125: Brony Madison

I've had that goddamn Three's Company song stuck in my head all week. Come and knock on my door. I think we did that to a lot of people. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks episode 125 for August 28th, 2015. I am Jason DeFilippo. And I'm sweating balls. I'm actually Brian Schulmeister, but it is hot as hell and humid. It is miserable out here. I was expecting it to be really nice out by the beach.

Even by the beach, it's been pretty bad the past few days in LA. This is a, this is uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah. I'm definitely regretting the decision to come do this with you in person today because I have central air. Well, yeah, this is one of the five days out of the year that we are very unhappy not to have that. Oh man. Oh, well, here we are. So we're, we're hot and angry, very hot, very angry. Now I just wanted to do a little follow-up on some things we talked about in the

past. Okay. And that have just come recently full circle for me. Why does the web suck so much anymore? Well, nobody wants to pay for anything. Nobody does anything ambitious or interesting. And, um, you know, even though it's the only method out there for promotion or anything anymore, nobody just really, nobody cares. Pop-ups are back everywhere. Every website I go to has a subscribe to our email list, which is, you know, okay, we're going back to the nineties. Now let's

go back to email. I was sucking. I mean, that, that was a thing that was popping up even about two years ago. Remember when there was all those boutique, uh, cool, interesting shopping sites that, that some of which made it into our, into our show a couple of times, cause they have cool stuff, but they wouldn't even let you go into the site unless you had signed up with them.

Yep. That's, that's, that's a comeback with a vengeance cause everybody's picked up on it now. Yeah. If you don't have your email list, you've got nothing. Even though email lists are actually email lists are extraordinarily powerful, but, um, UX UX on new sites is some of the most ridiculous stuff I've ever seen. I don't understand. Well, I understand some of it because they want more page views and more ad impressions, but we'll get to the ad stuff

later, but it's like everybody's given up and just says, eh, try it. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's one of two things are, is occurring. Yeah. They're, they're giving up and they're just like, let's make it as complicated as possible to increase what value we want out of things. Or they've given up in the sense of why bother developing anything or paying someone to do something cool. Let's just have a Tumblr site. That'll work. Yeah. That's out there too. But I'm, you know, I'm, I'm just running into a

lot of sites now where you go to an article and as you scroll down, it auto loads the next article underneath. So they can count that as a page view. Yeah. Which is bullshit. That is fake metrics. Totally fake metrics. Um, also when I go to sites that have video now, they just won't stop.

Yeah. If you pause them, they will start back up after 30 seconds with sound. Yep. Oh man. No, even I I'm looking at my screen right now cause I have a bunch of the articles open that just we're going to talk about in the intro. And I see a little sound icon on four to four different ones. It's just that playing by itself. And I've, I tried to stop it earlier. They restarted.

No. Yeah. I I've had to go back and apologize to a couple of guests on a couple of shows this week because it would just start playing when I'm trying to do some research. It's like, Oh yeah. Well, when I saw you put in this, this little bit of a rant about, about why the web sucks, I responded with, uh, they aren't getting paid decent money to build anything good work is scarce.

And God forbid you tell a client that what they want is wrong because you'll lose the, you'll lose the job. So on the developer side, we, I mean, I've been in this situation where I built something I 100% and completely disagree with just because I needed the money. I know, but a lot of these places are like, you know, big magazines that we're seeing and that's an in-house staff. So it's not even, I mean, you're coming from a contractor perspective, but this is like the in-house staff who should be making some of the greatest stuff. Like look at

the in-house staff at wired back in the day. They, even though they created the goddamn ads that we were talking about, they at least tried to innovate and do fun stuff and at least make the reading experience decent. But there's nothing in it for them now. They have to make money.

Oh yeah. And there's no way to make money on with your website much anymore, as we'll get into in a little bit. No, yeah. Cause they can't sell magazines anymore. No, no. Everything, I mean, everything is free, Jason. Everything is free. And that's why it sucks. Except my rent. Exactly. Or the groceries or the beer we're drinking. Indeed.

Oh, you know what else was free though? I know what you're going to say here. Apparently that permit that allowed Chloe Kardashian to blow off a bunch of fireworks at midnight on a Tuesday night, waking up basically everyone on the fucking West side, all the babies, all the people that sleep, all the people that, you know, have to get up in the morning and work something they don't really understand. Uh, this was just, this made me so angry.

Yeah. Cause I thought you were going to say you got a free, uh, fireworks show. Yeah. Free fireworks show would be great on a weekend or during a reasonable hour, starting at midnight and lasting 15 minutes long, which is an incredibly long time. Um, loud, loud, loud, loud fireworks are blown off in the, in Marina del Rey right here at, uh, by Santa Monica, uh, for, you know, a little birthday party for James Harden, Chloe Kardashian's boyfriend and a bunch of people

sitting on a yacht, a hundred feet out of the Marina, which is a coastal waters. So when we all tried to call and complain to the city of Santa Monica or a Marina del Rey, they threw up their hands and said, not us, all the Coast Guard. Yeah. And, uh, the guy from the Coast Guard who got back to me was actually really nice. And he understood how this is kind of ridiculous and should never have happened. But unfortunately they were given a permit to do so because they just had to prove safety. I don't think that they realized that these things going off at midnight would wake up every

single baby on the West side and all the people that had to go to work in the morning. So talk about your 1% or bullshit assholes. Indeed. Cause there's really not a whole lot between the Marina and just about any place to baffle the sound. No people. I had friends in Malibu that heard it.

Uh, it was incredibly loud here. I had friends down in Redondo beach that heard it. I had friends east of the 405 that heard it and it woke them up. This shit was loud. Like these two idiots inconvenienced half of Los Angeles just because they could. Well, it's not, they didn't think about it. They probably don't care because they're Kardashians. They don't care. They don't give a fuck about us. Exactly. Oh, you little people. Look at the pretty lights. Yeah. I mean, in case you

don't think there's an us and them, I mean this perfectly exemplified it for almost all of Los Angeles on Tuesday night. So I'm going to crowdfund a 24 hour fireworks party for all of Los Angeles, which will be centered over the Kardashian house. Uh, I think I finally found a use for Kickstarter, Jason. There you go. And another thing that came out this, this week that, uh, just kind of exemplifies there that people with money play by completely different

rules and, and it's a different world for them than it is for us. I'm not big on sports. I don't really know who Chris Carter is. Isn't that the guy that made the X-Files? That's the Chris Carter that you and I are aware of. There's another one. And he's, he's involved with football. He's an ESPN NFL analyst. I assume he played at some point or something like that. And he was speaking at the 2014 NFL rookie symposium. What did he say? Where they bring in the new players and they give

him lessons in, you know, how you should conduct yourself. And normally that would involve like, how about not doing anything stupid? Maybe save your money. Um, you know, because your NFL career isn't going to last forever. No, he talked about how you should have a fall guy in your crew to go to jail for you when you get caught doing stupid shit. Okay. So he's been watching that Ray Donovan show. Well, this just kind of tells you that this is how this stuff is for these players. Yeah. And they,

they run around with their posses and you know, this is probably good life advice for them, but it's a little fucking disgusting. It kind of is. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And when you're going to have hookers, leave your phone at home. Yeah. Don't take, don't take pictures of your hookers and make sure you have an idiot on your posse to go to jail for you. Yeah. This is like a mashup of ballers and Ray Donovan. He of course then apologized for his statement because he was going to lose his plushy gig paying him millions of dollars if he didn't. So it's one of those, I'm sorry,

