161: Everything We Know Is Wrong

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 for May 27th, 2016, episode 161. I am Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Morning, Jason. Good. Well, almost afternoon for me. It's 11 o'clock here in the lovely town of Downers Grove, Illinois, where it is really hot. Ah, it's overcast here. It's overcast and about to thunderstorm, so we may get some thunder on the line.

But I had to run out and mow my lawn this morning, so nothing like mowing the lawn to wake you up when you really don't want to mow the lawn in the morning, which is pretty much never. Don't they have robots for that now? No. They do have, like, the Roomba for the yard, but I've got a very complicated yard, and I can't afford, you know, a Roomba for the yard.

I can't afford a regular Roomba. You know what I have? I have a hand-me-down lawnmower. I have gas money and time. So that's how I mow the lawn. Yes. You pay with your time. I do. So let's do a quick up-to-speed post-mortem.

It's dead. It's dead. It's not coming back. We tried. There's just too much going on. You're having a kid. I moved. And we both have, like, jobs that actually pay the bills. Yeah. Yeah. You know, up-to-speed was a fun thought.

It was fun to do. It was fun to do. Yeah, it was fun. I was having a great time. You know, we were getting a lot of people listening to it, which is great. But then, you know, things happened like the two-star rating that we got in iTunes this week. Oh, yeah. Give me a break. From Gadget Virtuoso, who said that ad reads are one thing, but pre- and post-ad rules are going too far.

Have you ever listened to the radio, Gadget Virtuoso? You know, this is one of the reasons that I was disinclined to continue up to speed, because it was a lot of work for no return. And now people are mad at us because we're just trying to make a little bit of money providing this free entertainment.

Yeah. Yeah. So thanks a lot for that two-star rating. I'm sure that you are not a Patreon supporter either. So thanks a lot. Yep. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. So happy that you want us to just do this for free and not even get money to, say, pay the bandwidth that it costs us. Yeah. Anyways.

You know, up to speed. Again, you and I had talked about this internally offline a lot. Yeah. I'd love to bring it back, but I can only do it if basically this is making enough money to allow me to the time to do up to speed. I, you know, I barely have time to do this show.

So we got to pay the bills, people. Yeah. Up to speed did take a lot of effort just to have it all ready in the morning. And I was going to take it on solo because I could do it at like six in the morning here because I'm up that early every day. But even then, it's like I'm in bed by, you know, nine or ten o'clock now.

So it's just I'm I'm fried by the end of the day and I'm doing podcasting all day long. So it's like, ah, I need. Yeah. I just need a little bit more incentive to do it. I mean, we were trying to do it as also an audience builder for this show. So we had a clean version because we do tend to say fuck a lot on this show.

And what? Yeah. Yeah. As in fuck gadget virtuoso. Gadget virtuoso is a nice person that just doesn't want to pay for anything. Uh huh. Well, he's got to be obviously paying for a lot of gadgets since he's a virtuoso at it. OK, let's leave the guy alone.

OK. How about a little follow up? Paramount's lawsuit against Axanar is dead in the water. Oh, I'm sorry. It's going away. I heard there was some sort of Star Trek convention thingy that that Mythbusters guy Adam Savage was at.

And I guess they announced that they're just going to drop it and let him do whatever. Well, not quite whatever they're going to do. Apparently, Paramount is going to publish basically a guideline for fan films. So there will be very specific things that they will have to follow and not, you know, there are other things that they won't be able to do.

One would assume they're not going to allow people to do things with major characters, but you'll be able to do some play in the other world. So Paramount is going to have to provide kind of a world built document. Yeah, you can't mess with canon is probably what it's going to be. And, you know, this is the smart thing to do.

And, you know, the director of the new movie is the one that really went to bat for these guys and for fan films in general, because it makes them, A, look bad. B, it just builds ill will to the fan base. And with a, you know, couple hundred million dollar movie coming out, that's kind of the last thing you want.

So this guy looks like a hero, saves the fan base. Everybody's, you know, kumbaya on. And now we'll just get some more fan films out of it. It does seem to be a win-win. And it's the Star Trek franchise. I mean, when you have a franchise like that, you know, it's just unbelievable. You should let fans do it pretty much whatever they want, because it is what it is.

And, you know, Star Trek as a franchise is not exactly in the top tier at the moment. So any kind of building a fan base is a good thing. And maybe do a rev share with the fans if they're going to go out and, you know, figure out money. Yeah, Paramount should have, you know, Paramount should get their pound of flesh out of any of these things if they're actual money-making propositions.

I don't see how that would be a problem. There's a way to structure this that makes sense for everybody. Yeah, have a fan licensing deal. Like in the old days when Quake was licensing their engine out, it's like, hey, you know, we'll let you go, you know, make a game with our engine.

But you're just going to have to give us a cut. And it's not a big cut for what they were getting. You know, they're getting a multimillion-dollar engine to go do what they wanted to with it. And it was, you know, just like $25,000 to license it for the initial. And if you made X amount of money, then you just give them a little slice off the top.

It was a good deal. Fair enough. Okay. Yeah. And back to daily fantasy sports, which I haven't heard much about in a long time. Yeah. And this came across my radar that Mississippi has legalized it, which I thought was interesting. Can you only do it from a laptop on a barge in the river?

Probably. Because you can do all sorts of gambling on a barge in the river in Mississippi. So you can do that almost anywhere now. It's like if you have one brick in the water, they call it a barge. Can we just move on and just sort out an across-the-board standard on this?

Let's figure out what we're going to do about gambling and just make it whatever. No, it's states' rights, states' taxes. So the states have their say in it. But this isn't gambling. I forgot. This is a game of skill. Oh, yeah.

Or whatever. It's gambling. Let's say it's gambling. If you want to legalize it, great. And if you don't, then don't. But let's do something. At least with the laws in Mississippi, employees cannot actually play, which makes sense.

You know, if you work for a casino in Vegas, you are not allowed to play in that casino. Yep. That's the way it works. And a little more follow-up on the fan verification system for New York Comic Con. I actually went through it to see what it was like because a friend of the show, Seth, from the Grime Life podcast, is the one that turned us on to this.

And – He texted me. He's like, ah, damn it. I went through all this and I got a press pass, which didn't require one. But all they do is they text you a verification code. So, A, they verify your phone number. So you have a unique phone number. That gets you into the form. So two-factor off.

