Danny (00:00): Welcome rats, crocodraculas, dinosaurs and fly fishing enthusiasts one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts, Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld. Eric (00:23): And Eric Oestrich. Danny (00:23): And we have with us today Ryan Veeder. Ryan (00:27): Hello. Danny (00:27): We, we, we edit stuff out there is a, there is a post. Ryan (00:36): That's not how I do things. Ryan (00:37): So we're going to talk about Ryan's body of work in interactive fiction, his quadrennial exposition and the IF community in general. Welcome to you Ryan Veeder. Ryan (00:51): Hi. Danny (00:51): That's where it was going to go. That's fine. That's good. Okay. So first off how did you get involved with writing interactive fiction? Ryan (01:05): Mmm, in 2011, it must've been for my life. Up to that point, I had kind of dipped in and out of knowing about interactive fiction and finding places online to play Infocom games and then forgetting about it. Ryan (01:24): Then finding out about modern IF and then forgetting about it. And so in 2011, I was like, Oh yeah, I need to, I need to get back into this. What was that program that lets you play these games? And I remembered the name of the program was Inform. So I downloaded that and it wasn't a text adventure interpreter, but a development environment. And I said, Oh, well I guess I'll learn how to write a game. And I got started that way. Danny (02:02): Do you remember what your first your first Infocom game was? The one I think about all the, Oh, I probably played Hitchhiker's Guide first, but like many people, I didn't get much of anywhere in that game. That Infocom game that I think about the most. And that was probably the biggest influence on me from those very early years was the lurking horror. Danny (02:27): Oh no, that's a good one. Yeah, I don't think a lot of people got past the Babel Fish puzzle as people have remarked over and over again in the, in the years. Is there anyone in the IF community past or current that ah, you're just a really big fan of the, that you feel, I don't know that you'd like your work to, your works to to be up to the level of? Ryan (02:52): Well, the correct answer to that question is Emily Short. Emily Short has been a big inspiration to me and like encouragement to me. And after I published my first game, I put out this game and I said well I made something. If no one cares about it, then that's fine. I'll go on doing other stuff. But Emily Short published this review of my first game about making a stew. And she was like, well, this is kind of good and this is kind of good. And even at that point I was smart enough to know who Emily Short was, that her opinion meant a lot. And so that little bit of encouragement propelled me to keep on making stuff. So those were, those are the two coincidences or chance happenings that led me to be an IF author are accidentally downloading Inform and Emily Short bothering to review my first game. The other person I would name is Doug Eagan because in my, one of those spats of knowing about IF, I played his game afflicted, which is about a vampire and a gross restaurant. Ryan (04:05): Afflicted and the lurking horror are kind of the binary star of what I, my work kind of revolves around. I think the idea of games that take place in the dark sneaking around kind of a scary location. I always think about at least I get most out of text adventures is this idea of sneaking invisibly through a space that maybe I'm not supposed to be, but I can get away with it because it's a video game. Danny (04:39): And you see that a lot in the in the rat King, cause of course I played a bunch of these on Saturday. The rat in the museum. Is it possible to get caught in that game? Because it, it definitely says don't go that way, but it pretty much disallows you from going that way. Ryan (04:59): Right. I think that in the Roscovian Palladium, is that the one we were talking? Danny (05:05): Yeah. Ryan (05:05): Yes, yes. I believe that there isn't a game over in that except for the ending. So I could check, but I tend to design things nowadays where if there's a fail state, then it's something that like we block you from failure instead of actually letting you fail or if we let you fail, but then you have an option to rewind to a place where you haven't made a mistake anymore. I'm guess I'm not super interested in actually losing a game perhaps because the undo option is right there. So any kind of failure state doesn't feel very compelling in the first place. So rather than allow that kind of a cognitive dissonance of the game is over. No, it's not. I just start over. I tried to create a smoother experience of, Oh, well that would be a bad idea. We won't do that. Or we try that. And it didn't work and we're not gonna go any further cause our hand would melt or something. And trying to make things easy on people most of the time. Eric (06:27): So one of the things I pulled up the Roscovian Palladium and one of the things on the sidebars, you have two other games about rats as well. Ryan (06:35): Yeah. The first game I published is about rats making a stew that's called, "you've got a stew going". And then later on I made Captain Verdatere's plunder, which is about the player character as a human and on a pirate ship. And his captain is a rat who bosses him around. And then the Roscovian Palladium is kind of still along the same trail