115: Game of Bored

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo. Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet. And who's to blame.

Hello, Jason. Good morning, Brian. How are you? I'm doing all right. We are recording a day early, which was somewhat planned because you are traveling tomorrow. But as of yesterday, we had canceled the show and I almost rejoiced because I would have had my first vacation from Grumpy Old Geeks in two years.

But here we are. You decided we're going to do one anyways. And it's going to be a bit of a short one because basically I was like, you know, laying back, sipping a Mai Tai, assuming I wasn't going to have a show today. So why weren't we going to have a show today, Jason? We weren't going to have a show today because there was almost no power in my house.

And actually, all day yesterday, there was literally no power in my house. They rewired half of the damn place. And it, yeah, it was kind of a kind of a long craptacular day, I must say. Well, I was actually just at your house on over the weekend because you invited me out to your barbecue.

And I'd like to say I have nothing to do with it. I did not do anything to your house to try to get out of a show. No, I think that all comes down to a 1948 electrician, but also a bad breaker. So that's why I'm now sitting in a sweat box on an exercise ball talking to you waiting for the electrician again.

So this is going to be this is going to be very quick. So I think we should probably get to it right out of the gate. Let's go straight into it. I have yet another article about how the middle class is dying. Oh, OK. That's new. Like to beat this over people's heads, much like we try to do the one password thing.

This is a nice little write up on Salon. Link is in the show notes. Title is the American middle class isn't coming back. It's going to die with the baby boomers. The generation that's retiring now, whether the recession just fine, but it's all downhill from there. It's a very lovely article that makes me feel so happy about the future of our society.

Basically, what this means is we're going to work till we're dead. Yeah, pretty much. And that we're not going to do anywhere near as well as the previous generations. We are one of the first generations that will do worse than the prior generations. Oh, yay. Good times. And it gets kind of a little more in-depth than that.

But since we are in a hurry, I will just do my transitional story. Much in the same way that the previous generation is doing better than us because they had, say, more time to make a bunch of money before the bottom fell out of economies. And, you know, we don't have any job security and et cetera, et cetera.

And, you know, industries are basically shutting down or shrinking. So there's less and less jobs. Same goes for the music industry. We have the dinosaur bands that have been around for a long time that are all doing quite fine. Thank you very much. Because they made a shit ton of money back in the day versus the bands that are coming up now that are struggling to survive.

And basically usually can't survive and have second jobs. Related to that, we did talk a bit about Apple Music launching last week. And they did something that I'm quite fond of. They basically released exactly what's going to happen to your $10 after you pay for a month of Apple Music.

Say what? There's some transparency about where the money is going. We have the link in the show notes that's posted on Recode as well. So I'm glad they did this. This is obviously not going to save any musicians. It's not much better than anybody else.

In fact, it's pretty much on par with a lot of the other streaming services. But points to Apple for transparency. Interesting. Very interesting. I didn't see that coming. No, I didn't either. In fact, the fact that they would actually release this before they've actually released the product itself is kind of interesting as well.

But, again, I think there was an underwhelming reaction to what it was going to be because basically it's not terribly different than anybody else's. So doing this, pretty interesting. I will definitely have to give this a read. I'm not super that interested into it, but, you know, it's worth getting to know.

I'm going to try Apple Music when it comes. I mean, you get three months free. Why not? Well, I'm going to try it as well. I mean, I've been a Spotify user and a paying Spotify user almost since day one, at least day one of when it was available in the U.S. But I'm part of Apple's ecosystem. That shit works.

So I'm going to try it when it comes out and if it works as well and the interface is nice. And there are a lot of things about Spotify that I'm starting to get annoyed by in terms of their interface. I can't even tell you how frustrating the interface between that and I've got a Mini, which also uses BMW audio system.

And they have an app called Mini Connected or BMW Connected, depending on which car you have. The sync automatically with Spotify on that is the most annoying thing known to man. And it's starting to drive me insane. So anyways, we'll see. I'm definitely going to try Apple Music, at least, you know, I believe they're going to offer a three months trial.

Yeah, it's a three month trial. Yeah, so I've been on that. And, you know, they've got my credit card already. I'm in their ecostructure. I've got I use iTunes. I have an iPhone. I have an iPad. And we'll see. No, I think you just coined the term ecostructure.

Yes. I just want them to work better with Sonos than Spotify does. So if they can do that, I'm in. I'll flip. I did see your Sonos and I am very tempted. But I need to start with the bar for the TV, which is quite pricey. So off to a store I go to try that out and see if I like it.

In the news.

Yesterday, news came down that basically filled my heart with glee. My grumpy heart grew three sizes yesterday. Okay. What happened? The California Labor Commission ruled that Uber, an Uber driver, is an employee, not a contractor, which will clobber or could clobber the $500 billion company.

So we're starting to see that Uber is being forced into the regulations and playing by the rules. I run a small business. And if I hired someone and they worked basically full time, I would have to pay part of their health care. I would have to pay into various programs that I would basically have to take them on as a full-time employee.

