of the explanation for what an ‘interrorbang’ is, now with Tybee doing a robot filter and Travis joining in just raw dogging it before introducing himself as, “Travis, Steampunk Shaman McElroy”.

This was a mistake…

Oh finally, they are going to explain what this show is about! In three words Tybee describes why people should watch the show as, ‘Everyone Gets Mad’ which Travis then excitedly begins gassing her up for ‘killing it’ and ‘perfectly describing the show!’

Sigh.

And then they get distracted, talking about ‘games’ and how good Travis is at improv and- OH! Travis drops a slur for Romani people! Talking about werewolves in a **** camp. So cool.

Around 3 minutes in, still no explanation for what the show actually is, but Tybee has gone off on a tangent about being protective of her friends at bars when guys harass them while Travis keeps butting in to ask if the guys are werewolves and if Tybee is just getting in the way of her friends hitting it off with said guys.

Okay, 4 minutes in, STILL no explanation, but Tybee has declared, “Okay, so here’s my example” and so I’m going to guess the premise is each week these two come in with an example of something that makes them mad and talk about it? Genuinely don’t know, but I’m doing my best to follow along.

I need to stop pausing every couple seconds, but oh boy! Things got weird FAST!

So Tybee’s example involves the movie ‘Shame’ with Michael Fassbender which apparently, ‘involves allot of consensual sex, including with prostitutes’, something Tybee emphases as, “It’s consensual EVEN THOUGH its with prostitutes.”

Travis: [To clarify] Sex workers or hookers? The difference between women who advertise their own goods and services and what they do vs women who are property that other people pimp out and are forced into the sex trade?

Tybee: … Are you asking me which ones are in the movie?

Travis: *With the tone of a deeply concerned parent who ‘just wants to know your being safe’* Yes.

Tybee: The first one.

Travis: *Letting out a breath* Okay.

Tybee: In theory.

Travis: Okay.

Tybee: It’s not discussed in the movie, but it [seems like they where consenting adults] all the psychological stuff about becoming a sex worker aside, weather its good or bad… all these people seemed to be here to have the sex they wanted to have.

Travis: It wasn’t portrayed as seedy and bad and OOOO bad!

Tybee: Their is no [SA] in the movie.

Travis: Good. And they don’t have the Sucker Punch, “Dead eyed, I’m trapped in this world, I don’t want to be here” kinda feeling?

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK WAS THAT!?

I write incredibly dark porn as part of my day job and THAT made my skin crawl! The half, ‘I want to be sure these fictional women are safe’, half ‘and… these dirty girls, just how badly where they being punished?’ Energy from Trav and Tybee’s weird, “Well just to be clear, their wasn’t any sexual violence… I mean aside from sex work being basically consensual [SA] anyway.” Just… ew!

Okay shaking off the- GOD DAMN IT MORE TALK ABOUT [SA]! I thought the warning at the top was about Jessica Jones, Jesus Christ, I didn’t realize this was just going to be these two knuckle heads talking about movie sex scenes and which ones are and are not assault!

Oh and all of this is leading up to talking about how the MPAA rates movies, specifically R or NC-17! Okay this is something I’m actually interested in and can talk-

Tybee: Some of these movies have sex scenes that are weird.

Travis When you say weird, you don’t mean it judgmentally though, right?

Tybee: No! I mean weird as in like… safety for his mental health, but no one is [SA]ed.

And then they talked about how movies with bad sex scenes, ones that involve [SA] should be effectively banned while movies with consensual sex should be given lower ratings. So… no, she means, “weird in a judgmental way”.

SIGH!

Travis then goes off on a rant about how parents bring their kids to rated R movies, so clearly, R isn’t strong enough as a warning to prevent people seeing movies with upsetting content. That then pivots into how people buy movie tickets without knowing what the movie is about, just going off the poster and tag line and thus, they are setting themselves up for disappointment.

This man must live the dullest life if the idea of spontaneity and surprise in media actively upsets him.

Travis: If you want to pick a movie to watch by throwing a dart at a dart board, that’s fine, but you should be prepared to HATE that movie!

What a strange man.

And we are back to how things are rated.

the thrust of their argument seems to be that their ought to be more judgment on the value of sex scenes in a movie to determine it’s rating. That a movie about sex addition full of consensual sex, but that’s treated as a problem should be fine for teens to watch, but something like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that has a [SA] scene should be much more restricted because it’s bad and inappropriate.