but I'm not really sorry, but I want to keep my job. So I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Where's your fall guy now? Exactly. Where's his fall guy? Exactly. So speaking of cushy jobs, we were talking about working at Amazon last week. Yes. And I've, I found this on medium. Oh boy. Yeah. It's called a, I had a baby and cancer when I worked at Amazon. This is my story. Yeah. That's not fun. No. Had

her baby, you know, stuff went down, sad story. She left. But the funny thing is, uh, more stories like this are coming out from people I know that worked at Amazon and had babies. This apparently is systemic. It's not even systemic just to Amazon. I have many friends as well that have worked at other major companies. And, uh, it's yeah, basically, uh, that whole women's right thing. And that lean in stuff just don't have a baby. No. Because your company will not give an F about you. But we've

got enough people anyway. Stop breeding. Oh, come on. The problem with that, Jason, idiocracy. Smart people will hear that and go, we should probably scale back. Stupid people will have 17 kids and the Kardashians will never stop. Yeah. That's the, the law of idiocracy. Exactly. Always comes back. So have you seen the new Banksy video? I did. Uh, I am a Banksy fan. I am a fan of this

video as well. I think it's, he did something very interesting. My problem with it is, and I know this is going to come as a surprise because I'm grumpy and I'm angry and I don't like ugly, happily things. And you've got sweaty balls. And well that, no, I've got these great underwear. If only Tommy Johns would actually advertise with it. But anyways, uh, you, you would be surprised, but I have such a soft spot in my heart for Disneyland because I grew up two blocks away from it. I hung out there.

This, this just kind of bummed me out a little bit. I love Disneyland. Yeah. And the video is called Dismaland and the bemusement part. I think it's more of just a, uh, a commentary on the United States in general. It's culture and capitalism. And yes. Yeah. But it's a fun watch kind of, if you're in a really bad mood. Yeah. I don't watch it. If you're in a good mood, it's dark and it's twisted, but it is well done. And sadly it's pretty spot on. And I'm

happy with his move to these more large scale things and the production. I mean, it's, this is impressive. This is what happens when a true artist actually has money. Well, and it's, it's a, you know, conglomeration of like 50 other artists. Yeah. Yeah. So he's helping other people out as well. And he's, he's, yeah, it's a really, really cool thing. I wonder how he's doing these large scale things and not getting caught. That is interesting. I mean, obviously he didn't do it. He did it in England, I believe. Right. Yeah. This is, this is outside of, I'm sure he also

has a team of lawyers working for him at this point and makeup artists. Yeah. That as well. Yes. And fake IDs. Yeah. So, uh, we talked about how Facebook was basically trying to take over YouTube's position on video and they were having issues because they do not have YouTube's massive system of anti-piracy built in that goes through and kind of automagically captures things and marks them as you can't use this because this is copywritten. Right. Yeah. Well, apparently they've, they're rolling out a video matching technology now. Okay. They've got the, they've

got the money in the brain trust to build something like that. So yeah, time. Well, again, it's not necessarily in their interest. No, it's not to stop this at the moment because they want to build their video brand. Okay. Yeah. And, uh, because, uh, you know, you're sitting there with your Apple watch, I would be remiss in not letting you know that, uh, there's some good news for Apple watch. Oh, really? Even though they have not released any specific figures about, uh, how many they're selling. The Apple watch has debuted at number two behind

Fitbit or, uh, for wearables. Hmm. So apparently they're selling enough to see, how do they not release their numbers? But then I don't get it. Yeah. I have no idea. I don't, I didn't, I don't care about the metrics on it because yes, it's a quote unquote wearable, but I don't use it for fitness. I don't, you know what I use for Fitbit. I Fitbit. Yeah, I know. You're going to, you're carrying like 17,000 things. You couldn't not wear cargo shirts if you didn't want to. Hey, I'm

wearing my diesels today. I noticed you're not. And I am. That's kind of funny that I'm just lying. See, it's all fake. It's all fake. Uh, in other Apple news, apparently September 9th is the day when we will find out about the six S and the six plus S and God knows what else is coming.

Yeah. Well, since I just paid to have my six plus fixed, uh, I, I'm not getting a six S plus anytime soon. Now, dear listeners, do I go out on a limb like I did with the watch and say, you heard it from me here first. Uh, if, if history shows, Jason will have a six S or a six plus S within, uh, let me up at this time, three months. Okay. Well, you, I don't know. I waited. How long did I wait for the, from the five S to the six? I waited like eight months. You have actually,

okay. That's what, that's what you're getting better. Yeah. That's what screwed me up with the, the cycle. Well, you know, I mean, the difference is there, the difference between the phones these days, isn't that much. It's not like the difference between the three and the four, which was pretty significant. Now it's kind of like, Oh, okay. Well, there you go. It's a little tiny bit faster.

Well, well, the difference between the five S and the six plus is night and day, but I got it for the camera mainly. But now that I've got this giant phone, I love it. That's why going back to the five S last week was so terrible. I still, I'm very happy with just my regular size six. It was really hard to play candy crush soda saga on that little tiny screen and the porn. Yeah. You look at that stuff.

You can't, you got to squint. It is at least retina. Okay. So in, in, in final Terry Pratchett news, uh, lucky people in England can already get the shepherd's crown and we're stuck waiting till Tuesday. Every Terry Pratchett book has been released earlier in England though, because he is British was British was, well, he still is damn it. We don't say Newton was, well, yeah, we do. We do.

Nevermind. Yeah. That's why it's called past tense. Cause he ceased to be. I, I, I, he's, he's in my heart and in my mind, he's never gone in the news. The other big thing that happened on Tuesday besides, uh, Chloe Kardashian waking up all of Los Angeles, uh, the stock market crashed big time. I heard a little bit about this. Not a whole lot.

Well, you only have a couple's Apple stock and you're not really, uh, doing what I'm doing. No, no. But a third of my, uh, my stock wealth was wiped out, but it will come back. Yes. Well, exactly. Which will be my point as we talk about two of these stories. Um, there was a really good writeup on slate called a crystal clear explanation of why global stocks plummeted.

And it was relatively clear. So if you are interested in these sorts of things, we're not going to get into it too much here, but it is a, it was a well-written kind of funny and a very comprehensive overview of why things are kind of crappy right now. Okay. Okay. Much like our show.

Exactly. Uh, and then the other, uh, the other article I bookmarked is, uh, if you panicked over the stock market, don't sweat it. Society has given you every reason to do so. And this basically goes into something that's kind of more our area, which is, uh, basically we have an echo chamber of insanity because of social media that I can totally understand. Yeah. So that, that completely happened. And the thing is, unless you're, unless you're a friend of the show Trent and you're day trading, none of this matters to you. It does not matter by your stocks. In

fact, this is a good time to buy. And this is the time I wish I had more money. A lot of stocks. Yes. A lot of my friends were posting, Oh my God, there goes the college fund, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was just, no, I was relaxed. Actually buy more. If you have cash by now, stop thinking about it, stop worrying about it. It will come back. This is not the end of the world. This is ups and downs. That's what happens. Relax people just relax. And this is the problem with the internet. It's very easy for people to go fucking ape shit super

quick and get a lot of fucking support on it and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, craziness. I've never seen that happen on the internet before. No, that never happens. Not at all. Especially, I'm sure Justine Sack had never even thought of that. And the other thing that happened this week is Spotify rolled out some new terms of service.