toward one of the first ideas I had for an interactive fiction was going to be this very high stakes story about the rat society. Some stuff I like goofy world-building I had been doing before I discovered that I could write text adventures and I thought, okay, I will get around to doing this, you know, Lord of the rings of rats later, but I'm going to start out by doing a low stake story in that world. And so I wrote a game where rats want to make a stew and kind of characterize this world on a, you know, day to day level. And I still have not gotten around eight or nine years later to writing the big epics story of rat politics. But it's on the list. Danny (07:56): Do you like poke at it occasionally and just like, Oh this, this would be good for that over the years? Ryan (08:02): Yes, definitely. And it's taken a lot of different forms in the, in it, its first version was rats have shut down the factory that makes the sun work. And so someone has to go into the factory and negotiate with the rats and make the sun start going. And then I kind of backed off from that and kind of a slightly less than magical realist thing. And then I really wanted to do a fire emblem game but in text with rats. And I hammered at that for a while and made a combat system and it didn't go anywhere. I ended up using the combat system though and now it's, it looks slightly different. It looks more like a Star Fox game, but you know, big projects like that, you work on it for awhile, you shape it into something, you work on something smaller, you come back to the old project and you, you know, destroy part of it and you build up more of it. And, you know, maybe before I die I will finish that big rat game. Danny (09:17): I definitely know the feeling. I mean I've, I've been working with the same IP since 1994 essential. So I'm, I'm well well familiar with that. I'm curious about the the propensity to not kill off the player, to not have a premature ending. Do you ever get feedback about that? Like do people opine on that design? Ryan (09:42): I can't say as I do. I think that and probably my impetus for working that way has something to do with a general feeling in text adventure authorship in the hive mind of designing games in a friendly way, not wanting to screw the player over making puzzles that are fair. And I think of myself, I don't know if this is something that other people think about me, but I think that I do pretty easy puzzles. I tend to go easy on the player in a way that not everybody does. Danny (10:20): Now I feel bad cause I could not finish the lurkening. I gave it an hour but I did not figure it out. Ryan (10:28): That one is a tricky one because it was written for the MIT mystery hunt. And so it has constraints that text adventure games don't normally have. And it's intended to be approached from more of a mystery hunt minded mindset where in the mystery hunt or in puzzle hunts, you see something weird, a game or a crossword puzzle and you poke at it and poke at it and you have this expectation that an answer is going to fall out of it. You're not just going to finish it. You're going to get a word or a phrase and be able to plug that into the greater puzzle system. And it was, it was written with the expectation not that people would be, because you were like streaming this while while going through a list of games. So it's the kind of thing where more so than even other IF games, you're supposed to hit your head against it for a while and it is structured. The, another cool thing about this game is that it there's a very short time around the game. You have nine turns, I think it's nine. And then it's game over and you restart and then you have nine turns and you try to learn something each time, hopefully or at least get toward learning something each run through. And then you can learn different spells that you can learn or that you can apply to understand the space more and more as you go. So it's very iterative, unlike other games where you can just like actually make continual progress. Danny (12:13): Yeah, I think I've found one spell and it did nothing in every room that I said. So I was like, Oh, are there more spills? Like what, what am I doing? I'm sorry. It's funny, I was also confounded by some of the Balderstone. Oh yes. I did unsuccessfully jump in the pool of blood though, so I was, that was the event. That was a very confusing one. Don't, don't jump. But then I couldn't help but jump in. It forced me. Ryan (12:46): Well, you know what, that's another thing is something I do quite a bit that might not be a healthy game design practice, but I do it so often is to tell the player or tell a character that you must not do this thing as a way of getting the player to do that thing. And in fact, the game in the first tales from castle Balderstone game, there's a, one of the stories is called don't dive into blood kids. Ryan (13:16): And it's a game where you are told not to dive into blood. But that's because it's all about diving into blood and diving into things. And yeah, I mean it's the kind of thing where you have to, if you don't share the, a kind of social contract of understanding that like a secret language between the designer and the player. If I mentioned this a verb, that's a clue to try doing that. Even if I say you shouldn't do that. The fact that I brought up the idea means that I kind of want you to, but maybe the world of the game