Topical

It’s almost impossible to completely avoid caffeine in the modern age. From coffee and tea, to chocolate and sodas, it’s one of the most prevalent — and accepted — drugs on the planet. Jelly and Russell look at their experiences, from how they first got into coffee, to addiction, and even a little science about how coffee affects the human body.

Stress is a pretty normal — and somewhat negative — part of life, so Russell and Jelly take a look at how stress affects them: from the kind of stress they deal with, to the way it tends to accumulate, and finally how they deal with it… or at least try to deal with it.

Russell and Jelly have both been on Twitter since around 2008, and since that time it’s gone through many changes, both good and bad. They reflect back on how the social network has grown, how it differs from the other social networks like Facebook, the way it’s morphed over the years, and where it’s inevitably headed.

While living in a hotel room in Sydney for two weeks, Jelly’s been eating out on a regular basis. He and Russell talk about how you’re trained as a kid to consider fast food a treat, how your treatment of eating out changes as you get older, as well as afflictions like Macca’s Regret and Second-cup Syndrome.

Jelly’s been doing quite a few preorders lately, and so he and Russell look at how preorders work, how they affect the games and tech industries, and where Kickstarter falls in the world of preordering goods.

Winning is awesome, losing not so much. But is there more to it than that? Russell and Jelly were both told as kids that “winning doesn’t matter”, so they look at how they win and lose in everyday life; from Jelly’s traumatic childhood sports stories, to Russell’s attempts at finding success in failure.

Prompted by a comic which poses the concept of a machine that can tell you how you’re going to die, Russell and Jelly talk about a topic that most people would rather avoid: death. How it’s treated in fiction and the effect it has in real life are vastly different, and ultimately they find that there really aren’t enough Batmen.

Russell and Jelly are feeling a little more mature than usual, so they take a look at their experiences in buying and owning their own homes, from the positives it brings to how the responsibility can affect more than just your everyday finances.

Product placement exists in almost all TV shows and movies in one form or another, and this has Jelly very intrigued. He and Russell look at some examples from popular culture, and ways products are shown and advertised as part of, and sometimes in conflict with, a story’s plot.

Jelly’s clearly been thinking about the Apple Pencil a little too much, as he’s got user interfaces on his mind. He and Russell discuss how we interact with devices today, and more importantly, how that might change in the future and what needs to happen to take us there.