Pencil-powered pets
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.พ. 2025
- Robert Llewellyn, Dani Siller and Bill Sunderland face a question about accelerated animals.
LATERAL is a comedy panel game podcast about weird questions with wonderful answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcas...
GUESTS:
Robert Llewellyn: @fullychargedshow, x.com/FullyCha...
Dani Siller: @consumethismedia, x.com/EscThisP...
Bill Sunderland: @consumethismedia, x.com/EscThisP...
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett at the Podcast Studios, Dublin.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2024.
Apologies for Tom's video feed skipping frames. We're still getting used to a new studio set-up. It will be fixed for the next recording batch, but we hope you enjoy this highlight nonetheless.
Probably the lack of red (It's odd, but it will grow on us)
Sco-ScoScoSco-Scott H'Headroom.
The lighting is great! And you (Tom) are looking good, too!
This must be AI Tom, beta version.
Skipped frames are absolutely fine, the lack of red t-shirt however? Unsettling. Who is this man, and what did he do with Tom Scott?
Oh, wow, a shiny Tom! There's less than 0.025% chance for one to appear!
I laughed so hard when I saw this comment. Saw it already while the ads were running so I got very excited to see the Shiny Tom!!
Just like Shiny Pokémon, he's worth the same amount of points, he's just slightly different and a little rarer.
Looks great!
@@CrazedGeek Is that an Um Actually reference?
And the profile picture on his main channel changed as well!
Tom's new haircut somehow made him look both older and younger at the same time.
This is my goal with every haircut!
Which is confusing, since he looked simultaneously early twenties and mid fourties before...
@@TobyLegion So now he's 18-19 and in his early 50s?
@danwar2489 He exists in a quantum superposition of Dorian Gray and Dorian Gray's portrait.
Someone forgot to change the red ink on the Tom printer!
no, if that was the case, the printer would just refuse to print a tom and would insist you need red ink to print a tom
Maybe after the Let's Learn Everything crew showed him up, he decided to branch out?
Or maybe he noticed that Bill was sporting the red and decided to change before the show properly started and avoid a repeat situation.
@@OMacMacca If you open up the back of the printer, there are two little squares on the circuit board....
@@illexsquid oh shit is that for real just a way to stop the printer from cucking me? :o
I think the cloning machine had a hick up and someone set the settings to 'extra fine' this time
New haircut, new clothes style...Tom got a glow up in his TH-cam retirement!
I swear he even looks younger, or rather, like, "fresher", than he did during the last recording session.
@@grmpf because the current recording you see are recorded just about last month. according to what he posted in his newsletter. So he really had time to just relax.
@@sirBrouwer I know, I get the newsletter as well.
Its confusing to see Tom without a red shirt. I mean it should be normal to see people in different clothes, but i guess the branding got a huge influence on me and the other commenters.
I swear, my brain is still confused!
It's like when they put a holiday skin on a character, lol
I immediately noticed this as well lol. No red shirt, nor a grey hoodie. Tom has clearly been abducted by aliens and is now being impersonated.
@@kaelon9170 He's been cloned! Where's red shirt Tom!
I used to work for Walmart and my supervisor always wore a long-sleeve button up shirt and a sweater vest. He came in shopping one time wearing a t-shirt and leather jacket and I didn't recognize him at all.
I think the biggest change for me was the hair
Let Dani show off her Digimon! There are also people watching this.
Yesss I was gonna say that as well! I wanted to see them real bad!
Seeing Tom in anything other than a red shirt is an existential shock akin to meeting your teacher in a grocery store.
Even though Tom newsletter prepared us for his wardrobe change it was still shocking to see his new style
Is there a reason for the change?
@@Myrtanae He mentioned at some point that T-shirts do not fit to older people well. Not sure why exactly, but that is probably part of the reason. He also mentioned that he got close to an age where that was supposedly relevant and that red variants of other clothes would not look good, either.
besites that he does not need it anymore for consistency. As the podcast now are recorded in a block. 1 block has 1 whatever he is wearing.
tom has entered his desaturated era and we're here for it 🥰
Thanks for your support!
Tom, you look G R E A T !
Tom downloaded the style DLC! Lookin' good!
The mere existence of short-hair Tom both delights and terrifies me.
"We could use a pencil to speed up the Digimon."
- "An excellent idea sir, with only two minor drawbacks... firstly, we don't have any pencils, and secondly, we dont have any Digimon"
Not being British, I never saw Red Dwarf like so many others in the comments.
