167: Come and Knock On My Tor

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, episode 167 for July 8th, 2016. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Man, what a day. Yeah, there's all kinds of bad news out there. I mean, I'm obviously talking about Germany losing to France in the Euro. Devastating. Devastating. Yeah. But, you know, there's a lot of bad news. There's a lot of other bad shit going on in the world today. Yes, there is.

Yeah. So, you know, I think today, rather than piss off a bunch of people and get a bunch of one-star ratings, we'll stick to tech, mostly. I think that's a good idea. Speaking of tech, the Wired UK series has finally wrapped up with part four.

I believe it's wrapped up. It's like a 20-minute piece, and it's really good, but it seems to be, the way that the story was told, seems like it's the end. Right. So, it's not really future cities. It's future city. Yeah, we'll see if they do another one with a different future city. I don't know what city they're going to get that can rival Shenzhen, but it's a pretty cool series.

If you haven't watched it yet. I watched the first two. I have not seen three or four yet, but that's on the weekend viewing. There you go. Yeah. So, just a little follow-up from last week. It turns out that the guy that was driving the Tesla that was killed was watching a Harry Potter movie. Well, technically, not driving.

Not driving, yes. Yes. Harry Potter. Well, it beats porn. It does beat porn. Yeah. Which would have been much more embarrassing. Yeah. Yeah, it would have. You know, you hope that if that was what would have happened, they would have lied about it and said, oh, he's watching some religious thing.

Or maybe Harry Potter is the code word. Or maybe it was the Harry Potter spoof. Yeah. Yeah, moving on. Harry Pooper. Yeah. Oh, man. So, we talked about some VR stuff last week, and it dawned on me. I remember going in the 90s, going to an actual center to play virtual reality games, and it was called Virtual World.

I remember there being a lot of spaces like that. There was, in fact, a company that basically had been, it was right near me in Orange County when I was growing up, and they were outsourced as game testing. And basically, you would just show up and play games with other people all day. Yeah, the one that I went to here was, it was a Battletech center.

It was the first Battletech center in the U.S., actually. So, you'd get in these pods, and you'd basically play a Mac. And, you know, it was all networked, and you'd blow up your friends. It was really cool, because the pods were, I mean, you really felt like you were in one of those Macs, because the switches were everywhere.

You actually had to learn how to drive a Mac to play with it. It was a ton of fun. And they also had the ones that, where you got in a little circle, and you had the gun and the face mask, like out of Hackers. Right, right. The same one that the guy wears in Hackers. You could play those, too. And that was my first bout with VR.

And I just, I don't know why I remembered it. And then I found a couple of those pods were for sale recently, like four of them for $25,000. I'm like, man, I wish I had some money. Wow, that would actually, they're pretty damn cool looking. They're very cool. Super geeky, but that's quite pricey. Yeah, very, very pricey.

Yeah, yeah. So I got a notice this morning that my internet usage is apparently very high. Okay. And they're going to move me to the one terabyte plan. Right. Where I don't have to do anything. It says less than 1% of Comcast customers actually use a terabyte of data or more in a month.

And then after that, they'll start charging me. And this month or last month I have done, or my average data usage for the past three months is 548 gig. Okay. Yeah. You know, that's not really all that much. If you do what we do on the internet. Yeah. I mean, I'm doing basically podcasts that are all in Dropbox for all of the shows that I work on.

And that's, you know, they're a couple gig a shot. So I was actually kind of surprised. I'm like, three months? Well, I haven't even been here three months, so maybe that's why. That could be, yes. Well, let's see. Well, we'll see how that works. But yeah, Unlimited is gone. There is no such thing. You must pay. God.

And we reviewed the three body problem on the show a while ago. We did. And it turns out that they have just found a three-star system with an actual planet going around it. I'm like, okay, that's kind of cool. Well, this might explain why we can't replicate any of our science.

Could be. Could be. If you have not read the book, you know, that's pretty funny, actually. Yeah. But yes, if you haven't read it, I think we were both kind of B minus-ish. Yeah, it wasn't an A, but it didn't suck.

It was interesting. You know, again, a lot of it, I think, is just a cultural thing. So, you know, he's Chinese. And a lot of the book relates directly to their cultural history. So a lot of that flew over our heads. Yes, definitely. So, you know.

I guess you just have to be smarter to enjoy it. Could be. We're not that bright around here. No. No. In the news. Well, this is very appropriate for today.

I don't know if you've been on Facebook much today, but, you know, it's a little full of opinions and posts and stuff. Yeah, I'm staying away from Facebook today and Twitter and basically the world. A friend of the show, Chien, wrote me this morning and said, you know, basically just saying Facebook is totally useless today.

And unless you have some sort of fresh point of view, stop posting and reposting shit, which I agree with. That's a lot of that going on today. But the reason this is happening is that this is a post from Recode.net. Facebook is now the dominant social network for news.

It has surpassed Twitter. Most people in the U.S. are reading news from their phones and of those on Facebook. More than two-thirds use it for news, according to new data from Pew Research. Pew! The rest of the report paints a fairly bleak picture of the state of news media today as well.

Some quick bullet points. Young people read less news than old people. That's shocking. I know. I don't think that's actually any different than the past, to be honest, because the nightly news in 60 Minutes has always had very older demographic, even before the internets and the Facebooks.

Those who do read news get that news online much more frequently than old people who also read news. More people get news from their phones than they used to. 72% of American adults in 2016 versus 54 in 2013. That is a pretty big jump in only two years. The majority of Americans, roughly 75%, think news organizations are biased.

That would be because they fucking are. Fair and balanced, my aching ass. Yeah. And Facebook is the dominant social platform when it comes to news consumption. This last point, of course, being interesting because it was only a week ago that Facebook tweaked its algorithm to get rid of news.

Yeah, that's the funny part. So now instead of actually getting the news reports, we are getting crappily retweeted and reposted shit memes that mean nothing. So we've removed any news whatsoever. And to that point, other friend of the show, Felicia Michaels, the very funny comedian who guested on our show quite a while back.

Long time ago. A long time ago is made a post that kind of points to the problem with this in my mind in that we are basically creating echo chambers of our own beliefs. And there's no real news coming in anyway. So she did post, I used to think it was important to keep different POVs on my feed as I wanted to be balanced and fair.

But that is just a fantasy. If you are posting memes, videos, or sharing ignorant posts from others in favor of any kind of hate, you are out. No asking others to cut and paste where we met. Nothing. Just done. So this is the problem with making Facebook our only source of news. Yeah.

Yeah. That's kind of how it goes. I still get most of my news from Twitter, surprisingly. But because if you're most people that post crap on Facebook, I just hide them anyway. So, yeah, yeah, I know. Pretty much. You're one of those Twitter people. But, you know, the facts are the facts and the numbers are with Facebook.

Twitter is basically an outlier at this point, even though, again, like I say, they have the best PR company in the world because everybody name checks Twitter on news. So, yeah. There you go. Mossberg, also over at Recode, Walt Mossberg, he does a lot of op-eds and opinion pieces.

What, Walt Mossberg has an opinion? Oh, for shame. I know. We should give him reviews saying one star for having an opinion because that's what we need. He wrote a really good article about the tyranny of messaging and notifications, which I am feeling every day more and more.