doesn't want you to and it's just the designer who's trying to say that. Danny (14:07): So we're, we're already talking about Balderstone and the lurkening. And I found having played both of them, there's a bit of a juxtaposition. Balderstone you could just skip there. There's a number of scenarios you can just skip them. Like when I ended up in the pool of blood despite my best intentions of not ending up in the pool of blood, I couldn't figure out how to get out. So I just use the skip word rather the safe word. But the lurkening is completely the opposite. I found it very menacing. Especially when you die and it says "unless you--", I found that very menacing cause I could not figure out what to do with "unless you--" except restart. Ryan (14:52): Oh okay. Danny (14:53): Cause it said you could use restart "unless you--". So I thought it, I thought it meant there was something else I could do. So I felt I felt highly menaced by that game. Ryan (15:03): Well, you know, I like to do like spooky stuff. I don't want to actually scare players, at least I don't think I do. Sometimes I write stuff. I think the Balderstone game, this is a problem that I've had for a while. In 2012 I wrote a book called motorcyclist and other extremely scary stories and the point of it was to use like the conventions of scary stories, campfire stories or just like nightmares and tell them in a completely stupid way that is impossible to really be scared by. And it was like therapeutic for me. Dealing with them, being too scared to watch movies or read books to like frame things as, as if you strip away all the atmosphere and you say a guy came back to life. Ryan (16:03): It's as, it's not scary. It's stupid. And it's funny and I tried to do that, but people were still really scared. Same with castle Balderstone. I wrote these sub stories and I put them in the mouths of these different fictional authors. And the idea was that characters keep talking about how these stories are so scary. We cannot stand it. But I tried to make them just weird and funny and fun, but people are still scared by them cause I'm not good at my job. Danny (16:33): Well, for what it's worth, I felt the camp, I, I felt the campiness of Balderstone and I was not scared. It was very much like watching a one of those, the horror movies where the, they forget to edit out the boom mic in one of the shots. Ryan (16:54): That's a good idea. I should use that. Danny (16:55): That, that is, unfortunately, that's not my idea. That actually happens in a, in a spoof horror movie from the 90s. Ryan (17:02): But if you see a boom mic in a game about a scary castle. Danny (17:06): Oh yeah, that's, that's even bad. Why is the boom like there at all? It's a game. Ryan (17:12): Let me write that down. Thanks for the idea. Eric (17:18): Okay, so you've been in the IF community for awhile. How has it evolved or changed as far as your perspective has gone? Ryan (17:26): I think it's gotten nicer and nicer. There used to be, right when I started out there were just kind of a general feeling of, I don't know, like the bombs were about to drop sometimes. And like there was tension and friction and, but like people are working all the time to make things more friendly and welcoming. Ryan (17:55): And I think that like, it's not like when I started in this community in 2011, it was the dark ages and things have turned from black to white in the past eight years. More like, it was always a nice place. But like that I think is the prevailing sentiment or change is that people are always focused on making it right, a friendlier community. And I dunno, that's not very interesting, but it's kind of all I have to say. Danny (18:27): Oh, that's maybe there's, maybe there's hope for the mudding community because we, we started, we pretty much started out catty and bitchy and we're pretty much all still catty and bitchy to this day. To that end the quadrennial exposition for good interactive fishing, uhh fiction, not fishing fiction. Ryan (18:53): Well, so we have to stress that it's the Ryan Veeder Quadrennial. Danny (18:57): Ryan Veeder's Quadrennial Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction. Ryan (19:03): I don't want anyone to get the impression that this is part of the general, you know, tectonic movement of the community. It's my dumb thing that nobody should be taking seriously. Danny (19:16): But so so you ran the first one in, well, you, you propositioned it in 2015 and you ran it in 2016. Was it? I wasn't around in the community back then. Oh, was it quadrennial in 2016? Ryan (19:31): Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. The, we might as well explain that joke. My birthday is February 29th and so in 2015, I was kicking around a bunch of goofy ideas about like competitions and events and wanting to do my own thing. And I thought, I have a birthday coming up. I can use that as an excuse to demand that people make games for me and then I won't have to do it again for four years. And so people won't be, you know, offended that I'm making this ridiculous request because I won't be making it again for four years. Ryan (20:18): I think at the time in 2015, there may have been more of a stat of, Hey, here's a new competition. Here's a new competition. I want to encourage you this. So I'm making a competition to do this. And so it may have been parotic of that movement, but I don't remember it especially