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5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel and Cattails are both video games. That is the only thing they have in common, but that does still technically make this a double video game episode. 2D chess apparently wasn't hard enough for Conor Petersen, so he decided to create a chess variant with some new dimensions: Turn and Timeline. Does that sound confusing? It is! Have fun. Cattails, on the other hand, is a 2D, top-down RPG where you play as a member of a faction of wild cats. You'll spend your days hunting, expanding your faction's territory, progressing along a unique skill tree, and even mining! Does that sound much less confusing? It is! Have fun!This is the link to the soundtrack for Cattails, if you'd like to listen to it:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDOXxv1h510We apologize for all the lag, voices cutting out, and other various sound issues this week. We're not sure why it was worse than usual, since everything sounded fine while we were recording, but it is what it is now, we guess.

 If you're into tactical games, first person shooters, games where no two rounds are ever the same, or for some strange reason even just games that are set in Bangladesh, Zero Hour could be the game for you. It's got all the stuff just mentioned, and more! If you're intrigued by this description, good! Zero Hour is Cirdan's topic today, so you can look forward to a detailed explanation of the game there. After that comes airships. Today, the most publicized stories about airships are those about disasters such as the Hindenburg. There's more to discover about airships than just the tragedies, though, a lot of which Jonah takes you through in this episode.

If you guessed Insurgency: Sandstorm as the Cirdan's topic for this episode, well done! Sadly, there's no prize except the knowledge that you're doing better than Jonah on this. Insurgency: Sandstorm is the sequel to Insurgency, a first-person shooter which has been covered on the podcast before, in the episode titled "Game-Changing Thruster? Elaborate Hoax? Just what is the EmDrive?". We recommend listening to that episode before listening to this one, since the parts of Insurgency: Sandstorm that are the same as parts of Insurgency aren't discussed in this episode. Jonah's topic for the week is Sun Tzu and his book The Art of War, during which he spectacularly fails to remember the existence of Asia. We apologize for this episode being released a day late, both of us were very busy with school and unfortunately didn't have time to finish the editing yesterday.An Important Message from Cirdan:The day after recording, the competitive mode was removed from Insurgency: Sandstorm. Some of the stuff mentioned in the episode may no longer be accurate because of this. I suspect this was done with the express purpose of making my life difficult.

Crop circles look really cool. They also appear out of nowhere and have no scientific explanation, making them a popular focus for fringe theorists and New Age groups. This episode, Jonah gives a more scientific look at crop circles, demystifying some of the weirder ideas about them in the process. Also in this episode is Cirdan's review of Brass Brigade, a third person shooter centered around massive, incredibly configurable bot battles. You may have noticed this episode is a day late. Here's a snapshot of our conversation yesterday:TechnoPorg Yesterday at 5:15 PMDon't forget to upload the episode todayTaox Yesterday at 5:16 PMYea I will when I'm done editing[5:16 PM]I'm doing chores right now[5:16 PM]It will only take me like an hourTechnoPorg Yesterday at 5:16 PMOkay sounds good[5:16 PM]Just wanted to make sure you hadn't forgotten because I have done that beforeTaox Yesterday at 5:17 PMWell I haven't ever forgotten lolTaox Yesterday at 9:07 PMCRAP I FORGOT[9:10 PM]THE ONE TIME I FORGET IS THE ONE TIME THAT I WAS REMINDEDTechnoPorg Yesterday at 9:36 PMDon't worry lol[9:37 PM]I'm honestly glad you forgot because I was about to fall asleep and then I realized "Crap I haven't released the episode for today" and got out of bed and ran upstairs[9:37 PM]I'm going back to bed now good nightTaox Yesterday at 9:37 PMLmao[9:37 PM]Goodnight[9:37 PM]I'll have the editing done tommorow[9:37 PM]Dont worry

If you've spent time in the world of shooter games, you've probably heard about a game called Rainbow Six Siege. What you might not have heard of, though, is its predecessor, Rainbow Six Three: Raven Shield. This episode, Cirdan takes us back to the start of its life in 2003 and gives his thoughts on this old, but excellent game. This week's other topic is compilers in general, but primarily one compiler called LLVM. It's quite a nerdy topic, but hopefully still an understandable and interesting one. We're still having problems with the software we normally use to record, so it's another week using Discord. This is definitely not ideal, since Jonah's ping will periodically  shoot up to 1500 ms and do weird things to his voice in the recording. We apologize for this, and with luck everything will be back to normal next week. In some time zones, it's probably still Monday. I definitely didn't forget to release this episode yesterday.

Have you ever considered that for a large portion of your life, a loaf of bread has been watching you? It's a staple food in almost every culture, and yet it's easily overlooked. This episode, Jonah shines the spotlight on bread, going through its history from 800 000 years ago to about the time of the Roman Empire. It ends somewhere anticlimactically there, because there are no more major advancements in the field of bread after that point. Prior to that, Cirdan reviews Vigor, a shooter/survival game set in post-apocalyptic Norway where you have to upgrade your shelter, craft weapons, and fight other players to survive.