We used to complain about our email inbox and the dream of getting to zero. Now, not only do you have emails, you have everything else. And I've complained about this a million times. You know, people can't pick a way to have a conversation anymore. I've had friends that have started conversations in text and then automatically somehow switched over to Facebook Messenger to continue a conversation.

I'm like, why didn't we just stick with the? Yesterday, I actually had two conversations going on with the same person, but two completely different topics. One was in Slack and one was over text. And I'm like, can we just consolidate? Yeah, we don't do that anymore.

And this entire article is about how frustrating and insane it can be because you have 7,000 different apps dinging at you all the time. So many different things that you have to check. And all of this was meant to save time. I feel the same way about how the fast food industry replaced the regular cash registers with the photos of food because in theory, this was supposed to save time.

Yet it takes fucking five times longer than it ever used to to get anything. I can't find your picture of fries. There you go. I know. Are we going to hell in a handbasket? Are we getting stupider? It's hard to say no. It's hard to say no.

So what I've done recently is I've gone into my iPhone and my computer and I go to the notifications panel and I turn everything off. Literally everything is off. That's what he recommends doing as well. Basically shut off all notifications and just, you know, do like every three hour spin through things to check and see if anybody has written you and start training people up, which is what I've been doing.

Yeah, same here. You write me on Messenger and when you should have been texting me, I'm just going to ignore it and I'll get to it when I get to it. That's about the only way you can do it. And even with and the one thing that, you know, we've talked about Slack a couple of times on the show and you're you're a newbie to Slack, but I've been using it for a while now.

I treat Slack like email now. I only do it in chunks because otherwise it will take up your entire day. Yeah. All you will do is sit there on Slack. I am I am using that as well for a new kind of semi part time company that I'm doing with a with a buddy and he likes to chat, which is fine.

There's nothing wrong with that. But I have had to train myself to treat Slack the way that you say, because otherwise I will just sit there and we will type at each other all day long. Yeah. And get nothing done. So, yeah, that that, you know, that change cost. If you're trying to write something and do something and people keep bugging you, you know, there is a cost to going back and forth and losing that attention span.

So turn it off. Yep. Turn it off and train up your friends. My friend of the show, Fergal, has done a very good job of that with everybody that he knows. We all know. Don't bother texting him. The only way you can get a hold of him is is write him on Facebook Messenger. End of story. So that's what we do.

And it works. No, there you go. There you go. And rant. It's hard not to be in a bad mood today, but we'll move on. And this is something I found that I think is ingenious and somewhat clever. And it's a silly little story.

But smart pirates are fooling YouTube's copyright bots by hiding movies in the 360 degree videos that they have available. I got to give him credit for that. That was pretty clever. It is clever. It is very funny. We have the link in the show notes. I think it's been. They've all been taken down.

Yeah. They've all been taken down now, but briefly they got away with it. And it was quite funny. Yes. Do you know? Where there's a will, there's a way. Got to give them a. Yeah. They will always, you know, it's the never-ending chase. It's the never-ending game. They will come up with an algorithm. We will find a way to beat it.

They will better their algorithm. We will beat it again. And there's always just Sweden. So. Yep. Just go to Sweden. Yeah. Although I don't even think Sweden's in Sweden anymore. Is it? No. I think Sweden's in Russia. Yeah. Mostly. Or on a boat. On a boat?

Oh, yeah. The Pirate Bay. Ah, yes. Arr. The week's, this week's number one album is the lowest selling in history. That could have been said last week, too. I think it's going to keep going. Yeah. But this is kind of, this one's popped to my attention because as you can imagine, I have quite a few musicians as friends on the book of the face where I get my news.

And they were all posting about this because it's, it's, it's kind of sad. It's Rihanna's auntie, which was in the chart a while back and then came back after for a second non-consecutive week. It is the number one selling album this week. It has sold 17,000 copies. Wow.

17,000. That's it. Your garage band from down the street could probably sell more units back in the day. No, I wanted to, I ran out of time. I was going to Google and try to find some, some idea of like what punk bands were selling in like the, you know, 80s or early 90s.

And I'm guessing it was more than that. Probably. And this is now the biggest artist in the entire world. So I did find though, in 1990, Phil Collins had the number one selling album that week. But seriously, 4 million units sold. Slight difference.

27 years, how the mighty have fallen. Or 26 years, I guess. Yes. How the industry has gone away. So let's get into driverless cars. Because if we gotta, if we gotta, well, we can't not because it seems to be the only, you know, we're, we're sliding there quickly.

Very quickly. LG has made a deal. They're getting into the, into the fray. They've partnered with the Volkswagen. Okay. So a little surprising there. I would have figured Volkswagen would have gone for Apple or something like that, but they're doing LG. So, okay. We'll see what they come up with.

The scarier thing is they are not just going to do the self, the self-driving car. They are going to integrate with smart home services as well. How, why? So your car, your car will now be able to control your lights and security system and domestic appliances from out on the road.

Isn't that great? What could go wrong there? Why wouldn't you want to be able to check your fridge from your car? If you're in your car, you might need to stop and get milk. Oh, I suppose that's technically true. So yay. Yay. Exciting. And apparently I spent a lot of time on Recode this week.

You can check the link in our show notes. They have come up with the complete timeline to self-driving cars. Obviously, this is guesstimating, but it is running through the realities of testing and what steps will be required and how this will work with governments and how this will work with what I've always said we can't do, which is the combination of self-driving and regular driving people.

Basically saying we're looking at around 2047 before it is completely, totally automatic online. Okay. Well, I'll be dead by then, so I don't give a shit. You might be. I'm planning on still being around. We'll see. Okay. Yeah.

So, I mean, that kind of is in line with what we've talked about before, you know? Yeah. I mean, we think it's going to come super, super fast. The reality is the technology will get there, but the implementation will take a lot longer because governments move slow. This is true, but they are trying to get better at it.

They are. They are. We'll see what happens. We'll see what happens in November. We might be back to donkeys and carts before we know it. Yeah. That's what I'm more than a little bit worried about. So, on a lighter note, I am trying to break up my crap stories with fun ones.

Although this, I guess, technically isn't that fun for the guy involved. A man who felt Google was watching him, also not wrong, is arrested for setting a Google mapping car on fire. Oh, my God. Prosecutors have charged an Oakland man who felt Google was watching him for setting one of the company's Street View vehicles on fire.

His name is Raul Diaz. He arrested him on the Google campus on June 30th. He also had firearms and items to make a pipe bomb in his car, so this is a bit less light-hearted. Yeah, where's the funny part here? Well, it got a little less light-hearted. It started funny, though.

Yeah, he intended to shoot into another Google building, and he felt Google was watching him, and that made him upset, according to his sworn statement. Okay, so he's just a crazy person. He's a crazy person, but not wrong. He's not wrong, but he's still crazy. He's not wrong. But, you know, the reaction to it is a little crazy.

That escalated quickly. It did. Jason, you've always liked to talk about the man-poo problem in San Francisco. Man-poo. Yes, San Francisco does have a very stratified society at the moment, a large amount of homeless and a large amount of ridiculously rich people. So San Francisco, as a city, has decided to take some action about this, and they've put forward a proposal to tax the tech companies more to address the homeless problem.

Okay. They are suggesting a 1.5% payroll tax, which would be used to pay for programs for the homeless and aid in solving San Francisco's affordable housing issues, which it definitely has. It would raise nearly $140 million per year and help balance the city's $9.6 billion budget.

