Hello and welcome to Connected, Episode 377. I'm Jason Snell, and I am joined as usual by James Thompson.

It's good to be finally back. Thanks for looking after the show for the last few weeks. Some interesting guest choices are.

Well, yes, of course, we're also joined by Mr. John Forhees, who never, ever misses an episode of this show.

Hi, John.

Hello, I've never missed.

No, I don't think I've ever been off this show.

It's been tough sometimes, but yeah, I'm a bad penny.

I just keep turning up.

That's good. I mean, I like the commitment that James seems to have failed to make to this show.

Look, some of us have things to dig.

Wow. Wow. I think that cuts deep. All right, you know, we should stop with the nonsense and get down to business because we've got a lot. We've got a packed show. The show document is overflowing this time because it's the connected holiday special. It is indeed. And of course, as always, we begin the connected Christmas episode with our gift exchange, the triple J gift exchange, and we open our presents. it's a, it's a tradition like none other.

It doesn't feel like a year since we lost that one of these.

Oh, yeah, I know. I mean, it seems like, it seems like a long time, but, you know, hey, it comes around quickly.

That's COVID time for you.

Time is flexible. It happens. It's like, what is time even now? But I love this. It's a great tradition. We go around

Round Robin style, as is our tradition, and give each other a presence. They're not on the show.

The presence happen at a later date or immediately during the show. It's not something like,

I don't have this stuff here because it's supposed to be a surprise, you see, and we can't trust one another to not open the packages. So, anyway, James, why don't you kick off the Round Robin? What do you have

for me? Me in particular? Yeah, I know you're important here. So I have commissioned your

favorite artist, Jen Bartel, I believe, to draw you a sketch of a micronaut holding up a similarly colored IMA.

And kids, if you don't know what micronauts are, you were probably not a child in the late 70s.

They were kind of like translucent robots that I'm going to say, without any shred of evidence, that they were the inspiration for the original IMA. And I'm just going to say without any shred of evidence that they were the inspiration for the original iMac.

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