Important If True 20: Christmas is Canceled

[Jake]

Important If True 20:

Christmas is Canceled
If you had the ultimate power of suggestion over your friends, but only when mumbling while pretending to sleep, how would you use it? Will a coterie of highly specialized Christmas spirits put Santa out of a job? Why die alone on Mars when you can watch someone else do it from your living room couch? Answers to these questions and the rest of life's mysteries, coming to your theater this summer.

Send us email at questions@importantiftrue.com. If you enjoyed this and would like to subscribe to an ad-free feed, please consider supporting Idle Thumbs by backing our Patreon.

Discussed: Highly-specialized Krampuses, Yule Cat, Salad Fingers, Krampus, the Yuliverse (Yuleniverse?), moving to Mars, getting Truman Show'd on Mars, years-long sleeptalking deception, food genie apocalypse,

Jake's Endorsement: OBi200 1-Port VoIP Phone Adapter to turn a Google Voice account into a real landline

Chris' Endorsement: Field Notes Reporter's Notebooks

Nick's Endorsement: Bon Appetit's cooking series It's Alive with Brad

Sponsored By: Hover domain name registration, Quip electric toothbrushes

 

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• Listen in iTunes

[unimural]

I quite enjoyed Mike's genie-email, but I think the poop-apocalypse math was off. The mass of Earth is roughly 6 * 10^24 kg. A ton is 10^3 kg. A billion tons is 10^12 kg. To increase the Earth's mass even by 1 percent means increasing Earth's mass by roughly 10^22 kg. With the extra 7 billion tons a year, this would take 10 billion years. In roughly 5 billion years the sun will turn into a red giant, swallowing Earth and all the extra poop. Stuff is big and takes a long time.

 

Another way of looking at is that nothing close to humans eating half the planet a year happens. We only eat very very tiny portions of Earth's crust. Or, yet another way of looking at it is that if 7 billion tons is 50% of the mass of the Earth, the humans would make up something like 2-3 percent of the mass of the Earth.

 

Still probably doomed by all the antimatter explosions and shockwaves.

 

EDIT: Also, with the extra poop would could fertilize a lot of the barren lands, and we could convert all farm land into carbon sinks and combat climate change. And cause all our waters to become overgrown.

Edited June 30, 2017 by unimural
Benefits of poop!

[Nelsormensch]

Oh happy hot damn, the jólasveinarnir ("Yule lads") are just he most wonderfully fucking weird, great things. They lack the menace of Krampus and are just weird and kinda gross? So good.

 

All 13 (plus their mother and father) are illustrated here, courtesy of the government of Iceland. 

 

I'm not sure which my favourite illustration is, but it's probably between Ketkrókur the meat hooker (look at the grip on that hook!):

 

 

and Askasleikir the bowl licker, because damn is that one salacious look:

 

[Problem Machine]

3 hours ago, unimural said:

I quite enjoyed Mike's genie-email, but I think the poop-apocalypse math was off. The mass of Earth is roughly 6 * 10^24 kg. A ton is 10^3 kg. A billion tons is 10^12 kg. To increase the Earth's mass even by 1 percent means increasing Earth's mass by roughly 10^22 kg. With the extra 7 billion tons a year, this would take 10 billion years. In roughly 5 billion years the sun will turn into a red giant, swallowing Earth and all the extra poop. Stuff is big and takes a long time.

Yeahh I was pretty sure that there was something that wasn't adding up about the "humans eat 50% of the world a year" theory. Thanks for running the numbers on that.

I love that this podcast has become the "we turn your emails into a 90s movie" podcast

[Flay]

Wait, Vinnie and Brad... Production guy writing on the screen... Did Giant Bomb make a cooking show?

[infamous space turtle]

Yule cat definitely swallows children whole quickly and discreetly. 

 

 

[Kyir]

I would like to point out that the easy solution to getting a second season of people to Mars for the murder/fuck reality show is to not tell anyone it's actually a reality show. You can simply recruit people as "colonists" and pretend to be making a legitimate TV show on the side based on the new excitement about actual Mars colonization. You could even announce openly that the TV show profit would be going toward Mars research without admitting what's going on up there.

[Urthman]

I can't tell anymore when Idle Thumbs is predicting/re-inventing dumb pop culture and when they are just gaslighting us about A Bug's Life, but I was leaning towards the latter when Jake and Nick were talking about the Santa team-up movie being a DreamWorks-type thing. 

 

https://youtu.be/aPLiBxhoug0

 

(in which Santa, Jack Frost, and the Easter Bunny team up  to save Hoistmas or something) 

[SuperBiasedMan]

Christmas is Cancelled is my most anticipated Wizard Jam game for December.

[Chris]

5 hours ago, Urthman said:

I can't tell anymore when Idle Thumbs is predicting/re-inventing dumb pop culture and when they are just gaslighting us about A Bug's Life, but I was leaning towards the latter when Jake and Nick were talking about the Santa team-up movie being a DreamWorks-type thing. 