well. Danny (20:37): And one, one interesting thing about it is it's a contest and there are, there are things you give away to the winters. Correct? They're donated right? Ryan (20:47): Well, they're donated by me. I make a plush dolls that people can choose. The first time around I made enough dolls that everybody got a doll. And this time around I've been so busy with other stuff. I don't think I'm going to manage to make a doll for everybody, but I've only promised to make 9. And to date I've made five dolls. Ryan (21:12): So after this interview is over, I'm going to start making doll number six. Danny (21:16): But you've stressed that the entrants need to be anonymous on penalty of, well, almost death. Ryan (21:24): Oh, that's expulsion of from the contest. It's very important. But before I get any further, you're both disqualified. You may not enter and if you have entered then the curse to be to thee. Danny (21:40): Okay. I have not entered. I'll, I'll say that. Ryan (21:43): Well, that's a good thing. You're not allowed to say whether you entered, now I have to disqualify you again. The idea was just that if, if I'm going to be the sole judge of whether these games are good, then like my relationship with the author, if I know anything about who wrote this game, that's really gonna color my appraisal. And if it's someone I like, I'm not going to be able to, you know, I don't want to give this game a bad score and jeopardize our friendship. Speaker 3 (22:18): And if it's someone I don't like, I don't want to give, you know, feel like I'm obligated to give this person a, a bad score out of spite or something. As I was planning the exposition the first time, I was tormented by these thoughts of having to navigate socially this, this exposition while also trying to actually give my honest opinion of games. And so I demanded that everyone be anonymous and the first time around, yeah. This complicated thing where a couple of my friends, Jenny Palona and Emily Boeheim were the stewards of the exposition who would be Go-Betweens for all the emailing, all the communication they would, they knew who all the entrants were and I just sent things to them and they send things onto the entrants. This time I've made everyone adopt alter egos so that I don't know who anybody is, but they can still email me from their alter egos and that's a lot easier for Emily and Jenny, but it's quite a bit more work for me. Danny (23:28): Right. Yeah, I could see how. Was there, speaking about the first year versus this year was there a difference in how the community received the contest? Ryan (23:40): I don't think. The community has been very kind in not really saying anything about the exposition. A few people have like retweeted it and promoted it in small ways. But you know, the rules about anonymity, say you cannot communicate with me about this exposition at all or you will be disqualified. So that has kind of a chilling effect on people saying wow, Ryan what a great exposition. So it's, you know, because of that and because of other things. The, it's just the exposition I guess shows up and people who are interested in it participate in it and other people ignore it and hopefully they get around to playing the games. I think like even though the point is to entertain me specifically and entrance should be focused exclusively on making a game that I will like the games are also very good objectively speaking and I hope that the rest of the community will get around to looking at these games and enjoying them even if that's not their primary purpose. Eric (24:53): Before we move on to our next question. I just thought I've, I've found that the, we're breaking rule number five right now. I think public discussion of the exposition by entrance shall be conducted only through guises of their alter alter egos on pain of forfeit. And there there's a funny little I don't know, explanation I guess where it's as a general rule of thumb, as long as you behave as though you're terrified of being disqualified, you should be fine. Ryan (25:15): You guys are so disqualified all the way up and down. Ryan (25:21): Okay. So I guess moving on a bit, so your most recent release is Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing. What was the inspiration behind this? Ryan (25:32): I really wanted to make a fishing game. I am not a fishing enthusiast, but I have a soft spot for fishing games. The best example in my mind, and this will prove that I'm not a fishing enthusiast, is a fishing resort on the wii, which was this I guess pretty generic fish and game. But just had these gorgeous environments, had this surreal feeling of, you know, you could walk down from the lodge to the beach and then fish and then the sun would set and then you'd, you know, go up, back up to the lodge and eventually you unlock a bicycle and you unlock all these other fishing locations. And that kind of stuff. I loved it so much and I just, I said, I need to make a fish and game. I will make a fish and game. And I got down to it and I implemented like your cabin and there's calendar on the wall and there is light kind of filtering in through the window and your fishing rod is there and you'll go out and you'll, you know, walk down the Hill to sunset and such a place and start fishing. Ryan (26:55): But as soon as I started trying to design the fishing part, I realized, I don't know anything about this. I don't want