So yeah, they did. Yeah. Well, if you read them, they're very interesting. Basically they said anything on your computer or on your phone, we get to keep, we get that information. We, uh, we want access to your photos, your contacts, your audio, your video, how fast you're moving, the speed of your movements, such as whether you're running, walking or in transit and basically anything else they could possibly get from whatever device you're using. Yeah, they did. Yeah. So, but you know,

a lot of these terms of services, as we've talked about before, need blanket authorization to access this stuff because they're using it for other, other avenues that they can use that will actually be nice for you. Like they need access to your photos if they want to, or if you want to post a photo as you share something or things like that. Right. That was a strong defense, Jason.

It's not a strong defense. Uh, they should know better by now. This is the umpteenth gazillion time this is happening. Here's what kills me. So immediately Daniel, well, not immediately after he talked to about 7,000 lawyers and about 18,000 conference calls, I'm sure. But then Daniel took to Spotify and blogged. Um, he wrote a, a one, a one title blog called sorry. And the funny thing about this is they must be using WordPress because, uh, this is actually, uh,

the URL is sorry dash two. So this is the second time he's written one called sorry. Uh, and in this blog post, he basically says, sorry about that. Um, yeah, we asked for all that, but we asked for your photos, but we will never access your photos without explicit permission. We asked for your location. We will never gather that without your explicit permission. We asked for your voice. We will never access your microphone without explicit permission. We asked for your context. We will never, you get the point. I got the point. I got the point. So yes, they asked for everything and he

came back and said, well, we're never going to actually do that. We just legally have the right to do it. Well, they, that's the thing. They have to ask your permission because most of the phones and all the OS's basically say you need to give permission to the app to do it, but you only have to do that once. We are relying on, on our, basically on our operating systems to protect us at this point, to force people to say yes. Right. But you don't have to do that every time. It's only once. So once you give them permission, once they have carte blanche right now in defense of,

you know, opening up the privacy policy a little more, I just had a scenario. I just thought of this when we were talking for Spotify, I think it would actually be great if they knew my speed, my location and yeah, speed and location pretty much cover it because it'd be nice to be able to have like, you know, a playlist that are based on if I'm going out for a jog, then I, my jog playlist just starts as I start moving from a certain position until I get 400 feet from my wifi base station.

And then it takes three or four minutes for the cell to connect picture to connect. But I think that would be kind of a fun feature. I would turn that on. Yeah. You were jogging five minutes ago. So therefore we'll start this playlist now. And also because it's so goddamn hard to hit start on a playlist. Come on, man. Jesus, how fucking late. If you're a jogger, you are not that lazy.

I'm a walker. Also, the other thing that bothers me about this is I'm kind of okay with this. If you're free again, things are free. You have to pay for them somehow. What if you're a premium user? If I'm paying, I don't want them to be able to access all this information. There needs to be tiers of service. If you are offering tiers of service, be it free or paid, then the privacy policies and the terms of service and what you are doing needs to also be tiered. Hmm. That's a very good point.

Damn right. It is. But you know, but it'll never, never happen as per usual, a little followup on Apple pay. Cause we've been talking about that a bit. Have you started using it yet, Jason? Um, I haven't been able to get my Citibank card to think you're having the Citibank issue. Yeah. Because I mean, now that getting the watch had part of the reason I got the watch was you, you pay, you know, say an Apple pay was so great. So I can use my watch and go ding. Here's some money. I've seen, I saw a very attractive commercial that made the Apple watch actually look cool for that, where she just held her watch up and

done. But again, I don't know how that actually works because at least with the phone, you have to do the thumbprint to authorize the thing. But apparently if you just have the watch, all you have to do is. Cause you had, cause the, the watch is off with the phone. So the phone's already with me. So my bet is that's not how it actually works. I bet you hold up your watch. It does a ding.

And then you still have to get your phone and do the authorization with your thumbprint. Well, if I can ever get Citibank to get off their ass and off my cards, then I'll let you know. I do have Amex off. Amex was like two seconds. So am I trying to do it? Yes. Try to do something do for the show. Try to make a purchase with your watch. And let's see if you actually have to pull out your phone and still do the authorization. Cause I bet you do. And I bet that commercial is total bullshit. Okay. Anyways, the point being they are now rolling. They've made a deal with a service

called pay anywhere, a credit card reader serving over 300,000 locations across the country. So they're expanding this Apple pay will be everywhere. Uh, Samsung pay. No real news about that. Haven't heard much about that one. Yeah. Cause they're probably have finding a hard time making deals. Yeah. And all, well, I mean, everybody has a Samsung, but they buy them because they're cheap and they don't want to spend any money. Yeah. And they probably aren't going to be running around trying to pay with their phone. Who knows? Who knows? Uh, big news with Instagram this week,

they've launched their API to allow basically anyone to put it ads in now. So, uh, all those little bit of corporate sponsored ads that you've been seeing off and on on Instagram from the big people who have connections at Instagram. Well, now it's, now it's game over. Everybody can do this. I'm going to, we could, you'll be getting a grumpy old geeks ad if we actually had any money.

Yeah. I mean, what they've done is they've just made ad sense for Instagram. Yeah. That's it. Yep. So that's a, you know, they've been rolling it out a little bit and people have been getting pissed off about how many ads they're starting to see. Well, you're about to see a shit ton more. Hey man, if you want, if you want to get rid of the ads, pay for it. Exactly. Oh wait, you can't wait. You can't because they know that's not a valid business model. Cause nobody will.

That's right. Interesting. Uh, the other thing that you'll be seeing on Instagram are photos that are no longer squares because it's 2015. Wow. You can do portrait and landscape and square. Yeah. So now we'll see how many people actually know what portrait and landscape are. Uh, well, probably not many Instagram users. No, come on, give them, give them some credit. No, if they can figure it out, if they can figure out how to use the filters, then they can probably figure out what, what,

what's right. Nobody is right. They don't even know what the filter names mean. They just press all the buttons until they find something that makes their thighs look pretty. Yeah, I do. What's your point? Okay. Uh, in other news, Facebook has now launched M. What the hell is this? It's bold answer. According to wired to Siri and Cortana. I do like the M name. It makes me think bond.

It does. It does. Except I think bond is cool and I think Facebook is shit. So there's your, there's your, and it's built into messenger only. So the, hence the M unfortunately did not come from a cool place. It just came from the first letter of the stupid app. Instead of just cutting a few vowels, they just said, fuck it. We're going to cut the whole word. I should have just called it mess because I'm betting that's what it is. Would be anyways, we can't see it yet. It's only rolled out in

the Bay area. Of course, of course, of course. But other interesting Facebook news, uh, for the first time on Monday, $1 billion at 1 billion people were on Facebook or visited Facebook during the day. That is one in seven people on the planet. That is a lot of people. That's a fuckload of people. I just, I'm still amazed that, I mean, shit, I get 300 people on my server. It goes down, you know, I know that's some serious horsepower. They are using some serious stuff.

