A&B Edition: Adulting

 This week the girls take aim at Adulting... 

In the latest instalment of the FNWF A&B edition, Bianca, Amy, and very special guest Danni discuss all the pros and cons that come with being an adult. 

But first, what were we drinking?

Amy was drinking Theory of evolution

Available from Liquorland

A&B Edition : Video Games With Dani

This week the girls take aim at Video Games With Danni_Hell... 

In the fourth installment of the FNWF A&B edition, Bianca and Amy have invited a very special guest to join them! Bianca's "bro" Dani is joining the girls to discuss her passion being video games.

But first, what were we drinking?

Dani was drinking Koa Moscato

Available from Woolworths

Bianca was drinking Brian Fletcher Merlot

Available from Naked Wines

Amy was drinking the Theory of Evolution Grenache

Available from Liquorland

Bianca introduced tonight's topic with a brief discussion of video game history ending around the time Amy and Bianca started playing video games. She also introduced our very special guest, her sister Dani!

Video games began in the 1950s and 1960s as computer scientists began designing simple games and simulations on mainframe computers. The first of this kind was the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology's (MIT's) Spacewar created in 1962.

The early 1970s brought the first consumer-ready video game hardware, a home console (the Magnavox Odyssey), and the first arcade video games Computer Space and Pong which were both later made into a home console version.  

Magnavox Odyssey

Numerous companies sprang up to capture Pong's success in both the arcade and the home by creating clones of the game. This caused a series of boom and bust cycles due to oversaturation and lack of innovation. 

By the mid-1970s, low-cost programmable microprocessors replaced the discrete transistor-transistor logic circuitry of the early hardware. The first ROM cartridge-based home consoles also arrived including the Atari Video Computer System (VCS). Coupled with rapid growth in a golden age of arcade video games with titles such as Space invaders and Pac-Man, the home console market flourished. 

Atari VCS

A major crash in the United States home video game market occurred in 1983 as the market was flooded with too many games and the sector saw competition from inexpensive personal computers and new types of games being developed for them. 

The crash set the stage for Japan's video game industry to take leadership of the market, which had only suffered minor impacts from the crash. Nintendo released its Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States in 1985, helping to rebound the failing video games sector.

Nintendo's first console

The latter part of the 1980s and early 1990s saw video games driven by improvements and standardisation in personal computers, and the console war competition between Nintendo and Sega as they fought for market share in the United States and around the world. The first major handheld video game consoles appeared in the 1990s led by Nintendo's Game Boy platform. 

As they say, after that the rest is history. 

As we had a very special guest on tonight's show, Amy and Bianca each took turns asking their guest, Dani, some questions. 

First up, Amy asked Dani what video game originally sucked her in and sparked her passion?

Bianca then asked Danni to explain the world of Twitch (because we had no idea what it's all about) and how Dani uses Twitch.

After learning that Dani predominately uses Twitch for gaming Amy asked what games Danni plays on Twitch. Amy also asked what goes into organising a Twitch session. 

This is about the point where Bianca and Dani got their nerd on and left Amy distracted by something shiny. 

Bianca asked Dani what her rig is and what her stats are. Amy learned what a rig and stats are in nerd language. Turns out they are not at all what she thought.

Amy then asked Dani if there are any games that are due for release soon which Dani is excited about. 

Finally, Bianca finished us up by asking Dani to confess her guilty pleasure game which may surprise our listeners.    

Thanks Dani for being on the show! If you would like to follow Dani on Twitch you can find her here!

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A&B Edition: Easter 2022

 This week the girls take aim at Easter... 

In the third installment of the FNWF A &B edition, Bianca and Amy take a closer look at the widely celebrated holiday of Easter! Western Christians, using the Gregorian calendar, determined that Easter would always occur between the 22nd of March and the 25th of April each year within seven days of the astronomical full moon.

But first, what were we drinking?