So

I am sure I don’t need to explain how, “We should be judging sexuality based on what the MPAA thinks constitutes wholesome and educational vs deviant and wrong!” Is a TERRIBLE idea for many, MANY reasons, but just as the most obvious example…

Hey Trav? Hey Tybee? What do you think a conservative ratings board would do to a film involving queer love if they where rating sexuality on a curve of acceptability? Hell they already DO THAT and it’s BAD! Imagine if that was just the blanket rule!?

Ugh, I need to speed this up, I’m barely over a quarter of the way through and this is already getting out of hand…

Travis: I watch allot of CSI, I LOVE CSI!

I bet you do…

They continue talking about how violence is allowed on TV, but a boob is forbidden… and that’s good??? Because [SA] scenes make them uncomfortable, so sex should be more tightly regulated then violence?

They opened that by talking about how American’s don’t like being made uncomfortable and I thought they where going to build up to how our puritanical culture has created a skewed sense of priority where ANY sexuality is demonized, but horrific violence is fine, but… nah it seems like that’s just cool and good, I guess.

And then Travis talks about being made uncomfortable because he watched Sideways with his mom and that movie has sex scenes and that was bad because he didn’t know sex would happen in it.

Sideways.

Then Tybee talks about watching a play when she was 15 where a bunch of grown men got fully naked and she later thanked her mom for taking her to see that since it helped to destigmatized male nudity for her.

Travis follows by talking about watching Rent and seeing an actress moon the audience and covering Griffin’s eyes, but doing the, “Cool big brother thing of opening them enough to let him see”.

Tybee comes back talking about watching Trainwreck on a plane and being made uncomfortable that they allowed her to watch a movie with sex scenes on said plane as other people might have been able to see her watching it!

Oh good and then Travis talks about watching the Shining for the first time (apparently Teresa doesn’t like scary movies so he can’t watch them at home) and complains that it surprised him with uncomfortable nudity and as both someone in a plane and a movie goer, he was scandalized at the fact that… heaven forbid, the Shining would do something to make him feel uncomfortable!

I’m chewing on my coffee mug.

And after ALL of this, after ranting about being able to watch sexy movies on planes and wanting bad sexuality to be more tightly regulated in films, Travis pivots to talking about a topless beach and gets on his high horse about how the government is trying to regulate public nudity.

Oh yes, when it comes to watching movies, the MPAA needs to be harder on this stuff and planes should NOT allow you to see titties, BUT when it comes to stripping on a public beach, personal responsibility should be enough and the government needs to butt out!

Personally, I agree that topless beaches are fine. Free the nipple baby! But I also DON’T think anything uncomfortable in a movie should be slapped with an NC-17 so Travis McElroy wouldn’t have to risk seeing it.

Tybee: I mean we just don’t live in the age of personal responsibility anymore, sadly. But I think the boards that rate movies should allow for more challenging art! We shouldn’t just censor everything that makes us uncomfortable!

Travis: *BIG SIGH* But the thing is, and I’ll get off my high horse in a second, but we’ve programed people to trust ratings.

So Travis’s argument is… ‘I mean I’d love to not censor art, but I assume people won’t bother looking into the media they consume on their own, so really, it’s best for everyone if we just ban/heavily restrict and censor anything that might be upsetting to me- I mean a random kid who might see it!’

Okay I NEED to speed this up!

Travis complains that as a 13 year old, Sex In The City didn’t have enough sex in it for him, but then pivots to expressing that he actually thinks its good that it’s a show about women now he’s an adult.

Tybee hated the city part of Sex In The City. Also not a fan of Entourage which Travis gets kinda defensive about.

Watched that show with my brothers when I was younger, it was pretty fuck’n bad!

Oh god Travis is just quoting Entourage and getting upset as Tybee describes it as being just like Sex In The City.

…

Jesus I need to quot this:

Travis: The correct explanation should be this. Entourage is Sex In The City for people who WOULD like Sex In The City if it were about dudes. Sex In The City is Entourage for people who WOULD like Entourage if it where about women.

Tybee: Yes.

No.

Travis: I like Entourage because it’s so not like me. It’s fluff! Like aliens! It’s like watching aliens because I’m not an alien and I like watching them interact with one another.

I am at a loss for words.

Travis: It’s fine because Entourage isn’t real and could never be real! No one has ever claimed Entourage could actually happen!