Yeah. And the form is basically just a bunch of questions. What do you want to see? What do you want to do? And under sex, it's like – Yes. No. Yeah. Well, generally, you just think – you just say no because this is a Comic Con. But it was male, female, and self-identified.

And then you had to fill in self-identified. So I wonder how many people did unicorn. I just like to state for the record that I did call it two-factor off last week. And you said, no, it's not – but it actually ended up being two-factor off. It's kind of – well, it's kind of – I mean, well, it's phone verification, but it doesn't – I'm totally fine with that.

I think that's actually a great idea. I think that this should be integrated everywhere across the board. This should be Ticketmaster when you're buying tickets. This is – I mean, it's not a foolproof method of stopping scalping and all that sort of stuff, but it's pretty good. Yeah. No, I think it's great. Yeah. Honestly, it's like, yeah, you buy the ticket that you're going to use.

The only – yeah, the hardest part, though, is if you get sick and you need to transfer it to a friend. I've been to the Troubadour before, and it's almost – it's impossible to do it there. And most concert venues are like that. But that could be built easily. I mean, I'm already halfway coded it out in my brain, haven't you?

Oh, I could – yeah, well, that's easy. Yeah, that would be super easy to do. So if you're listening, Ticketmaster or Live Nation, we will be happy to build that for you for $20 million. Yes, and we'll make it not work the first three times. And then on the fourth time – Yes. We'll refactor and pivot, and then we'll make it work.

It'll just cost you another $30 million. Yes, exactly. Easy enough. Tech Insider had an interesting article on eye-tracking heat maps and logos. And it shows a bunch of logos and their before and afters. And it turns out the Instagram logo actually is a huge improvement on the eye-tracking scale, as it were.

This is where things start to get a little terrifying. Why? I don't know. Make a cool logo. Don't have heat maps and see what people are looking at. Well, this is after the fact, you know? I know. I know. I know. I bet they tested it internally with this sort of thing anyways.

I don't care. Look, if people test this internally, you'd think Google would be the first one to do it. And their score went down from their redesign. This is a bunch of redesigns on a bunch of brands. And, you know, Uber went down. Well, Uber, we discussed Uber's stupid logo at length.

Yeah, yeah. Well, between Uber and Airbnb, and the funny thing about the Airbnb logo, before I thought it looked like Goatsy. But when you look at the heat map of it with the halo around the word Airbnb and the logo itself, it is a giant butt plug.

Yes, it is. Airbnb is, you know, air butts and butts. Yeah, this is getting frighteningly into logo design and how to mess with the brain. Yeah. And interestingly enough, I found an article on Signal V-Noise, which is the 37 signals.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, no, no. Basecamp blog, their internal blog. Okay. Great title. Eat, Sleep, Code, Repeat is Such Bullshit. And it talks about how they've been able to make amazing products, work four days a week, have hobbies, and have a life.

What? Makes me really wish I'd learned to program Ruby. Yeah. Because I should have been working there. Never left Chicago and stayed with those guys. Oh, wow. But it's a great article. Great article. Yeah, yeah. You also dropped something from Elizabeth Warren talking about the gig economy in here and you put in, haven't read it yet, placeholder.

Yeah, but I read it this morning. Sweet. So did I. I mean, I'm an Elizabeth Warren fan. I don't necessarily know if I know enough about her to want her to run for president, but I have heard a lot of her speeches and I tend to agree with her take on things.

And we all know my thoughts on the gig economy if you've been listening to this show at all. I hate it. So. Yeah, but you've been living it for 15 years. I know. That's the weird thing about that. You know, I'll just read a quick quote from the actual article. Warren's essential point is that for all the talk about Uber, ride-sharing apps and their brethren are only a part of a larger destructive trend towards classifying workers as part-time.

Long before anyone ever wrote an article about the gig economy, corporations had discovered the higher profits they could wring out of an on-demand workforce made up of independent contractors, Warren said. And I didn't know it had reached this level. It says 53 million Americans, one in three, is now a freelancer. It was a lot better when there were fewer of us.

It kind of tended to work out a little bit because when a company needed somebody that was outside and wanted to save a buck or two, they would still pay us decent prices as freelancers. Now that everything has kind of shifted and corporations have thrown on this let's screw everybody hat, the freelance money ain't so good no more.

No, I used to make bank as a freelancer. Now it's just like homes for the poor. Now everybody is a freelancer working for the company. So, you know, it's just, yeah, it's not working out very well for all of us. I was up till midnight last night because somebody threw me a bone and I'm just like, hey, I'll take the money.

Send it on over. But I like her three points. Improve the safety net, which, you know, because there really is a problem with, you know, if you get sick or something catastrophic happens, you're just homeless unless you have friends with couches. Make employee benefits portable.

That'd be nice. So you can just take it with you where you go and increase regulation and clarify laws around part-time work. Also, you know, bring back the unions, damn it. We need a freelance podcaster union somewhere.

Get on that, Brian. Well, we'll talk to Bernie about that. See what happens. I don't think we'll be talking to Bernie about much of anything. No, and workers in China aren't even going to be getting this anymore because even their freelancing gigs have gone away. Foxconn, which is a supplier for Apple and Samsung, has basically just replaced 60,000 human workers with robots.

Here it comes, people. Well, yeah, but here's the thing. They're also retraining those people for higher skilled jobs. I mean, yes, those jobs have been, you know, basically given to a robot because they were boring and repetitive, but they're moving them into R&D jobs and quality assurance jobs.

And when you look at how many people Foxconn actually employs, which is 1.2 million people, 60,000 jobs in that isn't a huge chunk, but it is going to grow. Yes, it's going to keep growing. Yeah, but they're going to take those people and put them into higher value positions, which is what in a utopian society is what's going to happen as we automate everything out.

Now, is that going to happen? No, there's going to be a really big shakeout and we're going to have some problems, I believe. We're going to have a lot of problems because many of the other things we just discussed. The interesting thing is when I drive around town right now, there are tons of places that are hiring.

There are jobs out there right now, which I have not seen in a long, long time. Everywhere I go, everybody's hiring and I honestly have not seen that in a very long time. I actually do have to agree with you about that. I have seen – I mean I don't know. The pay is probably not great. I don't know what's going on with other things, but I do see in terms of like retail or just walking around and being on the streets, almost every store, restaurant, et cetera, they're all hiring right now, which is fantastic.

I even went to my local pet store and they just had three new employees that started that day. I go to CVS, there are new employees over there, the jewel down the street. Everybody is bringing on more people. So something is happening. Something is happening. It's hard to see, but something does seem to be happening. It must be that Kenyan-born Muslim president is doing something right.