They're using the big iron. The fun and interesting stat that came with this is, uh, there weren't even a billion cars in the world until 2010. Wow. So yeah, this technology might be moving along a bit faster than others have. And, you know, we talked before about, you know, how some scrappy upstart could come knock them off their horse. Never going to happen at this rate. Well, in related news, Oh, uh, over a hundred people went to LO on Monday, mostly to shut down their accounts.

Oh my God. Uh, root metrics put out, uh, a report about mobile performance in the United States. Um, I actually kind of wish I wouldn't have put this in the show notes because this is vested interest reporting. This is, uh, basically they're, they're, they make a lot of money from the cell phone industry to put out these reports and it does not, it's very basically focused on performance. And it basically says Verizon is kicking the shit out of everyone else, which basically we all know

everybody knows that. So, well, I, yeah, I mean, that's not hard to really figure out my iPad. I can take anywhere. I took it on a train in the middle of the desert and, and uploaded a podcast on it. Yeah. And I, my phone didn't work for three days, which was AT&T. Yeah. So yeah, uh, it's a big long report that basically runs through performance of all the different major carriers. Verizon is definitely the one to go with, but, uh, what they didn't bother to do is factor in pricing or any of

the crazy bullshit that everybody's trying to do now to screw you even more like Verizon getting rid of their yearly things and all the pricing and stuff like that. I will, I need to report based on pricing. Like how much are you getting screwed by your carrier? And let's see which ones come out on top. So what you need is a consumer reports. Exactly. Have they done that? I'm sure they have. We'll look into it, but we didn't because we were too busy looking at the Tesla model S P 85 D consumer report.

Yes, I actually did. And it, I love the headline. It's so good. It broke their system. They basically have a hundred point system, the Tesla model S P 85 D, which has a great name. Marketing. Uh, got 103 out of a hundred. That's pretty good. That's pretty damn good. Now, if I could afford one, that's the problem. They are insanely expensive. Uh, Tesla is supposed to be working on rolling out a consumer, like lower level consumer, decent quality pricing cars. We'll

see what happens. We'll see what happens. But I, what I fear happens is everybody that has a Prius will drop their Prius and move to a Tesla and move to the cheaper Tesla. I don't think it's going to, I still think it's going to be priced out more than more than a Prius is. Thank God. Yeah. But, uh, you know, Hey, I got Tesla sock. I'm happy about this. They're, they're knocking it out of the park with these, with these cars. It's just a matter of getting them, being able to build this at a lower price point. Which will come. It'll come. I mean,

everything is fucking free these days. Soon cars will be too. Well, what's not free are, uh, these new taser drones in North Dakota. This scares the fuck. Yes. North Dakota actually legalized taser drones for cops and, and, and tear gas. You can put some tear gas on them if you want. Yeah, that's great. That's, that is awesome. Cause all like two years ago, we were all complaining about how the police got too militarized and now we're letting them put weapons on drones. We don't

even like our, our air force doing this. We don't like our government doing this. And now our fucking local, local police in North Dakota are doing it. Well, you see here, well, yeah, I mean, just the dumb bum fucks up in North Dakota. Cause the only people that go to North Dakota are probably running from the law to begin with. Cause there's nothing up there. So the cops up there need to go back into the Hills to find these guys and squirrel them out. Right. But this is a, I'm, this is a bad precedent, bad precedent. I don't think it's going to last for too long.

We'll see. I tell you what though, the one thing it might do is a ramp up some anti drone technology. That is very true. Everybody might be carrying a pocket EMP soon. Business opportunity. Business opportunity. The EMP hat with a camera on it. It's just foil.

You know, it's got, it's got visual recognition and it sees a drone and then it just goes pop. I think when it lands on your head and you die. I think we need to market a joke, one of these. I think we could make a lot of money. Let's Kickstarter it. That could be our first Kickstarter. All right, we'll do it. And in, in other drone news, the FAA has approved a commercial use of a drone paper airplane.

Okay. And a helicopter pilot actually put in the paperwork to get, uh, the right to fly one of those crappy little paper airplane drones. Reattach the little thing to it. Yeah. And the whole point of this was to just, you know, highlight the stupidity of how the FAA rules work around this stuff.

He has to have, he has to have a pilot's license to fly a paper airplane with what we used to do with a rubber band, a stick and a little propeller. Yeah. It is a little bit ridiculous. I mean, the government's just, things are moving too fast for, for government to keep up with. And personally, I think for even us to keep up with not us. I mean, our show's fucking great. We're right on top of things, but in general, government just might be going too slow.

You think? No, maybe. Okay. Hey, we got a black man. Well, maybe we'll get a woman next. Oh, Oh Jesus. This is at least a woman's fine. Just not that one. Okay. Off the politics. Off the politics. Uh, and in ad news, like we said, we were going to mention before, but we've been talking about ads of the whole show.

It seems, um, this is, this is Admageddon or the Ad Apocalypse. Oh, nothing. We haven't been talking about that. It's not like we haven't said this is coming. Yep. It's just taken everybody else a couple of years to get behind it. Howard Stern has just found the ad blocking plugins for his, uh, browser and now millions of people know about it because millions of people don't listen to our show.

They listen to Howard Stern because he's, he's entertaining. Um, and now there you go. Game over. It's out there and Google makes it official today. Chrome will freeze flash add-ons on site on September one, which means if you're running a flash ad network, you're done.

You're, you're out of business. You should have been out of business a long time ago, but let's be honest, you know? Yeah. I mean, I wish Howard Stern would discover one password. Security. Since it is so amazingly hot here, I am literally soaked to the bone.

We are just going to do one quick thing on security this week, and we're just going to talk about Ashley Madison. And, uh, we have, we have, we have just, we have a few stories, but I think generally Brian, what we can sum up with is told you so told you.

So, uh, everything I've said about this, when the story hit, I was right about every single thing. And, uh, even John McAfee, who's come out and he said that the database was stolen by a lone female who worked for avid life in, has been trying to prove it. This, that it all jives.

Everything's inside job. Much like I'm pretty sure we all agree. Sony was too. Yes. Inside job. Inside job. Pissed off employees. Total scam. Complete scam. The site was a scam from day one. The stats on, on females in the database who are already tiny to begin with 99% of those tiny amount of women to men ratio, completely dead accounts.

Employees that were forced to basically interact with people pretending to be women or just other dudes pretending to be women. Yeah. It's usually dudes pretending to be women. No, but there was a, there were a few employees and I actually don't have that, uh, in the show notes, but I was reading that there were two to three employees that have come out from Ashley Madison that said they were women that said that basically their job wasn't to do this, but they were forced to basically go in and become different female accounts and interact with men.

Yeah. And that's for, for sites like this, this is not unusual. I worked for one for a couple of years and I know this to be true. And that's why I had my desk is far away from the door as possible because at one point somebody was going to figure out he was talking to Carlos from, you know, from Juarez and he was going to come in with a shotgun because he was in love with somebody else.

Yeah. That person did not have a penis. So listen up you ladies that looked up, uh, your, your partners, your, your dude's email address in those databases. They were paying for a bullshit fantasy. They weren't boning anyone. Yeah. I think it, I think that is the, you know, the one thing that we can take away from Ashley Madison is nobody actually got laid.