And interestingly enough, even the city has noticed that the tech boom is slowing down because they are saying this is also a preventative step to help the city's economy when the boom slows down and they can already see signs of cooling, as it were. Oh, you mean Twitter's not going to be around forever and everybody's sick and tired of getting apps for their phone?

Yes, pretty much, yeah. Who called that one? I don't know. It must be some one-star tech show that I've heard of before. Yeah, goddamn opinions. Security? Ha! So, our schedule's a little off this week because I was supposed to be attending a conference, which I did attend for one day.

Everything got – I got a little under the weather and I basically slept for 20 hours and missed the rest of the conference. But so our schedule's off, so Dave Bittner's not with us this week, but hopefully he will be returning next week when we're back to our normal ass-crack-of-dawn recording schedule.

Maybe Brian will jump in and jump into the fray again. But this week is just me and you, dude. All right. It's just us. It's just a shame we don't have somebody who actually knows what he's talking about this time. Well, we'll get it back. We'll get it back. We kind of know what we're talking about. We kind of do. All right.

So it's security and there's no way we could not talk about the Clinton email case because it's security. So the FBI has basically said we're not going to charge her. Yeah. And then the State Department reopened in investigation today looking back into the actual issue.

So the FBI said we're not going to do it and the State Department's like, just give it a second here, guys. This is not right. Now, from what we know, they're basically saying she was extremely careless and yes, she was. I am not pleased with this. No, not at all.

I think she's getting a pass because even the FBI goes, there's no fucking way we can have Trump. And if we take down Hillary Clinton, basically, we're going to get Trump. I can just hear these one stars racking up right now. Ding, ding, ding.

I'm just I didn't provide my opinion. I just said I think that's what the FBI is thinking. Yeah, I do. I mean, and I'm not the only person that feels this way. There's more than a few articles that were saying that were this any other election year, Clinton would be done.

But it's not. And she isn't. And but then you also posted something that reminded me of something that I had forgotten about. So in the interest of being fair and balanced, the George W. Bush administration had very similar problems. Yes. Karl Rove was actually using his personal email address to send around a lot of stuff that he shouldn't have been sending around with a personal email address.

So this has all happened before and this will all happen again. And it happens on both sides. So we can all shut up and stop posting our memes. Mm hmm. How's that? Now, not going to happen. More fun security news. A bot has hacked NASA's Twitter account and posted a picture of a woman's butt in red lingerie.

OK. That's all. Well, you know, if you had to take a picture of your anus, you go. See, I went for full moon. OK. Full moon. I'm going there. OK. And then speaking of full moons.

It is a nice full moon. I got to give them that. It is. They deleted it quickly, obviously, and hopefully started using one password over at NASA. We'll see. I doubt it. Then speaking of celebrity full moons. Well, we weren't speaking to celebrities, but now we are. A second man has been has pled guilty to the great fappening.

The fappening. Into celebrity accounts, which was what? Over two years ago now. Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah. So this guy is in your neighborhood, Jason. Chicago man, Edward Majorsik. Majorsik. Doctor to the Polish names all the time. Has agreed to plead guilty to using phishing scams to fool more than 300 people.

Not specifying how many of those are actual celebrities. Into compromising their Gmail and iCloud accounts. Including. Oh, there we go. Including up to 30 celebrities. Yeah. You might want to read that before. Says the guy who put next to nothing in the show notes. Yeah. Kiss my ass. Yeah. Anyways.

Yeah. So he there's by no accounts. There's were the two connected in any way, shape or form. And they also haven't been able to approve or disprove that either of these guys posted anything themselves. Just that they managed to get them. So. Yeah. We'll see.

I mean, he pled guilty. So he must have done something. He must have done something. Although one could argue that basically all they did was rely on the people being stupid. So. Uh-huh. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. Security. As a tattooed up guy myself, this gave me a little pause when I saw this article.

Algorithmic tattoo identification for law enforcement. This is not good. They've had this for a while, though. I know. It's basically facial recognition, but for your tats. Yes. Pretty much. So there's an interesting article on Slate that gets into it. And talks about the various different uses of different symbols and how you could target a certain symbol as being, say, racist or whatever, when it may not be dependent on the use.

And beyond ethical considerations and accuracy lies a bigger issue. Freedom of expression, freedom of association, and religious liberty. Furthermore, all these algorithms can obviously generate false reports and flag people with tattoos of cultural or spiritual significant symbols as being members of hate groups.

Yeah. Yeah. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Although, I've got to give Scarlett Johansson mad props. She's got a Mjolnir tattoo. Way to go. Yes. I read that in the article, but, you know, that's a typical, you know, she would end up on a questionable list because of that. Yes.

Viking watch list. Hey, man. After Iceland, you've got to be worried about those slow clappers. You didn't watch the Euro Cup. Never mind. No, I didn't. No. All right. Sports ball, Jason. Okay. Sports ball. You and your sports balls. This one comes from Boing Boing.

Researchers have found over a hundred Tor nodes that are basically spying on people who use the darknet. Yeah. I still haven't done that. I guess that's a good thing. Although, I have my VPN, so I'll be okay. Yeah, you'll be fine. Sure, you will. Yeah.

That's one of the things I've never actually done is use Tor to go bounce around because I figured nothing good can come of it. Yeah. Absolutely nothing good can come from me bouncing around the dark web. Yeah. Well, definitely you. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

I'm already on it. How many lists am I already on? Come on. Everything except for the tattoo one. Yeah. Basically, if I install Tor, somebody's knocking at my door. Yeah, pretty much. Come and knock on my Tor. Oh, my God. We have a show title. You know that house is just down the street from me.

I think I've heard an episode of Grumpy Old Geeks where they talk about where that house is right down the street from you. Well, I never listen to the show. I heard there's a bunch of opinionated assholes. I gave them one star. I know. TP Link. Yes. TP for my bong hole. You've heard of TP Link routers, right?

I have. From way back in the day. I used to install many of them. Yeah. Well, apparently, they let their domain lapse. That was one of their configuration domains. Whoopsies. Yeah. And they're not even going to try and get it back, which means that if you have a TP Link router, don't go to the sticker on the bottom and use that domain to actually try and configure your router, because it at some point could fall into the hands of malicious people.

Do they know who has it now? I don't know. They said they're not going to actually try and get it back. So it says it's an unknown seller right now. Interesting. Yeah. Why wouldn't? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The old domain is TP Link login dot net.

Why would they not try to get it back? I don't know. It's ridiculous. Right? Yeah. I'm not. Okay. I'm not missing anything in this story. It's just they're being idiots. Yeah. And it's on Cito. It is for sale. Right. And you just make an offer and buy it.

I think we should make an offer, Jason. We got some money in the hopper, don't we? I get about 12 bucks. You got some change? Well, let's give an offer for 12 bucks. Okay. We're on it. Okay. And we'll be right back. But now, a word from our sponsors.

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So, Brian, I'm putting this in the comment of the week section because I forgot to put it in the intro when we were doing follow-up. I figured out the mystery of the enterprise rental trucks that we talked about a couple weeks ago on the show. The Amazon deliveries coming in enterprise trucks. Yes, because I was wondering if they were UPS employees or if they were Amazon employees.

Right. And the guy wouldn't tell me. Well, I saw another guy the other day getting out of his enterprise. I didn't have to. You know why? He was wearing an Amazon shirt. So, they are direct employees of Amazon, not UPS. So, they are disrupting UPS apparently as well.