We'll see about that. Too bad he's gone. And in the greatest read of the week, how technology hijacks people's minds from a magician and Google's design ethicist. The fact that Google had a design ethicist was pretty interesting. Google loves to shoehorn ethicists into a lot of their positions.

Yeah. But you realize this guy is an ex-design ethicist because he probably left around the time that they changed the – they say, oh, no, don't be evil. Well, that was just kind of a saying. It wasn't really a doctrine. It was more of a rough guideline. Yeah. But I highly recommend reading this and checking out his TED Talk.

I'm going to get this guy on – I've got to interview this guy for something. I love this. Everything that he talks about is completely true and, you know, this goes back to that article last week that I was talking about with Free Will.

Yeah. This really makes you question if you actually have any. Yeah. It was a good article. I really enjoyed it. So it's a great think piece. And if you've got quite a bit of time because it's rather large, I highly recommend that you read it as well. I enjoyed it immensely. Yeah. Yes. It's a long piece.

But you know what? Turn off your phone, take a breather, and read it because then you'll realize why you keep reaching for your phone every three minutes in the middle of trying to read this article. I'm sorry. I was checking my phone. What did you say? In the news.

Oh, boy, am I having fun with the news the last couple of days. Yeah, there's been a lot going on with the whole Gawker and Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel thing, hasn't there? Yes.

The fact that Peter Thiel has been outed again because of Gawker as the funder behind many lawsuits against Gawker and has turned into, like, for me, he's like the Robin Hood of just crappy internet journalism.

I cannot stand Gawker, Nick Denton, Valleywag, and the asshole Owen Thomas, who is the one that wrote the article that got this entire ball rolling. So seeing that, you know, this billionaire has had this, like, kind of red team in the back corner for 10 years, like, planning to go after these guys and take down their company just makes me kind of giddy.

Like, oh, revenge is sweet. So let's hope he doesn't, you know, screw it up. Oh, you have a – okay. I mean, I can see that. I just – I don't think that there's any heroes in this story. I think they're all bad people.

Well – So. Well, yeah. Well, here's the deal. The worst people I think will get the, you know, the worst end of the stick. Owen Thomas had – when he ran Valleywag back when I was, you know, in the scene back in, you know, 2007, 2008, whenever that was back then.

Can't remember. It was so long ago and my brain is shot. He had a habit of going after the grunts, the day workers, and got a lot of people in a lot of trouble and got a lot of people fired. Right. And got me in trouble a couple times.

So, you know what? Well, that's not so surprising. Well, you know what? But it's not – I'm not Valleywag worthy, honestly. I built a site called ihate.vc, okay? Mm-hmm. And he outed me as the guy.

He actually did the research, went around the who is privacy controls, and found out that I was the guy who bought it and owned it. Right. So I had a very interesting conversation with the VC company who was actually funding the company I worked at.

Right. As soon as I got into work that day. And, you know, fortunately, one person on the board there realized that, you know, I'm a tongue-in-cheek kind of asshole and got me off the hook. Yeah. But the billionaire who ran the company was not very happy with me. Yeah.

Well, you know, these things happen. It does. It does. But, you know, I know a lot of people that didn't fare as well as I had. And so, you know, yeah, Peter Thiel's a whack job. Yeah. And this whole thing is just crazy. But – and the Nick Denton open letter to Peter Thiel that he put out is – I mean, I was kind of just laughing the entire time I read it.

But it's a lot of inside baseball. So if you're really not into the scene or know a lot about it, there's a lot of stuff in there that is – there's a lot more going on in that letter than is actually said. Yeah, and I have a new official policy of no longer reading anything that has the word open letter in it.

Well, see, this was my first open letter that I posted. You've posted like 17 from all these crazy-ass old musicians that you follow. So we got Sinead's open letters. We got Alana's open letters. Who the hell – probably had a Justin Bieber open letter in there somewhere. I don't know. I don't think he's ever read a letter.

Visa CEO Charlie Scharf, which is a great name. I Scharfed once and then I had to run to the bathroom. It was bad. Well, when you're CEO of Visa, you're kind of a powerful dude. There was a – JP Morgan and Chase had a tech conference. PayPal was basically the target.

Friend and foe. PayPal is both liked and hated by credit card companies apparently. But he is basically advocating, you know, screw you, PayPal. We're going to go after you because you tell people to fund their PayPal accounts with their bank accounts instead of their credit cards, which is what people should do because you shouldn't spend money you don't have.

Well, yeah. Why would you spend 10% to fund an account? That makes no sense. That makes no sense at all. So, Charlie Scharf, I understand that you'd rather have people use your credit cards, but it doesn't make good financial sense. And I'm assuming you would like people to pay back the money that they owe you.

So, let's have some decent financial sense rolled in here somewhere. Yeah. I'm glad I use MasterCard now. Does any place actually take MasterCard? Everywhere. MasterCard is accepted everywhere. And Amex is not, which I found out.

Discover card. Oh, the old Discover card. My Discover card is what got me my first Prodigy account. So, hey, man, they're not all that bad. The two incredibly outdated things. Uh-huh. Google's Paris office was raided in a tax fraud investigation.

I got a chuckle out of this one. Aggravated tax fraud. Aggravated tax fraud. Yes. Yes. This is good. Go get them. These people want a lot of money. They want. They should probably get it because I'm sure Google is not paying their fair share in any country.

So, let's keep this rolling, people. Yeah. I mean, there was a payout to Britain this year. But it's funny that they sent 25 computer technology experts. I'm like, these guys better be ex-Google employees because you're sending – that's like sending Lady Gaga in that meat suit into the lion's den.

Yeah, I know. You want to talk about technology experts, you just walked into Google. You just walked into them. Yeah. And keeping up with the financial story, this – I filed this particular story under I feel much better about myself, but then I cross-filed it under terrified about the entire country teetering on the edge of financial collapse.

These are two big file folders I have. Okay. This is from marketwatch.com. Most Americans have less than $1,000 in savings. Okay. Approximately 62% of Americans have less than $1,000 in their savings account and 21% don't even have a savings account.

This is a survey of more than 5,000 adults, which a friend of the show, Qian, rightly pointed out isn't exactly the largest sample and they don't really specify exactly where they were. However, it is still beyond frightening that a large percentage of Americans have absolutely no safety net whatsoever, no cash reserves on hand.