So why the fuck doesn't Uber have to? Okay. Yeah. Just quick clarification. There's $50 billion, not $500 billion. Oh, sorry. $50 billion. Yeah. Oh, geez. There's only $50 billion in the company. I know. It's so small now. You know what this actually reminds me of is when the AOL monitors back in the day rebelled against AOL and said, no, we want benefits and retroactive pay for going over your message boards and moderating them for you.

You remember that, like the great moderator revolt of like 2001 or something? I do remember that. And all these companies are trying to basically just pay people as contractors instead of actual employees because it's a lot cheaper. But it also screws the rest of us because guess what happens if somebody gets sick or et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, there are rules, people. Rules like saying you get something that's unlimited and turns out it's not? Oh, yeah. Hi, AT&T. AT&T finally gets a slap on the wrist. Yeah, $100 million fine because they've been throttling the basically grandfathered in unlimited bandwidth programs, you know, and they got caught doing it.

So now they got fined. Of course, AT&T has responded saying they vigorously dispute the FCC's assertions. Yes. Well, I vigorously think they're a bunch of twats. So let's see if the FCC can get some claws and take some money. I wonder if it'll be a class action like we get money back or just goes straight into the government's coffers.

Yeah, who knows? We probably won't get any money back. You got to rely on class action lawsuits for that. But I mean, if they get this fine, then somebody should put that together because that's a no-brainer. But you get $10 in five years. That's how class action lawsuits work. Well, dude, for some reason, I get a check from a pasta company, Dreamfields, the other day for like $27.

I don't know where it came from. It's like, you are part of a class action lawsuit. I'm like, I am? You have to opt into those things. Somewhere along the way, I must have responded to an email. My roommate, Shay, she got like $75 for this thing. Yeah, Dreamfields claimed that they were carb-free and they obviously weren't.

So we got money back. Yeah. Are you still on an unlimited bandwidth program? No, I'm on a family program because I, yeah. Yeah. If you wanted to go past, say, an iPhone 4, basically, I don't know anybody that's still on unlimited bandwidth anymore. I know like three or four people, but it's almost impossible now.

They're making it so hard to do. Yeah. Oh, man. Speaking of unlimited bandwidth, Pandora has a radio station now. Okay. Because the airwaves are unlimited. You know, you can have that. Yeah, it was a terrible one. Pandora just bought a radio station so they can try and cut down on their royalties.

I think this is a weird hack. It doesn't really make that much sense to me because every radio station has been trying to go online. But okay. Well, they were probably trying to go online because they didn't have to pay as much in royalties as the online companies did. So they could probably think they could save some money or make more money.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm still kind of shocked that Pandora is still around. But hey, okay. A lot of people like it. A lot of people don't like playlists. They just want random music coming to them like you'd get, you know, say, when we grew up on the radio. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

But you can get that in various. You can get that through Spotify. You can get that through Apple. If you can find it in the goddamn interface. That's very true. Yeah. It's a pain in the ass. Well, actually, no. The hardest part in Spotify is making it play in a straight line. It's like, can I shuffle or turn on a radio?

Those are the ones they want you to do the most. And I'm like, I don't want to do either. Let me reiterate. And Spotify, I hope you're listening. The hardest part of Spotify is when you try to transition from being on Wi-Fi to streaming or just your carrier. Because basically, I lose Spotify for five minutes every time I walk out of my house.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've had that happen. When you take the dog for a walk, you're screwed. Yeah. All I want to do is walk down to Main Street, which is, you know, a 10-minute walk. And I want to listen to a tune. For five minutes, I can't listen to shit. Thanks, Spotify. Thanks, Spotify. You have to go, you have to, like, flip over to airplane mode before, like, five minutes before you want to go on your walk.

You have to plan ahead for this. And then when you're out of range, you know, when you think you're out of range and you can turn off airplane mode and then it should pick back up, you know. Yeah. You can figure out a way to hack the system. So we talked about Top Gear before, and it seems that there's a new host coming.

Yeah. Yeah. I have no intention of watching the original Top Gear. I will wait for the Netflix version that involves the three guys that we like. Yeah. I love the three guys. We like them. They're going to do a new show. I'll give this one a shot for at least one or two episodes. Hell, I even watched the American Top Gear for two episodes to give it a shot.

But I know Chris Evans, and I'm betting you're not going to like this. Oh, you don't, you think I'm not going to dig this dude? Nah, he's no, he's no May. He's no Clarkson. He's no none of that. He's basically, I would call him the Ryan Seacrest of Britain. Ew.

Yeah. I mean, he's kind of wacky, but in a generic, not inoffensive way. Huge radio guy over there because, again, the inoffensive thing. You know, I never watched Top Gear about the cars. I watched Top Gear because of the personalities, and I'll watch the first one, and I'll be interested to see who they have with him because it's not obviously going to be just him, and being the Anglophile that I am, I'll probably know who the other two are, but we'll see.