Interesting. Interesting. So, first comment of the week. Patreon's new subscriber, Jerry. Welcome to the club, Jerry. Thank you. Thank you very much. Woo-hoo. And we got a direct deposit PayPal donation from Richard.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Richard. We really appreciate it. We do. That we're going to use that money to try to buy that domain from TP-Link. Yes, we are. TP for our domain hole. Yes. And this comes from Burns. This is a great, that's the problem is the name of this review.

It's a five-star, take a hint, people. Love the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast. I never miss it. The problem is that I get so engaged in all of the topics the guys are discussing that I end up talking back to my speakers. No matter how loud I talk, it's almost as if Brian and Jason aren't listening to me. Well, I don't listen to Jason either, so don't worry about it.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't listen to Brian. Who gives a shit? Thanks, Burns. Appreciate it, Burns. Yeah. We got a couple comments over at GrumpyOldGeeks.com. The first is from Bacap. Bacap. Great show. I look forward to hearing your opinions each week. See? Mm-hmm. And the mixture of humorous commentary and tech news is exactly what I was looking for in a podcast.

Definitely the best podcast of the week. Keep it up, guys. Have your whiskey ready. Hold on. Mm-hmm. My dog also enjoys the show. Drink. Drink! Oh, yeah. My dog, he's not here, so you can't. She's away. Away in a manger.

No. She's away to trainers. So Greg writes, hello. I'm a longtime listener and even gave some money back before Patreon came into play. Well, we appreciate that, Greg. So my opinions don't amount for much, but I have one. Since you have affiliated the show with whoever it is that places the ads at the beginning and during the show, I have become very annoyed by another new irritant.

I listen to podcasts after eye to bed. I listen to five or six, and if I fall asleep, I just play the episode the next night until I hear the entire show. Recently, about in the middle of the show, like last night, I am drifting into sound sleep and am very rudely jerked awake by a loud screech that is apparently designed to wake people up so they can be spoon-fed ads.

Very, very obnoxious. No other cast that I listen to uses that tactic. This is so blatant that it goes against everything negative about the web that geeks stand for or stand against. Why do you allow this? I was about softened up to make another contribution, but if this can't be changed, I'm going to have to give up on the show.

Sorry. Yeah. Take it away, Brian. Would you like to say something? Might I suggest Brian Eno's music for airports to go to sleep to instead of a talk show? Yeah, and you know, the bumpers for the ads were actually a fan suggestion that that's why we put them there.

You can't make everybody happy, you know? Yeah, we did get the suggestion to actually do some sort of audio in and out intro to let people know for sure that we are doing a read or listening to an ad rather than, you know, content. So, sorry that you don't like it. You know, we're not in control of a lot of this stuff, but maybe, Jason, you can crank down the volume on that if possible so we don't wake up Greg.

Okay. And by the way, it's actually a requirement from the Federal Trade Commission that we have to actually say that these are sponsorship reads. So, that's why that's kind of there. You know, we're waking him up. Let's crank down the volume a little bit. I'll see what I can do. Go to sleep.

Go to sleep, little Greggy. And our next comment is from Rico. No wonder we get one star. What? I'm trying to help him out. Okay. Our next comment is from Rico. Hey, gents. I agree with some of your long-term views on Brexit.

However, this article headline kind of shows what a fickle bunch of loonies are running the ship. And there's a link to CBC. NASDAQ jumps 1.5% as stocks extend gains materials lead. Yeah. Not so sure what that was about. Okay. It's only been a few weeks.

What happened there? Keep going. I'm moving it around so I'll keep you on your toes. Stop moving it around while I'm trying to read the comments. Ah, yes. Thank you, Hackpad. Hey, you woke up Greg again. Okay. It's only been a few weeks and the major indexes have already recouped their losses.

It just goes to show that we are all at the mercy of Doug and that what goes up must squirrel. Must squirrel. Hope you both. Will you stop autoplaying that stuff? See? See NBC. Bite my ass. Hope you both had a great holiday. This is by far my most favorite podcast.

I dropped a little something for you via PayPal. Patreon is not my thing. Well, we don't care where it comes from. So. Oh, one more thing. I have a couple of book recommendations. Necroscope by Brian Lumley. I've heard of Brian Lumley before. I don't think I've read anything by him. Probably my favorite vampire series. Very cool origin story and has a very interesting setting.

The first book is a lot of backstory, but I know you both will like it. Purge of Babylon by Sam Sizzaveth. This is probably more for Jason, but it's a light bro-esque zombie series, but with a twist. How do I get thrown in the bro camp? This is my favorite comment of the week.

Shut up crying, Brian. That guy's not listening anymore. It's a very enjoyable read when you want to turn off your brain. It reminds me of that. He also wants you to turn your brain off. 80s movies like Lethal Weapon and Commando. Keep up the good work. Thank you so much, Rico. I appreciate it. The Brexit thing, I think it's a long-term thing.

Yeah, the markets came back up. We'll see what happens because we've got about two years. We've got to see what's going to happen with the trade deals that they're going to have to renegotiate, what that is going to mean for the U.S. markets, what the U.K. is going to do. I think, again, still overall, it's not going to be a good thing, but the short-term, good.

I mean, anybody that has to retire now is totally screwed, so that's nice. Yep, and I just put in Necroscope into my Audible wish list. Sadly, only the first one is available, and the rest of the... There's a lot of...

My God. There's like 18. There's 18 of these damn books. This is going to be worse than you and Dune. Well, only if you like it. That's true. You might prefer the Bro-esque zombie series. I know. What are you going to do? Thanks, everybody.

You can find us on Twitter at GOG Podcast, on Instagram at Grumpy Old Geeks, or at Patreon, if that's your thing, at Patreon.com slash GOG. 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, 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 only take a minute or two. Just go to GrumpyOldGeeks.com slash iTunes, and it'll take you right there. So, this week at the library, I seem to have read all of the books for us.

Yes, I finished nothing. You read a lot. I read Skeptic by Michael Shermer, which is an interesting book. It's a collection of his short stories from, I forget which magazine, it's like his popular science thing or whatever. They're good.

They're very good. They're very nice and short. They're bite-sized. Scientific American. Scientific American. That's it. Thank you. Yeah, but it's, you know, it's good stuff. I like him. I like Michael Shermer. We did a show with him at the Art of Charm that's coming out soon that you should definitely check out because he's a smart guy.

Okay. Then I read a book called Chaos Monkeys, Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez. Okay. This guy's a twat. He worked at Goldman Sachs as a quant and then moved to Silicon Valley and started to work for Facebook.

Okay. So a lot of the stuff that we have to deal with with retargeting and Facebook comes from this guy. Oh, joy. Yeah. Thanks, buddy. And that's not the part that bugs me about this whole story. He is a self-described twat. Okay. Well, plus for knowing yourself, I guess.

Yeah. The book starts out with him getting arrested for, or almost getting arrested for a DUI. Oh, lovely. 0.91 over the, you know, blood alcohol. And then he cons the cop into letting him go. Then he hooks up with the girl, gets her pregnant and bails on her, then gets her pregnant again, bails on her again.

