9/10 tornado sirens. Just make sure you have subtitles handy—the XviD audio mix buries the dialogue under the canned laughter that Young Sheldon doesn’t even have.

If you watched Young Sheldon Season 5, Episode 13 on a proper HBO Max stream, good for you. But for those of us who found a grainy, slightly desaturated rip floating around the internet, we experienced something different.

Why specify the XviD release? Because Young Sheldon is a period piece (set in the early 90s). Watching it through the lens of an outdated, compressed codec creates a meta-textual loop.