Seeing Robert Llewellyn again, my mind said, "Hey, that's the host of Junkyard Wars!"
That was a great show back in the day.
Oh wow! Kryten in the flesh!
Non-red Tom Scott isn't real, he can't hurt you
Non-red Tom Scott:
Oh neat, we unlocked pallette-swapped Tom Scott!
Tom has officially entered his silver fox era 👌👌 Really brings out your eyes!
i gasped upon seeing tom in completely normal clothes that if anyone else was wearing would not be notable at all
Robert Llewellyn?!! Fantastic!
For once, Tom wasn't the oldest person on the show!
This was a perfect episode. Everybody brought some important peace of information and together they got closer and closer to the answer. If it was a show with a script, one might have said this is too straightforward of a story!
Got this straight away. I overclocked my graphing calculator by drawing on a resistor.
Nice to see Robert Llewellyn has a couple of Kryten on his shelf in the background! It's amazing the celebrities Tom is getting on this podcast.
It's weird, he doesn't look much like Kryten at all. The years have smoothed out his angles immensely.
I mean, it's not like Tom did not had a video with Robert before ;)
Yeah, but we're not going to see Tom Cruise (very famous) or Roger Chapman (obscure, but famous in the late 60's - early 70's), are we? Wait a minute, Tom, are we?
@@yurisei6732 Well he'd have to take his car to the crusher and forget to get out, first...
I had a different answer that fits the question! In the versions that had a pedometer, instead of actually going for a walk, you could clip it on to a pencil and bounce it up and down while studying and it would count as "steps"
right but that could be done with any other similarly shaped everyday objects (pens, toothbrushes, nail files, etc)
very few everyday objects have a conductive material that can be shed onto the circuit board which is a lot more specific…
Everyone's talking about Tom's shirt, but my first thought was, "Why is Tom's hair silver? He's not THAT old yet!" 😅
Tom's hair started going gray in his 20's. Being fully silver at almost 40 makes sense in his case.
It might be a lighting thing. He mentioned that as a problem in one of the Park Bench videos, and while he was willing to mess with lighting to make that not a problem when he was filming a proper high-effort special-effects-heavy video, he probably wouldn't bother for a gameshow/podcast hybrid.
Not seeing Tom in a red shirt is like seeing your primary teacher in the supermarket. My brain cannot compute.... Looks good on you, mate!
I can't believe they weren't shouting out Tamagotchi instantly. I didn't have one but it was such a cultural icon in the late 90s.
My first thought was Furby, since I remember you could put it on an uneven surface to make it happy because of how the tilt sensor worked.
But Tamagotchi and similar were my next guess.
Tamagotchi wasn't really a thing around me growing up, but amazingly the correct answer _was._ I'm astonished that it came up because I haven't heard about those things since; they don't seem to have had the same cultural staying power Tamagotchis did.
@@JimCullenI think the egg shape made them more cute and impressionable in the minds of kids (certainly for me) and they were still a thing well into the late 00’s in Australia
My reaction (like most others): DAAAAAYYYYUM, TOM!!!
This really does prove that a computer is a rock that we tricked into thinking.
love the hair my guy! and the shirt and open jacket makes you look like the cool chem teacher
Is this a quiet rebrand‽
No red top? Hair cut? Embracing the silver fox aesthetic?
I love it!
Kudos on the makeover Tom. Looks great!
Who's the new host? 😂 Kidding, loving Tom's new look
Love Haircut tom, Better than the pony tail. Post 2009 :)
I immediately guessed it was a virtual pet, but beyond that I didn't know the trick.
The only virtual pet I had, and still have in a box somewhere, was a Giga Pet frog. As I recall, it was seen as a cheaper knockoff to the more popular brands, which was probably why my parents bought it for me. Few people seem to remember it.
According to Wikipedia, it was the first to market as V-Pets in 1995, before Tamagotchi (Nov 1996), Digimon (June 1997), and Pokemon (March 1998). It renamed to Giga Pets in May 1997.
I loved my frog, and then I chronically injured it when I accidentally dropped it in the toilet.
Was hoping Dani & Bill would make a reappearance after they were briefly mentioned in last week's episode. Happy to see them again!
I was very close to getting this immediately without ever having hands on with those, though I had the specifics wrong. Some simple electronic devices can be sped up or slowed down by drawing over the back of an SMD resistor with a pencil, the extra conductivity lowers the resistance of the resistor and lets more current through.