And when you don't even have a savings account, I'm assuming there's not much going on in terms of retirement. I have a savings account. It has $20 in it. Oh, boy. You're part of this? I am one of the 62%-ers. You are one of the 62%-ers. Uh-huh.

Oh, Jason. We got to work on that. Oh, yeah. Fortunately, we have people like the guy that gave us a two-star rating who don't want us to get paid for any of this. Yeah, seriously. Cocksucker. Anyway, there's an interesting article on Mashable because we didn't talk about Google I.O. last week.

No. Kind of by design because we generally don't go into a lot of that stuff. But they've got their new thing coming out, the Google Home. And the interesting thing about this article is – here's a quote from the article. Allowing Google to take a more holistic, further back view of your digital self isn't the same as throwing away privacy.

And with AI, it could finally unlock lots of hidden potential. In fact, it's an essential step toward the future where intelligent systems, be they virtual assistants, smart homes, self-driving cars, robots, or some as-yet-invented technology, take the reins on most of it, not all of them – or most if not all the mundane tasks in our everyday lives.

Yeah. No. No. Nope. Yeah. Even this article says, yeah, this stuff is kind of creepy. And I'm the one that has an Amazon Echo downstairs. I know. You are such a conundrum, Jason. It was free, man. That's how they get you.

See if these Google Home things were free. The only thing that I could think of when I was reading this – and this is a feature that they really need to build into these little home units. Even with the Echo and with the Google Home – because Google owns Nest for the time being until they divest it.

Yeah. Why don't these little gadgets have carbon monoxide testers, smoke detectors? And since they're all internet connected, if the smoke alarm goes off in more than one of the units in the house, it could call the fire department, things like that.

Like, build in more useful tools instead of Amazon – or, I'm sorry, Echo, I need more toilet paper. No, I agree with that. I mean, it should be unified and integrated, and the safety aspect of it would make a lot of sense. But, you know, people don't think about that.

Plus, that would be cutting into services that already exist. Well, yeah, then they couldn't sell you a Nest smoke alarm, I guess, but still. Yeah, that sort of thing. I was just – I'm just thinking inside the tube, as they say. Oh, Todd. Yeah.

I actually should have put this in the follow-up. I just wanted to quickly touch upon the Facebook trending topic and the ongoing Senate idiocy about this. You said last week – as you said last week, Jason, which I agree with 100 percent, they are a private company.

They can do whatever the hell they want. They are not required in any way, shape, or form to provide a conservative viewpoint or a liberal viewpoint. And if they are, then somebody should go talk to Fox News. Yeah, yeah. No, so, yes. They're a private, public company. Yes.

But their only job in this world is to maximize shareholder value. Exactly. Always remember that. Yes. So, but Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota is not cool with that. He is demanding details about Facebook's editorial process, et cetera, and is claiming some sort of oversight authority, which they do not have over a company like this.

So, let's just get over this and move on, people. They can do whatever the hell they want in the same way that Fox News does or any radio station that broadcasts what's-his-face, Rush Limbaugh. And not even that Facebook is all that crazy liberal because it's really not, especially if you read your uncle's feed.

And, well, I mean, this guy needs to go – he's in South Dakota, so he's probably still trying to get on the internet through AOL dial-up. So, I think he's a little behind the times. A little behind the times. Amazon has made the news because they have stopped giving refunds when an item's price drops after you purchase it.

They used to do that if you notified them and filed with customer service, and they have stopped doing that. And the interesting reason why they've stopped doing it is because, basically, generally, you would have to go search this out for yourself and be proactive about it. And you would probably never notice that something has dropped in price after you purchased it because why would you go look at it again?

However, there's apps for that now. Yep. Ernie, which is E-A-R-N-Y, which is cute. Get it, Ernie, Ernie. Yeah, these people who are checking your email for purchases, they're logging into Amazon to find out if the price has dropped from when you bought it.

And then they will automatically send Amazon the request on your behalf, which means that these people now have access to your email password, your Amazon password, and what could go wrong with somebody having access to your Amazon account?

Well, I was thinking about that as well. It's unfortunate that Amazon has stopped doing that, but obviously, it's understandable why now, because now they're getting a deluge of these things. But these startups that actually – I use the TripIt app, right, for travel and all that sort of stuff.

The way that Ernie should – I would never give any third-party access to my email or my Amazon account. Never, never, not in a million years. Why isn't it that I can't just forward my Amazon purchase confirmation emails to them, and then they can send me an email so I can proactively then go into my Amazon account and do what needs to be done?

I don't want it all automated for me. Do we see the problem with automation here? They get access to everything. Well, yes, and then they get hacked, and then Russia has access to your Amazon account. Yes. Yeah, it's stupid. Now, that's why APIs and security tokens and all that kind of thing exist, but nobody's – Nobody cares.

Well, it's not that nobody cares. Amazon is not in the business of giving sales tokens to – like API tokens to – for your sales data to a third party. That's not what they're in the business for, so they would never write an API for that. Yeah. And that's why they said they're shutting it down.

They're like – and they – before, it was a courtesy to everybody. It's like, oh, yeah, these are the exceptions. So these people just crapped all over all of – anybody who was out there with the wherewithal to go get some money back on their own steam. These people just shit in the salad at the party.

Thanks, Ernie. Yep. Awesome. Apple has confirmed that iOS 9.3.2 has a serious problem, and yes, it does. Yes, it does, and I need them to fix it immediately. Yeah, my battery lasts like half the time that it did before, and my iPad just keeps reminding me that I'm ready to install 9.3.2, and I go, okay, and they're like, oh, it's not there.

And it doesn't know not to keep checking for it because in the general settings, it says, hey, there's an update available. And I go to check for update, and it says, hey, there's an update available. It doesn't know how to un-update itself. I know. But the battery thing is insane.

Oh, yeah. I had seen you put this in the show notes, and earlier this week, I was like out and about for maybe two hours, and I was like, how the hell am I down to like 40%? Yeah. I mean, it is just draining like no tomorrow. And of course, right before I'm about to travel, and as you very well know, when you're traveling, you tend to be out and about for long periods without a charger.

Get one of those Anker batteries, man, I'm telling you, or one of the Amazon Basic batteries. Those work too, and they're lighter. But anyway, this isn't – I mean, unfortunately, this week, I dropped my iPhone, and it's in a case, but it landed in one of those magic spots, like right on the corner with all of the weight on it into a tile floor.