No one got laid a lot of fucking money. No one got laid, but a lot of people are getting fucked because the lawsuits are going to be coming fast and furious. The other thing I immediately called as soon as I heard about this story is there are going to be class action lawsuits up the wazoo against this company. Oh man, every, every scumbag lawyer on the planet just started drooling when he saw this, this news come out.

He's like, Hey, I, I, again, what I said to an unnamed doctor day of the story was, I think it's fair that, that the homepage for Ashley Madison was covered with the security certificates. The, the promises of your data will never be released.

You are safe. You are secure. That's false advertising. That is a class action lawsuit right there. Well, that, and the fact that the people that paid to have the, I wish I signed up. Yeah. Now part of this damn thing. Yeah. And the, well, I, the problem is they're not going to have any money to pay anybody out. No. And I saw the CEO resign today.

So I'm betting he's on a jet somewhere with no extradition treaties and where no one can touch his money. So, so kids scam scam. And if it's too good to be true, it's too good to be true. Not that this is necessarily a too good to be true situation. I mean, it's kind of fucked up, but you know what I'm saying?

Yeah. There's not a site that you can sign up to get your dick sucked. Sorry. There's just not. There were, there were, but it was called Craigslist. And well, there's grinder. I suppose that would do the job. Okay. You're going, you're going down the wrong rabbit hole here.

I, all I wanted to say was we told you so. This is what was going to happen. Nailed it from. Nailed it. Nobody nailed anything.

Comment of the week. Last week I mentioned the German term schadenfreude, which is a enjoyment of other people's misery. I just wanted to bring that to mind before I read our first five-star rating on iTunes from BG Nickname. Title being, if someone said this about me, I'd blush.

Great show if you've been around tech for a while. Good info slash tips. Sharp observations with a bit of black humor about the latest, greatest thing. Great reviews and pickups, but most of all, great attitude. Irreverent, intelligent, and funny. Interesting, up to date, with just the right touch of weltsch mess. Which is German.

This is another beautiful thing. This is why I'm German. It's a word that basically means a feeling of melancholy and world weariness. Now, you see. What a great language. It is, but it's not. Born German. It's not why you're German. You just became German and then you came out German.

It's not like you had a choice. There was no option. Thank you very much for the review and thanks for dropping the German, especially a great word like that. That, again, has no direct English translation. And very funny because, you know, most of all, great attitude. That is something that no one has ever said about me.

Not a teacher. Not. But, yeah. Thank you very much. That was from Grumpy Old Geeks. Or that was from iTunes.com. That's from iTunes. So now we're going to our comments from GrumpyOldGeeks.com. This comes from Dan Pick. Hi, geeks. I know you're busy, guys, but I have a request.

I love science fiction, but as an even older geek, it's hard to sift through all the math stuff to find the good reads. Recently, I liked Wool and the Atlantis Saga. You can't trust the Hugo Awards anymore, so would it be possible to put together a top 25 list of books you each like or the top books in each genre?

Your show notes are great, but they're simply links and give no explanation why they even are on the list. It could be a crappy read. Thanks. Well, it's a good idea. Time is an issue there, but we only put the links on the show notes because we actually talk about it on the show.

Yeah, the point is to get you to come and listen to the show, in which we do discuss it. I do like this idea of putting together a top 25 list of books, like the sci-fi thing. I mean, I've started writing the Dune reviews, but what I'm finding is that it takes a lot of time.

But you don't really have a job anymore, so. Oh, yeah. That's ramping up a bit because I am getting work right now. Yeah, I would like to do at least, let me finish the Dune thing. I'll try to get that done in the next two weeks or so, and we'll publish that.

And then maybe I'll go back and do like my top 10 sci-fi series of all time. I was going to say, I'll do a top 10. Okay. I cannot commit to 25. Yeah, let's do, why don't we both write up a top 10 sci-fi? And we're not going to do like more than a paragraph in terms of writing about why we like whatever.

You know, we wax rapazodic on the show about these books when we do read them. So we'll put together a quick list and a little bit about it, but keep listening to our At the Library segments. Yeah, definitely. That's where we really get in deep on them. And the thing about a top 10 list or any kind of list is what we found out is they keep shifting.

Yeah, they do. Because I tell you what, the Martian came out of nowhere and would have knocked off number 10 in a heartbeat, no matter what it was. Well, I'm going to be dropping seven eaves in my top 10, and that's brand new. Yeah. That sits right up there with like Dune and the foundation and things like that. Seven eaves was that damn good.

See, I think I need to go back and read it again because I really liked it. It'd be top 25, but not top 10. I think, see, now again, already, do we just do books? Do we do series? It's so complicated. So complicated. Our next comment comes from Jake Frechette.

Love the show, and it's one of my top three now in the precedence of podcasts to listen to each week. I was listening to your bit about the fastest ships and wanted to comment on the Millennium Falcon. At the risk of exposing my inner geek, a bit late for that, I wanted to explain why Han explains how fast a ship by referencing a unit of distance.

A bit of wording missing there. If you go into the expanded universe, they explain that the Kessel Run skirts multiple black holes in order to avoid detection. Ships with higher top speeds are supposedly able to better resist the gravity forces of the black holes. So it's like a slingshot effect, I'm guessing. Therefore, ships with higher top speeds can move closer to the black holes and shave distance off the entire trip.

Now, I don't know how much speed you would actually help you when you get closer to a black hole, but otherwise, this seems to make sense. Keep up the great work. Wow, that was super geeky. That was super geeky. And what this tells me, though, is that they got called out for using the wrong unit of measure in the first movie and went back and literally came up with this explanation to counteract their flub.

Yep, pretty much. Yeah. This is a revisionist history as far as I'm concerned. But thank you for the explanation because I found that fascinating. Yeah, well, and it does actually make technical sense. The slingshot effect. It was in use in many sci-fi stories.

Oh, yes, yes. Including 2001. But the whole point was getting closer to the black hole, so you do shave the distance. And it's all good. It's all good. Revisionist, but good. Okay. So a friend of the show, Lawrence Lee, writes in. And this is just a statement, which I love. Lee's Law.

In years to come, the rate at which things go wrong will double every 18 months. Sounds about right. All right, Lee. Thank you for that one. Thank you, Lee. Thank you all. So please do go visit us on iTunes and give us a five-star rating. Please tell a friend. And please visit our Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG and help support the show.

Ready, please. At the library. I finished Peter Klein's Ex-Heroes. All right. What did you think? Not only did I finish it, I'm halfway through Ex-Patriots.

I knew it. I knew you were going to jump into the next one. They're good. They're really good. Sanderson's, this is a step up in terms of the superhero kind of stories. Grittier, darker, real human interactions and real human frustrations.

Not just, Sanderson's was kind of more written from the perspective of, say, I don't remember how old the main character was, 18, 19, he was a kid, he was a kid falling in love. These are adults. These are adults dealing with the end of the world and the insanity of finding out that you have superpowers and then also creating a society with regular people.

The frustrations the regular people have with the people that have superpowers, the fears that these people are going to leave them and not take care of them. Real political dynamics. It's good. It's good. I told you, man, I was really happy when I, when I discovered this one. Yeah. Yeah. I loved Ex-Heroes.

I'm really enjoying Ex-Patriots right now because it's getting even darker and more involved and more crazy. It was interesting because I was reading some of the Amazon reviews of Ex-Patriots before I bought it. And a lot of people didn't like it. I don't know why. I'm really enjoying it. Oh yeah. I don't know why either.

