Tape 40 opens with an image that’s equal parts slapstick and unsettling: Caleb, attempting what he calls “skywalking,” ties his shoelaces around his hands until he can’t breathe, only to be spun around, slapped on the backside, and sent rolling down a hill like a roly-poly bug. Inexplicably, Hat Guy leaves the room mid sentence to holler a bunch of cattle off the front lawn. From there, the conversation shifts to springtime, a subject taken with Bootstuck’s usual logic: last year it meant Caleb strapping springs to his shoes; this year it will mean scattering springs across the forest floor so that no matter where you step, “it’s always spring.”

The discussion meanders through maroon Pontiacs, pastel colors, and the persistent complaint that everyone in Bootstuck interrupts each other. Dave drifts in with thoughts on gas mileage, while a failed attempt to spell “psychiatrist” leads to the revelation that Bootstuck has no doctors for the mind—only one who deals with ingrown toenails. Mental health, it seems, is handled socially: if someone feels blue, Steven paints them red until they’re a different color and “all’s good.”

The tape ends with a plan for a “fashion show at lunch,” a recurring event that involves burlap sacks and questionable creativity. While most will opt for the simple hole-in-the-top approach, Dave apparently intends to fashion burlap chaps—an idea received with the confused question: “You can see your bones?”

Tape 40 is as fractured as it is vivid: a portrait of a town where footwear physics, psychiatry, and lunchtime couture share equal importance, and where coherence is always just out of reach.

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The tape opens with a heated accusation of lying, quickly derailed into a plan for a New Month’s Resolution: stop working out and start smoking (though the order is negotiable). A discussion of pizza geometry (round box, square pie, triangle slice) swerves into the concept of “topic drift,” which apparently includes drifting cars in Tokyo via mysterious wind power.

Attention shifts to Stephen “Marbles” — a Bootstuck local with mismatched legs and shoes that somehow even out. His nickname sparks a brief shouting match of “Marbles!” before a strange “ding, ding, ding” interrupts. The host rushes outside, tangled in an extra-long phone cord, only to be hit in the eye with an orange while it’s snowing heavily.

This prompts the revelation of 16 feet of snow (measured as 768 buckets), with Caleb on “bucket duty” and a warning against alternative uses for the bucket. Barry, a newcomer “from somewhere else” (population: sign, flag, post, and a soon-to-arrive office), is expected to help dig out tomorrow — assuming the uphill, no-tire traffic doesn’t stop him.

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The tape begins with a triumphant ode to soup — thick enough to hold a flag and hotter than rice — before veering into an odd declaration that “science is a fact.” This somehow segues into a taxonomy lesson where chickens are “land fish” and tuna is “the chicken of the sea.”

A grim food memory surfaces: polishing off a case of tuna, only to realize the tins bore a picture of a cat. From there, dinner talk becomes a roulette of chickpeas, mashed pumpkin, and the occasional mystery can — sometimes opened “between your legs” to check for “different nuts.”

It all ends with an inexplicable cigarette commercial and the cryptic farewell: “Always down, never up.”

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