But I don't think you're going to be a big fan of this. Okay. Like I said, I'll give it a shot, but I'm not a fan of Seacrest, so I don't think Seacrest across the sea will be much better. No, not so much. Ran into an article on Slate. I think everybody that's on Facebook has been beat over the head with the On This Day in History feature, and if not, if you haven't seen it for yourself, you've certainly seen other people posting things that weren't particularly memorable to anyone except them, but you have to relive them again a year later.

There's an article that just is basically by this woman, Sarah Sink, that I somewhat agree with. It's, on a bigger picture perspective, she's 100% right about this, but on the small, like, have we solved cancer level, I don't see this as a big deal or why this is apparently upsetting her so much.

But she is saying that the, on this day, nothing happened, Facebook feature is basically making history useless, and we no longer pay attention to things that are important, but instead focus on what we had for lunch a year ago. Oh, well, that's pretty true, but the only, I mean, the only backlash I've seen is, like, you know, if somebody's pet died a year ago, and they're hashing that back up, or somebody's family member died, and that part I see a lot of backlash coming from.

Yeah, but, you know, on the bigger picture perspective, I do tend to agree with her, because we have gone away from, say, it's just the continuing egotistical self-centeredness of our culture and our nation, where basically what happened one year ago to us is of far more importance than anything that might have happened on the world stage.

Yeah, this is just, you know, the ever-present march of narcissism, you know, just traveling on. And related to that, what sins of the future are you committing right now? Well, I'm sitting on an exercise ball, sweating and talking on a podcast.

So podcasting is probably what, that'll be my sin of the future. Well, we could be in quite a lot of trouble for a lot of the things that we say on this podcast, according to this talk. It's, we've talked about the singularity before, about, you know, the point in time where technology has basically shot directly upward and surpasses human abilities.

And we live in this crazy world where everything is completely different than it is now. There, this guy, let's see, what is his name? He is the, his name is Brad Templeton. And he, at the executive program at Singularity University, I did not know there was a university. He gave a kind of interesting talk that basically says in the future, we will be able to go back and see basically everything that is being done now, because we're all recording and posting and podcasting, uh, the various things that we do now and who knows what kind of morality they will have in the future.

So will they be judging us and saying how we're super bad people and we just did really horrible things because things will have changed by then, but they have access to basically the entirety of our experience. You know, this has been talked about long, long ago. And there are times when I can't even find a photo I took like three weeks ago.

So if they can go back and find that and then judge me on the cheese sandwich I ate back three weeks ago. Well, again, this is, you know, this is post Singularity when, when, yeah, data capture sorting and all of that will be, you know, totally solved and completely the entirety of human experience will be. Here's the other part about it.

I don't give a shit cause I'm going to be dead. I really, uh, you know, you know, according, according to some people, the singularity will hit within our lifetimes and we will be able basically to live forever by downloading into a computer. We shall see. Okay. Let's, I, for one, I would like to basically state for, for our future overlords, records.

If I happen to be on a, in a Google machine somewhere that I have disagreed with Jason about just about everything. So do not hold me at fault. And then, uh, on the contrary side, you can feel free to pull the plug on Brian because I'm right most of the time. So there we go.

What was the quote from the barbecue last week, Jason? Oh, you, you had well thought out, but, but wrong is what you said about all my, my great ideas, but I don't, I don't agree with you. Okay. No, no, no, no, no, no. Uh, but who I do agree with is the FAA.

Mm-hmm. Finally, they're, they're actually putting the plans that we talked about, about drone usage. And you know, they're calling them drones, but they're not technically drones, but they're going to be fast tracking this because Amazon, I think Amazon is really why this is getting fast tracked because Amazon is publicly stated.

We want our fucking drones. We're taking our business to Canada, get off your ass and give us some legislation so we can test here. Right. Look, I'm all fine with this and it's not surprising that it's a big business that is driving this. It's certainly not going to be individual drone users. We need some sort of regulation.

We need rules and we need the FAA to weigh in and provide these rules because let's face it, these things are getting cheaper and cheaper and more and more idiots are buying them and we're starting to have more and more problems. And they're, I mean, they're, they're not that complicated to build at home. I can build one the size of a Buick in my backyard for, you know, probably a couple grand, but I can build one bigger than a Buick for less than a Buick.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and fly it anywhere. And if that thing does the battery dies, it falls out of the sky. I just dropped the Buick on somebody. So yes, we do need some regulations around it. And if you live in any city, like say Los Angeles, where there is a lot of stuff going on in the airspace at all times, we're causing, these people are causing a lot of problems by flying these things up.

I mean, especially around LAX or you got helicopters everywhere there. There have been near misses basically almost daily. So. Oh my God. If I could put up a drone shield around the house to keep the ghetto birds out at night. Oh, that would be great. That would be nice. Security.

There are a couple of interesting things that happened in security this week. First one was last pass was hacked. Now last pass is the competitor or a competitor to one password that we always talk about on the show.

Oh, so it's not like say for one password, just using one password or for last pass, I just use the last password I used. Right. Correct. So yeah, last pass, they were very vague about how much data was taken. Like, yeah, vast majority of users are safe.