Popped the glass off, bent it. I now have a Ben Degazi phone. It is completely warped and does not work for phone calls. Okay. So yeah, so now I figured out last night, oh, I can make FaceTime voice calls to anybody with an iPhone.

But for now, I'm screwed on talking on the telephone, which is great because I have a backup flip phone if anybody needs to get in touch with me. But yeah, so I'm going to hold off until they fix all this stuff before I go get another phone. Well, actually, I can't go get another phone because, as I said before, my savings account has $20 in it, and our pre- and post-rolls are pissing people off.

So no new phone for a while. I am literally going to be rocking an LG flip phone. Yeah. Well, I will be wandering around Toronto with my rapidly draining iPhone battery, and if I try to get an Uber, they could potentially screw me because of things that you don't ever think about. Uber can monitor battery life on your phone.

It knows when your iPhone battery is going low, so it can switch into low power mode, as they say. And it knows that you're way more willing to pay for a ride when your battery is running out. They've done a lot of statistics on this. One of the strongest predictors of whether or not you're going to be sensitive to surge pricing is how much battery you have left on your cell phone because if that's the only way you're going to get home and you lose your battery, you're screwed.

So you will pay extra if your phone is dying. But, of course, Uber says they will not use this knowledge for evil. Yeah. It's – the interesting thing about it is, yeah, they say they're not doing it, but when has Uber not – I mean – Yeah.

I don't believe that they are – Also, maximizing shareholder value. Again, maximizing shareholder value. Exactly. Uh-huh. But in China, you might not need an Uber anymore because a long time ago, we posted an article about a straddling bus, and it looks like they're building the damn thing.

That would be cool. Yeah. It goes – so traffic can go under this thing, and it's kind of like a monorail. It looks like a monorail at Disney, but a very wide monorail. Well, but you can still drive your car under it, but the thing about it is, it's a moving tunnel, right?

It looks like they might have some issues with people maybe running into the bus because it looks like there's not a whole lot of clearance under this thing. Yeah, well, again, oh, well. Yeah, and the more I look at the video on this thing, it looks like a bunch of model cars.

Yeah, it does. It does. It looks – yeah, it's quite an amusing little video. I know. It's an interesting concept that I'm not entirely sure is all that practical in reality, but it's cool. Okay. We'll see how – we'll see if they make it. Yeah. You know, they do tend to make crazy stuff over there.

That is true. I would expect it to come out of Japan first, but anyway. There are upcoming changes to tweets. Oh, yay. Yeah. They are maximizing tweet holder value on this one. Yeah, sure they are.

They want you to be able to put more of your deep and, you know, heartfelt thoughts into that 140 characters. So they're going to be trying to offset that by taking out some of the characters from the URLs that you post in your ads and things like that and moving them into metadata.

Or they could just increase the number. Yeah. That ain't going to happen. So stupid. The whole point was so you could use it – Let's do all these different things to get around the character limit when we could just increase the character limit.

I know. Because the entire point was when Twitter came out, it was for flip phones. It was for flip phones. There are no more flip phones except the one that I have in my hand, and I will not be tweeting from it. So I don't even have Twitter on my iPhone. But, yes, they need to really kind of – they need to pivot.

They need to twivit. Twitter is just so stupid. Anyway. It's getting bad. It's getting bad. Well, and so I think a lot of their executives are starting to agree. Two top Twitter executives left this week. Jana, I love her last name, Messerschmidt, the head of BizDev, and Nathan Hubbard, head of media and commerce, have left.

Okay. Sinking ship. Sinking ship. How many times can you type sinking ship and still be within the character limit? Twice. Hashtag sinking ship. Yes, hashtag sinking ship. Facebook and Microsoft have joined together to build a huge, as the future president might say, transatlantic data cable.

It's a high-capacity system. They'll be ready by October 2017. I just think it's really interesting that Microsoft and Facebook have joined forces for something. Kind of cool. Hmm. Interesting. So, capacity of 160 terabytes per second, or terabits per second.

Massive. Yeah. At what point does the NSA tie into it? Oh, beginning, middle, and end. Okay. I figured they've got to have end-to-end access to this. End-to-end reading capability. This is interesting.

It's like, why? Why are they doing this? The NSA's big underwater storage system is sitting right in the middle of it. Yes. You know, we all talk about the place in Utah with, you know, their big thing, but we haven't talked about NSA Atlantis. No. And we'll be right back.

But now, a word from our sponsors.

Security? Ha! The Society for Worldwide International, or sorry, Interbank Financial Telecommunication, aka SWIFT, which is used basically almost everywhere in the world to send money around, has just been getting hacked left, right, and center.

The third one just happened. Ecuador Bank was hacked via SWIFT, let's see, how much money, I can't even tell how much, nine million, something like that. Anyways, not good. SWIFT, not good. They need to, they got to start fixing this stuff because, you know, it's one thing when your LinkedIn account gets hacked.

It's another thing when banks are getting hacked. Speaking of LinkedIn getting hacked, on ThreatPost.com, I love the title on this, LinkedIn is the latest contributor to breach fatigue. And honestly, that's why we don't have that many stories this week, because I am suffering from breach fatigue.

Like, just seeing all of these over and over and over again, it's getting to the point where it's like, ah, if you haven't got hacked this week, that's news. I know. It's like, hey, we've still got our data, woohoo! And then next week, oh, the Russians got it.

Shit. Yeah. Oops. But the greatest part about the breach fatigue article is I've found, have I been pwned? I love this site. Mm-hmm. So you go and put your email address in, and it will tell you how many hacks that you have been exposed in and which ones.

And you can also set up alerts. So if a new hack comes out, it will tell you if you've been pwned. I have done so. I have done it with all five of my email addresses. And one of them, only one of them, has not been pwned.

Really? Yeah, I basically just have my one. I've been three hacks total. For me. Which one? Well, the big ones, obviously. Adobe. Adobe. Yeah, I was going to say Adobe. Gotcha. That was 2013. I already, you know, for all of these, I changed passwords immediately, so it doesn't matter.

LinkedIn. Yep. Got that one. And Patreon. Yeah, I got that one, too. Yeah. I got another one. I got a Stratfor one thing on one of them, I think, as well. Okay. But yeah. Yeah, those I definitely got on all of them. Yeah. Yes.

It's three of a kind. And the AP put out a story, feds spend billions to run museum-ready computer systems. Now, this is an interesting piece because I had a long talk over many cocktails one night with one of our spooky friends.