Amy was drinking something from the wine pyramid scheme

Available from Naked wines

Bianca was drinking Cape Shank Pinot Noir

Available from T'Gallant (no link because the winery closed down *cries*)

Amy talks about a common theme of easter being the easter bunny. As a kid, she never questioned his existence. He was like Santa or the tooth fairy. He was just there and she knew he was real because he left us chocolate eggs on Easter Sunday.

As an adult, Amy can’t help but wonder “what’s up with the rabbit? Why not some zombie Jesus?” “What's up with the eggs and why are they made of chocolate?”. With these questions in mind, she went straight down the internet rabbit hole to answer these exact questions.

Here goes.

Ok, so the Easter bunny….. WTF?

According to Wikipedia, the idea of the easter bunny came from German Lutherans (a species of Christians) who adopted the figure as a kind of Santa Claus. He brought gifts to good children the night before Easter Sunday. The gifts included coloured eggs as well as lollies or candy and sometimes toys.

The concept of a rabbit apparently came from the fact that the rabbit was a symbol of fertility and during spring when Easter was celebrated, symbols of fertility were everywhere. 

Why eggs? It was an established tradition to colour eggs during the springtime to celebrate the new season. People would use flowers to colour eggs. Cute right!? It was common practice in England for children to go and beg for eggs door to door the Saturday before lent which is another Christian holiday that commemorates the 40 days that Jesus allegedly spent fasting in the desert. So eggs were a common gift for children during this time and hence the bunny brings eggs. Also, eggs were a sign of fertility.

Who made them chocolate? 

This was a stroke of pure genius I say. 

Back in the day chocolate was bitter and was for drinking, not eating. Over time it developed into a sweet treat. Chocolate eggs first appeared in the court of Louis XIV but were not affiliated with easter. 

In 1875 some genius at Cadbury decided to create the modern Easter egg after developing a pure cocoa butter that could be moulded into shapes and history was made people. They marketed the chocolate eggs in time for easter and boom! A tradition that would live on for many generations was born. 

Bianca at first glance while quickly googling thought "omg what is this weird crime tradition that happens every year in Norway. Like are you good fam?"

Then she dug deeper and it's not quite as sinister as originally thought. But still weird.

One would think that after a long, dark, and bitter winter, Norwegians would welcome spring, sun, and the promise of summer.

That is probably true for the cold-challenged, but many Norwegians choose to extend the winter by spending the Easter holiday in their mountain log cabins, armed with mutton, eggs, and chocolate wafers.

However, one more ingredient is needed to really get into the spirit. To some, it is the highlight of the holiday. Murder. Preferably many of them, safely experienced between two book covers. Between shoveling snow or skiing on it, Easter for Norwegians means wallowing in crime fiction. In Norway, you can’t avoid it that one week of the year.

TV bursts with high-profile British mystery shows. On the radio, NRK has produced radio plays. Your newspaper’s weekend supplement has probably commissioned a crime short story and interviewed an expert on why Norwegians read Easter crime fiction, or “påskekrim”. 

And then there was the bakery that asked its Facebook followers to find out who had stolen their cupcakes. A fictional cupcake kidnapping case, because what is Easter without crime everywhere, right?

The reading of crime fiction during Easter is believed to be a tradition unique to Norway. The seed of the Easter crime phenomenon can be attributed to a specific day in history because it was a book publisher’s marketing ploy that started it all.

On March 24th, 1923 (the day before Palm Sunday), Oslo newspaper Aftenposten printed the headline “The train to Bergen was robbed last night” across the front page. The news spread like a free money rumor. In reality, there was no headline.

What Aftenposten had printed was in fact an ad for a novel of the same name, but few picked up on the small disclaimer printed next to it. “Bergenstoget plyndret i nat” was written by Jonathan Jerv, or Jonathan Wolverine, an alias for two students, Nordahl Grieg and Nils Lie. Both were born in Bergen on Norway’s west coast. Grieg went on to be one of Norway’s most prominent authors in the 1920s and 30s, while Lie would become a major figure in publishing.