I don't know. I cannot quantify vast. Yes. What is the, you know, the scientific symbol for vast? Should they not basically have the ability to tell you specifically if it was you or not? Yeah. Well, I don't think they actually know.

Great. Well, I, you know, this is, we've talked about this multiple times with companies. This is the exact not way to report these things, but okay. Yeah. That's, that's pretty much all. Like I didn't get to follow it too much, but some people were upset, but I don't use last pass because I use one password.

Now in, in a related one password, this is, this is a pre segue segue. So, uh, there's been a lot of talk about this Apple hack. The, uh, the register put out one, put out an article called Apple cord boffins reveal password killer O days for iOS and OS X.

Okay. We have max. Are we in trouble? Yes. Okay. If you have a PC, you're in trouble too. If you have a Linux box, you're also in trouble. You're breathing. You have, you're in trouble. That's pretty much it. So these guys, uh, have figured out how to, how to get through the everything, everything in, uh, OS X, iOS, they got through the stores.

They know how to deal with cross app sandboxing and pass through it. It's difficult. It's not easy. And there are a lot of things that are going on with it that are out of the scope for this show. So one password did a very detailed, uh, blog post about what they, what's good about it, what's bad about it, you know, as far as one password goes, but where they're vulnerable,

where they have taken steps to, you know, make sure that there's, they're safe as possible. But, and they said, they say straight out, uh, there's some problems in the actual system software that we cannot fix.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's basically unfixable because it's related to the relations between cross app stuff. And it's not one, it's, it's an overall issue. This is, yeah, this is an OS level bug. Yep. And these guys told Apple six months ago, Hey, we can do this.

And Apple's like, give us six months, please. So, so we can try and fix this. And it comes down to, uh, well, six months are up. We're telling everybody. Yeah. Which I, I, I don't know. I don't know. This is kind of a big one. Yeah. It's, it's a real issue and it's not going to get solved anytime soon.

Uh, it does seem to be incredibly difficult, uh, to, to actually kind of exploit this though. So silver lining. Yeah. Yes. We have an exploit and it's hard. Okay. But still it is an exploit and it is usable and you know, it's, it's out there.

And speaking of exploits and being out there, uh, God, Michael Hayden, the ex, uh, NSA director has pretty much laughed that, uh, everything that's done and did got one little tiny program killed and everything else is trucking along as normal.

That is not terribly surprising. No, no. Since we are, uh, not the optimistic type on this show for the most part, some days we are some weeks we are, but we kind of said, yeah, we'll see what happens when it happens. We hoped that there would be reform and it never materialized.

No. Uh, you know, a lot of Sturm and Drang and nothing actually occurring. Thanks. Uh, that's, that's what Snowden brought to the table. At least we, we know things are happening now, but they're just not going to ever stop. No. Yeah, they're not. And you know, people, people like the NSA have a very vested interest in Apple, not fixing holes like they've got.

So they probably knew a lot longer than six months ago. Comment of the week. Lawrence Lee wrote into us on our Patreon account. That's patreon.com slash GOG.

Feel free to kick us a buck or two. Uh, he said, hi grumps. Back in the day of the Mac plus people coded things called air quotes programs, which morphed into air quotes applications. I knew a guy who wrote code and fricking machine language in order to create the tightest, smallest programs possible, which were at the time called desk accessories.

Desks draw and desk paint were two of the best. There was freeware and shareware. And then Guy Kawasaki encouraged developers to charge more for Mac programs. And we were off to the races. Applications eventually became apps, which are more or less like desk accessories. Adobe took Photoshop online only.

And I bailed. Google put major apps online. Apple dumped disk players is now closing the ports as everything is being shoved into something called the cloud, which is just someone else's computer. And now I read in wire in a wired article that the de-appification of mobile software is in full swing as conceived and empowered by Apple and Google.

The article is titled Apple and Google race to see who can kill the app first. Is everything now going to be mobile and just a feature of the latest Google or Apple vision of what we should want? I can see the reasonableness of it all, but it also scares the hell out of me. What's your take on this, Lawrence? So I think that it's not going to happen that way because the issue here is, yes, Apple will always take features from other apps and bake them into the system to make the phone more usable out of the gate.

But think about how much money Apple and Google make off of third party apps. There is no way that they're going to try and, you know, knock everything out. And they can't because the market is too vast. There's just no way. But we've seen the decline of app purchases.

We've talked about that multiple times on this show. We're trying to get a friend of the show on who develops apps that says there's no fucking money in it. Right. But, well, for some people, there aren't like, look at Candy Crush. Look at King. Look at, you know, what Zynga used to be. People still buy games and people still do, you know, casual gaming.

Apple is not going to have a gaming unit that's going to start busting out games. You know, there's always going to be a market for that. There's always going to be a market for every type of little app because that's where innovation comes from. And if Apple killed that market, then they wouldn't have anything to steal from.

So it makes no sense to me. Well, I don't think that that's what. OK, first off, this is this is kind of bad journalism in that they are basically making it black or white. Of course, they're not going to kill off the market, but there's no denying that this is both. This is exactly what Apple and Google would like to have happen and are pushing their way towards.