Yeah. But all of that's going to get thrown by the wayside because I've received notification that my signed first, first, first edition hardcover of Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore is in the mail and should be arriving any day. Excellent. I'm so excited. So are you going to stop reading the Peter Klein's books to go straight to Christopher Moore or are you going to have to go stop in the middle?

Are you going to have to stop in the middle of a Peter Klein's book to read a Christopher Moore book to then stop in the middle of the Christopher Moore book to read the Terry Pratchett book? The Terry Pratchett book I'm going to put on hold. Okay. I'm going to wait on that one because I know that's it and I'm going to want to savor it. I will stop the Ex-Patriots as soon as secondhand, as soon as secondhand soul shows up, I'm tearing into that immediately.

Now, the other thing I'm reading though, by your suggestion, uh, is I'm also working through over success by Jim Rubens, which we talked about last week. And I think we're going to wait to talk about this until I finish. And I know you're not quite done yet either. It's good though, but that's, that's, it's all going by the wayside when the Christopher Moore book shows up.

That's first. Yeah. So I'm guessing that'll take a couple of weeks for the over success one, but, um, secondhand souls, I will read that in three days. That's the nice thing about Christopher Moore books is they, they are fast reads. They're fast reads and I will stay up all night. That's the other thing. I can't put them down.

No, neither can I. So hopefully they're releasing an audio version at the same time. So you can listen to it. Well, yeah, because then I have the same characters from the first time I listened to it. Okay. Fuck you. So on a, on a more, on a more heady mindset, I got to interview, uh, Dr. Carol Dweck this week for my day job and I've covered her book mindset, uh, the new psychology of success on this show before, but since I just talked to her this week and she turned out to be an

a lovely woman, incredibly smart clinical psychologist who's based in science and research. Um, just if, if you're into anything about getting smarter, uh, check out this book, it's called mindset, the new psychology of success.

It's linked in the show notes and it's a fun read. And I have to say out of all that new age kind of hippie crap, this didn't fit into it. And I took the, the lessons in this book and it's what let me do the change to pivot into the podcasting stuff that got me my new job.

All right. So it, it actually works. Did you ask her about what she thinks about listening to books instead of actually reading them? No, because this one I actually read. Oh, interesting. This one I read on my Kindle. So bite me. Okay. Okay. So I've got a couple of podcasts that I really dig and I haven't had much time to listen to podcasts recently, but in my, in my copious free time, I've been catching up and I want

to point out two of them this week. One was hello internet and, uh, number 45 technobabble. There's a great discussion on the episode about how people stealing professional YouTubers content actually affects their bottom line with numbers. And it was a, it was a really good discussion that really kind of got into the nuts and bolts by two guys, uh, Brady Heron and CGP gray who actually do make a living off of it and rely on that income.

Right. So if you're into that kind of thing, check it out. That sounds very interesting. And the second one was cortex number 11, uh, 0% entertaining with again, CGP gray and Mike curly and on this one, they talk about what it would take to start from scratch to become a YouTube, uh, professional.

And it was interesting because gray was very much of the mind that you can actually, if you put your mind to it and have great content can move up the ladder in a fairly decent amount of time and, and become a professional at YouTube videos faster than you could five years ago, because the, the, the user base has grown so much and they had a lot of numbers to back up a lot of their, their stances.

And if you're interested in starting a podcast, which you should never do, um, they had a lot of good background on that too. So both of those episodes are going to be linked in the show notes. I'm still going through cortex, but I listened to half of it on the way here. I think I want to listen to that one and I think we should talk about it next week because I already have questions.

Okay. And you and I may or may not disagree. I don't know. You don't like listening to words through your ears, so it might not be as good. Maybe we can get a transcript and you can read it. I don't like listening to books through my ears. I'm totally fine with podcasts. Anyways, um, I ran across a really great article this week that, that I like for multiple reasons.

Um, I was a fan of Sinead O'Connor as a kid. I listened to a lot of her music. It was in my wheelhouse. It was kind of that gothy punk thing. Um, and the first girl that I ever dated was really into her. So I got, of course, very into Sinead O'Connor, uh, later in my life, uh, when I was starting out my career doing, doing this web stuff for, for bands, I actually worked with Sinead and got to know her pretty well.

Uh, worked with her for a number of years. Um, I really like her. She's a great person. Uh, what I like about her is what a lot of other people don't like about her is there's no bullshit. She says what she feels no matter what, if that involves tearing up a picture of the Pope because she's pissed off about the way, by the way, who ended up being right about that?

I have no idea. No, Sinead was there were mass. I mean, all the scandals with the Catholic church throughout the, I mean, yeah, we, we got a good Pope right now, apparently, but she was right. Uh, to hope on a rope. We got a Pope on a rope, uh, to her recent thing, you know, online that, uh, there's, she just doesn't shut up.

And I like that about her. I like the fact that she is not afraid of a fight or a controversy and I know on her last one, you did definitely do a forehead slap. You're like Sinead. Yeah. Yeah. But, but she's still the fact that she just does it. I, there's no pretense.

It's no Kardashian handling of her image. It is just what it is. So that's what I like. Um, so this guy, Ed power, who, who is a, uh, reviewer, uh, for a living, he reviews music and he writes for a number of different people, uh, wrote a pretty much on a pretty positive review of her last, uh, her last album.

I'm not bossy. I'm the boss. Uh, he called it a return to form. She took umbrage with that and called him directly. Oh God. But no, this was good. I, he was, this, this article is, is a great read. I really suggest everybody read it. It's linked in our show notes.

Uh, and he talks about the whole process of the, of these calls. And then she basically bet him. I don't think you understand what I'm doing and what I am as an artist. So if you go and listen to my entire discography and rate every single song that you like and the ones that you don't, and then we'll talk about it.

And if you haven't changed your mind about my music, then I'll buy you a happy meal. So it's a bet for a happy meal to go back and listen to the entire thing. And now he, I'm not going to spoil it. I'm not going to say don't, no spoilers because it, this is a very fun read.

Uh, but the really interesting thing about this article to me is, is when he did this, he started to realize how, how we listen to music has changed since we were kids. And this is something I a hundred percent agree with. Uh, let me just read this one quote from him directly.

Uh, but along such insights, other stuff, the experiment carried, carried with it a sense of deja vu in my youth. This was how I listened to music obsessing over a record until I was sure I had cracked its secrets. The contrast with my present day regime of semi-engaged Spotify browsing was striking.

I'd forgotten the joy of delving into the darkest seams of a performer's discography and discovering those not quite perfect album tracks, which were delightful precisely because they had not been polished within an inch of their existence. Spending quality time with O'Connor's lesser known songs reminded me of the beauty of imperfection.

Motherfucking. Yeah. Yep. And that is the difference. That is why I hate Spotify. I don't engage with music like I used to. I love that a professional music reviewer realized I don't listen to music right anymore. Well, I mean, yeah, we've talked about this so many times on the show about how, how we used to get the albums and listen to them and sit down because your record player couldn't go on your smartphone and come with you.

So you had to sit in the living room and listen to it. You couldn't throw on a track, walk for three minutes, take off your headphones because you had to stop and talk to someone, throw them back on. Now you've missed two minutes of the song. All of these things. Music is just, music is meant to be, well, not the shit that most people listen to.