to research this. Like reading about different kinds of fish is driving me up the wall. I do not care about lures. I do not care about any of this fishing stuff. I just want that coziness of the environment and feeling like I mean a beautiful place. And so I guess it feels a little dishonest after the fact to say, well, I made a fish and game and there's no fishing in it. But the thought process really was, I am making a fish and game. I'm just leaving out that particular mechanic and I am leaving in everything that I love about fishing games. Danny (27:50): Well, honestly I don't think it's that dishonest. I have some friends that fish and they don't catch any fish. They go, they, even, one of them owns a fishing cabin on a Lake and he owns the Lake. And I imagine that costs a hell of a lot of money in taxes and everything else and upkeep. And they just go and they sit on a boat and they'd drink beer and one of them smokes and they just sit there with fishing rods and they don't ever catch fish. So I don't know that actual catching a fish is that important. Ryan (28:30): And that's kind of baked into the name Ryan veeders authentic fly fishing. The point of putting my name in the title I think at first was like just the, the joke of like me being as important as John Madden. Like I'm the authority, I, my name is going to sell this game. Ryan (28:53): But it ended up being partly that this is fly fishing as authentic to me, the guy who doesn't know anything about fly fishing, Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing is an oxymoron. And so the game, the name of the game is actually the null set. The other thing is I let this game be one where I, Ryan Veeder the narrator am communicating with you the player very directly and trying to communicate as we play. What my expectations about the game are and trying to like temper your expectations and you know, entertain you personally as a guy. Like this is my game. Welcome to the world I created for you in a way that I do kind of a lot in games, but this time was very explicit. Danny (29:47): Yeah, I definitely picked up on that. And I'm going to use this as a, as a bit of a segue. So at some point in the game there, there's a lot of places to go before this happens, but at some point you run into a moose or you see the moose, you're not allowed to go to the moose. I tried everything to approach the moose. And it doesn't, it doesn't give you a third person description of why you can't go to the moose. It explicitly says, dude, it's a moose. Just don't, don't go near the moose, please. Ryan (30:21): Yes, yes. Danny (30:22): And it's very first person narrator, like, no, there's like someone standing next to you like, dude, just, it's a fricking moose. You don't approach moose. And I'm going to transition that into the fact that the moose forces you to wait. You can't, you can't get pass the moose. And as I was playing I believe you were observing my stream and so was so was Jacqueline Ryan (30:47): Was JMac there? Danny (30:49): Yeah. JMac was there and I thought Jacqueline was there. But maybe it was, there were five people at some point. But maybe JMac, the one that's, I don't remember who said it. But they, they explicitly said this is a game that to be played over six or seven days. And is that, that's not common in interactive fiction? Ryan (31:08): No, I invented this. I was really excited for a long time actually. Although I only got around to doing something with it, with this fish and game, I was thinking about using like Inform7 has a limited ability to interact with the players system clock. And I wanted to make a game that, well, I wanted to make a location. Right. the, what attracted me to this fly shit fishing game was inhabiting a space. And I feel like in your typical game where you've got a, a world to explore but a problem that needs to be solved, puzzles that lead up to solving that problem and then the end, you might enjoy this space or while you're in it, but because it's a mean to an end, you, you know, you play at once you're done with it. And that place kind of ceases to exist. Ryan (32:19): I really want it to make a game that people would keep coming back to and like enhance their appreciation of over a long time. And so I thought of different mechanics that would take into account, you know, the real life passage of time. Calendar wise, not in a day night cycle or anything. And I, you know, I, the whole design was about making sure that you play a little today. That's enough. Come back tomorrow. Maybe some things have changed. Look at what's changed. Look at if you can solve any more puzzles, unlock any more areas, and keep on doing that for awhile until you, you know, until you actually have had your feel of this space as opposed to the game deciding that it's over. Danny (33:09): I find it interesting and I'm curious, I don't know too much about Inform or the platform used for it. How did you manage to save state? Really a platform that isn't really designed right? Ryan (33:23): Inform7 has no concept of safe auto saving. Right? it's, it's built on top of this tradition of, you know, these very early texts games that were all about save your progress save your progress, you know, every step of the way, because you might accidentally eat the scone that you were supposed to give it to the Badger. And so when you get to the Badger and you don't have this go and you'd better