And something that we've said again and again on this very program is beware app developers, because if your product is good enough and you don't time things right or maybe sell what you should, Apple or Google will just basically take your idea and bake it into their own software.

And they're going to continue to do that and will continue to do that. The article basically talks about get out of the single feature business for app designers, which I totally understand because I do actually enjoy the fact that these things are starting to get more and more integrated.

And you kind of have to have basically an OS level ability to do that. Now, lots of app developers are doing that sort of thing. It's never going to go away. Obviously, Apple is never going to get into gaming like that. So, of course, there's still going to be gaming people. Of course, there's still going to be innovation and people developing apps.

But I think we're going to see more and more these companies will get bought out or the Apple slash Google will basically just create their own in the next version of the iOS that works a lot better because it integrates with everything else. And that's I agree. That's the way we're going. But it's not going to be black and white, kill the entire app store altogether.

I just think that we're going to see more and more homogenized experience. People not using third party apps again, unless they're bleeding edge users like me and you. And basically, all of these features being built more and more into the actual OSes. You're right. It's gray. It's extraordinarily gray.

But there's so much in the app store that, you know, any Apple or Google is not even going to want to touch and they're going to make money on it. So I just see this. I honestly see this article as a non-issue. Like you said, bad journalism. Great. Then we spent a lot of time on the non-issue.

Well, I hope that answers your question. I hope that answers your question, Lawrence. Yes. Yeah, it's it's a very gray issue. Jason and I kind of may have somewhat. Actually, we kind of agree, but we're just saying we disagree anyways. So, yeah, we agree on parts of it and disagree on parts of it.

But I honestly think that it's it's not going to matter. You know, don't don't lose sleep over this article is I think what we're trying to say. I like to see the integration on the phone. I do. You know, I'm an old school guy. I used to build my own computer.

So I'm coming from the world of I loved infinite customization. But there is I guess I'm just getting old and I'm tired of dealing with all the crap. I love the fact that, like, I can pull down on my iPhone and see how all my stocks are doing because it's baked in. Yeah. We have iTunes five star rating and comment again.

Great podcast from Jeff dash in dash. Oh, so I'm assuming Ohio. Ohio is what I'm guessing, too. That would be my guess. I enjoy the show and commentary on tech and the Internet from the inside. Great info, entertaining and show notes worth checking. Nice job. Thank you very much, Jeff.

Yes, thank you very much, because I do work very hard on those show notes. And so does Brian. You work hard on them. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So if you guys are out there listening and are enjoying the show, please do give us an iTunes five star rating and leave us a comment. You can reach us on Twitter or on Facebook or on GrumpyOldGeeks.com, where our show notes live that are apparently very informative and worth checking out.

At the library. I needed to take a break from sci-fi and kind of fiction in general. And one of the books that I've loved most in the world, because I fly a lot, was a book called Ask the Pilot by Patrick Smith.

He actually wrote an article called Ask the Pilot that was on Salon or Slate. I can't remember which one for an awful long time, compiled them into a book with some more thoughts. He's actually a very good writer, a pilot, obviously. And I believe I talked about the first one, Ask the Pilot, on our show before.

This is a basically kind of updated slash sequel. He says it's about 70% new. He's repackaged a lot of the stuff and updated a bunch of things and written completely new articles to go along with it. And he's also appropriated the Anthony Bourdain Kitchen Confidential title.

So it's Cockpit Confidential. Everything you need to know about air travel, questions, answers, and reflections by Patrick Smith. So I think this is an absolutely fantastic book for anybody that loves travel or is scared of flying on planes. I know you had some trepidations because you're flying tomorrow, Jason.

You saw I pop this in the show notes. I recommend you put this on your Kindle and read it on the plane. He's a real pilot and he talks a lot about the specifics of air travel. Not too crazy in science. He likes to go, I don't want to bore the hell out of anyone, including myself.

But there's actually quite a lot that I learned about safety and about the procedures and how amazingly safe flying actually is and how it really takes a cascading series of catastrophic events for anything even remotely bad to happen. And even in those cases, there are 10,000 different ways for everything to kind of work out safely.

I think you'll enjoy it. And I think it really, you know, I was terrified of flying when I was young. I got over it just because I flew so damn much. But if this book would have been around when I was younger, I would have been considerably less terrified of flights. OK, well, yeah, I'm definitely going to pick it up because I am, you know, terrified of flying and I do only get over it when I'm doing it consistently, like, you know, every couple like every two weeks or every week.

And then then I'm good for a year. But if I take a break, then it gets harder to get back on the horse. And the best ones are when you do the super long hauls because you just come to grips with it. You're like, I am I'm flying somewhere 35,000 feet over the Pacific and there's nothing that can save me if something goes wrong.

Well, the thing I really like about this book, I mean, outside of the fact that he does that's the whole safety thing and the mechanics of flying and all that is a very small part. He goes into airports and history and design of airports and just the experience of traveling and all of that, which is all great because he is a very good writer.