However, it is widely regarded that it was the publisher Gyldendal’s director Harald Grieg, Nordahl’s brother, who was responsible for making the book a best seller. 15 years before Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio drama caused panic because of its simulated news, Harald Grieg achieved the same effect by employing the method known today as clickbait. When word got out that the robbery only took place in a book, readers rushed to the book stores.

Harald Grieg did probably not intend to create a specific and lasting tradition. Granted, he wanted to sell books, but even though he realised that selling light literature in March and April was a way to branch out for an industry that usually released their books in the fall, reading detective fiction instead of going to church is thought to have fastened its roots because of the specifics of the Norwegian Easter.

The most far-fetched theories, according to Norway’s crime fiction expert Nils Nordberg, stretch back to pre-Christian times. Blood sacrifice was made by Viking ancestors roughly around the time when Easter would fall centuries later. The plan was to secure crops and keep the gods happy. Maybe traces of this remain in Norwegian genes in the form of fascination for stories about violence? The metaphorical sacrificial lamb and the scapegoat are, after all, no small part of crime fiction.

Easter itself has a dark back story. When God sent the angel of death to kill the first-born sons of the ancient Egyptians, blood smeared on houses saved Israelite families. Later, the criminal case, punishment, and death of a religious rebel, Jesus of Nazareth, gave Easter additional meaning.

But had these theories held water, Easter crime should have been a thing in many countries, which it is not.

The most probable explanation is much less complex, but still about a form of death: killing time.

Nordberg says this makes the most sense because Norway’s Easter holiday is the longest in the world. Norwegians leave their jobs for up to 10 days, with 5 of them being compulsory days off. One in four Norwegians spends their Easter in a mountain or coast cabin, where daily life is associated with simple pleasures and unwinding. After skiing, murder mysteries are perfect brain fodder next to the log fire.

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A&B Edition: Am I The Asshole?

This week the girls take aim at AITA... 

We knew about this thread on Reddit but, don’t really understand how it works so we mostly just catch the highlights when they make the news or Buzzfeed or Facebook. When we researched this topic we were pleasantly surprised by what we found. We now think more people need to get around this. Fuck off we know we're late to the party. 

But first, what were we drinking?

Amy was drinking R Paulazzo pinot grigio

Available from Naked wines

Bianca was drinking Cape Shank Pinot Noir

Available from T'Gallant

Amy had 2 AITA for us this week... Comment below your thoughts!

1. I recently got a new coworker at my job who seems to be a bit of a problem starter. He argues with management and does not follow direction. He’s been here for about a month and has already gotten in trouble multiple times but he has yet to get written up.

The main issue I have with him is his lack of boundaries. He always tries to get me to stop what I’m doing to help him with something and will insinuate that it’s my fault if there is ever an issue with his work because he wasn’t trained. I trained him briefly and it seems like he understood but he is having issues now and won’t go to management about it unless I don’t have the time to help him. He also always sits at the desk I share with my coworker, even though he has his own. He always offers to go sit at his desk but then gets upset if I actually take him up on it.

The other day he said that I could sit there and I told him that I did have some work to do so I would need to use my computer, and he condescendingly offered it up and seemed surprised that I actually had something to do. I told him that he shouldn’t offer and then get upset when someone actually took him up on it. Because it was my desk, I had the right to want to sit there to do my work, and he had a perfectly good task that he didn’t like to sit at for whatever reason. I told him that maybe we should just stick to sitting at our own assigned spaces because he wouldn’t like it if I sat at his desk. He got mad and told my manager that I was strong arming him, which is not true because I was pretty polite about it. He ended up getting written up for being disrespectful of the space.

I’m glad that I was civil with him but I feel bad that he got written up. It’s not like I asked them to do that and I think it was about time that he got disciplined for something, but I don’t know if that was the right situation. Lots of my coworkers think that I was in the right for standing my ground and claiming my rightful space, but I feel guilty that he got in trouble for it. I thought the discussion would be fine.

