Small Time Champion, Part 6 (Patreon)

I think the sounds are fairly balanced and figured out! Lawry sounds okay - nice and clear. There's not too much processing damage. Seems pretty alright even on hardware meant to hear for the little stuff!

Anyway, this episode is interesting because it's based loosely on a real conversation I had with a friend. The topic was, in essence, "How bad can we make a production before somebody notices," with me arguing that people generally notice if you're making filler or putting in low effort. All entertainment is kind of a lie, but they're fun, sometimes beautiful lies, crafted out of affection, and as long as everyone is having fun, everybody agrees to go along with them and enjoy the show you're putting on. The metaphor my friend used, however, was this idea that if you gradually added sawdust to a rice crispy treat, people only notice past a certain volume.

So I looked it up and found out my friend was drawing this idea from a video about that exact topic made some three years ago, which discovered people will eat an "astonishing" 33% sawdust by volume before they realize something is up. However, I looked a little deeper at it, and the sawdust this person used was this really fine-grain, safe to eat sawdust, and it turns out that quality of sawdust is REALLY EXPENSIVE. Ironically, the cost per volume of this sawdust DRAMATICALLY EXCEEDED the cost of the rice crispy treat, and the only way you could get sawdust cheaper than the treat itself was to turn towards processed wood or some really gnarly pine waste, which would have been not just noticeable, but also likely a serious health hazard from either chemicals or common allergies.

Not so astonishing in context, then, that if you shop around for absolutely top shelf sawdust, you can put a lot of it into a rice crispy treat, only to go bankrupt because first, it took a lot of cost and effort to hide the deception, and second, because everyone will get mad when they find out.

For what it is worth, this is also pretty much what happened in the game this episode was based on. The sawdust conversation was separate, but the player Lawry is standing in for did use essentially this line of reasoning to argue on behalf of sabotaging the other teams.