The Back Log, vol. 15 - Drink Up, Babes (Patreon)

Chad Pockety reminds you to hydrate.

What's that? It's time for another Patreon exclusive merch piece? Well, next week we'll be sending out this wonderful, Ruby-designed piece to all you Merch Pocket peeps who've supported us at that tier for the past three months! We hope he becomes your best drinking bud, for whatever beverage of your choice.

Whilst the mug design above is exclusive to patrons who have already supported us over the past few months, we're aware we largely have released these designs later than the cutoff for people to sign up and still receive it. That's something we'll be experimenting with alongside the upcoming anniversary stream (remember, September 2nd) - we'll be sharing our Merch Pocket design for the August through October period as part of those anniversary celebrations. That'll mean that if you start supporting at that tier as a result of seeing the design on-stream, you'll still receive the design if you support us for three successive months from that point! Hopefully that makes sense (we'll explain it again around the date), but we thought give you that little teaser now.

And in other exciting Patreon news, you can now join the Back Pocket Patreon for free! We've been given early access to this new feature, which basically allows you to follow our Patreon without comitting financially, and thus get notified whenever we put out free posts (like these!) It's a good way to be able to keep up with Back Pocket news, and all you need is an email! If you want to join as a free Patron, click the Join the community button on our page.

Alright, that's all the housekeeping - onto the content!

THIS WEEK ON BACK POCKET

Back Pocket Tonight - Chaos Takes Over
Filling the fourth chair in the Back Pocket studio this week was Nicrotex! And it also happened to be the first time since Ruby joined the team that they were on the couch together... hence the chaos. Amidst that chaos, we somehow managed to cover the 10th birthday of Papers, Please, and talk about some video games, including Baldur's Gate 3, Stray Gods, Pikmin 4 and Whispers in the West. We also couldn't invite Nick in without asking him to prep one of his wonderful Pocket Pals streams, Talkin' 'Bout AI Generation! And to wrap it all up, we Schlash(ed) swords.

Baldur's Gate 3, Stray Gods + Sclashing Through AI Holes!  | Back Pocket Tonight 

Post Show (link to locked post) 

PocketBuds feat. Levins
Remember Levins, the man of many, many talents who joined us on the show last month? Well, one of those talents was being an expert on all things Sanrio and Hello Kitty, so Ruby of course had to get him onto the podcast to talk about the South Park meme-turned-real-life-videogame, Hello Kitty Island Adventure! I just listened to all of it, and if you don't even care much about Hello Kitty, I highly recommend at least listening for the supremely chill vibes that Ruby and Levins bring to your ears. And hell, you may even learn some things about those little (mostly) animal friends. 

But that's not all - we also now have PocketBuds EXTRA, which is our special exclusive content that goes out to Gold Pocket tier members! Normally, these will come out every Friday, but we put out an extra one this week to get the ball rolling. And guess who shows up once again - Ruby's chaos partner in crime, Nicrotex!

Yeah, But I'm Playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure (ft. Andrew Levins)
Spotify Apple iHeartRadio Podbean Google

PocketBuds EXTRA - The Unreleased Pilot ft. Nicrotex (link to locked post) 

PocketBuds EXTRA - On Other Islands ft. Levins (link to locked post)

Socials - Bajo Gives Us Nightmares
That's right, we made Bajo's horrifying Street Fighter creation on the show last week into a TikTok! Ruby and Gus also put together a wonderful retrospective on the impact of Papers, Please to celebrate its 10th birthday, and of course, you've got your Game Plan!

Game Plan 

Papers, Please turns 10 

Bajo's Nightmare Fuel

NEXT WEEK ON BACK POCKET

Well, we don't currently have a guest to share with you for the show on Thursday night - although we're working on it! However, we do have TWO things to share about the podcast next week.

First of all, next week's guest on PocketBuds is Chantal Ryan, lead dev on the upcoming game darkwebSTREAMER! And secondly, we'll be releasing the first of our special pilot episodes of Hard Agree, a podcast format which you guys funded as one of our stretch goals in last year's anniversary stream. This will go up on the main PocketBuds podcast feeds next Tuesday, and we'll be releasing more episodes in the coming weeks.

--

PHEW. That was a big one. Huge love and respect to you if you read this far. We're making a lot of content right now, and none of it could be done without your support here on Patreon. So I know we say it a lot, and maybe it sounds cliché, but genuinely, thank you.

Have a fantastic weekend! I'll personally be spending a lot of mine back in Baldur's Gate, and I suspect I'm not the only one...

- Ben :)