Kryten is here!! this means we have to change the bulb!
My God, I never imagined I’d ever see DIGIMON get a shoutout on Lateral. 😃
As more of a Pokemon kid, I thought the only thing I knew about Digimon was the first bit of the theme song that says, "Digimon, digital monsters, digimon are the champions"... but as soon as she described connecting them together to battle, THAT triggered a memory deep in my childhood brain somewhere... I could have *sworn* that was a Tomagotchi thing, but maybe I actually had Digimon and suppressed the memory for decades? 😅
I remember in the 2000s it was also a thing in overclocking CPUs to bridge certain contacts on the CPU casing with a pencil and it'd think "oh, i'm a faster CPU"
Because the chips themselves were the same, the casings would have different connections on them for it to identify what had been tested at the factory to be able to handle a certain speed
In 2009 I temporarily borked my mediocre graphics card with a pencil traces so parents would buy me a new, more powerful one. Terrible idea but it worked.
If anyone didn't know what the word 'dissonance' meant, now you know because that's what you felt after seeing Tom in this video.
Aww, if Dani had grabbed one we'd have been able to see it on this video highlight.
And I'd guessed the type of pet -- but didn't know the details of how the pencil might help
I was going to go Chia pet, and somehow having a pencil made it grow through the holes better.
I'm quite happy that it's about my childhood obsession Digimon instead. Although the anime was far better than any of the games, IMO.
Oooh cool Robert Llewellyn, love Red Dwarf and Kryten. I thought immediately Tamogotchi.
My first thought was also a bit early - chia pets.
I was thinking Chia Pets. I figured the graphite helped make the grass grow on it faster because it had important nutrients or something. No clue if that's the right time period though, I wasn't alive that millenium. Nobody tell Tom I think he might go into cardiac arrest if he finds out
Haircut looks great!
Pencil overclocking is not a unheard of thing. The early AMD Athlon CPU's had tiny jumpers on them that were laser cut to set the speed of them, which could be filled in with pencil to run them at a higher speed. Ive also heard of pencil being used to short out safety interlock components, or to adjust motor speed controllers to make them run faster.
Got this one rather quick thanks to watching every episode of Code Lyoko more than once. There's an episode or two involving a Tamagotchi
I remember overclocking an old handheld gaming device by by rubbing a bit of pencil between two contacts. Just a bit more voltage, just a few more MHz, and a couple more FPS....
Tom Scott fashion era has begun
Tom's got a new look! Fancy!
I need to see the Tech Diff crew react to new Tom.
Did no one else here overclock their AMD Athlon (Thunderbird or XP) CPU back in the early 2000s, using a very similar pencil trick? It unlocked the multiplier, IIRC, and in that 32-bit, single-core, ~1- to 2-GHz clock era, we appreciated virtually any speed boost we could get.
I never knew Digimon were something other than a TV show
Tom looks different.
He's not wearing a red T-shirt...
and has grey hair
I got to “tamagotchi” almost instantly, but I would have never figured out the real answer on my own.
Tom looks absolutely beautiful with this new get up. His eyes really pop. Keep it up, man.
Wow, What happened to Tom? Is it the same Tom Scott?
I was so busy looking at Tom at the start, I missed the question and had to restart the video just to listen to the question once again.
The actual answer was way more clever than I thought it was going to be - I thought it would be something along the lines of sticking the pencil in a hole and maybe twisting (like with casettes).
However, I'm surprised how long it took them to get to Tamagotchi (that was my very first thought whilst the question was being read out).
This is just like early Intel Pentium chips used to be. They would sell these cheap chips with less cache RAM and with a locked underclock setting, but it was really a high-end chip that had just had a couple of connections desoldered. If you knew what you were doing you could use a graphite pencil to bridge the connections and both overclock your CPU and give it access to more cache RAM, saving a couple of hundred dollars.
Tom's first new look for years! Nice work, Tom.
Sea Monkeys had three phases. Mid 70s, early 80s, and again in the late 90s/early 00s.
You know I'm old enough to have watched red dwarf as a kid/teenager when it was 1st aired.
Back in the day (probably 2000-2001) AMD's Athlon processors could be unlocked for overclocking by bridging a couple of traces on the top of the... not sure what you call it, the substrate that has the pins and the chip itself is bonded to it. Anyway, it was a trace that got laser-cut at the factory but you could bridge it by running a pencil over it and then covering it with a piece of tape to protect it.