Mm-hmm. And I'm not talking spooky Halloween. I'm talking the other spooky. Right. About this very topic. And when the enemy knows that you're running these old systems, interesting things can happen. Like, they can go and corner the market on all the parts.

Yep. And he reminded me last night, too, that they can corner the market on all the parts, then build in flaws to the parts. So, under stress, they tend to fail faster and then sell them back to the government on eBay or Craigslist. Yep. Ah, good.

That would be some good tradecraft there, I guess. But, yeah. So, reading this article, I'm like, hmm, I wonder if this is in the country's best interest to actually be pointing out which systems are actually in use. Such as the Verge article that I threw in the show notes that points out that the U.S. nuclear force has been using floppy disks and is trying to phase them out.

Did you just say nuclear? Nuclear. Oh, okay, Bush. Yeah. So, they're going to try to phase that out. But, yeah, there's a lot of outdated tech sitting around. But on the plus side, you don't have to worry about these getting air-gapped.

No, you don't. Right? All you have to do is bring in a... All you have to do is bring a neodymium magnet into the room and then, you know, okay, no more nukes. Yeah, but getting in the room is hard, see? It's like you can't even do the USB thing where you just kind of scatter them around the parking lot and hope one of the employees goes in and plugs it into the computer because you can't plug it into the damn computer.

Now I want to go and get a bunch of 8-inch floppy disks and just start leaving them in the parking lot. Good luck finding some. That'd be amazing. Oh, man. See, I think, secretly, this is quite a good way to maintain security. Oh, man.

Okay, that's all I got.

Comment of the week. We got a five-star rating on iTunes this week from Paradox49. You guys are great. I'm listening to the back episodes and you make my work bearable. Keep up the great work. Well, don't go too far back because then your work will be fairly unbearable.

Don't go too far back because if you go too far back, you get the – it's probably a two-star rating worthy, which we got two of this week. I've already read the first one. The second one is from Thrasher34343447473. I was really excited to listen to the podcast right out of the gate.

They call conservatives right-wing nutjobs. I'm for freedom of speech and expression. So if you believe it, preach it. But I love how when people do that. They're like, I'm all for this, but. Yeah. But to me, it kind of felt like an attack. Maybe just me and I might give them another shot.

Seem like good guys, just not my cup of tea. Generally, we try to stay away from politics, but obviously with the election this year, it's a bit insane and there's no way you can't because this is unprecedented. And I would like to state for the record, I have many conservative friends and I was not referring to all conservatives as right-wing nutjobs, just the actual right-wing nutjobs within the party.

Okay. Whatever you say. Whatever you say. We got a tweet from at I like big books. Hey. And I cannot lie. And I cannot lie. Ever watched hashtag Black Mirror? Pretty sure season one, episode three covers why capture is a bad idea.

Jason, you were a big fan of the show. We have watched every episode of Black Mirror and we have reviewed them all on the show. So indeed, I like big books. We have covered Black Mirror and we are very excited that it will be coming back soon. Yeah. And from GrumpyOldGeeks.com, we have a note from Dave Bittner.

Hey guys, love your show and I appreciate the shout out to the Cyber Wire podcast on one of your past episodes. Oh, no way, that Dave Bittner. Sweet. Just want to extend the offer that I would love to guest on your show if you ever want to do a segment on cyber security like we do every week. So yes, that would be awesome. It could make for a nice cross promotion for both of our shows, a win-win.

Let me know if you're interested. Yes, we are, Dave. So thank you. Yes, we'll be in touch, Dave. Jason will reach out to you. And Lawrence Lee from our Patreon supporters, who's one of our greatest and longest Patreon supporters, sent us a massive tome that we will get to next week because Brian has to get on a plane soon.

I got a hard out, people. We got a hard out. So you can find us on Twitter at GOG Podcast, on Instagram at Grumpy Old Geeks, or at Patreon at patreon.com slash GOG. Make sure you change your password because I just got reminded about that hack. We have a website at grumpyoldgeeks.com where you can listen to shows, leave feedback, or better yet, ask us questions that we can read on the air.

If you have friends, if you don't, I'm sad for you, please tell them about the show. And please, if you like the show, drop us an iTunes review. They really do help us out, and it'll only take a minute or two. Just go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes, and it will take you right there. Software, apps, and gadgets.

As part of the two weeks in now Mac-only universe that I exist in, and one that also involves much less coding than I used to do, but I still do a bit of coding, I found a new open source text editor that is great for web design called Brackets, and you can check them out at brackets.io.

It's pretty cool. I like using it. So what about it is actually worth talking about because it's a text editor? I'll tell you about my text editor in a second, but tell me about why Brackets is cool. I know your text editor. I use that as well. I'm giving Brackets a go to see if I like it better than Sublime Text, which is the one that you recommended for me.

It feels like what I was using on PC, which is probably why I like it most. I mean, it does the same thing. Also, it sucks. No. It does not suck. It's pretty cool. It feels very similar to what I was doing there. It does what everybody else does.

It'll do a bunch of the coding for you. It'll do a start, stop, a lot of good short keys. I just find it comfy. I like it. Okay. Yeah. I will take a look at it. I think you buried the lead on this one, though, because it will actually look at a Photoshop file and try and actually help build your CSS and stuff with it.

Yeah, it'll try. I haven't had a really good chance to try that feature out a lot yet, so I'm waiting to see when I hopefully have a project that will require me to do so. So far, I have not really played around with that. It does seem to be really good with CSS and setting all that sort of stuff up.

So it's pretty cool. I like it. Does it do multiple cursors? That's the one thing that Sublime Text does that is the genius killer feature of Sublime Text is multiple cursors. You know, I don't know. I haven't tried that out yet, so I will let you know.

Yeah, if you've never experienced the magic of multiple cursors when you're trying to, say, you know, edit 600 lines that all have something in the same spot, it will save you a gazillion hours, which it has saved me. And Sublime Text is fairly cheap.

You can actually use it, you know, without paying for it. Stick with number two. Number three is, you know, buggy as crap, and there's only one guy developing it, I believe. Yeah, it's funny. I just accidentally launched it because I was looking at the – I was checking out my iHeat map of their logo.

And it says, a new version of Sublime Text is available. Download now. No, thank you. No, thank you. Unless it's a version two update. Anyway, since this is the, you know, there's a gadget in the name of this section, West Hollywood has a robot parking garage.

Oh, joy. I think you need to go try this out for the show. I think you got to – it doesn't have that many spots. It's, like, under 100 spots, but it's kind of cool. It's got – we've got, like, our first robot parking garage. Well, maybe I'll take a – And it does say WeHo on the side, so. It's well-designed.