Just a general, now when you talk about bro, bro, you know, like the bro mentality, he's a bro. This guy kind of is a bro. Yeah. I, it was interesting. It was an interesting read just to see the other side of, you know, these people that make a ton of money and work at Facebook and do this kind of thing.

I wish I had seen that. I wish this book existed, but like in 1996, but it, it didn't. It was, he was there from 2011. Yeah. 2011 to 2014. So it's, it's a fairly recent, you know, tell all, but I would, uh, I would recommend skipping it personally.

Okay. Don't, uh, I just don't want to give him any more money. That's about it. Um, then I read, uh, night by, uh, now I, I'm having a problem with the pronunciation on this cause I've heard it pronounced a bunch of different ways, but, uh, Ely Weasel. Weasel.

Okay. Ely Weasel. Very topical of you. Yes. Um, cause I'd never, I'd never read any of his works and night was the one that everybody talked about after he died as being his, you know, his piece de resistance. So I grabbed a copy of it and it was, uh, it was fascinating.

It was a very, very depressing book. Very, you know. Very tough. And it reminded me of man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl, which I read a long time ago and went back and reread, I'm sorry, re-listened to for you purists out there, um, which is also a classic. If you, uh, really want to get, you know, get your depress on and well, I mean, I'm glad you liked it.

I, you know, I've read, I've read a number of his works and they're all very good, but yeah, it's, I mean, it's understandable why they're depressing. Yes. Yes. And yeah, you know, a lot of world war two stuff is not very happy go lucky fun stuff. No, no, it's not. And, uh, I did an interview or didn't do an interview. I edited an interview with Malcolm Gladwell recently where he talks about his fascination with spy novels of all things.

And I'm like, Oh man, after my own heart. So I'm, I actually am doing, uh, the John Le Carr, uh, series now the George Smiley series, which, uh, Tinker Taylor soldier spy is the movie that you've probably heard of that they, you know, made not too long ago, which was a, which was a great movie.

I love the movie. So I'm starting at the beginning and I read a call for the dead, which is the first one and I loved it, man. And it was good. Um, yeah, it was, it wasn't so much spy ask as it was like, it was almost, uh, Poirot in, in, uh, in the way that it worked.

It was very cool. I really liked your own adjective. I did. Yes. So I'm going to, uh, definitely start knocking these out as fast as I can. Cause they're really good. Okay. And the last one, the nightmare stacks by Charlie Strauss. Yes. Oh, I love it. It ends on a cliffhanger, which is pissing me off, but I just finished that.

And, uh, it is a, it's a great addition to the laundry files. So, right. Well, I'm, I'm still working my way through the apocalypse codex, which I believe is number four or so. I do have to say, I, I enjoy the books and if other people are going to get into these, I recommend that you do.

So what I would say though, is put some time in between each book, because what I'm starting to discover on, on book four is there is a very obvious formula to these books. Yes. Every single one follows a very similar trajectory and you'll start to notice that if you read them in quick succession as I am.

So I'm going to finish this one and then I'm going to take a break from them and come back to them. Yeah, that's a good idea. And any series is going to be like that. You know, once a writer gets his groove on. Not Dune, not Dune, fucking Dune. So yeah, very good. But like I said, it's, I've definitely started to sense the pattern, which I think is kind of why I'm going so slow with this one, because sometimes it just feels like, okay, I know what's going to happen now.

Anyways. Yeah. Good stuff. I think this week I'm going to try and do, I'm going to try and get through that gunslinger series book one. Oh, that one's a slog, but it's worth it. That's what I'm saying. It's like, you keep, you talk about it and I've got it. I own it. I should just try and get through it. So I'm going to try and get through it so I can move on to the rest of them because the movie's coming and I'd rather just have read the books first.

Uh, please do because the movie, there's just no chance it's going to be any good. Uh, the book, the books are just so good. Jason, get through the first one. You're going to love the world he creates. It is, uh, it is his piece to a resistance. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, we, we software apps and gadgets.

We have a new store on grumpy old geeks.com where we put up some stuff that we like and it does look like shit on mobile. Yes. We know about it. So stop writing us. Write Amazon. Yeah. It's not us. It's, it's basically an embed, but Brian put up the who to nine ports, 60 watt USB 3.0 hub with two smart charging ports and seven data transfer ports.

And I bought it. And the first thing I got when I switched completely over to Mac, um, it's nice. Cause, um, my USB hub that I had on my desk, um, sucked. So this one is actually really nice and, uh, I'm liking it because I have to transfer lots and lots of, uh, zeros and ones between all my hard drives and having a 3.0 hub is a necessity because I've only got two ports on my Mac.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Why I got it. Yeah. No, I definitely like this thing so far. So thank you, Brian. No problem. And it's actually relatively nicely designed. It's not ugly. Like a lot of hubs are. Um, so it's really convenient. I quite enjoy it. It is.

Mine is like stuck to the side of a desk, so I never have to see it, but, uh, it is pretty when I look at it. Yeah. No, it's good for travel as well. Oh, I might have to do that. There you go. Um, yeah. And I found, uh, an interesting, there's, there's a lot of privacy based ish apps coming out now.

Uh, this is an app. Oh, God damn stupid autoplay. Sorry. Um, yes, this is an app, uh, from a company called Airdos. Um, we have to link in the show notes and supposedly it will, if you decide that you don't want to have your, uh, photo taken, it will block your face or blur it and it will stop other smartphones from taking your photo.

Now, hold on a second. You may say, uh, how does this work? I'm curious about that as well. How does this work? Because what, what I, you have to, the way I understand it from reading their thing is you and the person trying to take your photo have to have the app installed. Okay.

Or there may be some sort of way to, I guess if you connect via a network and then you run something on your network, you can block people. But how does this, this doesn't make any sense to me. No, this is technology that needs to be baked in, into the firmware. If it's actually going to get, you know, pickup, this makes no sense.

Yeah. This cannot possibly work as is. It's got to be baked into the software at the phones themselves. So the, because that doesn't exist, this does not work and it is useless. Yeah, it's stupid. Um, and the funny thing is I remember on the, you remember the big end trilogy that William Gibson wrote?

Yes. There was, there, it was one episode or not one episode, one, uh, volume. I can't remember which one it was, if it was two or three, but there was a guy that had this secret shirt that basically would, would remove him from any CCTV camera. They just had to wear the shirt and then it would, it would like take him out.

It was baked into the firmware. Yes. And by the way, that is a great series. If you want to go back and start with pattern recognition and go through those three, those are, I still love those books so much. I like him better than his, uh, his original series with, uh, you know, coin cyber space. Yes.

Um, but speaking of cameras and baked into the firmware, I got a Panasonic DMC ZS4 OS. Um, because when I'm out with the, um, you got your whiskey ready dog, uh, I have, I can't take any pictures with my D810 because it's so big and I don't want to take it out with me.

So I got a pocket camera and I had the, uh, the Z30 before and the, the optics on this camera are amazing. And this was on sale for like 200 and 200 bucks. Um, it's got a 30 X, uh, optical zoom with like a glass or in like, it's just basically a, you know, brand name.

Now it's not really that much different from regular Sony glass, I believe, but, um, it's beautiful. It takes great shots and for the price, you know, it's, it's pocketable and, uh, I highly recommend it. Yeah. And for the photos that you put on Facebook of your dog, I'm totally okay with it.