But the thing that I really enjoyed is basically he runs through every little thing that happens when you're sitting on a plane that terrifies the shit out of you and why you should not be terrified at all. I'm in. You sold me. OK, so pick it up, read it. Great book. OK, so my book of the week is Love Me When I'm Gone, The True Story of Life, Love and Loss for a Green Beret in Post 9-11 War by Robert Patrick Lewis.

OK. So we both kind of went a little bit off sci-fi topic this week. You need breaks every now and then. You've got to switch it up. Well, you've got to be well-rounded, I think. So, yeah. Now, your book is going to make me feel better about flying. This book will make you feel better about not being in war.

I always feel pretty good about not being in war, Jason. Yeah, no, it's a fascinating book. And Robert Patrick Lewis is the guy that wrote The Pact, which I reviewed maybe five or six episodes ago, which is it's a fictional book, but it's really fun if you're into the crazy survivalist stuff.

But this book is just his life story about him being a Green Beret. And, man, the training those guys go through is insane. Just the months and years and, you know, just one specific thing, like how you clear a house. It's like, OK, you do it with nothing in the room and you do that for a week.

And then, like, next week they'll put in a chair and you do it just over and over and over again because they know that, you know, when your adrenaline starts or, you know, just goes crazy, you just revert back to muscle memory. And just hearing the stories about how they do that in the military is really fascinating.

Right. And the part where people are shooting at him and trying to kill him and kill his friend, that part's a little bit more, you know, hands on. Harry, oh, I don't want to go to war. So I highly recommend this book. I loved it. Software, apps, and gadgets.

I don't own a console game. I haven't, like, you know, just a console, like an X-Bone or a PS4. I don't have any of those. I sold my 360 after the Red Ring of Death four times. But now I saw the gameplay footage from Star Wars Battlefront that comes out in November.

And I might just have to revert to my 15-year-old self and go buy one of those consoles just to play this game because, oh my God, it looks awesome. Yes. And as it's been well documented on this podcast, I'm not a gamer at all. But I watched this clip that you put up.

And basically, the games finally look like all the commercials made them look for years. So it looks pretty badass. Yeah. The gameplay footage now looks like rendered footage because the machines are so powerful. And they got the software so good. Yeah. It looks pretty cool. And, you know, I'm a Star Wars geek as well.

So this is almost tempting except for the fact that I know I'm not a gamer and I'm not going to invest all this money in a game machine to play one game that I'll play for about a week. But you can also use it as a Blu-ray player. I've got a Blu-ray player and I don't even use Blu-rays anymore. All my DVDs are in a box.

Actually, do you want to buy them, Jason? I know you're a DVD guy. If they're Blu-rays, I'll check them out for sure. All right. I bought a Blu-ray player and I've got like only the Blu-rays that we did on Does It Have Legs. So I need some more. And I love them. I think they're beautiful. Well, I shall get a list together for you.

Speaking of games I'm abandoning, the ongoing saga of my Game of War, I think this is week three on reporting. I did as Jason suggested because I was feeling a little bit guilty about playing the game for free. So I tossed the game makers a couple ducats. I bought about $5 worth of resources and I sent all those out to the alliance that had protected my ass for the last two weeks.

Instead of keeping them myself, I was like, here you go, guys. I gifted them away. And so now I feel my karma level is clean with Game of War. I got two to three weeks of enjoyment out of it and gave them a few bucks. And I'm officially bored as hell with the game. Because basically, it would only be fun if I could start attacking people.

And the only way I could attack people is if I spent more money. So I'm out. That's kind of it. Yep. But and here's the thing. Once you start attacking people, they start attacking back and then you're back to being bored. That's the problem with that. Because then you're back to grinding until you can attack somebody again.

At my experience, I enjoyed the concept of the game. And I agree with whoever wrote us last week and really went into depth gaming. I think if I am going to get into a game again, it will be something in which you basically have a buy-in and then you cannot buy your way higher in the game.

And then you just kind of go on strategy. I think that would be something that's enjoyable to me. But having had this experience for three weeks, I think that's at least a year or two years away before I dive back in to try anything again. Oh, that's too bad. I want to get you on StarCraft because then I'd have somebody to play against. Oh, maybe.

We'll see. We'll see if I get bored not playing. Okay. But I've only got until November because then I'm going to go be stuck in Battlefront. Okay. Well, I might wait for that because I think the intrigue of it being in the Star Wars universe might keep me more involved. Excellent. So Dark Sky got an update.

And we've previously talked about Dark Sky and how you thought it was so useless in your neck of the woods, which I agreed with. I'm like, you've got no leading indicators of weather. It is a very beautiful update. I'm looking at it right now.

It's gorgeous. This is one of the prettiest apps I've ever seen now. And it's still completely and utterly useless if you happen to live within a few miles of the Pacific Ocean. But what they have put in is a real-time report what the weather's like now. So hopefully over time it can get better.