It looks very pretty. Maybe when I come back, I'll go on a field trip. Yeah, check it out. Since I'm definitely not – yeah, 92 cars. I'm definitely not going to be going there ever. So, yeah. Yeah, you say ever. We'll see about that. Trust me on this one.

Anyway, go ahead. Everybody, go ahead and feel free to go back through Grumpy Old Geeks' old episodes and find all the – time mark all the times that Jason said he was, A, not going to move back to Chicago when he was here, or B, not moved back to L.A. when he was in Chicago. Yeah, sometimes there are straws and there are camel's backs, and we move on.

Apple Leak has confirmed that the next iPhone will be all glass. Oh, great. Just what I need. What would have happened to your phone if it was all glass when you – Yeah. Oh, no. It looks pretty, but I don't know.

I want a titanium phone. Don't give me this glass shit. Give me a goddamn titanium phone. But in wanting to feel old news, the aspect of the story, 2017 will mark the 10th anniversary of the iPhone. And it's great because I still have my iPhone 1, and I brought it with me because that was one of the relics.

I couldn't put very much in the truck when I fled L.A. Right. Because, yeah, it's that bad. I brought my iPhone 1, my original one, and it still works, unlike my 6 Plus.

And trust me, I have dropped that iPhone 1 a hell of a lot more times than this 6 Plus.

Media candy. I bet you're going to love this one, Brian. Survivor. I'm sure you watch Survivor every year. This will be the 33rd season. I'm sure you've seen them all. I have not ever seen a single episode. Well, I have seen – I have probably seen 27 of the 32 seasons that have been out so far.

But this next one you might enjoy because it is Gen Xers versus Millennials. I won't enjoy it. I think you just might, though. I'm sure I won't. Okay. Well, did you enjoy the Star Trek Beyond trailer, the second one that came out?

Actually, I did. This actually – the first trailer made it seem like an absolute horrible movie. The second trailer had a little bit of life to it. Yeah. No, I'm – I'm in. Yeah, I'm going opening night. Definitely. I – you know, I – the whole Fast and Furious thing had me kind of scared.

But now that I know that the director's like, you know, is a fan and coming out for fans, you know? Yeah. He's got me. The whole Beastie Boys synced first trailer had me terrified. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I – you know, Gen X. It was not good. Yeah, not good. Not good. But this trailer's good.

I liked it. It'll be linked in the show notes. Check it out. But I'd also – if you have an IMAX theater in your area, you know, I'm talking about the old school dome IMAX where you sit back in the chairs. Yep. There's a new movie called A Beautiful Planet that's out that looks unbelievable.

It's only 43 minutes long, which is the problem because for me to go watch it, I have to go all the way downtown to Chicago to Navy Pier, watch it, and then come home. So the 43-minute movie is going to take like two and a half hours in travel. But it looks amazing, though.

I was all in on this until I saw the one line that has just made me go, no. What? Narrated by Jennifer Lawrence. That doesn't bother me. Because when I think NASA, I think Katniss. You know, I don't – that's not going to bother me. It bothers me because these things always happen.

It's like all of a sudden we can only – we have to hire one person to do absolutely everything for a period of like one or two years. There are a million other people out there that could have done this. You could have had Morgan Freeman as God. You know, see – well, no. That's – that point right there. I am sick of Morgan Freeman narrating everything.

I know. See? You're making my point for me. Okay. Well, I have not heard anything narrated by Jennifer Lawrence yet. She's too busy being in absolutely every movie. Okay. Well, speaking of all the movies, if you go to Fast.com now, Netflix's new utility will check your real-time download speeds and not give you the BS from those speed tests that are run by ISPs.

You know what I'm really curious about? Hmm. How much Netflix paid to get Fast.com? A lot of money I'm betting because that's a great domain name. And there's no way they had it. Oh, no, no, no. I'm sure that was probably a $10 million domain right there.

Yep. Had to be. Had to be. Actually, though, in this domain economy, they probably got it for $20. Are you a Fargo fan? I've tried. It's interesting. It just hasn't hooked me enough to watch it all yet.

I love it. Okay. Season 1 and 2, loved them both. They both start out a little bit slow. Season 2 definitely started out slow. But in Season 3, we're going to have Ewan McGregor. And he's playing two characters even. So we get double Ewan.

Double Ewan. Ewan. So we're going to work between that and Trainspotting 2. I think we're going to be Ewan'd out for a while. I think so. Okay. Good stuff, though. Bauhaus and Skinny Puppy. Peter Murphy and Ogre from Skinny Puppy are both going to star in a horror movie together.

What? I know, right? Okay. That'll be interesting. It's so weird. It's going to be definitely interesting. There's a horror movie called Black Glove Killer, which is going to be directed by Toronto-based filmmaker and composer Chris Alexander, Fangoria.

Nobody knows much about the plot, but we know it's probably going to be something vaguely vampiric. And it'll be fun to see a very old Peter Murphy and a very old... I'm actually not even sure entirely what Ogre looks like because I'm just used to him in his outfits when he's performing live. Yeah, he's all covered in crap, so you don't even know what he looks like.

Yeah. So that'll be interesting. I've... You know, Bauhaus is one of my favorite... And Skinny Puppy are two of my favorite bands, so it should be fun. Yeah. The only time I've ever seen Ogre out of makeup was when he was doing backup for KMFDM. Yeah. Or when he was briefly in Pig Face and I saw them play live, so...

Yeah. I have disturbing news on the remake scene, going through the reboot scene or whatever you want to call it. Yep. Big Trouble in Little China, starring The Rock. No. Yeah. Are you fucking kidding me?

I wish I was. Yeah. And, you know, The Rock... You know, The Rock is the Jennifer Lawrence on the guy side. Like, he's in everything right now. He is in everything right now. They're saying that... The Rock says they're trying to get John Carpenter on board. You know, I was talking to a friend of the show, MXV, this morning.

He's like, yeah, we hope we get John Carpenter on board. So he shuts the goddamn thing down because nobody wants this. I agree. Nobody wants this. Big Trouble in Little China. I have such fond memories of it. I'm sure it... To, you know, give your other podcast that you don't do anymore a plug. I'm sure it doesn't have legs.

But what a great movie. Actually, we did Big Trouble in Little China on Does It Have Legs? You can search for it on GrumpyOldGeeks.com. And the verdict is... Sorry, Lillard. The verdict is... Go listen to the show. You bastard. We'll be right back.