That's why this crap is so popular. It's throwaway. What we've lost is the deeper stuff. And not to beat a dead horse, those damn sure headphones that I got have re-engaged me with, with taking time, sitting down and listening to music in a very nice way. It's really good to go back to that.

And I've done that with a couple of bands recently. I mean, I've done it. I've been starting to listen to a lot of the cure recently or even new bands. Like I found that band cold case that I talked about last week. You know, just sitting here with, with the headphones or I've got these really nice studio monitors in front of me.

And instead of listening to things while I'm coding, just taking five minutes, rolling back in my chair, cranking the sound and listening to a full track, doing nothing but listening. It's, it's great. It is nice. Yeah. Very nice. But what might not be so nice, Galaxy Quest might be being turned into a TV series.

I'm guessing not the original cast. Oh God, no. Of course. No. Some of them couldn't, they could never afford and some of them are just too old and some of them probably don't act anymore. Yeah. But because the original movie was one of the best movies ever made. Oh, it's hilarious. As far as I'm concerned.

Yeah. And, but turning it into a TV series could go really right or really wrong. That's the problem here. It could go either way. I'm excited and terrified at the same time. Yeah. We'll see. I mean, it could be very funny. It's all about, it's going to all be about the casting.

It really is because you got to have some good people. It's, it's a comedy. Comedy requires funny people. And good writing. And good writing. You know, I mean, it's, it's going to take both. Yeah. We'll see. I don't know. You can have a great cast and a crappy writer or a crappy writer. And I just said the same thing backwards.

Pretty much. Yeah. I just wonder how much money they have left over after they dropped off all the bags of monies at the top gear guys. Oh man. If they put enough money into this and they pay the right people and they get good people, they could be good. Indeed. So another thing I just want to do a quick chat about, which we will definitely talk about in future shows is Mr. Robot because everybody's talking about it.

Yeah. I finally sat down last night and watched the first episode and all I wanted to do was go to sleep when I turned it on. But I'm like, I really just want to check this out. Like 10 minutes into it. I was like sitting up in bed with my iPad, just going, I can't sleep. I can't sleep. I got to watch this. Amazing.

Right. So at least, at least the first episode was, I haven't gotten much farther than that. It's a little cheesy in parts, but it's a lot less cheesy in other parts. And it's, we'll get into the nuts and bolts of it. But if you haven't checked out Mr. Robot so far, give it a watch on like at least episode one and we'll, we'll, we'll dive into it.

I can guarantee by next week I will have seen everything except maybe the finale because they pulled the finale because of the events in Virginia. Which kind of tells you what might be happening in the finale. Yeah. Spoiler alert. Yeah. I will, I will be, I'll have watched at least once.

We'll definitely talk about it because I believe the friends from Sweden are dropping this off for me. Well, it's on TV here. It's not a, it's not a hard thing to find. Moron of the week. Just like the old days, we have planes in the background. So, cause we're back in Santa Monica.

So let those slide please. It's, it's a really hot day. It is very hot. We have to keep windows open and fans on during breaks. Um, I found three morons this week. Three. What about, uh, Chloe Kardashian? Doesn't she count as four? I don't know. Okay. She's always, I mean, it's okay.

That's not, that's not of the week. That's just. Kardashians are a given. Um, so is Amanda Palmer. She's my first one. And I was kind of hoping you had read this one, Jason, that you haven't because you've defended her in the past after having read her book. Uh, she's on medium now. Oh no.

And let me just say, note, this is my first piece of writing on medium. I'm really happy to be here. I think this platform and community of writers slash thinkers is fantastic. Hi everyone here. Hi everyone. Because God forbid Amanda Palmer not show up at any, any technology thing that's getting any sort of traction to not promote herself.

And I love that she shows up naked. She is naked about 17 times in this article. She's posted a number of nude photos of her because you know, whatever. That's what she does. The title is no, I'm not crowdfunding this baby. An open letter to a worried fan. I'm fucking sick of open letters. Uh, and then I love the subtitle, how I'm slightly terrified of the oncoming mix of motherhood and art dot, dot, dot.

And how judging and terrifying me further isn't going to help me. Oh no. Oh no. Somebody's not happy with her. And now she has to write an open letter and complain about it. This whole thing fucking pissed me off so much. I'm just leaving it here.

I don't want to talk about it anymore. I fucking hate her. I don't want you to talk about it anymore either. All right. Moving on since you didn't read it. So we can't fight about it. Um, I ran into this article also on medium and I believe it was written by somebody in the company, uh, is the worst press release I've ever read in my life.

Uh, it's a new startup called unify and they'll pay your internet bill for free. Oh, they want your data. They will collect every single bit of data ever in exchange for giving you online access for free. So they will literally own you, but don't worry because this is a good press release written to say you're already giving this data away anyway.

So why not just give it to us? Oh, what could go wrong there? What could possibly go wrong with this? Fuck you guys. Oh my God. That's ridiculous. There's no date for when unify is going to officially launch, but you can sign up to get notified of any updates. Yeah. No. Yeah.

Well, no idiots. Yeah. And the last, uh, moron of the week that I found, uh, crossed my Facebook path. A friend, a friend of mine actually posted it saying cocaine much as the title, which is very funny. Uh, it is a Craigslist ad for a webmaster intern slash partner for a new business development firm in the Santa Clarita area.

Uh, when I tried to bring up the, uh, the URL, it had unfortunately been taken down shockingly, uh, but we did find it on the way back machine. So the entire post in full and boy, is it long, but boy, is it worth the read, uh, is up in our show notes. So I highly urge you to go read this.

Um, this is the best thing I've ever read in my entire life. This is better than the, the, uh, the things that went viral about the musicians being asked to come play for free. And then the response is about how about you cook for me for free forever. And it's funny. Yeah. The URLs that are listed in the article are gone too.

So he must've gotten shamed off the internet. I I'd hope so. This was an absolutely ridiculous post, but it is the best thing ever. And this is, uh, not terribly. I I've basically been approached by people with very much the same idea. Come work for me completely for free and give me all of your knowledge.

That's pretty much it. And, but there was, there were a couple of good points in here though. Pull up, pull up a couple of those because they were just, they were, they were gems. Oh, there was, there was actually, you can just, you can just grab a random paragraph and start reading. All right. You are a healthy eater, environmentally friendly and progressive minded.

Okay. So that's first off, uh, you're incredibly ambitious and have a desire to generate enormous success and wealth. Um, by the way, anybody that is incredibly ambitious and has a desire to generate enormous success and wealth isn't going to come work for free because that's, well, I've kind of learned that's not a way to generate wealth working for free.

Uh, it doesn't go that way. Um, yeah, uh, I mean, there's an 18 points of, uh, requested qualifications of which if you knew half of these, uh, you would never work for free. Um, it's just, it's also good. I don't even know. Okay. We're done.

We're done. You got to read the whole damn thing. There's just so much. It'll be at the end of our show notes. That'll be at grumpy old geeks.com slash one 25.

The web's not dead. Oh no, it's not. I kind of wish we had talked a little bit about over success the, this week, but we'll do it next week because of this kind of tied into it a little bit. Um, I've been kind of scaling back a bit on work and, and enjoying it.

Um, and not going crazy next week's discussion. Uh, I've ran across an article on life hacker, the top 10 highly desired skills you can teach yourself. Now this is pretty cool. I kind of want to go through and like basically spend about six months on all 10 of these, like just six months learning to do this, six months learning to do that.