2. This happened last week, I told my F26, husband M31, I was planning on having a girls night in at home and he initially was like "No not here...get a hotel or something" I said I couldn't afford a hotel + no need for a hotel. He asked if he could join us if he's going to allow it, but I said no, this isn't how GNIs work. He eventually agreed to let me have it and even said he'd go out so my friends could be comfortable.

I invited the girls over and most of them had a lot of heavy venting to do, at some point things got a bit emotionally charged and there was crying, lots of it. After that we brought in the food and drinks, When I went to turn the TV on, I spotted a small device tucked on the side, I took a look and found that it was actually a voice recording device, I was in disbelief, I knew my husband put it in there to listen to our private talk which felt highly violating.

I didn't hide it from the girls, I showed them the device, called my husband to get him to get home and confronted him right there in front of the girls. The girls were shocked and my husband denied after I flipped out and called him out, then said he was feeling curious to know about what we were talking about and wanted to make sure we weren't "trash" talking him specifically. The event was cut short and the girls left.

I kept lashing out at him for ruining the night and possibly my relationship and trust with my friends, I said that not only did he violate my privacy but my friends' as well. because they were talking about very personal stuff, He argued that it was no big deal, That I should've let him join us if we "had nothing to hide" and that this was ON THEM for opening up about private matters to begin with. He went on to talk about how I humiliated him to call him out in front of my friends, I told him they deserved to know who he really is after what he's done. We argued some more and he went out again.

We're in conflict till today and I feel like I made a mistake calling him out like that aside from how I felt about it. He claims that my friends will no longer respect him after that.

Bianca also had 2 AITA for us this week... Comment below your thoughts!

1. AITA for making my children pay for their own portion of our family vacation?

We have been planning on going on vacation to cuba for the Christmas holidays for a week. It’s pretty pricey during the Christmas holidays but that’s the only time we can all go. We have three children 20F, 15M, and 12F who we are making them pay for their own ticket and part of the hotel since we wouldn’t be financially stable enough to pay for 5 plane tickets and such.

My 12 year old daughter has been complaining that since the other two have jobs and she doesn’t that it’s not fair. However we’ve decided to stick firm with it and be equal to them all. Their other option if they don’t want to pay is staying at grandmas. She has savings which are just enough to cover the vacation but she also wants to save up for a phone. My other two children aren’t happy that they have to pay for their own but they are willing to since we’d be going to Cuba.

AITA for making them pay? I feel like most families don’t make their children pay for their own tickets but since we all really want to go my wife and I think it’s the best option.

Edit: my 12 year old daughter (almost 13) is going to grade eight and she has worked at our business a couple times for me which i would pay her.

2. AITA for telling my extended family how many men (roughly) my sister has slept with after she outed our youngest brother as a virgin?

We had a family dinner this evening. My family has four kids in total: me, my elder sister (29F), younger sister (24F) and youngest brother (22M).

Extended family attended our family dinner. So all of our significant others, our cousins, aunts and uncles etc. During the dinner my elder sister and youngest brother got into a mild disagreement. My sister seemed (at least to me) to be coming across as very aggressive out of frustration and losing said argument. The two of them were too absorbed in their argument to realise the rest of us were getting a bit fed up.

Eventually my sister got really fed up and said “Shut up, I’m not going to argue with a 22 year old virgin.” My brother hadn’t done any personal attacks up until that point, it was completely unprovoked. I think it might have been the alcohol as my sister is a mean drunk.

Anyway, I immediately told my sister to grow up and that she was making an embarrassment of herself. She replied by saying everyone knows he’s a virgin and she didn’t say anything wrong. This annoyed me as my bro definitely has confidence issues and doesn’t need to be made fun of like this.

So I responded by saying how she slept with well over a hundred men while she was in college, and that since everyone in the family knows this it’s not a big deal right? Turns out her husband didn’t know this amazingly, I genuinely assumed he must have known. he left the party angrily saying my sister mislead him about her past.

Family is blaming me for their marital problems. I refuse to accept I did anything wrong. My sister bullied my brother in front of everyone, all I did was give her a taste of her own medicine.

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Amy was drinking