Just coming from the iPhone. Uh, well, there's a picture of, of the dog that was from this camera that was on Facebook. So, well, thank God, you know, I was able to zoom in. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's an 18 megapixel camera. So you can zoom. You can see all the whiskers. That is exactly what I do.

And, uh, speaking of Facebook, we talked about those 3d photos and how they're showing up now on Facebook. Yes. I found one. A little waggly mouse thing that tells you that this, there's more to this photo than meets the eye. Like a pirated movie. More than meets the eye. Well, I found a picture of a HR Giger's bar and I'm like, Oh, okay.

This is a cool use of the tech. I like it. Yeah. And it, uh, uh, friend of the show MXV's wedding. I was talking to my friend Brooks and he had been using the Rico, uh, theta S cameras to do the 3d pictures. You know what I mean? The 360 degree pictures. Yes.

And I picked one of those up too. It's on its way today. So I should, uh, by next week, I'll have 3d or 360 degree pictures of the dog. I cannot wait for the 360 degree megapixel photos of your dog. Yes. I was thinking about making a hat tripod though. Just be able to wear it on, on my hat and take pictures as I walk around.

Make it out of tin foil, Jason. Yeah, no, it'd be great. Um, so with all of this stuff, I needed to get some more hard drives. Yeah. So we're going to save all these photos. I got to save them somewhere. And I went and I looked and, uh, sure enough, the Western digital, uh, my passport ultras, which is my go-to brand for all of my, my stuff.

Mine as well. Um, a four terabyte versions are out for $139. I bought two four terabyte drives for like 330 bucks. I was just like, you gotta be kidding me. Oh my God. We're so old.

I know. So I just, I pared down and here's my rationale behind it. Cause I have, um, my data on one drive, my audio on another drive, and I have backups of both of them. So that's four hard drives. Right. If I, and to, to have to sync those all week long, keep everything up to date, the time that it takes to do that and swap everything around and storage and moving them.

I'm just like, ah, just if I can get it down to one drive each, perfect. And, uh, then I just take the one offsite and then once a week I back it up when I go offsite. So that's why I got them. So now I got to get rid of all these two terabyte and two and three terabyte drives. I'm so annoyed that my, uh, time machine is so small now.

I know. That's useless. Uh, yeah, I've already, I've already filled mine up like three times over. So I use backblaze for all my backup needs now, but I did, which is a good thing, I guess, because now that I have that terabyte, uh, Comcast connection coming, I'm going to need it.

Apparently so. Yeah. Uh, and final tech bit of news that I saw, and I can't believe this is still news. Uh, the BlackBerry, I, I, they're still around apparently, but not for much longer because the last lucrative contract that they had, which is the U S government is now over. The Senate is ditching BlackBerry phones and BlackBerry is trying to ditch phones.

Apparently they are pivoting to what nobody really knows. Uh, anyways, Senate staffers are now approved to use either a Samsung S six or an iPhone S E instead of the BlackBerry and S E how sad. Um, yeah. And that's that. So there you go.

No more BlackBerry. Bye bye. Bye bye. Yeah. So no more phones. The big thing is gone. And, uh, they say that there are more than just a phone company, although nobody really can tell me what exactly it is that they're doing instead. Yeah.

What's left? I don't know. We're just going to sit around here and think of something to make. I mean, here's the statement from CEO, John Chen, despite my best efforts to tell the world I'm a lot more than just a phone company. Every question I ever get is about phones. Well, what else are you then? Yeah.

I don't think, you know, I don't think they know either. They've just got a bucket of money and they're just going to sit around and say, ah, we do something. I don't know. I show up. Hey, we're more than just phones. We're more than just a podcast, Jason. We are. I don't know what, but we're more. I'm stopping this now.

We'll be right back. Enjoy a word from our sponsors. Media Candy. You had pestered me to watch the movie Stardust and you had so much belief in it that you not only told me I needed to go watch it, you purchased it for me and sent it to me through the ether webs.

Yes, I did. And I promptly ignored it. Yes, you did. As I do. But last night or two nights ago, actually, I was a little bored and looking through, you know, there's no TV on right now. Everybody's on their hiatus. And I scrolling through iTunes and lo and behold, there's the movie you gifted me, Stardust.

So I watched it. What did you think? I can't believe it was made in 2007. Okay. Now, I'm wondering, I'm guessing they probably did this on purpose to make it feel like a throwback movie. It felt like it could have been made in, say, 1990. I mean, a very Princess Bridey kind of feel to it.

Overall, it wasn't bad. I didn't mind it. It was a little slow moving at times, a little too many, a little very slow at times, a little too much like music playing and very slow walking around and moving plot very, very slowly.

But it was cute. It was fine. I didn't mind it. Okay. Did you recognize the protagonist? I did. That was the fun part of the movie is going, oh, wow, these are all these people from nine years ago and going, wow, Michelle Pfeiffer was still hot as all hell nine years ago.

She was way hotter than what's her face? Claire Danes. I was like, no, either that or I'm just getting older now. I think you're getting older. I think your tastes are shifting as you age. Michelle Pfeiffer was hot. She was smoking in that. Yeah. So it was good. It was cute. It was fine. De Niro was funny back before.

You know, again, this is another one of those things where this is probably the first time that De Niro did a silly role like that. And now all he does is silly roles like that. So good. Okay. Good. Yeah. It's a lighthearted romp. It's what you have to you have to remember. It's just a lighthearted romp.

It was lighthearted romp. Good for kids, which means I'll be firing that up again in about five or six years. Yes, it's not. It is definitely not as good as Princess Bride. If you want, if you know for the better lighthearted romp, definitely go with Princess Bride. But this is Princess Bride light. It's Princess Bride light. Yeah. It's a light, lighthearted romp.

It is. Light squared. Because, you know, there's only so many times you can storm the castle. Yes. So there you go. Star Trek news. Oh, let's see. John Cho, who plays Sulu in the new reboot of Star Trek, has announced that his character will be gay.

Well, there you go. As a nod to George Takei, who was really gay. Oh, man. Apparently. So, I mean, if you're going to do any character, it does, you know, that is a nice homage, as it were, to make it Sulu. So I don't really know how this will play into the show itself or the movies themselves so much.

Maybe it'll just be a nod and a wink. Who the hell knows? They've got bigger problems because they've lost one of their major characters, sadly, as well. So, yeah. Yeah. Good times. Anyways. Hey. I'm going to get my Sulu on. That's right.

And in other news regarding big, long chains of movies that mostly we kind of like, the alien movies, Sigourney Weaver has confirmed Alien 5 story plan is the headline. And if confirming the story plan just basically means, oh, yeah, we're going to ignore the third and fourth movie, then yes, she did that.

Okay. Interesting. It's just fine because the third and fourth alien movies sucked. So. See, the third one was pretty because it was David Fincher. But it was pretty, but it sucked. And the fourth one was even worse. And that was that was written by Joss Whedon. So people forget about that shit.

Well, not everybody has a hit. Yes. Yes. And I mean, the alien, you know, aliens. The second one was a fantastic movie all around. I mean, just amazing. Good job, Cameron there. So anyways, they're going to make more movies and they're going to pretend that those movies didn't exist, which is totally fine by me.

Yeah, no, definitely pretend they didn't exist. And, you know, thinking of, oh, I do believe that would be a delivery from UPS for me with my camera so I can take pictures of the dog. Here comes the 360 degree photos of dogs.