Enjoy a word from our sponsors. Moron of the Week! I didn't know... Well, I heard on the periphery that this was a thing, but there is apparently competitive vaping.

Yes, yes, I know. The silence is deafening. I was just looking at the photos from the show link. These people are not competitive at anything except for being losers. They're blowhards. Literally, blowhards. Ah, I see what you did there. Yeah. So, do they sit around sucking in this crap that has, you know, God knows what in it, and literally all they do all day is blow?

Unsurprisingly, this is in Vegas, which is also where they tend to have a lot of the... Yes, and what we're talking about is the two hours of competitive vaping, a viewer's guide from dig.com. It'll be linked in the show notes. Yes. And, yes, go ahead. I think I've come up with something here. Drone racing.

They often need a lot of smoke and lasers to make it interesting to the viewer. You just have the vape competition at the ground level. They can provide the smoke for the drone racing, and at the end, the drone racers can just crash into the vapors. Yeah, yeah. And the drones and the vapors are gone.

Awesome. We could totally do this Mad Max style where we take pylons, you know, in the drone competition like they had in Dubai, where they had all the pylons that they had to go through. Well, we strap vapors to those, and they just have to keep vaping to keep the smoke out so the drones, you know, hopefully can't see them.

And, you know, every now and again, somebody's head will get cut off. That'll be amazing. Ah, I think that's what we need to do. I have a new hero, and his name is Josh Newland.

Hi, Josh. He wrote a fantastic piece of software called Say What? And it uses IBM's Watson Technology, their speech recognition program, to recognize his name.

So he wrote a Python script, and when someone says his name, it will back up, give him a transcription of what was said in the last, like, minute or 30 seconds, so he can get up to speed and unmute himself and then join the conversation again.

I love this. Yeah, this is all about, you know, board meeting or any kind of phone meeting. Any meeting. Yeah. I want, you know, if this was a feature in Google Glass- If this was commercially available, I would pay for it. I will give you money, Josh. I know. This is just the best thing.

It's just like, I'm just going to do something else. And it's like, oh, I'm up. Okay, let me go read what they said. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry. I was on mute. I was talking, but I was on mute. That's his excuse. But now they'll obviously know. But, yeah. Genius. Genius.

I love you. I love you, Josh Newland. Please open source this. Yes, please. And in the somewhat genius, but kind of not category, Barisier? Is that how you pronounce it? I don't know. It was a pet project for designer Joshua Renau. Renau? I'm doing horrible with names today.

What do you mean today? I know. Today. It's a coffee brewing alarm clock. So it looks very pretty. You set the alarm, and when the alarm goes off, it just starts making you your cup of coffee. Okay, coffee machines that I remember as far back as 1960-something, because they have an alarm clock built into them.

Ah, but they weren't pretty. It didn't sit by your bed. Oh, okay. Do you see what they're doing here that's different? And then, of course, they're taking it to Kickstarter. Oh, that's the difference. You got to Kickstarter it. I see the difference here. It is pretty.

I'll give them that. Anyway, on the previous story for the fans, Josh Newland has actually open-sourced it, and it's on GitHub, and there will be a link in the show notes. Oh, excellent.

I found my new favorite site. Why I deleted your band's promo email. This is the line that made me delete your band's promo email.

So, obviously, this guy is working in the music industry, and he gets a lot of promotional emails, and he has started a collection of the worst lines in every single one of them that just makes him go, I think I should hit delete. Some of my personal favorites are, it's hard to put him into a category because he represents so many.

Or, on the Welcome to Jam Rock cruise. Or, has matured into what can only be described as a throwback to a pure, authentic rock. And then he also, obviously, hit delete because one band's promo line was, Red Hot Chili Peppers or the Dave Matthew Band.

Okay. Delete. I went through a couple of these, and they are pretty damn good. It is hilarious. It's been a big hit with me and all my music industry friends. We've been dying over these things. It's genius. I'm not even a music industry guy, and I recommend checking it out.

Are you kidding me? Love it! The licky brush. I heard about this. The worst thing to ever see Kickstarter, well, since probably yesterday. This is a brush that you can stick in your mouth and lick your cat like your cat would lick another cat.

Yes. And I wanted it to be a joke, but it's on Kickstarter. It's not. It's 3D printed. Which makes me wonder why they need $36,000 for it. Well, it's $36,500 for the goal, 30 days to go, 600 backers.

And they've raised $15,372 as of this recording. I'm thinking they're not going to make it because they've had their big publicity push. They've been on a bunch of TV shows, and they're only halfway there. Guarantee, because after all the research I've done in Kickstarter, most of it happens at the last day.

Oh, okay. Most of the push happens at the last day because I listened to Zane Lamprey's podcast, and he did the math on his campaigns, and they came at the end, and a couple other podcasts did the same thing. So I think Licky Brush is going to get funded. Boy, I hope not, because I'm looking at the animated GIFs they have of people using it.

Oh, my God. It's disturbing. It's disturbing. I've sent it to all my friends with cats, and I'm like, you've got to get one. They're like, hell no. Hell no. Because somebody might make a video of me doing that to my cat, and I cannot have that on the Internet anywhere. And also, in Are You Kidding Me news, I was hanging out with a friend of the show, Calbee Monday, and Nicole, and their kid, Cy.

Well, guess what? What? Cy has action figures of his YouTube heroes that they buy at Target now. Yeah. Time moves on, Jason World. I know. And it was that conversation that made me realize that I do not know a goddamn thing about what's happening out in the world anymore.

That's about it. But that's okay, because you're not supposed to be a 43-year-old man. I'm not a 43-year-old man. I'm a 44-year-old man about to turn 45 in two months. You're not supposed to be a 45-year-old man. Who knows what's going on in the toy section. Well, I am now, so suck it.

Closing shout-outs! Brian has to go get on a plane and go have some poutine and drink a lot of beer in Canada, so we're going to cut it right there. And thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo, and you can check me out at jpd.me. And I'm Brian Schulmeister, eh? And you can follow me on Twitter at aslenderfungus, eh?

Grumpy Old Geeks is a partially 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 and leave us a few words and five stars, not two, 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 Apple Music if it works. Or you can donate through Grumpy Old Geeks' Patreon page at patreon.com slash gog to get 10 exclusive tracks. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stochansky.

You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash houseofandy. Andy'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 161. Oh, Canada, you're not my native land.

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