All of these are great life skills and all of these are things I'm really interested in doing. And, um, it's really interesting. And, and it, with the internet these days and with the bevy of free or very low priced options out there, you can pick up all this stuff pretty easy.

Yeah. I'm just amazed that you're still looking at lifehacker.com. Well, you know, they still did it. So apparently they still do some kind of interesting stuff. Well, yes, this article is very interesting. Well, you only have nine of them because number one is website. One I took care of already. Yeah. That one, that one's sorted, but, uh, it's a good little list and, um, it's really interesting.

And I, I, this is the kind of tough stuff I want to spend my life doing, not working my ass to the bone for no reason. Hello, homeless guy. Hello, homeless guy. He's working his, he's working his fingers to the bone, trying to get some bottles to recycle. He is too. Uh, and I ran across another article called the most timeless songs of all time.

This is a big data Spotify thing, which I thought was really interesting. Uh, using Spotify to measure the popularity of older music by older, they mean the generation of music that we grew up in, which is sad, but, uh, and he's a big fan of no diggity by black street, because apparently this song does very well on Spotify.

Uh, it's a very long article, but it's really, really super interesting. And I love, I love when big data is used this way to find out what people are listening to using the streaming media to find out what songs from the nineties are the most popular. And, um, just a huge shout out to friends of the show, the Google dolls, because, uh, basically Iris by the Google dolls is the number one song from the nineties.

Wow. Um, it is kicking ass. I hear that song everywhere I go. Uh, yeah, it's insane. And when you scroll through all this stuff and I mean, well, I mean the most popular song is smells like teen spirit. You can't beat that. But after that second Iris. Wow. And, uh, you start to see, it's really interesting because you see the artists that maybe are going to be forgotten and kind of dropped off and versus the songs that are just never going to go away.

Yeah. Because what we're really kind of dealing with here is music that is older that kids are listening too, because most of the people are, that are on Spotify are younger. So this is like, what's going to tell, what's going to last the test of time. These are the kids that from that weren't around in the nineties.

And these are the songs that they're finding and listening to from that generation. Cool. So this is actually really fascinating. The whole article is absolutely fantastic. It's, it's really worth the read. Um, it's especially if you're our age, because it's interesting to see what the kids think about the music that we were listening to.

And we actually did make some good music back then. We did. And some of these songs are just very popular. And, and then later in the article, it's a, it gets to some hypothetical mathematics about current tracks and current artists that are very popular and kind of charting how well they played over time, just in the limited time period that these things have been out.

Will they last as long? Will, will any of these songs, will Lords Royals or Daft Punk's Get Lucky be an iris? Well, in 10 years, will people still be listening to these songs? Oh God, I hope not. I don't mind Get Lucky. It's not bad. I actually really like Royal. I like Lord.

She's pretty good. Lana Del Rey can go away. Robin Thicke can go away. Are you kidding me? Love it! We're getting ramen, Jason. I'm getting hungry. Well, that's why I want to finish this shit and get out of here.

All right. Well, you know, are you kidding me? Because of the Banksy thing that made me think about Disneyland, I did a little Googling. I found a nice little article because I grew up there from the LAist, 10 Disneyland urban legends. Some of them true. I heard all of these growing up in Anaheim and hanging out Disneyland all the time, and I will just read them to you, and you can go read the article to find out if they're true or not.

No one can die at Disney. Are there secret rooms? Okay, I'll give you a teaser. Yes, there are. Would you like me to chime in on these to see if I can guess them right? Oh, sure. Actually, no, no, no, because then it'll just ruin it for the readers. Okay. Walt's Frozen Head is supposedly at Disneyland.

Interesting. The Haunted Mansion Scared Someone to Death. I've heard that. There's a dead body at Disneyland, apparently, as part of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. I've heard that one, too. That one's bullshit. Teasers. Abandoned Disney properties around the world.

Never heard that one. Where they bought stuff and were going to develop new parks, and then they just kind of let them go. That would make sense, you know? The Disneyland Cats. Tons of cats that live in the park, and they're actually tolerated to control. So, the world didn't problem. Long-haired hippie people need not apply back in the 60s.

Actually, that, as anybody who's ever worked at Disneyland knows, or gone to Disneyland knows, that is very true, because you're a cast member, and there are specific things that you agree to in terms of your look. So, that one's not so bad. They control your mind through sense. You laugh at that one, Jason.

Go read it. Go read it. And Disney character actors used to share underwear. Oh, yuck. Yes, lovely. Yeah. So, that's a great article. And five artifacts that will shatter your image of the Middle Ages. This came from crack.com, which occasionally has some pretty good stuff.

I really like this read. It was a lot of fun. Basically, they go back and find artifacts in various different artworks that came out of the Middle Ages and point out how incredibly fucking insane they are. Flying penis badges. Yes. There's this one particular artist that just did these really creepy ponies that definitely look like they want to bone the hell out of you.

They're frightening. Yeah. That's what puts the bronies to shame. Yeah. That is the original brony. Wound Man, which I love. Different artworks throughout the Middle Ages that basically illustrated all the different kind of wounds you can get in battle, presumably for field doctors who are their version of. Oh, my God. That's so disgusting. Yeah.

It's amazing, isn't it? It's crazy. The most confusing book of Revelation ever made by, there's this one particular artist that did a version of the book of Revelation, and the artwork is phenomenally bizarre. This is just great stuff. Yeah, but my favorite is Henry VIII's Horned Helmet.

Yeah, that's pretty awesome, too. That thing is pretty crazy. It's kind of like, it's like Robotech before there, or Steampunk. Yeah, Steampunk. Steampunk before there was Steampunk. I mean, this is the beginning. Wow. Yeah, this is good stuff, man. Yeah, you got to see these pictures. You can't do this justice by our description.

Well, that's why it's, uh... Well, it's not the web's not dead. Never mind. I think it's time to wrap this puppy up. Yeah, I'm hungry. Closing shout-outs! I'd like to make a nice shout-out to Central Air Conditioning, because today's show is brought to you by, not Brian's sweaty balls, because he's got nice underwear, my sweaty balls, because I wear Hanes and they suck.

Yeah, sorry about the lack of air conditioning here. It's nice most of the time. I would like to give a shout-out to Sennheiser and my noise reduction headphones, which I put in five minutes into the fucking 15-minute Khloe Kardashian fucking firework show at midnight on Tuesday.

Thanks a lot, bitch. And they actually worked? Yeah. Oh my god, that's great. They did. I went to sleep after that, so there you go. Wow. The power of Sennheiser. These are good headphones, man. Well, thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFilippo, and you can check me out at jpd.me.

And I'm Brian Schillmester, and you can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus. Until next time, where it will be cooler and hopefully a little less noisy in the background. Hopefully. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan-supported show. Check out our Patreon page at patreon.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 grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars or tell a friend about the show. Intro music for the show is provided by the band Among Us.

You can find them on iTunes, Spotify, and Tidal, and Apple Music, and wherever music is sold. Or you can donate through the Grumpy Old Geeks Patreon page at patreon.com slash gog to get 10 exclusive tracks. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stuchanski.

You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash houseofandy, and he's also on SoundCloud at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 125. My little brony, my little brony.

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