All right. Do you have to go get that? No, I don't. So I but talking about Cameron Terminator 2, there was a big anniversary for that this this last week and which was also a fantastic movie. I highly recommend Terminator 2 and aliens. Yes. He was good at the sequels. He was very good at the sequels.

How good would it be if he actually did a Titanic sequel? It might actually have done pretty well for him. Don't get me started on Titanic. I fucking hate that movie. Anyways, I worked on that movie for a year. You think I don't hate it more than I've seen that movie 30 times, at least.

I hate that movie. All right. I found a link just for you, Jason. Thank you. Now visit a free virtual museum of Prince's many old websites, including one that Jason built. Yes, you can. And I was looking at this this morning when you sent it over. I'm like, oh, my God, am I in there?

Am I in there? Am I in there? And I went scroll to the very bottom. I wouldn't have sent it to you if you weren't in it. Actually, I would have. And I would have been like, ha ha. They let out your they left out your crappy site. Exactly. Could that because I can see you doing that because you're a dick. Scroll to the very bottom of the timeline and then up one.

You'll get to my because the first one isn't actually a website. Prince Interactive is not a website. But if you scroll up to the dawn, that would be the one that I worked on. And I'm looking at that just like, oh, my God, talk about bringing back memories. So I was at Ructropolis when we worked on this.

Yes. So that was the original original official site for Paisley Park. Nice. Yeah. So go look at it. What color palette should we use? I don't know. I was thinking purple. Yeah, I'm thinking purple and brown. That's pretty much it. So enjoy that one.

Thank you, Brian. No problem. Moron of the week. The Moron of the Week is somebody that does not impact my life in any way, shape or form whatsoever. In fact, I wouldn't even have included this or thought had a second thought about it if it wasn't for the writing done by the folks over at Wong Kat.

OK. In particular, this is written by Robin Pinakia. I got to give her points and call her out on this one because I love this. I'll just read because I just read the headline. This is fantastic. Checkmate, atheist. Duck Dynasty dude says Jesus existed because calendars.

Noted public intellectual Phil Robertson of the Duck Dynasty Robertsons spoke at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver this weekend, and there he laid down a very strong argument for the historical existence of Jesus. Did he bring up the writings of Josephus or Tacticus or the letters of Pliny the Younger? No, no, he did not.

No, you see, Phil Robertson is sure that Jesus existed and was the son of God because calendars. You know, because the Gregorian calendar uses BC, which stands for before Christ, and AD, which is after Christ. Joke, people. We are joking. To count the years. And ain't no one else got the division of years named after them, do they?

This is beautiful. So there you go. Thanks for the writing. That killed me. Yeah, this is good. And you know he went to like Harvard, right? Well, you also know that they have shots of all these guys before the show, and they don't have beards, and they don't wear the stupid clothes. They're wearing golf clothes.

They're suits and golf clothes, yeah. And suits golfing. It's all bullshit. Yeah. No. Good times. Calendars. Yay. Calendars. That proves Jesus. Ooh, fancy. Fancy.

Ooh, fancy. I would like to hail the professors over at Iowa State University as heroes. I know. I don't use the word lightly. Iowa? You mean you don't use Iowa lightly? Either. These fine men are true heroes.

They have developed a small contraption, a tiny device that is capable of creating a continuous supply of fresh wine. I know. The wine must flow. Now, this isn't created to basically just keep your bottle ever flowing, sadly.

Maybe it will get there someday. But it is important when it comes to aiding winemakers toying with fermentation processes that may be outside of the box. They can't make a whole lot of wine, about one milliliter an hour, which ain't going to do shit for me. But maybe they'll get there. Well, you just need a lot of them. I have 1,700 of them lined up.

Exactly. They're just direct, you know, just funneled right down into my mouth. No, this is cool science. It's really interesting. And, you know, maybe someday. Maybe someday. See, dare to dream. Yes. I do believe in the Internet of Wine and that it is coming for us. Oh, I can't wait for the Internet of Wine.

That I will plug into.

A lot of people are unhealthily obsessed with theme parks, particularly Disney. I have my own reasons. Cory Doctorow.

Yeah. He's one of them. There's a lot of strange adults out there that are very, very obsessed with the park. I have my own reasons for being obsessed with it, of course. I grew up just down the street from Disneyland. That's where I hung out. Goth loser. Yeah.

Well, basically. I hung out there a lot. All my friends did. We were there basically every day. We had annual passes. And that was when an annual pass really was an annual pass. Not a, I bought an annual pass. I can only go nine days out of the year because of blockout dates, which is what they are now. But so there's a site called Theme Park Tourist.

And they go into deep history on the parks. And there is an article about a specific ride called the People Mover. The Wedway People Mover? Yes. I love the Wedway People Mover. We called it the People Maker as teens going there because that's where you went to go make out.

Yep. With the girl for the day. But it's long gone. It's been jettisoned. And this goes through the history. And fascinating because it moves beyond just the People Mover. It talks about Tomorrowland in general. Walt Disney's original envisionment of it. How it's changed throughout the years. How the different parks have approached it.

And how trying to keep it fresh. It's seven or eight pages. I mean, in depth. This is ridiculous. It's five pages. And it's ridiculous. It is awesome, though. It was such a good read. So enjoyable. So I know it's a limited market of people out there that would be super interested in this stuff.

But this site is unbelievable. They have all kinds of different articles about different aspects of Disney and other parks as well. But obviously, the one with the most history would be all the Disney parks. It's just great. I enjoyed this article so much. Yeah, this is by Brian Krosnick. And man, this is cool.

I'm going to dive into this. I think this will be my weekend retreat from reality. It's a fantastic and fun read. And it makes you a little bit sad about what's happened to Tomorrowland, at least here in the Anaheim Park. The Paris Park has it, right?

If you read the story, you'll see why. It's fascinating. It really is. It's totally cool. This is so cool. This is what the internet is for, my people. Well, something else that the internet is for. Talk about deep dives. Yeah, the web's not dead this week. It's going to put you back a couple hours in your browsing time because there's a site called Typeset in the Future.

And they did a piece on Blade Runner that just goes deep. I mean, deep into everything that is in this movie. And it's pretty insane, I got to say. Yeah, I'm still, I've been scrolling for a good 30 seconds now and I'm still not at the bottom of this article.

Nope, that's what I'm saying. Awesome. Well, now I have my thing that I'm going to read this weekend. Yeah, there's some serious time put into this article. I mean, this is the way we used to do it, you know? Yes, yes. We didn't do listicles. We lost our minds.

We wrote incredibly long, detailed articles. So, yeah. Take a look, kids. See what the past is. Oh, and now, randomly, as I'm scrolling down, I see a chessboard with Ron Jeremy on it for some reason.

I don't know why. That's very strange that Ron Jeremy shows up in the middle of this article. But, yeah. Ron Jeremy has a way of doing that, doesn't he? He does. He just kind of shows up. If you're ever around Google it all shows, you'll get that joke. Oh, yes.

He just kind of shows up. Okay. Are you kidding me? Love it. Now, we haven't had a good Kickstarter in a while, so I thought I'd bring one to the table.

Yeah, you found a doozy. The basslet. Basslet? Basslet, basslet. I'm going with bass because, you know, you want to drop the bass. Right. But you can get this on Kickstarter. It is a wearable subwoofer for your body. This is the dumbest thing.