 

https://youtu.be/aPLiBxhoug0

 

(in which Santa, Jack Frost, and the Easter Bunny team up  to save Hoistmas or something) 

 

At least for myself I can honestly say I was not aware this movie existed 

[RaggedClaws]

I can't help but think that Christmas is Cancelled is just a weirder, shittier, and far more specific version of American Gods.

 

Also, which other Christmastime characters would join the Yuleniverse? I vote for the Christmas Log. I also vote against Black Pete.

[Cordeos]

There was a time where Krampus was marketed as a sort of scoundrel and ladies man

 

That is all

[Nappi]

This was a hilarious episode! I love where the podcast is headed, even if I don't know where that is exactly.

 

Someone going through his/her webcam footage and finding out that a weirdo creeps in the kitchen every night to lick all the spoons would be terrifying premise for a horror movie.

 

On 30.6.2017 at 11:17 PM, unimural said:

I quite enjoyed Mike's genie-email, but I think the poop-apocalypse math was off. The mass of Earth is roughly 6 * 10^24 kg. A ton is 10^3 kg. A billion tons is 10^12 kg. To increase the Earth's mass even by 1 percent means increasing Earth's mass by roughly 10^22 kg. With the extra 7 billion tons a year, this would take 10 billion years. In roughly 5 billion years the sun will turn into a red giant, swallowing Earth and all the extra poop. Stuff is big and takes a long time.

 

Another way of looking at is that nothing close to humans eating half the planet a year happens. We only eat very very tiny portions of Earth's crust. Or, yet another way of looking at it is that if 7 billion tons is 50% of the mass of the Earth, the humans would make up something like 2-3 percent of the mass of the Earth.

 

Haha.. I also enjoyed the email quite a bit – very Randall Munroe's What if? -esque – but that bit made me stop walking and go "Wait, there is no way this can be true." Maybe the reader was using log scale.

 

Edit: Thanks Nick for recommending It's Alive with Brad. A friend of mine once linked me an episode, but I did not have time to watch the full video then and quickly forgot about it. I really like the thing Brad and Vinny have going on.

 

[Deadpan]

I think Chris and Jake's disagreement over the evolutionary effects of the food wish is caused by the fact that Jake is talking about biological evolution while Chris is focused on societal evolution, since the premise of that conversation - what if the ability to summon food was introduced earlier in human history? - is relatively vague. So in a way, I think they are both right in that before a certain point, the ability to sustain yourself without effort would have doomed our species to drown in poop, but after a certain point it would have accelerated progress (towards also drowning in poop).

 

I checked out Alive with Brad and it's highly enjoyable. Normally this sort of post-production mockery might seem a little mean spirited, but it's nicely balanced out by the fact that Brad is acting friendly to the point of almost being overbearing. Any time anybody walks through the background of the shot he's like "Oooh it's my main man xyz!" or has some nickname for them, so the text popups end up feeling more like a cheerful "get a load of this guy".

 

EDIT: Also, a bad Krampus movie was made not too long ago.

Edited July 3, 2017 by Deadpan
Hoistmas

[twmac]

As the gang were describing the Krampus stuff, I was imagining puppets in the vein of Labyrinth or Dark Crystal and it was a series of terrifying images of each of this grotesque characters doing lewd things as they stared at me.

 

Ugh, thanks, that will seep into my goddamn nightmares.

[Atlantic]

Good news @twmac! In 2015 there was a film called Krampus that featured the titular creature as an 80s style man in costume with his little helpers as various puppets and such. It's actually a very good little film!

 

[twmac]

I've seen Rare Exports.... Fuuuck this is going to give me nightmares. I don't like Christmas at all, so when horror elements creep into it, I really don't like it.

[SNAKES]

Krampus is by the same guy that directed Trick-R-Treat, a halloween classic!

[TychoCelchuuu]

I binged every episode of It's Alive with Brad and that was amazing! It's now my second favorite YouTube cooking show after Henry's Kitchen.

[Patrick R]

Given it's group of rag-tag freaks with intensely lacivious not-quite sexual but nonetheless disquieting obsessions, I think the Yule Lads movie can only actually be directed by John Waters.

[fondue]

So pleased. The Yule Lads came up in our festive quiz at work. Surprisingly, I was the only one who knew door sniffer was real... 

[xepherys]

So, my wife and I are in Iceland for our anniversary, and decided to visit the phallological museum because, well, why not‽ Interestingly, they have a small room that contains displays of cryptozoological penises, including none other than our friend the Yule Lad.

 

 

[Problem Machine]

Festive!

[Tant Ragnar]

What better way to get in to the holiday spirit than to read a heroic crown of sonnets about the Yule Lads?

 

“Awake now!” Midnight Slammer then proclaimed
With all his might he’d shut the door so hard
Its hinges squeaked and popped as he exclaimed
Quite joyous, “Never leave your door unbarred!”

 

Rest of the crown of sonnets about Gryla and the lads available here:

 

http://danielstahl.co/books/a-most-sorrowful-christmas-tale-of-wishes-unfulfilled/