Fun fact: 31 in base 8 is the same as 25 in base 10, a statement generally written in the form Oct 31 = Dec 25. Cirdan, clearly embracing this sentiment, has chosen a horror game called Phasmophobia as his topic. Jonah, pretty far on the other side of the topic spectrum, gives a comparison of Godot and Unity, two popular game engines. This is an important message from Jonah:I do not enjoy learning from videos. Whenever possible, I use written tutorials, which is probably why until today, I had never watched a video tutorial for Godot. Godot has an excellent manual, but this time, I couldn't find what I was looking for, so I decided to turn towards YouTube. The conclusion of this seemingly irrelevant story? Within the first 10 seconds of the video, it was revealed to me that I had been pronouncing Godot wrong the whole time I'd been using it. Please, while listening to this episode, pretend I'm saying Go-Dough instead of Go-Dot.

This week, Cirdan leads us through the multiplayer element of the game Bannerlord. If you missed last episode, where he talks about the singleplayer element, we recommend you listen to that first. I wanted to call this episode Mount & Blade II: Electric Boogaloo, but since we already had an episode with a similar title, I decided to restrain myself. Following that, Jonah gives a somewhat technical, but hopefully still interesting explanation of techniques used by professional teams of developers to manage their code.

The coronavirus is influencing a lot of things in our world, and among them is Jonah's topic for this episode, vaccines. This includes what they do, how they do it, types of vaccines, and more. After that comes Cirdan's topic, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. This is an incredibly cool game set in a completely dynamic medieval world where you can pretty much do whatever you want. It also happens to be full to the brim with bugs, but players agree it's still one of the best medieval games out there.

In this episode of the podcast, Cirdan gives his review of a game called Hollow Knight, a game which he loves playing and thinks you would too. One of the best parts of this game is the soundtrack, which you can find at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZjpMCu2JRc . After that, Jonah talks about Isaac Newton and his three laws of motion. Please note that at one point, he says something along the lines of "The second law actually doesn't say this will happen", but means "The third law actually doesn't say this will happen".

Door Kickers 2, a top-down strategic game. You'd think it has nothing to do with kicking doors. At least, that's what Jonah thought. That assumption is false. As Cirdan tells us, there is a significant amount of door kicking involved. Prior to that, Jonah teaches us about the basics of 3D, which in this case refers to the realm of 3-dimensional images created using software, by walking you through the steps required to make an animated movie.

For the first time possibly ever, Cirdan and Jonah are both talking about video games. Cirdan's game of choice is Layers of Fear 2, a horror game set on an abandoned cruise ship. Jonah will give a review of something quite different, a game called Kingdoms and Castles. Kingdoms and Castles is a medieval city-building game. I, Jonah forgot to do my show notes for this episode, and thus my topic sounds fairly awful. I did record another version of it by myself afterwards that sounds quite a bit better, but we decided to scrap it because it doesn't have any participation from Cirdan. Sorry about that.

Pretty much what the title says, and Cirdan talks about Ravenfield. I can't write a good description :(

In the 27th episode of the podcast, the Nerds discuss the game Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, and a few programming languages that don't merit their own topic but are worth mentioning nonetheless. I'm not sure if Cirdan edited this out, but if I say "According to the TIOBE index, Visual Basic is the 6th most popular programming language, right after Visual Basic", I meant to say C# rather than Visual Basic a second time.

This week on the podcast, Cirdan shines the spotlight on a game called Vampyr, about a British man who turns into a vampire. Sounds boring? It's not. Technically, Jonah talks about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before that, but that's so short a topic it's barely worth mentioning.

Soccer is one of the most ubiquitous sports on the planet. That is, soccer with feet. Soccer with cars, on the other hand, is another matter entirely. This week, Cirdan introduces us to Rocket League, a game where you play soccer, but with cars. After that, Jonah gives us a rundown on C, as in the programming language. Sorry to disappoint anyone who was hoping for 23 more episodes about the alphabet. Also, Cirdan is now editing the podcast, so it might sound a little different.

This week, Jonah gives us a basic rundown of coding and coding languages. Additionally, Cirdan tells us about Call to Arms, the spiritual successor to Men of War and one of his favorite shooters/RTS. 

 In this week's episode, Jonah introduces us to the EmDrive, a seemingly physics-defying thruster with the potential to revolutionize space travel as we know it. Before that, though, Cirdan gives his review of an old and somewhat forgotten masterpiece, the first-person shooter Insurgency.

This week on Rambling Nerds, Jonah will be telling us about Starlink Internet, a project that aims to get WI-FI on all parts of the earth through the use of low-orbit satellites. Then, Cirdan tells us about a very unique game that he loves, SCP: Secret Laboratory.

Yes, that's right folks, this week we have our first guest, Lukas! This means that this is our first ever episode to feature 3 topics, with Jonah talking about zero-gravity planes, Cirdan talking about Battlefront 2 Autoplayers, and Lukas talking about, you "guest" it (haha much laughter), the Chilean Civil War!Also, here's the link to the video of weightless cats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9XtK6R1QAk