Well, you know what's even dumber? Mm-hmm. Let's see here. Where are we at now? They've got 2,525 backers who have pledged $425,238 with 16 days to go. We are in the wrong business. What were you doing podcasting?

I know. Let's just make up stupid shit that people will pay us to not make because it's Kickstarter. All we have to do is make a video. We just have to make a cool video. That's it. You don't have to make the thing. Look at the guy with the tattooed arm strapping the stupid thing onto his arm. They've even got a guy from Spotify in there, too.

Oh, joy. Yeah. Yeah, this is dumb. We'll make the asslet instead of the basslet. I don't even want to know. I don't either. But, yes, you should definitely check that out if you're into something really silly to pay money on, I guess.

Yeah, I guess. You know, it shakes your wrist. It does. Yeah. Talk about fucking shit we don't need. Yeah. Yeah, there's real problems in the world, people. Okay, anyways, you found something horrible. I found two things that I actually think are quite funny.

This is great. This is over in England. Residents are baffled after coach loads of Chinese tourists to send on unremarkable Oxfordshire village and ask for selfies and take a bunch of pictures after being told it was used in Harry Potter films by a rogue tour operator.

What? What? So some tour guy that's taking all these Chinese tourists around England basically just decided to pick on a village, drop them off there and say, this is a village used in Harry Potter. So they're all just walking around taking pictures of the village and the people in it. That's awesome. There's a video.

Chinese tourists mobbed down after Harry Potter tour scam. There's all these photos of the Chinese walking around with, you know, cameras that Jason probably owns taking three pictures of old English guys that are going, get off my lawn. Well, I would, but they put it, they left a sticker instead of my camera.

So I don't have any three 360 degree photos today. Oh, I'm sad. Yeah. The second story came from NPR and I was tempted to read it in NPR voice, but I'm not going to. Why not? I can put some music behind it. I get some piano and. The dark side to the fireflies flare.

The reason I put this in there is it does remind me of some of my friends dating lives. Okay. A lot of the flashes that we see are in the air from fireflies. They're flying mails and they're flashing their hearts out. They're trying to get a response from females of their own species. They are desperately looking for love, Jason. Meanwhile, down on the ground, there's.

Why do I think that I'm the friend in the aforementioned friend? You can read into this whatever you'd like, Jason. There are females and those females are coy. They are not going to respond with a flash of their own to every single male that passes by. It's only when they see a particularly attractive male that they get a flash back.

But in addition to these females that are toying with Jason flies emotion. Maybe not Jason. There's a whole nother group of females and they have much more nefarious intentions. These females belong to a group, different group of fireflies.

Their name is Fotiris. They've been called femme fatales. The reason they deserve that name is they mimic the flash signals that are normally used by females of their intended prey. And by very accurately mimicking these courtship signals, they lure in the males and then kill them. Yeah, sounds like a lot of my ex-girlfriends.

Oh, see, there you go. Awesome. And some of my ex-girlfriends used to hang out at Disney with you probably. So down at Bat's Day. Yes. So they grab the male. They sink their sharp jaws into its shoulder. The blood oozes out. Firefly blood is white and they drink the prey's blood. Then spend about the next hour slowly chewing up all the soft bits, spitting out the hard bits until there's just a pile of scattered remains and a broken heart.

Yeah, that's pretty much my love life. Thanks. I didn't think of you specifically. Oh, I'm sure you fucking did. Anyway. So, Twitch, the video game site.

Let's end this on a positive note. Send it up. Yes, Twitch viewers now have a new channel called Social Eating. Yeah. This comes on the heels of the South Korean phenomenon called Mukbang, where people do videos of them eating.

Yeah. I thought that that's why we had Twitter. Well, we just had the 4th of July. That's when they do all the eating contests, right? Isn't that enough, really? I don't know. Taste of Chicago is going on, so they're cranking it out right now. So, hey, I don't know. But it's a really sad channel.

I actually went and looked at it today before we started the show. And there was one girl, one Japanese girl with a British accent, super hot, eating sushi. Okay. And a couple other people who were eating Cheetos.

So, not really the liveliest of channels. And I'm wondering how this got to be news. How? Oh, people just go and watch. Other people eat. That's it. What the fuck is wrong with me?

I'm telling you, man. That's it. All right. You know how earlier I was trying to figure out, are people really just getting stupid? Or is it just, you know, we're old and we didn't notice this before? What the fuck? People are really just getting stupid. There's a video of one woman who has over a million views because she's eating Kentucky fried chicken on YouTube.

This is a different one. This isn't even on Twitch. This is on YouTube. She has a million views eating KFC. But you could just go down the street. I don't. I don't. I don't understand. I really don't. They're like, it makes people feel like, you know, less lonely.

I'm like, why don't you go to a fucking restaurant and watch some people eat there? Don't see people. I know. Out of your home. I don't. Jason, I don't understand the world. Closing shout outs. I don't really have any shout outs.

But while we were doing the episode, I was casting around while Jason took his little breaks to not get his camera and tried to find some recipes for tonight. So I'm going to make flattened chicken and grilled romaine with parsley lemon sauce. And maybe I'll hop on Twitch and film myself eating it for dinner. Oh, man.

You know what would go well with that? I can send you a summer succotash recipe that's actually mind-blowingly good. Well, please do. I was trying to figure out what I was going to make as a side. Yes. It's got okra and lima beans and corn. And it is delicious. It comes from the Southern Gentleman cookbook. OK, well, check out the Grumpy Old Geats eat Twitch channel.

Grumpy Old Geat. Grumpy Old Geats. Goddamn. That's what a world. Anyways, I have no shout outs because that blew my mind and I'm tired. The only shout out I have is I got to meet some cool people at the podcast movement show that I was at for three hours and never got back to.

Rob Walsh from Libsyn actually turned out to be a really cool guy, which surprised me because we have so many differing opinions on the internets, but super, super smooth guy and got to watch the awards. I have fourteen hundred photos or thirteen hundred and forty five photos that I took at the awards ceremony, which will be pared down to about twelve.

But thank you. Thank you for that. Yes. Well, I have I have all these terabytes lying around now. I've got to fill them with videos of me eating. Yes, there are there are no pictures of anyone eating from the ceremony, which is great. But I did end up giving beers to the guys who won the sports bowl category.

So that worked out well. OK. Yeah. I can't remember who they are, but they were pretty funny. So. Yeah, no. So that's it for me. Thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFilippo and you can check me out at JPD dot me. And soon there will be three hundred and sixty degree photos of something.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister and you can follow me on Twitter or Slender Fungus and I'm going or you can go to Twitch dot com slash grumpy old grumpy old farts eating shit. Geats. Way to bring way to bring the show down. Grumpy old geeks is a partially fan supported show.

Check out our Patreon page at Patreon dot com slash GOG. We really appreciate your support. If you don't want to or can't donate but still want to support the show, please go to grumpy old geeks dot com slash iTunes and leave us a few words in a five star rating. And if you can 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, maybe. Or you can donate through grumpy old geeks dot com our Patreon page at Patreon dot com slash GOG to get 10 exclusive Among Us tracks. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stochansky. You can follow Andy at Twitter dot com slash House of Andy.

And he's also on SoundCloud at grumpy old geeks dot com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpy old geeks dot com slash 167. You'll see that life is a frolic and laughter is calling for you down at our rendezvous, Three's Company 2.

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