Your new look absolutely fits you Tom.
Yay Kryten!
WOAH WE GOT RARE-SHINY TOM BEFORE GTA6
DAMNNN AND THAT CAMERA QUALITY
Tom's new look makes him look like he could fit quite well as an extra in a movie scene about riots in the london streets
Back then, we used to use 'pencil mod' to overclock CPUs. Together with 'pet' -> 'tamagotchi' thought, it was pretty obvious.
Some of my friends had Tamagotchi pets, I had Gigapets and a talking Nanopet, but I never saw anyone on the playground with a Digimon.
same here. mid-to-late 00’s the only one of those that notably existed amongst the kids where I grew up were Tamagotchis
I got this instantly despite being too young to remember the 90s
Oh. So this is why everyone wore the red shirt. They knew it would be their last chance.
As someone who did unlock AMD K7 CPUs with the same technique, I had the answer very quickly !
Looking great Tom!
I'm freaking out! Tom is not in the red t-shirt. The universe is about to collapse on itself or what?
You could do something similar with AMD CPUs in the early 00s. On the top were some contacts pads, and you could draw a line with a pencil connecting them to trick the processor into clocking higher than it ordinarily would. It was basically free performance if you didn't mind the risk of a little bit of instability
Meanwhile I was the only person in my school seemingly into Digimon...
New haircut and new top? I can't deal with all these changes... 🤣
I did a double take at the new silver Tom. Gone are the reds, but that’s ok. Silver is the new red!
Reminded of the fact that, thanks to Garmin and others, instead of a tamagotchi we are now the stupid animal we are trying to keep alive!
I'm just young enough that I didn't know Digimon existed outside the video games lol
Tom with some phenomenal style.
Haha! This was how we overclocked our processors back then for our computers.
OH MY GOD! It's Robert!!!! :D :D
I was probably too young for a Digimon, but I do ever so slightly remember the television show. Or at least, I remember the theme tune
Initial thoughts: either tamagotchi or chia "pets", or some derivative fads; possibly using the action of sharpening the pencil to improve/trigger/fill its quality of life?
Perhaps having a living pet, like a rodent, that would make good use of the wood shavings (e.g. for lining its environment)?
Could also be a therapeutic or helper "pet" that's linked to the use of a personal journal; or to encourage writing, drawing, creating, or maybe recording dreams/habits/schedule?
Some video games involving "pets" in a larger sense could even use a pencil type input device, like a Nintendo stylus and such.
Then there is using the pencil as a timing device, like fuses or candles were, to remind the user to perform some tasks helping your pet.
Also, "pet project", "pet peeve", "petting" given to your pet, "your pet" in a **** way... Or using "renewable and eco-friendly" wood instead of dangerous/toxic plastic/ink...
My first thought was Tamigochi and when Bill started going off on Sea Monkeys I knew it would take a while to get back on course. And then when they started on the graphite and Tom brought up the screwdriver, but they ignored his hint I realized, the pressure of being on the show has to make this so much harder.
coming up with ideas in real-time is rather difficult, even if you are good at imprv
Wow! Tom looks like Freddy Mercury if he had been a science communicator🤩.
First thought after hearing the question: Tamagotchi?
Did I wake up in a parallel universe where Tom is slightly different?
We've witnessed the end of an era of the internet: no more red shirt Tom :(
This is really just me being pedantic, but the Digimon (Digital Monster) is the creature on the screen. The de *vice* is called the Digivice.
After hearing the question the first time I can think of certain Japanese gadget that was very popular among kids in the mid to late 90's approximately, something that was a pet and fit in the pocket.
Edit: I've never heard of Digimon being discussed as Tamagotchi instead of the Pokemon like animated tv show and the playstation etc games that followed.
Just wow!
holy shit Tom Scott leave some rizz for the rest of us! looking good with the fresh cut my dude =)
Lol, got the idea straight away, just the wrong name 😁
There were actually certain AMD processors back in my day that would allow you to unlock a higher performance when you would connect 2 points with pencil lead. A B-type pencil was recommended, HB didn't leave enough graphite.
Tom getting a upgrade I see. I can't believe I can't remember these Digimon devices, I knew about the cartoon, I paid close attention to gaming news, I was into Pokemon and Tamagotchi's yet somehow I only learned about these this week in a 'This Is' video, and more about them just now.
Damn. Tom scott can pull off looks other than a red t shirt. Who wouldve guessed?