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!? It’s a show about rich, out of touch dick head actors and agents sleeping with women and being homophobic, what part of that is unrealistic and impossible to imagine happening!? The part where they made a big budget Aquaman movie??? Cus that was the one joke that people had about how the show was unrealistic at the time and it fucking happened!

Oh god he’s just talking about the Entourage movie… and ends with:

Travis: And that’s why you shouldn’t be mad about how they treat women, because nothing is real in Entourage. [Because its meant to take place in real time, but the movie breaks that continuity a bit.]

… okay man, sure, whatever.

And then Travis moves onto talking about how if you don’t like Entourage or Sex In The City, you should watch the OC because it quote:

Travis: In the future world where race isn’t a thing anymore. Everyone is just one beautiful same race! And they’ll forget what white people are like so they can go back and watch the OC to learn. Their is a Jewish dad and he’s the most diverse person on the whole show! It’s an amazing show! It’s the best!

I swear to god, I am starting to wonder if I’m just hallucinating at this point, because none of this can be real.

36:40 - 41:48:

Travis: The secret is that everyone has only actually seen four things. So if you talk to enough people it seems like everyone is watching something else. You talk to someone and they will say I’ve seen The Flash, Daredevil, Jessica Jones and, these are all superhero shows. And Supergirl.

5 minutes from the end of the episode, Jessica Jones is mentioned in an off hand remark! THE SECOND HALF OF THE TITLE!

38:11 Travis ACTUALLY starts talking about watching Jessica Jones. He genuinely could not talk about it more then Entourage at this point if he wanted given the remaining runtime! Just call the episode Film Ratings to Entourage, you coward!

Oh and Tybee HATED Jessica Jones because, “They force [SA] culture down your throat!”

The fuck is that supposed to mean?

Wait, hold up, Travis follows with, “My greatest fear in life is that I’ll krill* someone!”

… okay.

He clarifies he means accidentally krill someone OR be forced into doing it, since obviously, good boy that he is, he’d NEVER do it intentionally!

And that’s it! The show just ends with a plea for people to donate fan music to replace what they are currently using and an offer for people to write in with things for these two to complain about.

Give me a minute, I’ll wrap this up, but I just need to collect my thoughts.

Okay… ALRIGHT!

First of all, I still don’t really know why this show is called interrobang, it’s not really about interjections or questions, more just the two most problem free people in the world complaining about things.

Secondly, good lord Travis and Tybee both are unbearable! Tybee’s a little better, at least compared to Travis, but both of them can’t frame an argument to save their lives. They constantly double back or contradict themselves as they go, “This is bad! I mean it’s fine, BUT WHAT IF IT’S ACTUALLY BAD!? Anyway, I don’t like, but that’s a personal thing, or is it cultural? Hmm makes you think…”

It feels so much like that one episode of Always Sunny where Dennis and Dee start a podcast because they are convinced they are so naturally charismatic and interesting, anything they talk about MUST be solid gold!

Anyway, their is only so much I can rant about people ranting on the internet before I start becoming self aware and embarrassed so for now, thank you all for reading, anyone who bothered to get this far and… have a Trav-Tastic Day!

I’ll see you again soon... Ish. Maybe

*Sorry for the stupid joke, but Reddit’s already pinged me once for ‘threatening’ people by making a joke involving a gun that wasn’t in anyway a threat or call to violence so just going to tiptoe around that a little bit…

Also did a similar thing with r*pe since I don't know how reddit's moderation feels about that word being used as freely as it was in this episode.

For anyone struggling to unlock the puppet hands or to just complete The Chimney in general, I just did a quick for fun run and happened to roll Metacarpal Refinement for the perk you get at the first interlude and... GOOD LORD!

While it's use in the campaign can be somewhat questionable given how many sections require jumping vs normal climbing, the Chimney is basically all about straight forward, fast climbing and in that context the buff you get from MR is INSANE! Forget about the grip loss from ice, you'll be moving to fast for it to catch you up. Forget about the rising water, you'll be speeding along past it! And the glacier section at the end where you have to climb a slanted overhang on icy handholds preventing normal jumping and boosting strategies from working? Trivialized!

I've found a few decent tricks for dealing with the often punishing difficulty of the chimney and have given advice to people struggling on it before, but I legit think Metacarpal Refinement might actually just be the stealth hero that players struggling with the challenge have been looking for!

Has anyone else tried this strategy since the perk was added to the game and if so, have you had similar success? I'd love to know if this really is as good as it seems because I know allot of players would love to hear a really solid answer to the chimney has been found!