If you say, or if you open it up and it's like, hey, it's raining and you didn't tell me, then maybe they can figure out how to make it work for other people on the beach. Yes. I think I may have to tweet them and say, you know, if you need to put some sensors out that are in the water, maybe station some Dark Sky surfers out, maybe two to three miles out.

Otherwise, this app is completely and utterly useless for me when I'm at home. Well, even at the end of the piers, you've got the Venice Pier and the Santa Monica Pier. You can put some moisture sensors out there. So by the time it gets to the end of the pier on the land, you're good to go. Look, I don't even care if I get like a three to one minute warning.

I would just like it when I'm actually standing outside and being rained on it telling me that it's raining. Yeah, no doubt. That's all I'm asking for, really. I mean, I can hold up the phone. It's wet. Shouldn't the app know that? In interesting news, Neil Gaiman's American Gods gets a full series order on Starz.

I give this about a 0.000000000005% chance of being any good. See, I give it about an 80% chance of being awesome. You know why? You know why? Because Starz has a really good history of doing these kind of things.

Their programming, I think, is top notch. If you go back and you look at Spartacus, which was cheesy but entertaining, and I watched them all and I loved them all, I think if they can bring, you know, but that was Sam Ramey and Rob Tappert and those guys, but I think they're going to do a fine job with it.

Let's just quickly run through the track record of books that I've loved that have been turned into movies and or miniseries. Dune, horrible. Children of Dune, horrible. Ender's Game, horrible. I'm blanking in. I should have prepared more. But I don't have, you know, and whatever they're going to end up doing with Stephen King's Gunslinger is going to suck, although they're never even going to get that off the ground, so it's just never going to happen.

So I don't have to worry about it sucking. I just, I don't buy it. Same, you know, why I keep hearing that they're going to do Stephen King's The Talisman. That's never going to happen. Actually, yeah, but this has been ordered, you know, this is this is going. They did The Stand, and I have some appreciation for it, even though I do just because I love the book so much, although objectively, horrible.

The list goes on and on. There's just, they're not going to be able to do this book justice. I think there was a lot of Stephen King in there that you kept calling horrible, though, so. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, because they haven't even bothered to try to do anything like Asimov's Foundation. I would love to see that turned into something, but it never, it'll never happen.

And if they do, it'll be crap. So, no, I have high hopes for American Gods because the showrunner is going to be Michael Green, who's the executive producer of Gotham, which I actually really enjoy. Gaiman's going to be an executive producer on it, which means he's going to have hands-on with the day-to-day of the show.

Great. Amanda Palmer is going to write the fucking theme song. I might, just might. I don't mind. I like your music. I'm definitely out then. Of course you are. Anyways, apparently it was originally being developed for HBO, which may have been a little bit better.

I think HBO is a better track record than Starz, but we'll see. I propose a bet right now, another bottle of monkey rum. If it sucks, you buy one for me. And if it's good, I buy one for you. And we can't rely on each other. We will actually put a poll up on our Patreon page once this is out.

Okay. Yes, there will be a Patreon poll. Is it shit or not? Exactly. I'm not a big fan of the passed along email links.

You've got to take a look at this. I tend to basically lie and say I did and write back and go, ha ha, that was funny without ever looking at it. I did get this one. I did open it. And I highly recommend that you do as well, particularly if you happen to be a Family Guy fan. Seth MacFarlane was on, I believe, the Graham Norton show.

He happened, you know, he's promoting Ted too, basically. And conveniently, Cyndi Lauper happened to be on the same show. So he then proceeded to basically sing some of Cyndi Lauper's greatest hits as both Stewie and Peter Griffin. And I fell off the chair laughing. Okay. See, I'm a Graham Norton fan.

I'm a Seth MacFarlane fan in certain aspects, but I've never seen an episode of Family Guy. Really? I've never seen a single episode of Family Guy. So. Gotta say you are missing out. It is, I've fallen off the wagon. I haven't been keeping up with it, but it is by far probably my favorite animated series of all time.

Okay. I might have to go back. I'm definitely going to check out this bit because I, I, I love the Graham Norton show. I actually saw him do standup in West Hollywood one time, which was hilarious. I love him. So this is, he brings out the best in people and the weird. That's the good part. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Very much so. So I'm a big fan of his show as well. So, uh, but, uh, you've got to get on the Family Guy thing. I don't know if this will be as enjoyable for you not being aware of those characters, but if you are aware, it's just fucking funny. Yeah. I'm aware of the characters. I've heard the voices, but I haven't just, I don't have the context.

So, but whatever it's, it's somebody with Cyndi Lauper. I'm a Cyndi Lauper fan. Oh yes. Peter Griffin doing true colors. Need I say more? Oh, perfect. There you go. Uh, and Slate has a feature on their site or an area called Atlas Obscura, your guide to the world's hidden wonders that they do not update enough, uh, in my opinion, because I've always loved the articles that they posted.

They did post one recently, which is about the USPS, that's the US Postal Service for you, uh, out of country fans facility that deciphers your illegible handwriting. So if you drop off a piece of mail and nobody can figure out where the fuck this thing is supposed to go, apparently it ends up in Salt Lake City of all places where there's a United States Postal Service remote encoding center where all day, every day workers basically sit there, read the scan bits of correspondence with questionable addresses and try to decipher where the hell they're supposed to go.