reload an earlier save where you still have the scone in it solve the puzzle and you know, modern games games that aren't built on that tradition and, you know, text games in other formats. Are all about conveniencing the player by just saving progress. And so I wanted to recreate that, but it was hard because there was no framework for it. Ryan (34:18): But Inform7 does have the concept of writing some information to an external file, just you know, a text document that to can contain either a string of text or it can contain a table. And you know, with a table format, you know, like a spreadsheet, you can save any kind of data you want. And so I thought, well at first I'm just going to figure out a way to keep track of each object you've picked up. And when you pick up that object, it gets added to this table. And then we knew we reload the game. The baseline Inform7 things thinks that you've started this game over for the first time, but the machinery that looks at external files says, well, here's this table of all your items. We'll just dump all the items that you have into your inventory. Ryan (35:13): And then there ended up being several other tables to store things like what you name the cat. Whether you have you know, cleaned up the beach by how much you've cleaned up the beach and other stuff like that. Just to, you know, well, when you figure out a kind of a agnostic way of representing data, then you can save all you want anything you want and just put it in a table and then have the game read the table. It started right. It's actually pretty simple to do, but people haven't felt the inclination in most cases. I know some other people have done some work on a saving thing using external files as an auto save mechanism, but I don't think to the extent that fly fishing did, I don't think Danny (36:09): Another odd thing, and maybe it's an odd thing with me I noticed I believe it was in, in the lurkening. You ended up using a word puissance, which is a old Anglo French word, meaning stronger and generally only used at this point in the equestrian field or people talking about the European Union's trade power for whatever reason, they use it for their you use that word. And it's a word that I push all the time in the mud community for magic, for like magical strength. So where is that a word of your common parlance or? Ryan (36:49): Well, here's, you know what, I took French in high school and I don't speak it with any actual fluency, but sometimes I played video games in French. Animal Crossing new leaf for most of my new leaf career. I played it in French and other games. I can't remember which ones off the top of my head. I've also played in French. And so it might be that I'm remembering that word from French language games that are more likely to use it to me in the magical power or it might just be that I looked in a thesaurus and I saw it with, you know, archaic next to it and I said, that's the one I want. Danny (37:40): You're talking about French game. So I have to ask is I run into this, so little French language games, the gobliiins series, a classic point and click adventure is a, is French in origin and the most predominant versions floating around the internet are usually in French. And I actually played them in French when I was a kid. I'm wondering if you've ever, you've ever gone into the gobliiins? Ryan (38:03): No, that one. So you were playing as you're playing them in French as a kid, were you as a kid speaking, reading French? Danny (38:12): No, not as such, but I also played muds that were exclusively in various European languages, like German and Norwegian and things like that. I was always playing things I couldn't actually understand. Ryan (38:27): Well that's something that I like quite a bit, is not understanding something. Yeah, I can see the appeal there. Danny (38:37): That's pretty much all I've got. Is is there anything else you'd like to mention? Anything besides the quadrennial a contest or anything coming up for you? Ryan (38:49): Coming up from me? I'm still in the process of judging event. Two of the exposition and then I'll be judging event three of the exposition and then I'll get back into my normal flow of actually making games. And I guess I should say I have a Patreon and people in Patreon support my game design work and they get to a beta test stuff and C in progress work and see recently I've been working on like using Inform7 to randomly generate a city in a way that I don't think is right now anyway, going to make its way into a game. But you know, if you get access to the patrons only Twitter feed, then you get to see it some of my coding there. So yes, definitely everyone should look at my Patreon. Danny (39:40): And we will link to that, Patreon and will be included on the episode's link page for anyone interested. Thanks. so with that I will bid you adieu to continue the French. And thank you for coming on. Thank you for talking with us. And and I hope the mud community gets more involved with the IF community too, because that's, that's a big thing that we're doing and I just hope that all our communities can, can join together and make a larger effort in, in the industry. Ryan (40:14): All right. Yeah. We'll teach you how to be nice. Sorry. Danny (40:17): We could probably use some of it. Trust me not on you. Ryan (40:23): Sorry. Thanks for having me, you guys. Danny (40:28): Thanks for coming on.