Oh, that sounds like a fun job. No shit. I bet they're considered, uh, contractors. Well, they would be if the post office was Uber. No, yeah. Government, government employees. But I, that's, this, this sounds like one of the jobs that going postal, you know, would have spawned.

It's like, yeah, totally. Yeah. And I think Atlas Obscura probably takes a little longer to find the world's hidden wonders because they're, you know, hidden. Take some time to find them. Yes. Yes. Well, it is a great feature on their site and, uh, I scroll through the archives as well.

It's, it's good reads. So, uh, the, the one that I found, I, I haven't seen Jurassic World. I honestly don't have much desire to go see Jurassic World. Nor do I. But there is, you know, in the, in the trailer, you see Chris Pratt, like wrangling his raptors and apparently zookeepers have been having fun with it.

And they're going out and getting all of their animals in the zoos and recreating the scene. Well, that's quite clever. And the pictures are pretty funny and, and they get funnier as you go because it's just get down to the chickens. Yeah. Yeah.

No, this, this is great. You rhinos, you got seals, you got otters, uh, penguins, everything. It's, it's pretty cute. Oh, the tortoise one too. You can, uh, that, that, that was probably easy to set up. Don't move. Don't move. Well, just be a tortoise.

This is a fun, it's a fun one. Check it out for shizzle. And, uh, okay. I'm going to go watch the Cyndi Lauper thing now. Awesome. Closing shout outs. So we've muddled our way through our, there wasn't going to be a show. We were doing a quick show show that I didn't prep for show.

So I hope everybody enjoyed it. Uh, I know Jason, you are off to Chicago. I also have quite the busy weekend ahead of time. So a couple of shout outs, uh, first a shout out to Karen, whose birthday is tomorrow, a friend of the show and Jason, you actually met her back in the day when she was working with Zane Lamprey.

So I'll be hanging out with her tomorrow night. Uh, on Saturday, uh, friend of the show, Carl Wallinger is in town. I'll be hanging out with him and, uh, catching his show at the Troubadour, uh, the band World Party and, uh, pick up the album best in show. It's kind of his greatest hits collection. So very much looking forward to seeing Carl and then seeing him play at the Troubadour.

If you are in LA, come on out. And Sunday, in addition to it being a father's day, my mom's birthday. Uh, so I'll be heading down to the orange, the orange County for all that crap. And then coming on back up and catching Underworld at the Hollywood bowl, which I'm incredibly excited about.

So very, very big weekend. That is an insane weekend. I'm sad. I'm not going to get to see World Party or Underworld. Um, yeah, you got a lot of world going on. Yes. Yes. There's a whole world of under parties. Okay. Oh, not going there.

Um, so yeah, definitely. If you, uh, you did, I guess there's no chance of getting Carl in front of a microphone for us for the weekend. Uh, no, unfortunately he's, uh, playing San Francisco tonight. Uh, the rooting doesn't work out. He's basically just here for the day and then he's doing San Diego tomorrow and then flying back to the East coast.

So we'll have to get him on, on Skype at some point. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Getting a touring artist to sit down is pretty tough. Yeah. But, uh, mentioning Karen, I, yes, I did meet her a long time ago when I did one of Zane Lamprey's, uh, drinking tours, which was three days, 50 people on a bus going to different restaurants and not remembering about two thirds of it.

But we have the photos. It was a blast. Uh, at the barbecue this weekend, you brought out some of Zane's monkey rum, which we talked about on the show because I was pissed off that you got the spiced rum. Yeah. Zane Lamprey has changed my mind. That shit was delicious.

Yes, it was. And it didn't last very long. If I remember correctly. I don't know if you can't remember correctly because it didn't last very long. Therein lies the problem with the monkey rum. So, uh, we're going to put a link in the show notes. Uh, you can buy it online, I believe. Yeah. And it, it is at, uh, other local liquor stores, but man, that was good.

Also a quick shout out to resistance pro wrestling because I will be there Saturday, uh, in, I think it's summit, Illinois, uh, go to resistance pro.com. Check it out. If you're in the Chicago area and you want to come see an awesome wrestling show, uh, tickets are cheap. We're going to have a good time.

There is beer and wrestling and I will be, you know, spinning the discs as it were. You're going to play some under party. Um, actually, yeah, I do play underworld while I'm there. Excellent. Thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo and you can find out more about me at jpd.me and I'm Brian Schulmeister and you can follow me on Twitter at, at slender fungus until next time at, at grumpy old geeks is a fan supported show.

Check out our Patreon page at patrion.com slash gog. We really appreciate your support. If you don't want to, or can't donate, but still want to support the show, please go to grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars or talk to a friend about the show.

Music for the show is provided by Andy Stachansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy. Andy's also on SoundCloud, which you can get to by going to grumpy old geeks.com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpy old geeks.com slash 115.

But I see your true colors shining through.

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